Joseph McElroy

Women and Men

1987

My thanks to Alice Quinn, my editor at Knopf, for hours, weeks, and months she spent on this book. Thanks also to Margaret Cheney, the copy editor, who has followed every parenthesis and sentence with the most exacting attention. And thanks to my friend Robert Walsh, a young writer and editor of great gifts, who has read the book several times and encouraged me at every turn to believe in the American heart of its common sense and heartfelt and humorous extremities. And thanks to Chris Carroll for help when I needed it.

My thanks also to the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for grants, and to Queens College of The City University of New York for paid time-off from teaching, and to the University of New Mexico for the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship in San Cristobal, New Mexico.

J.M.

I always think of the child as a girl. What if it’s a boy?

Oh, it couldn’t be . . .

Martha Martin

Revelations, Diaries of Women

Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.

A. Lincoln

Letter to a fellow lawyer

November 9, 1842

division of labor unknown

After all she was not so sure what had happened, or when it had started. Which was probably not a correct state to be in, because what had happened made the biggest difference in her life so far. Hours of life that worked her back full to breaking of pain and drained it of its work when the back of her child’s head with a slick of dark hair and its rounded shoulders gave her that last extra push to free its arms still held inside her. She would tell her husband later—she knew she would—and she did tell him. She told her husband and he told others for weeks afterward. Also he had his own side to tell. She loved his excitement.

Pain all in her back worked free of her at the end, dropping away into a void below, and it could almost not be recalled. This pain had been new and undreamt of. As new as the height of the young obstetrician whom she had never seen until she arrived at the hospital, he stood in surgical green against the ceiling above her head, then at her feet, at a distance down there between the stirrups tilting his head this way and that way between her thighs, and the green cap on his head was as far away as the bright, fairly unmetallic room she was giving birth to her child in, and the young obstetrician’s words were the talk that went almost and sharply along with the pain her husband Shay —she was thinking of him as Shay—also in surgical green, could not draw off into the ten-buck pocket watch he’d timed her with (where was it? in a pocket? mislaid? she didn’t care where it was). Her husband Shay’s chin hung close to her; I will always be here, his chin might have said, and his hand out of sight somewhere gripped hers, his hand might have been invisible for all she knew; but then he had to see for himself what was going on at the other end and he moved down to the foot of the delivery table and he peered over the doctor’s shoulder as if they were both in it together, and then Shay half looked up from that end against his better judgment she was sure and frowned at her but with love smiled the old smile. He needed a shave, his tan had grown seedy. The doctor stood up between her thighs and said they were getting there.

She was just with it enough to be embarrassed and so she didn’t say she didn’t want Shay down there looking. He was already there. Her baby had changed. It had felt older last week, older than their marriage. One night he had told her with his tongue just what he would do to her when the head began to show, and she didn’t think he meant it but she didn’t tell him. Now he heard her pain. He couldn’t see it. She could see it on the blank ceiling, oh God oh blank, and it was coming to birth, that pain, and would always be there like a steady supply of marrow-to-burn mashed out of her from her skull downward.

The men there between her thighs said, "Hey" and "Oh" at the same time (doctor, husband, respectively). They spoke at once, like song.

What’s she look like down there? Oh God oh God. What’s she sucking spitting look like down sucking splitting there? Look like? Well, she never really had known, so why should she know now? A saddle of well-worked mutton? A new dimension of Her. Later she was encouraged to recall it all. As if she did.

Afterward she did recall a thought about being an invalid that had escaped her during the pain, the labor, and came back at a later moment of the pain when she was not really trying very hard to recall another, different thing that she couldn’t at that moment even refer to (so how did she know there was anything to recall?), it suddenly quite naturally during the pain took the place of the invalid insight and it had to do with Shay moving the way he moved when they were at last in the delivery room and he’d been at her side holding her hand. He moved then slowly away from her head to the foot of the delivery table to look at the very top of the baby’s head (girl head or boy head). But also at the part of her he said opened like an animal looking to be a flower. But now with the baby coming down, she was pushing against what Shay would be seeing, whatever that was, and the thing that had come to her had to do with his moving from one end of her to the other, from the upper part where her eyes were, downward—the way he did it, walked to the foot of the table, and the way this turned her into something but she lost it—had it, lost it, a wrinkle in her mind somewhere stirred like the start of a laugh— and later she found herself recalling this thing about being an invalid: that, here she was perfectly healthy, never more, and healthier than Shay with his sinus; and in order to have this baby she had to become an invalid, and she got the picture again of her recurrent dream she’d never told Shay, of gazing out the endless window of her lab and seeing a man led to execution who she learned had been in the hospital getting better for several weeks until he was able to have the punishment executed on him which then she saw was a thousand and one strokes; then he was to crawl back to the infirmary he had just walked out of: but she saw that her thinking was incorrect and she was not an invalid at all, she was using herself, that was what she was doing, being fruitful. Her husband had hated his first name when he was eleven and had been Dave for a while and then, of all things, Shay, he hadn’t gotten over it, she called him Shay sometimes, hadn’t gotten over what? it sounded like a movie actor. What is the fruit of a cross between an animal and a flower?

The men looking her over, head to toe, were glad to be there and so was she to have them, and so was the nurse and so was she to have the nurse and so were they to have the nurse, and so were they glad to have her and her pain and the baby that she could remember looking ahead to: the truth was not head to toe, it was the men looking when they couldn’t see in, until they saw what was coming out to meet them, which was nice, wasn’t it.

How did you feel?

It was (she sips the last of her daiquiri which now is not so chilled) the most beautiful experience of my life. No, it was rough, it was painful, but I couldn’t remember all the pain. It was an experience I wouldn’t have missed.

Have another?

O.K.

She was glad it was ending, glad Shay wanted to be there with her, she was alone with her pain whittling at her, but no, we are not alone.

Shay and the chin he was hitched to moved away but down and near the foot of the delivery table in the bright delivery room, and he moved politely as if he didn’t want to notice himself moving. She found on his face a pursed-lip fixity sharing her pain, she knew he shared it. It was love. She was glad, so glad. She couldn’t have done it without him, later that was what she was telling everyone again. Having apparently already told them. For how else could there be an again? She heard herself.

And recalled the word for what Shay had made her into when he respectfully moved with a Sunday museum-goer’s slowness, from her higher to her lower, from her eyes and dry mouth that he’d kissed and that hadn’t changed, to the action down there—she thought of him as Shay during the labor—and he mustn’t look back at her, this was what she felt, or felt he felt, as if he could share her labor only by not looking back at her. Well, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t have had a mirror to follow the action. But he, who had been impatient for the baby to come and who had said the time had never gone faster, had looked along her length so that by his slowness she had become a model.

Of what? A model of a woman on a scale not to be sniffed at.

Still, a model. A model woman? In the mouths of others. Scientist, lover, mother of a fetus nearing term, nutritionist at the bar of the breakfast nook, creator soft and trim who’d give you a hand and a thigh, demonstrate relative acceleration, share a birth with you, be tracked by your pocket clock through space to the next contraction (breathing quick and regular, hhh—hhh—hhh —hhh, as she and Shay had been shown at the natural childbirth sessions), while she’d often said (knowing she will often later say) that she must have (later had had to have) you there, it must follow as the timer her and she the timer that she must have you there in that time between the looking forward full of love, hope, content (and looking forward itself), and the looking backward full of love, content, tiredness, blab, work, and looking forward. Well obviously he went down there to that end of her to see what was happening; the baby was more slowly downward bound than he; and her pain was bound to her until it dropped downward with no speed at all or she dropped through it—its bind—into a void like the death which, she always thought, wasn’t like relief for the doer of the dying, because the doer unlike the really relieved was unfeelingly dead. It wasn’t a child she had in her hands, for if she had had one, the grip would have crunched the little beautiful child who was inside her still while her hands gripped whatever they gripped, gripped the bright hospital room she was in, all by herself, except for Shay, the nurse (but there were two nurses then), the doctor, and the baby who was getting the fuck out since there was no room in.

Her husband would describe her pain, she was sure. He had heard enough about it even though she didn’t so much recall it as hold on to its weight. He could look back better than she and see the glazed, willful eyes of their three-minute-old child, a tube (he said, but she didn’t remember) in a nostril, the fluid draining out, the amniotic fluid (he said), which doesn’t touch her because saying "amniotic fluid" was not recalling anything, not looking back (at her or whatever he looked back at); but what, then, did he lose in that looking back?

He had his hands clasped behind his back at some point she was sure as he moved to the foot of the delivery table. Museum, or lab, one like hers, and a model was on view, and you walked along it and around it, looked through its windows and its valves and if there was an equals sign looked through the equals sign to what it led to, but to this model there was more than met the eye, and it was a gap between last night’s lipstick and this morning’s extra-careful shave—at least she did not sport a five-o’clock shadow!—or you had balls with rods sticking out of them from ball to ball, and then another cluster of balls with rods, but between the clusters nothing, and you put the two parts of the one model together but without doing anything to them, for you put them together in mind.

And she was in that gap there in the middle which was still an empty gap no matter how much of her was in it, she was what was in that gap in the middle, but she was there just for a moment, and it was the thought looking either way that she and no one else caused him to get that hard-on, she was what had done it, but then also that, well, he got it, a hard-on, he got his hard-on regardless, and having gotten it he would get it into an available cunt. So long as he did not look at the ceiling. She had looked at the ceiling and didn’t know herself any more, knew only her baby inside her and God like a blank perfectly painted.

Push. She had no choice but to.

He came back to her, held her hand in his, he knew when to grip harder when she pushed. She had worked hard enough but her work went on. She couldn’t have done it without him there. She actually believed that. So push. She had no choice but to.

The hand went away and she had hold of something else but it was the ceiling he’d never looked at that she wanted to grip though it was beyond the birth of her baby which was happening and happening.

Her husband would thoughtfully ask all she’d felt. Did he want to know?

Between us, it was what marriage was all about. We suffer alone. We are not alone. There’s life elsewhere. We have each other. Till death do us part.

The baby inside her, had it been speaking all the time? But speaking to her? Why her? Why not anyone? Why not him? But more her than him. For she and the baby had both been inside her and might have come to an old understanding. Yet this felt like how he would think.

She stood, as she’d known she would, in a gown you could see through and held the stem of her glass while a man poured a daiquiri into it and the lime smelled the roots of her mouth which watered. The talk went on, women and men comparing experiences of birth, some in this room probably in the process of losing one another, maybe a woman and a man looking right at each other to see each other. Where? There was a moment of no talk and a woman said, "Sue," and everyone laughed. The pouring ended neatly and the daiquiri at the brim was almost like the first and as she smiled at the man named Marvin or Martin who had filled her glass and who she’d heard from her husband was a free-lance diver who had worked for the police and in oceanography, she heard in the empty moment of silence behind her her husband laugh and say to someone, "Division of labor," and a man laughed.

But at the end when the elbows and hands and bottom and knees came free, slip, blip, grind no bump—and she only much later thought of the gunk draining out then, and nothing seemed to matter except the glistening baby that was younger than last month and was a baby beyond boy or girl, beyond not before, and then without strangeness nothing at all for quite a long moment seemed to matter—or be between them—not even the baby that was O.K., she’d looked at her husband behind the young doctor’s hands and she found tears on her husband’s seedy unshaven cheeks, tears from the wonderful vagueness in his eyes and on his forehead too, as if he had wept upward into his thick, bristly hair. But later she remembered what she could remember, as if she might have receded into her own breathing and part of her was never to be seen again, and knew he told the truth when he said it hurt him to see her in pain, and then she recalled those tears upon his forehead and saw that of course they were sweat. And she knew that while he did not look at her while he waited down there between her legs with the doctor, the tears that he could not keep from running out onto his face were not only for his daughter, because they did not—she was sure, she was sure—fill up his eyes and drop onto his skin until suddenly he had looked up past the appearing baby to look her in the eye—us, us—as he had not been able to down there at that end of the delivery table before now.

And so, weeks later, balancing her fresh-brimmed daiquiri against the poor flippancy she’d heard her husband speak behind her, she did not turn to look him angrily in the eye.

BETWEEN US: A BREATHER AT THE BEGINNING

We already remember what’s been going on. How is another question.

Isn’t that a large shadow on the road running parallel to us or our dream? Is it loaded?—it’s approaching in some opposite direction too, looking for its light. Check it out. It is to be shared, and with us, we think. Do we deserve to know what is outside coming near? We really forget if it was in the prophecies, there is so much to do now.

Once a mother who did not tell stories sent her two sons away. To be human, she told one of them certainly. But each son felt that the leaving had been hers, not his. Though his own future motion was real enough: hence relative to hers as hers to his.

To go on, once there was a power vacuum. An as yet unfixed emptiness simply asking power to rush in. This much was agreed. By people sitting down together, all their legs near one another under a table. The table took shape from month to month, year to year—round oblong oval round—century to century, we heard—while under the table the legs of all the people developed protocol. A new kind of leg work. High energy, was the report. And aren’t they your responsibility too? we asked each other—and answered, The legs or the people? (Legwork, one called.) But while some of this was to be tabled, power vacuum was generally agreed a possibility. Like the human thigh, it had evolved in the mind. Like femur for "thigh." But power vacuum: think of it.

The words took hold. In them a daughter had a name for Father. But in the midst of a time that would rush us into bastardy, why we had a name for us period that got us off the ground bam bam whoosh thank-U-Dad; for Power Vac was just the label to market our dream. So take this trip, a leg of it anyway, to market, babe. Power Vacuum was all the handle we need.

Oh handle for what?

I know what’s been going on, an unknown child says to a changing grownup. Like, don’t think I don’t know.

Handle with care. The shadow on the road, the high road, is a Wide Load, its sign says it is, and this Wide Load (a house or other container) which we took to be running parallel to us we can’t seem to pass or not pass. Yet after it has been arduously and dangerously passed, isn’t it ahead of us again? That’s correct. Could it not stop for us, as we could not for it? It had windows and half-open blinds. It had signs on it WIDE LOAD, and the back that we remember so well we can almost see it facing us was as wide as the dark scenery we passed through in our native, late-model vehicle, our bicycles on the sun roof fixed mountainous flashing their spokes like this Wide Load vehicle’s great double wheels now up ahead and spinning slowly backward as reflected in the mirror-faced low offices of an insurance-type firm at the outskirts of a new village.

We remember what’s been going on. Already remember what’s been here with us so long we had the time to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember. For who are we not to? Yet give ourselves permission also to forget.

Now, a thinker of the century in question, twentieth among many late centuries surrounding it that were on occasion repelled by the twentieth, said Meaning something is like going up to someone. If so, what is this that we mean to get over, and while we’ve got one another here, who is this someone we mean to share, we who were probably not here first yet who are no less natives at least of this motion. We deserve to know what approaches us.

Is there a break here? Or is it our breath together? It’s what’s between us, or we share. A relation, which we are all. And what a time for a breath or break. Before we’ve half begun. Which we are always doing, aren’t we? It’s the best time. A breather now.

For hear us falling. Toward the horizon albeit oblique, for we imagine it isn’t our natural state. We are some power to be here and to have changed toward life even to think distinct from these angels lately to be heard speculating in us as if they were learning to hope. We deserve to know what is in us.

Now, sent away by a mother who herself appeared to have been the one who left, those two remembered sons were secretly one as well as two. That is, we go on but we do not go on; go away but are still there. Mayn was the name, and of the two sons the one who eventually did go away was James.

And to go on: a personalized power vacuum a daughter found in place of father before she had ever even heard of a power vacuum out in the hinterlands stayed with her all along and into later life something of an inspiration. What would she have done with a more definite father? Call her Grace Kimball and she will hear.

Hear us all falling toward the horizon. It’s the wind the other side of an obstacle that draws us toward it. But the wind is our wind as was the obstacle we heard only as a prelude to whatever lay beyond. Hear what is in the wind. A song, says someone (grownup, to be sure). But, built into the song, hear the noise. The noise, it is a city in itself where not everybody knows everybody else. And each century is a person coming to that city. Like, for future reference, an ever-young, once-wed, once-divorced woman without children but with a following, by name Grace Kimball, who was bound to be heard from; and from another angle, for future reference (read residence), a family man and traveler, also once wed, once divorced, a man named Mayn, James Mayn, hear the noise. And should they never meet, we have been invited no less: like we are the news either way—meeting or not meeting—as we are the relations between them. And have we not felt we are more?

The angels to be heard at times in all this or in us were not here first. Sometimes we really don’t know what they are.

Once long ago a mother told one of her two sons he should go away and he was still very young, though a strong, manly boy. But then she left before he had the chance, and so he felt the leaving was hers, not his.

She never told stories, but his grandmother did, and his grandmother’s were made up out of an adventure she had really had in an earlier day, earlier century in fact. These old reports could sound sometimes a little like what was going on now in the grandson’s life, but he shrugged it off, trusting his grandmother’s little histories.

He belongs to all this which does not easily tell love and separation apart and is about both together. Unhappily he left his wife and his children. Yet did he not live, then, somewhat as he had always lived? It is a time of such changes. Life change is much the cry and we hear it and he probably more than gives it its true weight, which means he must take a longish view— maybe too dumb to be afraid, he jokes. Some brief, important people coming and going here more or less known to him—are they like parts of the work he does? are they news?—of birth, being in love, tenancy, privacy, children? To all this belongs also a woman he may never quite meet. Except through some of these same others. Unlike him she does think of these others as her work: aren’t they discovering body-selves? aren’t they designing their lives? exploring options? For all the world like traders coming and going around her. History passing through her helping hands and voice revealed to her twenty-four hours a day so that in the women’s groups she created and makes her living from in the mid-seventies of the century she runs things with a faith that comes from power more than the other way around. She can be fooled but not for long.

All of this speaks. In many bodies or, as our leaders have said, on an individual basis. Speaks also, we understand, in this "we" that we have heard. What is it? some community? Ours. Operating less than capacity then suddenly also beyond itself. So that in the zone between we have this voice of relations— is that it?—of possible relations too.

A truth here is that angels exist in thought. In great numbers as the case may be, and in small compass we understand. But as angels are summoned to be guardians or messengers, vascular go-betweens or light for its own sake, they seem granted more power than potential. Still, do not angels have rights or anyway abilities to be unprecedentedly other than themselves, or less, or more, since they are lodged in thought? What if they edge in, infiltrate, graft, find real being already present along the curve of the human said to be their arc of new evolution—though into us or into the angels they can be?

Are these merely our angels? They angle into and out of our speech like some advanced listening advice we recognize because we remember from somewhere. And what is this community—this large We we ourselves voice? It will be a community for one thing and capable of accommodating even angels real enough to grow by human means.

God the interference! Can’t hear the interference like we used to, what we once heard—the god relieving himself, blowing tubes, like our weather ship beneath her Coast Guard white paint.

Himself, did one hear? The god himself! Blowing rather his or her tubes; his or her nose; or noise—our noise. The news. But it was all news. Wind that we mouth into sounds of caves. Sounds on skin. We knew it, sound of bones living below the surface, visible like ankle and jaw, and then all that’s between connecting the neck bones to the thigh bones which masculine or feminine are the same old femora beneath the skin. May we not together likewise find, say, one question to comprehend two or more answers? Is there not breath enough for all of us to take one here?

Now if male is to female, then moral be to femoral, if we hadn’t instantly had our heads slung beyond these things to where, listening at the very thigh of the divine (flesh no obstacle) we pick up—the less hard we listen, the better we pick up—vibrations of a better way of doing things—costed, cost-risked—we pick up what else but the will of a slow worm in there. In the divine thigh (make it flesh).

We pick up only however the tapeworm’s track, but echo track of the headway it’s making elsewhere quite a ways from here. Vibes coming from up in the belly area actually where the worm is hooked in, yea up beyond the vaulted groin’s divide.

And this tapeworm in its steady state takes in along a multiplicity of small-scale units that are its nervous system’s segments a homogenized menu of the godly diet—read sacred—divine—read diva suddenly which is opera for goddess. But wait: what diet is this? We have to know. Oh it is food digested by her the tapeworm’s host then processed by the worm her guest plus helpings of a new para-placenta that lines the linings of this diva’s—read songbird’s—read opera singer’s—gut: so as the worm makes its way, and its way makes the worm, the diva gets hers, her way, which eats up her surplus and empowers her to shed really a lot of weight, sundry reported amounts upwards of a hundred foolish pounds. The better then, with her amazing range, to go on as the sinewy dramatic soprano that she is, as mother, lover, barmaid, princess, or herself, to music—if you call that music real noise.

The tapeworm thus did eat at length and having eat ate on unmindful of the noise of waters, running waters, running waters far away and near, of molecules hitting, hoping, sticking, and combining, for what could stick did, and the willful worm at work upon its environmental meal never minds the noise overhead that’s gaps of power burnt, burnt into music, burnt to expel the song of this practicing singer content now to turn her windy will to work, having a month ago introduced this very special tapeworm into her system, her heaviness, her hunger, her desire, in the flesh of a predatory fish—a pike from the Mille Lacs region of Minnesota—a M’Lacs pike that had turned the wrong way at the wrong time, been caught, identified as a tapeworm host, and flown live one thousand miles direct to the supposedly overweight diva’s favorite Japanese restaurant by an Ojibway Indian medicine man with a diamond squint—a tapeworm (a fish tapeworm) prescribed by her fond but at this event secretly squeamish New York physician who knew he had to do something or give way to someone who could.

He thought he read her like a book. But what one?

"Confused," she once signed a little note hand-delivered to him one morning begging his advice: it meant "in love," and two months later she would confide in him that it had been just sex. When he said more than once to her, "I’m confused," it meant clearly "moral" and "angry," but also (undeclared as usual) "in love" (but with her, his patient, his dear friend), though she might refuse to read his moods. Is he important among these elementary elements? We know enough to ask. He knew he was important to her but not like her audiences in the darkened house, who mattered with a depth so great it verged on the invisible, and so mattered almost more than family (if she had had family in this foreign America—she had a father far away).

Sensational opera sheds little light on private life, but how weigh such light shed from her suns and windy heavens where she must have forgotten him for hours, her doctor, yet knew, like the most precious childhood awkwardness within this very lovely lovable body, that this loving friend was there. Nor did we mean to shed light upon the private life of grand opera. What happened, in good faith, was that we double-checked the god and took it from there; followed where the sounds led, through a divine thigh up to a tapeworm that later proved to be dual-sexed. In turn, this worm’s will to live by growing unknowingly obeyed the will of its host (nee hostess) to reduce. Yet she, too, gave way before a greater will or emptiness. Which some fresh power in us guesses isn’t the wind on the other side of the obstacle but an obstacle beyond the wind.

Inspired. Coming out of left field. Turning an eye that way as if we took place not just in the receivers of our waves of relations but as those receivers no less. Is that, then, true reincarnation? Grand, to be sure; maybe abominable, this vague incarnation intimated to us. Was it angel, animal, mineral, chemical, chemo-therapeutical? We will be asking again.

To go on, an obstacle. And inspired by trying to recover what we have chosen to forget. These words belong to a speaker for that century and the preceding, who maybe in what he refrained from saying knew the light that is thrown by forgetting itself. But how? we ask. And find one answer in ourselves: Light passion-bent past roadblocks it has itself devised: yes, in the fine void of our possible intelligence that announces owl-like one weighty day that we didn’t know what light was but we’d been promised a power and thought it might be to find that on good days we were light or got to be.

If it needs to be worked through, raise it in the workshop. Our void’s first lady, Grace Kimball, with reportedly Indian cheekbones, sees ahead to a better way of doing things, of doing us. Grace Kimball we already remember found history in women: in the women contained by men, and in men retaining secret fluid of women you don’t own up to, and this in all the people who passed through her helping hands making her sometimes in her dreams (for she and this history did each other full time) invisible as the raped call for help, and sometimes in her dreams non-important as a monstrously yawning future unplanned (and by others not oneself). Grace saw ahead into a future that looked back at her through the same eye with which she saw it, into a room without furniture. Her Body Room she would call it, as if other rooms in her apartment were not also body room, yet if in this day and age we become acquainted with long spaces by means of brief capsules, by, in turn, as we understood it equaling long spaces to short times and at other times simply, babe, letting (as in let it happen—as in life) letting (we already forget) letting a broom stick be equal to a base ball because if we can’t build our scale life in the lab mustn’t we look past what we already think we know and just say that this blindingly multiple curve equals those several lifelong brevities? Why did we even ask?

Her Body Room she would call it. Though other rooms in her apartment were that, too. Body Room. Renamed by the times through which we swing, celebrated by Grace, obscure like Mayn, and turned into her "Body Room" through being emptied by the wide load of her trip, her once violent motion away from an old home far away to a new. And as for the family furniture back there in that old home in the exact Middle West, forget it: for like that legendary legal Wide Load of our highways it held firm at that moment of launch yet with this difference: its inertia instantly forgot she’d blasted off when she’d moved that inner landscape of her life without furniture of her family from one of America’s middles to New York once upon a time.

But we already forget her marriage that came in between and filled if not New York her apartment there with modern furniture; she had tried to go the straightest route, do everything right, but this time far from home; later, in a dream she grasped her marriage as if, in the memory, it was the water or semi-precious stone the light came through, and had taken place not in the city of New York but in her hometown (read small city) where you could be owned and never know it till you were being carried to your grave reduced to a sign or an undeliverable message (read literally massage) and her father came home from work and was Dad and called her Gracie and never quite, it one day came to her, asked her anything about herself (except the nearly timeless "Where’d you go?"—just now? today? the last few years!). But this is only what we know she felt. Was he dull? This is but the beginning. She would find him in the living room annexed to the space near the dining-room door, fixed among her poor mother’s furniture like a passenger in a train and out the window the countryside is moving at pretty much same speed same direction you are.

Therefore, a later New York Body Room emptied itself of her dad’s powerful overstuffed low square armchair that if in the old days where she grew up you were coming from kitchen and dining room you have to pass to get into all the other furniture in that parlor, the Grand Rapids pair of lyre-backed straight chairs, and the green chair and the red chair, the gray davenport that didn’t open out and, facing it, the new blue that did, the tables you could rarely go under but had to go around, the magazine stand with its V-trough "hung" between small, narrow tabletop and same-size bottom shelf; a brass-buttoned brown leather armchair that felt cool on a summer afternoon when the heat from the miles—or as the Browning Club’s visiting lecturer from Chicago called them, the versts—of fields outside of town flattened the town and its colors and rose like a real, low flood around the houses until twenty years later when she was so long gone that she had returned from New York to pay her parents and then her mother several visits, the flood loaded all the circuits of the air conditioners and the electricity might go off in one whole block at four in the afternoon so suddenly you were aware of the still grass outside. Grace had emptied her prospective Body Room in her adopted New York also of—hadn’t she?—a gap that habited that old living space halfway across America where, with one thirty-second of Pawnee blood, she’d come from, where her father in the low armchair sat in almost any weather with a brown bottle of beer or with a tapered old-fashioned glass of blended whiskey held constant in his hand until one year a TV set materialized, or took its place blindly on the table at his elbow so it need never be looked at nor the local newspaper necessarily looked away from until the glass became the drinker’s magnified substitute nose upon being drained and this was Decision Time—just as Dad need never breathe ("breathe," she said to a man in argyles some years later whom she married); and yet her father sang, audibly in the bathtub, irritably in the dark garage; sang an instant American favorite "Oh what a beautiful morning ... the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye," having driven the family through seventy-five miles of wheat fields to see a road show of the musical Oklahoma!, which was a neighboring state. But he didn’t sing in the living room, where there was a piano, in that power vacuum she only half named that was in the whole house, was it he or the room?, one name or another, for years, from memory plowing through all her mother’s parlor furniture to get to her father who wasn’t really there at the far end especially since to get into that tableau where you would not exactly cut a rug, you didn’t so much finish with him as start, start as you came out of the dining room by getting past Dad and his unforeseeable silences and the soft brown-and-red-diamond argyles she had completed for him one Christmas as, with her one marriage and except for her two pregnancies (depending on our point of view), she completed everything she started—one of two pairs of socks she ever knitted apart from craft experiments in the rapid seventies.

Largish town. "City Limits," signs said. Do things one by one, her mother said, this one and then the next; there’s time for everything. Her mother said all this, seated very straight at the kitchen table that had a metal top painted white. Her father changed the oil in the car. His beer can by the front tire, his backside in the air as he dragged the full drip pan out from under, he then on his knees took a drink of beer, got down on his back and worked his way under again to screw back the cap. It was this doing things one by one in their time, she couldn’t always think about it except to know she had to find a way to not do things in order but bypass as one day many hundreds of women knew of her through bits and multiples of her story like Eleanor Roosevelt or Helen Keller. Like Curie, for cures she always knew meant danger. (Always, Grace? even in high school, even at the sink with some boyfriend, even swimming at night in the Middle West before New York?) Like legendary Owl Woman whom a dynamite social-studies teacher named Ruby Foote in Grace’s old high school had said healed people of the southwestern desert with earth matter and a magic of understanding (that’s all magic is!) and with words of song that often went on in the absence of their singer and composer (Owl Woman) who would reduce herself to a tiny cactus owl as easily as expand the time you spent with her, according to Ruby Foote, herself some lone missionary type from the southeast coastal region, North Carolina way (where she’d been once married); now in the true Midwest a fast driver at age sixty of an aging Cadillac (she called it); a strong midnight swimmer, student of Indians (what Indians there were), and philosopher of rape as early as 1950—yes, like Owl Woman, whom Grace thought about and thought about until one day years later she thought Owl Woman into a promise protecting a future when Owl Woman would pop up like a reincarnate double.

A woman-model anyway and Grace knew the way would partly come to her. She relocated to magical Manhattan—and swam in a pool; met "her husband" (as she and an interviewer later identified him with backward prophecy) and he had RR on his combination-lock attaché case (before self-destruct optional became a standard item); who swam fast laps his head down watching his lane painted on the tiles of the pool bottom but sometime veered all over the joint like a motor without a boat; he was in the market, he (no) he was in market research, that was how he got off, and he could and would sell— read travel—and weekends was training to be a Long Island realtor; but market research, he was good; she knew it; she was sure, and she was right as always in her time.

Oh clean break! That’s the dream. What you won’t remember can’t hurt you.

Really.

O.K. you agree in principle.

But what if clean break bring circulatory problems? You know?

Don’t go looking for trouble. Fall toward the horizon with us, that’s where the market is. You’ve earned your trip, babe. Don’t go looking for obstacles. We’ll set your sheets to the wind.

Who is this "We"? We have but to ask when lo! it curves piecemeal off breakneck into nowhere, we shouldn’t have asked. Was it these angel relations trying to change their lives, adopting the local language cum customs? Have we learned to breathe together? Breathing is waiting. The mother who said to go away but who left first—Jim would not forget her yet does not quite know her. We have to learn all over again. And isn’t this hard when we ourselves are always at the beginning of ourselves?

The child looks up from its work and no one knows if this is that unknown child who said, I know what’s been going on, don’t think I don’t know. For we can’t tell except that this child is one of us. The child doing homework. Homework that is new to us at least if not to the angels rumored circulating in us. Whose child is this? There may be others in the next room, and are; and we, of whom these children are parts as if we were the whole, note that this child who looks up at the dust-sheened gray screen of a small TV and reaches and turns it on and then off, and looks down again at the math workbook, studies rotation. Which, if we let ourselves, we at once grasp, and with regret as odd, vague, wide, and bodily as this child’s studies in rotation are to us abstract. For R equals apparently almost any number. But we are in the next room now where another is copying homework information on those giant molehills to be seen several hundred feet apart in Persia, now Iran; mark the well-known qanats, your system of underground canals that irrigate the desert by drawing moisture from the earth: and these channels under the desert go on as surely as they have been insufficiently understood these five thousand years. How they collect water from the dry desert and return it.

The unknown child has not quite yet asked why these desert canals need to be studied; the child writes on, and is part of our larger concentration taking the form we now see of dispersal, though the curve of this dispersal we don’t quite nail down but at least point to—and feel the pointing inward, don’t we?—to two chief specialists so far: the opera singer’s Fifth Avenue physician and his Ojibway medicine man (one third Sioux in fact) between whom our concentration shifts because drawn either way: for instance, toward the Ojibway Indian, who had guaranteed there would be at least one tapeworm in the belly of the pike tank-loaded narrowly by him in its own M’Lacs water to take its own high road airborne from Minnesota to New York. This guarantee was backed by his long sporting acquaintance with the diva’s physician, who fished with him regularly and had arranged, through his star patient (and star friend) the singer herself, who was of South American extraction, for a South American government to sponsor along with several of its young nationals this native American healer in an aeronautics program at a small college within shooting distance of Lake Superior as the diva’s doctor put it.

This doctor likewise siphons off this concentration we achieve and suffer as a community were there not here like force a way between these two medicine men that—as we pass a woman combing her hair, a random submarine conning a beach, a dark man traversing a whole continent tracking a mystery for all of us but also tracking a beloved woman who nonetheless never moves from her night chair except to pause in her combing and stare at the window—condenses and multiplies our speed and us and even at an illusion of length travels so blindingly well that we spin (we think), finding what else but the diet tapeworm in our way: a worm that has female and male capabilities, yet by itself will only grow, not reproduce. But while the Ojibway-Sioux (for he is part Sioux, which takes him in his past westward) would not guarantee that the pike-aged tapeworm came without a companion (one or maybe more), which even so would have to lie close alongside for anything to happen between them, the diva’s doctor swore on bended knee that when the time came and the desired weight loss had been achieved, a dose of good old-fashioned atabrine would flush out any number of worms as neatly as the dramatic soprano’s system all along would regularly eliminate terminal segments of worm as they ceased functioning and dropped off, which happened more slowly than new segments formed up forward just below the tapeworm’s neck.

Yet forward? below? Which way is up? For the worm may stay hooked on one pasturage for weeks and the thrust of its growth be backward.

And should diva watchers on both far shores of Oscillocean see their star barmaid, princess, vengeful mother, priestess, lover, prima donna contract— yes, lose weight from week to week, from role to role, some said—seeing through her secret means from end to end, we saw her not recede but be there more than ever.

The infamously gifted general officer of a South American republic’s navy told her offstage in Spanish (vaguely both of her slimmer self and of that evening’s role which was new to her) in essence that she seemed exactly as if she had more than found herself inside her now eternal beauty; meanwhile she with roses in her arm and sweat on her brow stared at the pen (a late-model Japanese ballpoint pen with fountain capability) in the South American officer’s raised hand and she feared in his sweeping compliment an inquisitor’s next question—Was the tapeworm story true? So she turned away into the known obstetric jolt of a flashbulb, hearing the man at her elbow whom she had met at diplomatic dos but never till tonight in civilian clothes (read civvies) ask her something different from what she’d feared; so now she’s relieved, inspired (and we potential relations with her) to feel inside her her secret hunger to forget herself.

Forget herself? She doesn’t believe it; she’s implausible to herself, flashing back magic at the officer whose name and politics back home do not bear inspection (she is certain) and whose eyes and words touch her and recall she can’t tell what histories of passion she aroused in him, one unknown member of the broad dark living house she played to for three hours from memory herself. (What’s she doing here? The path between the two medicine men led through a tapeworm not the tapeworm’s host.)

Tonight, a note or two below her range, and to tell the truth below her status, desiring to sing a lesser role in company with a great, not greater, goddess, she sang the Kavalier who, attentive to the older Princess, poses as a chambermaid; is flirted with by the bass Baron yet in Act Two as Kavalier proper again bears the loutish Baron’s silver rose love token to the Baron’s betrothed to be beloved at first sight—and will leave the older lady for the younger. So we ask the unknown child if silver roses grow in the Persian desert, but the child has gone to bed.

So much for the customary token and its loutish sender’s message; and so very much for the Kavalier, sung by this dieting diva, the boyish bearer who becomes the borne, who gets the girl who got the real message which was not the Baron’s silver rose but the singing messenger himself, who, in the mezzo-persona of a female artiste the South American diva who’s been a Swiss citizen for thirty months, could forget for three hours if not that endangered species her father back home in Chile at least her own flesh, and at least one tapeworm, and never know that if her notorious backstage inquisitor (as it happens, of the regime—fellow- if officially former countryman) seeks her out not for her voice alone, we now like her—we whose growing voice breaks into many voices we have always known, many breaths, all shadow of (was it our?) former prism—we like her for herself if there were time, and not just for her tapeworm, its lighted path, thoughtlike through embedded night, its own tunnel or "wormhole" (to be quite as blunt as the obstacle out its far end). Obstacle? But why would the tapeworm track take us anywhere if it is in the diva’s beloved body? Is there an answer for us as we seek another pause?

A cuffless trouser. Whose? All together we don’t yet know but the knowledge is loose in us—and the heel of a shoe half off a slender platform, call it a running board, hear the noise, and hear that backfire.

Whose? Who’s looking at a photograph?—the noise is of a male, breathing; not our communal breath and yet of us, and we’re breathless spun upon the instant through a far end of what we already remember we were accepting as our known diva’s internalized tapeworm but in us turns waste compaction into time’s momentary tunnel; but someone is breathing for sure.

Which has no effect on the photo’s black and white, which blows up as we reach the end of whosever wormhole so fast we go from too little to too large and for a second don’t see, and like an interesting snapshot feel ourselves part of the computed grain of what pocked interplanet’s ground, but now what is it? it is a young man not quite himself.

Not quite himself in top hat, cutaway, striped dark trousers.

More than a wedding guest, less than the groom—he’s riding after all on the running board. The brownish photo holds and hides the strain tightened along the left arm, that goes with the right trouser stiff behind with wind, some starch of motion, and this extra-wide-loaded car must be turning with a squeal of tires, a vintage, top-up convertible, and the young man’s sliding like a skater, one leg out behind, one hand (the left) inside the car window; and above his top hat and the quiet breathing heard above the old photo, a white steeple leans upward, it’s done its part, car and rider make for the hotel downtown and the human breather we are too close to knows at a glance a generation and more later that this is the Best Man five minutes away from first meeting a young woman whose family like a multiple dwelling in time own the town newspaper and who moves as if she would like to not quite put her feet down upon the floor, the carpet, the flagstones, the grass. The breather holds his breath. He is almost born, less than a year away. Curled in another body like a clef he must be hearing Caruso underwater which is how it sounded on the heavy records on the crank-up Victrola which his father played. It was his father playing Caruso, not his mother, his father was tone-deaf. But who could have told from the photo of him on the running board the day of his best-manhood when he met the mother-to-be of the breather here? Whose mother was the musician and played the brown violin, yes he (because a person he is here examining photographs with put the idea in his head) feels himself tilt with his mother, inside her, bass clef, rebel clef, as she leans and lowers the neck of the instrument bearing down frowning in love with the bite, the mad delicacy of freedom between the fingertips of her left hand and the wrist and elbow of the right (though none of this private musical event is in the photo of the young man on the running board bound from wedding to reception)—and yet down this time tunnel’s light bursting terribly with planes upon planes that only the camera contemplates with equanimity, the breather Jim Mayn who was hardly able to observe the event has been born—that’s it.

Free to grow up strong. A humble, reckless fighter and friend in a New Jersey town. Grandma’s rough pet. Deeply, secretly rewarded by her, which his younger brother who materialized unexpectedly one year never was able to be, though definitely loved, while the grandmother’s daughter the violinist— mother of the two sons—told this older son Jim, with twigs and dirt sticking to him, to go ahead and be the animal, the mountain lion or flying squirrel of the family (he could get right up into one slender, high, sinewy cherry tree in the grandmother’s backyard and get across into its companion; his father told him not to) and his mother also (but don’t quote her) but Jim’s grandmother would never have told him, as his mother Sarah did, to go ahead and be the hedgehog or coon or eavesdropper of the family under the front porch if he felt like it, he would have to cope with his father, and she said Oh if his father knew how to roar and growl—Hey, Mom, who roars and growls around here? . . . (hey Mom?)—but, as it fell out after that, Jim did not eavesdrop under the porch any more because here again—again?—he was not able—(so free?) in the midst of friends and varsity football and varsity baseball and the odd jobs he always had pruning an old lady’s lilacs, tending her furnace coal; mowing the soft lawn of the Historical Association so flat it seemed to sink and then (double-header across the street) the everywhere-sloping lawn of the Revolutionary War monument; or painting the horse-drawn wagon of the silent ice-cream man vanilla white who came by at twilight—when Jim could hear a cousin across the wide street playing the piano; or helping a social-studies teacher who was baseball coach retouch with dark and light green and dark, bark-brown paint a glittering reptilian relief layout of North and South America—jobs always as if in order to miss helping out his father in the office of the newspaper—Jim wasn’t able in the midst of a legitimate life and upbringing to hear—Christ! let’s not—Christ, Mahomet, and Thomas Alva Edison! let’s not make too much of it, there’s such a thing as—wait, able to hear some words he knew were there, with sounds like voices, in the long interim between his parents that he took for granted. Interim? His parents did not talk much to each other; she gardened happily—mostly inside—and played duets, trios, quartets, quintets, played at the Cecilian Club concerts (which you had to think was about Sicily) twice a year which his father hardly attended, being tone-deaf, he said, though the occasions were noted in the paper, the mother’s family paper that his father published weekly, while the second son, Brad, Jim’s three and more years younger bro who looked like no one in the family, ass-white face, did everything and nothing right; helped at the paper running messages, delivering printing jobs, and sitting in the big street window as if waiting for the messages to come from outside; practiced the violin all through high school almost (skinny and pale enough for it, certainly) and gave it up, to his mother Sarah’s relief, she said; was apt at figures and opportunities and imagined he would go into the haberdashery business someday (now there was a window!) because Brad’s girl’s father (who was dead—her "late" father) had been in the haberdashery business—a girl not the prettiest but you looked at her, you looked to her, you reached out toward her with your cheekbones and she had been shy (probably sincerely shy) till she met Brad —and come to think of it, afterwards—and had been nice to Braddie from eighth grade on, good to him you really thought then though without quite that sound, that word; and her mother, a widow who was half Jewish, had kept up the business and was prettier than her daughter though both were quiet—both of them!—and the window down the street from the newspaper was lighted up at night so you could look (obviously!) but also feel they were eerily alive the waiting neckties, stiff rep silk stripes for Sunday, corduroy shirts (for Thanksgiving Day! for Christmas! why?); argyle socks that could make you happy enough to stay in one place all your life yet the next moment got you moving; loafers with the finest-quality (dummy wooden) ankles; eventually regular clothes, checked sport coats and dark blue suits, on the way home from the movies you could look, and the older brother Jim who thought you either saved your dough or you spent it would sometimes see a light at the back of the newspaper office by the old press from the last century and the newer one his father had to theoretically pay for with ads that the new competitor paper was taking away from his father (from him personally, was how it felt to his son who years later understood he had felt his father Mel’s feelings much more than he thought), a father who late on a movie night could be seen—his square, heavy head talking on the phone—grinning come to think of it late at night, which he never did at home: and Jim’s friends sloping up the street with him to stop at the drugstore by the Jersey Central tracks, seemed—hold it—like his father of all people. Which didn’t make any sense at all to Jim because he didn’t gravitate to his father, whereas the guys were his friends. His father had a way of showing up at places with a sour or indifferent eye as if he felt the same seeing Jim get hit and knocked out of bounds onto a pail as he did seeing him dropkick a field goal against the cold wind that brought the peanut-and-vinegar scent of horses, their hides, their dust, their hardening fields. (In attendance, though, was Mel.)

But no, the father seemed like the friends to him because—wait—Jim slugged Sammy, they were fourteen, Sammy kicked him and ran, they all ran, they were running past the newspaper, the father was like the guys because, because, because he kept him from getting someplace he had to get to, that was how they were alike: it was dumb and a surprise arriving at that conclusion and maybe exhausting even while gulping a twisted toasty cruller at his grandmother’s, who wore her hair wound in a gray bun and had always told him stories you didn’t have to believe if you didn’t happen to but you still kind of did, and wanted more, and yet sometimes they had a funny brand of politeness between them, Jim and Margaret (he would jump up laughing even to himself in the middle of her story and run outside onto the kitchen porch and yank open the screen door and leap the seven steps(!) down onto the first flagstones of the backyard). Sometimes he thought he was supposed to be hearing things that he wasn’t, yet she left him alone, but not the way his mother had her way of being left alone. His grandmother smelled (more on one side than the other) of nutmeg he realized years later and soap the way his mother smelt of the same amber soap but pound cake and lemons for her tea. Slow the conclusion—like wading waist-high in Lake Rompanemus— because he didn’t quite know what it was, and exhausting (not his own word) because he knew he could follow it up, the conclusion, like the way he often thought about girls and what he liked and about New York (miles away across the Jersey flats with the Statue which was officially in Jersey very close facing away from them up the alley of the Narrows of New York Harbor) when they drove in once, he and his little brother Brad and two other kids with Mr. Bob Yard the electrician and his wife, who seemed to have a big running argument all the way so the boys stopped discussing how much money they had to spend for candy, the couple yelling at each other about his unpredictable driving and butting in when one or the other would speak to the kids who were not theirs, the couple making noise and all through this pretty much laughing, all the way to see Bing Crosby in a movie at Radio City Music Hall, New York hardly a fifty-mile drive, that seemed year by year more and more too close; but about his father being like his friends, well that conclusion wasn’t exactly exhausting either: it was like what you got left with when you arranged to already have other work (that you happened also to like) as an excuse when your father wanted you to work at (give him credit) a dime more an hour in the office of the paper running errands that involved taking down important reportable information, and doing "a bit of everything," with a chance to learn not only everything but how to engrave stationery—"where" what got substituted for, was whatever real reason stood behind the excuse of ("Sorry") already having more than enough odd jobs, a reason which was only half there, and this was like the conclusion about his friends and father which asked to be followed by a next thought but asked so that you half felt you’d made up its asking, and so this conclusion about his friends and his father keeping him from getting someplace he had to get to was more like letting go of a dream next morning that he half knew he could, if he tried to, follow up, since it had come only after he had woken up, not a sleeping dream which he didn’t ever have. And did follow up when he was staying up the street at his grandparents’, come to think of it, but this in turn wasn’t because his grandmother asked him for more of the dream once he got started; for she would have a story that was like his dream, he always accepted that; but with the conclusion about his friends and his father, he couldn’t follow it up, or not for a while; but then the next thought in the thought got together with the first one, he got to the next step by accident one day when he flashed anger like some ability withheld in his face at his grandmother for something she hadn’t meant to say but he throttled down seeing she was the one he loved, realizing it here fifty yards down the street from his own house but felt he hadn’t lost anything by blowing up, though it was wrong. And the step from that first thing about his father and his friends keeping him from where he had to get to was then that where he had to get to was this smart mother of his, but in her place was the future, and God that was where he had to get to. And the accident—accident?—that word his wife years later used when his own son, no paltry dribbler, unburdened himself in his pants at nursery school—was his grandmother saying, "Things haven’t been quite the same between your mom and dad since before Brad came along," but the next thing in Jim’s thinking was only months later and he’d been more openly opposing his father by announcing he was going to work for the summer on a friend’s family’s farm a few miles out of town where in the field where they would plant horse corn the furrows and red hunks of rock-like earth felt to the eye and the foot like a larger scale—planning to go to work there for the summer when his father wanted him in the office and made so much of this that Jim saw his father had gone a little crazy. Jim did not appeal to his mother. She was sick all that spring, that much he later and much later knew for sure: his father would tell her to see the doctor and she said he always said, See the doctor, or she said, Of course, of course; still, Jim found his way through the atmosphere in the house, he went to his mother. The house though he was older had gotten bigger. And the quiet after supper was a distance between his parents he would like to reckon by blame but he was stretched between where he’d been and where he had to get to and with no one to run him down more than his father who was somewhere downstairs or (who knew? by now) saying of Jim’s grades, "You have only yourself to blame," yet yes Jim went to his mother who was sitting on the edge of her bed watching him when he opened the door, one night after supper which she or Brad aged eleven had cooked, to tell her about the farm job that coming summer, and keeping in shape. She in her calm way smiled as if there were no trouble except maybe how to tell what was funny here, which you might get to in time but she hadn’t the energy for or maybe time. He didn’t mention his father, only the farm. She said she wished Jim’s little brother Brad would do something like that, that he would growl and sweat once in a while; and then she said, "You will go away where you belong."

This scared Jim because it came out like a command—but whose?, and she was the one receding, or they both were and you couldn’t figure which of them more so.

And he anyway didn’t get around to telling her—because he didn’t have on hand the words to say—her drawn sick face kept from itself a health inside as sharp and dangerous as it was far.

"And live a more human life," his mother said, and did not reach out to touch him, though he saw it was late for her to tell him stories that she anyway had never been inclined to tell, for she played music instead, which his grandma did not, although his grandma told stories that at times came over as sort of true.

He remembered this thing about living a more human life, and a month later, between two victories that came exactly between 1940 and 1950 (one Victory-day to the East-called-West signed if not delivered, the other Victory-day to the West-called-East, to come in mid-summer), between these she was gone, gone into the elements except for yon granite memorial in the family plot that Jim and apparently his grandmother but he thought not his kid brother Brad liked to imagine preserved someone underneath. Their grandmother wrote an obituary, tore it up in small pieces, ordered a marker practically before Jim’s father got around to thinking about it—and had it placed; and, beside her in the cemetery one hot Sunday afternoon, Jim heard a throat cleared beside him, the beloved throat of his grandmother who had made him mad that day weeks before and got her as close to (in her words) "flummoxed" as she could be, for if what had made him, her grandson, mad was when she said, "Things haven’t been the same between your mom and dad since before Brad came along," still it was Jim himself who had started it when he said of his mother, "She’s always so glum, know what I mean?—I mean, excuse me for living. Why’s she have to be like that?" It wasn’t that she felt her mother Margaret had gotten too much mileage out of that trip in the 1890s, it wasn’t exactly that. It wasn’t that family stories made her impatient—though they did—but did she not have any? But Margaret replied, "She’s not always glum by any means." Which was very true. His mother’s drawn face was less sick-looking than (y’know) it kept from itself a health inside as sharp and dangerous as it was far.

Jim felt sent away, but his mother was the one who had gone. To get salt in her lungs: but then evidently salt water if we could find her lungs; but sand in her eyes, Jim. But what is not being said here? Like we already remember we heard ourselves speak of an interim between his parents: is that not time between events? and did we mean just a regular old distance? To mean "interim" would be to go up to someone, isn’t that what was said? or was it angels using us voice-over flip-side to change their lives?

Jim sent away for what? To become human—was that what she had said? (He would like that hour back.) She mattered more than she had a right to in her absence! But as potential relations we have a right to know how did she go away—and if someone goes from you, do you go from them, too?

He turned secretly everywhere. He fell, but unlike his younger, less heavy brother, did not hit: he fell toward the horizon for both of them; fell right through solid objects as if they weren’t there; followed maybe where instinct led like a moving obstacle. But Jim Mayn, we remember, did not dream— did not have night dreams—that is what we know he claimed: if, looking at him, we can’t just say No to him on this—though how do you not dream?— mustn’t he have had something to put in place of dreaming?—and did he really not dream or only not remember come morning? He said it to his grandmother Margaret. And he said it to two or three others in his life of those he found in his way, halfway human like himself, women and men on errands that felt like detours or, next to all those bigger issues, not clear enough. He turned secretly everywhere, we already remember, but since this—his secret—was the future and was maybe what he put in place of night dreaming, he might (O.K.) expect these errands, his and others, like their warped course, to be in doubt.

But they might come together from what’s left of the original cities. Errands veering all inward hit and gather tribal like a fair. Grace Kimball in New York one middle of the night on radio heard someone say that someone they in turn couldn’t recall had foretold—and Grace felt she’d had the same idea—cities in future like periodic fairs, you know?, a party of tribes for a few energy-transferring weeks. Show us that scene again, can you? Sure thing: the only cities left exist for a month or two from time to time. Festivals. Markets in the human sense. (A little business, too? Sure I don’t see why not. O.K., great—the market is unprecedented, we feel almost guilty.) Can you run it backwards, that future city, so we can check it out? Why sure why sure, we’ll get right on it. See, you’ve got your weak force that you get when things break down and run away on you and your strong force that brings things together and binds ‘em like the blessed tie (what things?); and you have the two together if you know what you’re doing, O.K.?, two in one if you can jump between, kin you jump between?, ‘cause jump, babe, there’s no power without the vac, jump the vac.

What’s vac? / Where were you? I What’s vac? / Oh we forget, give us the replay give us—oh now we remember—

Don’t want to know any more.

But you are electric? / Is that all? / You are magnetic. / And?

You shift before my eyes. Can it be our secret, our thing we do? Before my ears, you mean? I feel we have known each other all our life. Have I been in you like you have been in me? Oh like, but different. We can really talk to each other. You’re inside, you’re outside, then some days you are past all this mere physical jumping and have found peace past motion. If past jumping, then on both sides now: did we market that? Old angels they get a lot of them to the square inch of pinhead but they don’t get to be two places at once unless ... but if they exist in thought, angels have done so for a long time, so if they now, some of them, are discovering within their matchless power to be real an inner potentiality not granted them before, they would be within human being not for the first time but in a new way—in the bodies of us who, speaking now, are dazzled by this chance that just as we think them so they now speak out of us yet are we dazzled only insofar as we are not they? When do they speak in all this and when not? Oh ask our twenty-four-hour-a-day power vac—right, we’ve heard of it—well, it’s not used any more—oh but it’s been internalized back to where it all began.

But if so, what happened to what we punched in? We punched in what we had and we didn’t write it down. Write it down, you run the risk of error, and that’s not the only risk you run, but I like the replays I like the replays.

But what are we going to do about the kids?

Their homework, you mean. We’ve tried to get a handle on it, we’ve looked up topology and rotation, and we’re just about read out. Displays and diagrams appear on the walls of the children’s space, interesting and decorative—damned decorative—till our heads spin with R and equals signs, and we with pride in our kids but authentic resentment too, think now that R is = , and all the = glance back at us for all the world like light off the wall.

Yet we need that child or children. (There’s one or two of them right in the next room.) We said to our child in the next room, to our babe, our love, our hope for ourself, our sweet honest force, "How much light is there, then?" for the all-purpose child is doing its four terms of science dwarfed into one-and-a-half class-weeks (pill-assisted memory-wise, but we didn’t dare ask) and it should (our child) come up with a few of the answers and should know a thing or two about light; and it answers, "Plenty to go around," it was us, not the kid, the kid knows a dumb question when it hears it (How much light is there?); yet then, inspired by pity, the child with angelic directness is heard to say, "Light is inside people so long as . . ." and we add (because maybe that’s as far as our child is up to in class and because the light inside us feels deflected or busted, that sort of thing, though rebounding), "... so long as they turn," because we have found upon turning that there’s light that likes that, inside us, it makes sounds during eye contact and in turn finds others nearby who have just turned as well, though not necessarily to us—"as long as they," now continues the child formula from the next room, "turn it on!" This plus the cheer that accompanies the everyday discovery of the light that is cast by ice cream in the refrigerator.

We’re getting warmer. Harder than double-checking the god is double-checking a checklist for desensitizing the room of a "breather" with a known-to-unknown allergy. Ready: damp cheesecloth over forced-hot-air inlet; no auras; no toys or stuffed animals, no pennants, no books or bookshelves, no rug, no pillows made of mold-prone foam rubber, no chenille bedspread; no ornately carved furniture; no flowers; no large, luminous reptiles; use powerful tank-type vacuum cleaner (a good buy) and vacuum the vacuum before using, and (hear?) always air the room after vacuuming, and (hear?) never ever vacuum with a breathing child in the room.

Which child? One of them is a breather, one a bleeder, which is which? Let’s not take any chances. Shall we listen to them?

We wanted to hear voices. And then we did, but while the voices were promising and boiled down from a cloud of near-angel voices (awfully like ours on a good day) to now and then one voice, they proved to be a band of tortured archaeologists, or anthropologists anyhow: pros, but tortured by doubts and with a pair of earphones at the ready, you see they were sitting on top of something big, they knew of a hidden city and they were sitting on top of it. But they found themselves tortured by professionals in a room and a next room, above a dungeon in the Southern Hemisphere, rooms fitted only with bare needs, an outlet for the earphones, a chair to be seated in, a floor to be stood up on, familiarity waiting to receive routine, plus the sound of the sea and, for those who don’t smoke, the old smell of the sea’s cool sweat down your own little wormhole’s thread.

While this other was going on, we didn’t think much of opera. Opera was high-classical singing in a second language. It wouldn’t go away, we found, and the stars meeting and proliferating onstage spread their arms taking curtain calls before a giant meaning of brocade, the three women, princess, kavalier, and bride, and the bass baron puffing in preparation possibly for a seizure. The weight of the world can be negotiated—is not this the music, the lordly loveliness ongoing on and on of opera?

They turn to each other, baron and kavalier, a smiling moment between singers. Tonight is an articulated structure that gives play to a multiplicity of small-scale units. They turn away together into the broad face and mouth of the audience. They are female and male—separate as we already recall the music being from the plot, but electric magnetic singers.

But what memorable thing did the infamously gifted general officer of a South American republic’s navy say to our diva offstage a few minutes hence when she had feared he might extract from her her secret the tapeworm? It was her autograph he wanted, raising the Japanese pen, that’s all, her signature. And as she was reminded of the Ojibway-Sioux medicine man now long since back in Mille Lacs, she saw over the mufti officer’s (the civil villain’s) shoulder her breathless doctor entering backstage with a host of silver roses, and she answered her military admirer in translation, "Oh—autograph me." But when on bended knee the mufti officer now made to write across one satin thigh of her kavalier breeches, she raised him telling him softly to take her literally and then she introduced the physician her long-time friend who now materialized and tilted his head at her for he was off balance asking her without words if their secret had fared well. "Supper?" he murmured, old intimate that he must be at this moment, coveting hours of moments, old listener at her breast, breath cutting life into words, a sentence into meanings. But she put him off for the evening: "Can we make it tomorrow late brunch instead?"—flashbulb lighting—"I will be responsible for the coffee and orange juice, my darling, if you will bring ... the brioches and—" she waited for a flashbulb—"and the atabrine."

He felt her know some moving part of him, then instantly swim away and know another part, and he loved her and he hated her for reading his mind. But she said, "You know me like a book." "A libretto," he murmured amazingly. But she shook her head sincerely with that ultimate sensuality that was not for him, her tongue tip tight against her upper lip: "Darling when you try to be clever . . . forget it."

Atabrine, did she say? His presence drops him. His cerebellum wheels like the wind spoken of by Indians he has known. Can he cope? Is he equal? Hairline fracture arcs slowly slowly down the doctor’s face. Atabrine? Time to flush out the worm or worms? Has she, then, achieved the desired weight loss? Does he matter? He does not like the look of sehor who’s been introduced to him and he recalls this man’s name from somewhere, an important man, was that what it was? Latin, upper middle class, a light cruelty in the soft eyes (sex? tradition? some task?).

Opera’s not for everyone, especially at these prices; and in itself is overweight. We willingly recede down the wormhole but with an expansible width-capability such that we can avoid passing out with the wormhole when it’s flushed away next day long after that specialist brunch. But at our end now let us not breathe so hard as to suck in the tunnel’s membrane, we know that that far end, now a pinhead of experience, was our end, too, and remember what we should have seen more closely (for luminaries are entitled to have fathers, too): the diva’s endangered father glistening somewhere newly incarnate in her eye, far away along a coast where he was born and she was, too—she who in Rome, Milan, Vienna, Geneva, Paris, London, and here in New York is acquainted with so many exiles better than herself; and, half-knowing, she knew ahead of time more fully than exactly how she would feel when, later, sometime between love, her dashing questioner of the night (not now in mufti) who is himself a question asks her what she in the deep recollection of her body needs to ask him: How is her father?

For we have, you know, more than enough information on other matters. Yet for what? For remembering? To do what? We already remember we have changed toward life. The unexamined life is well worth changing. We knew life, yes even when we were least together. Though not how long it was. While knowing life was brief next to light. Had not the Latin thinkers called light longa? A good question, though just what light was seemed lost in mass and speed.

We will—you will—change your life on May One (why wait? asks Grace K. gently touching up her voice with revelation). Buy yourself a plastic speculum and examine your body/self; you have a hand mirror already, feel yourself, look at the surplus, are you getting anything out of it? eat live food, take the time to chew and especially if the live food is moving—lasts longer and so will you if you can not be so available to your family all the time, right?, and look at your posture, you’re round-shouldered, what are you protecting?—got money of your own? this is nineteen seventy-seven almost. Do you even begin to know what you’re capable of, honey? even if (so long as he doesn’t specifically make the request) you are a Sunday cocksucker, investigate alternative sources of protein, information is all available but we don’t share it, honey, we didn’t share it like we should.

Surplus of information such as that kid with a regular contact smoker’s hack at eleven studying rotation, is that the kid assembling facts on the sub-Iranian desert channels? Because if so time has passed; because in that next room the kid is four years older at least because he’s studying sunspots now and has learned that sunspots rotate around the sun they are part of that itself doesn’t rotate like something solid, and that when the sunspots along the sun’s equator speed up, this may mean an ice age is coming. Like the Little Ice Age which began in the middle of the seventeenth century and lasted seventy years and is called the Maunder Minimum and caused suffering in Europe. The seventeenth century is the sixteen hundreds.

But sunspots have been on the scene for centuries, and, as an inventor based in nineteenth-century New York City told a very young woman from the immediate hinterlands on her way to and then later from experiences westward, sunspots and money seem close kin by cycles coming and going, but that is mathematical moonshine (she smiled) and little more (for she was interested in the planet Mars and how livings were made and Africa and the anti-vivisectionists and tall buildings in Chicago moving against the great cloudy American winds, and interested in Indians and not only in general). He and she had met eight years before in New York harbor on Bedloe’s Island, she scarcely twelve—1885—fledgling observer come with her father who brought out a small weekly newspaper in New Jersey to see the more or less uncrated pieces of the Statue of Liberty; and, standing in unmown scrub grass, she watched over the shoulder of a photographer taking the Statue’s detached face from the inside, which though inside out gazed through the open frame of its crate dolefully and dark-cheeked (and was there even a touch of the Native American or jojoba-au-lait there?) and with huge, curved Grecian pout gazed back at the photographer in front of the girl from the hinterlands yet stared (did the Statue) a hair to their left as if over their left shoulders like a person at something beyond them until this twelve-year-old who looked thirteen from New Jersey heard behind her a voice muttering sotto voce, "Too big— never get the damn thing together. Facing the wrong direction, for Pete’s sake. Unequaled, my foot," and she turned, amused, and he asked her, 4’What’s your name?" and when she said, "Margaret," he said, this weathered old Hermit-Inventor of New York, "Go west, young girl, that’s where you must go, and you will," and "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will, a whole world outside tracing your window and bent like weather by light." And Margaret said, "Of course she won’t, because she’s only a statue," but Margaret stared hard into one of those understandable eyes and when she turned with her small leather notebook in hand, "How do you know?" she retorted; whereupon the Inventor of New York with the wind of the harbor uniting them, retorted in his turn, "I bet you can recite poetry." Thinking this tall, brownish man with squint-small cavernous blues for eyes rude and funny, but hearing her name called in warning from the far side of the Statue’s strewn sections, she thereupon recited what came to mind:

. . . ever drifting, drifting, drifting

On the shifting

Currents of the restless heart;

Till at length in books recorded,

They, like hoarded

Household words, no more depart . . .

and furthermore,

Far or forgot to me is near—

But the brownish man with the blue eyes murmured, "Very good, very good." And Margaret went on:

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again . . .

And when, on hearing her name closer by yet in a new way so she felt she was much older (this she told her grandson one day half a century later), she was asked by the Inventor her birthday, she told him hoping for a present; and then she felt a grip upon her arm that drew her away toward other pieces of the Statue so firmly the grip is like the tone of her father’s protective voice, with whom she is jointly visiting Bedloe’s Island. But(?) Go west, young girl, young woman? Who has the time?

For we felt late.

Yet replays are available. As we for them. So we saw whatever from new angles and in an order not up to us but we at least felt it could have been. Just as we got to be at high times the very angles we saw by, and knew in a rush this was none other than the angels sharing what they could with us— their intuitions not unlike what we term telepathy; their sympathy with another being or beings as close as what our own recent formulae infer to be Simultaneous Reincarnation; their patience much like the mind-bending trip our recent research promises, mapped of detours that arrive by curves that prove parallel by crossing. The replays will help and we should be able to replay them in future in any order why even a child could think up. But then we came down unavoidably and into another medium also watery but then we felt no more like angels. We did feel collective knowledge in excess of the event our preparation targeted: an event which was almost too much like itself, to wit a sort of execution. Weren’t we sure? And weren’t we there? Weren’t we even the ones meant? Breath breath breath breath breath. If you’re upset it’s because you want to be, it’s coming from you, you know, not the squad facing you in the prime playground. We already remember, and have we even seen it? Whatever it is, it weighs less while costing the same, yet can get into the habit of looking like it weighs nothing or is divorced from the concept of weight until we step quickly to one side of its shadow and see that, sure, it has weight. And then we see we remembered, unlike prior angels who needed no such process.

How we remember is something else, a whole nether question down the worm-road’s thread eroding some exact degree of blood between the diva’s doctor’s friend the Ojibway healer and guide and his one-third-Sioux part-Navajo cousin, a father-sky of turquoise upon his shoulders, a mother-earth beneath his pony’s hooves. And this cousin is in turn so distantly connected to a Navajo Prince of the early 1890s that we need even more justly define that kinship, maybe with this very patience coming to us periodically like refractions through waters of rain and bright dusts of air. So that in doing so we know more than we did or thought; and it will not go away, the northern bison tongue which that Navajo Prince held fast to the study of until violently interrupted and held fast to still, while he crossed the Pacific-Atlantic land-bridge between New Mexico and New York, holding always in his bag or pocket a section of bison’s tongue which he knew could yield active force immeasurable if only the layers of its fiber and light could be touched in a manner that the Great Spirit must already have told us in the loaded dreams some wide mountains experience. Meanwhile, we might just reduce that kinship to questions that are more lasting and alive than answers, if it had not already been done.

By at least one of our number. A grandmother who told stories upon stories to a grandson James or Jim long before his mother took her life if not her drawn, apparitional face away from him, and sometimes afterward also. Stories that often did not finish and were easy to understand, he thought; stories that passed the time. Stories that he retold himself to remember in new form, across the gap between what she had said and what she had not.

He kept an eye on both. This left him by our count one eye free for what was in between but put his moving feet in two places often at once like East-West magi even of that time, wise persons who they say could be in two places simultaneously, Grace Kimball on second thought among them though not for that feat (for she was always only here) but for having a total view, including healing change, finding as she must on what we will call her wheel a place and time and power for just everything:

Women and men each other’s axles, she felt on good days; each other’s future and frontier—Words, words, words, Grace Kimball quoted herself, getting to the point by getting away from some other, women and men each other’s separated cooperative, for this is the future, she said, this is it, babe, and we are it, ‘cause we know if we don’t do our thing, why darling nobody’s going to do it for you.

(What is this "thing"? asked voices of a later age, and what was this "future"? and what was this "abundance"? Answer: we didn’t mention anything about abundance yet.)

And where did that one free eye leave James Mayn?

It was his secret from himself, while his use of it was his secret from others.

What secret? That he didn’t believe his mother had left? That he held his father responsible? No. Rather, that, falling far into the horizon, he had slipped into—that is, without benefit of much known science (he being an ordinary person) or any wish to hold a long view—or any view—of history, its thriftless drift, its missile balances, strip mining, and multinational corporate selves but also linked sphere of weather stations called the Earth, all which he helped record, journeyman that he was—slipped, yes, into future (the word is out), and from there he looked back like a shadow thrown upon us by a part of ourselves, but Mayn looked back so to the life that past was present and his secret kept—we mean he was in future as he casually joked once with not his son but his daughter, he was in future imagining our present as his past and so we may have felt truer having been imagined by him to the life since he is one of us.

Which brought him not a will to power but the reverse—and didn’t bring him, but did one day yield, Grace Kimball herself.

Now, they two aren’t to be thought of in the same breath here. Yet if the chance remains that they should never meet to our satisfaction, still we ourselves are their relation, think of them as being like married folk who have so much between them they need friends to be between them too.

"So much between them"? So once more we caught ourselves saying two things at once, and late children whom we have come up to are heard saying, What? as if we’d thrown them a curve—so it is wondered if they will turn us in.

For, say two things at once—that’s double-talking, and the man with a foreign voice making inquiries, who has you in the next room and removes his late-model jacket and has the legs of a soccer player and moves toward you now where you await him in the one available chair, wants to know, All right, which is it?—make up your mind—I’ll read you back what you said: you refer to and I quote "a time that would rush us into bastardy if it could," which means either that where we are makes us bad people, or makes us illegal: because we know what "bastard" means as well as you, but you are saying two things at once, so which is it?

The room’s silent, your mouth dry as a drunk’s, knowing less than nothing more than that the brass circle-with-a-collar in which each chair leg sits or stands is what they screw down ship’s furniture with—you too when you look back on that after all quite fun crossing it’s so to the life it is a very picture, painting not the town but the ocean red and the thirty-knot floating town blue and white on the outside, and wet on the inside, color no problem, it’s still done to the life (before air fares much less matter-scrambler beamings got prohibitively cheap); and the power vacuum a daughter found for father out in the hinterlands that stayed with her into later life is more of this insidious finding two or more questions for only one answer; ditto the sons of the mother who sent them away but seemed herself the one who’d left, those two sons (one who went and one who stayed put) who were secretly if we remember one as well as two, does that mean they two were one or that one of them was two, the one son sent away where he belonged to be human? the inquisitor wants to know, our hands are connected to the arms of the chair, the man conducting the interrogation can’t wait, his time is worth its while, O.K., he’s said, which is it? The earphones with hard-to-beat frequencies are almost upon us while the wire for the earphones uncoils by itself, the man says he’s going to offer us some encouragement, some inducement to decide which of two things we mean. (Wide Load!)

Did we lie, then, speaking doubly?

There in our inquisitor’s eyes are shades of our danger which maybe he shares by knowing what is going to happen to us here no matter what we say maybe, or in the other room which now that we’re here becomes what this room once was, namely the next room, hear the silence, you could cut it with an electric prod, and you should; hear within the silence a high-frequency tuner rising in pitch or volume you can’t tell maybe both.

Just talk straight, honey, said Grace Kimball again and again, late in her century, tell it like Mama didn’t teach you; go public, come out (you know?—spelled TV O) be up front, like the money, everything else is guilt and manipulation.

James Mayn on another track thirty seconds away by phone, two three four five hours by air, said, Include me out of this Discussion of the Void and what is supposed to fill it; look if they get me under the lightbulb how do I know what I might say, I’m not one of your great talkers but under that kind of interrogation I might become human, I mean I might elect to survive, I’ll do what I have to do if I’m lucky, I might even make up what I’m supposed to know, I might get inspired, I’m human I don’t know how I’m going to react, I’ll say this, maybe I don’t even know my sources to divulge, maybe I can’t say what I saw or what someone said, but I would go easy on the jokes, I think, because those guys who do the interrogating have a sense of humor to begin with but on another wavelength which when it hits my skin-ends could just get into my wavelength or is it width, overloaded width? ouch, I’ll keep myself going maybe by thinking, What if I had this guy interrogating me alone man to man in a shopping-center parking lot, no secret weapons, nothing fancy, equals you know, just a couple of temporarily missing persons settling a difference.

Yeah, yeah, that’s how men settle their differences, a female voice on two firm thighs is piped in.

You mean how man, growls a male voice on two suspect knees.

A child is heard observing to a fellow child, See I had this block that was chipped, my dad threw it against the wall, there’s where it hit, he got a long-distance call from my mom, and he came back and we were working on this launch pad and suddenly he picked up this block and threw it, you see where it got chipped?

Breathe, said several people softly in unison and it was a comforting command.

In those days there were breathing problems they were called. We’ve cleared all that up by now, looking back, and that’s a promise. But in those days, from the city citizen in one’s high-rise apartment caught between the sounds of the sky and the sounds of the street, to the grand diva singing her guts out for the cheaper seats up in the troposphere interface as much as for those in the dress circle and closer in in seats so inflated they were out of sight, there were popular misconstruings as to the future evolution of our equipment, for instance what song we would be singing fifty years later. We’ve said "future" to be clear, for according to our historians picking up after our anthropologists, the past is also evolving, as the old song ("My Dreams Are Getting Better") had it, "all the time."

Looking back we found that we too had gone in for human sacrifices. To get where we were, we’d made them, and included others among us.

We have been busy. We have worked on it and some have become in fact busy bisons. But dispersed along our respiration’s warp that gets us together and expels us, flows us and stammers us, We have worked on our collective awareness of, as the poet says, similarity between us, which is liking, and difference between us, which is loving, in order as a long-range project to become single.

***

Yet inside this noise a silver needle is heard over its compass rose still in its package vibrating less Obstacle Race than Obstacle Hunt. It’s what I’m getting—O.K., what we are getting—as an imprint through glass, cardboard, paper, and skin from the wildly jiggering compass needle. Obstacle Quest it sounds like. For you can’t get around the ob. until you locate it through what gaps between.

Like what a father didn’t say or a mother didn’t do. Gaps where somebody wasn’t. So we took up position there, O.K.

But fell through.

That’s the horizon for you.

More to it than our mother and our father, who can’t take all the blame for the fix we’re in and who now turn out to have been obstacles inspired by our trying to get through to what we’ve chosen to forget may not be there.

Except as a wind that takes you where wants go. To the next obstacle. If it doesn’t pass you by. That you go past, then, to see it back there as if it was, my word, "the limit," that’s what a fantastic grandmother called a snoring grandfather in his and her sleep, "you are the limit!" whom she probably would sometimes dream of punishing for dropping cigar ash in his pleasant bed-dreams on such carpets as connected in later years their separated bedrooms, Persian carpets almost meeting in an L-shape, whose angle is both the gap between them and the threshold into which we turn to see the other.

Who has . . . what? disappeared?

Not quite.

Is it the Buddhist monk, who as he burns away even this last desire to burn so seems to spin, as a creed enjoins? As ye reap thus shall ye sow, the western observer of this event quick-quote-reports on tape, and she is a beautiful, dusty little woman in a Stetson hat, and her cam’raman and his gear have disappeared, and she reports on tape the crystallized advice of this dying Buddhist burning with purpose. No microwave oven he, no Sugar Crisp bargain fed to the air which knows he can’t be totally consumed, a piece of him will survive the fire’s fuel, there’s a fossil shortage. Also his economic teachings will survive him, if we remember. They’re on tape don’t forget; some anyway, if we recall.

Later the muddy-faced dramatic little woman’s voice is joined by her body Stateside. She’s draped now in one simple length of uncut, unsewn saffron matter illustrating a principle of economics that other women at Grace Kimball’s loosely structured Body-Self Workshop who know this correspondent-woman’s reputation expect to be but a preface to history when this small, beautiful, now clean woman removes the garment that represents a maximum of well-being and a minimum of labor and consumption, but instead, there, then, she is, naked, "lovely" (somebody says) and not at all the confident person thousands of miles away graveling on magnetic tape the burning monk’s economic doctrines of full employment for its own sake and purification of character as opposed to multiplying goods and wants.

But an articulate structure, we’ve heard that one before if not been messenger for it when actually we had thought it up—was it a promise?—weren’t those the words—articulated structure? The tape ran out, the void keeps spinning, the leader flaps, James Mayn has appeared in several places in the audience, which in its haphazardly individual or single way has some claim to be itself the real show, and this is not quite the opera house (which was full in any case though Mayn with his press connections could have obtained a ticket but he doesn’t like opera, he arrived at this view with a minimum of sweat and independently of Grace Kimball, who also does not go, she hasn’t got the time for that puffed-up stuff, it’s ripe for a high colonic enema, all those overweight transverse colons up there and it’s not her show anyway, she honestly upfrontally unclosets. Mayn himself meanwhile an audience of one hearing a tape rotate (faulty), against its plausible (read poignant) crackle background of enthused (read kindled) flesh, three or four familiar tenets of ancient economics, and who is elsewhere in another audience either in an all-purpose conference hall near the Santa Fe opera house or at Cooper Union in New York hearing from another foreign thinker (an increasingly gaunt South American economist with red hair) that this "articulated structure . . . can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units," Mayn will just jot that down, and, as quoted by the thinning-red-haired Argentine, jot down also that "people matter."

A multiple child in the next room rotates a whining pencil sharpener and reduces something or other to R, which may then be positioned between any two other things to make them equal, hear the noise. But what am I equal to? I said I preferred not to think about that Wide Load approaching (with typical Danger signs) down the high road, our mind having been cross-multiplied into a various we with new powers but less room to operate in.

Yet if we are multiplying, who were those two who were together for a while and then there was one? That’s what it seemed—suddenly one instead of two, one citizen, one bonded messenger. And we for one can’t at present say it better but add that we deny, at least categorically, that anyone has disappeared from the country, for one thing we’ve got to feed them, they keep coming, out of the hills and the forest, later the woodwork and the closet space we didn’t know our property had in it squirreled away.

The two who disappeared, frankly we question them, this reported disfunction called disappearing, though this suddenly seeming-to-be-one where there were two isn’t unheard of as if one had spun behind the other. So we’ll get right on it, there’s got to be an angle, for we now can’t see the one supposedly in front for some reason yet the state of our knowledge is such that this in front may be a thing bleeped out to the naked eye (think of it) yet blocking with its invisibility that certain someone behind it that, if we could only see it, is visible to the naked eye. But we’re looking good wait one sounding good whoosh going out on all power vac bands, good old sound waves, they’ll stretch a point if you need one, they’re a lot longer than light waves, don’t you know, so they work round an obstacle, whung, they stretch, they bend right round it, lose nothing; nevertheless, elastic as it is, the sound front has been altered by that obstacle, what we call a sound shadow, really don’t think about it, we’ll take care of it, why of course people matter, your very child agrees "people matter" and signals this agreement to the terms by introducing an R between them—but we’ll take care of it, we are some power to be here, we have a history of this, though we are not the first angels to conceive of the obligation to adapt, we understand the structures involved, if for our new coastline development we need a tree without a trunk then let’s go get it because we don’t need to ask, we know we’re it, now some of us get into worrying ‘bout what we don’t just understand, and that is bad, and maybe you know him, he is a citizen, a noise-mac her, a singer. He lives . . . with himself. Not always a good idea because he lacks . . . patience, let us say. Yet patience shared is just the rent reputed angels lately express in us for using us in their own life-changing, potential-seeking experiments, you feel them in your speech, forms of dreamt advice if we can only listen to these apparent visitors, these learners, using our language as they can.

He lives, to go on, in a multiple dwelling covered by rent stabilization not to be confused among apartment hunters with rent control or statutory tenets; an old endangered apartment house, old building, but well built originally with walls sound-proof, we’ll be repointing the bricks in a couple of years from now but in the apartments the walls of the rooms are sound, in fact soundproof from unit to unit, that is apartment to apartment, if not within a given unit: still this well-known singer, a basso rotondo, would get out of here and buy himself a townhouse had he not recently become afflicted with a secret he cannot bring himself to tell his doctor or his friends: like the recently divorced tennis pro who one day in the middle of a match he’s met starts thinking about his wrist which at that instant becomes suspect, he finds it tilting to hit the ball up over the fence or down into the net; or the long-time diver, his tanks like rockets on his back, who suddenly questions his lung capacity and can’t stop breathing faster and faster—well, our resident basso one day finds himself thinking about, ye gods, his larynx, his head register, his wind, his glottis (narrowing its void-like passage almost to non-existence to increase the frictional vibrations in the famous membranes either side); also, above the true, the false vocal cords that close, then cough-like quick-release to attack a note—ye gods, these are all parts he learned long ago to forget except as love of self but now can’t help remembering, part by part, lest it all fall apart, eh?, his acoustical equipment, to the point where now he’s gone on to thinking about his difficulty swallowing and now here he is, not in his own living room between a baby grand and a giant divan that belonged to his mother that, what with the declining state of the elevators in the elegant, turn-of-the-century building you could never get furniture movers to move out of here so we’d just have to get a rigger’s license at an astronomical hourly rate—no he is not at home between piano and divan but he’s onstage across town, you know, having all evening puffed his way around problem after problem, ye gods, doubt upon doubt, as if this Strauss opera Rosenkavalier equals an attempt upon his life by dramatizing this secret that’s wrecking his confidence, and now at curtain call he’s breathless, swelling his sternum like a victim of slow vacuum torture.

Yet at that instant he sees in the gaps between his parts a dark-haired bald man out there in the windowed world beyond the stagy brink frowning but applauding and beside him a light-haired lady smiling but not clapping; and seeing them turn to each other, the basso rotondo, for whom tonight performing was never so like work, turns to the woman in kavalier costume beside him and because he’s inspired by the look of that couple in the orchestra why he is suddenly released, loose, afloat, pure angelic promise turning in space, empty as if hearing his own delicious requiem; so he’s put in mind of the story going round about this slender lady beside his own wide load, she’s looking out into the full house she whose father far away in South America is said to talk louder and louder the older he grows so that his daughter the diva thousands of miles north is alarmed for his safety, so to the basso rotondo she seems newly frail; so he, betrothed for a moment by her innocent thigh, takes her hand, forgetting himself oh forgetting himself as two more singers come from the wings, and he and this lady who is dressed as the Kavalier move left with the Princess on their left toward the center of the great stage, and the basso, busy bison (it comes to him from nowhere), angelic bull at large within the delicatest discipline of total ballet, knows in his heart that he had always known that there must be infinite room for People, here and over the brink of the stage, for the magical individual, the limitless person, in this—what?—loose-strung grand opus the ongoing gods he feels in all his oh suddenly relaxed registers are giving us to live gorgeously and gratefully in, bravo bravo bravo, he can smell already the lasagne verde, the forbidden mussel-shrimp-and-oyster-stuffed striped bass, the artichoke stuffed with mor-tadella, and before the liquid freckled pear or fleshly orange persimmon, the ripe blue gorgon foiled in the oven then mashed with sweet butter (and give us a soft nugget of ash-enveloped chevre!) and through all this across the restaurant table his friend with a roslein in the button hole and such fingers on the keys to one’s self as even the great cogent Verdi could not compose!

Elsewhere in a broad-based effort to recycle, they’ve started without us, and we need to get over there, as if not there already bringing our prestressed flange units in postponement of perhaps pain, whatever news pain is. What, though, have they started? A woman looks forward and backward to have a baby naturally with her husband; elsewhere, another does the same if she only knew it, and meanwhile lies incarnate in a motel bed near Cape Kennedy hearing from her new lover, who does not dream, dream-like memories murmured till she can’t stay awake no more no more; elsewhere, a man tries to hear what his new lover instructs him to hear, like a third party between them—news to him. Oh, these people, many more, are sharply felt yet minimally known, of an articulate community that is our representative blood but, like inmost organs and habits, unknown to us or word we bring sealed by the sender, whose parting words were that there is no neutral messenger.

For in this brief-turned age or interlocking place we were thrust back to the drawing board. To find that our understanding could prove to be just plain light—for there’s no reason to think angels can’t learn too—while light in our case had recently proved sometimes sound. And, given off from us, this sound had more to it or less depending on the viewer’s place—that is, how much you were, and where you were coming from, and how. What mattered, though, was that among all points of view the more Much averaged a shade greater than the less. So we had not just differences in point of view: we had a net more Much given off, and this might mean so much in the long run that the shade greater More felt downright massive. And so we chose for Much the new term Mass.

Yet how came this net More? From the sound at source in us. Even us in the sound. Trying to know when our tenant angels spoke in us.

But given a net More given off, the source must suffer net loss. Net loss of mass material which could be weighed. Which meant (we had to think) that sound had weight. So weight in some state might have sound. Yet if our light was only sound, sound could well be light. If so, light too had weight (which became it never so much as in the losing of it).

This was hard. But actually not on us. Beset by abstraction we many of us thought to hang in a little longer. If light had weight to its mass and on good days proved relatively endless, must not we its sometime source be endless, too?

Whether or not we needed it in this seeming endless supply, it seemed to need us less. We hated to lose light like that. Yet coming to us, leaving us constantly, it seemed still to know its place. Which we kept it in. That is, its place of use to us. For reading. For gardening at sunset. For cave weekends. For open-ended incandescence. For seasonal definition, if at times light’s swift generalizing power transcended such particulars as that Chile was not South America, New York not the Capital, the Statue of Liberty not art. Lately, we used light for Obstacle Manipulation, where Eye-light means Contact, and we had learned by chance that at a distance and without touching we might move a plum away from a lemon if not toward ripeness; move a person—say, one half turn; or move a mountain with its half-known contents, yet do so only so long as we saw the movable thing as in a beautiful relation to us (thus Optical Kinaesthesia). And first and last, we used light for interrogation and inquiry.

Inquiry was not new to us. We had long since isolated through shifting densities light’s lightning turns, refractory quirks, and strangely confident bends impromptu and for all the world like thought—light’s fantasies or dreams no less! These we had plans to guide through staggered densities prism’d to sooner or later get back to us so that refract might come round to mean reflect. Until one day, angling and bending in hope of mastery, we grandly thought light’s refracting mediums no other than ourselves. Yet now the sound of voicing such insight shed light in us. Right down inside us. So light, losing mass to us inward, must find itself as if anew. Thus received in us, it must be in us conserved.

"Kept in its place," did we already remember saying? Its speed stayed constant even now, and if we now first surmised that, like its speed constant to all passing points of view, we could have our light and be it too, we still could not for sure maintain in bulk the illumination now shedding itself inwardly. We looked out on others of us and at our stars and at light’s bent through our waters and slow motions, and entertaining the possibility that we might through adaptation experience the first angelic senility. We looked inward and felt curious. We thought not just that if light never slows nor speeds up how can it be us?, but since its sacred speed seems an unalterable inertia, why not an inertia of no motion? For we already remembered we had been told that we might make it stop.

Stop? But be itself. Let light, say, stop with us and be a pause.

And we half-listen, breathing, and with half ourselves wonder if it is by some awful standard exactly half. We can go in the front or back, the top, the bottom, one curve or another, or segment or seam or width of century, city, apartment house, gossip network, weather-station system doubling as arms-control monitoring grid, newly designed head, articulate structure that can accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale units, one gets the idea—though what about the long hills of soil turned over by hands? now this is small-scale agricultural homework inefficient and wasteful to one vision, body and soul by another, these hills are ours too and content to be not a model of the whole but a piece of Earth that’s one of many places we might be reflected, while some of us may be found elsewhere trouble-shooting to see where sunspots cross depression, high belts of auras fuel deep quests for the power source we were always meant to have, the gods told us through holes quietly drilled in our heads, if we could only look at it and see it, that power source which may be mere talent for prophecy. We’ve got a multiple child that’s equal to anything, exploring it, researching it, playing around with it—the harvest cycle, and Maunder Minimum rotation, deep steam from Earth’s magnetic engine, pure clean power from nuclear (say after us) Fusion, the race to find the tack to harness the void, for that’s where the power is.

Which Jim Mayn in later life listens to. At least there’s the machine and there he is, the tape recorder on the table and he’s sitting by it, used to being two or so places at once, staring along the desk at a picture of a global weather network.

Why has this life happened to him? Questions threaten to be unearned questions. He’s a guy—oh that explains everything!—a little more independent, more up on things by virtue of his work which he works hard at but at a leisurely slope. But why has what happened?

Nothing much. But a turn that your head takes and you aren’t all there for a while. I mean you can work out, go to a movie, have dinner with a lady, take your plane, or like now hear the flown-in tape, make a note or two, stare at the sphereful of weather stations doubling as other centers: But he’s looking down at it, the globe with little towers like a satellite’s antennae, a Christmas orange that grandma’s just getting started sticking with twig-hard little cloves the ends blunt so she has to bear down against her own flesh; but wait: that pomander’s a secretly familiar obstacle to this uncanny other.

He wouldn’t speak of it, this turn his head takes, they could lock him up for what he might know, but here it is, O.K.?, he’s listening to the dusty correspondent-lady twang—no, simply say—her Buddhist quotes against the paper-thin crackle of fire she’s also reporting, within the larger, quiet, flesh-smooth breathing of the flames subsisting on an imperial gallon of non-renewable fossil fuel, fed too, in Mayn’s head, among all our multiplied voices, by an official back in Washington who got round the obstacle of dire new taxes if not death by beaming right through his compartmented economic advisers who said you can have these but not this, these but not this, substitute tat for tit but not both, Mr. President, through this and these the aforementioned official—future inflation be damned—beamed a budgetary implication that the war in question would cost ten billion tops and be all over by fiscal year-end—until Mayn is back where he’s been before quite really, yes quite really, and where, double-bodied, he is mile-years (scale-wise) above this weather-sphere.

He is in the future, not shedding light up to his full potential.

That’s right; in it. And a future boding ill for that past of ours we’re now in, that he has now in helpless interest or sympathy doubled himself back into, so that it might as well exist. But he’s not the type for this warp-vision; rejects the patent. Not crazy or original, a newsman who’ll carry the ball if it comes to him but has never agreed to take a view of history, no not even that it makes no sense. But he can’t get out of the way of its waste-oriented debris that, once seen, relate—and thus graduate their vectors of distance, disaster, hence perspective out of thin air like mind (it occurred to us) till this process of relation could turn (read flush) waste into flesh.

But he know that he in the future and from there hav’ thought back up a few familiar angles of the past our current present, which includes—

But wait, for while we wait for it to pass, it was a Wide Load transferring itself down an interstate in the middle of the night roughly eastward in the middle roughly of the continent. We had heard this Wide Load was mineral matter relative to us; its frequent no-show felt like it had something to hide (you ol’ Wide Load!) if only itself: as highway widths changed, so did spot reports of the overlap, until margin was our main worry, but if mineral or other substance receded, where to? No one must have seen the Wide Load at this instant we feel from how it looks through the Flying Camera keeping pace with it above the telephone lines and fields and treetops, while, long-lensed and intimately at this distance of fifty or seventy-five feet, the camera ear listens in on at least two voices somewhere there inside that Wide Load behind shingled walls and moon-pale Venetian blinds. A Wide Load being shipped interstate and at this dark hour without benefit of advance patrol—wide and immobile as a home, this unit, and hanging out over the edge of its great, low carrier trailer and out over the edge of the road as if the road’s been narrowed or a mountain had arisen widely from a moving molehill, so if a section of us other than the camera being flown beside this night cargo came the other way now, we’d have to swerve off this speeding road, foray out into farmlands of uncomfortable earth ridged and mapped with memories of soy seed and feed corn, or a brief forest of some sleeper’s saplings shadowing the far side of a dubious bridge, landbridge or any edifice to travel through. But if this other part of us, at large upon the interstate at this hour, must hold the road in the opposite direction approaching this high truck cab and its sweeping Wide Load, we would have to make a leapfrog dive up and over like the nationally screened daredevil who stands in the approaching vehicle’s path till the last instant, or alternatively we’d have to be clotheslined like a fat (as they say "a little short") fast ball wham into the middle of Indiana or Ohio, or (to skip cartilage in favor of bone) we would have to have a gap in us between our land-gear / undercarriage and the rest of us for this Wide Load to pass with its fore and aft signs through us going the other way. Unless, that is, this Wide-Load container of at least two room-type spaces—this room and a next room—prove penetrable!—as that tired voyager Columbus imagined when, having been offered by the Indians an herbal pick-me-up, he found "the illusion of ‘arriving from the east at the Indies’ more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco," or the thought that he was the first and therefore the beginning. For Who Was Here First proves to be a function of Where You Coming From.

But wait: elsewhere, they’ve started, apparently without us, and we want, kind of, to get over there. But we were always getting started, until of late we saw again us getting started, yes there was the word like the event itself, until we saw it wasn’t our fault, we were larger than life until life caught up and wouldn’t have if we hadn’t been larger as an incentive system. We can’t get out of the way of Mayn’s claim that he is at times in the future—because it is literal but also because it is so private as to be imaginary. He means what he said: and from that future that he at times is really in he has thought our current present up—not too consciously, though, and with help—thought it back up as if it were the past, which includes (within random wide-load boasting possibly two angry voices exploring the subject, and within the routine parameters of Mayn’s work where meteorology and arms control have met primarily since the reconnaissance scandal of the U-2 plane high as some satellite sculpture but without an orbit came crashing down through even its own surveillance upon another continent it was not meant to touch but beamed into as a bend of our own potency angles from the glass of the air into the layers and waters of our lands) . . . and takes in (because we don’t wait any longer) . . . wind and weather as a cover for the powers that be and also for a mother—

But where is she? And won’t we find her amply covered with tales the grandmother Margaret told of the Eastern Princess nee of Choor who arrived by great-circle detour doubtless upon a large bird that consumed Navajo horses under its wing? Add to this the account of the headman’s son the Navajo Prince, who once far north of his home saw a herd of bison nudged like a shadow off a cliff and felt in the stillness of that fall through the late light a waiting force somewhere in the nature of their bodies as yet not found; same Prince who even more obstinately pursued the Eastern Princess not back to Choor but along a curve of Mother Earth across a continent to where the Hermit-Inventor of New York who had given emergency counsel in the West but earlier had urged her as a girl named Margaret to go west in the first place, turned her, at last back East near home, into a sun-drenched mist to make her escape from her literally continental lover into by one account the now assembled Statue that harbored her as her disguise then compacted her cooler and (by another account) shapelier, when swift, soft, footsore steps of one tired Indian wanderer were heard climbing nearer and nearer, ascending the foreign keep of the Statue’s towering interior till they passed through her, and she passed downward like the wind, leaving him her one-time Navajo Prince to reach for himself the Statue’s eyes and look out toward the ocean he had seen only in the curves and wave-motion of his home deserts, prairies, and plateaus. But had heard of it in the Hermit-Inventor’s talk who himself was curiously never to be challenged as to his name of "Hermit-Inventor of New York" or chosen by those people or by the Eastern Princess he helped get into trouble and get out, or the Margaret she also was or even the grandson she told tales to later. In fact the Hermit garrulously sojourned upwards of half the year in those western lands to which he had sent that girl and later woman Margaret whom at more than twice her age he secretly loved, and though he lived by himself the balance of the time in New York and worked alone, he talked loudly into the night and lived among his schemes of buildings yet unbuilt, wind shadows yet to be cast, underground-wind-powered subways, floating underground buildings made of mirror—designs of weather that he hoped would make his skyline prophecy resound in all the colors of its building material and the powers of people these future buildings contained— Which we now all together have been saying include— To go on . . . with no more waits ... for even Margaret’s daughter Sarah, Jim’s mother, who heard but one of Margaret’s tales the one Jim did not hear, of what happened when the Navajo Prince met the East Far Eastern Princess once of Choor and her long-time betrothed and who else or other trace of future lay windowed in that turf so patient, but . . .

Wind and weather a secret familiar cover, as we said, for the powers that be, and wind and weather a sandman’s cover also for a mother who went away where salt waves rolled and eyelashed upon a beach but who then, as a future absence, brought herself close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap. And through this gap a future would always come back, as she did not: except a breath that came firm and steady, expelling, drawing back, the night, the day, human, animal, those who are known and those who are also known.

Choor Monster of the Long White Mountain

That sounds good, somewhere. Close as the next room (if you happened to be downstairs). Soft, loud, high, low; not without end, but still continuing. Song, yet then again like argument talked—not to you, or anyway not you alone. Space between it and you. Soft, loud, like music you would overhear when you were growing up.

But that’s it. It is that music. Or was it the person playing you "heard"? Was that the feeling? Heard but not seen! A sound of Experience itself. Weigh it, store it; luckily in your "life" you can be dumb about it. Her privacy inseparable from the noise of the instrument: piano or violin; some days both. The musician’s secure devotion. Practice, yet not to make perfect. Scale-like up-and-down workouts on violin that were more like real music when the in-between notes got crazily played. Early experience of somebody else’s, yes, thought earned. Or could it have been some teenage, fairly early experience for you of pausing: pausing to Look Back! But why back, when what you were hearing was your mother’s concentration right now? But where was it going?

This was you going too. Does that just mean "growing"? Or that you doubled her going? Who could you report such claptrap to? Is it monstrous that to this day you have not thought much about her going? Fact was, she went, dead or alive.

Decades late, an event now in the apparently near future may get away from you. Two persons stand upon a metal plate: alloy to the best of your knowledge unique among late-century alloys in being natural; occurring in a natural state, and mined, not made in the lab. But upon this plate two persons stand waiting to be elsewhere. And behind them, more twos wait.

Wait: what was this Choor? she asked, a passing affection in her and even in her word was that let you feel you might plead ignorance (here when you were headed out the door) or chance the intimacy of denying her the answer. I never heard about any Choor, she said, humorously but it bothered you but didn’t surprise you because the stories your grandmother Margaret had been telling up until not so long ago were for you, not for this daughter of hers who was your mother ("independent as hell," your father said as if admiring, but you didn’t quite understand). Choor what, did you say? she said. What Choor? she persisted, it has a funny sound, are you sure it’s right?

She meant to bother you, but you were the one who had dropped the mention: so on your way out of the house you stopped and you told her what maybe she wanted to know—your large, soft-oiled first baseman’s mitt enfolding a slightly reddened and browned American League hardball there beyond where your thumb and fingers reached that would always let the long mitt do its own finding of a ball coming at you high overhead or vacuum a low throw out of the dirt—a mitt with powers of trustworthiness beyond even the warlike leverage of your friend Sam’s black rubber fins at the lake, which were fun, but cheating—but magical.

You told her only what you knew.

Margaret made up Choor, you thought. This Princess got sent away on a mission or something by her father, who was King of Choor. Margaret didn’t tell them like stories much any more except once in a while referring to some Indian or mountain or agriculture or cure as if she was one of the listeners nowadays. Choor had a long white mountain, white in the summer too and just as white after some of the white broke off up into the sky and became one of the giant birds that grew there though they grew a good deal darker when they flew away. The Princess flew away on a giant bird on this mission and where she went to was really out West where Indians lived, but they weren’t all Navajos. (What mission? his mother asked. To explore the New World, he seemed to remember, see if they had any monsters. What did the bird look like? his mother asked, chicken-in-the-car-and-the-car-won’t-go, she added, sort of between the two of them. Hey that’s "CHICAGO," he said; no, her bird looked more like a big duck but the size of a house.) Margaret’s stories eventually got to be more like what you would have seen if you’d been there, you know what I mean? They had cures for everything.

Such as?

Well, tobacco ash makes your teeth white.

How ‘bout tobacco smoke, Jimmy? (But his father was the one who got mad when Sam’s father told him the boys rubbed lemon juice on their first two fingers to clean off the stain.) But this Choor, she said, it was just some place to be from? was that it?

Well, soon as the Princess left, things changed, he said.

Oh, shrugged his questioner (his mother, the daughter of Margaret) sounding like now she didn’t need to know anything more, and to Go on, Jimmy, scat.

And he did, sailing like a broad jumper off the porch, not hearing the screen door (is this true?) clap shut until he hit the sidewalk at the end of their walk—but today without that calm shout from his mother from inside to not let the DOOR slam.

Meanwhile, decades later in the near future two persons stand upon a metal plate waiting to be elsewhere. And sure enough, behind them more twos wait their turn to step onto the plate and be transferred from sight. What becomes of these people? The plate is a type of transformer plate and the occasion is not a twenty-fifth-century movie in a theater in the 1940s where you know a dozen guys and girls plus your friend Sam, and your younger brother Brad is there in the dark somewhere with a real girlfriend. No, the people on the plate are bound for a frontier colony out in Earth-Moon space; and while it feels like home it is uniquely economy-oriented in that, unknown as yet to these pioneers, they wind up on arrival one person, not the original two. But what does that feel like? Is this Experience again? What happens to their clothes?

This is a future where you have been, and not by dream, Jim Mayn, because you don’t do dreams; and not by vehicle or through the aether to the best of your knowledge. Which you heard of long after it had been found to be not there. (Is that a trend?) And how did you get to the colony? In your same body? Maybe you didn’t stand on the plate. Were you simultaneously reincarnate?

But not dreaming, not dreaming.

A curve felt through your nature cuts distance brain-like and seeks in you to have been there first and retroactive to have guarded you through absence or secreted your viral memory from itself for a generation during which the future went ahead, homogened, homosomed, heading these willing pioneers for the hills of, after all, near-space, but getting there each pair as one person.

Which would make for richly human letters frequency’d back home, you can imagine, reluctant journeyman. But it didn’t make hard news you might readily share, cast as you could feel from that future like a shadow, whatever half-known way you got there to begin with; and while you’re not listening for more, maybe it is listening for you, for it seems to be there, and who was There First is like what Came First (the Indians or their Great Spirit that sets in motion our own stake in it).

But if two pioneers into one comprises one beginning ongoing, here is already another: a room, a city room, a mid-room of a railroad flat: and on the chipped walls big blood-red, blood-black working drawings on brown supermarket bags opened out, cut up, masking-taped together. And you are listening to an elder meteorologist with a broken yet rebroken and lengthened face expound too fast (then too slow, ignoring you, Mayn) that these represent another weather that may arise from convergence of atmosphere with some coastlines that of late actually have seemed disturbed, have varied suddenly like subtle fronts.

And while the world doesn’t interfere now with this elder maverick’s work, he does have a few correspondents left. One is a native American adolescent, New Mexico Pueblo Indian, y’know, who calls the Hermit-Meteorologist "great-uncle" and mails him bright chalk pictures (they’re in the other room) of sunsets and faces and mesa-based Apollo rockets like individual ears of corn; the second correspondent is an established inmate of a penitentiary, and he sends—God!—tips of some telepathic iceberg, y’know, reflecting what he found in his mail: write a lot of letters, you get a lot, the Hermit observes: oh this fellow’s much exercised about the high cost of opera tickets (that popular art!) and the current claims of women yet their "will"(!) to give themselves up for their men; but more to the point, letters re: precipitation of New Weather in new self-supporting communities. In return for all these letters, the Hermit’s afraid he’s sent back only a postcard now and then (like the one you got, you bet, brief-scrawled so it looked like a sketch: COME AHEAD—naming this afternoon).

The Hermit like a discoverer in this bare room chock-a-block with his concepts and his weather: it was there to be found. (That epithet "Hermit-Inventor" adhering like a given name he has lived up to—did you actually hear it given this man? There’s some hum he makes you resist around him of catastrophe. With it comes calm as sharp as a second voice, female far away in some next room of this dilapidated "railroad," babbling soft and old and dearly.) He has pivoted one coastline so it runs cross-country, you’d swear. He has replicated another so it comes on like crabbed waves across the continent. Mountain range, you suggested (to say something). What about a mountain? the man demands.

Is some time-defying coincidence afoot here? Hermit-weathermen-inventors-of-New-York talked their way into and out of histories your spirited grandmother told you portions of; your mother did not tell stories. Were those hermit-inventors all one hermit, as you were one boy? "Great-uncle" to an Indian? It hardly rings a bell; coincidence anyway is against your religion. Jim Mayn will settle for just this oldtimer, tall and irritable, who can’t afford an unlisted number to cope with these screwballs and probably foreign powers who call up (he guesses you’re O.K.), and so is phoneless, hence more concentrated on what’s here: snowflake-fringe coasts and diagraphs of pressureless voids that look like meteorite showers of infinitesimal equation on the wall of this Greenwich Village railroad flat—these could make their clouds of fingerprints considerably more than New Weather (as you clock these curious clouds—their curves of whorls blowing down to smaller and smaller whorls)—no, not just coasts of a weather but, up there on the walls across vertical piece after piece of brown paper, mountains seemingly as well (for your money) or just any old graph contour of some expert’s risk-benefit analysis yet coming right at you or your brain anyhow (friendly dried-out polyp of a still two-gun arsenal, leftrightleftright) receiving obstacles of turbulence that your guy’s differential equations for the evolution of the atmosphere and doubtless half a dozen other things at same time and/or unseen aren’t going to help you with (and if you’re this recycled man some woman called you warmly you have to admit the other day look around at the accelerated evolution of practically everything including these . . . what? you feel the word move your throat and mouth, the word "angels," where’d it come from?) and hell anyway this elder maverick New York Hermit-Meteorologist says forget it if you’re not up to them, the equations, he as for him never got family relation straight, left it to the women—second something twice removed—"Great-uncle to an Indian?" you ask—"Oh my gosh who knows what the boy meant by that? Second cousin I would have guessed, if my uncle or was it great-uncle was his grandfather. Leave that to all our kinship hunters in the field," your host mutters . . . "—where’d you say you’re from? Jersey?" People underrate the grandeur of New Jersey, he laughs the very laugh you heard in his postcard replying to your humble inquiry. Pretty much over your head, you had inquired if radioactive mists might breed atmospheric "sports"— freak fronts, stacked weather—say, like a tree with no trunk, you half-see, half-hear (but did not say in your letter), or a mountain you can’t see.

Word of this man’s bulletins launched from a local radio station near Cape May had come to you—the Coast Guard had complained—then elsewhere he was fired by an offshore pirate television station because, according to (he laughs) his prison correspondent, the hermit has powers of warning communicable in a beeline to others—so no need for wire service, radio, or TV. (Wait—the powers communicable? or the warning?) But "the grandeur of New Jersey"? For a second the old tales wander back—all of them and for just one second.

The old geezer’s not after publicity. Unless it could get him the funds to hire the plane and the infra-scan gear and a human or two on the ground to prove his guess. Oh you’re willing to believe weather and coastline connect: this is no hare-lipped hype for the news-margin traders—you could name one who will send and, yes, buy photo-illustrated rumor linking a mountain of mineral matter with an intelligence strategy undermining what might have been one of the more interesting socialisms in South America: whereas the hermit’s meteorology finds only a relation between unprecedented atmospherics and the behavior of little stretches of coast that may alter infinitesimally overnight: work he’s done that’s solid and odd: but hardly your staple all-points conspiracy theory like what the South American (Connecticut-resident) owner of newspaper chain you James Mayn currently work for asked you to look into: that has a Chicago industrialist’s estranged son thousands of miles south arranging President Kennedy’s Texassassination to impress a Chilean woman he is pursuing while he’s studying magic music-stories with which Araucanian Indian brujas in the South demoralized their Spanish conquerors, but at same time north of there near the port of Valdivia helping rebuild after an earthquake: and the woman? she’s a member of far left MIR (M for Movement) but soon to flip her coign to equally anti-liberal rightist revolutionary hive; nor is this New York maverick weather-discoverer’s coastline-atmospheric-pressure correlation any suspense-loaded Doom ding-a-ling in all probability, certainly not mystery’d like family closet within closet complete with (remember the Edison light bulb that goes on and off with the) door, so let’s make it last and leave the madness, folly, deaths, and their relevant skeletons back in there—for this isobar-tailed atmosphere freak in a railroad flat in New York’s legendary Greenwich Village is coming up with science that resonates. And while you don’t grasp all he’s saying, if he has found a New Weather of enclosed voids that like "strangers" do not draw outside pressures inward, the old guy’s right to call it "weather-possibly-without-a-cause" and at the same time relate it to "outlandish parallel phenomena" he describes as infinitesimal breaks in fanatic coastline indentations directly beneath the weather in question—breaks that are not supposed to be there—"where" both weather and coastline turn out to be expressible in these (he calls ‘em) "erratic shape equashuns"—"regular monsters, ‘fya look close, like each surprised by the other, sky, land, sky."

Oh, some middle room of a Greenwich Village "railroad" and someplace along the hall you passed the room with that babbling lady voice—a mother as old as she sounds far from children, who her hermit-companion says tells him to "go tell it—tell your message." The weather diagrams polygonally strengthened here and there by the appearance of the supermarket bag’s bottom look like coastlines, but also vertical layeroids rising one upon another: the rock of history, not the history you don’t believe in but some history of rocks you do.

O.K., this meteorological speculation plus this broken and rebroken face hosting you is another beginning less necessary than equal, more equal than prior—work of an out-of-work savant, unfrocked more than unemployed, who beams his suspicion through you as if you, James Mayn, have sensationalized him, made him a household word. He didn’t know your name when you announced it, did he? He of course knows all these other things you don’t, the fact and math—even the grandeur of New Jersey—O.K., but not who you are, except your job.

His face is changing on you again, fabulous geezer—O.K. Cut . . .cut, please.

For in still another beginning, a man and a woman—had once been married—but they didn’t know each other necessarily—because it had not been to each other they’d been married. Which is an O.K. opening for a friendship. Or Open Marriage (OM), as we once said in sanction of some liberty to fuck our freedom. But they’ve not really met yet, and on this new beginning we now leave them, you see, it takes so long for people to meet. Others have to meet first.

No order, that; but you’re in Florida, not all these other places: like Choor, the homeland of Margaret’s Princess; a railroad flat in New York; a metal plate to turn pioneers to a transmissible frequency; marriage OMing into friendship; these other other situations. (There are no situations, there’s only people. You missed your chance to tell the Hermit-Meteorologist about the visits you would swear you paid to a future where pairs of people get transmitted from Earth elsewhere only to arrive as one person. A technological economy, literally breathtaking.) You have just come in out of Florida where the night will smell of unused daylight and, come to think of it, of used daylight, too. Which might just be the Fountain of Youth Vaca de Leon. You have happened into a roadhouse in Cocoa near the Space Center, and here is where you are. Give the order. Is that an order? It’s only for drinks. They’re waiting. That’s all you do, you’re the one that says the words, let others carry them out.

A home passes overhead in orbit, ‘least you saw it launched this A.M., an empty household fully equipped, built-in cabinets, now it’s over the Andes, downtown Won Ton, Tunis, you wouldn’t know, and sure to come by again in ninety minutes, no need to duck.

You know what you have to do. Think of those waiting. Nothing to it: it isn’t as if this is even a mock killing-at-a-distance—nor that you have to be one whole person to give this order at a protracted time when you are letting a divorced whim bring you down here to Florida looking for a once-encountered Chilean only to find one of the best women you can remember.

"Shoot, kid," came the father-type voice (meaning, "Speak") far away in time but close inside the void.

But you, you don’t have to do the shooting. You just give the order.

Just? (For somebody hammering away at somebody else in a self-help workshop has just shown us that the word "just" often is minimizing our own self’s felt needs, as in "I just called up to tell you.")

Yes, that’s what you do. You do just. They take it from there. Standing up. Against a wall. In a revolutionary courtyard or an appropriated playground. But you don’t know what shooting: because maybe we have here a trial run, with blanks. Trial run to gain experience. Or give the squad waiting to take their best shot the real thing of hearing the blankety-blank gust of the weapons’ waiting life. And as for the terminal others waiting opposite, assembled in one timeless scheme all together or coming up in another time one by one to face the squad, the trial run gives them the complementary experience of, say, passing out at the explosion the shock of which we’ll hazard they’d have been condemned to run the risk of not quite hearing (whether they went-to-the-bathroom then and there or not) if the blasts had not been blanks—which "Victim then fills in" as blanks are to be filled in, with indifference, hope, rage, self, the blindfold smell of self’s waste, or say some tortured failure of heart (for who would go through that fake execution again? don’t ask), or (to reverse the words and economize) heart failure (for risk’s a factor and there’s such a thing as torture that goes too far) while on the other hand (human nature being what it is) failure of heart threatens to widdle and resolve itself into mere you know temporarily decreased cardiac silhouette or arhythm; or, after all, temporarily decreased cardiac silhouette may be but terminal arhythm.

Dry run or wet, give the order. It’s waiting to come into existence in order to be executed. A mound of sanitary landfill waits to be a layer, a quantity of vegetable, animal, mineral-kindred (not controlled-toxic, though literally mind-boggling) landfill, and some of those waiting are to be under the layer, and some not. So give the order. You have to anyway. Don’t distract yourself with memories of the future and a metal plate with persons standing on it, two at a time, two to the zero power it comes to you. Save your breath. Think instead of those waiting here; be considerate, you have to bring the order to the point of execution. So give the order. Give it your best shot. Yet hold it.

Oh sure, talk about the weather while we don’t know enough about it any more unless we wire Venus for un analogue much less consult weather’s novel rethinker in his disintegrating apartment furnished faintly with a sound of a cheerful old female talking aimlessly: or unless we hold to those ancient cumulus towers given us by the very Great Spirit who’d never incarnate vast self even in sign, even in spiral idea, much less stiff hat and short braids. But before getting into the weather, first give the order. That’s what you do. Take the power that’s fucking yours. The mayor’s spiel has gone on long enough. Don’t look back down the short circus of the century to a bomb or some such which once upon a biggish bang was set off in a territory named New ‘merica by desert marksmen, who knew better or worse after the blast to confirm that their preliminary risk-yield analysis had shown that the blast just might kindle the atmosphere (its enthusiasm?), evacuate our oxygen, take our breath away right down even to what we’d saved. But like the vacant furnished household swung round overhead tonight every ninety minutes, that one-time risk will stay where it is and take care of itself while you give the order.

Yet hold it, you know—hold the mayo; no, hold the mayor, no, hold the mushroom, hold the landfill, hold the lettuce (but don’t get caught holding the lettuce), hold the bacon it’s on the way home come to think of it for Mom had her first day on the job having broken the firing squad sex barrier—hold it, we said: but tell where we are, say we’re in a roadhouse late on a Florida evening and have approached the bar.

A young woman’s at our elbow while the micro-seconds that won’t settle into each other fall out of you into a noise umbrella like the we that you are and that you join.

But hold it, weren’t we a team, a squad? weren’t we about to do the necessary with the weapons at our disposal in the real field of a revolutionary system? Go on, don’t screw around, say it, say we’re one place or another. Go on, they’re waiting.

But somewhere else you see folk standing on a metal plate in fact of an alloy unique among late-century alloys in origin. Somewhere else—forget the chain of fire sphering the planet (call it Earth), forget that orbiting household (it’ll be there), forget that stand-up firing-squad routine did you think you were some young Chilean lieutenant?—no, forget all that, for people are standing on a metal plate you recall at a site called Locus T.

And they’re waiting for what better than what could happen.

Which they would embrace but it embraces them and raises them to its power to rid them of their twoness—elsewhere, not here in Fla—where the night smells of sugar percentage in the ketchup field.

And the couples waiting at Locus T—married? lovers? comrades?—seem cool and content, made of titanium, say, and about to be alloyed with a corrosion-resistant future. And only you know something, and you’re carrying it on you. It must be communicable, herd-wise; what is it? A number of those here seem not to find you dangerous. Hell, we all show traces of this ‘n that.

You were in future: that’s why you’re slow to execute. A shadow of the future? Hell no! You’ve no less than come back from the future. You have a power. Naturally don’t want to overuse or underuse it.

But here you are to give the order. Your teeth press your lower lip, or is that the floor, it’s so rough.

Give the order, give it through the gap. The gap? This vacant space between the arms. Left arm, right arm. The order can’t be executed if it isn’t heard (it says here). So execute, man, execute. You’ve been well coached, you have desire. Where’s the inspirational coach who said, "My guys like to hit and be hit"? The football coach in New Jersey, which if it had a decent mountain could have been a great state (had the coastline, the weather, the soil, the horses, had the good position north and south), New Jersey where you were a boy and where some story-book truth about (was it?) a hermitage invented of New York—we don’t ever get that right—not to be confused with the defrocked meteorologist whose wall diagrams you interview—not to be confused much less alloyed with some geezer arising in your monster-and-Choor-Princess-and-Navajo-Prince discussions in the late thirties and early forties with your grandmother Margaret down the street, but that was not on the football field where the coach should by now be laid to rest in the end zone staring up with all his heart at one stump of a goal-post timber impaled above him in the sod of state soil where the confined but still-functioning beep-bleep of his athlete soul picks up year-round the cleat-beats of his own executed plays thundering downfield, the football coach who wears a baseball cap to practice, to skull sessions, who hardly feels his tongue say execute when he takes his field general to task during drill for an intersectional clash (for we’ve graduated into America now, and the coach has been turned by sheer frequency of voice into many coaches). And where’s the general in the field or behind the scenes—a rebel of the junta (so goes the report), a revolutionary, but against what?—where’s the general who’ll say, "Execute them," much less, "Have them shot" or "Off them" (like your economical syndicate voice), when just plain "Take them away" will do the trick? Or (in fewer words compounding the economy of removing-without-replacing) "Remove them." Or, to effect this liquidation, he may confine himself to a look, a look intent and/or blank, the look his lieutenant sensed well and truly like the light clamp on the butt the first-base coach gave the rookie after a clothesline single who stood on the bag and now takes a healthy lead off first, his arms hanging from his shoulders.

But can the future know all that was meant by such orders and communications? That is, if you, this Jim Mayn, have really come from there. Or are still partly there or will be there. There is no future, it’s sentiment about what might have been. What say we make a package and see the future gets it? Why, then the future does exist. Yet wait: it has gotten it, and inside is the history meant for the future, but the package is so flat it can’t be opened, it can only be "read" or reconstituted. History is cover, but the cover story is increasingly worthwhile. But the package is being opened after all by its unknown receivers.

Are they the two by two waiting for what is to happen to them at Locus T?, standing to begin with on a four-cornered metal plate of an alloy mined not lab-concocted, found in its pure impurity in a mountain of America, discovered and extracted and used As Is? No: call them a bad dream, though you don’t do dreams; and forget this business about your having shuttled back from that future where the people are waiting on that transformer plate.

They don’t know what they’re getting into.

It’s as well a legendary package about an Inventor of New York giving a secret sendoff to a regal young woman, only to receive her on her return almost a year later, all told by a steady grandmother who seemed to make up so much it threatened to be true; maybe it’s throwaway advice from a mother to go away where you belong (now you saw her, then you didn’t)—some fleshly difference between advice and prediction which is the filling between them, block that kick the crowd goes on and on except for a recognizable father who doesn’t say anything but watches him chase around the cold football field. Maybe it’s a fifth of sour mash; maybe it’s one compressed person for the agony of two—some loot for the future so they know.

But*he don’t know. A guy somewhere near the gap we were speaking about just said loudly that he don’t know.

But that’s not you, you’re a guy who knows, who knows an onus from a behoof. Yet wait: give the order. See yourself along some curve of inkling that in this Florida roadhouse, or void Between, you can know a thing or two right here worth knowing, send it or not to that future where people by twos are waiting to be transformed into one. No, that’s jumping the gun. Transfed to frequency then to be transmitted from Locus T elsewhere. And when the frequency reaches that other place, the two transmissible as one have become one and we shall have no right to miss one or the other. An economy the future holds like word that is carried but not known in so many words. Is there divorce there, after this two-into-one technology?

Forget there: you’re here, facing a gap between arms, this gap awaiting your order. Your stomach warps and you hang fire, you don’t need to be accounted for by some group you’re being interrogated by that sounds outside you.

Where you coming from? Is this just another life crisis in face of which you know you do your work? But you’re not down here on assignment, you said. And not on vacation, so what is it?, though here is this subtle young person whose heart swims toward your body.

What’s going down? It isn’t new love, this powerful drift. And it’s not mid-life consciousness infection sluicing you in/out of the Untapped Reservoir of voices you figure all belong to (those that honestly don’t dream, those that honestly do). And it’s no more Chile than violence: because your job is nuts and bolts—fundamentals—not slow-blowing a bloody cover so that in five years the truth of who gave who the business can come out covered by the healing objectivity of time’s clarity wherein is the only safety upshot column by column into a morning news of riveting investigative reporting to be read in order not to think about what happened last night. And if the Argentine owner of a string of papers you work for has a brother who fakes his death by plane on a foreign continent, where it leads is probably not worth even dreaming about; nor are you any more into tracing several underlings named, say, Contreras, several with same first name too, some in receipt of political asylum in Texas but some spirited to a reputedly apolitical mountain and put into it like value one day to become minable veins; nor if you can help it are you into fielding blind volts of hardball played by proprietors of a stadium where you don’t tell the spectators from the game.

Where you coming from? A metal plate ahead where people stood Indian file, butt to gut (or are they being held up?) waiting to be reformed into frequency and at once transited elsewhere—where when you wake up there’s one of you. Two become one: did the Hermit-Meteorologist have an equation for this little monster? Two times almost collide! Is that a new one? And again, unreportable! The miss slides one between the other. New front-like shapes in the coast-cum-upper-void weather diagrams of an elder maverick fired for speculating about new weather as well as reading his mail on camera on an off-the-Jersey-coast non-commercial pirate TV station. Meanwhile, you saw Locus T like never before. Why’s it recede, then? In this void, to call up the future is to recall it. (Like division of automobiles ordered to have their mildly poisonous air-conditioners reconditioned?)

But no. Say what is so true that it recedes. Grasp it; it recedes. Grasp what? That that scene at Locus T was not future; it was a now, only one, mind you: the gathered point with one person in position right behind another person. They two are about to go. Isn’t it sad? But didn’t we toy with this for decades? Here it is, and not an experiment where hazard yield waits unknown.

The place is a station not a lab, though an all-white operator runs the trans-frequency send-off as if the controlled element were research, and after the send-off of each two the inspection of the transparent elevator-car-like bubble where they stood and its Locus alloy-plate might seem like tracing the still unknown. But unknown traces you, you can be either a jerk or a monster, your last choice, you have a moment to decide. The weight of your very own body is falling all the time. It’s your neck, look about you.

Bubble indeed! A million templates of electro-magnetism jointed continuously to make an ovaline so clear that with the help of a base plate made of a unique mountain alloy mined in its natural state, it throngs two waiting bodies with non-visible radiance, it brings out the cells in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin.

Till the instant when the million templates at what used to be the touch of a button collapse into one idea.

No experiment here, for this was no imaginary future; it was present. At least for you, who have not much in the way of imagination (you tell the girl beside you). But its vividness got so overdrawn on its own bearable present that you couldn’t stand what was happening to others, two by two and you were about to speak when you were cast out of that future (you won’t tell her any of this—yet, anyway) like a shadow though were you ever sufficiently dangerous and wasn’t your exit then also because you made up again an earlier time, well 1973? Where now you are for a while. While now those future scenes at Locus T are vivid—they live—because they’ve been seen before —for it’s, from Florida 1973, a future you’ve lived in, but as well because the scene at Locus T aligns itself with the arms and legs of that memory of two becoming one elsewhere in time—at a time when two becoming one did not mean this that is before one now in what can already be remembered as having once been foreseen as future. Seen, though, now with awful life because that memory helps the rememberer see that the T of Locus T isn’t just TRANSFER—the dissolving of a person or persons here in order to be reconstituted elsewhere in order not to have to slog from here to there through spaces as a running displacement of volume—but T means another change. It is a clean economy so clean who would notice it? So awful, yes, that if one can find the right past to call up, why then this clear economy transpiring at Locus T makes one’s notice recede (T for TRANSFER, T for TRANSFORM, t for future). You’re not a dreamer; you’re at best a trace.

When you told her you lacked imagination, she said she thought you were instead a recycled man. But then she said to forget she’d said it.

Two became one. This gets unbearable. You’re hard-headed, plodding; real as need be, but you’re invaded lately. Two become one. It might be three, it might be more. Four become one if you make a good enough plate to stand on. Two-become-one seems, here in the future-become-present, to mean people made congruent to fit an aim that’s beyond them yet with which they are in tune and which if viewed wrongly and with alarm recedes, as this flawed witness unable to bear what he has seen would be bent simply (as if he’d had an attack of superfluous gravitation like a head cold) off toward Locus S, Locus G, or N, or P; Locus L.

The spoken L lets off L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, from marked memory; and you who kept subjects and faces target-distinct from one another, so as to never seem to know what you figured you did not, can’t tell how you know (but you do) that those Ls with the numerals aren’t lunar and aren’t locus, yet how you knew locus with all these letters escapes you (but into the friendly void). No. L1, L2, L3, L4, L5 are points in Earth-Moon space, quite comfortable space, yes, that’s it—libration points. What is libration? Libration points— that’s all you know and plenty more than a man like you needs to know, which is in turn a reassuring conclusion that, as soon as you divest yourself of it, feeds back in its recession some new stuff coming at you obstacle-like, the fact that at these libration points you can stay put because the pull of Earth and Moon balance out with another force you were not maybe to know. And around these libration points are gravity valleys; for every school kid knows that gravitation makes valleys in space as well as mountains, vales as well as hills—and wells, too, which is not to say Earth’s the bottom of the bucket, just the bottom of a bucket, or of the well of somewhat made-up gravitation like the Moon’s, but far greater: you forgot, you forget, for you’ve really been there—whereas this girl at your elbow (your bicep) in this infra-redneck roadhouse in Cocoa near the Space Center is sure to know, though she has not come from the future (though in turn will have been told by someone at school and/or college that she is the future): but as for you you don’t feel like the future, you feel like your future’s angling past, but this isn’t what you know to be the truth, that some future to come is what you’ve come from, and you’re not persuading yourself of this, you know it’s true and you don’t want to know.

Can’t speak of it. You have to give a simple order.

Through this present gap which is an opportunity. (Team’s fidgeting, squad’s waiting, squad’s right.)

If worse goes to worse you can make a package without knowing all that’s inside it.

Which represents a further economy. Hey, while we’ve got us here, say we make two or more places one, so we know where we are, even if in theory we sacrifice a few powers of people, there’s a limit to S.R. (standing room) when you feel you owe it to them to bring them out of frequency back into body. You saw what was happening, that the twosomes out of earshot on the metal plate waiting to be emigrated to libration-point space settlements necessitating unusual economies had not been told just how light they would travel, and you knew the (so to speak) theoretical "joke" was on them though in the interest of survival, and they really did know, somewhere in those beings of themselves that had invited mountains to come to them bearing natural alloys that made them invisible to people living in their vicinity.

Yet the basic economy was borne by those who left as two and arrived as one. So what were you to do? Warn others it could happen to them?

Give the order, give it through the vacant, noisy space between two arms.

A left arm and a right arm, of course. ("Shoot, kid," an old voice says in you.)

But the left arm is to the right of the noisy vacancy between two arms, and the right arm is on the left side of the space. Solution is that left arm and right arm belong to two men, not one. The arms pieces of muscle and bone turned by you in a flash into one flesh. You don’t go in for that type of thing, yet you are so much a part of other voices that you can’t hear them telling you you’re one type or another, you almost don’t hear voices. You are spoken. Like voices that hear you. It’s new—did something in you go to pieces light years ago?

Directly across the vacant space on its far side the thick (for lately mortal women hate the word chunky), pale woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. {Chunky I hate chunky, comes the abstracted voice (through aether or whatever other is the latest thing in filters of our life together) of a loved, onetime wife; and I hate pudgy, too. But you’re not pudgy. And plump, I hate that, too, and you may say they’re words but they’re used instead of —No, my own dear, they are just instinctively cruel, you mean.) Well, however you describe her, the woman in charge can’t take the order if she can’t hear it. Grins at what someone says but looking straight across this vacant space.

The order’s been given, but are the words wrong? Doesn’t the squad know the word?—’cause nothing happened. Nothing except the two arms slid an inch, narrowing the space—collapsing in. The woman on the far side of the bar flicks her chin up as if to say, "What did you want?"

Well, it might not be worth saying again.

So change it, forgo the firewater, the part that can be changed, your part, the second part of the order. You know in advance what you’ll say.

"If they have it," adds the other woman, your near woman, the younger woman, whose fingers are on your arm as if she depended on you, the younger woman for whom the glass of wine has been ordered in this redneck tavern along the Florida highway.

A house passes overhead far out, bearing its appliances lightly. You have only practical words for this vision: a shower, three sleeping stalls, magnets to hold food utensils on the heater-tray, telescopes to gear the eyes, and insulated urine freezers, experimental sunflowers. How many working journalists have already called it a "house" tonight? The house passes overhead but so far is empty of occupants. No need to reach for it, it loops the earth each hour and a half, so at some point it will come by again. And when it does, no need to duck, point it out to a friend, if the light is right. People will credit anything; it’s such a relief from their endless skepticism. You hear inside you a mountain that dreams.

The house awaits its housekeepers, and they it; they dream of it. They’ve rehearsed inside one just like it. But it will pass overhead many times before they take up occupancy.

"If they do," says Mayn.

The young woman beside him may think he means, "Yes, if they have white wine." What’s happening with these arms? they’ve moved again, they’ve inched back, opening vacant space before the one vacant bar stool.

"Glass of white wine and a club soda."

Mayn said it through the massed vibes of the juke box, the claims and the clamor of talk. The pale, heavy woman tending bar didn’t hear the first time. And they don’t have any white but they got red. Through the lowish light Mayn makes corrections for color, he’s had experience with barroom light, ships pausing in the night while it passes them; but speaking through this under-light comes hard tonight against sound all around him like fire. It’s doing what other stuff has been doing. Speeding up and slowing down. Trace shells flash gold before the big gun’s quake hits you like the future observer of a blast-off thirty years later at Kape Kennedy, and out of the gold flash comes the tracer’s red dot already one quarter of the way to its target as if the dot in an instant of another time stayed still for the Sicilian darkness to rush past it but then (reversing the rocket of a generation later which lifts so slow it’s afloat on some stalled phase of its burners yet then suddenly is off and far off) the red tracer braked on another track to a speed at which it covers the remaining three quarters. Speeding up, slowing down.

Try and step outside this sense. Maybe Mayn brought it down here with him. Not on assignment. And this simulated vacation—well, the void drifting through him confirms he should be used to it after twenty and more years in motion.

He felt like an ocean voyage. (Don’t look like one!—his father’s one joke, on a rare occasion, these days, when he saw his father.) O.K. then, Mayn, wake up and die right (another expression of Mel’s), wake up and freeze yourself into the Arctic ice pack, take three years to drift from Siberia (near the "real" Choor?) to the Atlantic with his instruments if in return he file a slow-ocean story slowly fleshed-out reports unheard-of up to now, the southern rain falling upwards from the Pole. Time to feel the wind and tell the drift of ages of ice, study the bottom where some have faith it’s being pulled apart, drop your piston-corer through sediments of Arctic Ocean history, a year of leisurely hours to get the full story, the only deadline completion itself—you come out in Choor, for all you know, where things changed as soon as the Princess left in search of New World and monsters you recall reporting to your late mother when she who was not told these stories, except for one where one pistol became two, asked you what about this Choor, but never to the best of your knowledge asked what had changed in Choor (on Choor?) after the Eastern Princess left. But here he has not often been in Florida and he never understood Florida because it’s way down below the deep South as he thinks by the map, yet whereas they say "the South" (as in "will rise again") but they say "Florida" (like "Texas") and Florida definitely is closer (Fly me) than the deep or shallow South, so put that in your simulated vacation and feel it like you sometimes feel real tweed or real wood under the seat of tweed pants or smell shaving lather drying in the little wooden bowl or coffee once upon a time in Norway where modern meteorology began with fronts but where the coffee is not the least bit diluted but is as good as the prospect of coffee as you slowly get out of bed onto the floor so it takes you an hour of joint contemplation if in company, coffee getting out of bed so slowly it’s the sixties now—in beautiful, rebuilt Warsaw and twenty minutes later passing (not in his sleep) neatly dressed coffee drinkers less comfortable but more entrenched than cafe sitters in Paris (who seem to have more to do outside the cafe in their leisure or business, a teapot or a ruby kir), the Warsaw cafe missing also that fuller grain of (accept it, it’s likable) noise in Paris that slides density through the smells. He was followed and, bearing in mind the trip he was going to try and sandwich in to Cracow south of where his ass was at the moment, courteously led his shadow, a woman with dyed auburn hair, the short way to the Embassy where that morning all they had for him was a story on how China, which had not then begun to open up, had acquired the best collection of Ping-Pong players and railroad trains in the world. A story filed. But recollected. Like a vintage or a fine hobby.

Nor is this simulated Florida vacation of breakfast yesterday and today among the postcards of spacecraft and armadillos, the souvenirs and sunglasses and short sleeves and elusive mind of the media people, like having a drink of pisco with a Chilean-naturalized German beekeeper who wants not to be identified, watching the brandied December sun come up out of some Andean peak two days after fifty thousand middle-class Chilean ladies have banged their empty cookware marching against the Doctor President’s two hundred percent inflation and his alleged hundred pairs of shoes; and Mayn, upon finding some far window all but sinisterly traced inside him from valve to unseen valve of his inner organs by that rich burn lifting the sun out of catastrophe-knew-what mine of mineral information, Mayn, yes, caught himself trying to inject, lend, lard, connect into the loving picture of the simplicity of this rural beekeeping business (presented by his Chil-Kraut host who declined to discuss money he—paper-montyl—lost to some Santiago salesman for Investors Overseas Services) inquiries he had made into Du Pont’s preservation of the Delaware coastline from industrial development and his inquiries into an inquiry as to a Delaware canal’s potential water supply for two firms other than Du Pont, because the beekeeper has made a lot of money in nitrates and has a bank account in Wilmington like "American Switzerland" and corresponds about bees with a CIA bee-freak scholar in Washington, though such connections have never been Mayn’s yen: his business is get in get out. Of the subject, that is. Which isn’t the same as getting out of your mind, for you don’t want to wind up in that elusive media mind, though doesn’t he find when he gets out of his own there’s the next he’s right in? Where daydreams can’t be all his—some ancient trivia, yes—like what happened in Choor after the East Far Eastern Princess left on her mission to find New World and/or monsters—why some started up right in Choor—and did that fact come from Margaret or from her grandson listening?

The Apollo souvenirs—them you can smash. No sweat. Shrapnel facsimiles of themselves mined up a shaft of the future’s shape. Mayn would like to use them while he doesn’t know his multi-spectral scanners, isn’t up this time (nor any time) on peaceful uses of space to be tried out in that house kept orbiting the Earth. What souvenirs? Hard enamel keyrings; hard-baked enamel tie tacks commemorating the three of Apollo 1 which—who—burned together on the ground; Apollo 11 money clip; Lunar Module cufflinks; Apollo trivet, Apollo lighter keyring, Apollo bumper stickers, sterling rocket charms, Sky lab tankards, a Skylab spoon.

Is this simulated-vacation feeling what you get for a free ticket to one of the final spectator sports? He came—he will tell the young woman—here on the dumbest of hunches to find a Chilean gentleman he no doubt could have located if he had used his contacts to put out a trace on the man, whose chance words were a lead into nowhere. Mayn’s stuck in some future stadium lately where lions and gila monsters are being fed to high-strung, professionally itinerant tennis players bronzed into being near-Indianized. Would he cover sports? he was asked by a free-lance diver who did a lot of police department work and was looking for a couple of hard-to-get tickets to a rock concert, ignorant doting father. Mayn gets tickets—"ducats"—when he wants—for sports—sometimes. Never sports assignments; wouldn’t want them. The diver said that that was just what he would love to do—cover a great pitcher thinking his way through the late innings, a great outfielder diving to steal a Texas Leaguer, a great third baseman snuffing out a suicide squeeze. Had he ever visited one of those five-thousand-capacity Texas League fields and seen a young centerfielder pass the helmet after knocking the ball over the fence? Yet Mayn would rather do it: it’s the trick elbow in his brain that swings free to take him back to a tumble in a gym echoing like a pool under lights on the late afternoon of a dark winter weekday, or to a wild, hard squash-court wall. Or play at wrestling—being covered by two children who jump on him and get a lock on his neck. He could play less easily at being what is wanted of him elsewhere: at being Bureau Chief. He’s been pressured in his time even by a wife who loved him to amount to more, but can’t say this to this young woman he has met here. Let Bureau Chief vanish into a high building where Bureau Chief can wait for Mayn’s utilities pieces from New Mexico, for the follow-up from Iowa on drought prediction, short crops, to cut, (go ahead) edit, totally compress, compound it, turn it into space/money. Pressured once steadily to be Bureau Chief in the inevitable place, did its old-time inventor feel this in him like inspiration?—the Inventor of New York, the phrase finds him, he doesn’t much recall those old things—like, though, it’s now, and Jim still married, with a couple of domiciles to contemplate supporting (and a fine and subtle wife with six thousand a year from a charitable great-aunt), and a pair of dependent kids (the words come), kids (all but grown-up) whose games got more grown-up and less visible like relations at close range year by year. So what does he support now with the money he sends? A sounding down his gullet here in Florida regales the sweet fume of oyster flesh. Oysters that winked between him and his companion—Jean—Barbara-Jean, she prefers not to be called but doesn’t make an issue of it—at a table this night, hearing (the two of them) nearby a Spanish sentence about Castro’s Golden Falcon Skydiving Club in the Everglades (not Fidel because the club is for Cuban Liberation people), oysters reflecting what’s going to happen next, and the dinner companion looks away out the window, Jean, her hand around her glass, watching for a sign that tomorrow’s rocket for the crew of that already launched Skylab is being readied. The light of a jet swings red over the Cape, one-way trapeze. You wait into tomorrow, you have done it so many times you’re looking back at yourself now from irresistible future, a vacuum you fell for; you wait to watch. To watch the shot, the hit, tee-off, coin flip, puff from the starter’s gun, national anthem. And who of those curious folk with press badges got a clue what hands guide the rocket or swing the spent, absent Saturn’s payload at an orbit’s bargain rates around the sky? A plane, a bus, ship, windmill, paid-up home, basic expense: these routine orbits might have been devised by the same men who have measured out to the function of sleep a 12.3 percent wedge of the daily man-hour pie up there in orbit as American as ampule pie, we’ve got a monster-type in our head just saying things like a guardian angel. Dead vacation? His whereabouts are poised to come at him again while elsewhere so is his idea that this dead vacation is a second chance. Here before him at the bar, here it is again in the vacancy in front. Slow down, put on some speed. Is the mind dying? He’s got no business dismissing technical whattage he’s not up on and he wouldn’t hesitate to tell this young woman with him—she’s on assignment, she’s eager, she interviewed the high-school prize winners at the Press Site yesterday, she knows a third stage from a second, she is in her kind but oh so damned intelligent he’s half-stumped. O.K., he’s not on assignment this trip, nor was when down here in December for Apollo.

"The final Moon launch," the girl said, nodding fast.

"The first night Moon launch," he said, not owlishly but maybe as if there was more where that came from than this love he’s feeling.

This girl with a hand on his arm, this girl he sat down next to today in the grandstand at the Press Site three miles from the launch pad—Mayn has told her only that he was twice with the Associated Press but got into something better. Spaced his words for some funny effect of more point than his thought claimed, not that AP was ever bad; the old UP was worse before UPI, but that was before even his time and they had such skinflints at UP that their newsmen were said to belong to the Downhold Expenses Club (she smiled). He didn’t know why he told her that, it was like someone else’s divorce story. He did have credentials in pocket and he was a fair listener when it came to Skylab housekeeping, but this trip was a hunch-gamble on the Chilean economist, no more to do with space green stamps than with—he heard it speak in him—a much-chewed place name—say Choor—some incomplete place out of those accounts of Margaret’s that proved his as well—for instance, when she allowed as how monsters had been there all the time (Where? in the mountains? At least) she was appropriating his idea, he reminded her. Why, so it was, she said and laughed a little hoot of hers (brief as a thought more than a piece of a laugh; but, in a family way, the counterpart of the grandfather’s Haw). But then Jim heard her say a thing he learned from, though he stored the learning away (and resolutely could not use it when a time soon came for it when he had a falling out with his grandmother), and what she said was that maybe the monsters couldn’t appear until the Princess of those stories had left Choor. Well, that killed him! It was some surprise freedom of mind.

What will he tell the person here in the tavern whose fingers he feels on his arm? It’s a question. Why? What has she come in on? She spoke first today, she noted four youngsters, three boys and a very flaxen girl who was doing all the talking down in front of the grandstand: high-school award winners, designers of experiments to be carried out in Skylab’s orbiting blender, and one of these smart kids who didn’t win came down anyway. Here at night in the tavern he feels the fingers let go of him there above his trick elbow. The two owners of the arms before him that narrowed the space but now widen it are turning. Today Mayn and the girl sat in the Press Site grandstand watching the white rocket three miles away at the edge of the sea as if it would go at last when they were ready, its sides steaming and the red gantry holding it at arm’s length; and the flat sea was as flat as the land. A blonde girl down in front of the grandstand suddenly looked away from the three in glasses and short-sleeved shirts with their laminated cards pinned to the pocket and searched the grandstand so intently that Mayn felt he missed a point; the blonde girl opened a giant sketch pad and showed the boys, looking at each of them, and made marks on her pad like writing, not drawing; and Mayn kept looking around for the man who was in his mind all the time from December—the South American gentleman—man from Chile whose words telescoped with some unformulable acceleration less to connect Mayn with Chile than, later, to mean he had to catch up irrationally with the Chilean (that’s not right) before his own life changed unrecognizably: so the Chilean was why Mayn came down for another launch, having already tried in vain to get in touch with a Hispanic Voice of America reporter to find out who, what, and where the Chilean was.

Mayn looked behind the young artist along the grandstand and she was leaning forward, her arms across her knees, and where at the small of her back the beltless top of her jeans stuck stiffly out he saw down to the parting and there a sheen of downy shadow, not a stitch.

A dark swim is what’s called for, the water close, the grand night missing on both burners thus far, so that with his monstrous immunity to dreaming he will bring in the night himself; as in great hollow daylight Mayn had tried to bring on that night with that maverick’s new meteorology that he didn’t understand because he needed to check out coastline-atmosphere-chance theory professionally catastrophic for the old maverick meteorologist who did not care (nor gave written handouts because it’s only human interest to a newsman if that; and the chain of papers Mayn’s with has him do really important dull stuff, and yet the novel weather back there in that railroad apartment in the city holds his mind at bay and he will say it’s unique, no more)—so he could leave his San Antonio trousers and his Boston sport jacket on the wide beach and mysteriously ease his way out a hundred, two hundred yards and lie on his back looking up through the two or three constellations he will identify if given the chance, looking through them at imponderable speed.

For a long time he has been marked to die quite soon unless the event in whatever space it came to got shifted to one other person. How do you know a thing like that? But how do you feel? Little, apparently.

Alone, sunny side down in your motel Breakfast World, he got the speeding up and slowing down like a compact future-pill in the snowy grain of hominy slid in an inertial mass before him by maple-sugar high-school arms and legs.

A slow slow drawl either male or female is heard saying, "If I knew for sure, I’d take every penny out of the bank and bet it on the nose." The speeding and slowing, the rubber soul falling, he’s tried to step outside it. But this evening all he did, after a first course that turned out to be his dinner of a glutton’s dozen (= 2 dozen) slick, cloudy-cupped oysters, was do what he didn’t much want to do—leave a good fish place on a quiet, breezy pier when he needed another orbit of oysters—open and swimming at him. Yet, after a meal leisurely as a swim, though bothered by a skydiving FLNC Cuban bragging in Spanish at a nearby table, Mayn was racing in a rented car to get himself and the young woman to the ominous briefing at Canaveral, laughing with her at the grandmotherly waitress’s words (in a little apron), "Have a nice day tonight"—and now, after the smoke, the surprising letdown of a briefing where he looked again for the Chilean, he walks into a tavern over in Cocoa to feel, in those separated arms and the broad back on the right, that a position has been taken up in advance of his coming. Here first. The light is infra-reddish and the neck here first could be Native American.

He and the young woman have still only just come into the roadhouse. In less than a second a lot can happen, not his fault. Why does he know that she wants to ask for more about his son and daughter? He has already said he doesn’t know much about his son right now. Newspaper people who act as if they have seen it all. Is whatever you say a cover for something else? He could ask this girl. Why is she more a young girl tonight for having stepped out of her jeans and slipped down over her a sleeveless black dress? So light or smooth she seems to have nothing under. Which is halfway to the truth. He looks for anyone he knows. The stodgy gypsies of the press are not here, he thinks.

In this light only the girl. She’s taken off the badge that told him who she was with when they picked each other up this afternoon, going easy on each other, letting the National Geographic guy with the cardboard tub of fried chicken behind them explore women-in-space, a month is a long time, she’s a token woman but she doesn’t get just a token orbit. "Token of what?" the girl turned around and said, and while she had a mole under her ear like a magically hung trinket, she was her hair, as she turned: "There’s a lot of interesting non-sex feasible if you know about it," she said awkwardly—and in the short dark curls he found a quick silk of rusty orange that was only light maybe. So Mayn saw all the different hair around in the grandstand and saw that he appreciated his own gray hair, never wear anything on your head, give the follicles a chance to see—see what? what’s left out—of a chunk of information reported like a taxable sum in the submitted copy, dispatch from Geneva (New York?), Delaware Water Gap development, history’s parts of a mechanical being conceived but not yet invented by us all, so given a chance at the light, the hair follicles see both ways, curling outways yet double-ended to tickle used brain cells so the brain can dream they’re growing friendly through skull and dura mater to touch the void. So the National Geographic photographer didn’t handle the girl’s challenge, and he said, "I don’t want to know what they do up there." Mayn was touched by the girl and heard her words before they were spoken: "Soon, in a few years, people won’t be into sex so much, it’s getting toward the end of this kind of dopy thing." When the National Geo man said low and fast, "Let’s have a little eye contact when you say that," Mayn declined to deal with the guy.

Tonight all changed. At the press conference tonight the new problem called forth the old challenge. An official who at another point through the smoke introduced a voice from Texas said on the contrary the damage sustained by Skylab during launch into orbit today is exactly the kind of thing an unmanned operation is insufficiently adaptable to counteract. Heat shield torn off. One wing of solar cells undeployed, maybe torn off. Have to guess what’s gone. Tomorrow’s launch scrubbed. Before they launch the crew, they need to work out how to erect an improvised heat shield to replace the one ripped off today, time to think up a parasol.

Ballpoints through the smoke adapt to a director’s language picking up that it is a canned answer. Like an exec’s at a chemical-waste-disposal conference Mayn covered. Or sporting goods, all-weather, good-down-to-sixteen-degrees sleeping bags—gauge the impact on sleeping bags of NASA’s Mylar insulation (light, cheap)—don’t flirt with business, either get into it, make your million and get out—or stay out to begin with. Which isn’t the same thing as spending on insulation now so you’ll have it even if you theoretically haven’t got the money, it’s worth spending to install, say, that "cap" of insulation in the attic. The girl casts her eyes restlessly so that she radiates some subtle trouble. He’s not bright; he’s just looking. He couldn’t place her until their eyes crossed going opposite ways and she was the one with the sketch pad who had been taken by Mayn’s companion for one of the students, and there’s still a point about her he missed.

Hours later now he is touched by the rented car outside the tavern like a familiar object from elsewhere. All because of talking to this smart young woman he likes—who objected to the word girl even when he said that he would be glad to be called a boy, hell; and she added, You’re white.

In the car they discussed the heat shield and the parasol; the lack of resistance in space—no air—the solar cells that, like color TV, neither of them would claim to be able to explain.

And now, he listens to the girl and she to herself, "Do you think they’ll get a new heat shield up?" and when he smiles at her they both know that apart from her knowing more than he, the peaceful awkwardness of her saying again what she’s just—they’ve just—been saying in the car is, well, shy and warm. He is waiting for her to give point to the evening and the day. O.K., it’s about time for the rednecks to have completed turning. Say redneck: the light speeds into orange and hangs. A short man standing close up behind a woman in white pants with his hands on her stomach raises and lowers his thumbs and she gives him the elbow and he steps out from behind her, both of them laughing. Mayn turns back to the gap in front.

See the neck on the right, above the T-shirt, below the crewcut hair. Hair light like straw (waiting for a match); light in weight; not thick: thinning, they used to say: balding, isn’t that what they say? You don’t have to do anything here, but the angle’s arms are multiplying and you aren’t all here, it’s only the extreme vividness of what’s here that makes you here. Rather than where? Somewhere—not a word for a news story—charted to the fourth-warped, foot-minute future-past, two hundred miles out in an orbit Mayn’s not up to saying he understands, a home awaits entry, a house waits to be held, an experiment in living, the eye of a compartmented lab will scan scars in Earth. Yes, this life of his coming up on the meg that he’s telling himself his own story of wouldn’t be shapely like that household overhead underfoot. Aren’t you talking to this girl all this time the words might seem to an outsider only inside you? He loves her maybe. The he that is you. That home could house an orbital bomb but is not itself a re-entry vehicle. Go back to the motel and get your brown Skylab press manual on the unmade bed under a sky-blue buttondown shirt you wish they would just take away and wash, though you never said that to your one-time loved now lost wife whose messages or auroral emissions you go on picking up though the bang-up in a vacuum of near silence is now years and years away so the distance hits you and waits the way the future stands ready. The one here called you recycled. You get the manual, get it into your hands and speak with authority. Say it slow this time; you’ve no story to file, no pressure to fire it off. You’d do it fast—like brushing up on the stuff. But you needn’t. It’s being written, phoned in, taped, computed on the AP computers—stories assembled by others all around you, though you trust not here in this highway tavern where you’re looking at the back of a neck in low light. Why have you slowed down and separated every word? To breathe? To laugh yourself out of getting a one-night crush?

Slowly it comes out. Red neck. The red back of a neck. Creased more hard than deep. Creased with a wildness and object-deep finality like scars that some writer maybe of fiction’lized journalism dive-bombs like he knows the entire infra-fraction of your American infra-redneck. Scars of what America was? Yeah, scars; that is, just scars. Say redneck. It means a blue-collar male American likely rural often southern maybe farm, who works pretty hard if he’s got work and ready for any outsider who happens to come along carrying his light instead of his bushel. Wait: say redneck: order yourself one: but here are two rednecks, turning on their two stools between which is the vacant stool, the one in the T-shirt very broad, the other in a red-and-white bandanna and attached to it in front a big red-and-white-and-blue leather medallion that looks like an eye with a hole in it.

Does it slip as he gets up? His hand rises to it like a woman’s. But he’s just going through the motions, next to the other man in the T-shirt who’s jerked half around already talking.

"You go on and tell her, go on tell about the heat shield."

"But," says Mayn to the void of the man’s unexpected face, "it’s not what I want to tell her about; she can tell me about it; why I can do without the micrometeoroid shield" (but where do these words come from?) "and I can dispense with the multiple docking adaptor and I’m already trading in my molecular sieve beds that purify the two-gas atmosphere of smells, heat, humidity, carbon dioxide—all but the smell of no-smell."

He took his mouth for granted. Some press release refracting like real life off a slice of brain? Future commonplaces from which he was leaning back into a 1973 past that was more vivid than present? His whereabouts comes at him along a long curve winging through him just as he is about to grasp it—the speech of some other hustler’s information, as for Mayn he just does his job. Is he picking up ripples of the girl’s learning?

"Think they’re going to get right away from the Earth," says the man, "but they be lucky if they find some old germs on Venus to live off of; that’s what I’ve seen and it’s not such a long ways."

The girl’s voice gets automatic: "Venus is too hot for viruses." She is changed by the other man who has bowed her toward the vacant stool while coughing and stepping away from his own and fingering his cowhide medallion and smiling and backing away along the bar until a friend in a yellow wind-breaker reaches an arm around his waist and speaks to him, and the man in the bandanna replies in an odd voice, a voice Mayn can’t place partly because the broad man with the thin crewcut—hair white-thin—is saying, What’s Skylab after the Moon? He’s saying, If they can bend a man round to the dark side of the Moon they better get on with the real business, send a man out to colonize Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, time’s short, split their time between this solar system and the next—"split your time, split timer"—what redneck is this infra-talking?—"But no, they got to shoot three fellows into a Skylab tomorrow so close it’s like spitting out the window (if the window’s open)"

"Tomorrow’s off," says Mayn, about to sit.

"They not going? Well, hot poop," says the man, ready to stare Mayn hard in the eyes.

The girl, who was going to sit on the outside stool vacated by the bandanna man, slips in front of Mayn into the originally vacant one in the middle next to the man in the T-shirt.

"We are not alone," says Mayn.

"Well, hot scoop." The face is definitely void but pressurized. "Put that thing on automatic’s what they’d ought to do; save the men for the real trip. Save the loot, spend it right. All the money they poured into space, I ain’t smelled a cent of it."

But as soon as the girl is sitting, she’s leaning back to look behind Mayn at the man with the leather eye on his throat, and says out of the side of her mouth, "You’re spending it right now," and Mayn across her arched chest wants to ask her if she was the one who mentioned these libration points because how would he know? But Mayn explains to the man in the T-shirt (who after all acts like he already knows, too) the multiplier effect. Look what happens to capital created by a U.S. firm when it sets up an operation in a South American country.

If they didn’t take it over first, adds the man and Mayn finds an effort converging in him and going on, the noise inside Mayn and outside is incommensurable except as levels, yes they talk about noise levels of course, but they multiply, not rise, if that’s feasible, and he’s lifted with them, an object of science (as close as he’ll get) immersed, afloat, so his own noise directed at the redneck with curvature of the brain comes from other levels of him, from his vibrating wishbone shoulder to the redneck’s vibrating wishbone shoulder, or from knee to knee voiced like old phlebitis spasm of burn or between each other’s half-inflamed veins of humor heart to heart, don’t think this drivel unless you really think it, for profit—is Mayn drunk on a curve of light, sight, drink, indifference? A superpower sneaks from each individual nostril and sniffs this angel as he is about to touch the girl’s wrist, his libration between a past Now and a later Then—it’s never been so bad—got to fight this compositeness or be pushed into waking up and erasing it all—plus this guy—say only what you’re sure you know, oh well Skylab is a modern custom kitchen.

Well, it’s the same thing (Mayn has floor now) or similar, with the President, with Congress, NASA, the contractors, you name them: Chrysler makes one stage of the Saturn in New Orleans, North American Rockwell makes the Command Module in California which gets the astronauts up to Skylab, Martin Marietta makes the multiple docking adaptor in Denver, and Whirlpool designs and launders your Skylab food system in Michigan, rotate your kitchen, it’s a lab—and the space suits come from Delaware, where there’s a lot of business being piloted through the water gap. This isn’t just money paid to contractors; they get it but they pay it out too—so your local sporting goods dealer sells three more two-man inflatable rubber dinghies, and your supermarket manager moves more six-packs, more soap, more cryogenic pizzas, he hires another boy, who gives twenty bucks a week to his mother, but people move like money and the bus company puts on another vehicle on weekends and one driver blows his overtime pay taking the wife and two kids for a pizza Saturday night—wait—no, he finds himself balancing thirty Saturday nights plus a piece of a third kid against the alternative, let’s say, of on the other hand a long-held dream of a pool—and wow this balance works out for twenty-eight Saturday nights, not thirty, and he finds himself buying a complete pool package circular four-foot-deep collapsible rust-proof aluminum so big it only seems to take up the whole back lawn turn your backyard blue—

—(how much acreage, asks Mayn’s companion of the Void, have the DuPont family pushed for for public parkland in Delaware?)—

—which is good for the pool company his bus route goes past because it’s business for them—and so on—as if that first million of appropriations will never end.

Somebody shouts at the instant the man in the T-shirt, so quietly that it seems to come from his face in general, says, It ended.

Of course it did, says Mayn. It’s leakage, ever heard of leakage?

The space program is a luxury in the end, why not enjoy it, says the young woman, who should know.

Leakage—he has to get this across to the man in the lowish light, but the words, which are work, are a prefab substitute for work thus rank, too— for someone was once overheard to say a sign of high rank is exemption from industrial toil.

Sheer mysterious luxury, the young woman adds.

Leakage, yes the principle of leakage. That’s what they call it, the money that escapes the multiplier. Where does it go, this mysterious money leaking away? Some gets saved, right?—and some never existed in the first place.

Explain that, says the man in the T-shirt meaning whatever the angry opposite might be of that.

It wasn’t new capital because it was a substitution for other investment that got aborted; and some of the new capital (a woman is chalking her cue, and some of Mayn’s force leaks toward her dyed black hair), some of the fresh spending power lifts prices, so consumption-buying might actually decrease in some sector, you see. But what we’re saying is that after we subtract leakage, what we still get is the multiplier. We divide—you still with me?— divide the original new investment by one minus r (I think it is) where r is the marginal propensity (tendency) to consume—

You’re out of your mind, says the man. You’re no businessman. You must be—he ponders Mayn—some inventor.

—no, no (Mayn’s laughing) and your marginal propensity to consume is the percent of your raise you’d spend if you had a raise. So if two-thirds of the new income is spent, the multiplier comes out as three (because you’re dividing the investment by one-third)—so you keep tripling the nation’s money—which makes a hell of a lot of money running through the economy. They talk about its velocity.

You ain’t going to find it up there, the man says; for a home has passed again overhead and Mayn looked up to it, last chance for an hour or so, and he and the girl again hear "La Moneda," which he gets now: it’s the government palace in Santiago—the guys talking are the Cuban skydivers.

The furniture is all screwed down, he wants to tell the man, but then says, Do you understand gravity? I mean, do you understand it?

I got it inside me, I don’t have to understand it, the man retorts.

Gravity may not even exist, says Mayn. The girl has laughed, and the man wants to know how many launches Mayn’s got on his belt. Well, the man’s not an expert but he can rebuild an engine if he has to. Brother-in-law’s got a body shop, says the man, heavy oval face and thinning crew, maybe sometimes you got to go ahead and try to do the job when you don’t know how in hell it got that way, people are crazy what they do to good simple machines. Last week he’s down Route 12, it’s a back road, and right beside a palm tree’s a little red car upside down, foreign car, hell to install pollution devices into, upside down, that’s all there’s the matter except in the front buckets a man and a woman upside down in their seat belts—dead, you know, fairly dead—and the woman in the driver’s seat is grinning: but here’s the thing—front wheel’s spinning away like it’s on the blacktop still—might think it’s got a back-up ‘mergency motor in the bearings, and when I stand there looking, do you think it stops?—no sir, wheel keeps spinning—going to report it, it must have just happened if the wheel’s spinning, even if the wheel should have stopped spinning, little red Renault front-wheel drive but the engine’s not running, got a big cut of darker red across the door and rear fender but the woman here’s the thing—

—the thing you’re going to fix, says Mayn—

—even ‘f I don’t know how it got that way, right!—woman’s got blood all over her face but it’s dried almost black—but her wheel’s spinning.

Got hurt before she got in the car, Mayn and the girl say raggedly.

Well, only that she was grinning.

The wheel stopped? inquires Mayn.

Right about the time the police car came along.

On a back road? says Mayn, looking impolitely past their T-shirt man at a friendly argument between the woman with paint-black hair standing behind a man with a big nose who is sitting at the bar and talking over his shoulder.

Newspaper reporter on an expense account, right? says the man in the T-shirt. My point is that it don’t keep going. I’m no expert on nothing. Stop in here, have a few beers—"multiplier," you said; "velocity," right?—the companies made the helicopters for Vietnam, they spent their money and gone away on vacation but where’s the helicopters?—blown up, rusted out, stuck up in a palm tree. Like the newspaper now, what man ever lost his job because he missed today’s paper?

The man with the big nose is not looking back at the woman with black hair now, but he on the stool and she behind him are talking in profile as if an audience were out there in front of them in the array of bottles, but there’s no mirror and the woman is talking into his neck.

Mayn can’t say, Let’s get out of here; for the girl is angry; she’s saying, What about the men in the helicopters? and when the man in the T-shirt looks at Mayn and turns to look away where Mayn is looking, he shrugs, Hell the men is easy to replace, it’s the helicopters, ma’am.

He leans behind her to catch Mayn’s eye: What they paying you to come down here?

A price schedule looks up and passes overhead: one war equals ten launches, two multinationals (read bottom-line American) equal one potential earthquake or two (non-cancer) lab breakthroughs; but how many more launches will Congress find it fun enough to fund?

So the girl swings off the stool—goes and stands squarely in front of the juke.

Oh they’re paying me the same whether I come down here or I’m a thousand miles from here. (Comes out sounding mysterious to Mayn himself but not the man.) She’s the one covering Sky lab.

She frowns over there.

Didn’t think she was the wife coming along for the ride.

Your spinning wheel, you didn’t get to the point.

The man digs out a yellow alligator wallet and smooths a fiver on the bar, checking the other room, it’s on his mind. The point? Listen, the cop swings his door open, and quick I put out my hand, stopped that wheel myself. Them foreign cars they must know something we don’t about cutting friction.

The girl’s looking at Mayn, and the juke box isn’t playing. But as he nods to her he finds in some gap between himself and the man in the T-shirt words that he wanted to say before they were said by the man, as if the man were responsible for his having missed the Chilean as if in turn the Chilean had been here in Florida yesterday and today to be missed. So Mayn says the words as the girl takes a couple of steps toward him and his hand goes up to the bills in his shirt pocket and on the third of the three words "Shoot some pool" he knows that the man in the T-shirt has said only the first two, and has said them in unison with him. Mayn isn’t like this; he’s getting compacted, or is the man some window that’s picking up traces of Mayn, who isn’t drunk?

The man in the T-shirt has reached him. The man with the nose passed a bill to another man when the couples racked up their cues.

Does the girl want to play? (She wants to go; he didn’t have to ask; then the noise says, Ask, ask, ask). The music parties up, and Mayn holds her and slow-dances her down the bar, curving along people. He can listen to her thoughts later, irritated or all the rest she is capable of, and he sees in himself after this two-day junket two or maybe three years during which he hardly runs into her but then he does and is still fifteen to eighteen years older.

Winning’s not the issue on the green baize. Lousy break, the balls resist, did the table get concave? Mayn goes, but the table is still a mess after him, and when the man finally busts it up, a pink ball slam-drops at the far end while the cue ball having fought its spin bends onto a cushion and banks back home to drop at this end. The guy is angry but has gotten to Mayn but doesn’t know where: where is the girl? she’s not here but coming back, her hips slightly swaying, her glass held up like a toast, and as he looks sideways at her from the table, her eyes see past the glass and she says, "I’m here," and pauses and takes a sip.

Something will get settled by the game. Four or five clean shots shape up ahead, dangerously possible, you see a clean run composite, a spread of objects, the land, history, get it over with. The girl speaks suddenly of New York, while Mayn’s playing, a woman she met at a swimming pool who played billiards with her husband every other week at a tavern and one night looked down her stick and beyond the ball to that chalk thing on the rim of the table and her husband’s hand picking it up to do the end of his cue and she knew she would leave him. (Bet it was pool they was playing, said the man in the T-shirt. Secret of concentration, Mayn adds, taking a shot. What’s that? the girl asks. Doing two things at the same time, he comes back at her.) No words for his belief that he knows the New York woman already; or is it that he will know her, through this girl? (I feel like I know her, he mutters, and recklessly cocks to line up his following shot and she doesn’t name the woman but, You probably know people she knows, she adds with some soft meaninglessness that fully excludes Mayn’s opponent—though she’s getting to be a celebrity in feminist circles.) He’s pounced recklessly but takes his time lining up, the green baize swells in an uncanny middle unless he is half-drunk, and the balls are going to just follow the slope to the pocket and lucky for you you don’t claim you personally caused all these dead shots—you are sensing a downright flesh closeness to the girl but it’s talking to you like a happy plural toxin monstrously claiming strange stakes yet not yet the wonderful girl here but some payoff for being able not to dream, is it he’s in a couple of places at once, embodied in that woman the girl has mentioned? though not sexwise exactly, he doesn’t know but damn! some heart and ears and hands and loss lie between them, and this discovery sends a charge of used euphoria, no drunk dizzy spiel, up your brain later recollected as the right side which means love or work, you forget which.

The man with the void in his eye stands close behind him like the joker in a friend’s basement one year who would bump the base of your cue at the moment of execution. One day Mayn rammed him back, a heavy volt to the chest. Kid sat down and started crying, breathless, he was fifteen or sixteen, stopped crying and started gasping. The man in the T-shirt is pushing more than joking.

Now I look at the trash out by the garbage can and I think what am I missing if I don’t see the paper tomorrow, day after, don’t see one for a week? What am I missing? The dog charts? Not a suckin’ thing.

But you’d like to be quoted, Mayn goes for the man’s sharpening edge.

But forget the man’s solar plexus, make the shot. But what does the girl think of the man’s saying a word he wouldn’t use with some other women who are in the tavern? She’s in a chair with her legs crossed, having a really good time somewhere in her head. The man is pushing a little more, but where?

Mayn’s weight rides on the left side of his left hand, four fingers fanned like a tripod on the green baize, the cue slowly sliding forth again, again, probing or pushing, the distance between the chalk-blue sky-blue button and the white ball, then resting in the fork between forefinger and the tight-arched thumb.

Tell me what am I missing: news today, history tomorrow. You could spend your life reading the newspaper, said the man.

Mayn grins down target but for the benefit of his girl. Her speech, family more than college, and the way she carries herself unmarried and making good money (and to the man maybe smoother and older-looking than she is to Mayn) lets him with his void in eye say (with only the first letter changed), "fucking" where if she were a regular here he might not.

The cue strikes through the steady sounds; tip jabs the white ball low for a stop backspin; the blue jumps for the corner, smacks the back of the pocket, rolls up into the air and, rising, falls out of sight rattling back down the alley to clack the wood of the tray at shin level. Before making the next shot, speak. (The green baize has developed a slight hill in the middle.)

You have to know what not to read, man.

The man laughs. Mayn speeds up; he looks into a distance and is where he looks. Where was he? He can see only back. He’s falling but the bills in his shirt pocket are stuck to his cigarettes and his shirt.

Before they left he asked the man if they usually played for five bucks.

Mayn said they were going; the man wanted another game; Mayn asked if she wanted to drive. No.

They drove back over to Cocoa Beach past fewer lights now, and she was beside him asking if he’d seen the hole in the other man’s throat who had given up his seat. He’s so near to her, keeping his eye on the road.

Fewer lights. Most selling something. She agrees quietly. The woman upside down with dried blood all over her but the wheel spinning was impossible. Like different time schemes. But the girl didn’t hear, did she? Yes, with one ear. She got beaten up, said the girl. But she was driving him, said Mayn. Quite a while before the accident, she said.

Mayn parked between two motels. Or so he later thinks he recalls. In a public area where some giant local kids, four of them, powerful-looking if you cared (and more than four of them, the males, plus a couple of girls, blonde like the boys), stood around two big bikes watching Mayn and the young woman.

Put all six or seven of those kids along with their machines into a compressor, come out with not a new race but—Jean’s name, voiced on the beach as if he hadn’t been told: she thought she had said Barbara-Jean, which her mother still held out for. She doesn’t smoke, she points out. Forgot to leave her shoes in the car, which equals Mayn forgetting to take the ignition key. Beach so long that (sure, she agrees with him) they’re walking the coast of Florida.

Has he ever been down to the Everglades?

Only thought about it. (She made it sound like ‘‘Tomorrow.")

What is he doing here, she wants to know, if he’s not covering the launch? Nostalgia for the last one, he smiles. Worried or irritated, she is thinking and he feels it right up into her words: Well, what was his overall . . . aim? (she doesn’t really finish). Not to make too much of what I find out, he tells her: maybe leave things as they are.

You have power, though, she replies, but the precision and forthrightness of her voice spread her meaning so all he knows is she feels something for him.

He told his kids a story about the Big Dipper but they couldn’t—(How old are they? she asks calmly, womanly)—they couldn’t see the Bear; and to tell the truth sometimes neither could he; or believe it. Let’s see: it’s 1973 tonight. He ages his son this side of twenty, his daughter never see twenty again. (You’re joking with me, she says unamused.) American Indian story updated so the Great Bear unknown to the Great Spirit learns how to use the Big Dipper in order to drink more, faster, and when the Bear invents a way to tip a jug of honey so it pours into the Dipper, the heavens instead of coming apart wait and wait for the space-cold syrup to flow so that as the parts of the sky reach rest, a cleft appears like an inverted spigot.

Pulling out his cigarettes he dropped some bills on the sand and she shifted one shoe so she had both on the fingers of her right hand on the far side of him. He put his hand on her shoulder, she was about twenty-five, and he guessed he was comfortable to her, journeyman that he was; and when she said, "Can we go back and make love," her name and him with it fell far back into the whirr of the air-conditioner clamped down into a distance of window sills and parked cars and an unknown Chilean man of middle age not so "active" as elegant. And in the whirr, which brings the sea so close, as if Florida is all shore, is heard the bellow of some creature out of Mayn, a wrinkled sea lion on the point of a drowned mountain Darwin never saw. The stage sets down the horizon, the maverick meteorologist defined horizon, raising in question form how retreating from an object or what’s called a perturbation may balance out the emergence of mountains behind the initially observed eminence with their disappearance down Earth’s angle, arguing that from the properties of the horizon you or some alternate right person might divine a round Earth, but did this help explain recent weather fronts whose shapes Mayn had just barely gathered during his allotted struggle for existence.

The vessel sets down the horizon, and if you are on it, you’re also James Mayn sitting up straight on a bench burning fermented chicha down your gullet here in Temuco numbing your historic gums, fermented quinoa grain once divinely amino-rich. A black Indian beside you who has little to say except his uncle went away to the nitrate mines years ago and they are still waiting for him to come home, you are waiting here in Temuco to talk to a German beekeeper who has made some other way a fortune in Chile (partly in brewing but partly in lumber apparently) and has a Boy Scout (emeritus) son happily in military school close friends with the son of someone who runs the national airline. Four days three nights was what Mayn could spare for the entire country, look through that skin and see aboriginal mapuches, dark people of the tierra who hold right in their eyes memories of such ancient mapuches as wiped out a few waves of conquistadores and got their own back before it was taken away from them, so Mayn donates a thin bottle of Peruvian brandy, feeling after all some digestion kin to this strange man’s next to him in lieu of any whit of history to be grasped between them, as, then, it is necessary to cut to the German materializing near the village-square bench Mayn and the Indian are leaning back in: cut to the German, surprisingly youngish for mid-forties at least and slender and brown and with the darkest yet faintest dried-blood-red crescents incising sills under his wary eyes, for he turns to you often walking down the road to his land—it’s called the Alliance for Progress, still winding down late in the decade, 1969 it was, and you ask him What will happen?

Son a former Boy Sprout (old New Jersey witticism) in military school, daughter desiring to study animal husbandry and buy a ranch and raise Chilean beef (Does it make sense? the father with some odd German indirectness, asks you, and answers, The haciendas have always tied up the land, not used it, but we will see what happens). Did Mr. Mayn know that forty-six percent of university students here are women?

The man and his wife? Bees, now, and a boat. (Does it make sense that the people in this country don’t eat fish? he asks.) And string duets almost every day, the children never played. (Strings? Two guitars in fact.)

The Alliance, though? Well, everyone even the Indians know that Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon spent a billion to keep us from going Communist, but to protect the projects of the left which never got off the ground anyhow, they spent huge sums on counter-insurgency police.

Any predictions?

The man in his pressed khakis shakes his head slowly, subtly. Your father came here at the end of the War? you ask. He was Alsatian, the man says precisely; started an automobile repair shop, just the engines, not here, north of here; there were not engines enough and he fell into something else. Your mother? you ask, was she Chilean? No no, she was Bavarian: the man stared into Mayn’s face, they’ve reached a long wooden fence, detoured where Mayn had had no wish to wander, it’s so long ago: Your father is dead?

What is it you are looking into? the man goes on, not desiring to end the conversation. The Alliance for Progress or old German soldiers who were in the lumber business? That man, though, in December ‘68 knew the answer, as the girl four years and five months later in Florida does not yet quite. But tonight in Florida we are not even there, on the German’s land, a sixteen-minute walk from the village bench where Mayn left the mapuche and the Peruvian brandy. We are in Darwin country in reality, south Chile, the real baja that Mayn never got to, had to get back—it’s south of Puerto Montt (a name only, but what a name!), way down near the Cordillera, where he is a fashionable Patagonadal sea-male yellowish brown, and his nose in the sun sighting the Darwin range ashore sniffs sweet coastal coves where cows birthing young are now to be mounted again on that annual basis. Put that on the wire back to the boss but you’ll be home again soon enough with the industrial profiles pre-election/overall-hemispheric prognosis. Bellow it back, having grown a mane. Bellow back into the present what the German said when he put down his guitar that was unusually deep and fat and had another name. Do away with Nixon and with his right-hand man and prove it was a lunatic who did it and not a Cuban, and Chile might make it, next time around. But this was not news, not even that a German with money thought a Socialist government could feed the brains of children with milk and nationalize mines that represent four-fifths of Chile’s foreign credit and bring the absentee landowners home from Rome, London, Buenos Aires, Paris not to be shot but to help think it through from month to month, the future.

But Mayn doesn’t rid himself of that future whose shadow he carries, having been cast from it as if he could not stand what they were doing there. Where two become one. Twosomes reduced to frequency in order to be transmitted to Lj or L2 and so on, when they were expecting to be two also at the other end when they came out of frequency into their own reconstituted flesh arriving in the libration space settlement, though all of them had been told what was really going to happen even if in a message system announcing— that it bears in it—its own drug—and the effect on these emigrants when, on arrival, each one transformed from two discovers what has happened and turns and turns and turns looking for some other while seeing only the apparently straight expanse of vast libration-point torus, one’s new vast-doughnut home, cannot be estimated except in special instances by, strangely, geiger sifter; can’t be estimated because, because—he is an economist besides his credentials as sea lion or more generalized monster, or at a great distance a worm digesting Earth, his laughter leaks like madness and he alone can return to Earth to try to do something only to find that all he can do is try to know what happened—because, because there will not be two to contemplate one another, but one alone, which doesn’t preclude the new one meeting someone, which anyway must happen where the curve of destiny sloped out to Earth-Moon space steepens subtly with law unprecedentedly honed.

One alone? But with what characteristics? Did he get that far? He is not there, he is deluded, isn’t he? Is he a guy grown more familyless than less as two or three years became six or seven and his family apart from him grew? He missed being naked in that woman’s presence whom he loved. No, that is not the first story; he is in a Florida roadhouse on Skylab night but he can’t get loose from that future he has come from, how old must he have been? he can’t reconstruct it, and fails the more he tries until he recalls he isn’t in the roadhouse now but in bed with a friendly person. Mayn recalls his own name, Mayn smiles (or thinks he smiles) in his sleep. He smiles on her sleep. Her generation grew up on noise, turning that wild wire of juice whorling down the ear into a mountain of life to look into the map of poison or radiation and imagine taking nothing from it but what can be used, except that this is Mayn’s own generational lie, not theirs. Her name gets dismantled in the air-conditioner, but her elbow’s all there. He smells the girl in her sleep: soap fading somewhere on her still holds: it makes clearer the last breaths of his Gauloises as rich and cutting making a home in the throat, as noise down the worming gullet of an ear. Bed sentiments from here to Walt Disney’s piece of Florida’s own Orlando the coast Chileanizes his intestine but make no mistake, Chile’s as long as America is across, so thank God the strip is stabilized by the Andes. Yet narrow as a mere layer: file that, file it along some southern continent’s Pacific flank. She doesn’t smoke, he sees along the cold rocket flanks steams like leaks of day into night, the Saturn V night-white waiting to fire stands upright fixed by the weight of searchlight beams. So it’s not yet May, but December: the night launch. Five months gone, and he not a stupid person but he came looking for the tall, tailored, bald Chilean not knowing what he would say when he found him. Slow-motion interview: would you mind saying that again, sir? History is the cover story. Why tell the girl? Will Mayn love her? He’s talking to her, which is important.

"What is it?" she says rather softly when he gets her name right and she moves her elbow off him; but her face doesn’t turn toward him but a couple three angels have hung around near the modular chests of drawers long and low or are checking out the towels and the clickless light switch.

Well, "it" threatens to grow by blurring into insignificance: is it a story? "How I played winter ball and was approached by anti-Castro elements," or "How I declassified a CIA director’s secret play to have himself abducted by his own men," or "How I became a message from here to there implanted in me and recoverable but not by me"—or "How as a P.O.W. in Vietnam I had to whisper for five years and what this did to my hearing," or "How I kept to myself a conversation with the pilot who helped stage the plane crash that faked the death of a right-wing Chilean revolutionary in January."

"Yes," she says.

No, said the Chilean that night in December, have we?

But I looked the same; he was the different one: was I drunk? No. He was taller and a shade less thin: mustache dark and drooping but he’s less bald close up if possible than five hours earlier in the correspondents’ telephone room at the Press Center—

I don’t think you usually talk like this, she says to Mayn, the most intimate thing so far.

Anyway I saw him meeting this moderately disreputable guy I know named Spence, and now I’m meeting him again and he looks different and seems to be saying he doesn’t think we have met (I mean, who really cares, but) . . . and he’s murmuring, half-politely, I dont . . .

While I stared, and—

I don’t think so, he said. Unless, New York? he suddenly added like he would give something to get something, although there was fear. The accent on "York" Slavic, Italian, Spanish. But then hands were clapping hollowly in the early evening, hands that were not pressing pictures into cameras.

Jim, she’s saying close to his mouth, I can’t be bringing all this out of you.

No. You can’t.

But am I right? are you in the middle of something you can’t decide if it’s there or not?—so I feel, Is it trivial or dangerous or important or what? —because you aren’t whimsical.

Anyway the three brilliant white suits came out of the building, each man carrying his twin-hosed portable life-support pack, out of the suiting-up building (you understood that) and under the outside roof-overhang above where the white van was parked a grand hotel seeing off a team of—I don’t know what they were: not warriors though suspicious plunder was their aim; not priests, notwithstanding the slow uniforms and tight caps beneath the helmets; not condemned men in their divers’ fishbowls fixed forever onto neck rings; not statesmen in protective on-site inspection suits—but (words fail, again and again, words, words) surprise!—explorers: hunters. A fireman on one knee watches them stop to greet their families, the rangy American women dolled up, a cool, Sundayfied adolescent or two, one in a long skirt, was it Carlsbad Caverns, the Empire State Building? No kissing through the helmets, two wives not three—one wife, the Command Module pilot’s, did kiss her husband’s convex bubble and he the air inside, so their kiss met very firm, no tongues, poles invisible they are so familiar. And the blithe bachelor rock man Schmitt (also seen off by a lady) kicked up his huge Earth-heels—or was it Evans, the Command Module pilot—just before he climbed in the back of the Apollo van, his white bringing up into contrast a touch of rust-brown.

The boxes they are carrying said the South American gent next to me after all, maintaining the conversation he had seemed to decline. I pointed out the hoses and told him what I’d picked up—which did not (in reply to him) include who made the space suits and where. He said, They are taking overnight bags . . .

Kidney-machine overnight bags, I said.

They are getting away from their women for a weekend—

—on the Moon, I said—

—it is every American’s dream, he said, it is what you and I were bused here from the Press Site to see, it is a brief, expensive shot from a movie—

—seen much closer up (I pointed out) by the crowd back at the Press Site on closed-circuit. But are you a journalist?

The astronauts are elated.

They’re like kids in those aviator skullcaps.

Who is the one who danced? Was it not our bachelor rock man?

The geology of space.

But now that they are in the van I am not so sure.

Hard to tell.

They look alike, suited up. Unknown soldiers.

Wasn’t the idea one unknown soldier? Mayn asked.

Yes, more than one spoils that.

Ah well, unknown soldiers vacuum-packed for burial in space, Mayn slowly quipped.

Is it the Service Module pilot who orbits the Moon while the other two are on the surface?

The reliable friend who is there for the heroes.

Still, a vacation in a vacuum, said the tall, bald man with the mustache; what was that you said? vacuum-packed for burial in space? I will remember that.

The van has a rusty tailpipe, I said.

It will drop off on the way; nothing spent, nothing gained.

You know about the Polish revolutionary who was told to blow up a bus.

I knew him; he was not Polish.

And burnt his lips on the tailpipe.

That’s not the one I knew. Your astronauts don’t make mistakes. Can they be heroes?

Those tight skullcaps, that’s the secret.

It is a performance.

Shot out of a cannon, I said: do they have that act in your circuses?

In America you can see anything and live to tell about it, said the man with the Spanish intonation in the first phrase and in "leave" for "live."

Or see nothing and not live to tell about it, Mayn had replied, he thought.

Nothing? A man in prison assured me, yes, prison is about nothing. But of course that is not just anywhere.

A journalist also? I asked.

Also?

A journalist?

In fact, he had once wanted to be one, since you ask. As well as a public speaker, perhaps, though now compelled to have a limited audience however practiced an audience.

Political prisoner? I asked.

He killed someone. He had a theory, said the tall, bald man.

Political? I said (I couldn’t just say, Oh?).

Possibly about imprisonment, said the tall, bald man, but it was about the unconscious: in effect he said—he was not so clear as my summary of him—he had found it unavoidable, the unconscious—we reconstituted ourselves in each other’s heads, I believe, our minds being congruent frequently, does that sound right?—always near to being one mind, was that it? Oh, he apologized, always, and it was not him I at first went to visit; he eavesdropped; he ignored a man and woman who had come to see him, actually, and listened to me and the man I was talking with. It’s chemistry, this mind-family affair, but I was unable to give him my full attention. His theory was of imprisonment, and in the fragments I heard while essentially speaking to the person I was with, I gathered it was consolatory rationalization, yet moving. He expressed contempt for exposes of prison life. He was quite intelligent: he called jail abstract. No, his theory was about all imprisonment, if there is such a thing; but I would not have called him a political prisoner. I learned later that he had killed a woman one night who had been his girlfriend more or less since grade school. He was doing a long stretch.

You were not.

A matter of hours, no more. He seemed to have taken up economics but later I wondered if/ had started something.

This lean, diplomatic man with a mustache turned away, clasping his hands behind his back and raising his chin like a royal consort on a visit. Or a king. Not a journalist.

But I did see you, I said, in the telephone room at the Press Center back in town.

The man seemed frank—and if contempt was here it was not for Mayn, to whom the man had attended quite warmly. But he was looking away now. He did not speak of the man Mayn knew with whom Mayn had seen him in conversation, an ageless little villain (well, not so little) named Spence. Ever meet him? he gives information a bad name. The Chilean answered me that he was not a journalist, he said he knew nothing of space but he had heard there were particular pathways in it finding which we might save time. He had humor to spare.

That’s quite a lot, the girl murmurs, and an elbow lands on Mayn’s breast, and charges into him so the skin and bones couldn’t stop it.

Mayn’s more awake and there is a strip of horror over his heart, he wouldn’t know why, he hasn’t been asleep, he knows that. Hey, did you tell me the gravitational hills and valleys of space give us libration points but not the transfer of persons two to one?

Two people one, yeah, the girl murmurs, half asleep and more than half, Libration, vuhbration, she says the v like another language.

But did you?

For just a moment she’s awake like a woman he once married who when she woke up cocked one eye at the light and kept the other shut (but which eye suddenly seems important, but it’s lost): Yeah, well libration points I know but ... I don’t really recall . . . saying anything about them, and . . . transfer of persons from two to one, I know I didn’t say gravity ... her voice closes . . . didn’t . . . and she’s out again. Or in.

Where did he get gravity valleys, gravity hills, geology of space, libration points, where’s he coming from?, he’s no scientist, far from it. It’s like a mountain is coming to him.

We are not there any more, he continues. "No, we’re at Sky lab, May, ‘73," he imagines her sharply saying out of one wire-thin cleft of sleep; but he hears, "Mmhmm" and says, "Please" (meaning stay awake and hear me) and she says, "No" (meaning perhaps some opposite) and breathes; and then she breathes words he’s heard before—"resting my eyes"—heard from a wife—again between his lips feels the softness of her lower lip and her eyes looking out the back of his head. His fingers catch the ghost of the word Spence.

We’ve been bused back to the Press Site now, and it’s getting late. The place is packed, the grass infield stretching from the grandstand toward the Banana River. We don’t know for a few minutes yet that we have four hours to wait. The delay doesn’t dull me. Against the blinding giant disk of searchlight the contour of bald head and loose robe of an Indian holy man stood for a long moment. A delay is coming. A computer hold. And the computer is far away in Alabama, same Moon though. But my man, you see, appears twice more to me and then a third time. Under the grandstand at the hot-chocolate machine. Hands at his sides, calm, indifferent you’d say if you didn’t pick up this weird independence. But he’s not doing anything there, and you can’t see the launch pad, and he’s not there to study the structure of the grandstand or blow it up, although I might ask again about that one. He’s got to be waiting for someone, and I felt stupidly it was me. He looks away through me with a steady power I didn’t see before, so he’s above me and I’m only half there, and I have to make some conversation, the bastard; but then abruptly he acknowledges me: Where are they? he asks, and he answers, Elsewhere, elsewhere. The Governor of Alabama and the one-hundred-thirty-year-old slave must be seen, and he smiles and moves away.

I look at a girl’s name tag as she tips a paper cup to her mouth and eyes me and I look away to the body in general of a girl next to her who doesn’t have a name tag and this girl does not notice, and moves away from the other girl, they’re not together, why am I going into this?, while someone behind me reports that Press Site buses will visit the VIP stands, and I can hear a student returning to her friends camped on the infield grass down near the dark glimmer of the water say, "I saw him—he looked dead," and a boy called out, "What about the slave, Suzie?" while somewhere a woman says, "Zsa Zsa Gabor," and the syllable hangs on and holds as if the whole statement opens toward verbless nothing, but we know what is meant even if the future should think it not worth the struggle. The third time that night I see my man the South American—I’m jumping from first to third—

Mmhmm, I ‘member.

No, this is December when I was down for Apollo. We’re near launch, near the big sneeze, I recall my grandmother telling me the Earth sneezed once to launch a giant bird westward, we’re on the infield watching the great electronic scoreboard record the countdown and there is the rocket and a flat gleam of bay that’s part of the Banana River at the edge of the grass, and here’s the son of a bitch I’ve already seen him with once back in Cocoa Beach in the correspondents’ telephone room, but now they’ve got their backs to me and I remember my man wears no press badge, and they’re side to side facing the sea. My man in his dark suit has his hands clenched behind him; the other man, Spence, seems smiling when he turns to him—I’ve seen that smile when he listened to me—and I keep hearing him say to my man, "No," but also in combinations like "You know"—plus whatever; and when the countdown hits ten minutes I’m closer, but a woman with a tripod asks them to move and they step apart, glance behind without seeing, then walk away mingling singly, and after the launch they’re nowhere.

The launch?

But the second time—the second time that night mattered most.

Ah, says the girl, you had a lot of reasons to look this man up, I really believe that.

My back to the bay I stood halfway up the infield grass toward the grandstand.

Mmhmm.

Mmhmm. Contact. Here is a holy man in a baseball cap.

Mmhmm. I ‘member.

No, this wasn’t this trip. This was December. This was on my left while next to it on the right were commentators in the three network trailers—trailers, were they?—and I was looking away from the rocket, the bright launch complex.

Mmhmm.

Mmhmm—look away, look away, CBS, ABC. And NBC. Trailers had their picture windows at the right angle. People inside had their legs crossed. But outside in front were some small tables—card tables, weren’t they?

Mmhmm, I ‘member.

Glad to have you aboard—corroboration and so forth.

Mmhmm.

Moral support, and standing by one of them was my man, and the man sitting down at a mike was a Voice of America man I once met in Washington at a Softball game—turned out he was the South American voice, and later he seemed not to know who I meant by the tall, bald man, but here now he assumed I and the man knew each other. He and the man—he was Chilean I learned later—were talking as I walked up. The Voice man started to introduce us, but the Chilean bowed to me and said we’d met.

I don’t know any Chilean, the girl murmurs.

It is very beautiful, the Chilean said—a squint of gaiety pinched the points of his eyes. He would look out toward the rocket, then at me; I only at him, with my back to the rocket though I saw behind him the picture windows of the networks: men on camera recrossing their legs and lighting up, while they thought of something to say while the hold went on.

It’s money, I said.

Money? He had a slight stammer but you didn’t pick it up, he used it to hold back what he was going to say. They risk their necks for a few rocks, he said; and I said, It’s not money they’re being paid off with, staring at him. He dropped his eyes to my shirt pocket where I’d neglected to unpin my press badge.

Why . . . why . . . The girl’s whole body stirs vaguely.

They have no necks, he said; look how the helmet sits on the shoulder: a new skin will develop in which one can live without the pressure of our atmosphere.

And the blood pulsing from inside? I said.

A new cool blood. All one type. Type R. Reptilian skin with fine patterns, and these creatures will come to understand each other without speaking, one will be like another, they will all be married to the future, they will live in zero gravity, no gravity will be wasted, and if they find the wherewithal and the tranquil control, they will be interchangeable, I think I have heard this said—I don’t think it is original with me—their hair will not need to be cut, they will die if they wish and the wish will be beyond burial or incineration —that’s as I’ve taken it, and I don’t know a booster from an Apollo.

Greek to you?

Greek I can read a few words for myself, though if they say liquid oxygen is being used I am prepared to believe even if I do not know. It is their wings, yet it is wings they fly from, to become what?

News, I said, but what he said felt like life or death.

It’s a very good show, he said with that slight intensity of stammer.

The girl rolls over and bends her back and brings up her knees and snuggles back against Mayn. How long have you been divorced? You said your daughter’s working on the environment?

I went for something to say, I didn’t know what I said: chemistry, I remember saying, you know your chemistry, people can be made interchangeable.

Nothing to speak of, he said. The chemistry of trade.

He made me think of his prisoner. Your prisoner, I said, and heard "Your witness," "your witness," "your murderer."

My prisoner, he said. My economical prisoner.

Your profession? I said, but he replied, An unusual inmate, but he had to spend his time somehow; he was attempting to take some thoughts he had and, I believe, collapse them into one.

The unconscious.

Oh yes, the Colloidal Unconscious was how he put it. But we were interrupted and I see I have to visit him again when I am back in his part of the world.

Colloidal, I said.

I checked, said the gentleman: it is between a solution and a suspension—fine particles in a liquid, you know. Homogenized milk but not a dust storm. Particles too small to see under a microscope. But for the unconscious I do not know what it is. But I carry it onward, you know.

The Colloidal Unconscious? I asked.

Sounds like news, he said.

Something else is what it sounds like, something else I have never heard out loud before, or a crackbrained American business.

But the Colloidal Unconscious, said the South American gentleman, I would not speak of it. I don’t know any Colloidal Unconscious. It is, as you say, something else.

Maybe it’s news, I said.

It’s news, he said, looking away toward Apollo 17 and the sea, both of which had stopped existing for the while, but he wanted to say something more.

They take the elevator, I said, up to the top floor, make a few phone calls to influential people, loved ones, then they’re off. If I did some homework I’d care more.

The other way round, he said, and I felt him to be a brother.

Mmhmm.

What prison were you in? I asked, and Spence grinned in my mind, never forget it, like he knew me—which of course he did.

I was not inside, the Chilean said. I was paying a visit. I left the city in the morning, I was back in time for a late dinner. A Vietnam restaurant cheers one up, an authentic one as opposed to half the Vietnam restaurants in Paris.

The prison was a pleasant ride through the hills. You are almost as persistent as another man against whom I once stammered; but I stammer slightly in several languages.

Santiago? I thought, the approach is through wide, flat fields of shining green. Caracas—Caracas has hills. Are there hills outside Athens, and a Vietnam restaurant? The ones in Paris, but a prison in Paris and a highly conceptual prisoner? Possible.

(Are you kidding, the girl murmurs; of course there are hills; it’s a regular amphitheater.)

But Spence materialized at the corner of the press grandstand. My man had seen him at once, and changed absolutely and asked me what it was that I wanted, as if I had been after information.

I said, Your prisoner was not in prison for his beliefs, I gather.

He had found a way around waste, or a way to stem the anguish of it. The passerby—what was it he said?—who carelessly strikes off the head of a sunflower. The thoughts we may or may not call our own that go nowhere until we immerse ourselves in the larger colloid. The need to go away but the discovery that we can go away by staying and being left. I see I must visit him again. When I return from California one day I may. One day soon, was the offhand remark the South American gentleman I think made against the Voice of America man transmitting.

But what I had really wanted to know was what the tall, fine, bald man had been doing with that Spence in the Press Center telephone room back on Cocoa Beach; that is, what Spence wanted with him. No: that’s not true: I wanted to hear him talk about astronauts evolving. No, that’s not it either.

What is next? I think he asked—he asked, yes, absolutely, asked instead of walking away from me. The Voice man was sitting at the card table talking into a pretty good facsimile of an old Western Electric saltshaker mike. He had a humorous face—don’t ask me why. The night air open to South America. The big boys behind glass smoking minutes away.

Next? I said; you mean Skylab in May? I said.

This is not your field, no? he asked frankly.

I am adaptable, I said, but I wondered what he’d been told, and if so, had it been by Spence?

So I have recently heard, the South American gentleman said.

It’s pretty far from my humdrum dispatches about missile economics and strip-mining sulfurous coal off the face of the Earth.

Oh I hardly believe you, said the man standing beside me, but between the two edges of his words I found a thought of my own: Far from barroom chat, from information capable of being phoned in, information on space spinoffs, on the highest clouds of all that condense out of dust from outer space and shine from the sun’s silent light practically all night long; congress on drought in the Sahel desert, on global weather network; proliferation of seismic monitoring devices; the minor beauty of the obsolete missile such as the Sprint; the "hardness" of the "hard target" offering endless economic scenarios where, regardless of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), three Minuteman III warheads "delivered" upon three Russian silos having a roughly U.S.-style "hardness" have an eighty percent chance of taking out one silo, whereas seven M-III w.-h.’s would have the same percent chance of knocking out one silo three times as hard; the good-story myths of offshore cloud-seeding interception to dry up Castro’s 1970 sugar crop, the Venus hothouse scenario turning New York into Venice, the two-billion-dollar Russo-Canadian "black film" scenario to fly in ten million tons of city soot to cover the Arctic ice cap and melt the north-polar glacier; far from this yet in the presence of the after-all-pretty-ordinary South American elite bald mustached intelligentsio, I got the aftertaste of what I was prepared to say but did not: a burn of bad breath vacuumized into a stress-factor of empty words: Mylar-insulated sleeping bags the coming thing already here, would they take your stain? (I sipped a bourbon in Oregon); clearer X-rays (I felt the Chicago cold beer follow my system all the way down); laser gear spots continental drift (soda water on some coast at either end of the American landbridge bubbling up into the tube of your body driven by convection currents somewhere among the all too believable, faith-informed deep plates they make up below our crust); and the micro-electronic revolution that had been spurred, spawned, sparked, and sped by Russian superiority light months ago in blast-off thrust to where and when, and by NASA’s consequent need to reduce weight in order to get off the ground, hence miniaturize, reduce space—hence brainstorms that sent computer exports up fourteen hundred percent the first ten years of NASA, Inc. Take Chrysler cars’ new clean-air ignitions, their new distributors computer-checked by the same system used in Saturn rockets, same system that will check your windshield-wiper motor. Potential barroom information at rest, and I have learned (but when?) to hate and fear potential, is that it? But I said to the gentlemanly, somewhat hard though melancholy and subtly exiled Chilean here in the final month of 1972, No sir, it was not my field, and maybe this was why I saw through it, and as for me I thought all this show tonight —Alabama Wallace in a wheelchair, former Truman on ye deathbed—and throw in that operator Spence long known long unknown half-life magnet—

What do you see through it? asked the man.

Fire, I said; games, I said (and answering this finely displaced guy was like being traced or calling up the trace in me, you know some old inch of wire with congealed words in it coiled in your gut where you swallowed it a century ago, some mineral that belonged to somebody else and after all this time it’s sort of cushioned and cocooned by your congealed juices and greases but it’s starting to do something, move or give off impatience, I didn’t know and was not accustomed to talk or think in this vague way), fire, games, speed, a touch of war, sky’s the limit, I said. Great American vehicle floating a loan!

Very good, said the Chilean; I see something else.

What is it? I said, and realizing I wanted to find something else to say to this guy—but what?—I said, The unconscious? You sure it’s out there?

Yes; it will be there even after it is gone, said the Chilean (though he may not have meant the unconscious). It is taking us there. It is like a nation, an institution. It is not people, though it is like greed. I say us. I am of the Americas.

It’s people giving their destiny away so it’s all clear and set, I said (not myself). I still hadn’t said "it," I might have said more—even me—but the Chilean who I didn’t yet know was Chilean, much less involved in the government and here in the States on some kind of business apparently for Allende—and I wonder if he got called back or got back or got stuck here, caught here—he stopped me with his eyes that included me in the vista he swept from side to side, the fixed image of the rocket some three miles behind me, the mob on the grass—

—Mmhmm, mob, she murmurs, mob.

What enables the three men to get away, he said, is the same that gets them back, and it goes with them but it stays too.

(Well, this sounded as bad as the trace wire in my gut giving off rays perhaps.)

It has no ordinary body, it can be felt when the blast comes, though I have never seen a blast-off except on television, the red gantry like an oil rig is silhouetted but close up the real thing that stands out in the void of the fire and darkness is the anatomy, you see, the building of the rocket, the bones of the idea. Last night before it was rolled away we saw the mobile service structure against the rocket with a vertical column of slanting parallels that are stairs for the men servicing the rocket but are an idea too: the anatomy—

Whew, I felt—

—the anatomy of some power without a body except mental and a power that also goes with the men, do you see.

I turned, following his eye, the rocket in the side of mine, figuring this man was running a Rudolf Steiner school in Yucatan or was a foreign writer discovering America, and my turning, our turning, reminded me of ancient days, of God knows what, that if the Earth was wasting me, maybe I had some small power, hack that I am, that was a threat to it—and I saw, among the two or three faces looking our way, Spence the journalist, and wondered who he was "with" this time, and I answered this foreign visitor of mine who carried some thread of pain or brave dread lightly so I said only, I think, that through his words I saw God, some emptiness between the upright rocket and the mobile launcher holding it in place, and then the horizontal flat land of scrubby beach coast, O.K.? (you’ve seen it), and that it led me step by step to feel that one Mylar sleeping bag and one astronaut equaled two Mylar sleeping bags and no astronauts, or three and no—talking over my head occasionally. Wasn’t what I’d expected to say, which should have been, What’s your business with that Spence? and I did at last say, What’s with Spence?

Whereupon the Chilean gentleman looked at me and me alone with nothing in his eye, which I realized is a lot more than "very little" in his eye. And he said he was an economist, sort of a statistician (I think that’s how he said it). I said, The nitty gritty. Yes, he said, the "nitty gritty." Esoteric equations, I said, but then he said he didn’t believe anything was equal to anything else, only people were equals. Hell, he meant it in a specialized way; that’s O.K. He was obviously South or Central American; he didn’t have that heaviness Spaniards of that class tend to have, and he was obviously involved with Spence. I don’t know if he meant by my "field" the pieces I had mentioned doing on the relation of certain big mineral partnerships to the growth of multinationals, the Southern Peru Copper Company and the greater freedom the aluminum partnerships have, to shop around for bauxite extraction, and the freedom or lack of it of some U.S. subsidiaries in Australia to export. You know, popular business economics—material you can get from other news services—oh, about risks like Ford rubbering in the Amazon, parent companies parenting. And I stupidly but it was irresistible said, getting the name out in the open, I’m about as knowledgeable as your friend Spence. The man nodded politely—and he half-turned to the Voice of America man and said, Science fiction?

And I remembered Dr. Allende’s amazing speech to the UN just seventy-two hours before.

And I said, No all I meant was that what’s happening in the next room usually matters more to me, you see.

It is through each other that we see, said the Chilean and as he moved away like a cocktail party I felt, So what?—but free—a free agent—but then felt annihilated—

—You said "no reason at all," the girl says; there’s always a reason.

"Annihilated" is a bit strong, but Allende’s words came to me then about "forces which operate in the shadows"—which meant the NIK—we all knew—and I thought, The guy’s from Chile—and then the Voice of America guy with this humorous round face told me the man was an economist who had been spending a few days here; he did not name him; he had met him in Washington where he had had a brother and in New York and when I pressed the V. of A. man he added that a hippy free-lance he had talked to had pointed me out as—

—Wait, I broke in: who was this "he"?

Oh the Chilean gentleman, Dr. Mackenna.

Pointed me out as . . .

Oh as a person with connections down there. Railroads, airline, newspapers?

Who on earth told Mackenna this?

(Mackenna was his name? the girl murmurs . . . what’s "NIK"?)

The Voice of America man with earphones on raised his hand, listening, and bent to the microphone; looked up again at Mayn and smiled and shrugged.

"Who’s Spence?" the girl mutters, breathes, murmurs tenderly as if her interest in facts themselves is tender and in the dark she’s as young as a very young wife but fairly off somewhere in herself for having both responded so regularly and just about slept through this amalgam.

The guy he ran into in the correspondents’ telephone room at the Press Center in Cocoa Beach—a crook named Ray Spence. NIK equals Nixon and Kissinger, and the I is for CIA.

Mmhmm.

Well, I mixed up the sequence.

Mmhmm. It doesn’t matter.

Communication unvoiced, but telepathy this late is not the issue, the issue is whether what we convey etherially to each other is worth it.

A crook, did I say? First of all, a bit of a character, a subsidiary worm, probably a minor monster.

But this Chilean: tall, dark, bald, the Chilean whom he (Mayn) hadn’t yet known was Chilean had been waiting to use a phone it seemed, for they were all in use, but waiting so detached that he could contemplate Mayn.

The man returned my look which I held just longer than I’d meant to and he gave a bow and I saw two men I knew and I went and talked to them without finding out if they knew as little as I did about space. Then, with his dark glasses propped on his hair—ponytail behind—and torturing his mouth into the sinew of some smile, Spence came in, or was in the doorway, and was the one the Chilean apparently was waiting for, but you couldn’t be entirely sure. Spence waved a sideways wave like a saxophonist I know to me with eyes lowered as if we both knew something. Then a switch-off, and I didn’t exist.

I followed them into the information room. The orbital charts were being given out. Then we went upstairs—the contractors’ handouts—half promo, half straight dope, two halves slanting away in a curve not quite routine, information dividing itself, its future, its source’s future multiplying its trite labor.

The silence next to Mayn shifts emphasis but is silence still. She murmurs. He stammers in several languages he hasn’t heard himself speak, and the sounds are familiar. Can Mayn feel activity in the elbow that’s on him like a thing coming to life? There’s her lovable circulation, he would swear; it’s her blood flowing along his hairs—he’s with her all right—hell, that’s what you always hear but he’d had it for a moment, "one-with," they said—they’re one, he’s sure they’re one—is that good? They have a plate for newlyweds to stand on where four western states meet, corner to corner. He tastes nicotine saliva seeping down, rejected by now-dead brain cells as their last wish. He ought to go into the new but fragile motel bathroom all done in green and throw up, but he would have to try too hard and two-thirds of him feels good and what if he tilted some relatively fresh and unused void capacity out by mistake, but he’s got a cap of rock-wool insulation up in the attic he paid to have it blown in before that house was winterized for divorce, keeps the heat from escaping—his once friendly former wife’s, his no longer growing kids’—and he stared into the Florida motel mirror until he was sickeningly dissolved to be transferred to another bathroom of another color, he sees yellow but it’s no particular prophecy, he’s been in yellow Johns before, and he goes on seeing the wall beyond the foot of the bed, the wall through which he’s assumed he might be having a dream which he can’t walk out on like a shadow under a door.

He’s got this feeling he’s said too much as well although the girl’s not going to remember it. Take a shower in the morning, have a cup of coffee, wash down the scrambled eggs, grits before they take hold. His wife Joy would let him go on about how he believed in anarchy for children and then would throw it up at him later as if some prediction of his had come cruelly true, while neither child is close to being as dislegalized as the father, nor at this time close period. The elbow stirs and slides, leaving a hand, like a substitute or residue. And he might run his tongue into the forks of her fingers, to finish between her thumb and forefinger: old, deep southern-hemisphere’s wrinkled mind stirs on top of the submerged mount: wind rises from the right direction: mature sea male among shore smells he makes not much distinction between the young and old sea mares, he sneezes, he observes them all, he doesn’t have to do anything (isn’t that him?), he feels them unfolding all round him and he’s the center of a wind from all quarters, he hears the voice naming the hustler the Chilean was intermittently with then in December—December 7th—at Apollo 17—just three days after Allende’s UN protest—and can’t see why the Voice of America man when he phoned him two weeks later didn’t know which Chilean—well, the Chilean who (forget that snake Spence) spoke of future blood cooled under a new skin and of future communication without words but between whom? between survivors so grotesquely fitted into the new atmosphere that who then would want to survive? Except naturally the survivors, who in turn at a plateau of zero gravity would never think to take up the option of the wish to die and such thoughts as all these were— as if the Chilean had heard Mayn often think—whether with Joy or alone. And Mayn contemplates the wall but looks into it, not through. He hasn’t been dreaming: light from the parking area has found a Venetian slat stuck open, and on this wall opposite the foot of the bed a framed color shot reduced to black and white by the night is of a towering Saturn in the A-frame doorway of the scaleless exterior of what’s touted as the biggest pile on Earth, so big a pile Mayn obligingly fits Chartres and other cathedrals and their orbits into it while also transferring St. Peter’s perilously into orbit where it is at last safe unless it collides with astral debris, but since he’s tired now, could he be thrust back along the particles of his own shadow to that future he came from where on metal plates persons two by two are being transferred by frequency to space settlements where upon arrival they will find themselves participating in a population-control project which Mayn knew of in advance? One more eccentric proposition (like Allende’s "We are the victims of virtually imperceptible activities, usually disguised with words that extol the sovereignty of my country"—paranoid, right? fatal-sounding was more like it, Mayn knew—fatal paranoia, then?—but the paranoid in this case was not the victim).

The man with the bandanna, she’s saying, had a hole. Yes. You know that operation? People know all the operations nowadays. That’s right . . .‘case they take out the wrong lung, et cetera. Yes. A thumping starts—and the chance that it’s their door breathes him more toward sleep. Is the Earth perhaps undergoing long-term separation trauma? Is that it? Yes, I think so. What did you say, Jim? What did you think?

She’s waking up, he feels inside his body. But Mayn isn’t happy with that mobile home that keeps passing like a Wide Load up the highway or some mind of his vacantly overhead is it every ninety minutes?, no he is in orbit around it. He never got around to giving the firing-squad order. Turned out the squad was formed in a circle and those facing it were a larger circle and so on, and the squad leader had to discuss this before any order could be given. And all he can get out of the incoming messages is what he was once ready to have but now needs to see through, in honor of the Chilean: for the—laryngectomy, the girl says—for the motel’s words about itself are not worth using, too easy, not funny, not the thing: "Jettison all worldly cares, splashdown transcontinental load in Space Coast motel pools at strictly suborbital rates, your motel launch pad puts you in perfect orbit around the sun"—but the Chilean knew there was more to it than techno ahoy ha! and Mayn and the Chilean were messages to each other unknown to the bearers. But in addition Mayn still missed a point: two shapes slid together and looked congruent and he had trouble identifying them.

He reaches for the ceiling: his uncle or his father (he’s getting too old to have a father) said (heart to heart), "Shoot, kid"—so his shoulder tips the girl’s residual hand off him—he, Mayn, part Indian-country where he could kill Spence, erase him out of mind, and he Mayn is not a killer, believe Mayn, he isn’t a killer, or not yet, though his future nature is all here, the votes are in and he was elected hands down, yet to a new life he always had in him, no chameleon sweat of a Spence-hustler just old Mayn a non-toxic monster (patterned on earlier earthling-newsgatherers) doing the job as coach said, "but you know something?—that old meteorologist in the Village is second cousin to a Navajo." And Mayn hears himself slur, "There goes Skylab again, why’s it have to come over every ninety minutes?" "Skylab passes over the same spot on Earth only once every seventy-one orbits," is the answer and she says this while simultaneously asking if he is awake, God it’s only three-twenty and he goes Mmhmm, and she asks if he will be seeing her again up in New York sometime (the "sometime" hedging her), and he replies, Mmhmm, which is not the sound of the void (send out for sandwiches), and which is the sound of another creature to the north and not the brou-ha-ha bellow of a sea lion in the other Chile that’s way to the south—cordillera country, my man—a Darwin South that he never quite (he Mayn) got to except to hear the rains falling upward from the Pole (and he suspects that a whole lot of other people who say they’ve been there really haven’t)—but what the hell did Mayn’s "quite" mean? but no sequence to speak of for he’s tired of his insistent soul threatening to bore him and needs to migrate to another belt, says, "Mmhmm" again to the girl’s "Well if you’re here for Skylab because of this Chilean economist you met at Apollo 17 in December" (surely she’s only pretending to be awake) "who did you say he was? Mackenna you found out his name was? That’s South America for you. Then what were you doing at the launch in December?"

"Mmhmm" is the way the other creature speaks, then surprisingly, "Sure": for China’s opening up now, we’ll have to think again about Chile, have to get a visa to China, China’s opening up. Choor, then, only a matter of time till Choor has a nuclear capability?—no, nothing so obvious—rather, till Choor can be mapped so that when there’s an underground event in Tibet shock-waved off the scale-scope Choorward, we don’t always have to jump to another map to check the event’s warp through Choor or Choor’s registering of event while in doing so we no longer sure if quake-plode-quoia originated in Tibet or the indestructible Great Salt Dome of Kamchatka whose peninsula moves toward Choor or on another map America bearing its whole weather system with it, together with selected coastline whose breaks correlate with zero-pressure pockets above but do not show up to naked eye.

"But Jim—hey you asleep?—what’s ‘choor’? ‘something-choor’?" He explains it is probably a made-up place with precise alternative locations for contingency movement. "You mean like bombing?" He laughs in his half-sleep. She’s too young for him, he thinks he is too old to fall in love with a future mother, he chuckles still or rumbles, and nearly gets to dreamland but he has never dreamed—only hallucinated, he laughs—and she pinches his nose so he feels it behind his trick knee, What’re you doing? she says when she is the one doing. Her name again is Barbara-Jean, and she overlaps the times he is in, answering his "Is the Earth possibly undergoing long-term separation trauma?" before he answered it himself: Yes, she thinks so. The symptom of this urge, he says, waking up a bit, is the urge to figure out what it all means.

But she: You mean when Earth doesn’t suffer separation trauma any more, the urge will pass?

But, he goes on, you got to ask, How was the Earth made?

Well?

Oh, it got itself together, he concludes. But she has not concluded, and digresses to his account of Apollo 17, four, five months ago. "But Jim, I don’t know when you told me, it must have been this afternoon but I don’t remember but those meetings are very clear to me, in the correspondents’ phone room, then five hours later outside the suiting-up building when the Apollo 17 astronauts came out and got into their van to drive to the pad, then under the grandstand when he was waiting for someone, then on the infield during the hold, at the Voice of America table, then Mackenna’s off talking to the creep you don’t like, and you think they got something going, so I see the meetings clearly, but why did this guy make such an impression on you?"

"It’s possible," he murmurs.

So if the event-quake in Tibet-Choor territory (wait it out, it feels like a monster’s monstrously silent sneeze) remains only intermittently monitor-prone, and while we are seeing about a visa to China, somewhere along the long white mountain in Manchuria, the path marked by great sprinkles of green pods of unripe peppercorns—or along some above-the-surface Tibet (nonetheless safe from the nose-to-the-ground Beagle of Darwin discovering an American corporation full incarnate in Chile), a mammal can be seen, thing all hairy muscle-fat gaping out of a hole in the top of a root he inhabits like top of many-limbed trunkless tree that dreams its way growth wise up, up, from way deep in the ground until it just reaches the surface where this creature—

—What kind of choor did you—? hey! did you say choor?—

—"make the economy scream," Nixon ordered for sick Chile, as CIA Helmsman took notes.

Mayn’s not quite with her, or it, and she’s asking, "Jim. You awake?" reaching for the light and thinking better of it—"Who was second cousin to the weatherman? and who married Tall Salt?—is that the name? did the weatherman have an uncle who married an Indian woman named Tall Salt? did he stay with her if he was a New York hermit? is that an Indian name?" "Oh, Choor was a place my grandmother knew about. A place a Princess went adventuring from."

Forget; "create"; take the "choor"—let the credit—no, the continents are adrift this year, next year they will have never budged—such reliable fact as the drift station now being set up itself which is to be a source of fact, freeze an aging Coast Guard icebreaker of the Wind class into a floe and let drift be our guide, plus the Norwegian Nansen who set out like a Viking in 1893 (a big year in our family) convinced that like an old wreck that he knew about, trapped northwest of Alaska that wound up in Greenland not to mention trees from Siberian forests, he might "sail" up the Arctic Ocean to within spitting distance of the North Pole: but if you can (fact) keep the bears off your equipment and believe that your receivers are really telling you how and when (and which) high-energy particles are bombarding the sky at the top of the world and thank God for our weather satellite what did we do without them for so long?—but we need the oil, we may annex Alaska leastways any land arguably moving—but there remains the long white mountain that has now gotten moving, compacted for the moment to next to nothing, and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we find that Choor now positions itself by what events occur naturally around it, and since we can’t find that mountain suddenly except in self-styled angel voices living us and tracking some Wide Load traveling a highway by night (no big problem, just get the route straight, the mileage figures and approximate bearings), and if it is supposed to be from that part of the world, we figure that Choor, or feel that this mountain, may have gone underground or (off-loaded by day) may get to where we see it is not any place except what’s happening around it.

"My hair goes quite light in the sun," he hears (of another season, not Florida—a future as well, he feels: of going to the beach; living). Her hair is too dark to go light, yet she’s reliable: she finds it incredible but eerily so, believably incredible, that he has never dreamed but she has not yet said, You just don’t remember. "But, you know, you don’t show your moods so much, whereas you have a lot of them." "Sounds like New York talk," you grumble. "Now what was this Choor, these Choor monsters? I mean didn’t you say that your mother before she—well, obviously before she—or was it just Choor she asked about?"

A curve of news passes so near it is surely Mayn’s, but, making it his own, he feels in his mouth a tongue of prediction: Mayn will fall in love again if, and only if, he finds the formula joining (i) his uncontrollable power to witness two persons transferred by frequency into one; (2) his faith that the Chilean economist matters more even than his connection with post-Allende politics and the Spence link; and (3) his lifelong inability to dream.

Then a tender compliment feels you where you live but some countdown the end of whose unseen hand sure reminds him he’s forgotten a little lower-back dread born of today though of a future known in one’s system if not spelled out except in some longer, tough stranger-tongue in the old animal mouth: that you yourself are this vagrant stump-tail monkey-bird Choor Mon’, still not quite shaped despite all these generations, and of which the mountain really remains to be found, for the coastline breaks that won’t stay put when you go looking for them hours after your infra-red aerial scan has jointed and correlated them with unfamiliar uncaused weather pockets of non-pressure mount up, until the impossible shape asking more and more to be called ancient threatens to be understood by not the curves and equations of some loner Meteorologist of New York but actually him whom you never dreamt of identifying with earlier Hermit-Inventors of New York historied by a grandmother whose tales made up to fill a grandson’s mother-gap became extra-true at a bad time for you. You are the He who belongs to that Mountain of Choor, but what’s a monster nowadays, and if—God!—angels have had to get into evolution and haven’t the power they once had to be absent and/or give potentiality, why more and more monsters with or without new role models may also be deciding to join the human race. Let me get this straight, she’s saying, your aim was ... to succeed in not changing the world?

Lost without other people, through whom he falls bending toward them, just missing them, sometimes lighting them before he gets to them.

Misses his family, that’s no news. Kind of loves this woman—young, smart, nice, fine, yes. Love waves deflect his bullet into orbit, how about that!, whose was said bullet?, bitable, choorable, he will wait and it will come to him, for while he lives, haply he is lived. By relations processing him into perspective, maybe he’s theirs.

Or by other people who know themselves so well they don’t feel clear, whereas he has dinner with them, plays squash, phones, hears their unre-portable doings in the same room and bent through others, which is a relief from his own light, which also weighs. Lived by others? Sentimental inkling, no more. Though it goes on at length somewhere, it’s just hearing yourself in others.

Forget it was even thought. Never stand up in court.

the unknown sound

That sound, she said—and he felt her attention touch him—doesn’t it bother you?

She lay in a corner of the long leather couch. She looked beautifully composed, relaxed. Her toes were lighted by the TV screen, the light crossed a knee, a shoulder, her nose. She was new to him and in a way he was thinking about her. He was on his knees across the room, and when he sat back on his cold heels his knees cracked like a painful joke. She didn’t seem to notice.

That sound, she said—she smiled and shook her head quickly—it’s so strong.

Well, let’s have it without sound, he said, and started crawling toward the TV. I often have the sound off.

You can’t, she said, unless you turn off the TV.

What do you mean I can’t? he said, and stopped where he was.

It’s always on when the set’s on, she said.

What is?

That sound.

I hear the guy talking, and I hear the crowd, right?

That’s not the sound I mean.

She smiled and he felt the warmth of the smile through the low light, but the smile had a clarity he did not grasp. He didn’t know her yet. He crawled back to where he’d been.

Hear it? she said.

What did she mean? Sound was something he knew about.

Look, I’m not deaf, he said. He wanted to go over to her. He looked at her eyes, one at a time, both at once. Above the nipple of one breast was a brief, tender shade he knew to be bluish. On the screen the young pitcher in a gray cap with black letters with orange hair bulging out beneath was staring in at the camera, close-up. She didn’t follow baseball, she’d said, didn’t really know baseball; but she’d played—softball, that is. The pitcher was at the top of the screen now and smaller, and three figures were grouped at the bottom of the screen watching him. These were the batter, facing sideways, waving the end of his bat above his shoulder in a brighter, a white, uniform; a player squatting behind him in a gray uniform, his cap on backwards; and behind him an older, burly man in normal clothes leaning over the shoulder of the squatting one, who now tipped onto one knee.

The thought of what she might be seeing made the picture suddenly so familiar he didn’t see quite as he was used to seeing. But what could she hear that he didn’t? It was one of the older color TVs. He concentrated and he felt the four figures—umpire, catcher, batter, pitcher—blur back into the extreme and ticklish rear of his eyes to be surfaces or components. He heard the announcer, and then the thuck of a pitch hitting the catcher’s mitt, and the shout of the umpire, who did not raise his arm.

Wait, she said. She pulled her feet up under her, she leaned forward and crawled off the couch so smoothly that the couch’s level and the floor’s were not separate.

On her hands and knees she reached the TV, her bare back arched, her head childlike up close to the screen, finding a new thing. When she turned the right-hand knob her hair, as if in the sudden absence of sound, was surrounded by light.

Now hear it?

What’s it like—is it a hum, a whistle?

It’s hard to describe.

You’re right on top of it, you sure you’re not hearing the announcer very faintly?

No, she said, it’s what’s left.

On her hands and knees she swung her head around, and she observed him, her chin against her shoulder.

You’re being mysterious, he said. He wanted to touch the blond down on the small of her back.

She fell over and, opening her legs, sat with her legs crossed. Her force was clear, but it confused their ages a bit. Turn around, she said, and don’t look.

Her pale stomach was straight up. He followed the line of each leg out along the calf to the angle of the knee then in along the thigh. He turned his back to her.

He sat the way she was sitting. He straightened his back and then realized what he was expecting. Her touch. So far he recalled each time with her; and he wondered how long it would go on—it.

Try again, she said.

He heard the set turned off as the light in the room slid away toward the one other source, the white globe on the window sill.

Ready, he said.

Maybe you should close your eyes, she said. But he didn’t; he remembered the Lord’s Prayer in church when he was a child.

Tock goes the switch again, and the sound brought up the armchair and rug and, in the window, an image of glowing bookshelves.

Do you hear a very high sound?

He didn’t. He said maybe he was inured, maybe he was flooded. He wondered how often she watched television.

Maybe once a month, if that—she didn’t have a TV.

They tried again.

The light from the screen dropped away. Then it came up again so that he saw the top of the armchair reflected in the window where the lamp was.

It’s so strong, she said, and he felt she was smiling.

Too strong for me, he said.

Come on, she said, don’t say that. It’s high, like a whistle. Very high.

A dull crank of gears echoed down in the street. He wanted to see her.

He turned himself around and she didn’t object. She was unusual in that she didn’t try to get him to talk about his work, except once she’d asked if he had to do much actual swimming. She pushed the knob, the screen became a gray mirror. She kept her hand on the knob and looked at him with something in store for him. He kept an eye on her hand.

She pulled the knob and there was a between-innings commercial.

He felt a vibration, he thought. Or a pressure.

You really can’t hear it?

A whistle, he thought, a whistle without the whistle. It’s like speed, he said.

Speed? she said.

No, I mean like the speed of light—but without the light.

But then he didn’t know, and she agreed, and said she didn’t want to push him into saying what he didn’t mean.

He didn’t know if she would spend the night this time or go home.

She smiled when he told her about her neck, her collarbone, her hands, the tender bluish shade he had touched with his eyelash, even with his eye. She’d liked his hands, it was one of the first things she looked at in a man. He’d let her get away with that.

Let’s listen to the sound, she said, and he thought she was saying also, Concentrate, here’s something I can bring you on your home ground.

In the same serious way she had asked if he had some light penetrating oil; the record turntable sometimes failed to stop and the arm sometimes didn’t come back. She wanted to tilt the housing up, she knew where to look. He’d said he would buy some oil.

Now she switched the TV set off and told him to shut his eyes and put his hands over his eyes.

He asked if she’d heard this sound before.

Only the few times she’d watched TV.

She and her friends listened to music. She’d lent him a piano record. It sounded like a half-magical, musing mish-mash of Debussy, Schumann, pre-War nightclub songs and barroom rag heavy on the pedal and old American songs he could not identify, only respond to, a tune from Stephen Foster maybe, or a camp meeting by a river. He’d lent her Delius and the Bach partitas he liked. She’d said little about him himself except that she had always wondered what free-lance really meant. He had volunteered the information that most of his salvage work lately was for the police. She told him a little about her friends.

Her friends thought of themselves as coming out of the sixties, but he saw they were suburban kids not old enough to have been actually in the events of the sixties. They lived together in musical apartments but they weren’t hippies. They would be fairly romantic, he supposed, though she, he felt, was not. And she didn’t preach or brag. She ate little—only live foods, she said, meaning raw. But a week ago she’d asked if he minded if she smoked a cigarette. She had enjoyed it, looking out the window, and he had smelled a sweet richness he had never tasted when he had smoked.

This sound thing was something else.

What are you trying to do to me? he said, his hands over his eyes.

Listen, she said.

I am, he said.

Her words were softer in the absence of sound, and he found that his were, too. Are you trying to make me believe this sound’s been getting into my head for years?

You’ll hear it, she said.

And then she seemed to have answered No to his next words before he’d finished saying them: You mean like tasting preservatives in a loaf of bread or a can of tuna? You want to persuade me I’m being poisoned?

He knew some chemistry, and he knew he was already made of chemicals.

The supermarket chemicals are different, though.

Yes, they were. But who had just now said so? If he uncovered his eyes, would he find out who had said the words? The supermarket chemicals are different. He could have said them himself. He knew about preservatives. But the words had come not out of him, they’d come to him; yet had he heard them said? The face of a good-sized school tuna came at him squashed to the curve of one seven-ounce can dividing his eyes. He’d lost the tock, the tock of the TV switch; and anyway now he didn’t know if the last tock he’d heard had been the On or the Off. How does the blindfolded captive wait for what comes next? He smelled her skin. It was the odor of unbitten apricot and somewhere between a peanut in the shell and nutmeg. She hadn’t known the smell of nutmeg and he’d brought her the small jar with three partly shaved nuts of the sweet spice—pits, in fact—brown outside, pale wood inside with fine branchlets of dark grain like a leftover slice of pear.

He wanted to uncover his eyes and look at her. But he kept his hands on his eyes. He felt compelled to.

He wanted to believe her, he thought. But having thought this, he saw he wanted not to believe her. Let her try something. Did spirits fly in the window to her? Yet wait—let those spirits wait in their own midair, like hummingbirds or dragonflies—yes, wait: he’d give her this much: she hadn’t said he was putting up a fight. He was sure she hadn’t said any such thing, whatever else passed between them in this atmosphere in which he now didn’t know if his TV was on or off. And this time he wasn’t out of the room as he had been last Saturday.

Last Saturday he’d been watching his first baseball game of the season; he had gone to the bedroom for the book of matches that he’d fetched her the night before—then back to the kitchen to the stove, when suddenly there had been someone at the front door; and as he went, he wondered if he’d left the game on in the living room, the sound was off and he couldn’t tell. He recognized one of the voices and he opened the door. The game had been on, as it turned out; but the point was that at that moment on Saturday the television set in the living room had been at a distance—game or no game—while tonight he was close up and with an interpreter.

The sound he now identified with his eyes closed in the palms of his hands was one he had never heard. Yes, he did hear a sound.

It was steady; that was what it was, it was steadiness itself. It reminded him he was feeling good, and so he thought it wasn’t a poison or a coefficient host carrying untoward influence or bad substance. It was there like the faintly gaseous purity of compressed air to be taken, as his breathing might draw it, in cycles of amount; but it wasn’t divisible the way drafts of air from one of the tanks on his back were; and if, hearing it now for the first time, he recalled the anesthetic wind that sometimes tasted of mentholated rubber in the first breaths of compressed air before he went down, breathing wasn’t what this was.

Because for one thing (had he said so to the girl who must still be in front of him to one side of the TV screen?) the hearing of the sound arrived all over him. What the hell was he saying! Distributed was what the sound was. From head to heel like a film of buoyancy. Or was he turning into an ear?—for the sound was something heard. And steady, so steady that it could not have been brought in here by the girl. But it was not him.

Well, he’d been telling her some of this, telling her during the last few moments. He could recall her silence. But was it that of a good listener or, if the TV was off, not on, was she now at a loss because she thought he was trying to impress her by faking it? She was past that with him, he hoped. Or at least above it. He liked her. They could communicate, couldn’t they?

Got it, he said. Had it all along.

Hey look, she said, the sound I meant is no big deal.

The sound had surrounded what he was telling her, as if it could be also a carrier outward from him. But it also steadied what he told her into a new silence.

Well, now he was not speaking. He smelled her all over him very slightly. The heels of his palms felt his cheeks rise and tighten in a smile at the words, You’re turning me on.

She had not said them. Had he?

The touch of her smell was all over him. She was closer than ever. Ripples over him were less his looseness of skin than the girl herself, dissolved toward him to preserve him, preserve even that comparative looseness of skin that was, well, mainly in the mind, skin which tightened into laughter: he was arriving inside himself, he was joyously guffawing so the warm-water kisser fish and the long cold shark and the doppler-headed dolphin heard him bubble melodiously down through his system coded words—My lady preservative!

He heard her, heard her trying to say, Hey, I just wanted you to, you know, hear it.

But she was near at hand, nearer than she knew. She was a hand, and it was conducted to him by this continuous sound he’d found in himself which yet was not him, for he was something else, its conductor.

Now he was not sure as to when things were happening. Tock goes the switch. The speed he heard went on, diminished and steady. Yes, and speed not of something.

It goes on, he said. It helps. Maybe I’m used to it, but it’s not too strong. It’s gone on longer than I’ve known you.

Or yourself, came back to him.

Just what I was going to say, he thought—but hadn’t seen her mouth open.

What has gone on? she said with audible doubt, with an emphasis that had waited a little too long before voicing the doubt.

Oh—why it’s a current. Strong, very strong.

But I thought it wasn’t too strong, she said. A current?

Like when you get inoculated, the antibodies may never need to be boosted. Like I’ve been inoculated against dead bodies that I might come up with, but that’s not the same thing; you have to have that inoculation again the next time you take that kind of job. But other inoculations, you know, they last.

You go in for lots of shots? she said.

This is hard to describe, he said—it’s so beautifully strong.

And with that, he dropped his hands and opened his eyes to find the TV screen was off.

The girl unbent herself and went full length flat on her stomach and ran a finger over the hair above his knee. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or intrigued, she said. You’re not hearing the sound, you know. At least not for the past couple of minutes when you said it was on. Because the TV set’s been off, man.

Maybe so, but the other thing goes on.

It touched you. Like someone else. I saw it. It had a beautiful effect on you. I felt it touch you. You had your hands over your eyes but I saw you smile as if you saw ahead.

What did it feel like? he said.

Well, ripples. Ripples in the skin.

I thought it was you, he said.

Maybe so, she said, but it wasn’t what I meant in the beginning. I meant the ultrasonic ray from this particular tube in the TV. That’s what it is, that’s exactly what it is. My dog tilted his head when he heard it. He tilted his head and he yawned like a silent whine. Because he heard what was coming out. It’s the ultrasonic ray—you can measure it if you have the right equipment. I didn’t want to hit you with that until you’d actually heard the sound. You know, the actual sound.

He wanted her to stay.

He said, I want you to stay the night.

She said, I was going to ask.

And he heard her almost say, I didn’t have to say that—why did I?

He slipped away for a moment—she stayed where she was—he went to the wall socket behind the TV. He looked back at her. Her finger seemed suspended, waiting for at least some part of him to return; and from the darkened soles and heels of her feet up the crease between her calves and thighs that were neatly together like a diver’s to her shoulder blades he felt in his fingertips a trace leading him to a knot of tension where her neck joined her shoulder on one side.

Look, he said—and, still on her stomach, she turned her head so her profile was toward him. Even when a color set’s completely off, the plug in the socket keeps a small amount of current going in. They tell you it’s better for the set than unplugging it.

She went up on one elbow, her cheek in her hand, so her profile was tilted, and without the light of the TV screen he barely discerned the flare at the corner of her mouth.

Unplug it, she said, but he couldn’t tell if he heard humor in her voice.

He reached down, pausing to glance at his body. His thumb and forefinger found the plug. But then he didn’t unplug the set. The joke could have been clumsy. She curved around suddenly, she lay on her outstretched arm.

He was already with her. He knew she felt that.

What Found Grace Kimball, Goddess Quite Much Taken

It came after her at the end of a day and found her alone on her great uninterrupted carpet in her fully mirrored Body Room, and it was not the story of her life because not even jerking other people off was that. She was beautiful inside out, it was still turning into her, it had a handle on her, it came after her, but its sound no matter how far or near was unvarying. Plus, this could be all hers in a matter of minutes—forget man-hours—one long healing woman-minute of hand-made universe controlling your own rebirth if we’re talking birth control. It found her smiling lengthwise along her tongue, and Grace knew all this would happen—it was why she did it again.

It was the surprise it had like juicing fifteen hundred not only women in a great American auditorium. Don’t need a degree to fuck a university audience if there is light in their eyes, for they will give it back. Never mind that they came into the hall non-laughingly, multiplying before her offstage eyes into a fixed number of seats until they had to stand. SRO, the woman standing offstage with her had said. SRO? Standing Room Only.

Far Out, Grace said, but the woman said, "They’ve come to find out what is at stake." And some came two by two ready to invent their own lives and love themselves the last quarter of the century. Had the woman who had said it that day not known what was at stake, or wondered if Grace knew?

But here in her own Body Room on her own carpet this Self-Sex her term for it is to be shared in friendship/love with women and men alike: fallen back-on for back-up sex-respite or as trip in itself (words heard coming back to her—she let her stormtrooper assistant her own problem-child Maureen tell it): the old energy source retrieved each day I night continuum the holy joke let us be grateful for, coming back at will after you hit a temporary downer and think, You Lose. But no: it came in sheaves sprouting corn (ready for cream-canning to line the tempered bottom of her own faraway mother’s once-upon-a-time sex-negative orbiting cornbread skillet). And came in cabbage fringe and in a milk lining for Grace’s fingertip-spread heart of thanks. Because this chamber of walls mirroring candle-dusk could see. Because places could. And it would be a score of joy, scoring yourself, so she could step aside from her own body and let the recycled nudes coming out of her voice if not s’much from her workshop have the running of the world coming off Beef, Dairy, you name it, Caffeine, Grass, Sugar, Romance: she was there for them when they needed her and never forgot a first name, while if a friendship turned out to run its course quickly why that was how it was programmed: they came into her life and were gone along their own curve ‘way-way and she meanwhile in addition to the workshops ran the farthest-out or most energy-replenishing fuck in town, for the Goddess in her went thirty-five forty minutes up there at the peak, a speed of (it came to her) light far out but reversed so the actual peak wasn’t speed, it was slowness reaching where maybe no one had been: anyway, more than forty—for what was forty?—forty was the days some dude fasted for his pleasure: our dude, and more sex to him if he could handle it, what sexual energy, what crinkly hair (maybe he needed to come off hair like the rest of us, maybe that’s what was at stake, and Grace would feel her way back two thousand mere man-years to make a home visit, give him a scalp rub to grind off a few tight, glossy coils of that hair if he wasn’t out on the campaign trail, but), what spunk, what a whole hard-on of a dark person, out-of-the-closet next thing they oooh crucify ya.

His body’s cleansing high got Jesus what he went for, which was to run the show: and so as it came after her, she knew that what came after would find her without quite looking for her in its own sweet-yeasty time, the goddess being taken and by force that was her own feed-back that was all over up till the last converging grips, helping self or friend find self or just old words to get truth said. Or fucking self or friend.

Then it was still all over but out of sight and words, which were bullshit always.

Her full, shoppingcart day was coming to the point, and so now the hall phone going once crawled up her shin so far as her knee (the knee inside which her mother what a great talker sat in a faraway kitchen) and it could be anyone phoning—that’s what we love about the phone!—but Grace would sense who it was, it was her own baby’s-breath stormtrooper Maureen who’s hearing not Grace’s voice but "Grace Kimball residence" from the sassy black sister at the phone answering service): which can only make more abundant the bend of the approaching cosmos coming to her point so she has her way with (thankfully) herself, her fingers, her whole hand; and ‘twan’t her 1976 late-model Danish phone-shower-head dial a fine-tine/hard-prickle for there’s no privacy like a one-on-one shower, and ‘twan’t a flow of magenta from her felt pen into the big fat sketchbook she wrote things down in just like when she drew knuckles and muscles, cunts and cheekbones or the latest dream: so she also’s finding out how her unconscious is doing—how ya’ do’m’l—and ‘twan’t her cassette-recorder mike (neat smooth black-cockhead princess mike) she had in her hand.

She had it almost, her day-load cleared/vacuumed of words words shitfall of them coming down to one point alone. And if the phone’s being answered across the city at the answering service by the sassy and (Grace would swear) long-tongued black sister, baby’s breath friend workshop-assistant Maureen stormtrooper might still enter here using her own key coming to show Grace her newly done velvet head and Grace was with herself in her Body Room and could not be turned by Maureen even if Maureen stood right over there stretching on the chromed chinning-bar lintel at the threshold looking into this all but furnitureless space and fully mirrored nest of the abundant Body Room reserved for the Goddess, the outer entrance hall beyond and behind with its bakers dozen soft silver (painted/plated) cunts for workshop women’s clothes to be (H.O.A.) hung on arrival.

But Maureen can’t come here yet. The dayful was coming up to one point alone, and Grace would not quite bear down, she had the idea, the whole thing of it this time not spurred or oiled by thoughts of other hands or a little big toe working her over or the soft line where someone’s tan began.

How did it happen? Was it a Body-Self breath loose from words dragging at it? Her unlocked pelvis called aloft, and, in the old faith that so linked-up her lower back to her knees, but many knees getting ready globally to come together and take over, and her shoulders to her waiting voice and non-metallic (because non-carnivore) scent of her coming into its own (for women according to scientist Maureen smell and taste more truly than men), Grace had it all before her and she saw she had had it.

But say what it was.

What else but a bunch of lives who, in contact with your Body-Self love, are right here feeling you’re taking too much time: and then’s when you might accelerate or (even with yourself) fake coming, or just get up and go answer the phone, the door, the letter that’s easier to answer you think than holding yourself so dear you can flirt with yourself in the almond-oil bathtub and never forget the power not to be judged Good or Bad but waiting, which our female history has too often grabbed, so it is up to us, as if we were not our history, but—

Say that again, Grace . . . ?

A dayful bunch of lives turning each day secretly a great minute and a little year, secretly same shape but all you can do is know it, you can’t put it down, it’s the tip of the yelp, the coastline of your receding—

Your what, Grace . . . ?

A bunch of lives she has—

What, Grace . . . ?

Internalized. All her people, like she’s some newspaper. A friend’s gone-to-seed body. A suddenly-out-of-the-closet friend’s busted husband. Or faraway milk bottles with an upper stripe of cream hundreds of miles (years) west clinking cold moist rounded potential weapons in your forgotten dreams where there were now red-and-white waxy containers of homogenized if you’re into dairy products, which is a small outline of the larger, it comes to her.

Is it the shoreline of our mind, our consciousness? Is that what you mean, Grace? Who was it said, "the yeasty sea"? Some man putting in man-hours on words.

Goddess be with me but she feels others, like angels trying to get in on her act, trying to catch up, speaking like her language, speaking her, but angels are special, aren’t they?

Dayful bunch of a black dude on the street in an alligator hat murmuring, "MAma" as Grace swung past in alligator-booted breeches.

Add one cassette-ful of herself: it’s in her knapsack, her live-recorded speech—Her, live: we mean last night’s gig by a figure in the history of her time: Grace Kimball, her shaved, velvet-headed, get-in-touch-with-your-pelvis-headed-thigh-high vision of all women gathering underground turning their slow and oh yes constipated struggles into self-auras available freeze-dried they’ll come to life centuries later, be reconstituted like orange juice—will it work for carrot?—tho’ once taught not to believe in own existence by the same guys (doer-dudes but with a little help you know closet self-crucifiers—) who could make your asshole cream in its own unrefined sugar so you’d never know it can think for itself:

While a burglar breaks into Maureen’s little baby’s breath apartment while, down on Twenty-third Street, she is doing kung fu in a second-floor plate glass window, and, having swiped Maureen’s stereo tape deck (stamped with the local police precinct’s owner-ID imprint so if the cops catch up to the unit they can quarantine it in their widows’ and homeowners’ domestic reserve) and swiped her checkbook (she knows it by heart, stub by stub), and swiped by mistake her American Express credit card bill and Maureen’s florist bill for standing order of baby’s breath as well, this paternalistic burglar the following day takes responsibility for delicate, power-seeking Maureen by paying her Amex with one of her own checks she has instantly stopped payment on yet burglar-boy pays her florist bill with his own cash—so her fatherly florist phones up, oh honey he didn’t want her paying that bill, that one was on the house he thought he had told her last week and she should never never send cash through the mails; so Maureen winds up less mad at the thief-god than at the overweight florist who will lust after her pussy-willow head which receives more load than she can handle some days which is the problem with all women uniting down the ages.

"What will happen has happened" stands out on the soft page of the large Sketchbook . . .

Suicide alert for Cliff; his hands and fingers deeply touching to me when they touch the wood they will cut, shave, turn, and mold like something soft. "Words, words, words," Cliff my old friend says so honestly—all that page-boy hair, and at the down-corners of his talker’s mouth a tiny curve of self-destruct if not in ever-ready potential for flesh-surplus between hip and rib-cage:

firm at fifty, unloading the white Cadillac still panicked him, old friend, he owned it too long, once garaged in Maine, driven to Nova Scotia, paraded through Ontario and two Shakespeare plays—postcards to prove it: stolen, she recalls, in Mackinac, Michigan by the son of a lighthouse keeper on an island in Lake Superior; returned like at the end of dreams Cliff’s had about it with a full tank of premium; driven to New Orleans where Grace joined him for the Alcoholics Anonymous Reunion Hop (what a pair!)—

to dance in the street at Mardi Gras surrounded by Ham and Romance junkies which we didn’t realize they were because they had kicked booze and some even pleasure anxiety—

now selling the grand old white Cadillac gave Cliff a huge grant of time free of that moving space/furniture he had had to worry about, like making meals for members of a family in one dream he had about the car, changing their oil, greasing their bearings, fly to Maine instead, rent a compact, put in a phone call, clean break:

but now another suicide alert: what is at stake? is it serious? Cliff thought what did it was standing in line at lunch-hour at the Motor Vehicle Bureau to get owner-transfer forms when he didn’t need to: not that he’s ready for the flight deck at Bellevue where they wouldn’t let him have his carving knives though the bedposts aren’t exactly made of maple there, must ask Cliff if maple is too hard to carve:

she had told him she didn’t want to eat at Nippon Nosh tonight, was going to jerk off and talk to whoever came out from within

me, Goddess or her adopted loves and children through energy-abundant roof or through door, though knew my periodic cluster would send me uncaused something greater later and I said Cliff better jerk off the way I showed him, preferably with someone. I did not add (though felt enough the Goddess to) that Cliff has carved enough cunts for one month and it was turning into work (Manhattan cottage industry). Who was it said suicide is the white man’s disease? "Brother," I would say to Cliff. Brother? What about "Sister"? "You’re a good man, Sister." Now Cliff complains this friend Dave he’s keeping from me can’t go on

living off his wife, who cooks him gourmet animal protein, picks up the baby from sitter’s on way home, where Dave’s been making all-day sculptures he doesn’t sell that look like lungs, hearts, enlarged livers

and my kidneys after a motorcycle trip to the Finger Lakes, take your lumps and if they harden on you shrink them with concentration, while last year Dave Shea was of some "school" making mockups 3-D diagrams of vertical traffic Cliff calls inhuman. I agree this Dave is spoiled for the mid-1970s, though recalls according to Cliff natural childbirth like it was his own. I think, Why does Cliff get his ass in a splint, but he doesn’t pick up on my thought, must have been bent right around it by the kind goddess who knows when you’re not ready. Historian always more feminist than me, he’s not feeling so suicidal now: says isn’t it great Dave was there when his kid was born. But where was Dave afterward? I asked and Cliff agrees; yet, "Male plot to take over world," he chuckles, not so sure what he himself meant—did he mean—

—give yourself back your head, a dayful of head coming to a point of nothing but Love / Power cluster: which drew in along her Black-Dude-street-walk an interesting Old Couple, and not married, she was certain, but deep —and they had a story—what is your trip? (Grace went), projecting her mind to new people—so different from each other, he skin-and-bonesy, ravaged, rangy, the old lady so pretty (and nuts) and charming, and old—not cunt-old and maybe not cunt-negative, the beat-up man still in his late sixties gaunt-pocked navigating irritably/kindly along the sidewalk this soft-faced, half-gone old lady. But they had given each other their looks right before Grace’s eyes, like the light off each other’s face and you felt they were not on fixed income but into some other trip.

And later—later—not last, though; never never last (for there’s your sound system, and there’s always the phone . . .

—which now rings as Grace thinks it—to be picked up by the dark-cream of the Answering Hand somewhere in the decentralized system covering the city) . . .

—but later—after the businessman who kept vowing to put a cunt-positive drawing of Grace’s into T-shirt production but declined the bunch of orgy-swarming fruits in purples, silvery reds, and persimmon orange as too artistic, a fat-sounding man—and after a visiting sociologist (dear Sketchbook) on a week’s whirlwind from Denmark ("advanced sexual company hopefully") whom she will describe to

Maureen with her baby’s breath (cut flower) problem which is all Maureen’s got left to come off of except the one biggie, Grace herself though some days Maureen is turning carrot-orange—yet can compare notes at two in the morning like no one anywhere, scientifically, softly, reporting she has bettered her orgasm endurance record earlier in the day only to recall from years ago being home in bed with flu—whereas in Denmark shit they do what we do here, it’s obvious from the Dane, the sociologist very interestingly bald shave-cut with three lateral strips of shortcut sprouting—a man with three degrees

was studying American group sex in relation to and as support capability for the bottom-line pair bonding of couples that attended the group swings: which Grace is phasing out for a primarily open group-future while this sociologist-drone with a long but foreignly supple hard-on he was coaxed to bring forth so they could compare hard-ons still turned her on to herself in terms of historic fantastic break-through (gotta hand it to him) for he, after an international pause, consented to pay a fifty-dollar-an-hour consulting fee Grace spontaneously heard herself request because who was this guy to use her time for his thing, so that when she put his cum-towel in the hamper and later powered her Electrolux over the field of her mirror-to-mirror carpet she found herself unexpectedly in the sweet, not-overweight but posture-impeded/shoulders-forward body the actual body of the Danish sociologist’s wife houseworking a minimum half day pausing while dusting piano to peruse a Forum her husband left on top of his opera album, the night before he left amply equipped with traveler’s checks in denominations of twenty and fifty to visit the equally vacuumatic Kimball.

And after the successful Kate last night with the stark face of a sailor and diesel dedication to the seriousness beyond power which is political seriousness just as the power is political power—all in pursuit of being Grace’s assistant, when the job was, for the immediate present, taken unofficially by Baby daughter of the revolution Maureen who says that she is paid "in kind," when Kate, smiling under the smoked glasses, asked what she thought the job was worth; and after dear smart Cliff, old old friend Cliff but don’t say "old" (who is so full of knowledge who wishes through it all to serve her even were she to try to be First Lady but political beyond politics), with some classical music behind him who had to hear about last night (having offered to chauffeur her out to the Long Island appearance but reneged) and had a buyer (just like a coincidence) for his old white car and Cliff now wanted to have dinner at their Jap place because he was suicidal (or just guilty for having let her down when he had said he would drive her out to her gig on the Island, and covered that feeling with "Are you sure that’s correct? Whose dictionary are you using?—does ‘witch’ come from victim?") then, in the late shank of the day—"curving" (she wrote in her Sketchbook) "like a road that you know has to stop curving but doesn’t"—there came a streaky-blond-haired foreign woman, Clara, to the threshold of this warm place.

She came in person about the workshops. Grace almost had to get this out of her. The woman had not phoned. The workshops were starting again next week. A woman with an English-type accent and the name Clara Mackenna and a United Nations orbit like what Grace had once felt at a UNESCO nutrition meeting at an Italian woman’s Fifth Avenue pad overlooking the park, it was false composure and a different sense of money, having money that was taken for granted yet also not at all thrown around, foreign money, not Abundance money (which was Only Money), but foreign and vague except that that vagueness was tight like a banker if you got down to it. Was it a home Clara had here? She was actually South American (at least through her husband, whom she cared about and who Grace knew loomed like someone dangerous waiting in some other room). So the politics of marriage mostly unstated in all the words that seemed to state it, felt like capital P Politics somebody sleazy being threatened with a gun in a foreign language, standard men-drama.

In a pleated tartan skirt: a woman with a look in her forehead and hands, fine active hands, warm backs-of-hands as thoughtful as the forehead invaded by brittle Upper East Side hair, yet worried hands, worried palms maybe, a smooth rhythm and a classy look of dignified trouble (do we mean, "fright"? Grace heard someone in her, maybe a new self, say)—anxiety over why she had come to Grace Kimball’s apartment. Rocking the boat? Some secret but so predictable terrorism in the home? Unknown lives not yet lost. It took women to get wheels turning, one week you’re seeing your eyes in the window pane and hearing the door opening, the next week you are the door (write that down)—through it, trace a curve slung ahead of you scary as some old starfish newly growing in you from a little lump that already knows doctor talk, you hear it in you, -ectomy, -ectomy. Women in Grace’s apartment talked and talked as if their clothes had gagged them for years. And if our Puerto Rican super who you knew only half cared how many good years he had left and responded to eye contact by squinting as friendly as he was astigmatic and to a hand upon his forearm when his building was receiving Kimball criticism, turned upon her to condemn her "friends’ " cigarette butts on the floor by the elevator {and Kleenex, and cellophane from a pack of cigarettes), he would come in and sit on her rug with her and have a hit of Morning Thunder, and once half a joint, and sort of enjoy slugging it out with her when she said it’s the habit women get into where they’re the hostess who cleans up after others, and he knew she might ... he didn’t know what— but if he said the word?—but the words came out in a bit of dirty talk but no come-on, as if the apartment house was too real—this once elegant home of temporary plaster jobs and electrical wiring of a gauge long outdated.

Clara had to get dinner. For a husband. Why was she here? Grace didn’t think she had to ask and didn’t. Yet Clara at last, as if in the backward tilt of her neck quietly getting something out of Grace, brought out that they were from Chile.

Far out, was what Grace said, off her beat a little seeing the fine face of this woman solve what Grace’s words meant; so Grace mentioned a woman, first name, who’d been she was quite sure in the Peace Corps there seven eight years ago—’68?

Clara, a well-to-do South American girl who had probably married young, surely had children, yet seemed almost not to. She said they were not here, they were grown. But what was this English accent? it was more than a trace.

Something had been happening in Chile, Grace remembered, you might as well read the newspaper the super did, because they all lied. Grace stood in an open place somewhere, helpful, open. This Clara was going at another rate inside. Clara had to think about dinner. All right, then, really think about dinner. Where is he on his way down to the plate with his knife and fork? Working. Working for what is best for both of you? Make dinner for a past, present, and future husband, which is promiscuity.

Yet Clara was coming from somewhere Grace didn’t quite feel. Like a type of danger you didn’t need to go through to understand. Grace felt the cramp of Clara’s need, her hands like faces, eyes Grace wouldn’t quite catch; smelt beef grease in her pores responding to her husband’s, and the pure chemical breath of the double Gibson’s crystal ball, the baby onion waiting at the bottom of the martini like a lab vegetable or chilled fluff of cum, it’ll wait; but no, Clara and her husband (he who in the absence of all information, except some hint that he was important, seemed more foreign than she) would be winos, not martini drinkers; and Grace felt husband very foreign, with a moustache rinsed in after-shave. The woman gave no hint of him. Grace maybe like the goddess thought Clara had left and come back.

Get it together: keep generally women and men apart. Nationwide chain of pleasure bath-houses, women to women, bodies loved like selves as selves should be—and are like bodies (write that down).

At some point Clara had asked if Grace had any children.

Not to my knowledge, Honey. Two miscarriages, no abortions, possible sperm-bank option, short list of preferred candidates.

Then Clara made one of these big efforts and Grace felt for her and Grace’s eyes watered, Clara’s effort to both say it and keep from saying it: "I could have another." The eyes staring at Grace, concern across the forehead, the restless one hand held down by her leaning her weight on it, the other clenched on her thigh.

"Do you need that, now?" Grace asked. And, not adding questions and answers but letting it drop seemed to let go in Grace a guess at the truth about this woman. The word "politics" from last night wouldn’t go away. Grace didn’t need to read the newspaper to know. But the word was old, she heard her father say it and he was talking of the Mayor, and she heard the word come out of the mouth of the man she would show, but she had shown him already, if he was watching, and what had he meant by it? Politics meant men and women now. She didn’t trust this woman not to know something she wouldn’t be able to help her with. Was that it? Their conversation groped gently.

Well, pleasure houses for women maybe, but—"But," Grace’s old friend Cliff had said, "men have always had their gyms and steam rooms, so the idea isn’t new."

Grace projected toward Clara the words "To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it," then, "You are what happens to you." But while she had been projecting these words at Clara, Grace had felt observed. What will happen has happened: Grace wrote it down often: not for a talk, not for one of the all-new-workshop sessions beginning next week. She heard her words like feed-back, observing her; they came together back to her like next week was now. She felt Clara’s heart close to her. Clara was interesting; beneath all that international control or smoothness a twist of life tightened and was a mystery for Clara; Grace would help Clara beyond the subtle politics of marriage, the give-and-give and the take-and-take, help her along easy.

You could be a fugitive with nowhere to go and not know it, in a marriage, Grace told her. Clara found humor in this, but did not smile: Political fugitives? she suggested. Refugees, Grace said. From where? Clara asked. From a patriarchal—Grace began, and Clara said, Political refugees; and Grace went along with whatever this trip of Clara’s was and nodded, Right, right, political refugees. Clara said, That is what we are. But Grace felt more than one Clara speaking; it was weird. Clara wasn’t the convert type like Maureen. The shoes had come off as soon as she had seen Grace’s boots, sneakers, and moccasins lined up inside the front door under all the coat-hooks. (Pretty good for a foreigner.) Was someone else here, she had wanted to know, stepping down into the living room, the Body Room, and, seeing no furniture, she heard Grace say, "Not a soul."

Grace saw the alarm in the shoulders, the sweep of the eyes, the head tilting to hear. Slender, with that shoulders-forward, lovable apology in the sway of the walk to turn the best of men right on, Clara, her legs did not quite know each other and her stocking feet looked for a place to land. Clara sat on the carpet, legs folded in the mermaid position to one side.

We’re nude: the one requirement of the workshops broached at once. All of us are right here for each other. (Whose words rush forth? Her own?) "Love precedes Energy."

The woman is thinking. And Grace thinks, But Energy equals Love, and Thought precedes Energy—this has been established: it crosses her brain and shunts toward her navel and her quick, silly (she knows), caring (she knows) humor. "Americans are so abstract," Clara says. Grace is giving the abbreviated spiel.

Naked? Clara said—she lowered her gaze from Grace’s eyes yet not her face. A face from Clara’s now great history and travels. Clara was going to ask a question about another person; that was all Grace could guess. A face seen in Grace’s face? A man’s face. A man Grace sometimes believed she once had been. An Indian man. But it did not come from her fraction of Pawnee according to family lore. She would claim this earlier identity—to Maureen, who weighed it almost equally with the evidence that women ejaculated—Maureen knew Grace had an open sense of reincarnation. But, this male face seen in Grace’s and met by Clara in Clara’s previous form? Which was another woman. Who Grace knew must have journeyed from South America. In search. Why not, then, once, twice, to meet the Indian that Grace then was? Who could call this impossible in the face of powerful intimation? Grace’s face, for Grace was already naked when Clara arrived and Grace felt each stitch of cloth on Clara’s legs, along the body of her arms and hands. Naked was the word to use, proud of warm skin, gone public so you can really work on yourself. Naked as the night they would meet again. All that that woman meant was "naked, not nude." She was saying her country had a long coastline and she loved the sea, "so New York is not so bad for us" —and she spoke with real love about creatures of the sea, little ones, very little ones. Civilized was what that woman was. Boy was she! (And Grace would say so later to Maureen, she could hear herself, a long, late-night chat—what it was all about, she sometimes thought: a late-night chat with someone you cared about.)

Then Clara was gone toward suppertime. And Grace was giving herself time. Lying with herself, her hand on the simple plastic of the vibrator, portable energy center, just part of the American household, coolly warm to the hand; and she was smiling at her own words "Not to my knowledge, Honey," but knowing she needed to not look back because as Maureen could say the Past is Past (like she knew): but was that a male idea to keep us in 1976-7 from sensing where semen came from?

But soon she is already there. Why would anyone have words for it? The describing has been done, if women would only seduce themselves for real. Why does anyone ever describe it? It is a finer coastline too cunningly made to say. But she wants to ask Cliff, ask him anything, not how famous is she really but anything—like what was going on in Chile, the newspaper will never tell you the truth, and what did Cliff mean that the cosmos was not approaching but really going away from us (and rather fast!, she grins, silly). When Clara looked at her, Grace was that other person from long ago except simultaneously the person was present, too. Was reincarnation, therefore, more true than Grace had been saying in her Control Your Rebirth raps?

Cliff’knew women ejaculated, or said he knew; yet she was above herself flowing to the ends of the goddess’s greatest lakes hanging like gardens and in love.

Someone lay in the bottom of the mirror across the evening room. She saw across the spreading room to the mirror, the carpet-to-ceiling mirror that rose behind the great candle, and, behind the candle like a two-way mirror that was only one, a goddess she was sure. Goddess lying with open mouth between raised knees. Do goddesses get raped ever? Little light rape by the light of the big candle without benefit of man. Or is rape how they get to be goddesses.

Just as angels get to be humans, came to her.

To music rocking talking underneath her, it found her reaching everywhere along her without trying—the meaning of her day: an unheard-of story approaching: it found her; she had a handle on it. She knew where she was, she was into the secret of her day: she was this someone else who was just her.

Which she was already telling to one whom she had always told herself she would show oh she would show him, but it came out "someone else."

But she was right on, right out wrapped in a garden of fingers that sluiced in and out of the total awareness of the cosmos she was sure: fine tips, fingers with tongues, was that it? fingers tipped with clits right on target.

She knew where she was coming from and it was all the breathing spaces, each breath-pulse point: she was coming from what found her! Someone had said, doubtfully, Consciousness. Who was it?

The meaning of the day she had come through to this cloud of candle fire. And an I-told-you-so told the meaning of her day to the man she had vowed she would show, and this came back to her as if she had already told it—to be through with talk, with words, words, words (she heard the homework voiced apparently by Cliff in his car passing through Ontario toward Superior powered by housework of her own true vacuum cleaner in a room without furniture). Consciousness, was what her visitor Clara had said with sex-negative doubt in her head. Grace was helping her help herself, for she had come to Grace.

Grace saw this day of hers all at once at the moment when she knew what the goddess in the bottom of the mirror across the room would do before she did it; saw the knee drop and lift and the sigh open the mouth. She’s there and she’s here, back rubbing the fur of the carpet.

The buzz did not let up, someone telling her what she knew with the words all changed into someone’s words-to-be, universe-orbit of infinitesimal cunts that hers was if you blew it up to find smaller and smaller stretches— not her words, she didn’t know these: the buzz loosened into its cycles and met the music from her sound system in this room and the next, and the friendly machine’s low song going on as long as she wanted made spaces of a grand cloud that was like her becoming her—and the cloud lost its shivering buzz as she came, and at every spread breath-fork the cloud really got into her and was her, and the tips kept coming, rips of grip in passing, dear, in passing—beyond applause, for who was here to applaud? They made her laugh at herself, this was all there was to it—not even a young male secretary thrown in (she had old friend Cliff anyway). From the interior of her feet haired in the expanding carpet that her heels and toes pressed hard into, crests walked up through her knees, down through her thigh-thighs like a lightness to meet themselves tiding from head and shoulders, scalp and eyeballs, like parts of her that didn’t tie off at the end, bunches that, with some rocking happy fuck-ya that she didn’t quite put her finger on, didn’t end.

And then what? "The present," said her Sketchbook (her Sketchbook/ Notebook, her standard not racing handlebars, her hands gloved with feeling, one on the soft velva of her shorn haid, one on the velva of the Panasonic’s cushion of world sound, a long extra hand,

the present. The Future. Cliff in a flap, volunteered to drive me out to Sue’s coming out love-nest for my gig and so getting his car a tune-up because it was "missing" (he said) and then after all not knowing if he would have it in time because they had to work on it a hundred bucks worth. Self-sacrifice means that the future is worth less and becomes Your Present, which then turns into Fake Future. Saint Joan of Arc was actually taken in by Church with its male hierarchy glad to turn her from an embarrassment into a permanent attraction. To go through with it, she had to have been turned on. They didn’t have prolixin, which Sue’s great son Larry, who is taking Sue’s coming-out very well, said they use today for pre-execution jitters, the ultimate male lockerroom hands on/hands off. Capital punishment = Sex negative. How many women have been given the chair? What has this to do with clearing out furniture?)

What was at stake? Clara came back to mind—was this an answer to the question, or Avoidance? Clara would not know yet how to put her finger on what’s wrong. (But things aren’t wrong or right, stormtrooper Maureen baby’s breath will say.) Something else about Clara was not sex-negative, like she knew something powerful Grace didn’t and in her own terms could get it on with herself. Whatever was at stake did not end. But the meaning of Grace’s day which came to her alone as she plummeted all over herself, was what had found her all at once, clustering round her, and to the man who was only a few miles away (though urban distances strangely varied) even if he would not lick her shin this sudden meaning of her day was to be told by her and with love, she noticed, for in some span when she had at last shown him, it had already been told: it’s coming back to her in a changed voice other if not larger than her own, like two people she had been made into out of just her own self—for the meaning and unheard-of story of her day turned out to have been told in future and with some love to another man she didn’t see; who was familiar but unknown, a lost brother, not the man who was her former husband charming stocky Lou who with his now three kids and Hungarian Catholic wife the Lou whom she had wanted to show once and for all, no not that man but another who would appear and feel her radiance, her power and "glo" and not the man either whom she had once in her thought and body-cup heard saying to her, "I wish I had six arms"—how they had adapted to that thought—and not the bald Olympic back-(therefore 5-position)-stroker either, whom she once had taken to a swing but he got cold feet and wrapped up in a beautiful yellow blanket and spectated, and for weeks when she was seeing him he never knew that he was a healer even when she told him; and not the tattooed writer (one of her dreamers) who walked in his sleep and woke up to find he’d moved a blanket chest heir-loom up against the door of his and his wife’s bedroom because something was threatening to come in, he had dreamt it—dreamt he had thought it: when the door, which opened inward, was stopped against him too, the meaning which Grace had told him sitting around long ago, laughing crazy as if for inspiration both looked for a lover (who had never dreamed, it came to her)—"or was it a chest of drawers?"—oh doubled up laughing—"in the dark they’re all the same, honey"—he crying too with (she couldn’t stop awfully laughing) giant black eyebrows then yelling into this furnitureless Body Room of Grace’s laughing again and again at her, for she called herself (had he never heard this one? she did not have a million of ‘em but that was her secret, but she liked this one, the line came out always like openers for audience-warmers, was this one-liner maybe the truth? just that she called herself) a nun who had kicked her habit: until eventually she gave him a massage, which settles everything including his hash: what was his name? weirdly only his last came back.

But what found her now as she came down let down by the sky into low waves of the mirrored room must be more than this meaning of her day that had seemed so clear during the grip and spit-flo-here-I-am of cum fed back to cosmos.

So clear it had brought together her out-of-the-closet friend Sue’s busted husband Marv, who in good anger but bad hate for once wasn’t thinking twice about (nor secretly aiming at defusing or "forestalling") what his opposite number would feel, in this case Grace, in his office this morning where she had for some reason in person gone to pick up the tape of herself; and brought together streets going and coming spun together with sun made brighter by the filter of the old city; and had brought that old couple who were not a couple but looked alike across the street, like everybody’s strange old couple: you think, they don’t want any help; and brought together the black dude with the alligator hat she knew she would meet, pusher, pimp, parking-lot attendant, business person; and brought together her own sounds she had actually played off the tape when she got back home:

Herself speaking to a group in Long Island, or making them a group, last night and the phone ringing below the sound of the vacuum crossing the free, earth-brown, empty carpet of her Body Room. Meaning of her dayful so clear it had brought together also calls left with the answering service and some taken when she felt like it—and she’d heard in the rise and fall of the ring as she came in her front door the call from her mother nineteen hundred and some year-miles away, a ring she did not answer until later when she had played her tape, then came her mother again, who phoned to say that she had a Date, this lady in her late sixties, granted prodded by her daughter longdistance, maybe less Grace’s Mama than a Woman, with a spacious white porch out there on a wide street and a relation to each stick of furniture like meditation if not jerking off by a long shot, her daughter told her in no uncertain terms long-distance, so that daily dusting (once upon a time the dust of others’ haste leaving the house—but coming back in the house, too) was like the singing her mother did at an upright in the living room. "Deep Purple" and "Love Divine All Love E-excelling" and "Oklahoma!"—dusting like a lover of antiques who will never sell; dusting free of charge like zipping down to the supermarket driving these days without a license which she let expire because the duster of tables and washer of dishes even only her own now and launderer of dish towels and cooker of days should be beyond the law, as beyond freedom and—and she had a happy talk with the man down cellar whom she had called to fix the timer and the baffle on the furnace.

Streets of New York spun together with sun converging in an underwater fire (where was it coming from, the bottom of Grace’s mirror? the double glo from a giant candle? words a boy had read to her once?) the meaning of her day out of her hands then coming from where she lay on her cushions and beyond this small risk like some foreign hand gently joining her own on her breast, the risk in the person of the woman named Clara this afternoon with almost an English accent who said she was not English who claimed to have phoned earlier and got no answer, and had come here anyway to speak face to face apparently about the workshop, and who could not have got no answer if she had phoned because the service always picked up; and who had therefore (Grace concluded) not phoned at all: a human fib from this light-haired, light-boned, bone-strong, will-strong woman with amber eyes and a mole above her lip; in some measured way alert—but only in her whole person looking over her shoulder at what would happen, while seeming wise, and so, seeming in some fascinating (yes) public way not to care what happened behind her back. What could happen? Maureen coming in suddenly? she didn’t know Maureen. Clara was not liberated, but the words, while accurate, scattered inside your head with a not-mattering quality. Was it simple gross danger she had brought into Grace’s Body Room? Was Clara human? Grace could ask the question to herself seriously.

Clara was important, and to Grace, as the meaning of the day formed: but so that when the day ended this evening on her cushions, she had already told her day and it was feeding back to her the teller from someone she had already told it to: not the man she would show, but another: so that it was part of that unheard-of story beyond celebrity-gossip being told back to her, her own story (wasn’t it?) reported altered—through water so it swayed and slackened getting to the point and wasn’t so bright as it could be, and not only her own story as big as the cloud that came buzzing over her and became her like a void that reached her as she reached it. ("Void oid," comes the deep voice, "just so long as you’re Cunt-Positive," comes Brother-Sister Cliff’s chest-cold-type voice (from where? from vibrator waved into sound system? from phone-showerhead, notebook, combination pen-mike? from Grace herself, her phrase taken by him but not her void that found her as she found it, at day’s end thinking tonight how well-known was she, and once well-known, did this maybe not change at all but other things about you did change?).

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and moistly for good fruitarian measure. And she sighed and yelped small welcome to little last nitwit licks that buttered through her hips, for the vibes of the buzz converged in the old hum that that same busted double-knit husband Marv on Long Island last night had said got really in the way, Grace, for him when she had made him try it upstairs although he locked the master-bedroom door (but she heard it going even when the toilet flushed and bathroom door down the hall opened). She laughed for the unknown familiar man now down the hall whom she couldn’t quite see now (not the man in her mind, Lou, whom she had to show, who’d been her husband—she breathed the word harshly—but) another man, unavoidable, who had been telling her the sense of her day and the unheard-of story she had now lost all but the sense of. They were talking it all out at this end of the day. She had herself, she was not alone. The goddess in the high mirror cemented to the far wall dropped her knees. And this whole day that she saw, she had seen at once all around her, round and round, as she came, while the phone went softly, tinkling in two places at once simultaneously reincarnate she suddenly knew, though she had two phones, one in the H.O.A. hall, one in bedless bedroom.

But one also in an office hours ago that smelled of ink, smoke, coffee, and indirect lighting that never got turned off and had aged to an impermeable tint that stuffed the place and made smoke and coffee smell alike; phone ringing in a busted husband’s office just before she had gone away into the street. She liked the street. It was where high boots did best, alligator skin around her calves. And the street was where she saw the beat-up old guy and the strangely Jiof-quite-pair-bonded old woman on the other sidewalk at the instant she knew in another vein that the stars shone out of the day sky too, right down to her without interruption. She had last night’s tape cassette in her bag slung against her ribs and she had been good, she had been good last night in a house in the suburbs, electric-eyed Sue’s new out-of-the-closet Love-nest, where else, which could almost have been Grace’s home were it not for the goddess, though not with the man who was still somewhere her husband one of these days, and Grace saw a future in which she got his Hungarian wife learning to breathe in a workshop.

"Where the furniture stands in the room, the body’s flow is blocked," the Sketchbook-Notebook read from months ago so it was like a letter, ones she’d never written her Dad:

Told Maureen, take your colonial ladderback = part of your coming-off-Marriage trousseau, and lift it and put it over there to the right; then step through where it was. She smiled sweet stormtrooper’s baby’s breath smile, said it wd take less energy to go around the chair and leave it where it was. But in that case, I said, she would have to go around it whether it was a Colonial ladderback seated with that pale, crickly-sounding caning, or an ugly armchair overstuffed and undersprung, because, I said, "Furniture is furniture." And good old Maureen replied as if in touch with my body more than her own: "I understand." Maureen is ready for another clean break, it feels like.

At ten-thirty this morning Grace visited the offices of her last night’s hostess Sue’s semi-busted husband Marv to pick up last night’s tape. Where his aunt-secretary, permed and nonorgasmic, got up and moved because her desk would not, yet because she had been a part of it while sitting. She was indeed a wonderful woman, as Grace had heard him say. "She’d do anything for Marv—money in the bank," Sue had said and here she stood in a doorway frame as bonded as a Wall Street messenger and treated to a Chinese lunch on her unnumbered birthday ("odd-numbered" birthday she would sweetly say, reported Marv to Sue, who told Grace, who for a terrible instant could not visualize Sue), a woman knowing every inch of his office there in the communicating doorframe behind him twelve hours after Sue’s remark and now gaping at Grace’s velvet head given her if she wants to do something with it, sit on it, blow on it, touch it tenderly/experimentally, till she turns into a person Grace knows and likes her and would touch her wrist or non-orgasmic arm or shoulder or the small of her back, and say, Listen, sugar, it’s O.K.

Marv would not send a messenger to bring Grace the tape this morning, having been one himself by commuter train early this fine day from the home where once he had been chief-bottle-washer, down the Long Island tracks to these two Manhattan business rooms of his with key-protected outside John where he still was boss. From the house in Port Adams, he had brought the tape that had been left in the tape recorder. Grace will someday have a Men’s Workshop, too, and betcha life with Marv in it. And then as last night and last year she will always trust herself to speak the words that come to her.

As this man, a gold band bonded to his finger, did not. She smelled vitamin pills in the blood of his breath while she absorbed without trying to understand the bitter, bitter words as he handed her the tape she had left in what had been but now was not his and his son Larry’s (though still maybe Larry’s) home in Port Adams, just moved out of to an apartment in Grace’s building, a fact lost to Grace’s mind when the tape-delivery had been discussed: the truth behind his words now worked away in his neck bent toward her: "You have your public, Grace, but you should try listening to yourself."

"I hear myself, I don’t listen," her eyes watering, her toes out, her hand now on his hair-darkened, warm arm, for he was in his shirt-sleeves and one sleeve was rolled up.

"That’s right. You always go too far," said the shaking voice. "I try to," she said, "it’s how people know me, it’s how I’m public." "You fucking little corporation," Marv breathed just between the two of them, "now you finagled a place for me in your building."

No use telling him that his out-of-the-closet still-wife Sue (who Grace very privately thought would not last six months with another woman but would not get back with Marv) had done this directly with the landlord’s agent, whom she knew; and no one had told Grace (it was a surprise! and, for her, not a bad one, because she liked Marv and Larry both) but then it came to her that Sue had said she had a surprise for her, and Grace at once had thought of their eighteen-year-old Larry, who stood with hands clasped behind his back, so aloof, alone, and funny/friendly, thinking always into the communal gig-bank. The phone rang then in Marv’s office and Marv’s secretary had her sex-negative arms crossed over her chest pushing her breasts down and turned away without uncrossing them.

Marv—what had he said?—"I think I hate you."

"Don’t hate me if you don’t really want to," she said. Her eyes watered warmly, she had felt hit all over her but inside in her blood. She thought of her Sketchbook-Notebook, old talk-converter: she was going to have one day a week of silence hermetically sealed.

She knew Marv couldn’t get going and let her have it. "You’re such a string of ..." He didn’t finish, and she took the words as eye-to-eye as he let her—he was looking just past her cheek—he told her how she had undermined his life with Sue, supporting all people seeking exit from relationships. Last night he had had that fixed smile hosting a rainbow buffet of live food with the teenage son Larry, while the hostess Sue mingled, and once late in the evening they had seemed to arrive at one spot in the room at the same moment and Marv hugged Sue and said, "Atta girl" and "Good lady," and Grace had heard heavy-duty Kate say, "He doesn’t mean it."

So everyone agreed, Marv had a long way to go in the mid-seventies of these United States, as Grace’s father had used to refer to them. So Marv had been kicked by true love before he could kick it.

Did he know how to properly brush his teeth? At least he had learned to eat. Decision Therapy could surprise him: you have nothing to lose but the people bugging you.

She really liked Marv, and he really liked his sharp, quiet son Larry, and he was trying to work with Sue without knowing any rules, that was what he looked for, too bad.

She had left the stale light of his office, turning to wink at the secretary with her bib and her heels, who had answered the phone and reappeared in the doorway to the other office as if she had never moved from that doorway, part of a set of furniture that they had forgotten to move and that was missing someplace else. Grace was ready to feel different.

Grace was in the street in her hundred-thirty-dollar abundance boots. She sensed that the office had been not long, as she’d felt while there, but squarer. And the secretary woman, upright as they came, maybe her alertness to Grace was the basic business welcome she knew, quite respectably animal, don’t knock it. Grace felt back there with her, getting closer and closer. But she had to strut past six hundred pounds of overweight, overpaid male silence now mainlining beer at ten-thirty in the morning (so who’s this dyke-cock-suckin’ hooker circus?, came the two-to-one white-over-black majority) leaning against their parked truck. Yet bearing down on her and employed at least in a flashy up-and-down-shouldered style of walking came a black dude with his high ass in a swing who said (up front) softly, "Mama!" as she said, "Daddy!" signing equals all the way deciding she didn’t have the time to exchange phone numbers because she had to get home to play the tape and because this real free-enterprise West Indian coming on to her own one-eighth Pawnee (according to family lore) had to be in her periodic cluster though she only vaguely thought she had seen him, and so he would appear again soon anyway, as physically fit in his late twenties as she in her early forties.

Beyond him Grace saw a girl’s hand in her boyfriend’s back pocket, thumb free to move, above the four fingers. But across on the other sidewalk moving the other way, there was the beat-up old guy again and the beautiful old woman: he was having trouble with her, did they really have anywhere to go?, Grace started across and the passing alarm-siren of a wide long van rolling away on its rear wheels behind a police tow truck passed under her nose and she could have been hit by this hysterical men’s world where they hadn’t turned off the van’s burglar alarm, and then she sidestepped a whirring red bicycle, it whipped around her, seemingly on both sides of her and she thought, I will be as old as those people I am going toward, because the clink like armor worn by the bicyclist was milk bottles moving toward a porch not to be found within miles of the old couple here in Manhattan: a porch more like nineteen hundred miles away. Did anyone sell milk bottles now?—weightily balanced and already in the glass if what you needed was a quick hit.

The man, as she reached their side of the street, was pretty beat-up, wasn’t he? Like his face had been swung around to either side of his high skull and the skin had fought back and sort of won. His companion the old lady—she’s fabulous for maybe seventy-seven though perhaps babbling— drew them all together. Did Grace know her from somewhere? His hand on the old lady’s arm, his thin arm tense, handling her—he liked her, knew her, and yet he had had years of separation from her or predecessors, some helpless history she had shrugged off was for him almost a danger that made him rational crazy. She moved her head softly side to side and had a white, plastic-looking rose pinned to her sky blue cardigan, talked at the same time fast, they overlapped each other like excited strangers, interested shadows, Grace felt. "Fly me . . ."—surely Grace had heard the words, as in the unspeakable stewardess gig for one of the male-run, financially shaky of course airlines, "Fly me," the old lady said, "fly me—they wind up in that window, for crying out tears." Oh she was making up for lost time with all that talk. And then as Grace gained the sidewalk, the man, his stubbled face mysteriously dark-scruffy-moustached and from the temples a fan of spider threads every which way unchecked even by his strong, faintly twisted nose—he so thin and straight—turned to the beautiful old lady—what’s he doing to her that she goes on like this?—and she (saying he should really keep that moustache, it came out a different color from hair, as if she had received Grace’s projection-thought) turned away toward the shop window hopefully, and he with her; and Grace saw that with the two of them she was standing watching a show. But at first the empty window held nothing more than a gray sign, MESSENGER SERVICE, and a rainbow star and across it, READINGS—PSYCHIC CONSULTATIONS, also then the lurking reflection of the old man.

Then a pair of twin-like people appeared and flew at each other: pummeling yet silly: yet Grace wanted to be there mixing it up with them. Their mouths were open not just for breath but for receiving, she thought; and they laughed and grimaced, but kind of hurt each other, wore a lot of rings; and the thing was, you almost didn’t know if it was girls or boys or one of each —far out!—and granting the difference between the two you felt they were warped twins with a new twist. One of each, Grace decided, as she moved up on the old couple, for the long-haired young pummeler in an old suit, no tie, had frail shoulders but stubbly cheeks and misshapen head while the short-haired one in a blue-and-gold-sleeveless jersey with an insignia had good chest development and biceps like those of Grace’s heavily-into-anesthesia dentist but soft, creamy skin. Now they hit hard, they bumped the broad window glass of the storefront, rings glinting off their knuckles, here we are, here we are, this is where we are, this is where we all are. Then the smaller, queer-headed male dropped his arms, dropped them and stood open: but was it wanting to be hit?, a little M to S?, but no, open to the other, his twin sister (Grace believed), who shied away, put up an arm to shield the face toughly as if to throw a punch, then faded out of the window destroyed. "Fly me, will they!" said the old lady; "why I am their rings!" But the one Grace thought was twin-sister returned and raised her bicep’d arms, brought hands together like a prayer, split them apart so Grace saw the Zodiac-like sign on the strongly breasted chest, the sister (if it was sister) turning out of profile, and what looked like smoke or some quickened reflection in the glass shot from this kid’s body in a puff of cloud, and the other, drab in the old suit as misshapen and large of head, fell forward, stricken dead, into the spell of its sibling and fell down below the level of the window only then to rise so the two of them could turn to the old couple smiling and Grace said, "Far out." The old lady clapped and clapped—"I am their rings!"—"You mean wings, honey," said the man—and she wanted to go into this place but was held back by the man who in holding her turned toward Grace whom the old lady now turned to see as if she remembered her (which was what Grace truly understood, for Grace for that moment was that old lady, jerking off into the future or reversed into the alligator abundance boots where Be crazy is Giving away in order to have what you give).

She was on her own free carpet for a long moment then not entranced by the sound of her voice on the tape of last night, remembering girls’ basketball when you got one dribble after which you had to glue one foot to the shiny wood floor like charming prisoner stretching and how the legs spread —no, she was here on a street near the bike shop, she was in two places or minds at once as she’d been seeing and freeing the old lady who seemed now to forget the show put on for her in the window of the Messenger Service/ Psychic Consultation place.

"Been a long time," said the old lady. "Martha," she said, offering her hand but cutting off her word very sharp, maybe remembering she had forgotten her last name. Grace introduced herself and ran "Martha" through hundreds of named people she’d talked to and when the Hermit-Inventor as Martha called him tried to draw her away, Grace told him to lay off, Martha could take care of herself. "Martha," said Martha, "is only one of my two given names and I’m giving it to you; the other one I gave back." "To the Indians," said her protector who now burst out laughing at what Grace had said. But he laughed so at this he seemed not to care, at the same time as he dropped the old lady’s arm—maybe her name wasn’t Martha—and said to Grace, "This is not a good place for us to be, by this window, those people in there are out of their minds."

"Which people?" said Martha, her eyes filmed with depth.

"See?" said the hermit running a hand along the angle of Grace’s arm bent at the elbow and unmoved by his touch.

"Why don’t you let her do her own thing," said Grace, wanting to be on her way.

But the old man said, "She’s much taken with you." He said it softly but the old lady Martha said, "He always does that." She shook her head. "Can’t explain. I have another name."

"I know what you mean," said Grace. "I think I have another name, too. Maybe it’s Martha."

The man said, "She wants to drink a beer now." "Morning, morning, he always does that," the old woman said. She shook her head, opened her mouth, couldn’t find the words. "I can’t explain."

"Much taken with you," the old man said, a bit curtly. "Wants to drink a beer now."

The black dude in the alligator hat reappeared from behind the van across the street where the men of the van had been having their beers; the black dude whom, it came to her, she would have her way with, was reappearing, and the van moved away from the curb in the opposite direction and Grace needed to go and the black dude was not to reappear until later, she was sure.

"But what was that show in the window all about—the brother and sister?" Grace looked from one to the other, back and forth, eye contact, bring them both in.

The old woman shrugged, it didn’t look right on her but her face clouded together and she didn’t know. Not even quite how to shake her head. The man took her arm as she turned back to the empty storefront window. "Brothers, they’re brothers, they kill each other and get up again, the man inside doesn’t know what to do with them." Her companion looked over his shoulder at Grace, shook his head in jerks as if to say, harassed, that Martha, if that was her name (it seemed to have an r and an a in it) was "out of it." He said, "Another time, kid," and the old lady said, "Old hermit crab," Grace thought, but to Grace she said, at impressive length, "He makes me out to like things that it’s really him that likes them," while her escort/old friend bending toward her caring for her (Grace knew) kept saying, "Like what, like what, like what?" and at a distance words came to Grace, a curtain opening and closing at the same time, "Well, sometimes we like the same things." And right then, Grace actively put from her mind the fact that her cassette waiting for her but on her person was a portable headache she could get rid of if she would. Like she almost couldn’t help going into the Messenger/ Psychic Readings storefront behind the empty, unfurnished window and see what weird business trip they were advertising in the window grab-ass she had enjoyed watching.

Was Marv’s fury ripping her to shreds? Did she not know what she felt? The tape in her bag had been drawing her home, but blocks and blocks of the city waited in the way. A bus appeared and she got a radiator seat at the rear where she could look at how the black dude in the alligator hat came past on the sidewalk going uptown and suddenly eyeballed her right on through the window. She could not get out of her mind her own taped words she was going home to play. They were live, they were her own, and when she got off the bus and bought one small white sweetheart rose at the florist and stuck it through a button-hole of her shirt—and later when she was jerking off to the goddess in the mirror as she had known she would—she had known she was being drawn home to know later what she knew already.

But on the bus’s hot seat and in the florist’s and alone in the mirrored Body Room, she heard the clink of milk, pieces of her bike, forks on Sue’s plates last night, and she heard a deeper, longer milk clink. But they were Marv’s plates, knives, forks, cups, saucers, embroidered tablecloth, and bottled pure Garden of Eden apple juice just as much as they were Sue’s or young Larry’s, who with tender shining forehead sat in the kitchen reading a book about chess but toward the end of last night’s evening figured out how to mix and was much in demand discussing the space program (manned versus unmanned, got heckled, shrugged it off) and chess, which he might be outgrowing at eighteen. While Sue gave the mother-provider trip a twist reporting that she had told Larry he ought to get laid. It was about time, he was almost eighteen, and, even standing over by a window trying to understand a tall political woman you knew would phone the next day who spoke painfully and too fast or too slow, Grace heard Sue through the noisy talk in the large room saying it—it had been what Grace had told Sue, that Larry should get laid, and now she heard it come back through the room to her, family history.

And even these you must empty your hands of, as she had not quite been able to show Sue, who was changing her life but maybe into new Habit Patterns that would grab her just like she grabbed what Grace had to say about Decision-as-Necessary-Shorthand, about Siamese Marriage, about carbohydrate hits: but prophetic, Grace had been called—by Sue, come to think of it—when Grace had said, You will walk out someday.

So why should Grace not find the meaning of her day sloping back to her? But in a new voice, not the silence of the burly driver of a bus that fell apart and back together at each dip so the man up there behind the bar with his walkie-talkie (while women communicate directly, she found herself adding to future gigs), the driver here wanted to finish off three non-orgasmic senior citizen ladies who had boarded the bus but not reached seats and were holding on as if this was tomorrow spelled backward like the letters on the front of an ambulance that’s not free, God as if this was tomorrow and there was no bus, only a loop to swing on, they were not quite making it into orbit. He knew what he was doing, floored his pedal, flipped the huge wheel, job-secure in the picture of his wife bent over the obstacle course her vacuum led her orbiting her kitchen while attached by a long cord to a plug in a socket, the noise all but overcoming phone, future doorbell, and other sounds but not the aroma that added up to three American cheese and sweating bacons she had grilled for lunch one after the other, yes, leaving the oven on after the first grilled cheese and bacon in case she had a second: foresight guaranteed: but why was she vacuuming in the kitchen? how had Grace seen that? Switch scenes and see the husband of Clara tall and thin with a foreign moustache levering the cork out of the bottle like pumping water, he like the busdriver’s wife proved to be with appetite as Clara had foreseen rising awkwardly from her mermaid folds on Grace’s famous carpet, didn’t have time for a cup of tea, saying she had to think about her husband’s dinner he would be hungry after his trip. Was he a traveling man? Not now, not now; just someone he knows who was unable to come to the city.

This woman Clara respects her husband and this is everything to her, she thinks; his words are her words coming to her like her own. He is tall and moustached, for I saw AROUND her to HIM standing behind her, there he was, and Clara says he is thin no matter what he eats, potatoes, beefsteak, fried bananas, chile, a loaf of fresh-baked bread. Funny, her nerves are showing and I thought nerves of sprung steel, not meaning like when they say it of charismatic male criminals, also revolutionaries with bombs, Clara’s fear seems made of steel. He has many worries, she said; well, so has Clara herself. Her share and unshared. The tall woman in the window at Sue and Marv’s can speak on the politics of Worry—share his to forget your own—she’s into Power Margins, what you leave potential for yourself resting assured that your treasury is on tap if you know that you take him as an equal however he sees or fantasizes you.

And this dark argument of a woman, thin but without muscle tone, awesome, waiting politically to be said No to, waiting outside if Grace (who, comparatively untechnological except for phone showerhead and Acme Juicer, had been impressed by young Larry’s report on nerve gas) needed a ride back to Manhattan: Sure, can you take me and Maureen?—for burning fuel should move as many of the people as possible: Which one is Maureen? the woman had asked vaguely.

But the man introduced into the system today by his lady Clara, this tall-ly metabolized mustache of a business-trip-upstate husband—brings home worries (to Clara), "up the river," Clara had said, like a tourist visitor, meaning the Hudson—had she smiled?—and is much encouraged by the homemaker of his home if not to handcuff her to the bedpost later on, at least to leave his worries on the doorstep—when these worries might have forced her, his cook and live-in lay (haloed by the odoroma of guinea hen enchiladas from a supermarket top-loading freezer as he with his one-and-a-half boring sex fantasies enters their hallowed living space, to let fly with her worries, which may not concern the long, narrow world at large like his worries which are important and therefore at rest because powered by dollar continuum though his secret anxiety about having this "Sure Thing" status tunnels into that Rest to siphon out the underside-rear-spout emptying the dollars-continuum of all but its nerve-gas buying power: his worries may not be about sales volume and what the Johns in Washington say about inflation, but which still matter, because if a revolution in a foreign country is holding up a delivery of a system, can you really get into that like you get into how a husband gets irritated?

Well, in a workshop we do a bit of everything: I’m open: we share sexual information, we talk about Body-Self image, we do some yoga, I demonstrate massage, we explore masturbation, diet, alternative energy-bases for self-love because even in a regular sex life so many women put a man’s orgasm first. We feel that—

We? the question came, but who had Clara come looking for?

Yes, economic power isn’t enough by itself, after all it gives us a heavy-duty matriarchy which is just as sex-negative as this number the men have been doing on us for centuries.

It’s not easy.

Who’s talking to Grace besides Clara? Is it Grace herself?

The world has become awfully complicated.

So do we leave it to the guys to understand?

Too complicated to beat.

Fly, thought Grace, while the flying is good. What was it the beautiful old lady had said? they fly me, but I am the wings. Write it down.

What does your husband do? I asked Clara, and then knew I had felt I was flattering her in advance. She started to say, "He is." And "an economist" came to me—her talk-converter isn’t like mine. "An economist," the words she would have said (and if I am supposed to be so prophetic maybe that is what he will be). But she said, "He is a consultant." "Is your life his?" I asked. "He would never take advantage of that." I wanted her to come to the real point. "You have to learn to live," I said. "Maybe that is a way of putting it," she said, as if she knew literally a world I did not, and again I thought, Danger: but could it be something other than the real danger of losing your self? "Putting what?" I said. Then like a man, almost like Cliff, Clara got her words out too fast—

The words came back to Grace, I mean I want to (her accent thickened for the next word) survive—to leave.

I reached for her arm and she let me touch her. I thought she would cry but she’s tough: but then I got it: leave was what came out, our American word that rhymes with give was what she thought she meant, and she wanted to leave. Not go public. But if she is brought along gently. Nurtured, for how she needs women now. To share with the goddess in her. To share information and break the old self-esteem barrier. But she is no breadbaker.

And there was something funny about her respect for that distinguished husband: so he was not interested in being tracked down by journalists, Grace was happy to give interviews, her life was to be shared, just let them quote you accurately.

But look at me going back later to the Messenger Service/Psychic storefront when I told myself I needed to get my bike now that they’d tuned it up and added a link to the chain due to worn-out derailleur (male-designed).

Grace had by then (but it was way past noon, why had she not sooner) played last night’s tape all by herself, Maureen was busy, played it denying herself nothing; taking it as she had given it—National Orgasm for Women, but not her N.O.W. quoted as a joke by Cliff when not on his monthly suicide alert: seriously a national orgasm: but so was the past crossing a street toward Martha and the lone guy taking care of her, only to be just missed by the whir of a red bike as oblivious of her as the jock in the saddle, but inside that wheeling whir was a clink and, though of chain, bolt, kickstand, or fender, it was a milk bottle delivered out of the past on that route a single milk bottle can clink all by itself as easily as be spilt: she felt the neck and the stripe of cold pale-yellow cream below her thumb and forefinger nineteen hundred and more miles away and the cool base of the bottle’s heavy glass in the palm of her right hand for a while: while, as she looked hard for the boy she loved who was her brother who had come and gone who got up before dawn dutifully and with an underlying mischievousness, too, that only she knew in him, left and along his route came back with the family’s milk and left again—she smelt behind her the breath breathing right through her as if to find something better beyond, when it knew too well: the hoarse breath of her unwashed father who was the living and half-blotted-out memory of last night’s moderate controlled drinking when you did not know where you were with him, for he could get courtly/serious, which might be worst, or most near to threatening, swinging his head and eyes slowly around so his perspective felt curved to her while he, up early, at the top and bottom of the midnight barrel appeared to know that there was nothing out there across the clear porch of morning beyond his daughter and the white misted bottle in her hands, upon which, she would turn, turn, turn (through his—she knew without looking—averted eyes) and step away holding the milk to her, leaving her father to bend just over the threshold for the other quart likewise delivered an hour or so ago by his son, who drank a quart first thing in the morning on the job and another at home during the day, good for missy’s milk-white skin, it was said—always the wrong information authoritatively shared, wrong if she had had pimples which she had not, but the wrong scoop period, but she made up for it now in her forties telling an echoing cassette-ful of mainly women (in a hospital-auditorium in Connecticut, in New Jersey a redone horse-barn, a north-shore Long Island home) how to survive. A good bunch! Did she make them good? And in the midst of this replayed spiel, eyeing the four shelves of art books, sex books, food books, and self books, and, feeling in one shin—why? that she ought to throw some of the books out, she had had the urge to be on her bike; more, have it. The tape ended with the warm, dry crash of clapping which got abruptly breathed back into the waiting silence of the small machine. Her mother phoned across the country. The abundantly dark-haired super stood at Grace’s door talking too long; well, she would talk to anyone who wanted to, but he talked too long as if even if it got abstract about obscure storage space being created in the basement out of nothing by this super, and about Respect—a commodity, he heard himself saying, hard to come by when you had to deal with some of the older tenants—still he figured she might like him well enough to, at the ultimate moment, flash: wasn’t this what all his talk meant?, he imagined that Grace possibly flashed for Manuel (now the doorman, once the handyman, who raced cars somewhere out of earshot in New Jersey) and for Spike the spick-and-span porter whom she liked to bullshit with and would never cover up for necessarily if he rang her bell alone. These blue-collar types shouldn’t have known how to take her but they did, and didn’t even sense they got an education, she was in a separate class. (By the time she was a hundred and twenty would New Jersey mean anything to anyone?)

And then came the voices of the T-shirt operation’s representative and the woman with bad posture (political woman, Grace recalled, heavee, with a touch so serious and urgent she would be serious and urgent making love yet hopeless and noisy)—who wanted to be Grace’s secretary but was into relationships not pleasure, and then a number of other Items as if the day existed in advance.

In the form of a list.

Whereupon some overheard words drew her in reverse to hike downtown, she needed that bike.

So it was that she again passed the storefront she had put out of her mind with the black dude in the alligator who had more important things to further than see signs in storefronts.

Messenger Service/Psychic Consultations, Readings, it said. Another New York operation, yet a play front for what male-female mystery?

She had come back downtown because she’d been driven from her apartment. Maybe by what the tape told her? Maureen would have known but Maureen was painting her kitchen today, controlling her environment, planning to leave it for an apartment in this building, caching yogurt behind an overwhelming sack of stubby carrots in the bottom of her fridge: so much tougher than before she had met Grace coming off marriage in danger of being restored to her now retired nuclear parents where the sun always shines, before she had gone on her power trip which was really turning her toward science, toward cleansing, toward a balance of nature where everything was related to everything else, sprouts on the sill to high colonic enema therapy with the bull Mama in the white coat who turned the dials on the machine and filled your belly to orgasmaximum—to science, yes, to juice cleansing, carrots, celery, oranges, to changing American fields from grazing to grains, from animal to vegetable; and Grace had got her started, just as, coming from someplace else, Sue was getting started now; the workshops and talks were always new starts, this was the timeless factor, she would write that down, she liked being heard, which was why at the end of last evening at Sue and Marv’s Grace had, at the door, responded to more compliments by recalling Cliff and saying suddenly to Maureen, who was at her side of course, "Cliff should have come tonight, you know that?" and Maureen had looked her quite lovingly in the eye and said, ‘That woman who’s driving us home is a creep," and it might have been then that Grace had wanted to be alone and had forgotten to rescue the evening’s tape from Sue’s machine.

So she’d had to visit Marv this morning, bring it home—and play it and be affected by it. It certainly was not dynamite.

But the tape was behind her, but she had let it into her day as if it could add to her the next time she made an exhibition of herself, when really she didn’t rehearse, everyone knew she didn’t, and the pleasure of laughing at her own jokes and the gig of growth was like the ultimate private personal high of her going public, she could not quite say all this. Yet knew her life felt edged near a blade that all her words ignored. And someone knew this about her. Who?

Driven, though, by some words in last night’s talk certain as a mantra, undeniable as your bullshit really could be. Driven back to this storefront in Greenwich Village.

There was a heavyset, gray-haired hombre in a suit looking into the storefront so close up that the two signs up against the other side of the glass looked out at her as if they’d been missed by him—she saw them while he saw inside.

He meant to be there. How did she know that? Because he looked into emptiness, and kept looking. Her gaze fell upon his shoulders; they were set back square though he leaned "into" the window. In the corner of her eye the same black dude in the alligator was sloping close, and this gave her a sneaking sense of neighborhood, he seemed to have been on the move along these few streets all day—not prostitute corners (the women turning, looking uptown, downtown, crosstown), especially not this morning and now at two he wasn’t in the vicinity of anyone resembling a hooker, though she had felt somewhere in his "Mama" this morning that he was friendly enough to be a pimp. Yet more close and free. Someone could give her more information, she knew only what she felt.

The black dude did not speak, passing her, she recognized from somewhere a very blond, short-haired girl all in black standing in a doorway with her boyfriend passing a joint. She had turned to face the storefront window across the street and the heavyset man in the suit who turned and saw her without looking, glanced back into the window, then the other way almost toward Space so she caught a glint like a piece of mirror on him somewhere, and he moved on, paused at the corner, which he reached just as the black guy on Grace’s side of the street reached the corner. And at this point ("At this point’n time," her father once would say) the heavyset man turned directly to look back diagonally across the street at Grace who managed then to be looking at the storefront window but though feeling that metal glint again not seeing anything: so she got this bad sense of being pushed, which was coming really now from the words that she now understood had driven her from her apartment.

On tape she had been through that unspoken private life of her marriage, "thru" her wife-provider trip, her Freud trip, her still ongoing Art trip as life was art; then, There Was Sex After Marriage or The Resurrection of the Nude Body; then, food trip, body trip, letting go, then breakthroughs and corners turned, through to discovering your hands through carrying a knapsack, your head through letting go of our greatest source of Vanity, the hair—to the great and memorable idea (probably a gift from some dude, but it’s what you do with them) To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it.

She found in her chest a kink of nausea, a lid afloat on what wasn’t quite there, and she wanted to vomit in the gutter but she couldn’t. ("I’m going to purify my system so that eventually I will be able to eat even shit." Laughs and embarrassment in audiences past and future—belief, wonder, recognition, and conversion.) And then she was glad she had not vomited, because, as she said to herself, suddenly holding back a flash of someone else’s (whose?) degeneration and madness (whose? her ex-husband’s? some future person’s? Cliff’s?), I know that I am feeling pushed and I think I don’t know why but I know it’s what I’m feeling.

Also, the heavyset man had turned to look back. Well, what’s wrong with women barfing, belching, farting?, they’re not goddesses on pedestals, ancient maidens playing girls’ basketball that allowed you two dribbles before you had to stop running and look around for somebody to pass to with your foot stuck to the floor as if you were paralyzed.

This time, though, would not have been free vomiting. The cornered feeling that she of all people now felt came not quite only from the taped words that had been around her from morning till night. Her hands were free.

No, and she knew it all the way back home; knew it bending her silver gear levers (as if she needed the two of them and ten separate speeds) bending them up and down to test the tune-up she had just paid one man for that another much younger man had taken much too long to do probably too quickly; knew it as she pedaled suddenly between pedestrians who crossed against the light; knew it coasting the fenders of a double-parked car as the door opened, raced the light at the wide Twenty-third Street crosstown intersection through a field of potholes; knew it and almost lost it at last near home seeing a woman named Jane who regarded Grace as a celebrity, thin, red-haired, round-shouldered Jane knocking on the glass door of the bank while two small kids ran away from her around the corner of the building—knew it, knew no obstacles to it (except its own sweet time it had taken her to see) what she’d seen well before she’d reached the bike shop (for the second time today) and paid ten dollars and rolled ahead down a sidewalk, no pedals, no feet, a track laid out by the wheels—no: the cornered feeling was in what had been seen before she reached the bike shop: seen when the heavyset gray-haired dude had turned from the storefront: and, apparently not looking across at her but mentally continuing to turn as if he saw her, he moved off down the street: for this was it: his turn. But then, when he came to the corner and looked back, her turn came. And the goddess of good old eye contact had turned her eyes away. There was the empty storefront and she had meant to be here but now she didn’t concentrate.

Where was the black dude from her periodic cluster? She now thought she wanted to follow through—or, bike or no bike, have him trotting along beside her. But he had vanished round the corner and she saw around that corner for a second but it faded: she faded, leaving her sight somewhere round that corner—but she did not think like this (coerced, nauseous).

And the curb right across from the point where the black dude had been was occupied by this heavyset prematurely gray-haired gentleman who had turned for a look back: and she had a spinning sense that he had known she would be there, near the storefront—a tough, square man, businessman but what business trip was he on? without a hat—a restaurant-owner, whose place was near here, or a lawyer with the habits of a senior jock, how he walked, but his mind she could blow if he gave her the chance, she a lady headed for the bike shop in running shoes, velvet head, O.K. said Larry, when asked to run his hand over it. But nothing might be the response of this cool, worn, heavyset, gray-haired guy, calm at the corner, a private eye maybe. While she looked at the storefront without really looking at it or its two signs, until she thought if he was so curious why hadn’t he gone in to that Messenger Service/Psychic Consultation storefront? He had instead thrown first that curved look out of some part of his eye (not sizing her up though at all, no visiting fireman with a flag in his button-hole drifting toward an afternoon bar): then at the corner he looked again, this time straight at her so she felt she was waiting for the afternoon show in the storefront window, and in the corner of her eye she saw him light a cigarette, which was extremely important information to have. She was on her way to the bike shop, the past was past, and there is no future.

But this time a motorcycle buzz-sawed into the block across her vision. So the spell was broken. She was game. The heavyset guy was one of your nice middle-distance Position-A humpers with a metal taste of meat oxide in his cum and a kinda nice, brawny-sad politeness and the booze lightly airing like aftershave toothpaste from the broad bones of his lean face and from the hard, secretly ruined stomach, though she was game. But as she went on toward the bike shop, the two pieces of spell hung near, and one was his turning, his strange curved look that continued to turn, she found herself too angry to explain the curved, nauseating look except it was his awareness of her like a mental turning that had this slow, sweeping, not-stopping quality, when really all she wanted to see was that he turned away from the storefront finally and caught her in the mere corner of (or cornered twinkle of) his eye; and the other piece of the broken spell was words she had known forced her to leave her apartment again, she need not repeat her gig word for word, words were strictly in your head unless coming way up from stomach like throat was a brain, to be spoken to a turned-on audience when the time came. But it was all there in a very few separated words that could call forth the whole thing between the heavyset man’s first, curved, turning look across the street including her, and then a minute later his second long, straight look at her diagonally from the far corner he had reached and occupied as the black dude reached the corner on Grace s side of the street but then slipped around the corner: words like all words shit substitute for action, for Body-Self, but breath comes through even so, when it is pure breath: TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER.

She had bent her bike into the elevator before the door slid shut and before she remembered that she hadn’t returned her mother’s call this morning that the service had taken. She had locked her bike in the stairwell hall next to the elevator entrance on her floor which was the top floor of the building with only the penthouses above it.

She took her clothes off; the white sweetheart rose she put in a vase on a window sill. Her clock which she read by letting it be a shadowy design in motion somewhere in this room, said 3:20. She rolled her stomach and abdomen muscles back and forth in front of a mirror, like self-kneading, no hands. She stopped and turned on the radio; rolled and shrugged to the music, a moment later turned it to the falling, waiting silence of Phono and put on a stack of records.

Now why (she struggled) was she coerced into going downtown to get the bike then and there and on the way coerced into almost but not quite throwing up in the gutter like a bum? It was the cleansing process, she’d given up cigarettes, the cleansing gripped your joints, or fattened you, or, obviously, could make you feel ill.

Be all by yourself. In your own head. She liked the words, they gave her back herself. If she’d be lost without people, what was she doing all alone on a rug like a cat? Did anyone know where she was? All the people who had incarnated and incorporated Grace K. into their systems. But was she sure?

That curved look from the man: she directed her thought to the tape, the part she’d been hearing when suddenly she had felt she had to go downtown to collect her bike, but didn’t phone the bike shop. Her tape was not her child: but instead of the tape with all the clapping, cheering, the wings of laughter, Grace felt in her Cliff apologizing: because he had had to renege on his offer to drive Grace to Long Island last night because his car probably wasn’t going to be ready: but this morning he was on the phone telling her it looked like he had a buyer. She tired of thought: why had she made her second trip downtown to pick up her bike and without phoning! that she had already called for unsuccessfully? But she encountered in her thought Cliff’s rhyme written after an appearance she had made at a college and he had come:

Father, bother,

Mother, brother,

Tune up the absent bike.

In sharing inde-

Pendences give

Only what you like.

That neatly folded piece of paper was beside the tall white book down at the end of the diet shelf next to a speaker. She had inspired a poem. She had written off to California to a place where, with life credits alone in this year of 1976 in these United States, you could get a Ph.D. for fifteen hundred dollars. Cliff asked, In what? mucus research?

The phone rang in two places and the service picked up. Vibrators lay like mikes or hair-dryers at two far strategic corners of her Body Room plugged in beside softly overflowing clusters of brown, orange, purple, and gold cushions and ceramic trays she had made—in another kind of workshop once, and painted rainbow vaginas on—which held carved pipes of wax or wood, double-ended for mutual toking, a cock’s peeled bulb, a cunt’s deepish flower, the chimney-bowl midway between.

Henceforth, she would have one day a week without talking, and this might be more helpful and cleansing than being off the weed. Push Rewind, let ‘er rip, push Stop, push Play, push Stop, push Rewind: she had found her place, remembering the day Cliff drove her to the college in New Jersey at noon and had reduced her spiel to his verses at suppertime—he said her body was what had put over her speech, pelvis power, those little abrupt struts and shuffles of the alligator boots—she had never had an audience of fifteen hundred! It was a university and they had laughed, they had loved her. And in this carpeted room where she now got a very odd division of temperature between outside and inside like swallowing ice cream and throw in a ‘frigerated thermometer up behind, steely speculum up her front, she had said to Cliff and Maureen that talking to that audience was fucking them, ‘cause that was what you did to an audience.

And it came back to her, as the curious passage from last night began to replay, and she thought she needed an enema or a joint, she had a little hash in the fridge—a break-through hash-enema she realized she had already discussed with Maureen—it came back to her that Cliff had answered, "You can say that again, Grace," while Maureen Baby’s Breath, thinking of God knows what—maybe what she called the "proof of reincarnation" in her own Grace Kimball—maybe currents of carrot juice freed of pulp, messengering with overwhelming news a city of mucus hawked up from the collective throat brain, for Maureen was a scientist, a new woman-kind of scientist sweetly smiling—and now to her leader saying, "Right on," though she had not attended the audience fuck at the New Jersey college.

So Grace with all this on her mind surrounded by TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER, didn’t think until quite a while after the foreign woman Clara had come and gone, that Clara had not been announced by the doorman Manuel on the intercom.

Father, bother,

Mother, brother,

Tune up the absent bike.

In sharing inde-

Pendences give

Only what you like.

TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER. It wound on . . .

My mother. Right? O.K. My mother. She was always there, you know? she was always getting ready to sit down [laughter], getting heavier and heavier but, in my insane memory of it you know, always not quite making it down into that chair, that straight chair that made her look as if she was taking a two-minute breather on our time not hers but it was hers [laughter] a two-minute breather from dusting the other chairs she didn’t sit in, if she ever got her behind down onto it, no arms—because y’know, as she’s sitting down she’s asking can she get someone something to eat. [laughter] Well, not if it’s any bother, Mother (I think that’s my Dad speaking); not if it’s any bother, Mother. Oh it’s no bother, [laughter] Sure? Sure. Have you been there, have you been there? [applause drowns out Yes yes yes yes] Where was I? [an enthusiastic wisecrack from audience not quite audible] Where was I? Jerking off under the covers? Don’t kid yourself, I didn’t know where it was [laughter] and anyway I’m saving that secret, guilty pleasure for the middle of the marriage-night ten or fifteen years after this little family scene [laughter] that I’m giving you which you recognize even though the North Shore of Long Island is a long way from a little American city in the middle of a cornfield, [laughter] Where was I? Talking pedal pushers—remember those below-the-knee pants that exposed the calves, the shins, a supposedly feminine neither here-nor-there? [laughter] And I’m talking about my mother, thinking about my father [hush], thinking at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that this is the way people live, right?, this is right and normal, O.K.?, this is my working model, the four of us, mother, father, brother, myself junked out on Habit Patterns, staying on instead of getting off, and that’s staying power for you. Like after five beers my father saying I think I’ll have a drink now. Or like Dad going up to bed an hour before Mama because Mama wants a chance to read the paper: wait! question! How many people admire their mothers? [silence, applause, drifting into some kind of laughter] How many I ask you? and why is that? Is it that she was the one who said, . . . No bother. Whatever happened to Mama? and is she still on your back because guilt perpetuates itself? overweight, non-orgasmic, creaking with varicose pains from the new linoleum in the kitchen clear up to her locked pelvis. Well, I got a knapsack to keep my hands free, and I got a bike so I can skip cabs that the man can’t fix if he knew what was under the hood, which he doesn’t, he doesn’t dare think what Henry Ford and Co. put under there, and that’s why he gets uptight when he loves his car, you live with him and you know, right? [applause, "Right!"] But he hates it and he pours your money into it that you never saw for your housekeeping except as an allowance you get from his real paycheck no matter if it’s out of a nice unspoken balanced joint account or like Dad doling it out on Fridays. [Pause, in which nothing is heard] But you never know what those men are doing under your hood [a loud lone laugh cuts short followed by a burst of brief laughter] until you get the bill and then you know [titters], so when a friend tells me he’s getting his car a tune-up and then they find problems they’ve got to work on I am glad to know every part of my bike because this way I can put it out of my mind like when I hit the street keeping my hands free by carrying a knapsack, you know?, full of sex-positive thoughts [laughter, applause], knowing every part of your body whatever your male gynecologist tries to lay on you in a little bottle that’s half full of cotton or a cold-handed metal speculum that feels like a computerized abortion when you could do it yourself with good old American plastic [applause, cheering, interrupted by someone calling something], the smallest example of sharing information, like that your doctor doesn’t know any more than you and can’t begin to know your body like you do even if you let him try. Flee, my dears, you don’t have to explain to him, just get your ass out of his office, it’s your ass and it will fly if you let it. Yes, dear sisters and brothers of the Goddess [laughter, cheering] the smallest example of sharing information in order to belong to yourself. To learn how to love your body. Friend left her husband, went to a room she rented and took a nap, woke up suicidal—we could have told her, Recharge with meditation or yoga, sleep is too much like sleeping it off’. Know what goes on in you. Have you ever gotten off on an enema? Sometimes the sharing is a simple comparing of notes to find out that you aren’t alone [applause, prolonged], you’re not the only woman in your apartment building in 1976 who doesn’t know quite how to share with others the absence—

"Absence"—what she had gotten wrong recalling Cliffs poem. Same old material but unrehearsed: on a fresh track but you’re the same person: track to one side of where she’d been: or a new person on an old track. As the door buzzed, she thought she was content for Maureen to believe in reincarnation, but maybe the whole thing might be updated. She got up, pressing Play, the old stuff suddenly word for word the same, an external memory; "to share with others the absence" started to follow her to the door: bullshit, she heard herself feel: the voice telling her back her story snuck up behind her, and "absence" was alone there and all the words fell away from it . . .

absence you can’t quite put your finger on [a pause, a silence] the fact, the human fact that you can’t quite remember when you had an orgasm and you assume you don’t need to because you can get off on feeling a little guilty you know about not wanting to screw last night, then angry over feeling guilty, then confused, which is a good feminine state to be in when he walks in the door and you sweep everything under the mat [laughter], guilt, did I say? guilt over taking a nap after lunch, and the guilt is your gift to yourself to get over feeling not guilty [laughter, applause], of being, O.K., not quite there when you were in the car with your two kids and your certified husband or of not, you know, doing anything worth spending all day today—Where’d it go? Today is missing. Because you’re busy and your loved ones need you and you’re constipated and have lower back pains to pity yourself for, and if anyone asks you, it’s no bother to carry this guilt, it gets to be like two-piece outfits the stores choose for you, no bother, but I mean really what do you have to give anyone unless it’s your independent self, and that could please even your family—

She had run back to turn off the voice and heard her mother’s vacuum running, her mother who, in incredible shape for her age, had let go of widowhood and came up sex positive, though basically anti-enema-cleansing. Grace was in the carpeted hall, a pair of sweatpants on one of the cunt-hooks; and just as she had known that the word family was the word that went with bike in Cliff’s verses, family bike not absent bike, she had opened the door to a half-smiling woman in a green sweater and a tartan skirt who couldn’t speak when she saw Grace all there in front of her and to whom Grace said, "Is it about the women’s workshops?" So the day’s periodic cluster had sent Grace away a couple of hours early to collect her bike so as to wheel her back on a fresh track as close to where she had already been as the cool, gray-haired, heavy set man was surprised to recognize her (and kept from looking her in the eye).

A track as close to where she had already been as the man with the curved look was surprised to recognize her.

Thinking not hers: then due to the Goddess, who said, Never argue: only assert. Whose voice is not the voice charging a very special cone of her body-mind with the cluster heats of convergence, but it’s the Goddess who gave her knowledge of the two cones making up her Mind-Body, so she can just about identify this voice—she’s already told her story to it in future though there is no future—familiar voice with a difference which is a lot of Space among the words, to breathe, lay back into: so she finds, like waking, a new Her evolved through all this work she has done on herself for so long. So when Sue’s teenage son Larry the expert on poison gas and chess listened with downright affection to her interpret earlier remarks by Maureen on reincarnation groping to tell the new kind that was coming into existence, Larry said he did not think there was a future but asked—asked—if what she would be reincarnated into wasn’t already in her—into her, he added. Girls aren’t used to doing all this kind of work on themselves, she said, feeling she was the same old person she had always been in her eyes and lips and hope.

"Girls," her brother said, out of breath putting down a half-drunk quart bottle of milk on the table beside a yellow mixing bowl, "always think you’re looking at them."

"They want you to look at them," said her father from the living room, huskily, absent-mindedly.

"Only if they like you," said her mother from the screened back porch where she had been humming—as if of how newbaked bread smelled like sweetened ironing.

"Maybe they want to be left alone sometimes," Grace said to all of them and wanted to get away at least to her room upstairs, at least to the bathroom to smile in all possible ways in the mirror; she heard the cushions of her father’s leather chair crack and she felt his body rising and unbending out there in the living room in a small city in the middle of the cornfield, to come to her mother’s proud icebox and "steal" a beer—who knew, as Grace’s mother said, where his bread was buttered even if he was apt to knock the toothpaste into the toilet bowl on a bad night and leave it there faraway.

"He kissed you at the train station a little wetly when you left for New York, and you never looked back," Maureen said: maybe at five P.M. for a quick rap or at eight on the far side of the salad bowl fingering the sprouts and green leaves and flowerets of cauliflower or living bright orange trails peeled lengthwise from the inner carrot—or at midnight or three A.M. when Grace worked. And " Right on," was what Grace said, as if she were Maureen, but had told many listeners many times. Told them that that particular trip of hers signaled by the corsage on the lapel of the suit was almost less toward professional school and career than toward marriage kept quite as secret from herself as from the parties involved in those old Life magazine specials, "Life Goes To An Elopement," although her unavoidable destiny with a smart, reasonably hard-drinking salesman named Lou three or four years later was just as much with others as well—her family and Lou’s so simply and smoothly swinging golfer father; and the public rendezvous, the nuptials, though only two days long back at the bride’s home nineteen hundred miles from New York, was carried off jovially—a little history in bright clothing—and, for a while that then lasted, New York was a break you joined yourself across so oppositely to its noisy ways that it burst into silence like terrific photographs.

What was she thinking of ? The only real reincarnation? that when it was discovered would be discovered by Grace Kimball? She phoned Maureen to tell her one thing and told her another, the sweep second-hand of her Body-Room’s office-style clock turning all the time. She phoned to share with Maureen why she’d almost been sick in the gutter but instead told her "about" the black dude with the alligator hat that nearly matched her Abundance boots who was "in all probability" in her periodic cluster—come on up later because he absolutely will appear.

But Maureen ("Far out!") was thinking someplace else, Grace knew her well enough to pick it up threaded down the phone connection, Maureen’s chronic ongoing internalization arguing like an icepick point by point that the body’s a conduit for the inevitable future of vegetables: yet she was saying, Did Grace know Sue and Marv were taking an apartment in this building as a second residence, they were keeping the Long Island place, but Sue was kidding herself, she was having it both ways, you can’t be in two places (—"unless": and Grace heard Maureen suddenly think) and how could Marv with that fixed smile last night, passive-aggressive, compulsive-defensive, not set himself up for feelings of retaliation (Maureen could suddenly take off with words) slaving in that glittering farmhouse of a kitchen all day for the party. Served the food, detested the scene. Wait a second, Grace said, he’s always liked cooking, they’re on a food trip, that’s all they used to really talk about—recipe books, mucus pie, where’s the fucking meat thermometer, fresh fennel; last night I got him upstairs to try the Panasonic: he’s a learner, I’ll have to give him that, but he hated me today, he doesn’t know how much he’s a feminist already, he’s got too much on his plate.

Well, he was ready to stick a meat thermometer into me, Maureen said.

They don’t eat meat any more, said Grace.

Marv waylaid me over by the window, said Maureen, next to that insane gigantic bookcase, so the other forty people slid down to the far side of the room, it was weird, he was sort of hitting on me—he was excited, he asked if the vanilla yogurt was really true because he’d heard me say you’d mainlined it out of my fridge and there you were publicly claiming you’d come off Dairy: I told him to fuck off, he said it was his house, I said tell Sue that and then he said, Sue thinks she’s in love with Grace, did you know that, Maureen? I looked at Marv and said, Love.

Maybe they’ll leave all the furniture out there, said Grace.

Furniture is heavy. It can’t move by itself. You have to move it. It’s full of unknown past and future people who are an environment you have no control over. Space is freedom if it is free space. So-called easy chairs are carted into your space to fill a void. I passed this on to Maureen, who I sense understands this better than I. Her antique expertise during her marriage was deeper than anything. The space you put furniture in is yours only if you stand in it. You put a dining table into a space because you can’t move the space while you can move the table. So what, Kimball? What was at stake? Empty your hands of it to see what it was.

She stacked some Forums to throw out. Give the neighbors a thrill when they visit the trashroom. She paused over one with a photo of a blonde kneeling behind an Italian-looking stud on a carpet somewhere, side-frontal but discreet. She felt hungry and had a handful of nuts and raisins. She would phase out the raisins. To the music she trotted into the sleeping room/office to check the project items on her wall chart, she was sending the Pitney-Bowes mailing machine back to the people in Stamford when she got up courage to tell them she was not satisfied. These are really just vulgar details, Cliff said jokingly, but he meant it.

Her business trip had left her looking younger after six years. In the Body-Self workshops, her own trip had gathered like the story it was—she wasn’t trying to prove anything—she didn’t have to—all she had to do was tell her trip to the women whose ignorance about themselves and their inner, untouched freedom was no more sad than their insights and sudden group laughter—and new hope through eating live food, speaking out, taking responsibility for their orgasms; instead of hitting on obstacles that made it easy to not get what you need, finding a seed in you that belongs only to you and was always there waiting to be slowly moistened, not pried at dry. Power was where it was at: but power to change to what? She smelled raisins and three sorts of unsalted nuts around the corner in the other room forty feet away like smoke. She dialed the answering service to sample the action. It was the division of labor, these separate tracks. They got back to her, she got back to them. Those other tracks kept going—to get to them she would turn to them. Each phone call a whole thing, an operation, someone’s unparalleled story now including Grace. Dial that number: in came the track. What was this Politics?

She let the light settle onto the carpet and walls, and lens the window panes until she thought she could see in less light minute careless crumbs, crumblets, like crumblet shadows made of light, not noticed before on the barely shining little piece of mirror lying flat on a low low table across the room. One morning a week she would let herself be two feet taller right after breakfast. One more thing to come off. But boric acid was what she thought ecologically of because it could give poor big-little roaches tiny white grains of gas but she had never heard them pop, they went away like perhaps the city pigeons to vanish in secret. Come off killing, too. And what really was this Politics? Group power, O.K., to be grasped and divvied up. It felt Sex Negative, but it meant women and maybe mind/body attached to earning power. The political woman who had driven Grace and Maureen home— Kate—laughed loud, like how some of the workshop women came. And last night in the dark of the car lighted by a deli open late and a street light and in a silence at a stop light, she said she had never masturbated. No real surprise, yet also here was another kind of applause, coming out of years of silence, eyes straight ahead watching the traffic light. Your need and his need on separate tracks: that’s why you get a hard-on for yourself, honey. Masturbation no obstacle to anything else you want to do. Or want to give up—like killing roaches. Hadn’t there been a twenty-dollar bill rolled tube-tight on the mirror on the table? Abundance present here or present elsewhere was what absence meant. All alone you can invent it. Sue had wanted her son Larry to hear Grace:

Yes that’s how I see myself at eighty, eighty-five, ninety-five, a hundred in my wheelchair at the home with all the sisters, we’re all in our chairs in front of our TVs, good TV porn funded by a government inspired by the Goddess, a Body-Sex government decentralized all over the land, California, Florida, and here we all are, a bunch of happy old ladies in our wheelchairs, our vibrators plugged in, happily jerking off.

She had designed sessions with fifteen women and men around the edges of her Body Room: fifteen vibrators at once, with Grace in the middle, that’s sixteen, until the collective energy rose peacefully from the group, and some people made noise, Cliff always, but not Desmond, who was all legs with thighs of a bike racer and later asked Maureen to tell him her trip again and asked Grace if his fruitarian diet might be why he was ejaculating a foot further than before, beyond the small towels Grace had distributed, beyond the small, woolly rug he himself was on, and onto the free spaces of the brown carpet: Grace said she would have licked it up wet if she had known all that protein was going to waste on her rug. Masturbation opens a menu of life-style choices, though the rug fibers might be carcinogenic though with months of charge built up from vacuuming. Her neighbors up in the penthouse felt their floors bowing and their roller skates rolling down to all the corners of their home. All coming together roughly to some point. Each making a contribution. Turning to each other and away, knees up, knees down, breath rising in praise, turning ahead. The unheard-of story that was being told back to her might be her own but it was coming from the future in a changed voice. She was evolving into a new type of person, wasn’t she?—and from outside in as well. The world, it equals Love—but she was being invaded vividly sort of and not by the Goddess just now—by those Grace had given herself to. Or invaded by just these—hmmm, well, angels she had to reckon with because she had heard them talked of lately, she had never feared angels—she thought that’s what these humdingers might be, for they felt like more than one. The puffiness by her nose and around the eyes at Christmastime had been the cleansing juice diet: it was convenient that she and Maureen each had their own Acme Juicer and had done juice alone for two weeks once until a case of free-range pineapples from downtown overloaded Maureen’s machine and burnt it out. What if there was an angel in the pineapples eager to be in her and Maureen, but she had not told Maureen. Coming off pot the first time gave Grace a rheumatism that was the body’s natural cleansing, and congestion in the chest so if she’d saved her snot she could have gone into business. Maureen agreed with Grace that work was an addiction; did Grace now agree?

She phoned Maureen, who did not pick up—then did, to say she had washed out her roller and her brush and was just about to have her enema, and would it wait. Grace felt grateful, then, and to the Goddess, that the intervention of Maureen’s at times almost invalid-like health-and-cleansing number had kept Grace from speaking of what was, she saw now, better not spoken of. The nausea today, the shorthand models of her talk, her gig, her repeatedly unrehearsed life publicly given from her own self to others, into others, her own distributed (that was it) person, an unlocked pelvis flying above Murray Hill.

The nausea from cleansing. Her shorthand memory. Cliff’s bitchy verses.

And the two looks of the heavy set, straight-spined man who had peered into the storefront window: the second look from the corner that Grace had turned away from, the first turning look that curved out with that outrageous male commandingness and included her: with nothing in between the looks except their awareness of each other, the glint in his button-hole, a street-singer somewhere thumping out that old Afro-ethnic "Wimoweh" that made her feel old, as old as the folksinging of the late late forties and early fifties, and in a doorway (she now placed her in memory) a young mime in a tight sports jacket with elbow patches Grace had seen working the New York Public Library steps and now she’s down on a sidewalk that the gray-haired, heavy set man’s first curving look had swept through without occupying.

A passing thought arrested by the sight of her velvet head. But he didn’t seem to pick anything up. How he would enjoy walking around naked!

The phone rang and Grace took it: it was Cliff complaining that Maureen had given him hell for interrupting her enema to ask her if he should get his head shaved. Grace told him more about last night. The dude in the western shirt and the gambler’s moustache who had talked highfalutin: was the point of sex only pleasure? and wasn’t the old idea of reproduction and evolution evolving itself to where how we grew into sex pleasure was evolution now rather than later? She thought that was fantastic, but she didn’t think of anything to say except this would be an evolution worth passing on to the kids, and Cliff said with slight jealousy did she mean you could inherit acquired pleasure, and chuckled, she thought dirtily. She repeated herself to Cliff, but he told her. It was her own feedback to herself.

New workshop sessions began next week: in sharing independences, give only what you like. Colonel Gibbon’s cassette fresh from San Francisco lay by the phone still in its package, the groans and guffaws of ecstasy coming through nonetheless: did Cliff want to take it home and play it? he ought to hear one of those northern California orgasms if he wanted a laugh.

Safely past the threat of earlier-in-the-day suicide, Cliff listened as she told how she had talked to Sue’s about-to-go-to-college son, Larry, who wanted to go in the city though his dad wanted him to go away. Larry had this severe late-teenage kindness which was condescension to his elders in flux plus passive curiosity. Kids shrugged like no one. The old lady on the street had shrugged, but she was crazy, but beautiful. Did Grace—Aunt Grace—want to have her way with Larry, slender, dark, quite pretty, shy, sharp: why not, said Cliff, it’d be good for him.

Cliff could keep her honest sometimes while he made himself mad, not her: were they two married? yes, to a friendship that was outside of them lest they get so alike they grow to that special homosexuality of marriage (write that down) (not very gay, dear).

She felt Cliff wanted to hang up. "It’s your body," she had said to Larry when they had heard his mother say across the room that Larry should get laid, it was what she had said. The kid’s brown eyes were troubled, or his molar had hit a pebble from the Port Adams deli: he was in flux. He had Sue’s dark, thick hair. Someday when he was fifty he would have a twenty-year-old girlfriend. Maureen at that moment had gripped Grace’s arm; Maureen’s eyes were (—"Maureen gets epileptic or mystical," said Cliff). Her smile had gotten fixed. Was Maureen crazy? It had been the incoming group at Sue’s front door, women excited at being at home together for something better than a shower or stitching flags.

Cliff now was calling to say he felt better, and to complain about Maureen, and not to again apologize for not driving Grace out last night but to say he had a buyer for the old white car, the buyer had a daughter in Washington, an impulse purchase. Manuel, the doorman in Grace’s building, knew him, and Cliff was paying Manuel a little commission. "I don’t know why," Cliff said, "but a nice guy you felt was judging you." The buyer—was this the point? "Had an insignia in his button-hole, military maybe; silver, a star, a circle with points coming out of it not all the same length. I asked, and he said, Wind directions."

"You’ll save money taking cabs," Grace said. She felt sick again and they hung up and something had been engineered around her that she didn’t quite get, though the Goddess does not need to understand. "We are the future," she had said to a couple of excited women, feeling sucked out of some place and toward them but there was nothing to see. She had noticed Sue’s tape recorder through the living room door and Marv there, fetched up high and dry in the other room staring at her as if she were the only person in the front hall crowded with people leaving, and he put his hand absently on the bookcase shelf where Sue’s tape recorder was, in fact on the black oblong thing with the silver handle sticking out: but Grace, having told Larry to come visit her sometime, they would talk, heard Larry say, "I’m going to college," and Grace said, "Oh, you’re going to college"—she was high but bushed. She was coasting, and he said, "I’ll drop up some night." He was shy—shy people were open—and he was funny and he liked talking to her —didn’t everyone? The Chilean woman Clara had said things that didn’t really tell Grace.

She registered—that Larry would be living in her building. Well, this was Change. If she was the future, she would come after herself. But, sliding away into Marv’s eyes faraway in the other room where he was apart from the departing crowd of mostly women (all women) in the hallway, and into Maureen’s tense grip on her arm, Grace turned to Maureen who seemed to come to the point: "You know Cliff could have driven you out, the car was ready this morning, he didn’t want to, that was all." And all this cluster of words and touch and sight was why the cassette had gone out of Grace’s mind at the last minute.

She now saw this, walking into her Body Room with Colonel Gibbon’s recorded orgasms in her hand (she’d never seen him but he had put on an inch and a half in height after ten rolphing sessions), and saw under her clock the white rose she had worn this afternoon surprising her straight ahead of her in a small glass vase on the bookshelf counter against the wall where her own recorder was on top of the box containing her Carousel slide projector she used in the workshops and there was something wrong with the drop mechanism and she was going to throw the projector out and get a new one.

National Orgasm of Women. The continent buckled upward, it bowed and shifted and waved. Arrived through her in order to belong to others.

She thought she ought to shout. She and Maureen sometimes did baby talk, nothing wrong with that. Don’t even say the word "wrong," said Maureen.

She veered off to her right through unfurnished free space to the high mirror. She lighted the big candle that came to her thigh. One day when she was fourteen she looked her father in the eye, they were at last within range, she was now five four but wearing heels, he five nine but a slouch. He smelled of drink the way he did when he hadn’t had any, like he used bourbon-flavored tooth soap, and she hugged him and her eyes watered and she didn’t say a damn thing, she was feeling they were about the same height. And she told this to the woman Norma here in the building who was going to be in the workshop, but it came out different from what it was, though Norma was a dear person and had a gift for listening that she didn’t put a high enough value on.

The Sketchbook talk-converter could also be a silence-converter, for to Clara (who after the strange tone of voice when she said, We are political refugees, said, I am happily married) Grace had not said what had come to her about Clara:

Someday [the fresh page read] she’ll just up and leave. It feels like someday soon. But she is resisting hard—microscopic sea-creature capturing food in a mucus balloon which is the dwarf house it lives in. But I had this crazy idea this afternoon that Clara has just found out she’s pregnant and it’s someone else and she doesn’t know what to do. She sees herself as the last person in the world to separate and go away and live on her own—plays cello—and disappear from the life she has lived. But maybe she can come with the Goddess’s help (Marv said to me: Isn’t anything sacred to you?) to see herself as the first woman ever to do it, which is always to some extent true, you’re deciding alone. But also hundreds of thousands of women have already done it and they have their stories to share with Clara, who looks like she can argue more than "tell" and she is like a person from a small, narrow town coming to the city. She does not see how masturbation opens new varieties of life-style choice. One thing is certain: she should not have another child. Why did I think she was secretly pregnant? She looked away from me and when I followed her eyes I was looking at my white rose in the vase and had the idea.

Grace’s new friend Norma listened and listened to Grace’s story of her family light years away from here and would probably tell her husband. They sat in Grace’s sleeping room/office where her sleeping bag lay parallel to the wall under her fresh-air window that on a rainy night mirrored her face. Well, Grace had gone public. Did she even know how to hide stuff? Cliff called her an exhibitionist. An example. A model. Could be diet mattered more than psyche, Cliff said, headed for another suicide alert, but when menopause comes, go with it, the electricity of it, the converging messages that are wonderful patterns coinciding into good old cause-effect.

When it happened once in a blue moon that putting down the phone she felt like shit, she would ask herself why and look around her clean, warm-colored space. She would take a deep breath and find out always. A couple, for example, whom she’d gotten it on with after they’d all sampled a weekend Decision-Therapy workshop along the Manasquan River in New Jersey who wanted her to help someone they knew because she had told them about her own workshops and her trip. It had been, she decided, their two phones at that end that left her feeling like shit when they all hung up. Or the man who moved dressers in his sleep phoning the morning after to ask her to come to Washington on the spur of the moment, he had business there (she had longer hair that time), and she’d "had to" say no, she’d hung up, felt like shit, and decided it was because she wanted to make him laugh and cry and yell again. Or her mother—who’d asked for news, and gotten it with bells on like riding nude on a cop’s white horse down Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday; and her mother after all Grace’s news had said, "Grace you go too far." Relapse-ville—but whose. "Of course I go too far. That’s how I get known."

Picking the phone up, though, now, she’d no time to ask herself why she didn’t feel good about the voice in her ear because the voice in her ear (which she’d heard so recently she didn’t recognize it) was saying, "How’s your head," and she was answering this woman’s voice that did not know her (and threatened never to go away), "I’ve been into it all day, and I haven’t accomplished a thing."

"Oh I wasn’t sure how you were this morning, you know," the woman’s down voice nursed and coaxed. Or was it a man’s, a young, soft voice getting at her, around her?

It was Kate the political woman, or was she a politician, ride home last night, call this morning, need a ride, need an assistant to handle your mail, your mailings, your phone, type seventy words a minute, sin (joke).

"Oh I’m just opening like a flower all the time, Kate, how are you?"

"Oh I’m O.K., I guess. I woke up this morning and heard a man saying out of some magazine article, ‘This is a post-feminist era.’ Am I being a pain in the ass?"

"Yeah, yeah—did you get it on with yourself last night?"

"I will, Grace; you’ll see."

"Listen, dear, I’m in the middle of an enema, I gotta hang up. Be talking to you."

"What, do you have your phone right there in the John, you picked up so fast."

"Yeah, yeah, phones all over the place, hanging from my shower head!"

"Sounds like music."

"I got rid of my bathroom door. It’s sociable. Be talking to you, Kate."

"Do you know if there are any apartments in your building?"

"You could phone Maureen she knows the landlord’s agent in the building."

"Not sociable today, are you?"

"Got this enema trip, Kate. Be talking to you."

"I think you always are, Grace."

She gave a friend a send-off so the friend came back. Was that it? She almost had it. She would buy some flowers for Maureen. No she wouldn’t. Don’t try to justify your life. It’s up to it to justify you. (Write that down.)

The phone rang, seemed to stop, then started. She turned both phones down so that from the living room she could just hear the near phone where she sat against a wall, and the one in her sleeping and work room not at all. The mirror grew around the candle.

More you give, more you have to give were old words she suddenly didn’t understand, but pointing ahead, pointing forward. This microscopic sea organism Clara described—"our country has a long coastline"—made its house of mucus, but the wall did get clogged eventually and then it blew a new house out of the mucus skin it had already secreted for a rainy day.

Just when she saw what the mirror was doing, it started doing something else, an illusion she had, let’s say, painted on the wall to make its length look higher, this floor just below the penthouses had lower ceilings than the rest of the building.

She almost had it. She was against the cushions. She was going to love herself. The periodic cluster would bring the black dude. She didn’t want him yet, he could stay behind the moving van.

Her right hand lightly touched the vibrator, her heels began by touching each other and then the balls of her feet—the bottoms of her feet were flat against each other, her knees lowered outward to celebrate the double cones of the mind as it united with whole stretched heart and flower-lipped ear and clitoral shaft and the receding lights and slow waters of vagina. One knee eased upward and she might rock if she wanted. Her finger rubbed the switch almost ON, but a sound came nonetheless. She had almost seen the meaning of the old couple different from each other but approaching each other in looks, and the milk bottles clinking like a rapid, too rapid bike with something loose, and the calls coming in with offers and demands, and Sue getting an apartment here, and Sue’s busted husband Marv bringing Grace her last night’s tape—having to—and the voice telling her back her own unheard, unheard-of story, and almost but not quite most of all the heavyset guy with the prematurely gray hair whose looks like her own had the strange power to curve and to go on and on.

But the sound she had heard like imagining her vibrator’s secret soul that never stopped running on its abundant (AC-DC!) potential that she had told about and told about, was her door, and when she reached her door she knew it could not be the black dude fulfilling the periodic cluster because he would have been announced from downstairs, they would never have let him up.

But it was not Maureen but Manuel, the day doorman; she heard him on the other side of the door and opened it as she was.

They’d taken him out of the basement and put him on the door, days. He’d been replaced "in the basement" by only a part-time handyman, who Grace thought could be a real presence only if he was really and truly as invisible as he seemed.

"When you coming up to fix the leak under my basin, Manuel?" They smoked an occasional joint, and Manuel gave her a hug but she never had her way with him and always said so to him those very words.

He wasn’t smiling. "I didn’t buzz you this afternoon; I figure it’s O.K." He had his blue windbreaker with the autoracing patches on the sleeve and he was small and strong, he could do anything in the building. He smiled at last, he couldn’t help it and wouldn’t want to help it, and Grace felt the whole congregated weight of all the tenants in the building caught inside because Manuel was outside, she got this clearly, as clearly as the mysterious importance of the storefront for the beautiful old lady and the heavyset man who appeared later.

She wanted to joke him out of what was the matter. She was surprised when Manuel said, "I’m not here any more."

"You’re what?"

"I was away from the door for two minutes helping Miss Rail into the elevator and I went up with her and helped her out of the wheelchair in her apartment, and the Super come and we had a big argument and he phoned the office and I’m fired."

Manuel was there but he wasn’t there. Grace was saying it was terrible, she’d call the landlord tomorrow.

4’You don’t have to, Grace. I got some people. Mr. Lustig, Mr. Goody, Mr. Mayn, you know they’ll go to bat for me. Hey, listen, I don’t buzz you this afternoon because it’s your friend coming up, O.K.?"

"You want a smoke, Manuel?" Grace didn’t have a picture of any of the three tenants mentioned.

"No, I got to get out of here. I just want to tell you, you know."

She wanted him to come in. She was glad he didn’t want her to call the office. The union’s going to protect him, get him in someplace else. So "whatever you hear, Grace, you know I want to tell you first because some people in this building they don’t like me, I don’t come running when they yell at me the sink’s stopped up, you know."

"Maureen and I, we’ll picket the building."

"No," he grinned, "no, you don’t want to do that."

"You won’t stop Maureen."

"You got another friend moving into the building, Maureen said."

"Yeah, yeah, that’s three down and a hundred and twenty some to go, Manuel."

"Yeah, that’s how I know her. She nice."

"Sue?"

Manuel shrugged. "Sue? I don’t buzz you when she came. She’s nice."

"Yeah, she’s getting there."

Manuel was going away, pressed the elevator.

"I bet you’ll be on the job tomorrow."

Manuel poked his chin out. "Super," he said implicitly, and shook his head.

"When was that, that she came?"

"This afternoon. You wan’t in? She’s looking for the Super, he just stepped out as she came in, she couldn’t miss him, he got Super on his shirt"— Manuel was grinning and shaking his head—"I never see her before, and she say she never met the Super, so I say Oh you’re Grace Kimball’s friend, you moving in. She’s nice, she’s O.K. She speak good Spanish to me. Keep looking at the names by the house-phone."

"That was Sue?" asked Grace, as if Manuel knew.

"Nice-looking lady with light-color hair, green sweater. She was looking at the names by the house-phone. She waited for the elevator. She look at her watch and smiled at me. T don’t have much time,’ she said. I say, ‘Super’s coming right back.’ Elevator came and she went up."

"Yeah, that’s right," said Grace. It was going on again, her story being told back to her. When me they report to, it is me they report. She did not tell Manuel Sue had dark hair. People, it came to Grace, disappeared into people. Were they people? Someone arrived in her, but ancient or future, who knew?

"Nice-looking lady," said Manuel, his own trouble not forgotten. Not lumpy till you got their clothes off and hung up on silver hooks, inner thighs with not Indian writing on them but good old American, lower buttock, pockets of trouble in the undefended and deceptive flesh of the back. The elevator came. "I got to go. I didn’t eat yet." Up front. Bye, babe.

But which story was coming back? Sue and Clara lumped together. In the dark, heavy articles of furniture are all the same, she had said to the man who labored in his sleep. Not the same if you’ve seen them by candlelight. Each one is different, each convolvulus unique. She had a hundred and fifty color slides to show this astounding truth. Dark lips, pale lips; rich petals swaying in the breaths of desire; or fine, long narrow neat leaf-edges; the hooded point secret, growing through the whole body yet still, though distended, the same; or a pendulous pinkie half out of its hood like a cock with its own shaft that you’ll see even better coming downward to the hood if you shave. Get a one-thirty-second-Pawnee hard-on just thinking about it, about each and every one, all there on slides whether the male-designed Carousel projector worked or not. Plug in, turn on; the vibrations are light but right, the underground waters are felt faraway and the right hand guides the wave length in its grip toward those faraway waters. Find what is right for you. The soles of your feet together. Let power find you, if you have to play hard-to-get. Sometimes she thought there would be peace on earth if we would just learn to breathe. All alone we have to invent even that.

But the story was coming back, told back to her, and she didn’t know which it was. Prophetic meaning beyond words and in future so told back to her it came in a changed voice: hey get your bull voice gone public, had she become a man flown back in future to tell herself her bullish prophecies had been right on?, yet the voice telling her back her own story—do voices hear?—was hers but a person she’d mistaken for Lou the husband man she wanted to show who was really another and she and this other are not quite facing each other deciding whether to get each other’s attention and her story being told back to her is so unheard-of and astounding she cries out, "You see! You are what happens to you." But, crying "Abundance," she has to ask, Doesn’t what happens come from you? and if incredible energy-levels grow from cleansing and mental attitude/intuition that will not be brain-washed into turning thought/feeling into some legal/logical analysis headtrip, are these strong, changed women coming toward her (who are thanking her, exchanging information, letting the patriarchal wars go on in the jungles and up against the Wailing Wall), yes these women are what happens to and from Grace, let’s not get into heavy argument, though new thought regarding how a natural female up-front aggressiveness can love and really change competitive male aggressiveness, is what’s needed now. But this story told back as if she didn’t know it already proves familiar like the stranger telling it to her in future: an elite Indian healer who stood with her and they saw a mountain lean toward them; a story with an old couple chatting not quite communicating; a brother delivering milk, entering her cocoon bedroom one Sunday morning to compare what they called "Indian writing" where the bed had impressed soft warm cuneiforms on tummy and ribflesh, or entering her bedroom at one A.M. once to tell her everything, leaving on his motorcycle, coming back married, becoming someone she didn’t like anymore but then becoming a father weeping at her face-to-face so he almost truly saw her his sister and that her grief over the death of his boy her nephew on a motorbike was also great; a story including a woman escaped, a marriage that did not quite speak, the threat of Nothing-Happening/Death, the message of life lived by the bearer but with something missing so her being known to a thousand half-known people was a story she couldn’t ever tell, she was what all these other people had of her: her dayful coming to a point (like your head, she would say to her brother cuddling in bed, joking) while the old reliable hum—Fly me—rests against a corner of her, spreading her and bunching her as she knew it would—why, be my guest, why just come on in, why you just have me.

But all these people in the story just now retold through Manuel wanted apartments in this turn-of-the-century building, all coming toward Grace Kimball as if she had asked them? You and only you made your home, and mucus could be an amazing building material, we produce enough of it, don’t be squeamish, and she wasn’t getting into some discussion with Maureen about these zooplankton Clara called appendicularians.

But which story now retold through Manuel? Not this story quite: for Clara was not Sue, she was frightened and let herself be posed as Grace’s potential friend. Which Sue would never have done, the vibrator’s hum almost said. For Sue was her friend. But Clara might be, too. Grace was much taken with her, she knew things, she kept her own counsel which still wasn’t good enough. For she had come to Grace Kimball for more, and, when taken for Grace’s friend, didn’t deny it—it might come to be true. Yet she had a home and had said nothing about moving into this building. And, observant as Clara was, hadn’t she noticed the Superintendent with "Super" on his pocket? Well, the answer, hummed in its own body tongue by the microphone with its ear that doubled as a mouth bearing on her flesh-and-bone Gaiete Parisienne, acid Rock, My Old Kentucky Home, in its own sweet time, was that Clara was in Grace’s periodic cluster and, shy of phones, maybe afraid, had come here drawn not just to eye-contact with Grace but through Manuel, who would by coincidence see Clara as Grace’s friend, so Manuel, who had at another time today left his post at the door and for whom three men tenants, Mr. Goody and the other two, would go to bat tomorrow with the landlord, had joined the convergence of her periodic cluster until the meaning of her day approached, and she almost had it, Take me as I am—still, words in another mouth that was distinctly fleshly. It was coming toward her and going away from her, but nothing she would tell the women in the workshop. They needed to hear about give and give/take and take—needed to hear themselves—marriage con came: and between the coming toward and the going away was a nothing which (something like We Are All Just Voices was retelling her) you had to keep trucking until you saw that this void where everything was happening in her life yet nothing, was nothing; so, like the heavy set gray-haired dude with the curving look today that was between Surprise and Recognition, there was really Nothing standing between the coming toward and the going away. But she didn’t quite have it, didn’t quite get what it was that came after her—she the future—orgasm peace. Until, coming or on the point of it coming, her softening eyes moistened the tall pier glass (my dear) across the candle-lit room, so it was wings taking her away—but her own—one throb, but that didn’t quite end—a woman-minute of her constant self: which was not enough: she saw that her day was lived, and this was as far as she could go, meaning coming to the point, and, given by her, not wholly in her hands, like the glimpse of the heavy set man in the street who didn’t turn toward her, or the woman Maya who published a book and brought it to Grace and when Grace said, "Join the ranks of successful women," Maya in the heart of her eyes didn’t really like the words but couldn’t come out with it, a meaning happily out of Grace’s hands, like the life of the stranger-woman Clara who had stood at Grace’s threshold, the light coming off her face and the light itself saying, Listen, my life is at stake, can I speak to you of it?— and didn’t speak till Grace asked if it was about the workshops. For Clara, whose address was upper West side not upper East, had come to this large apartment building looking for someone else, who had been turned by Convergence and the Goddess into Grace Kimball.

dividing the unknown between us

He was not waiting for her but he looked forward to her coming home. His whereabouts were well enough known no matter what he did: a New York apartment for him and his wife, for the time being theirs. He was reading the inmate’s letter by the living-room window and listening with his one open ear to the voices of the Saturday-afternoon opera. They were richly preoccupied with themselves and came from far enough away off there in the otherwise deserted bedroom to be at a nice distance. The telephones were in the bedroom and kitchen, which was the American way of consolidating atmosphere and action and privacy. Here where he was, bright-honed window panes shivered and warped, bashed by Saturday winds old and seagoing bearing endless light, and they seemed to come into his plugged-up sick ear from his good ear. He felt not quite alone. He had a force in mind, but he could not quite have identified it even if someone had offered to torture him. Private life in some unexpected simple way was what it was, and he was willing not to betray it. He was reading the letter from prison when he felt the gloved hand upon his head.

It was nothing he would own up to—this private life in all its power— certainly not testify to. But he knew it well when he felt the surprise hand familiar on his head; and had known it before the two phone calls, but especially while he had let the second one just ring. Knew it like an over-slow, a lifelike event rereading some of this letter on ruled stationery from a prison inmate who was not the one he had gone to visit but who had leaned over and said hello and started something there in the smoky, overclean Visitors Room, to the darkly uncertain amusement of the Cuban inmate that he had gone to visit. On a weekday without telling his wife. In a rented car driving sixty-five miles up the parkway and into hills.

Here at the window a block from the North River (as he liked to hear it called), the winds got neighborly and practically sacred banging away like irregular song against the rotten, high-tension system in his ear that an expensive doctor had a French name for and that struck him now in its panic ringing as the American city phone internalized with mechanical flow intact, the sign of it a light in his eye that would be instantly noticeable to the interim owner of this hand upon his head should he turn around, leaving the sentence he was rereading typed on schoolboy-ruled lines of prison-issue writing paper about a jailhouse lawyer who would handle your injustices for the experience, if not rid you of them.

But his head, his single great immigrant brain cell canaled with sounding ire like trapped light, had been spinning prior to the hand. Not with this half idea about private life he could not identify even under torture. And not with the local will, now, of a woman’s movement as near as the philosopher’s cue proving its power on the philosopher’s billiard ball flesh-colored but as yet unnumbered. And not with the history of opera, though on this workingman’s day off to crashland or hit the chocolates (knowing as we now do the truth that the expectation of them was half in the caffeine) or close the eyelids half trusting their pale-rose-filmed insides not to display boringly ancient scenes he knew too well, or have a secret from his heretofore absent wife—he had entertained just now while reading this inmate’s letter an alternative life for exile-Prince Hamlet: arrived in England; on impulse determined to stay; ensconced now in London no longer melancholy making a clean break with all that toxic family history back home in damp Denmark; and, taking responsibility for his life, being surprised and inspired and liberated by the new Italian-import drama-by-means-of-music with its song-soliloquies on plain firm chords like majestically shifting stages, forget your madrigals, homophonic si, polyphonic no—Euridice, the first opera, followed dazzlingly (this soon? and did it come to London?) by Orfeo—the Euridice of Peri followed by Monteverdi’s Orfeo—these Greeks! the latest Greek connection, for Hamlet had in effect more Greek than his businessman sponsor who when Hamlet arrived and decided to stay, was out of town on a trip, some said in Stratford, some said vacationing in the New World.

Which stopped the spin in his head no more than the hand materializing behind him on his bald welcome mat, or the Saturday-afternoon opera continuing like an actual production in the bedroom. His head spinning off the ringing visiting his ear that a doctor had discussed as if it had been his; spinning like final force off the dizzy discharge in the head, a mineral-smelling echo of vicarious death, his, here in this land of sport while disappearances if not traditional deaths of people far away whom he did not know, most of them, except as countrymen were possibly what was making him sick, or at least ring. The crowds that were gathered in a soccer stadium: it reversed, he thought (with the now ungloved hand settling slow onto his head like some limb-substance), the relation customary between locker rooms, underground runways, and so forth of a stadium, and the great visible central white-chalked playing field where the match took place that people came to see.

Yet why labor against love? For if his head was spinning, the hand out of nowhere upon it must be the distaff hand!

So, being less a philosopher than economizing on effort, and still hanging on to this "nothing" he would testify to that was almost here, he corrected his course slightly as he was hauled by sheer dizziness half out of his chair and instead of hanging on to it or the prison inmate’s ruled letter fell tall-ly out of it, out of this chair by the bright windy window and onto all fours for then she would not think he was dizzy or sick and only hear him on all fours growl GRRRRAAAWWHHHH! at that touch upon his hide. But expecting his wife’s approach, heralded a moment before by her silent hand upon his bald head, he could hardly anticipate it for she was here already on top of him.

And as he received her laugh and her slender arms elbow-crook’d around his ribs down where he existed on all fours on the rug and felt again her hand upon his head, for his head was what she wanted (and would have, but could not hold the drowning discharge inside his brain which was part fun because she’s here), he found that well before this he had known that he was not alone, and this was half what he would not testify to if anyone offered to torture him, say in a beret such as the beret she had bought him for his eminent dome. And now this inkling (roused moments before to some unlatching or a lonesome draft of air trying to get at his eardrum or the rustle of a thing coming to rest or a moist cluck—from her mouth opening, as she saw him and thought, His earplugs are in) plus that other inkling that was nothing he wished to identify was clotheslined by the opera long forgotten on the bedroom radio that’s nearing its violent end. What else was it that they had planned for this afternoon?

He rose way down in himself to the cheerful hand on his head, it had taken off its glove. He read every little part of that hand no matter where it came down on him—shin, chest, his ankle, his neck hair. The palm familiar, her palm tenderer than fingers, more delicious than her squarish downright fingers on the skin close to the osso spooko of his dome. Satisfaction with a minimum of means—a head, a hand. "Oh my sweet," she said, and he still had not seen her. She was related to angels, he knew in the warm liquid spread outward in the radiator of his body so he was very wide and inside himself sort of peeing slowly or bleeding not so slow. Not telling her about reading her hand no matter where it came down on him was like reaching out to her (and he thought, Where-wer^-you?-I-was-glad-to-be-alone). What else did they need but each other? He reached out to her without moving a muscle, amused musclewards to feel his face’s calm fixed until he grinned. He was pleased with her that a few seconds ago the shine across his bald eminence must itself have seen the light of his life coming across the carpeted room and not related the message downstairs. Thus interfered he not in her secret progress across the room, her nature. A room that, with the next, was like beginning again—did not these people say such things—in this immigrant city, this city in therapy (when it was the nation that needed it). Taking control of one’s life. Growing. Starting over. Making a clean break. Yet if Relationship was Bone, did not the strange people of this city mean "Amputate"? Then there was A Clean Breast. Yet here were he and she not in that way beginning again but in secret plenty where no one knew you. Though their name was not unknown, nor their whereabouts.

The letter from the convict lay half folded against the radiator as if sitting casually like the skeleton of a ghost.

He sat on the rug, eying the letter and digging out a soft earplug of wax (squashing, then filling out again but not like sponge or flesh), pink wax, rather disgustingly soiled by a short hair from his temple sticking into it; dug it out, squeezed it but not in two lest he leave a bit stuck down the burrow against his eardrum, and she couldn’t stop giggling as if she had been holding back, or would cry, which she never never did.

It was nothing he would testify to under oath or torture, this force he had more felt than said (to himself) before he had known she was even in the apartment with him, and now it was less known than a minute ago so maybe it was not just private life in all its power. (Smile.) The inmate’s letter was punctuated with those parentheses. (Smile.)

And then she murmured (because she could say it to him—because it had been said before and so was O.K. or at least code): "With your brains you could make a million in business," murmured less wickedly than before, when she had felt like an artist working on him, her fingertips and then her breath and throat on his heel—"all that you know." To which he still did not know how to give in: "You mean forget exposing the Americans and create our own mineral cartel?"

"Design your own life," she murmured modestly; but living here she and he were often ironic.

"They do have a way of speaking here, don’t they," he said.

"Oh my sweet ..."

"We have that relationship of which they are always speaking."

She smiled touchingly, and he let jealousy shift from his betraying eyes up into some dumb wrinkles in his forehead. It was nothing he wished to identify. He would kiss her foot in a moment. The letter lay near (or, on the rug and up against the lower edge of the radiator, sat near) the two books that had been in his lap. It was nothing he wished to identify, this force he had detected before the second phone call, the one he had let ring, which had been confused with the also regular ringing in his inner ear, if that was what it was—his doctor was the doctor of a famous singer after all.

His wife reached to caress his skull. She blessed him and he foresaw that when she took her hand off she would find again the creamy shinings making faces off his carved pate so maybe she would skip the nothing to be found upon his forehead, his brow. He stared with obedient doting a trifle fraudulent except in the love.

She, who was less a foreigner than he, had been so much to him Through Thick and Thin that he would sometimes subdue all that in endearments of style like calling her "Madam." Been so unbearably much that he thought he should not be accepting sanctuary here like some earlier immigrant. He thought of all the children of the prisoners in the prison that his letter came from, free children of imprisoned parents, brothers, uncles, relations. Also friends of friends. This one of the letter he had not gone to visit; he had visited the other, who would never call himself a political prisoner though he was one of the New Jersey Cubans, except he might call himself a political prisoner in the black way—a good cover for him. Happening to be spoken to by this other inmate in the visiting room, the visitor had responded once, twice, and, to the disapproving amusement of the man he had gone to visit, he exchanged with this other man, whose letter now sat against the radiator, names and addresses. ("You Irish? You don’t sound Irish." ‘The name is originally Scots." "But ..." "No, I am not from Scotland.")

"Have you been hearing things again?" she asked, and her hand came down his sleeve to his wrist.

"Earplugs are disgusting," he said, and she might have laughed again, she had a right to. He turned his unpredictable ear toward her and named the opera playing in the bedroom. Roman soldiers. Priestess mother. Her niñitos smack in the middle of their mother’s official life.

But she had noticed the letter, if not the light in his eye. "Have you been up there again?" "No." "What is this Cuban planning?" "What does one plan in prison?" "I think I have always liked Cubans. Your letter is from the other man."

The inmate said in his letter it was more dangerous in New York City. You wondered what all those children thought about their grownups off in a castle in the wooded hills (where you didn’t address them with the name of the prison but at a post-office drawer—like an unknown box holder’s discrete freedom: Number 2020 skis in with skis for feet like flippered South Pole gulls, terns, birds, not even God knew their name: no, the unknown box holder mysterious Number 2020 flies in, a small cross moving against the slopes of the sky, Cessnas in from the Arctic Circle once a fortnight to check his mail; canters in from the shimmering middle of a multinational mirage upon a camel whose time scheme is different from his; no, swings in along a hundred forest trees from lush safety to see what’s waiting for him in Drawer B drawn all the way out, and found not the grownup inmate—his fingernail clippings, his unmistakable hand, lock or lack of hair, thumbnail sketch—but his kids instead). Do you know where your children are? The man he had really gone to see "behind bars" said he worried about his little boy, and the visitor knew what he meant without his elaborating and so perhaps it is as well for this beautiful, still young woman on the rug to notice the letter from prison because it is so innocuous, and think this is the man my darling lord and master is mainly interested in at the prison. Did the children write the cons letters?— miniature offspring lying in Drawer B with dolls’ stiffness and calm; space savers seen but not heard (clippings or parings to be restored to fingernails after execution before burial): this, this was where his letter from prison had brought him and it was a substitute too close to his own nothing-he-wished-to-identify to be worth following until you got to the source.

"I said have you been hearing things again?" she could speak from her motionless hands. This time he indicated the opera with a slide of his head.

‘‘What pretty music, but what a lurid story," she said.

Druid priestesses being fed, bel canto, to Roman soldiers, you know.

"Well, two to one, my love," she said, "if we are counting."

He told her she seemed sometimes so much less a foreigner because of being part English; but then he didn’t know. It was his hemisphere. She spoke to him from other points in the apartment. He would turn to his window as he did more often now to see what he would probably never see again from this sixth-floor window, a man he recognized—but had actually met—at Cape Kennedy, a journalist—and liked—but then had been told was dangerous— yet told by a man who himself seemed dangerous but was a business contact (a photo-journalist) whom now upon better thought he could not manage to make go away.

And when fear touched home, he identified it as being on behalf of his children, who were not here. And were not children. Or on his side.

He liked everything about her. Her blue Peruvian shawl fallen on the couch.

He stayed out of trouble, produced his exorbitantly paid statistical overviews at the foundation, sometimes wondering who else was on the payroll. He had been named an exile in the newspaper once.

She was on her knees in the kitchen, he saw one stockinged toe upside down poking out beyond the doorway, and the power hit the right side of his head again in a discharge that fused cells—celled him for one two three expanding seconds expanded into one indivisible one.

She came dancing across the room, detoured to kiss his lips lightly, swept away to retrieve an oblong white parcel from a large red shopping bag standing on the small table in the dark foyer. With all of her sadness she used the city better.

"Martin Marpe has had Hector put to sleep," she said from the next room.

His beagle.

"You have a charming memory."

This Martin, was he more real because they did not really know each other? Something of a chameleon in her reports.

"A chameleon!"

Seemed to fit in wherever he turned up.

"I don’t see that at all, and look here—I’ve met him only—"

When he’s talking with a young policeman studying law, he’s against lady cops; when he’s talking to a young woman who’s making a career for herself in a well-known laboratory as a biochemist, he’s saying that we need women in many of the old sex-dominated—

"Hoyo-to-ho! la la la!"

—because their fresh slants are destined to make the great breakthroughs in the next quarter century; when he is talking to a Buddhist he’s against tailors; when he’s talking to a famous swimmer—

"You have not heard him talking to any Buddhist. The dog was old and Martin’s free-lance work is taking him upstate and sometimes he’s away for two weeks. Are you seeing him as a Roman soldier this afternoon?"

Let’s have Brünnhilde in the Valkyrie again riding her horse.

She sang with such heartbreaking softness "Hoyo-to-ho! Hoyo-to-ho!" he guffawed, but the softness was fresh distance down his inner ear due to these turns he was lately subject to or equaling a new measure of her unwillingness to ask him to see the doctor again who would shrink his labyrinth but in so doing amplify what might better stay dim or soft. On the other side, though, the inner-ear disease which this very Martin who put his ears under pressure beyond subway decibels had menacingly suggested to her as an explanation of her husband’s occasional ringing quasi-deafness plus dizzy discharge was supposed to feature a vertigo that spun your vision, rotated it, while leaving you behind—and this he did not "do," nor wished to investigate it, and he didn’t like this Martin knowing other people’s ears.

"Do you remember the beautiful woman with paint on her jeans who was teaching her little boy to ride a bike in the park?"

Weren’t they supposed to be going to rent bikes today?

"She was so elegant running along beside him and gave him that push that sent him racing off and he went round and round, do you remember, and couldn’t stop, and ran into a pram that was empty, do you remember?"

Of course he remembered. But why?

"It’s too late to go rent bikes now, isn’t it?"

He looked down into the street. He did not see the friendly journalist once met apparently by chance at a minor historic occasion (American) who was supposed to be dangerous to him, nor did he expect to see him down there, for once had been enough, one day in passing; but he saw now a small bald spot on the head of a passing bicyclist and the head clamp bridging those ear muffs which could be tuned in also to the climactic voices of the Saturday-afternoon opera where everything came unstuck at the end if you knew the story, and he wound up not mentioning that his own girl-researcher at the foundation had seen his wife entering an apartment building where two friends of hers lived, and he looked at his wife whose children on their own feet thousands of miles away were his, too, and—the late light drew faint curves beautiful between them and, because it was an old favorite no doubt, he could for one phrase hear in Bellini’s music "False-Hearted Lover," and felt room-wide trees falling toward him from thousands of miles south, felt boxcars disappearing over magnetic mountains operated by scale-efficient interhemispheric cartels otherwise known as American Involvement—"A.I."!—and lived again one of his rare social appearances nowadays with her (not that she, poor thing, because of their low-profile situation, had—or anyway took—many opportunities like the one in question) where he could feel even more incognito than at home hearing and overhearing fellow New Yorkers telling all the good news about themselves (so he would at the time have welcomed another encounter with the man supposed to be dangerous to his security, to his low-profile existence high among the river winds of the Upper West Side of Manhattan island, dangerous to his wife). And she, he recalled, had turned away from that youngish man Marpé who was not political in the least but was a free-lance diver—who looked like a lewd fish.

If one could make a suggestion, why didn’t she close her eyes, turn round three times here on the rug, and see if she could find her way into the next room, and if she could, there would be a prize surprise for both of them. But she stood looking at him. "With the opera on in there, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge finding my way."

He smiled and shut his eyes because cells in the right wing of his head had fused, discharging a duty he didn’t argue with. And in that head he heard her say, If you had used your genius to create a mineral cartel of our own to buy back the nation instead of proving that a preliterate American cartel appropriated it and destroyed our good man—I would not take your money, I would not take your love.

"America’s involvement is not worth investigating any more," he said, "though this man who said the journalist was dangerous and might be even in cahoots with him keeps up the game for money while I no longer care about proving it, and we do not need the money and he does not go away."

"A.I.," she said. "What’s that?" he asked. "American Involvement," she said humorously, and then he guessed she didn’t know "Artificial Intelligence."

Did she remember the retarded messenger he had told her about with the dark fuzz all over his face who—

"Of course I remember."

—who had turned up with a huge manila envelope—who lurched and had that deceptive vacancy of eye considering that he would stop to tell whoever would listen stories quite funny in a lisped, unpalatable gargle . . .

"Yes, yes, I remember," she said, so he wished she might close her eyes against some chance of tears blurring the situation.

Well, there were three or four of them that came, not only one, and once one began looking around the city there were God knows how many retarded messengers, eh?, plodding, marching up the avenues not acknowledging each other but you could swear all were part of a fraternity, an underground fraternity. Maybe the city’s messages retarded them.

"Why underground?" she said, and he didn’t know exactly what was eating her. "And what’s the point?" she added.

The point? He thought of a dozen. Oh, that girl, the research girl that these vacant messengers with their huge brown envelopes always went to, to her desk, this girl Amy had seen her one day recently, the girl said she was certain from the picture on his file cabinet, plain coincidence, the very same person, she said.

"Did she say where?" asked his wife, who could not be unfaithful to him.

Well, she’d been vague. He turned his head away, raised his eyebrows wrinkling his brow, shrugged without the downward completion of his shrug, and eyed her out of the maniacal corners of his eyes. But it was downtown.

"Vague," she said, not missing a tempo.

He guessed his wife, who had been so wifely much to him she hadn’t had the chance to find strength in playing defeated or fragile, wondered who really was the vague one here, her husband or the research girl Amy.

Her purse lay on the blue shawl in the apartment where they might pretend to be alone in a city unknown to almost anyone. A trickle ran down one eye, from this large oval seed.

"It’s an organization of retarded messengers," she said. "A secret society. You know what I think? I think you are jealous."

Oh yes, a very bear, a fox, an ape of jealousy, but wasn’t it that the city that united them in one secret security divided them in its time and size?

"You have nothing to be jealous about," she said.

Her hand caressed his noble dome. He caught a dull crank of gears in the street below and had again in his head the void of these volts, the push of a long river moving water against banks which were his right temple. He seemed to mumble as he told her he could tell every little part of her hand no matter where and with what small crease it touched down on him. She asked what he had been reading and he held up the small Shakespeare. She knew the title but not the comedy.

Had he not heard the phone? she wanted to know. Yes. He had answered one call and felt someone checking if he was home. The second one he let ring.

Now he showed her the prison inmate’s letter and he read her a few lines ending with Gibbon, which they had a good laugh over: "Among barbarous nations, women have often combatted by the side of their husbands. But it is almost impossible that a society of Amazons should ever have existed either in the old or new world."

She went away now toward a low, rising sweep of applause, and again he had the half idea of private life but as if it were hiding and not itself power, and he still didn’t know how she was.

The applause stopped short. She came back. She stood in the middle of the living room upright as a cedar, his harmonic mean, until he felt that between them was the angel, not she herself.

She closed her eyes and turned round and round again, her lids one expanse of sweet humor. She had turned more than three times around and was facing away. She held her arm half out before her and made her way to the threshold of the bedroom. She was on her way to be awakened. Was jealousy what he had not wished to spell? She was in the bedroom and turned. He was in view if she opened her eyes, copious economist. He was supposed to go to her. Everything got in the way. Railways, trees falling, the ends of opposed winds, places waiting for wood to make railroad ties, a desert laid end to end with solar reflectors and among these blinking dishes swallowing sun, an uneconomically single set of tracks along whose bed an antique railway ran as quietly through his thoughts as the ancient bilingual subway here blinded his ears to another volume of silence.

Elsewhere people, brawny Landburgers, waiting for the train not knowing the tracks haven’t been built yet. Baja York growing substitute parts and waiting for them to be shipped to the place of assembly.

Trees as thick as a horse is long, being sawn by remote control from an urban eyrie where an unseen private hand appropriates a public sector to its heretofore self-contained environment. Trees for the crossties in the railroad —laddering charming old locomotives up over still older mountains to bring pornography to New Castle, crossties to Denmark and Sweden once upon a time, and this was his lost country—what folk do during a given day, a matter of hours. The dizzy discharge hit again, he wanted to see his children thousands of miles south of here and he himself was still fairly young, and they were grown and he was disgusted to think the regime menaced them only because of him not because they stood against it which they didn’t. Some source as unseen as where a wind begins was loading this noise into his inner ear like torture that wasn’t normally painful. He breathed fast (hhh-hhh-hhh-hhh), there was also the messenger who, coming into one’s office, tried to speak through his impediment and gave up and left a card that said outlandishly, "Readings" or "Psychic Readings" or some such. He called to his wife, who opened her eyes squinting into a distance he was at the other end of unexpectedly.

It was nothing he wished to identify, but he did. And saw it was not jealousy. Was it the threatening absence of jealousy? They were not one of those couples here who had an "understanding."

He fell again onto all fours, neither child nor beast, his open jacket hanging down like his cheeks, and visualized against his will a surprised man missing his beloved legs blown away with the ignition keys of his American car; and growled and growled, and imagined a blue shawl tossed over him, and on hands and knees he stalked toward her, a shell of breaking troubles on his back the very least of which, if trouble it was, was an impulse toward verbal play at an ongoing moment of apparent lust and/or passion, and she smiled, uncertain, for he had not come silently to her side to open her eyes as he often did. "I like your shawl," she called softly, and he snarled or miaowed—they weren’t sure. "The better to see you with," he growled, pulling the front corner over his bald head and knowing he did not bore her. An immense weariness got the better of him, a fatigue beyond the repetitive, a repetitive insight that he might never reach the bedroom where she laughed. "Oh why is your breathing so labored, grand dear?" Finding the distance less, he growled, "The better to make you hear." "Come closer, so I can share your breathing." He sighed, seeing her around the doorway that opened between them as if he could actually see her, her silky knees. "Division of . . ."she began, and he heard, like a beast, "labor," "dolor," and "all this and more." Heard a matching sigh of the bolster that, like the one they had had before they had had to come here, she loved to be under with him.

She sensed the mood and waited around the corner. And then she said, "Are not you the man whose great-grandfather met Darwin on his great journey? And gave his wife for Darwin’s entertainment?"

"The myth is she played for Darwin."

"While he and Darwin discussed murder as human all too human."

He growled in agreement, in double understanding, and had to laugh being an animal that could laugh, and growled and made his way toward the threshold, the blue Peruvian shawl in the corner of his eye. They were not speaking the same language, word for word, and she did not know he might not love her without jealousy. He would take and hide her light under a bolster. "Your other earplug?" "No; only one." "So you heard me?" "No. I just knew that you were there." "I don’t believe that."

He knew how much she knew, and curves of privacy joined their thoughts often.

But she knew she would always find him funnier than life, and she knew he had not been unfaithful; she knew he would sometimes look through a window, for so would she, and see not a kid walking a mongrel or a pedigree but somebody going to execution, some one, some two, a dozen interchangeable poor persons, interchangeable even if you recognized one of them in that executioner’s dozen; she knew that wherever he turned he found home and

her; she knew that Lord B ‘s cousin had reported that Lord B , after

using the Atheneum Club’s convenience for years whenever he was in New York, had, upon being stopped and told that he was not a member, replied, "Oh, is it a club, too?" and she knew what passed through his mind often after she had done her weekly volunteer stint at the natural-childbirth office under a modest assumed surname. And she knew it might be tantalizingly hard to reduce the pressure they didn’t need the high-priced friend-of-a-friend physician who tried to treat them free to tell them was not only an effect of his deafening discharges but a cause, and a cause caused by causes. And she knew she was his harmonic mean, his chess mate, his past, his walking memory, and in a language he liked even more than American (and to use the Shakespeare words he had just read but thought that she had not) his "ventricle of memory."

BETWEEN US: A BREATHER STILL AT THE BEGINNING

All things to him she was.

But where, then, where, who, what was she?

What is this questionnaire form the report comes in, as if it weren’t her own heroic fault, whatever she thought she’s doing being all things to him? And she wasn’t getting any younger as the world turns, so your launch window gets smaller by the second until it’s maybe ten minutes wide if you want to launch to gain your desired orbit, because everything else is also moving in its directions and you won’t need a computer to process that stuff because women know. But whichever She it is that we relations raise into this window as a trial sacrifice, it was not consciousness alone we raised and targeted-for-Being, but the body she was becoming. Evolution of angel into human seemed illusion it seemed so slow at times. No easy fit, for hear it bump up ahead, grab, grope, grit—this body language we knew in their bones as Earth turned its windows in and out of line with the unknown aim of this evolutionary launch inclining toward undreamed potential. But can angels love inexperience enough to assume it. If build upward or inward, why not downward?

Did we want this grotesque marriage? Which one, even? And grotesque only in practice. And yet inner speech must needs get what it came for. So we relations angel or not will single her out: Grace Kimball—hear the noise. It’s the history of the restless window shade that’s now spent its spring and won’t go up. No matter, the history ignores the shade being broken and our sight-sacrifice in the window speaks for herself. And then we add, against her body’s effort to reject it, that the angel of today aspiring to Change—if that still is a thing in us—will claim the age-old human chance to sacrifice others as part of the package. And if you’re stuck in pecking orders or old coordinates, then along the curve of this new angel revolution (if it makes it), consciousness could make heroes of us all or feel like one more con, or raise or lower itself.

He, Lou, her one husband, medium height, could go to sleep for years to dream through the smoke of double signals all things she was to him: lover, co-breadwinner, co-coughing breakfast-nook-bar celebrant; calm, graceful swimmer to his mad, chugging lapper awash in his own potential; elbow at the movies; sister to him who’d been denied one, daughter-if-she-could-just-make-it to his would-be-power-vacuum-father-surrogate brotherhood; female pocket-billiards pardner once a month at a little West Side tavern with collectible red-and-green traffic light in the window; hostess to his growing problem, yet fair’s fair, both have drunk at length after the latish often not largish din-din of this working life (we hear them in American think, "But it works"—or her think—almost think—and all this awkward-sounding—was this sound their way of seeing things?) or if largish, oft not finished; and have brushed lower gums upward and uppers downward out of the shared tube, lest the proof from mouth to mouth not cancel whiskey-aura with vodka-wash along the route that lines the masses from stomach to gullet to mouth with the aroma smoke of spirits; that winds its fume up from the breadbasket but breath-broken and wind-gapped into old smoky signals blanketed soon out of your mind and to be lost in the next day’s blank; where also she was priestess of belongings and of the vacuum cleaner; mother of what have you (home, him, the object or ruled nucleus of daily life), and she’s daughter, too (throw in daughter with the bath salts); and recorder in scrapbooks (one the untouchable album white with gilt spinal lettering), and sometimes scrapper, scrimper, reminder like a co- or fellow sleeper who—look out!—wakes after twenty years (a "yore") of hours to tell him their dreams (twenty’s overdoing it)— a popular number in the Lincoln Van Winkle system if not quite his and her for it was just shy of ten years—(well, seven and a half)—they stayed together even it off e’en with jagged-jogged fibroid edge like your dream made you live an unnatural grotty voice not yours surely phase it out if you can’t even it out from ten and a half times per week to three and a half per month (or seven times one-half)—"from quantity to quality," she hears him laugh when her back is turned at a baby brunch—and "we" this, "we" that—and back to quantity in its preoccupied absence on the year-and-a-day anniversary of her hearing herself say during a long phone gab so unexpectedly that Lou, whom she was looking at across the living room now less crowded with wood and metal, looked dimly away from the eleven P.M. eyewitness news, "Well what you do," she said down the phone, "is you live with a friend," even it off, as we said, cut it off (ouch-ouch), we heard it said; clean break, hear the soundless snip, the lone hand clapped to the suddenly-not-there-for-you butt—the soundlessness of it wiping the noise and music and gross silence of those dreamable years out like a few late-model hours of our century that along its warp aged the grain of Grace and Lou. And scapegoat of him she also was.

Why "goat"? we many of us pick up the animal name—an animal posing as us?—then sense we asked a question, hovering, for we are not there in them even though they in us mayhap; yet (our) old descent from Insight stands us in good stead for did not we once hear ourselves adrift in the gut feelings of MacDune Scrotus centuries ago?—who really understood angels, defining them as not just Form but Matter too.

Why scapegoat? Because history through scapegoats turns Cruel to Fair, Revenge to Reciprocity, shifts windows to present a parallel sacrifice: so Jim Mayn’s father Mel (upon Sarah’s suicide) is your widowed scapegoat for his ignorance of life’s sweet mystery—when from his office where he’s known for saying, "Let’s look at the history," he came home, though homeward not quite to (and latish) Jim’s penetrating mother—ever late to her who seemed not to leave the house much (when did she? and when did lower Main Street see her? when did Jim’s grandmother up the street see her, her daughter? do we not know?)—and coming home, Mel is tired and yet threatening to bend someone’s ear (though never tweak), even hers, he wants to tell all at the end of the day: about reviewing Willkie’s One World (oh it was his lovely hair and Saint Bernard eyes—Sarah chilled her husband’s fervor—that made you think Willkie the Democrat’s Republican) but Sarah’s not political—never mind the newspaper in the family since long before even her mother Margaret’s continental adventures of the early nineties; or Mel wants to tell about Should we subscribe to the new wire service (i940-4i-ish)—or Mel’s telling (at the end of the day) all about old Pennsylvania cousin running for mayor "over there," for God’s sake, son of if-you-recall uncle who ran from restaurant to restaurant with the dynamite-tossing anarchists during his vacation in Paris, 1894):

. . . while she too is scapegoat—Sarah (if angelwise we many descend on her who one day around the end of the wars put her foot down—but on the sea, we hear added as if in poetry as if we didn’t know as if some additive from unknown within us)—and escaped at least that life: though wasn’t he the one who wasn’t there? (he left to go downtown! Jim’s father, the husband Mel Mayn, if not Grace’s Lou).

Yet some of him she kept. Some Lou. So did she throw away the wrong part? (asked our resident angel rabbi with honed wit resuscitating old MacDune’s athletic twist that the Matter angels are part made of is not really corporeal! —which is why angels can in great numbers occupy one place—whereas a human person) . . .

no Jew Lou, the name that Lou is short for’s, yes, Ripley)—her man, her one-time man with R.R. on the combo-lock (tho no more in it than in all the dumb stuff they employ telepathy to send) attache (maybe nuclear emergency) case who goes such a long time without breathing that maybe we expected him to evolve, easing us of our jittery distance which ‘mung angel relations is code for what went on between them, and on and on—just plain inertia—no crying-out-loud, no fistiquiff, ‘twas mystery why (pir-quoit) they stayed nor split. Man she had come east imagining: until, unseen till then, he materialized and filled the bill, who would be good-looking at a stand-up party and liked by those he told a quiet joke to about insurance that wound up anti-Irish, anti-Scottish, anti-race, anti-French (who cares)—but started not like that (because friendly, not like that at all, as Grace one day after a zingo of a clean-sweep wild energy-rising women-for-women’s sake workshop gently allowed to her dearest young friend Maureen) for Lou was pretty special, it’s what he stumbled into that was wrong, Grace’s homemade white bridal (record-) book gilt spined that would not chemically quite pour down the tube of Manhattan’s vertical Time, if you can wait through the awful mornings which, looking back, seem not so long a wait as the punchline of Lou’s joke when you already remembered it and forgot and remembered and forgot and remembered during the telling, yet really a man who alone with thee would make you an old-fashioned and be talking and/or singing when he came toward you timelessly across the carpeted room at the close of the day and you two were settled in until two hours later you rose to get ready to go out childless to a familiar restaurant—cowboy or Indian {Pir-Quoit-"Why" in Serio-pawn-akee) or fifties-early-sixties French of our latish enceinture-ee we’z find our way through any fog of being spirited to at least one of those restaurants, and as minutes wore on, still undeparted from the apartment (time lapsing into space) with your smoky, lovely fur-collared coat on and, at an ancient distance, the john cistern filling somewhere, you swooped, Grace swooped—and we stooped with her like air seeking incarnation in breath—she swooped, stooped at the coffee table remembering the luminous dividend in her glass, and suddenly a dream she had apart. The man, her what? {P or-quoit) her sleeping-and-swimming pardner, the amiable profile she watched lay out fresh greenbacks for their movie tickets and for a second kept his fingers down on the three dolla’ four dolla’ fi’-dolla’ bill guarding against a wind gusting (it felt) from within the glass booth of the trapped powerful ticket girl—the man (well, Grace loved him—’course she did) he must have been many things to her if, at the crunch when some went, some she kept—the man (he’s Lou: say "Lou, dear Lou") well he is also an elbow to her at one or two A.M. as she had been a scented elbow to him in the movies where a star interrogating another star says a second time but menacingly now, "Come on, you know—you know you know," for if here in their bed Lou’s rib floats her way or his sleeping forearm at that deep mid-time of bed and night seems (and is from his unknown distances determined to contact) that nourishing elbow—what’s its name?—on her side of bed, she can make her elbow be so still at his blind touch, his dragged palm, that her elbow is naked of motion, while she goes on listening with her thence wholly wrist-operated middle-finger pressing— of fingers pressing—down or in or both on the twice or thrice a month rush to meet herself secreting what she had discovered was love, but love in a bag she mustn’t deserve except as such sweet centers of blanketed guilt ambushing its faithful future where flow can no more interrupt flow, not even with angelic scorn conjured of relations sad, unsaid, and fallow-felt.

Yet in those only dark-night more and more slow near silences, she got better: and the months get together a code she takes time for so plain that— to get back to what in later life she kept—the gentle, fun-loving men (Enter, dieted, bearing clothes; Enter, already seated cross-legged) some freed: open as their bare, under-carpeted loins who in future (with firmed-up, ever young, well-swung near-myth) filled the shadow cast there by that part of Lou that Grace kept—the aborted son-of-Grace, the brotherly Son in Lou—loved (these new, light men) to sit around her furnitureless Body Room (these gentle, dieted men) and love to hear and like to do what she up-frontally asked including that they say right out what they wanted (that is, done) (that is, to them), sharing information, feeling good, and laugh how fantastic it was to let yourself just at last (you know) let go of marriage (yours; anyone’s!), a relationship, find a better way of doing things and laugh and once in a while cry over Grace once upon a really historic time interred beside her bonded husband whom she kept from getting the message month upon month as she kept a smaller and smaller chunk(-y) of herself (we knew but wouldn’t say) just listen and sniff the change brewing in her very forgetfulness of dreams such as where an old winged donkey nips at her digits where she holds on for dear life to a park bench on a high building as city life floods upward, while she stared into the lumped cosmos of her eyelids and softly rubbed off her own wrong upon parts of her she didn’t think about except in those days to think they’re rather inexpressibly (aren’t they?) too floppy, the pistil or the petals, or was it stamen, we already don’t recall, we been so busy knowing we have another body-matter someplace, seeing two places but not being. But how’d she get like that, like a warm soft-shelled clam thinking so hard ‘bout stiffening its will all it kin do is feel good, when twice (well, wzit once or wzit twice?) seen when in those driven days she did her rapid down-up toe touching with the mirror’s tranquil caress behind her, her legs divided (see "parted"), and her palms to the floor. But in the doubly bedded night-dark of not looking under the covers (not even moving, babe, except her trusty locked-in wrist) and because it was getting slower, is that longer?, and once upon the stroke of a thousand-and-one after she had let herself go for one luminous half hour, she’d observed sunspots by involuntarily celebrating making a widdle cry of true noise—was she just sex-mad?—went off like a clock radio and the sheet slipped up over her nose or was it her nose down under the sheet?—and it had come to me that I didn’t have to do it with my right hand—forever concerned—concerned? says the interrogator, what means "concerned"?—well, afraid—that Lou’d feel her arm moving—God! pick up the beat, maybe—I could do it with my left, although it took longer—and I still had to keep my whole right side from bucking. Well it came to her that this was quite insane: look what (por-quat-quaya) she had boiled herself down to—jerking (but is that quite it?) off—and she says this again (look what I’ve been reduced to) in the pause of having said it once. (You know what’s been going on, you’re no child, and you think just because you haven’t received your hairline fracture when you were scheduled to, and ‘cause you’ve stopped virtually breathing, you can get away without saying.) Reduced to this: so leave. So leave: words like a poke in the funny bone reviving their friend Sal’s fancy-dress divorce bash where they asked too many people (if you call those people real noise!) and Sal’s "husband" ‘s girlfriend and twelve other gals floated in in bustles and there was nearly room to move much less do anything. Which might relieve some percent of the guests. So leave: reduced to this: it’s insane: got to get out of this. It’s mutilation, she’s heard.

And so a few hours later Grace scuffs, stunned—or rather spunkily trots—into her kitchen’s awareness of her in a mind-burst zone of her that found history past and future in the middle of the night and now finds herself in the kitchen of her present like a home come back to after years of nights gray as her brother’s dreamed face but may lose what she found last night (for someone might say, Now that you’ve found it, it will be taken from you)—to wit, a whole account of what’s happened for two thousand years, that she has for Lou but in a decision too complete for words. For it’s tricky there for the skipper Grace Rhodes, nee Rhodes because born married, there at the controls of a changing kitchen where she’s turned on the burner to float under the pretty orange kettle (hers) without first (this momentous morning) reaching blindly through the invisible white door without opening it of the refrigerator (soon to be widely called, from the English, "fridge") for the two-quart family-size Florida orange juice carton substantial as a Monopoly hotel, and without reaching even now, she’s spooned coffee into the new glass cylinder with the plunger-piston purchased after seeing the Michael Caine thriller, ee-und . . .she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and dreaming at a great rate of history being both here and there yet knowing that in between is the act of decision (hold on to it! pin it down! a donkey’s nipping at her hand) that came to her, promised itself to her, alone last night abed beside Lou, who (through secret bond, the bond of a secret!) is such a known body that her act if she goes "thru" with it threatens her with incarnation (forget the re-, which she never believed in even when her grandmother quoting her friend in support of the poor (around the time of a so-called Panic in 1890-something) "time to quit raising corn and start raising hell," went along with that champion of the unemployed who held that at death the soul like the body spilling its organ chemicals back into the earth, returns to the gross stewpot of the soul reservoir from which children drew what they needed at birth, therefore, therefore, therefore, but)—she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and trying to recall all she must say to Lou now, who’s gon’ say, "Oh cool it, honey" and how hard to do it now—that is, to tell him, tell Lou (medium height upright, medium length in bed a widow’s width away, recall the Irish-Italian old pardner to end all pardners)—tell him without a fight, without a pretext in the convenient shadowy kitchen often so morning-comforted where the only light is the fire buoyant beneath the kettle but her body’s helping her out now so potently she doesn’t think to thank her mother’s God, except, evoking her mother’s word "waterworks" as if centuries of feminine crying were a branch of municipal plumbing planned, see, by (well you got your) managers distributing your monopolies where monopolies are due, she finds the miracle fluid of her morning tears breathing for her anew refueling her force with an angry humor for example that that very instant her face and heart and eyes came unsprung and she wept above the stove—did she hear a cough? the dream donkey ‘tween nips?—and of herself she flickered (watch!) some small communicating part back into the bedroom of these furnished aeons (which part?) that was suddenly certain her husband had been not breathing when she had left his side, or was he busy still being the donkey?, while here, buoyed as the kettle itself is by inexpensive flames, she on her side is breathing along the small, not unmusical up-beat of the gentle gasps that go with her tears. And this, in union with that experience of her other body inclining in the bedroom to touch her non- or minimally breathing man, puts her in (no, turns her into) her own picture and if she thinks about her being here at the stove (angry or not, weeping or dry) and being back in the bedroom examining a wife-poor husband worth not living with, she won’t say the one pure thing she is to say to him, only one thing no matter how you squeeze it, while the practically instant brewer pistons the hot water (which, she sees for the first time, the landlord pays for in property taxes) through the coffee a hair less easily than the languorous spy did it in the movie last month; while, recalling to one side of her memory’s decision Lou’s heartfelt "Ah" of wonder and thanksgiving finding the Way In, the entry that ducked once, twice (like another head coming the other way), against her bone only to cant its way in, third try, with gimme an Ah which she once would answer by voice contact relieved at his swift pang, she now reaches through the refrigerator resigned like a mistress (but tense) to not knowing how long they’d have together this time (why bother to open it like a slave) for Lou’s egg, and finds it with his other eggs (Ah, she’s just this second given up eggs; we know it’s so the future can get a purchase on her if only to hold her in its hand) and feeling it smooth and cool like a thing that ought to be hard and is to the lightest touch, she lets it fly toward the sink before she squeezes it into her hand and hears in the exhaled, absorbed cack of egg collapsing on steel what she saved by not holding on to it all gooky in the hand and in the coughing voice at her back what she gained by wasting it against cold steel conjuring a point of entry and departure for a sudden talk between the dry-throated transient who’s himself (!) materialized in a short, white terry-cloth bathrobe (a piece of him lowering notch by notch though not into position still sufficiently at the ready to be preceding him and to be called "it" though it’s him)—not destined to drink today’s juice eyeing the headlines of the paper that’s outside the front door we know through him and add (what Lou can’t hear but already about remembers) that it’s black-edged the morning—and, in front of Lou, his first wife Grace, heart breathing by itself for itself scaring not itself, only her, not quite ready to turn but ready to speak beyond the egg to Lou’s "What was that for?"

And while she’s for a second strung between overlapping views not to be confused with a whole history assembled and announced overnight in her heart at the whorled circuits of instinct interrogation, Genesis, Egypt, the brides of Christ whose soul was also in the fundamental American reincarnation reservoir—and she wasn’t sure if she wanted even a jigger of that, the bare mask of eyes in the all but covered face of woman—really beautiful woman—of girl grandmothers like her own who cared deeply for the poverty farmers and out-of-work marchers on Washington in ‘94 who’re men while still the women were equal to anything if not some Wide Load Grace feels in her shifting flesh reputed headed continentally our way, a pair of rooms (this and a next prob’ly not our style), maybe a mountain of stuff doubtless in a fair cubic shape not to wonder at because the girl grandmothers haven’t time though equal to their time itself but with all those kids, the creak of covered wagons instead of bed and prayer, their way west, their way east, into a kitchen that will collapse into history (let alone his-and-her history, indeed leave alone oh "What a view!" he’d often said, with a sky, an earth, a valley, a morning mountain, a car, a held hand what else canst give me: "Incredible," she agreed and wanted a story, then, anything so long as it’s a story)—she’s in a near future which she foresaw ten woman-and-man minutes from the kitchen, the man in the white robe now packing like an assembly line alternately two suitcases laid back neatly paneled on the undone bed, seeing the man put first in one case shirts in their soft-glass bags from the laundry, then in the other case two cashmere sweaters, pair of corduroys, an ex’s dozen sock balls; then seeing the man vomit into the first case, all this all at once for she sees all this from the kitchen stove ten minutes away thinking will he vomit into the second case too (not to be confused with the special hang-up case for suits that she doesn’t see yet) and when, entering the, yes, cluttered bedroom then in the future that she sees while still heart-throbbing, in the kitchen, she sees his white-robed back, bending away from her over the bad cough before again vomiting, she knows anxiously it was nothing he ate this morning or he "got" from her—she’s not the mother of his stomach—because he won’t eat a thing here in the kitchen as the interaction opens with Grace answering Lou before she turns, with words that she doesn’t feel she’s reduced to—and words that this time he won’t say (like, "Oh, skip it"): because although he didn’t know he knew that he too wanted out (and Grace by successfully not saying all that "needed saying" the fateful morning in the kitchen but creating a package statement delivered at once and yet again, their four bare calves insidiously communicating, will sometimes in future days go sit beside the phone because, with a pang as long as the space-time she’s gained from him by not saying all she might have, knows that he knew)—he too wanted out, for (!) she was now at last not all things to him and hey partly because she never was!—he couldn’t this time of all the times till now let near-silence speak as in the sound of the wide steel sink softly receiving the load of one egg; and he had his own hungover spunk to say, "What was that for? Why’d you do that?"

But he’s not alone in saying it, as don’t we many testify all here at this point? Future workshop women said it of themselves and of their spouses. And were urged to speak this language by Grace as she became.

The South American expatriate diva’s New York physician said it too, we already remember, arriving for a brunch he’d dreamed of after being demoted to it backstage the night before. He’s said it now on the threshold of her faintly disturbed living room, said it meaning last night’s backstage dismissal, seeing last night’s silver roses long dry of that drop of Persian rose-attar secreted by the silver rose of Act Two, for they’re strewn now all over the place, one by one along the blue and brown Andean rugs and as far as a corner of a kitchen counter dark and dim through a distant doorway, then back across the diva’s silver velvet divan (where once the doctor had been invited to bed down) which he sees over her shoulder to her left; then across to the grand piano’s music stand, where another silver, rose-bloom bends toward him as he sees it over her other shoulder to his right, where he stands on the threshold with a white paper bag—"Here"—that she with her other hand upon the sleeve of his camel’s-hair blazer takes from him oil-damped, so we see through almost to the brioches fresh from that miraculous bakery, and his eye zeroes in on one silver rose its stem cut short at the neck of the pale dressing gown that covers, he knows, three Chilean freckles.

"What was that for?" she echoes softly, noting his new jacket as if her own deep life could take its wool back to the source . . . "why for my father, for my family," she goes on, "for my country, for my sex," she laughs like there isn’t quite room for laughter, for she’s referring to the South American officer she went out with—Judith, he thinks, Judith, is she Judith?—and she adds, "For professional reasons—public relations"—and, irritated—"danger, curiosity; danger, comfort, fun," ignoring what her doctor-friend took as a snub last night backstage when she went off with the other man (as a stagehand-poet passed with a black-edged prop, a newspaper, only to return to interrogate the doctor as an afterthought), and she’s now referring, in all these unstable nothings—"my father took me to see a blast furnace once: where they make the copper?"—(then turning away with the bag of brioches in her hands) to what he with all his knowledge of her insides cannot know.

This is that the (as he senses infamously gifted) officer in mufti with a Romance name, introduced to him (a panting physician with a cone of silver roses) backstage last night by the diva may well have been asked by her (the doctor can guess) if the council will please ignore her frail father thousands of miles away along a South American coast, let him speak his mind louder and yet louder the older he gets (the doctor can guess this) but not that the officer asked the diva (at dawn in their walled duplex during some interval of (murmured) confidence or when she returned like a sleeping queen, a tranced priestess, from the kitchen her fine unstockinged flesh set off by the tumbler of imported seltzer she bore for them both) where in the world had he her night’s lover seen (did she have any idea?) the tall bald man seriously applauding near him in the orchestra and the fair-haired woman with the bald man "risueno" (smiling) but not clapping, not clapping, smiling but not clapping (was it at the embassy, a concert, a reception?).

Yet what the diva’s doctor does know—recalling the gap in which he fell as toward some unwanted horizon only to hear himself asked by a hungry-looking stagehand if the right brain works the same in a left-handed person —following her now beyond the piano past the stereo cabinet featuring on its top the record jacket of the Schwartzkopf eve-of-the-war Rosenkavalier (those wonderful Nazi singers, her father said with an empty laugh giving it to his daughter one Christmas hearing children caroling outside in the summer air), the libretto booklet containing a bald man with a flowered bow-tie, the composer, big ears, Strauss himself a smile over his face)—what the diva’s doctor does know, hearing her say she’ll put off the atabrine (if he remembered to bring it) she’s grown overnight so fond again of the food she was raised on that she abhors the very thought of that hunger diet she’ll be back on if she gets rid of this angelic worm: not to mention that she is going out for dinner tonight. But what the doctor, her doctor, does know (following her across a blue and brown Andean rug) is that the canal he dreamed last night in anger (getting a cold) or this morning before or upon waking, the canal with him in it, would recede so long as he must seek its end: for he was it, and he would like to tell her. And this canal boasted a queer force keeping just open the planned original hairline fracture of its bed. And along its length he is taking in, like a tapeworm, menus of nutriment but keeping his identity secret from all but his partner with whom he hangs out sinkerless lines with such still worms for hooks they’re then just baitless hooks bare as a sleeping fisherman’s but this partner (who?) alone knows his identity in the umber dawn of a nightmare spread with cashew beurre and local anchovies, turns on him, and it’s a waist narrowing to a silver rose below, yet it’s a squint— the diva and the Indian guide ogling the friendly doctor as if he is prescribed tapeworm so that, like the messenger who is the message, prescriber turns prescription, the tapeworm eats at length unmindful of the noise of waters, one thousand Minnesota lakes, since Minnesota’s only a map now, and this doctor-dreamer’s a live-in tapeworm fixed in a dear friend’s system free of Manhattan’s sea and of a cough crashing around him and taking in menus of nutriment and in return watering the dry earth, taking in from head to tail desert pike swimming terribly ahead; banks of rice goldenly upholding persimmon-freckled muscles stewed pear-soft, their skin basted to an Ojibway gloss; and a la carte a great vegetable deformed by peasant gourdists who give it two, three waists, just as divinity blows us hot and cold in alternate gravities to lopside our stomachs, coil our gut, thicken the neural tube of cousin fish a thousand sea-bottoms removed from our own tube-to-come that fattened all along its length, grew and grew until it grew its own bone around its growth to hold it, so we had nowhere to grow but where this mercurial but cramping spinal column left off at the top and our will’s way blew and swelled, doubling widthwise laying about itself right and left to take the sheathless end of the neural tube gourdward treble-bulbed to light the world to who knows what refracted recipes for mind and face, here craniums balloon at anchor, there chins retire before such seasonings of evolution that no double-sexed tapeworm shoveling it in, shoveling it out, evacuating week upon week can know the whole of it, nor Manhattan medicine man tracking a loved patient across her national rugs dream that on the noise of that nightmare he’d cruelly think maybe his diva is to find out that her father in Chile (having long since been moved from hacienda to apartment) has been or is to be tortured for speaking out or for the Masonic secrets of logia, famed liberation lodge—tortured, pray, how? melted down? first things first—deafened by the telephone treatment, juiced by the testicle generator, paddled on his formerly long-john-sheathed puckered behind with the olde wooden thing with the little holes, and, as if that were not already weird, is to be stood barefoot on open sardine tins holding a weight greater even than the weight of the world (which is called in the political branch of Chilean S. and M. torture circles "the Statue of Liberty") till either he drops or he succeeds in bleeding two exact half-tins-full of his own fish-scented blood pudding—then maybe the diva (read daughter) will so condemn her night’s companion this instrument of a murderous regime that she breaks her date with the mufti’d officer who plans to take her to a restaurant serving national food if the officer is not already here, hidden, muffled, coughing, snoring in some unit of this majestic flat established in what was farmland in Washington Irving’s day. But that coughing: who hears it? can we tell? is it some patience developing? It’s not the doctor, and he for one is alone here with the diva, who has tossed over her shoulder, "You’re taking yourself a bit seriously, darling," which he knows is right but only for him to really understand.

And for the second before she crosses into the duplex kitchen, flicking a wall switch like a priestess signaling angels, he all but voids this cruel plan for her father he’s imagined. For he who is much more than her doctor has followed his friend with his nose as well; and as the trail sandwiches now the toasty dough of brioche in the scented air she bears, he skirts his dream and finds the end of it: that other breakfast of his Boston childhood, his Boston adolescence; his Cambridge studies, when he crossed the Charles River for weekends home, his "Hiawatha studies" his no-nonsense mother cursed his passion for archaeology—he now a distinguished tapeworm, distinguished means to the mere end of his diva’s weight reduction, being dreamed out of another’s systemic din, double-ended means not now useful to its slim host, oh right then a gypsy fortune teller out of a book he never actually read told him, "Fair lady cast a spell on thee—Fair lady’s hand shall set thee free."

But seeing the kitchen light and the glass trapdoor in the duplex ceiling and the swirling skirt of the lady’s lone garment, he finds in the pocket of his new soft cashmere blazer the medicine he mans and with it a thought still dumber than his "What was that for?" a minute ago—he’ll slip it to her this atabrine evacuator in her juice, there’s a bug going round, delayed dysentery from our last international adventure kept alive in the guts of the veteran unemployed, in unemployment itself in the widening abstract.

Slip it to her in her juice? That’s how men make their dreams come true! says a voice preferably female and male. You might slip her a visitor at least! Because, that’s atabrine for God’s sake! But of course the physician’s not that dumb, with his income. He of course was a dream tapeworm being got rid of by her, since whoever it was who provided the atabrine, she’s the one who took it, if we look ahead. But now, with appetite stirred up, she changed her mind which means that even if one reason was to eat a poignantly garnished national dinner with her new South American mufti (former compatriot only in the narrow sense that her passport is now Swiss), the other reason must be to avoid detaching from her old intimate the doctor (so he thinks); but what’s a tapeworm after all, it’s what Jim Mayn’s grandmother Margaret said he had, passing through her kitchen appropriating a fresh cruller on his way to the chill New Jersey winesap apples in a bushel basket on the back porch only to halt at the threshold of the porch and backpedal, like thinking, like football practice, to the table where the large glass jar of crullers is as full before and after he hooked another toasty twisted cruller as it was a moment ago, when, on the way through from the dining room, he lifted the glass top by its knob and took his first as if he never once stopped moving toward the back-porch door, but this second cruller that he backed up for—"Jimmy, you must have a tapeworm"—he examined for a pure instant to see which soft, sugar-sanded end to bite—’Tor a boy with a sore throat . . ."—only to turn to the tall lady at the deep white sink with her back to him, and put a hand on her shoulder and whistle like a bird into her prehistoric ear half covered by her hair she’s combed brightly back tight, near wispless, into a bun, the ear that has a nose for a kid’s occasional cigarette.

Upon which—like the wind—he was not there. A boy propelled by what? By boydom. Propelled like Mercury, like Andrew Jackson horsing through woodland or Raritan brave returning through woods to his hidden canoe already as clear in his mind’s eye as the birch branch his eye missed by an inch— propelled through the kitchen threshold’s doorway to the back porch, but— hold it! thunders the interrogator, do you mean Andrew was propelled like an Indian? Where’s he headed?, past the apples all but the two which he takes in one hand, the leafed stems hard in the fork of his fingers, out over his grandparents’ back steps—Yea, me!—touching always the same two, propelled by where he’s going, not to be winded for years and years, if then, nor to know that if he’s running like the wind home or downtown or between, he is making his own breeze until someday he comes right up to one of these receding obstacles and beyond it a wind more real: runs down Main Street during a world war and is, he knows, seen by his somewhat unloved father from the newspaper office and Jim’s hard breathing holds in the body of its heartbeaten deep gasps the future sounds of words working underground un-sequenced in his mind.

I know what’s going on, the diva’s personal doctor refrained from saying, hearing again the coughing going on nearby. The coughing, locally quite ordinary but more largely odd, was either the multiple child from some earlier hope (breakfasting here, being born there; building, explaining; crawling toward glassen screens at either end of an apartment; leaning against a smoking grownup; doing its Rotation homework), calling out the window (or’d we say falling?), or the coughing was our late, if central, century’s very air going the signal Indians one better and thickening its own devolution so far and away as to precipitate the very throats without which it could not be coughed. The coughing as heard by the doctor with its way of acquiring in his mind heads of hair, chins, narrowed mustachioed eyes with each successful cough (if we understand aright) is yet so hard to hear that, is someone else doing the hearing? and the physician’s personal current has got crossed with that other actual experience?

—which? asks the interrogator in a next room—

—why, of a child somewhere at night, a contemporary child in its sleep with a contact hack caused by too much prescribed breathing.

He knows he almost knew himself on waking in the early morning and oh! if and when you had a body (to use the grandmother’s word) to tell that to at once, you didn’t have to tell yourself at times that you’re taking yourself too seriously (yet he doesn’t need an intimate to tell him, oh guess he’s really asking for it) when he’s strangely huffy and doesn’t think why except that the more beckoning feels the reckless anger of woe, of huffy mumbler, the less he reckons and the closer-up he comes to the wall but never the door of that next room where he is known for what he is. And sometimes at his moments of early-morning waking much alone taking the bait of another day he doesn’t go on with what he’s found waiting for him, the daydream, taking it from there, a horde of folk but there’s just one of him, at most two, two sons while we’re at it, for the horde aren’t him but are all others that he’s like, and waking he finds them waiting and knows how he’s like them, yet he does have a brother elsewhere in the house—

—two sons, two sons of a bitch, was what Jim for one heard his father through walls and years slowly say to Jim’s mother Sarah in the middle of the New Jersey night, meaning—what? to go right up to her? or meaning what he had said into the office phone one day when Jim was leaving with a printing job: "she’s everything to me"—yet

who are we bespeaking of? demands our late-century all-purpose interrogator in a second language, ours, turning away while quick-whipping us with the end of his unseen plated tail which refuses to fall off, while our adopted language if it gets away from him can’t go far in this next room where the door is somewhere closeted in the wall and we have no time for breaks except those clean breaks with self when light leaves us shed from us into the waters of other lives till those relations we see tongue-in-wing and mercurial mirror that we reflect, return us to a curve of angels or a prospect whose mere form we are.

But answer the first question: who we bespeaking of? And then: what’s meant by our adopted language? is it ours thrown quoit by quoit on the wing at moving necks and reaching hands—is it our tongue transplanted by the interrogator? or a language adopted by us on getting up first thing in the morning?

He saw it two ways, and turned back and forth. (Wait—who is this He you are implicating? inquires the interrogator with patience in some deadly proportion or, we almost remember, inverse width to whatever he is doing behind us—and breathes in our direction, from all over the room we could swear though even he knows he could never be all things to us, though from his kind we hope and know it couldn’t be one of the eight sacred genres of breathing the no longer dusty correspondent-woman, we already recall, will study long after she tape-recorded a load of slow-burning Buddhist monk and we now know came from that scene in Southeast Asia direct to Grace Kimball’s loosely structured workshop in New York, but the one kind of breathing that they say can be felt everywhere in the room—because by this cool specialist it couldn’t be—although we have only heard, or heard of, these eight special breathings and can we prorate them over, say, five earning years?, we’ve now got the hardware to do it with)—as we sit literally riveted to a chair brass-anchored to a deck, while on twin screens, miles separate from each other but overlapping, we can conceive of the cosm our brass anchors float in.

He saw it two ways, and later these were enough apart that if he had gone to a tennis stadium instead of an opera he’d have been like a fan following the ball during a women’s match, the court-length ground strokes woven for a minute at a time (read woven gracefully) (read artfully) cat’s cradle where if you look down from above each wondrous taut drive threads baseline to baseline (walloped nurturingly, nurturing the moment’s nature, read) to fade like a radar blip not instantly, across a tropical storm’s heavens that seem possible. Yes, two ways he saw it, looking there, then back to here, and so on, following; but now was different; he stayed at his grandmother Margaret’s down the street. Years, a few short years passed in the night; and he woke and soon reported to her some fully illustrated idea he had in his head but now he was too old to go into the next room and jump into her bed where he had once learned to whistle, so he listened to the gray doves until, still one-third asleep, it came to him that they were the doves he always listened to, and listened if it was a Sunday to red-round-faced Mr. Barcalow’s trotter pass down the wide street, the sandy roll of the high wheels of the sulky and no doubt a flash of a white carnation in the brown velvet tab of his checked sport jacket’s lapel; and Jim didn’t know how he leaned into his future, certainly that he (as we who contain him by being held inside him hardly know) one day might stand outdoors among thousands (he never minded crowds, didn’t have to stand out among them) and listen to the black man King who had a dream he called out into the amplified air of the nation’s capital, that he had a dream, hear the noise, quick, it went right through you: similarly with Margaret’s senior grandson, as, inclining through a dream that made the talk of liquid doves bubbling under the roof at dawn and within his body seem to have borne his daydream across the whole of the night when he’d in reality started "doing" it (as we later came to say) as he woke up—in this waking dream he’d seen into the narrow barrel of a Colt revolver, early Colt (early as Hartford but not Paterson), held and looked at so long he could identify the spiraling dark inside the barrel, that belonged "by inheritance" to his grandmother ("But it’s not really mine") down the wrong end of which, we greedily conceive (yet is it the wrong end?), to a capsuled space thirty years later than this boyhood dream beyond Alaska over the Straits if you want to go that route where many men looked down at the papers and numbers before them, acknowledging that the numbers were on the papers and thus the two could be held in the mind together, and, whatever their legs independently arrived at under the table, these men were able above the table, sometimes fulminating but on paper, to agree on some Upper Limits—boundaries as credible as the bound our Rotating, home working, testable child knew to be that Earthly halo the tropopause where the temperature stops falling, jet winds hollo by at 200 MPH, and the new Everests that have cast off from Earth and have grown like the aftermath of explosion reach their limits which are not your mountain-type peaks but broad mesas in the sky, and, upwards of eight miles from Earth one may pass, masked and well, into these mesas downward like a force aimed at discharging from these cumulo-nimbus clouds mountainous rainstorms which Earth takes in return and not personally.

And finding himself inside the blued barrel’s bore spiraled by its rifling, the boy had rather look at the Colt outside—this is the pistol he knows—that works effectively for God’s sake mside but is a magic weight built of metal like rock and, lying personal in the open palm, was so made for the living hand it seems a growth evolved by the evolved choice of the armed hand in which it has appeared not down a sleeve but from necessities of war— that’s it!

And this "growth" in the hand is, in the mood of some foresight that threatens memory, never absolutely unloaded (his memory told him, as it went beyond his grandfather and grandmother’s warning about loaded guns thrill-ingly to see that between your last look at the chamber and now, a minute or a second later, it might have got loaded again) while at the same time he recalled checking out each chamber, never (a voice in the daydream said) for sure empty as soon as the cylinder had turned that next chamber up into firing alignment. How many guns did his grandfather Alexander mean? This one? Two guns? All guns?

Did he dream one night? He’s sleeping downstreet at his grandmother and grandfather’s and his dream doesn’t matter, might’s well be the Saturday afternoon, as it soon will be, the screen of the Walter Reade theater downtown, a good Indian saying with craft at the corners of the eyes, "Me Jim"—don’t matter partly because he always had this core feeling that he didn’t dream— that is, asleep at night—and his grandmother said it was all right not to— though she had never known an Indian who didn’t and it did help you to know what you wanted to do, but if Jim didn’t, he didn’t—and it’s what the dream leads to in the morning first thing that matters.

Yet before his grandmother Margaret, her gray hair down her back in a loose plait, her eyes soft and aged with sleep, takes inspiration for a story she tells him while they get breakfast on the table that he never thinks of as, you know, competition on top of the dream (early-day dream likely, or daybreak but non-sleep), there was once upon a time in the lighted dark his (whatever it was) dream that provides the inspiration for her story he guesses was made up and thirty years later as late as 1970 and later that old dream came back maintained by the one of her stories it apparently inspired. In the long barrel of the night the boy Jim was ahead of the horse he gripped, a horse sort of made headless by the dark heavens and the mesa of the western night though unquestionably there with him, like a wild friend sharing in no language but that of intense speed some aim of the boy’s to get away to another place which was a place of rescue without losing the place between which he and the heart-lunging horse were leaving miles that no one knew about and you would never prove in the grandfather’s travel books, which were South American anyhow {Tschijfely’s Ride skimmed from half-finished chapter to chapter, from up here clear down to the big turtles with backs like original blank face masks facing down the sky’s blank fiesta, the dust jacket picturing Mr. Tschiffely atop his horse), and miles unprovable principally because you couldn’t isolate where you’d started from—until he and the stolen pony (it was always stolen) were running with their own speed yet, too, of light from the fires glittering all around them smelting the desert mesa with unheard talk where an internecine conference was in progress, and awaited them in a shore of campfires he had to take one by one, wouldn’t he?, except he was being held where he was so all he could see was all of them around him, a great circle, see?, or horseshoe, what they would do, but being the center he and the pony wouldn’t know where to go among these lights and had the impression that they need not run run run because by now the ground under them and the sky over them were their wings and they were the hinge. But the hinge, then, for a circling voice—he had words for it later but not then at thirteen that came at him from the campfires, in Indian that he knew he understood, but what were the American words that said the same thing?, he had heard them often at home but knew them only by memory, as he did in later years when memory told him he never dreamt.

His grandmother, who no longer read to him, knew how to appreciate what happened next, all that was going on, she really saw it. "Why, that’s almost what happened to the Far East Princess"—Margaret looked up from the steaming frying pan into the ventilator over the range and gave a laugh as if she couldn’t help it till it began to come out: and in those days, she said— as if Jim’s maybe just waking daydream was of that time too—it got dark faster than the bird with its lunchtime horse tasty and warm under its wing could fly, though urged on by the Eastern Princess whom the bird would not land until they had reached the flower-shaped mountain which her father the king of the Long White Country thousands of air miles away (since his daughter was determined to travel anyway) had asked them to make an inspection tour of in order to learn all there was to know about the Indian way of doing things. So the great bird went without the lunch held captive under its wing and partly because it already held in its beak another horse, the white-and-black pony the Navajo Prince from a cliff, a crag, far ahead had called out to the Eastern Princess up in the sky on her bird was hers as a gift from all the fast ponies in the pack of wild, royal, and vanishing horses that traveled with him this day that a great sing was to be held, the ceremonial Night Way to heal a hole in the head of the Prince’s mother who sang her own song saying she would let the hole in her head be while, visible to others, spirits of many shapes flew in and out of this demon den in the upper middle of her forehead and her son the Prince had gone away to consult a Sioux cousin in the Northeast, get his thinking on the subject since he had twenty daughters and the Prince had been coming back over the plains and among the sheer canyons when he had seen the giant bird and the Eastern Princess, and, seeing the bird dive and take one horse under its wing and aim at another that was swinging wildly off back to the pack, the fastest and most beautiful, had called out over the miles from his lonely crag that that horse was hers, upon which the bird, swooping again, perhaps concerned that its mistress would find a new steed and desert the bird of the Long White Country, took the gift horse in its beak and flew on: which is all background to the twilight arrival at the flower-shaped mountain as preparations went on for the Night Sing to heal the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head where as night came you could see some of the demons settling down in there, not moving around any more, they liked it there. So when the Eastern Princess flew in on her giant pale-colored bird she was accepted as a harbinger of some change the Night Way chants might bring. And when asked if she saw the demons with winged heads and fat cheeks passing in and out of the Prince’s mother’s hole-in-the-head said only that she did not—but that she did find herself seeing into the thoughts of the young, handsome Indian Prince whom she had met on the way and who pointed to her now as an event he had brought to his people.

But as Jim—having spent the night down the street at his grandparents’ and having understood he was probably not alone—sat at the kitchen table that he had laid with plates and silver for three, and doodled drawings that weren’t drawings really but parts of drawings on a pad of his grandfather’s lined paper, he needed to know more before he could tell if his grandmother was correct that the woman in the mirror of his vision was almost the same as the Eastern Princess. For there were some differences, out there in that western territory. Here he was, now arrived in the center of the glittering internecine fires, they were telling him a thing in Indian he knew he understood and had more than once heard in American words but did not, there among the fires, recollect—

—because it was all one single language, said his grandmother, that’s what you forgot—but who was the person? she asked, if you know who, then you’ll know what . . .

—but he understood that the council fires had other fish to fry—heard a guffaw from the distant living room and the crackle of a newspaper—and the circling talk had told him and his stolen pony that he had to go back where he came from and tell his people their peace offer was not enough and they would have to send a hostage. But desiring to stay there in the burning dark of the ring of glittering campfires, he called to them. And it came out in their language. Which if he tried to understand, then he didn’t, but when he stopped trying he got the main idea that he could be the one to stay, he was volunteering because he was already there, why go back, he’d make the decision there and then and be the hostage.

But at that instant the fires were banked and seemed to retreat and he was left down the barrel of the family Colt revolver knowing that now behind him lay all that land and the other way, which was the only direction he could go because he was cramped, was a pale, nocturnal woman seeing him and he didn’t know if she was in a mirror or he was looking down the barrel at her until the American words of the Indian directive came silently from her to him and he knew she was a decision, a future decision, and he woke with the familiar words, words his mother down the street had spoken more than once but as he woke he heard only the bubbling doves, heard them until he knew that it was them.

"That woman was the Eastern Princess, probably," his grandmother had said, "or at least she reminds me of her," going on to the next step which was the familiar story of the Princess’s arrival among the Navajo the night of the Night Sing.

Jim’s grandfather came into the kitchen with last night’s Newark paper. "At it again," he said, admiring the strips of rationed bacon being lifted on a spatula out of a smoking pan onto a torn-open brown paper bag.

"At what again?" said Jim, who’d heard it before so it must mean this first-thing-in-the-morning get-together between an enthralled vision reporter and a true tale teller.

"Your grandfather’s mind is like a perfectly clear pool," said Margaret.

"Or you see to the bottom of it because it isn’t very deep," said Alexander.

"The Navajo Prince s grandfather," said Margaret—and Jim knew she said it to him—"when he taught him to spear fish showed him it was the clear waters of the stream that were always deeper than they looked."

"But for sheer sharpness," returned Jim’s grandfather, "few could match the East Far Eastern Princess who at a turning point in her life disarmed the Navajo Prince, acquired a Colt revolver, and with amazing foresight changed the course of history."

Jim wanted a canoe though he’d been in a canoe only once. He would never ask his grandparents for it. His mother in her way of seeming not to make noise when she spoke had said that if Jim could earn half she would dig up the rest—what later were known as matching funds. Was there only one Colt pistol out there, for God’s sake?

"You can’t imagine how poor they were," said Margaret of the Navajo. "It’s common knowledge and it’s getting worse."

Oh Alexander recalled her dispatches to the Windrow Democrat, it was 1893 because that’s why she went to Chicago, the World’s Fair, the New Jersey exposition, the crystal labyrinths. But then she went further west and her dad, then editor of the Democrat, was fit to be tied, but she sent back good copy, from Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico. How did she do it? she was nineteen, a sensible girl in a long skirt and high neck, a hat with a brim you didn’t argue with though she changed her costume at some Dakotan point west-northwest of Chicago-Omaha, Jim Mayn for years never looked those articles up in the Democrat archives in the basement of the red brick Revolutionary home that housed the Historical Association (capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units).

"I was a tourist; that’s all I was."

"You were much more than that, Margaret," her husband said with a strength of accent that made the grandson stop chewing and look at these people he spent quite a lot of time with—well, much more than that—his grandmother had taught him to whistle when he was a small child coming into bed with her in the morning when he stayed over.

You know they gave the new Santa Fe Railroad the right of way forty miles either side of the tracks but they broke it into one-mile squares and the railroad got the odd-numbered squares like the grandfather’s checkerboard and some of those odd squares the People, the Navajo Nation, had been running their sheep on for the twenty years since they were allowed out of that mass internment-tomb Fort Sumner during the Civil War, and long before that, before that country through which they walked three hundred miles to captivity (people do that) beside the screak and shimmy of their wagon wheels had even conceived of the Santa Fe trackbed.

Jim heard some cowboys in a movie render the song "Wagon Wheels," he looked forward to Saturday matinee at one of the two movie houses, and his younger brother Brad, who occasionally cooked at home and wasn’t much of an athlete and come to think of it wasn’t very smart either though sensitive, was the one in the family who played checkers now and then with the grandfather who talked while playing, and Brad didn’t mind being beaten.

Well, they grew corn, those Indians, they had their fried bread, they had to go a ways to find water; seed mush they made; we saw squash, we saw melons, and the end-to-end pestles of a pony’s bones, and long after Margaret’s day we see pihon nuts like wampum growing on trees except salted and in jars and hear a goat chomping on a succulent fruit of some cactus in the middle of nowhere, which is a large loose place accommodating on a map a host of small-scale possibilities.

You couldn’t imagine how undernourishment makes fat, Margaret was saying. The railroad was liquor, the railroad was sickness shot straight into the system.

"No immunities, of course," added the grandfather.

Though it was the railroad that swelled Coxey’s Army of the unemployed in ‘94—the big contingents came from west of the Rockies—

A third of them were newspaper correspondents, Margaret laughed, and Jim didn’t right then but some time after did think (historically), so it wasn’t 1893 any more and she was still out there.

A thousand from Los Angeles, two thousand from San Francisco, Cant-well’s Army from Seattle, nine hundred came from Oregon but only fifty-eight marched from Boston.

One from New Jersey, said Margaret.

Oh I went out to meet you, said Alexander.

And missed us both, she said to him.

But got back home in time, said Alexander, so that Jim didn’t ask what he meant. Margaret recurred to the Navajo question. Kit Carson killed their sheep.

But at the time of the Civil War and Fort Defiance and’Fort Sumner and the eight thousand captivity, a rebel group hid out on Black Mesa, among them the very Navajo whose father’s cousin had taken the pistol in question from a Mexican who’d taken it off one of General John Wool’s young lieutenants at Buena Vista in 1847 an obviously communal pistol that Samuel Colt the original inventor was said to have manufactured in Hartford about the time the Mexican War revived his failed firearm business that had begun in Paterson, New Jersey, mind you.

Jim wasn’t much interested in Buena Vista and neither was his grandfather, who knew history but didn’t amplify on Buena Vista beyond some of the steps by which the military sidearm on the mantel in the study had passed into family life, steps which in the collective mind from the time that, back East, the Windrow Democrat was observing its tenth birthday, to a generation and a half later approaching the present century, this pistol that changed hands and belonged successively could appear to proliferate concurrently into many pistols.

"I was a tourist," said the grandmother.

"You were much more than that, Margaret, coming as well as going."

The boy stood up from the table drinking the last of his milk.

"I leave the history to you," she said.

He carried a plate and glass to the sink, grabbed a cruller from the jar whose top the grandfather had left off, but with the door knob in his hand on his way out to the kitchen porch he heard, "Whoa, mister," he had forgotten and was being told clearly what his first errand was before he set foot out of the house.

But whose child, and where, is this? asks the interrogator, and we can hear in the pounding, the noise, in our stereo earphones that he has said "we"—that is, in his statement, We cannot wait any longer for you to decide which you mean. And did the grandfather mean he went out to meet Margaret and someone else when she was returning from the West?

And, noting his "we," we see (but we see nothing—we hear. Hear) our own breathing from several parts of the room, breathing that is not that plural one of the eight sacred kinds of breathing but is literally more than one of him in the room, as if he’s all things to us, which he’s not—and the pounding in our ear is not just us but the telephone torture aforethought by our physician when we imagined what would deter his diva from going on with her fascist mufti, and which we now get without actually seeing, and if the telephone treatment is somebody clapping behind us so two hands never meet yet do meet cupped in the intermediating head—boop boop—whose bared ears they insufferably clap upon hearing us, in lieu of answering the interrogator’s demand we interpose the point "He’s not a child—by this time Jim’s probably thirteen going on fourteen!"

Yet the pain just isn’t quite here—you know?—that is, the pain in the sense of a weight of needing to be instantly not here; and the torturer’s clapping hands in this telephone treatment (if it’s not more than one torturer around us) crash through our head and hardly squash it except to the verge of being in the abstract, and, passing through, meet soundless so that we are threatened with having been already sacrificed to the void without living our death as did (unsedated) an occasional Pawnee maid, whose heart belonged (if not to Laughing Antler here tonight gone tomorrow to the high horizon’s ridge) to Morning Star, rising and dying god of vegetables, son of the Sun God and of Mother Earth, though of the four Pawnee groups the Tapage (or Noisy) went in hardly at all for human sacrifice and if you want to know about that kind of thing look south of the border because our Indians don’t carry on like that, as that original New Jersey explorer Zebulon Pike of Pike’s Peak certainly had at least the time to put it, who before being taken captive from Santa Fe to Chihuahua encountered Pawnee in his quest for the headwaters of the Arkansas; ate toasted spirals of pumpkin flesh (he s’posed they were) but never knowingly met with one of the then but not later (by historians) taken-for-granted sex surrogate aunts of the Pawnees and anyhow had hardly enough bare let alone red skin to pose as her traditional pupil-nephew (Yeah, yeah, yeah, good ol’ A-position P-V—read penis-vagina if you don’t read power-vac—a later Grace "Enters," punching into her single Self such programs of Change that, despite being that reliable mid-American one-thirty-second Pawnee, she is into habitually breaking Habit Patterns) nor did Zebulon ever personally see a girl’s heart cut out for Morning Star Mexican-style . . . Zebulon Pike, explorer, geographer, American, who, if he got the wrong lake thinking he had the source of the Mississippi in Minnesota, still came close.

Grace Kimball came east out of the West, hung high above the clouds, and for many moments pursuing the night with all of America around her, she wanted her brother, who wasn’t delivering milk any more, and had a job and was just married, so instead of him it was all of America she let herself desire to be in like a restless, pivoting (not yet unfaithful) spouse—from the wind-filled gorges of Wyoming where a hermit uncle lived, from the gusty Great Lake near overflowing into Minnesota where her brother had served on a cutter; from the herds and vast hot green of the Flint Hills near Wichita; from the school grandstands that she had once seen from a distance approaching an Oklahoma wheatfield as if the miles of pale brown grasses drew spectators with no football field in between, from town to town throw in the extreme southern Rockies of nearby New Mexico of all this sentimental continent, she loved it. She wanted anything but New York, anything flying in the opposite direction, anything but the New York she flew toward when she also felt but didn’t know she felt (right?) that New York was where everyone and no one would know her—didn’t know this any more than (she knew that) she might like to lie down with her brother beside the man-made lake they grew up swimming in, lie down with her brother another year, nor could have known then (could she?) that she would (in private with her intimates, at least, if not to her loosely structured Body-Self Workshop) preach incest if you feel like it for our post-marital era with its changed alliance systems: Came out of the West, she did, like—

Who now? butts in the interrogator with apparently food in his mouth, torturing our words, and wondering with a blink of his eye, a flick of his tail, what it might mean that the American President was learning to embrace other men in public—

For "Who now?" hears in itself sometimes "What now? what next?" (that is, will the god or once and future goddess think of): but if the Who is Grace, where did our knowledge of her come from, for we are but relations: the answer is, "From her, from her," knowledge given up from her to us though power given’s pow’r received we learn she came one day to say because she knew it all her life and if, once in a Thorsday-afternoon kitchen (though not in that event legally penetrated, for history’s precision yields humor ‘bout it if no one else), or once by a Sunday-evening lake, she got enterred so against her will that for actual decades she ran her own industry of disseminating happy powers of herself among women like offspring of a brief but seminal fuck (you) times an organic friendly uncle (who styled himself itinerant, staked Yellowstone-ward either by National Parks Department or the Secretary of the Interior) who got inflamed by how a teenage girl alloyed a well-equipped (one-thirty-second) Pawnee-American kitchen, but soon after by a friend-of-the-family man in uniform lakeside to whom she did not have the heart, once locked onto, to holler the information that from a point of "no return" as was said of an innocent wartime bottle with the neck broken off, the power she was being given was a certificate certifying that she had been raped long before she saw a work of art that proved all that carrying-on called (scream it jokewise in the shower) rape didn’t have to be entry for whether there’s a difference between up-against-the-kitchen-sink Uncle Walter’s hand coming down behind to clamp around in front thanks to his extensible wrist-watched wrist and (hard by the shore of a manmade lake) that other man that soldier’s gentleness that just got going going and hurt only in (a) one lower vertebra where the experience was ever after permanently housed and (b) her heart that got scared into a death she years later knew had been given her by the goddess to come back from like end we know by seeing it from the far side in each event she got raped without the word "rape" luckily so she could only use it as a growing/learning experience (words, words, words, you can stuff ‘em) until one year she found herself a center of once many distances, now all one by fiat (hers), here in a defurnished apartment breathing tragedy out of the trapped women who came to her and life in—into such formal closets of unused amazement (nee resentment, nee goodness, nee unpaid labor divided by that unwritten chronicle of come-come—or cum-cum) that one day when the children are grown we could just as well come out of the closet and check it out if when we do we leave our gowns lay where Jesus hung them or was hung whether or not Grace could prove not just to the satisfaction of those lives she helped but to her own mysteriously distant satisfaction that Jesus could have enriched the incarnation by getting into being woman too— a thought she had on the plane east—an original thought till years later she recalled her grandmother (somehow, she was sure, not non-orgasmic) who heard a dime-museum orator in the nineties preach about money and economics and claim we were all compound reincarnations from the caldron of former souls—it stayed with Grace:

—came out of the West, never imagining that beyond the general shape of her future husband quickly filled by one Lou (his index finger in 1950 held down upon the tilted shaker’s silver cup) was a "starreen" role in the very history she sprung out of her own refrigerator one wonderful, scary morning some years later aforementioned, yes New York cliff dweller that she stayed (leaving Lou by kicking him out) but restructured, now noisily now quietly and gently, into what her idea of history told her had always been—before Mesopotamia (wherever in the brain’s zodiac that was) and the flattening of the goddess by all her consorts who rolled and positioned themselves into one economy-size husband—oh before all these and more, before American Indian Pakulpota, herself the nurturing world of her own sacred stories, got bloody fucked by the gore-horned Greek goat of Grace’s birthday sign—before all these flowed into the pregnant forms that, suddenly that breakthrough morning in the kitchen like her heart in her mouth, bulged into being—which was the matriarchal force that can bring together and bind and renew you (hear also, in song, "Shampoo you") come again upon the Earth to supplant Dad’s power vac (read P-V sex) through whose nervy dispersals and non-orgasmic romps the balling patriarchy (if we may speak for Grace) disarms all risks abutting Dad’s Pad.

Receptive mixed bloods, we nonetheless find not the siwash cheese smoked roe man-hour (-like) truth-surplus we’re logging every damn bastard day, drinking Kickapoo Juice to change toward human, something more doing our potatoes in Seneca Oil, chewing our peanut-spiked Chiclets, gargling with whole pineapples, barking our noses on Ponderosas to try their chocolate scent in the midnight divorce and marriage ceremony of the late century in question, and (far) above rich deposits of coal, steaming our peppers, our squash, our grasshoppers, our tobacco, and our beans upon a bed of long-fiber cotton, while to really understand this Indian meal, we bounce a rubber ball fifty times without thinking succotash, and watch our joint muscles relax with a curare aperiplus trying in the midst of our silence at day’s end to recall through saying the full name of a sacred laxative we meant to pry away from the Indians before they upped their prices (though we will break it down in the lab, name or no name). But think only of corn—if potatoes are your nemesis—think but of corn to remember what we didn’t know we knew, that half our world crops were tamed first by proven red-blooded American Indians. Think but of the vast reserves of reservation taming all but, say, barbed bulbs of cactus whose babies, it stands to reason, are baby cactus (if the Indians, who like the technologists and the economists feeling technological/economical problems require technological economical solutions, feel Indian problems require Indian solutions, would only export these baby cactuses to the diva’s favorite Mexican restaurant in New York, pricklies depilitated! There it is possible for a small, once-dusty, highly metabolized correspondent-woman to sit at a nearby table thinking she actually hears all that half-conscious Navajo landscape dreaming of great planted fields out of the letter Flick read her—and she has shared a veritable granary of information at Grace Kimball’s loosely structured Body-Self Workshop (where she’s found that all the women who stayed at home while she was in South Vietnam bear with her nonetheless strange kinships) and while she doesn’t know that James Mayn (personally unknown to her) in the line of work Stateside took a story off her flown-in tape of a self-incinerating Buddhist monk with commentary (hers), she does know this very newsman’s daughter Flick, and hears his voice in Flick’s quiet, ironic, loving one reading Dad’s letter, and . . . women, she is starting to think, have seemed in ordinary social contacts lately more substantial than men by and large.

Flick works in Washington, boards her absent boyfriend’s motorcycle, but drives reluctantly (and parks) a great old white sedan given her by her father. She read to the correspondent-woman a letter her father wrote her from The Future (as he headed it) postmarked Farmington, New Mexico, claiming for that landscape this very dream of great planted fields, as if—as if—and our small but growing woman ignoring the well-known mezzo at a nearby table talking Spanish with a broad-faced, dark-mustached, elegant-lapeled male who listens to the diva beyond her words and into her following silence, lovers without question—the correspondent-woman chews a moist, slick baby cactus, moving it around with her tongue, and suddenly she has it! The way Flick’s father talks about that western landscape it’s as if he were—but she has lost it ... he were what? She can’t think?, is this being a woman? can only recall his written words in their imagined sounds read by his daughter Flick who found "kind of irrelevant" his response to what she had written him (God they had a good relationship, didn’t they?) about that strangely sophisticated South American country most distinct for us for being almost not there—2,500 miles long from Peru to the Pole and a quarter of an inch wide, though a thousand feet deep and now most "tragic," the daughter had written—what "we" did to Chile (cut off spare parts for trucks, paid the truck owners’ confederation per diem to strike, and then reported it as a workers’ strike): to which her father rather rambled on (yet not long-windedly—how was that?) about ‘69 and asking a well-heeled German-Chilean beekeeper in Temuco what was going to happen. Answer: if Nixon could be elected last year, Allende the good medical doctor can be elected next year. (You mean . . . ?) That both have been working toward their presidencies for years. (But what will happen if Allende squeaks in?) Listen, the only way for Washington to win this one is for Chile as a whole to win. The beekeeper whose parents came from Germany in ‘45 asked if Mayn was CIA but figured the CIA had other interests than a beekeeper’s father years ago. The beekeeper, whose money came from lumber and brewing, now has just the bees down here in the South, two houses, two hundred acres, two cows, a huge, exact, and green vegetable garden. (What will Dr. Allende do if he gets in, and are you for him?) The only Alliance for Progress will be Chileans with Chileans. (And will he stand his enemies up against a wall?) Is that what doctors do in the United States? (But he is an economist as well.) Allende has said what he will do.

O.K., we know how vulnerable we are to the interrogator and his or her questions; but now, in whatever garb, reverse-collar clerical asking us to confess, or mufti, or period, or (ostensibly to infiltrate certain groups in the big cities) nude, he now does not after all ask if by "kinships" the correspondent-woman means that the other workshop women have bodies like hers or in the local or non-statutory sense are governed at some distance by their mothers’ own trapped dominance and will be until they become their mothers; but instead, the interrogator asks verbatim: "The so-called newsman Mayn coded an eastbound message to his daughter ‘The Future’; she works in an agency in Washington; he has been observed watching the Manhattan apartment house if not the very windows of a former national in whom we too are interested, while Mayn’s people in New Jersey we know accumulated if not proliferated a standard military sidearm at least from the early 1890s on, but possibly since the Mexican War a decade after the founding of the family’s weekly newspaper now defunct—so, is Mayn armed?"

We found we counted on our bodies to tell us even what words we were to know. Until we learned too late (which is our life’s apparent time), that the bodies had not been ours and that we some of us were mainly metabolism mapping live the processing of foods and their absorption into time in persons who now had gone! Leaving us a metabolism working away with violent good cheer but with no body to prove it was our thing—our thing to change. For which—O.K.—Let’s change our things (we suddenly recall our mother said as we all came in in the days when metabolism was relatively unknown and we called our bodies our own and they came running until now).

But now, with no breath because no breather since the breather had gone away, we went on metabolizing; yet found limbs for our curves, fresh eyes for our would-be heads to gather round. Yet this had always gone on and was life’s answer to growth and we would hang in there separately or together, a thrust without an Eiffel to throw it, sometimes a will to stow book and torch in a backpack to keep our hands free for the road—yet with only great, locked-pelvis Lady Liberty available to us for body at the time.

From behind us, the question earmarked for us resonates and—whung —bends, so that, as sound, it acquires a shadow, a sound shadow resembling to angels a very ear, though an ear lighted by such inward sources the unknown brain deep buried there weighs its own visiting angels right as they shed from it yet to busy people imperceptibly imprinted; so comes that old lack or gap between what we’re experiencing and us it’s sad to say now that we have said it.

So that if the question with its overstress on Mayn as a belligerent warrior finds a way around us, the very way so hugs our shape that it threatens to describe us. But abstraction already introduced through the new painlessness of torture into us by the undivided labor of our questioner doubling as persuader opens up in us more than we knew existed yet no more than what we didn’t know we had in us. But comes a new problem: the torture of dividing right down to the bone our collective member (with its memberhood): a torture aimed at making unforgettable the information that comes with the torture, as when the slitting and splitting from root to bulb, vein to internally (urethrally) splinted stalk, of the youthful Indian penis (or peenis) followed by enforced blood-squatting above a fire was meant to make the male never ever forget whatever the point of it all was—his puberty, his father’s rivalry, his own unguessed vagina-envy—whereas our torture in the painlessness of its abstraction receives the interrogator’s question about Mayn only to drop the words through us first in the form of a question about a man or Man’s proliferated arms then into a dozen other questions negotiating the passage of what we might have known we had in us. Passage? (read wormhole, read wind-tunnel, read zero gravity chamber, read time baffle, so long as you kids read).

Questions we mean such as Why does anyone, woman or man, wish to go armed? or take the question of suicide in general, for instance sending or leaving an irate message in the form of suicide to the effect that for years, damn you, messages have not gotten through. Yet whadda you know, the abstracting of our collective member falling pain-proof through the shadow of the sound we would have made if we would suffer conventionally finds in its very thought a breakthrough as real as "the future we already remember we’re in, babe," said Grace Kimball some years beyond her divorced marriage in the month of a thousand reasons and one unrehearsed rhyme given the women who came to know her why first and foremost they had themselves, and not to blame.

Yet thus our demon interrogator has given his torture that old mnemonic twist after all, so we, wishing to be free of the new torture of painlessness, find we absolutely cannot forget Grace’s lanternslides (as they would have been called in her parents’ day) projected now in the eighth decade of the century in question up onto a screen for five hundred women to believe. The message of these slides paired side by side so it looks like two screens, is that—in this hotbed of biology and cure (the auditorium of a hospital)—see for yourself, sisters, the hard-on you’re getting right now proves it, look at the penis then look at the clit, trace your vagina and that scrotum is it, these are the same organs, ladies, which is why you knew you had balls and why men in business and men in bed forget they evolved from Our life.

She didn’t hear the rhyme till later. She didn’t ask whence came it. She said the goddess sent it to her, though if she’s a myth in her own time Grace (who for a time is all things to her intimate Maureen, who calls her Kimball) would not find in any rhyme we carried into her the answer to Where, who, what was she?

Who and what was she?—that sounds like a Lesbian question, she says—heavy duty, heavee—’cause Lesbians (if there are Lesbians) some of them her best friends, are into Romance, the Devotion Trip, and Relationships, though Grace will call herself bisensual and at an orgy good-naturedly swing both ways getting bulletins, my dear, against the warm inner thigh of Other space in her days of swings which one newspaper with her in its mind called group sex, which swingers of her acquaintance might some of them call "orgies," and where in the clean, deviant funs of three-on-one almond oils, laurel incense, pear or apple juice, a supple supply (and friendly!) of small-of-the-backs and hips and supportive parts, plus a less than at-large ratio of kissing to other acts other hugs other moists and ins, room could still be found at Grace’s for shy non-participant members who’d traded their underwear for Swedish blankets, their forethoughts for a fleshed-out evening with people, hear the noise, it is music from the wall, music to our rear, our vaunted groin—it’s breathing to music which drowns out history if you want—and across the openness of our frank rape-safe room see a bunched towel, two towels, yr prayer rug, yr bowl of apricots, yr plastic bag of grass fridge-fresh, a naked hand flat down on the carpet wrinkled at the wrist (a prop), freckles across a shoulder, a massage waiting for a back, all this across a thick and mirrored room-to-room carpet, a band of healthies, a party to fuck, kid to kid, even man to man, to swap experiences, to shed a good tear if it happened, to lay around, to reach, to reach and accept a No thanks if it comes—and to put peer bandhood before pair bonding in order to—to save us a chance: but a chance to do what? to demarry but keep it secret, or remarry our true friends with whom for too long we’ve been one times one, to make a bisexual capitalism to replace war?

She once learned, having said No (but this time not at a swing), that when it comes to real sleeping she likes to do it alone, and in those days she still maintained a bed (the bed), but found she had stopped crying, the little crying she ever had undertaken.

She learned what it was like to fuck someone before she knew him, to fuck on very first—and as the first—acquaintance, and much later, after playing with two or three others, find who this was when she left the easygoing orgy with him, and talk to him now sister to brother on the sidewalk. In a cab, beyond sex, and be properly introduced to each other and to a long talk in that diner that once existed—now mere history!—in the quickening and multiplying overlook of the century in question at Sixth and Twelfth, remember?

There he drank two heavy glasses of buttermilk and ate with magic speed (however slowly he chewed) two toasted BLTs; and she learned what he did and what he was coming off of and again what his last name was.

They had fucked around on a first-name basis back at the mutual friend’s swing and she had heard herself let go with all the regular party noise from her raucous years (high school and other) embedded in the West—"your infinite Southwest M/dwest," the guy drinking buttermilk softly said, who was very very quietly high on her or the night or the music or the imagination of a continent that’s not New York.

Upon which their laugh merged with her ongoing life story told like the wondrous confession of a once upon a time (if you believe it) inhibited American gal—or one of his confessions at his regular Alcoholics Anonymous meeting—well you can see they both of them laughed at his friendly three-o’clock-in-the-morning compass putting her on the map some lapsed, marginal map of mood-"infinite Southwest Midwest." And they held hands across the waitress’s Formica finding that in their respective marriages they had felt to blame and had assumed for ages that the about-once-a-month commemoration of their vows was like the way it was supposed to be even if there were better ways of doing things in poor urban Hispanic families or in Hollywood, Malibu Beach, or anthropologists’ tribes.

Until, like making love after breakfast, poached eggs, coffee, stacks of toast, cigarette smoke, apricot jam in the fridge, Grace and this guy’s long night’s swing wound down with a one-on-one at Grace’s place and such inflamed joy in him that, observing over his furry shoulder a Plains Indian print on her dusky bedroom wall, she might not have found her recently discovered No, had he wished at four A.M. to spend the night; but before she knew it he was gone and she was staring at the Kiowa baby carrier, its hooded purse on the wall a shape seen anew, until she didn’t know she was asleep and didn’t know and didn’t know she was asleep when in daylight she became aware of her hand reaching for the phone receiver to phone that guy with whom she was rehearsing her life and still in sleep laying out to him her new vista of sex-positive economic history.

But she had had this new vista in her anyway; but he got her started on the way home by quoting the philosopher who asked what would you do if you found you were going to repeat your life from start to finish, every fuck-up, with every pain, every downer you’ve endured already, what would you do? And so with a pang unusual in that it seemed to come also from someone else, she halted in mid-roll as she moved to extend her other hand to dial the number she’d anyway have had to get up on her elbow to see on the bedside pad where he’d written it: for she had learned this very little bit so far, which was as real as knowing—with a No—that she liked to go to sleep alone, and it was that this guy she’d gotten it on with at the party and later (harder to recall), here at home after her tea and peanut butter and English, and his buttermilk and BLTs at the diner, was doing that same old winged thing in her head that she knew so well, right? And her own leaden wrongness—she saw it from one half sleep to another—seemed to hold her hand back, that leaden wrongness, as the hand’s fingers went for the phone dial knowing his number after all without looking at the pad, until this leaden drag passed and she fell into a feeling like she’d had after she said No about sleeping and at once had seen that even more than she’d known it was what she had wanted just to say, and perhaps with all our help she found her younger brother absent from the life she had told that guy last night, and as she thought and thought and thought, and the bed drifted to where she recalled last night’s quite magical carpet, she caught herself hoping this two-way phone of hers would ring with the voice of the guy, who had not asked, "When can I see you?" but the phone silence got into her Sunday breathing and she was elsewhere—not (or not yet) Aphrodite dispersing herself far from where Emperor Theodosius’ temple-demolition crew could reach her—but in her very own breathing, which she’d discovered sometimes just stopped like her former husband Lou’s breath, and she would correct this.

And in that breathing with our help she heard her and her little brother’s silence amid the interrupted silences of their parents’ morning bicker. Her brother at that moment not so big as when we saw him previously. But now arising out of maternal fixity amid his parents’ purely verbal but sticky inquiry into whether the owner of a local auto-repair shop had taken up flying to get away from his wife who worked with him and answered the phone and did the paperwork. This issue between Grace’s parents was as outlandish as the earliness of the hour, for they were all of them too damn early that morning. As if by some accident of independently planning to do something private. Meet someone or something. But they must have made a mistake and communicated, and were in the kitchen, battling spouse-parent versus spouse-parent; and Grace’s little brother, when his mother saw the milkman out the window, got told to take two empties out before the man got away, bolted, but Gracie ran after him though mainly into the empty release her mother had created in saying to the boy, put on your jacket, mister!

And Grace imagined him with the empties soaring three steps at a time down the four-step front porch, dashing down the walk, calling to the motionless milkman and so she followed her brother out of the kitchen and through the living room the way he went, to the front door: so that he may have heard her—she never knew afterward to ask—but he turned his head as if to overhear a word of warning never uttered or some news behind him that then came between him and the milkman, whose elbow was on the edge of the delivery truck’s rolled-down window and he’s watching through the windshield what Grace saw from behind—namely, her little brother fall forward like tripping your skate over a rooty hump in the ice so at that instant of soft chipping you are leaving one element for another.

He was stretched out with flakes of one bottle under one outstretched hand unemployed and the other bottle in some form under him. She saw red, but before she saw it and before, with blood facing him, he lifted his backside painfully to get onto his knees, the picture on his little (what’s she saying, "his little"?) his little jacket, the design of the great superchief of the Cherokees on the back that he was proud of, it wrinkled like a slit across his back when the lower half of the jacket rode up skewed, and the legs and leggings of the awesome Indian were for an instant displaced sideward, these crazy legs, so they half came not from the glittering torso with the feathered face glint-boned in her memory but from the blue ground the Cherokee was stitched on.

Clean break, babe, the past is over, it’s history, don’t get drawn back in. Over there is the beaded baby carrier, the Indian papoose purse with the little hood-window blooming dark-pink-lined, standing on Grace’s New York wall one year, gone the next, though into a closet of memories, against the closet wall caged by the collapsible steel shopping cart she still uses even on her new food trip. Expensive, that papoose carrier, that authentic buckskin craftwork: was it women sewed those Kiowa babies up or was it craftsmen? no zippers no buttons no snaps so it must have been loops and pegs, hooks and eyes, but the shape Grace saw from her bed that Sunday morning having thought better of dialing her friend of the night before never revealed itself until she took it off the wall and stuck it in a closet and it had been so long in a closet that it had disappeared even from the closet eventually, the papoose carrier’s little hooded place at the top, the pursed closing down the front—while the evolution of the papoose carrier in her mind wasn’t single many of us could have told her, wasn’t only (since it looked like) the ancestral vagina that yields the future male member, it was the sun shining upon the middle of America where her kid brother and she lay by a public, a man-made lake across which as if on it three horses and riders could be seen passing one by one, and though he loved her he stopped talking and she in her two-piece bathing suit had to roll half-over toward him to look at him and say, listen, bud, demanding he answer her but what was the argument about? she recalls only the scene, their flesh, her orange bra, his bright brown, hairless chest, all told one night in New York like a huge laugh—told to Maureen or Norma, can’t recall, though Norma passes it all on to her husband, and then Grace told Sue perhaps too, whose husband listens and listens while their eighteen-year-old son hears.

"You see," the interrogator adds half-silently behind the potential apparatus, the charged vessel of our riveted chair, "you tried to non-answer our question re: Mayn’s being armed but you betrayed yourself."

Betray? we ask ourselves (betray?) into the area around our chair. Did you mean reveal ourselves or deceive ourselves? we ask, making allowances for his second language, ours, which gratefully lacks those no-no’s his has. And doesn’t the inquisitor who’s behind us pushing know what’s going to happen no matter how we answer?

We ask in the end ourselves, isn’t that our way?, and under this type of interrogation, as James Mayn himself said, we’re human, we’re a survivor.

But the interrogator (in uniform? in mufti?) speaks: This putative woman, he replies to our "Betray, reveal, deceive?"—this womanist nicknamed Grace Kimball has a younger brother, so does Mayn; she has or had parents who fought in private, so did Mayn; she’s divorced and so is Mayn; her genital apparatus is alleged to be in terms of evolution male-oriented; both had grandmas who supported Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marching on Washington Easter of 1894—plus (and our breath is taken away by how the interrogator has saved to spring on us however inaccurately now something largely said so very long ago that it’s just about believed) Kimball left her husband Lou yet he was the one who went: is not this like the mother long ago who sent her son away yet left him with the impression that it was she who’d left: plus the grandmother (breathes the voice behind us distinctly, and racing back over what we all have said, we hardly think but to condemn this totalitarian hireling who may have had the diva’s outspoken old father in the next room or in this very interrogation chair as recently for all we know as us but damn we are saddled as well with the suspicion that this after all non-native user of our language has so ignored the words of our query—"Betray, reveal, deceive?"—that he’s had humorous buttons created out of those words one for each day of his week, but we fight back). But that was Mayn’s grandmother what about her? we retort from our chair seeing nothing before us.

O.K. what about her? replies the interrogator closing in: it goes like this: Grace Kimball is one-thirty-second Pawnee, you said; and at her big turning point she flew east from Indian country to change her life; the grandmother likewise flew east from Indian country at a big turning point in her life and with the beloved Navajo Prince somewhere behind her on her track.

But the interrogator is going haywire perhaps because we have become everything to him—and, ‘ That was the East Far Eastern Princess," we mutely protest, our breath pounding, repelled by our heart—it’s not good—he’s so close now he’s breathing down our neck, what is he about to come up with? we’d like to set eyes on him but we’re riveted and his voice ahead of itself retorts in questions, Who and why was she?

Likewise somewhere behind the East Far Eastern Princess is that pivotal moment when she disarmed her awesome pursuer from the West, the still not entirely empty-handed Navajo Prince; conceived her vision of history to take back to her interested father the King of Choor; and according to Alexander —who is Alexander?—Mayn’s grandfather, but—according to him she acquired for future contingencies that common revolver that in all the hands Indian, Mexican, American that handled it, multiplied into perhaps a small arsenal in fact. While Grace Kimball, to turn to her as you did to avoid our question if Mayn is armed, also flew east having acquired already her vista of history: for it is obvious to anyone who knows women that whatever she felt some years later the dark morning she broke Lou’s egg against the sink and her heart came up—or was it his?—in her mouth—Kimball when she first fled east and well before she met her already imagined husband, already had her vista of history intact if only in essence and by intuition.

That is, without analytic thought, without the study of books which is known in women to bring on Bright’s disease, the interrogator jokes, we think (except to another voice submerged to the point of virtual disappearance in us it’s not a joke, and this voice, a woman, by historical convergence, sighs in recognition of someone whose words she knew so well she was like a friend to her, who died of Bright’s disease far away in another part of the country almost too far to make the trip until one day she elected to think only of herself and like a desperado covering his tracks did take that trip and went away).

So without study or research Kimball came to her vista of history when it came to her, that is to go ahead and be it, make it, because it was in her already in the form of an available space that needed only to be managed. But that doesn’t say how she saw it.

It had its funny side.

Funny? asks an unknown child, looking away from its homework screen but still reading—looking up to and from its home—an unknown child, a multiple child. Funny? it asks.

Well, a side beyond the triangle.

We’re doing rotation in class right now.

Well, there you are, honey, you rotate the triangle, never stop rotating it—that’s the funny side, like you go all around a statue so quietly the statue doesn’t see you move so it’s the statue that seems to be turning before your eyes.

I don’t see what’s funny.

Grace’s brother Saturday in the backyard where his mother in exasperation said he belongs, suddenly has nothing to do. (Except be watched by his sister from an upstairs window.) There’s a line drawn (Grace can just about see it) between his offer to help Dad change the oil and Dad’s gruff "You’re too late, I already started," and, at seven-thirty earlier this morning in the kitchen, Grace’s mother’s empty abstract feeling that she must go on to the end come hell or high water discussing a surprise postcard of a giant gorge—a dark cut in the earth—sent from Medicine Bow, Wyoming, by her brother whom her husband objects to because the man doesn’t drink, is unmarried, doesn’t vote, is a trouble-shooter running errands in the wilderness for the Department of the Interior, and probably (a man like that) doesn’t pay his taxes: the postcard said only, HERE WE GO AGAIN, LOVE TO ALL, WALTER: the discussion in Grace’s mother’s kitchen went on beyond breakfast when Grace’s mother interrupted it to say she needed Dad to drive her to do the marketing and he said he would be busy changing the oil and didn’t know how long it would take: that’s one of many, many triangles, some with Grace, some with only one parent, talking about one thing like a postcard maybe meaning something else which like the unused message space around her uncle’s bulletin from Medicine Bow is both something and a nothing, a gap where you fill it in, you dream at night that you have only others to blame, but for what?—you’ll have to go back and dream again to find out for what and Grace is determined enough to and finds in the office in her hometown where she is a draftsman in 1949 that all the love ‘n romance people are getting where she works is in triangles that all depend on her and she wakes up sad, though hungover and rarin’ to go: you say through (by now) your own windshield one Sunday, approaching the municipal lake, that you will have it different and maybe you will send for your brother when you get where you are going, maybe not. But one week Grace sold her little red (for Rarin’) convertible, hugged and kissed everyone So long—

—The triangles you’re talking about were rotating, observes the serious child looking away from its homework; so didn’t they come all the way around?

But Kimball, like the grandmother, must look ahead, insists the interrogator; she would not look back at the communication gap fusing mother-centered and father-centered forms in one disturbing moment of transition, would not reflect upon the triangles coming full circle—

—because, we add, the family circle, less than fullness, boasted—

—boasted? demands the interrogator, boasted?—

—a circumference, chimes the child.

And inside was all that was inside.

Who spoke up then?

No one really.

Boasted? demands the interrogator; up? his voice above but so close his words sting the scalp.

Nobody ever spoke up and said, I’m angry because after your second drink after dinner you’re half asleep; or said, When you go out to fix the living-room shutter that’s banging in the wind that’s sweeping in from the winter fields outside of town and then come back in like you’re in the reading room of the library and sit slowly so slowly with a sigh down into your straight chair there and right away ask if anyone wants an apple, why don’t you never ask me to go out and fix the shutter? or said, What’s it matter if Uncle Walter just enjoys himself in Wyoming, in Utah, in Colorado, let’s eat breakfast for creep’s sake, or said, When did you two have a good laugh together, no strings attached? or said, Let’s get it out in the open, the power in this family derives from what is not quite said and the power resides primarily—

—in, continues the interrogator, the explosive potential of this confusion of two systems patriarchal and matriarchal, such that (says the interrogator acquiring in our language an uncertain seat he’ll damn well sit no matter what olden cities now rumbling and coming unstuck he’s sitting on top of which is definitely something big) from a matrilocal system appropriate to a women-controlled garden-agriculture where men are secondary and gardens are irrigated by the heavens, the exogamy or marrying out of the tribe was Kimball’s which, as she winged eastward, a true Pawnee in her visions, imitated on the contrary the movement of women to the husband’s home territory in a patrilocal hunting culture where the sons continue to live where they know the habits of the game and every inch of the terrain as the sky rotates over it; whereas, though also likewise, the East Far Eastern Princess renamed Rainbow Cloud at the crisis fled on her bird eastward home to her father’s country having disarmed the Navajo Prince and drawn him against her will away from the lands of his home where he later was abandoned doubly to a matrilocal people as strange to him as their multiple structure of small-scale dwelling units, and to the wilderness of her heart’s one-time errands where he could not help casting his shadow, as he moved on. So you see, recedes the interrogator inside one’s very head totaled hole by hole, the question remains, Is Mayn armed? and is dodged if you turn to Grace Kimball, no more an obstacle to our question than her decision that men (the weak sisters) would certainly dream of failure, can keep the power vac of her privately beaten (now late) Dad from taking us wormhole and all on the public horse we also sit to the power vac externalized and tabled (is it 1974, is it the talks in Vladivostok?) in the form of an accord holding numbers and the paper they’re printed on together in the mind—giving the legs under the table a good deal of latitude: frankly if in the preceding two years three thousand warheads have been added, we have to live after all, so we’ll grant ourselves increases in this area within reason while we still set definite upper bounds, which, early in the eighth decade of the century in question, Jim Mayn, for whom the story itself made an inflationary spiral, recorded as a middling-conscientious newsman who doesn’t go in for predictions while in suspecting that history made little sense even as random intermittence (some overheard economist’s phrase) found more to interest him in the margins, in old and new weather, in it, indeed, those real outer screens, spheres of magnetism, and molecules-turned-ions, and ozone, yes weathers that lid our radiance and in the grandeur of their checks upon us inspire our immortality.

Which prods us to recall what matrilocal-patrilocal adventures the interrogator-persuader, a gross outsider, reported of the grandmother and/or Princess between the two of whom we pivot our eyes back and forth as fast as he interrogation chair our eyes are riveted in lets them, and prods us to retort blindly, Isn’t that putting the horse before the cart? (while we feel him behind us in the ballpoint vibes we’re getting from the ground up writing down enthusiastically as a local idiom new to him). But is it he or really us all now asking, Why did this grandmother-to-be, Margaret, turn out to be such a rather strict Victorian parent? And care less and less for that family paper? The answer is that this did not happen right away, but is that a good answer? And when her own daughter Sarah went to France the summer of 1920, why did she not let her stay the half-year she so longed for?

Yet the interrogator however internalized by us has said next to nothing so far about any Princess (nee born to be Mayn’s grandmother) winging back home East where the Inventor of New York her cranky, ingenious protector (though what was she to him?) turned her into a sun-drenched cloud so that she might escape for a time into the very statue the unassembled pieces of which she had once eight years previous in 1885 at the age of twelve or thirteen viewed with her father and an unknown photographer while behind her this older man she was about to meet who later sent her Longfellow’s Dante inscribed by the poet for her birthday muttered as they stared into the concave insides of the Statue’s face as tragic as it was dumb, "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will," having also given advice which eight years later she took, "Go west, young girl young woman."

So the torturer-interrogator betrayed himself. He forgot we had said nothing of the grandmother’s return adventures with the Hermit-Inventor of New York before she was restored both to her father the editor of a then thriving weekly newspaper in New Jersey and to an old friend and sometime beau Alexander to whom she soon gave her hand in marriage and indeed friendship and with it an authentic Colt revolver she herself by conflicting accounts had taken as a gift or stolen to use as a deterrent possibly with its possible former possessor in mind, the Navajo Prince who was never so much the obstacle she put behind her to coast the future wind’s inevitable road home as he was the love in her she passed on in her self and her stories to the one of her two grandsons who, then as later raised to the power of future, was in two places at once but not at one.

And one of these twos that he found himself so bound to he found them in himself like obstacles to be sought again and again was on one hand his grandparents’ house and on the other that other home down the street of Windrow, where a mother sent two sons away, at least one to live human and go on being animal, which, since these two were not just two but one, meant you might have it both ways, why Grace Kimball said so somewhere in the ongoing structure of her good works which accommodated a multiplicity of small-scale units, Redesign your life, cleanse that transverse colon you’ll feel like you’re flying on coke, while you’re at it, at it, at it.

But, Pawnee though she was one-thirty-second, other Indians meant something more actual by having it both ways of being human and animal, both your totem, hence you’re an eagle or you’re a coyote, say, and if the both of you are coyotes or you’re both eagles, you two can’t marry.

This the Ojibway medicine man with the diamond squint might still accept in this day and age matriculating thanks to the diva’s doctor with four of the diva’s own natal compatriots in a forward-looking aeronautics college within range of Lake Superior.

Can’t make a living shipping tapeworms to the opera stars even should she be reduced to the great Minnesota tapeworm as her personal totem softly singing in the entrails of a drifting, ever drifting Mille Lacs pike, "Fly me, fly me." But it was no joke to the diva’s doctor; words have weight; the past has weight, and so, as we have seen, have the diva’s multilingual dictates; just so, the doctor straggled for years to transplant his heart from the mother who called his true love Archaeology his "Hiawatha studies"; and he might relieve himself double-checking the god Morning Star though never at first hand confirm the published report that Navajo women think if you depart from the missionary position which gives you at least the vantage to see up through the teepee’s funneled smoke-hole (since they haven’t evolved ceiling mirrors beyond the mere sky in this culture as yet) your baby will come out feet first. Sediment info from a long-gone sea.

Like Mayn, who’s some of what by now we all have in us, we’re out here in the future but at the same time we’re not. This here is already past or gone and something of an illusion and as he lightly told his much-loved daughter he thought he was at times in future no kidding and was imagining our present as past; crazy, eh?

And why this should be he wouldn’t blame on anybody else which would be like seeking Power, or like seeing History as Seasons, or Upward (Yes!) Mobility, or Greed, or Consciousness Determines Being or Being Determines Consciousness, or some damn story to scrawl on a sheet of graph paper. Yet he knew he chose or "gravitated toward" unspectacular nuts-and-bolts subjects. He was curious how the nation made its living.

But that he was in future and, as we remember, covering a space or place known as a libration point, there’s little doubt, it’s ringed with gravity valleys and gravity wells, and it’s a place where you can stay put because the pulls of Earth and Moon equalize with another force they didn’t tell him what it was. And if he really went there along some declining curve, he did not imagine with enough vividness asking what dreams might come to citizen-settlers there after the thousandfold shock of being transmitted one for two.

But the point is that pairs of persons are lined up waiting to enter the bubble. They even eye one another smiling speaking in their travel excitement of that reckless rumor that they’ll become one person—but when?—and if so, who then? It’s like one of the old modern elevator-capsules and each pair when it’s their turn stand Indian-file on a plate inside this bubble composed of a million million chip-templates of perhaps electro-magnetism which, at the right moment, throng—we already remember, we’re repeating what was given us verbatim—throng two waiting bodies with non-visible radiance that brings out the cells in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin. Till the point when the million million collapse into one idea. And the two persons standing on the plate at Locus T are apparently dissolved to frequency here in order to be reconstituted elsewhere so as not to slog from here to there in an operational displacement of volume, but no they are instead subject to another change which Mayn finds in the altered meaning of T which was for "Transfer" but is now for "Transform," two to become one, a clean economy which may accommodate three, four, even five as soon as they improve the plate.

And he isn’t clear what the two transformed to one are transferred to, where do they wind up besides together?

His questions bury their own shadows and he is there in the past which being the century in question he’s got to get with, lest it seem unreal; he’s a decent guy (he sometimes thinks just in those words), and words have weight though sometimes giving light and sometimes not (and between him and others we have given ourselves those who are already angels flesh of ourselves so that entering a delivery room and looking at the faces of a woman and a man there, we might be light enough or too much to go around, for light as we become it has weight) and while he just as soon not know light weighs, Mayn’s going to see that disposable past (our present) as well as can be. Which helps us because we’re in it. Though then he’s in up to his ears, years deep, back to grandmother, who went ahead herself—odd—ordering a small granite grave-marker from Red Bank and saw that it was laid exactly where she said in the cemetery with, in retrospect, breath-taking soonness, so that for the grandson Jim (he wouldn’t know about his younger brother Brad whom he imagines he never knew very well) all these things are equal to each other long or brief, and falling far into the warped horizon of what he declined to foresee or made himself not think of, he drew with him like his grandmother’s stories also a throng of voices—call them Relations—such as his father, the cousin outsider from Pennsy who took over the Windrow Democrat when it was about to fail because no news was not good business—about to fail because it was still sort of old-fashioned political and small-town thoughtful and "passing parade-ish"—saying out loud to his wife, Jim’s mother, through walls and years slowly in the middle of the night, "Two sons of a bitch," which wasn’t as easy to say as his grandmother Margaret’s recitation of Henry Aldrich Long fellow’s "Seaweed," ending, God help us,

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting

On the shifting

Currents of the restless heart;

Till at length in books recorded,

They, like hoarded

Household words, no more depart.

—for which once when she recited it spontaneously at Bedloe’s Island in 1885 among the uncrated parts of the Statue of Liberty, she subsequaintly "here with" received in the mail on her birthday a marbled copy of Longfellow’s rendering of Dante’s Commedia inscribed to the uncle of the Inventor of New York by (as the Hermit always addressed our reverend apostle of a shaggy national literature) "Wadsworth," H.W.L. himself at his dining-room table in Boston, near where the diva’s doctor’s mother at Sunday breakfast once upon a time pooh-poohed his "Hiawatha studies" and nearer in time (but not place) to the table where a Unitarian sage momently adopting a shaman’s baritone wrote with the copacetic beat of a Hindu god that

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near

and so forth, words once recited by their mother to his younger brother Brad while Jim stood outside the music-room door listening and when there was silence looked through the wormhole. Which, with us probably in it, was flushed out after the diva’s doctor left and before her South American officer returned seeking not only her flesh but, as she, an anxious daughter, well knew, further information. The worm’s gone, and we’re behind the news because the diva has already sung another role and all we know, feeling about opera (grand, bel, comique, or other) as Grace Kimball and Jim Mayn do, is that at the crunch the priestess, torn as she was between love and anger, didn’t kill her two kids but instead disappeared into flame conveniently offstage.

We ask no more of her, and she’s followed by applause we hear without being told—not followed by the silence in Windrow, New Jersey, the silence in the next room, the music room, which made Jim secretly in the hall outside bend down and see what he could see through the keyhole because his mother had been sort of sick really months now but he saw only her bare elbow pleasantly at its inner angle puffed and creasy and then as she went on reciting or reading again her elbow moved out of sight and was instantaneously replaced on the chair arm by the fingers of Jim’s brother, the fingers were all he saw. Not long after that their mother’s death by drowning was reported in the Windrow Democrat. The report was incomplete, omitting reference to a suicide note one report said had been left impaled on a beach umbrella strut at Mantoloking, and as the days went on—and a day came when Margaret took Jim to the cemetery for the laying of a stone—he recognized that he did not want the body to come ashore because he would want to see it.

And so the weather and the sea made a secret familiar cover for the powers that be and wind and weather a sandman’s cover also for a mother who disappeared where salt waves rolled and eyelashed upon a beach but who then, as a future absence, brought herself close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap where, after that old silence, her voice would sometimes resume: "When me they fly, I am the wings." So she would pick up perhaps the vague memory of Emerson from her mother Margaret, if not the love of verse, which she had on her own.

And through this gap a future would always come, as she did not: except a breathing wind that came firm and steady, expelling, drawing back, the night, the day. And hearing this wind, her long-lost son Jim found obstacles for it.

Ship Rock

From any distance it is all by itself. But he is not thirty-five miles away now. But what is he?

Risen alone off the dry plateau, this rock or mountain of a rock has seemed as alive as it is dead. Now nothing stands between him and it. Upwards of fifteen hundred feet of ancient gross height, it is as much before him now as the great morning is all around him.

Look, he’s not a landscape man, and here the Indians have given this thing back to him.

Ship Rock: he doesn’t know what he feels—he feels that much and more. And then knows that if now nothing stands between him and it, nothing ever did.

There’s a word for it, there always is, he thinks, for the Rock all by itself. It is all by itself—is this the huge thing about it?—as grand as its name, Ship Rock.

From far off, it is like a mountain let go by some landscape it once belonged to. But close up, two miles away now, two and a quarter, it has him all to himself. (Well, now you got it, how you gon’ move it?) What was moving out there on the Rock? An eye that swept through him unseeing, leaving him what he is. He’s what he is, no more.

Ship Rock is great and natural, a mount freaked out of nowhere so you can see it from anywhere, that shows a rock can be greater than a mountain. It’s doing something he can’t get away from. Stately monster-craft bound always in some direction other than his, as if it has no memory of prey, has only his memory.

Look, he’s not a landscape man, he didn’t plan to be here. Yet having stopped, he feels how long he’s been going. And so he looks and looks, and for several minutes doesn’t look into other spaces of this New Mexico morning. As if he’s made a discovery. Though he and discoveries are as much beyond each other as the curls of taste in his mouth are too close for contemplation if not comfort. But they’re not the taste, the touch, of raised numerals on credit cards but of cigarette smoke, of bacon, buttered toast, yolk of fried eggs, last night’s booze at a motel he’s checked out of that’s thirty, forty miles away, coffee with all the creamy chemicals that went into it to give you a send-off where you stayed seated at a breakfast table that comes with all the furniture on top of it in front of him that makes you love America, a table chosen for the window it is near, your shoes on the carpet, thumb and finger on the cup handle, waiting for the—smiling toward the—waitress in her cowgirl outfit far away across the motel’s sparsely populated dining room. There’s a painting of Ship Rock by this window that looks out on the aquamarine swimming pool. But it wasn’t the painting by the window that brought him to where he is now. And where is that?

The Rock rises upwards of fifteen hundred feet right up off the plateau. Half again that long at its base on this south side, it still seems less massive than lofty, for it is alone. That’s what the local Navajos call it—the Rock. Pretty much one rock (mono-lith) with craggy crops lifting towards two westward peaks with a massed steady shift against downward veins of long, vertical sharding and against the backward pull of what starts two-thirds of the way up, a slow climb beginning at the top of what looks like sheer cliff and climbing from there so that, notch by notch, the eye that is taken along these splits and levels takes his whole crazy body into what he’s witnessing, until something is an event.

What is?

Is it his desire to change?

To be going nowhere for a change? But he has been.

His desire is to be here—that’s it.

But he already is.

But he would like nothing to witness. Not here in the stillness of the morning wind. Not Sandia Man crossing the strait from Asia twenty-five thousand years before they thought of Christ.

Yet what is moving? Something is moving.

For him the Rock and where it is are also an aerial photograph, black and white, in a friend’s complete book two thousand miles east of this great morning of the plateau. The picture shows Ship Rock and two reptile tails running out from it south and west like low ranges. They’re called dikes.

In the lower half of that black-and-white page the gods filled in the scene ages ago. An authoritative drawing of vast layers of sedimentary terrain. Layers like colored sand. Erosion centuries deep turned into height in the cutaway segment, so the former plateau lies like a dammed sea hundreds of feet above the floor he’s standing on and, dwarfed in the towering corner made by the cutaway walls, a familiar shape haunts itself, a complete mountain unborn within the Earth, not a ship yet, while behind it the corner’s beveled geometry fans back upward like a slide upholstered in concrete—the cutaway restoration of the old volcano’s inner cone descending to the place where magma came burning up out of its underworld of pressure and bored its vent.

Ship Rock, then, if you believe the geologists, is not half what the whole scene was.

The volcano cools and becomes inactive. Last lavas inside the cone harden. Centuries of weather sweep the land. Wind wears down the plateau, the volcano has vanished.

But not what hardened inside; not the cloaked shape, the Rock down inside the now vanished cone. Shielded from the wind. Hidden inside a disappearing volcano.

Ship Rock, then, was not visible; it was inside a volcano that is not here now, a volcano visible now only to geologists with their cutaway restorations. All this is easier to believe with the discrete drawing in his friend’s book in front of him than here.

She’d looked at the drawing when he held her book out to her, and she’d said very softly, "Oh of course."

The Indians, too, speak of a time when Ship Rock was nowhere to be seen. Or are supposed to speak; or will if you can get them to.

A hundred years ago a governor proclaimed that Navajos caught off the reservation would be treated as outlaws. Well, look at how the Navajos not to mention the Apaches raided the Pueblo Indians in what is now northeastern New Mexico.

Navajos don’t talk much.

He believes them also when they say nothing.

And he tries to think where he is now. He listens to the cooler, stronger wind in that photograph two thousand miles from here, the Rock in front of him fifteen hundred feet high and rising. And it is there because it rose. In another form, if you listen to the geologists. Another life. An economist who’s lived here off and on for thirty years differs: he says as far as he knows the Rock is fourteen hundred feet high. So maybe it is settling.

Again, there’s movement, maybe it belongs to the beholder.

But while the southward dike is in the corner of his moving eye here on his left twenty or thirty feet high running beside the car track and in a minute he could climb the boulder-strewn rampart of the dike to the brittle-looking crest (and look back down to where he is or was and see only an empty car), still he is watching only the Rock, for there’s movement somewhere there.

From here the Rock is a gigantic, partly slumped thing, a sacred thing he might have to admit, until he thinks about it. Set adrift by its terrain, it’s no less on the endless Navajo reservation, and he has no plans to give it back to them, they don’t need it, but it’s theirs anyway, and not his to give, even at this hour of the February morning.

And what isn’t on the Navajo reservation? Just about everything except New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Reservation ends when you get near the suburbs of a prosperous town with banks and bars. (The Indian women want no liquor stores on the reservation, they’ll trade the booze away, as far away as distance can contain the land, and in return they’ll take their men’s chances with car accidents.)

Did the Indians come here like him across the broad morning, watching the wind touch the dry land? When the Indians came here, they looked at this fifteen-hundred-and-thirty-foot-high berg of solidified lava shot through with hunks of sedimentary rock and granite torn from maybe nine thousand feet below and also from the volcano’s throat, and they told a story of how this deep-keeled Rock had brought them. As if it had not been here until they were. So they’re still at least tied for first.

He got off a better story than that last night in the motel bar. Multinational executive sent abroad to the wrong city and no one noticed. But other stories he’s not telling; some he doesn’t know; some he could tell without instinctively understanding.

Now moving goods he can follow—from electric power to paper products, from suds to spuds, white bread to natural gas. But funds traveling from phone to phone? from one nocturnal continent to another? from agribusiness through the congressional pocket via NASA to weather business, from insurance to war and back, the moneys finding their way into a faraway bank like a corporate thought confound him more than he ever needs to say in a report or in transcontinental gossip in a midnight saloon with a jukebox where he found he would not mention Ship Rock, didn’t want to, couldn’t.

(Well now you got it, how you gon’ move it?

Oh jes Chippeway at it.)

Not that he knew the Ship Rock stories in depth. Whose depth are they out of? his? theirs? What are those stories to him? A use the Indians put the Rock to. You can’t take that away from them. Not that the Indian Youth Council in Albuquerque guarding once-renewable land and water resources spend their time holding on to those myths. The Indians called this thing in front of him "the rock with wings."

Well, he can see wings all right.

Sort of folded.

If he’s looking at the right side.

But viewed from the west the Rock also has a prow—viewed from over there to his left toward Arizona, which is twenty-odd miles west of here. Seeing the prow, the Indians called the Rock a ship, and so its wings are also sails.

He flies to and from Ship Rock for a long moment on business, dividing himself between—well this rock has possibilities!—but such that he is one of them and is content to be hypothetical, a hypothetical man, if that’s not too safe. (Cochise Man began harvesting maize almost six thousand years ago; come on, make it an even six thousand!) He could rent a helicopter for two hundred bucks an hour.

But was he awake back in Farmington when he phoned from the motel and found he could rent one for two hundred an hour? Farmington—thirty, forty miles east of here, booming from the power plant and strip mine nearby in Fruitland. He believed the name but never found the town, didn’t look for it, found only what he was looking for, which was the plant, the mine.

Two hundred an hour to rent a chopper, fly over Four Corners Power Plant (think of flying under it), divide the labor, the chopper’s blind, throw in Ship Rock a few minutes west. And welcomes into his head now in front of Ship Rock a helicopter landing a girl on a craggy top to do an aftershave commercial, Indians don’t themselves shave, or do they?—a Hopi girl, Zuni, Pueblo, Ute, what’s it matter so long as she’s alone? to face the beast of height, be pumiced on the rough tip of rhino hide until the monster, its fading irritation pounding in its skull as the retreating aircraft sinks to the far corner of one eye, senses at last in its own renewable teeth the human gift perched riding it.

No headache took the place of that chopper, no pain the place of the girl—he saved her. He woke high and dry. The height of Ship Rock isn’t to be eroded by choppers dropping wrinkled yellow-and-black tape measures or taking soundings with a frequency that might erode the magnetic heart of the thing.

A sailing ship shrouded in power to the nomad Navajo in those generations before the plateau got to be more like desert, a wind that drew the elements together, and the earth was the earth and a supership could sail through it in those days. For was the earth not softer, subtler? has since become scrambled like the matter and/or energy of sample people two at a time standing single-file on a metal plate waiting to be turned/transformed/transported, drawn perchance (per couple) consolidated and economized into one person, a future nightmare of his (drop the mare, it’s a whole night) that only he has seen through, though he has asked if it may not be a dream while his question is a struggle floating upon a deeper struggle, which is to decide if the dream is bad or not.

Two thousand miles east and north a red convertible appeared between a blighted elm and a wide green maple. Two thousand miles east and north but at a minutely altered angle from where the friend’s book with the black-and-white photo lies. Angle of six months from the photo; six months/two hundred miles. A red convertible with flared sides—pontoons like the old running boards his father in a formal coat and top hat was photographed riding on from church to hotel at the wedding of a best friend. Pontoons now, not running boards. And the red car—the red car left the dirt road, rolled down the grassy bank into a lake and, honking at a small sailing craft, a Sunfish, that his own sun-dark daughter and son in bathing suits and only one life preserver were just coming about in, the car crossed to the far point of land and slowly went behind it honking, low in the waters of a New Hampshire lake doing eight knots instead of eighty miles an hour, the state where you’re in the shadow of Mount Monadnock which is no special respecter of the increasing complexity of family moving from the sub-Ur-father’s role as mere fertilizer (to be ploughed right in), to civilization, where the father spent much more time with his family.

Six months gets him to August, but what’s his direction? But this is also maybe six years ago. Time travel isn’t all magic; it can be hard overland work, minutes into hours into worm-geared days of a long division of labor as strung-out as a string of mistakes and as specialized as the stone of which the Ship Rock ship was made to hold together.

For a great stone ship was what the Indians observed Ship Rock to be, long before concrete hulls. The Great Spirit had sent such a ship to carry them. A vessel which he has no plans to give back to the Indians, for this is their ground anyway, all twenty-five thousand square miles of authentic Navajo desert, as full of mystery for some itinerant folklorist as for a farmer told to go ahead and plough, harrow, sow, and reap here. And here the ship is, supposedly.

Well, if it’s a ship, what does it draw?

From the west it is a weathered prow made partly of the seas through which it has come: but from here, from the south side, it’s a dark berg, gray-brown, relieved by sun to a dun ochre here and there. Which is very different (as someone importantly says, very different) from the far side, the opposite or north but not necessarily dark side, from which the Rock is a detached Alp but redder than on this south side; and on that north side high up a trough of snow with distant brevity runs down like a valley tilted vertical, and it leads down to a sheer face.

He tried to come at it from that side; didn’t get closer than about three miles, steering some cross-country dream into a gully, scraping the gas tank, the muffler—he hasn’t looked, the car’s not losing fuel, just burning it unleaden into Father Sky—but yes, smoother sailing in some early daydream he had before an alarm got him up in the motel this morning; he’ll get back to it, it’s in some limitlessly fueled motion inside a familial voice; Mother Earth’s? or an Anglo grandmother’s American voyaging in her grandson’s mind, her tales of the East Far Eastern Princess who flew over the deep land and the long waters to visit the Indians of another century—but now here on the south side looking roughly north he sees Ship Rock furled and unfurled, and slumped left-to-right down from the profiled prow. And its motion if you dig it in the faint rush of a mild wind and against a jukebox song in a motel lounge thirty-odd miles away about a "hy-po-thet-i-cal"—man, he thought—(half-heard last night beyond his own voice and others telling stories, two others, two big hats as if on one face, two voices he was with)—yes, the motion, Ship Rock’s, the motion of the ship, is all the more marked by the absence of motion in the sky, no clouds.

Oh other Ship Rock stories. Handed down (he can see them doing it), sung, unsung. Fellows around a fire—probably a painting of it on the motel dining-room wall. Handed down by women too. Do women think about ships, do they make up myths, what freedoms do they take, do they believe what men say? He’s dumb. He doesn’t know. Once there was a New Jersey grandmother who gave news of an Eastern Princess, angry, without appetite, hopeful, palely proud, riding over dry land and deep water on the back of her hungry bird.

Well, on the way out here on business he must have passed her going the other way, long dead, touring some other latitude of the dead.

Stories that weren’t hers, quite, but were stuff he carried now on him. The Indians had theirs; he had his. He liked her—his grandmother—and so he took the tales she gave him. Of this Eastern Princess whose "Father-kin" as she called him had shown her all the sights and great deeds of his country which was as far away as the mountains of Manchuria and the noises rumbling at the bottom of the world, and had introduced her to all the young nobles he and his loyal wife could muster, and he’d given her, in that country of theirs far away, an age away from the western Indians, a young and growing bird of a giant kind noted for its traveling powers and its generous appetite for large, moving animals, galloping camels in Egypt, cows in its smoking beak when it came upon them, young elephants curving their trunks back like horns, and she flew past the pyramids, and the long-elbowed mammoth goats beside the hot, lofty waterfalls of Iceland, and she visited the ritual slaughter places of five continents not to mention a healer in the Dark Continent who with a painless razor-thin whisper of a knife parted the skin of a patient’s back from neck to waist to let out the smoke and fat of difficult messages her middle-aged grandson now in contemporary New Mexico daydreamed as a boy in New Jersey that he must speak aloud, not just hand over sealed, because these words and tales he knew in his sleep, how the Eastern Princess went among crystal labyrinths decreed by the chieftains of the Chicago tribes—O.K., that’s got to be the 1893 World’s Fair she visited, but what about the unheard-of flowers growing down out of haunted ceilings that for all her humor and calm may have haunted the Anglo grandmother who once evoked them—but when her stories stretched out to the western Indians, they were other than your authentic tales given from age to age about, well, Ship Rock: if not made up by an ethnologist tape recorder in Albuquerque in collusion with the Indian Agency (stumped by unemployment), handed down to a generation of geologists (some in collusion with the energy interest—though geologists and true) who concluded, who saw, under the moon of September or here under the morning sun of February, that the Rock looks like a sailing ship.

Its sheets and shrouds hauled full. Its speed a myth unclouded and un-tackled by any measure except here this hypothetical man’s shallow anchor where he stands in front of his rented car in extreme northwest New Mexico watching Ship Rock.

It’s been there since yesterday, he couldn’t get away from it, getting closer to it, going away, coming back, scale constant, size negotiable, alone, hence receding.

He’s not sure if no one knows he’s here.

Across the red slope of beach at the base of Ship Rock about two miles from where he stands, something moved a long time ago. Too fast not to be a vehicle. Then he didn’t see it—and is there a road out there across the Rock’s sandy-looking foundation?

Who goes there in the February morning? He’s heard from an economist in Farmington thirty, forty miles from here, of lovers with pitons, hammers, climbing boots, who didn’t make it. Who went up there together and came down separately. (Permission needed to climb the Rock.) Or were never seen again, together or separate—drawn into the Rock or into themselves like newlyweds who stand on the plate twenty-some miles west and a bit north where the corners of four states—Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico— meet at one point and you and your lover can celebrate a boundless troth by being in several states at once. In 1906 the people of Arizona vetoed joint statehood with New Mexico. Maybe two stories slide together, the Rock that absorbs, the Ship that transports. The stuff breaks off; it’s volcanic tuff, a lot of it—ash—it crumbles. And people do more damage than the wind. But to themselves too. The lovers got high enough to fall but not to leap. It rises while you climb. Designed to.

The Rock’s a place itself besides where it is—a place then more three-dimensional than most places. It is its own place, he thinks, and, unaccustomed to such thoughts, he feels a slight exaltation threatened with being exposed or wiped out, knowing what he feels, holding together. And holds on to what he sees—that Ship Rock might be a fistful, a handful—might be terrain grabbed like material, a land grab, some heavy stuff like sandpaper snatched and yanked in one wrench upward where it stays stiffly, nobody’s going to hear the continental crunching sound he makes up, one hand touches the other finding a brown-and-green relief map at school in New Jersey thirty years ago swelling under glass so you wanted to run your hand over the crust of mountains, long before he knew Ship Rock existed, and if so, would it have been visible on that school map under glass?

This is Ship Rock in front of him. There it’s been since yesterday. It stuck up through its own rust haze at thirty-five miles and could be seen long before the journey to it was begun or thought of.

But now he is here, silently close.

Some two miles away, away but practically there, here on the desert-dirt track rutted down off the highway. A mile or so off, and then with a Navajo language talk-show in his ears he gently braked the car as if he’d reached the NASA Press Site for a launch how many moons ago and couldn’t get closer, and there was a white Saturn rocket, three miles away, quite a distance, but you give a monster space.

Now a rock.

He’s taken 5,648 (the plateau) away from 7,178 (the top of Ship Rock), figures on a survey map, to get 1,530 feet. Up off the plateau. The great continent of the plateau, that has a tilt, the faithful say, a long tilt as slight as time here was slow. He’ll feel the tilt this morning if he can.

The economist in Farmington could laugh quietly as if he knew where he was, and probably did, and didn’t seem to weigh his words and didn’t need to, besides some of the figures on coal and water that he handed over on a sheet of paper, also Mother Earth, Father Sky, helpmates in the song like white corn and yellow corn, the frozen reconstituted orange juice that the economist mixed with mescal like the Indian song’s music and words growing together; quoted the idea (not his own, he said) that a country is like a cargo ship where the load isn’t lashed down and when it tilts with the ship the load slips and the ship founders.

Oldest habitation in America. Desert floor is a phrase you hear. Prior words. He thinks up desert ceiling. And what falls if the ceiling tilts?

Geologists, of whom he is not one, say Ship Rock came here not across the land and sea but up from below; and the Indians, of whom he is not one, have a tale to match it, about monsters in the depths of the earth—heroic, perhaps memorable conquests of which this mass, once monstrous, is a petrified sign, for the long, miles-long dikes are the congealed blood of the Hero Twins; but he, hypothetical man, he came out to this region on business. Business that’s as visible from here—off to his right, four topless stacks hung from white smoke, twenty-odd miles off—as this Ship Rock was from there yesterday. This ship. From everywhere around here. Its draw is fathomless.

He’s at Ship Rock and didn’t mean to come. Detour this far, this close. Or has to see that he didn’t mean to come in order to guess that maybe he did.

Not that he could avoid seeing Ship Rock from where he was yesterday.

From the power plant and the strip mine beside it that were his job to see.

While Ship Rock twenty-odd miles west kept coming into sight over the shoulder of a white man in a hard hat showing him the great plant and the so-called Navajo mine. No, not the mine. He went to see the mine for himself, he passed the power plant’s distinct blue lake. "No Fishing, No Waterskiing, Keep Area Clean"—foreground against the four white smokes rising into Father Sky. They’ll tell you the strip mine’s a whole ‘nother operation; but it’s right there next to the power plant, stretching for dark hundreds and hundreds of acres beyond its own monopolized horizon.

The mine’s power plant? Well, it’s a different operation, you don’t have to dig for the mine’s power. The power plant’s mine? Well, sure—the Navajo mine. Electricity for California. Power to the People. But this isn’t California; this here is New Mexico.

"Ship Rock is distance," he jotted into his head beside some figures. But let’s not get soft-headed about the Rock out there, O.K.? your voice inside you like an inner peace attempts an inner drone.

But outside you the man’s voice in gear growls pleasantly. The man cites Navajos on the payroll. The question arises, How many, and are they in top jobs at top dollar? And what percent of the good jobs are filled by non-Indians brought in from outside?

Ship Rock sailed on in the distance like a touring hallucination. But right here Utah International’s got the black coal cars of the Navajo mine railroad hooked up behind a red-and-white-striped black locomotive.

How he first reached Ship Rock was through a book, a black-and-white glossy shot, and on the facing page an account of this supposed volcanic neck: the Rock photographed from a plane ten miles to the south, maybe more, the Rock sending off like a supermount two lesser chains, the dikes, the reptile tails. (The photograph is, among other places, two thousand miles east of here, near the three scattered members of his immediate family.)

Volcanic neck. The State of Montana boasts a volcanic neck famous from the proving grounds of New Mexico to the gales of Wyoming, but that volcanic neck doesn’t look like a ship and (courtesy of the geologist’s imagination) it’s missing a head. But wait, a voice says, we mean neck in the sense of throat. It doesn’t have to have a head on its shoulders. But the truth is that the throat is long gone; the neck is what’s left, the neck that was inside the throat, if you see.

The way the heart is inside the stomach at seven in the morning after a hard night. God, he recalls necks of land with plates of Little Neck clams on them, but not in the noise of last night.

The volcanic neck in Montana doesn’t seem to be climbing up out of the plateau like Ship Rock. He’s seeing things, he’s a victim of last night, last year, of what he’s read or been told; and he’s sick of it. And prefers to just look. Look at one object.

Prefers? The word weasels between yesterday and this coming afternoon so that they threaten to approach each other like yesterday afternoon’s business and last night at a motel, threaten to jam him between industrial information and, at the bar, boomtown big talk, two engineers from the Four Corners Power Plant, their evening Stetsons low to the eyebrows, both going home later to their ranchhouses along some street, but as for him—on a business trip—going out down the walk to his unit, past the still swimming pool, past two blondes who stopped talking as they passed him—never much on blondes—he was humming a song his first and only wife so long ago sang with a friend of theirs about a drunk husband coming home late to a bunch of wise answers—who couldn’t see or was encouraged to not quite see another man’s hat upon the hat rack—and so the wife sings,

You old fool, you blind fool,

Can’t you plainly see

It’s only an old chamber pot

My mother gave to me?

No. He prefers to just look; he’d rather.

The scraped flanks of dark and brown and ochre rising as if in a state of being set, constantly set to sail. Not set like the storyteller’s sun known as The Setting Sun beyond which was a narrow sea: but yes he would accept the narrow sea the Navajo crossed to land then among an unfriendly people from whom they had then to get away and so the Great Spirit sent a stone ship to help them, and it brought them here. Which was its object. And yet it seems to have been getting ready to move again while this hypothetical man in front of his rented car has been watching.

Now I’ve traveled this wide world over,

Ten thousand miles or more,

But a J. B. Stetson chamber pot

I never did see before.

Or was that only the little movement at the base of the Rock, someone’s camper, pickup truck—do Navajos go on picnics on a weekday? For a price the vessel will take your car, you must tell it a story it hasn’t heard.

He’s looking at the south side, looking north along this car track that runs for a way beside the jagged dike rampart marking a fissure where lava broke out but not with the push that came up at the main vent, the pipe, the throat that Ship Rock finally filled. For the volcano that was once here is here only in the last lavas that came up the pipe, up but not out of the throat, never made it out but hardened. Like a photograph of something you know is moving.

The volcano having blown slowly away.

Like brush; like chaff. Like grasses that money over a period of twenty-five years (just begun) will strip away in order to mine low-sulfur "surface" coal that can be turned by the power plant on the far side of the vivid, implausible lake into power for which the cities are hungry.

Give us a ball-park figure for what this is costing. He’s not a businessman, maybe a cut above, certainly a pay cut below—by chance thrown up separate enough to hope that while he’s no engineer in Thorstein Veblen’s elite crew getting the most out of Machine Process against Businessmen whose profit taking gets the least out of it, he might yet sneak in as a Workman, but in only the wake of what’s become of Veblen’s hope, Veblen’s Process machined to serve survival: well, a divided Workman laboring to grasp and bring together the dynamite loosening the surface, the colossal dragline unveiling the seam, the 375,000-ton shovel that picks up 120 tons of overburden from the coal seams and transfers it to "spoil piles."

"Overburden," did you say? And is that the Ship Rock over there? And how far away is it?

As far as tomorrow—thirty-odd miles from this business of first things first, a mine where spoil piles have been graded and regraded by bulldozers into hills whose contours aren’t like white elephants or great flashing birds because they’re dark as dust-dulled licorice, as a dreadful old story, dark as the coal they slice out by accelerated geo-logic—and aren’t like anything except those hills far off where pinon trees grow here and there and two other kinds (two or three). Except that on these spoil piles of overburden you have only the contour, like a dark sea of dunes—say it, a black sea.

The Tribal Council down in Window Rock couldn’t say no to the royalties—was that it?—even if as yet Utah International (with the collateral end-run of its good will) can’t figure out quite how to re vegetate.

But the manager on duty did not perhaps read his visitor’s face with its little skeptical twitch any more than the hard hat did who said goodbye and disappeared, while he, hypothetical man (unearthed by converging teams of archaeologists at the site), saw Ship Rock across the blue lake miles beyond the lake across the full shimmer of desert miles; and thinking not that Utah International had sent a plane to collect him (which he is not quite eligible for) but that he’d been asked how he liked his work—traveling so much, etcetera—he thought but did not reply that to tell the truth investigating this operation was a respite from his highly involved personal life ("if you know what I mean," he also would not say).

But the manager was pointing at the stacks now to their left across the lake and to the left of Ship Rock twenty-odd miles in front of them westward saying did he know that the plume from the Four Corners plant was the one man-made thing the Gemini astronauts had been able to make out from space; to which this hypothetical man, this ad hoc man with a pocket notebook in his pocket replied, What about industrial haze? Wouldn’t they—the tightly sealed Gemini heroes—see the industrial haze?—while he actually thought, Why not Ship Rock—wouldn’t they see the Rock?

Glad, though, not to utter the words. Thinking also that he’d like to know what collateral Utah International had to put up—if any—to build Four Corners: that is, how the thing was done. But Utah International did not build Four Corners, they put together the package, wrapped up water, coal, tribal acceptance, and the participation of the power companies. And he’d like to know what the Utah stock, preferred or common, is quoted at (if there is any stock), and recalls someone’s words he probably did not finish, that, through the division of labor, the whole of each person’s attention is naturally directed toward some one very simple object.

Across the plateau, Ship Rock would be a respite from the information he could extract. Respite—for Ship Rock he thought then yesterday gave no answers (though mind you you could never get it to face you) and yet now (having to his surprise come), he sees the Rock rushing imperceptibly through landscape and he is distracted from all other respites and places, because the Rock is close enough now to show him people all over it. Everywhere clinging to the edges of the ship like stowaways whose salvation has been turned inside out. Indians coming from behind the sunset; now you can’t quite see them, they go with the Rock; they seem the picture of some necessary blindness, theirs and the Rock’s working together. Why, is this how the Indians are giving it back to him? (Think you’re funny.) People everywhere cling to handholds, wedged in notches, immigrants nested like blind lookouts or passengers of a ship that has been turned inside out and could not see where it’s going but for the Great Spirit’s knowledge of the route which the Rock feels as its own, which in turn seems to inform the ship’s complement of this event.

Arrived, however, these hundreds and hundreds of Indians have come alive in their eyes and are climbing, not coming down. He sees them now in the Rock, through it, a Redman’s trick of color, the light, the volcanic ash, but what’s ash and tuff, and what’s lava, lava was molten but didn’t burn, he’s even less geologist than maybe Indian; but then there’s perhaps their time and his time, they’re more eternal than he, you can bet, yet this is a multiple operation, as the man back at Fruitland said of the mine cum power plant; for the Indians, female and male, both climb and descend and they come off and come out, both up from within the earth (having turned the monster that was bugging them to stone) and down onto dry land which, like the volcano and its ancient lands, shrinks from their feet until (though he’s no mentalist) they tell it to stop and then they stand, no more alone than a man in front of a rented car, upon which they turn to see what brought them and see not some lava mouth below them within a cone’s throat, nor any old big rock, but the stone ship: so though he’s no authority on Indians he has to see that, sure, the Great Spirit sent the stone ship, but sent it from here. (So two stories meet.)

Sent it while the volcano was still here and the resulting absence inside it would be unknown. So that, to take the story further and bring Indians and geologists together, the volcano’s erosion, its wearing down, corresponds to the return of Ship Rock to this place. Here it comes, it’s ploughing the seas, Indians manning the crags, the mind of the Rock harrowed with women and men lookouts speculative as any rock man with his cutaway restorations. But full of some stone’s-throw dream of monsters done for.

Head of a rhino, arms of a spider, torso of a cactus, legs of a linebacker.

But wait: the Navajo story tells of individual heroes, not a communal attack on the ogres.

Well, that’s their story, and don’t expect to be admitted to any of their shindigs.

All of which is his alone to know, hypothetical man, a notch more beat-up this morning, last night’s pound of steer ground down in the gears of his gut, no one’s going to push him around; but hypothetical: but only he knows this secret union, the geology and the Indian stuff. United in what you can call one operation, like the same collateral for two loans, make it three, four; and he is encouraged not to get a more single-minded telling of the ship story or the monster story or the bird story from the environmentalist lady from Albuquerque who wants him militant, that’s why she’s trying to see him— develop an attack—make certain the surface-mining legislation coming we hope this year at least compels operators to repair damage to the land, and while the polluting particulates, the sulfur dioxide, the nitrogen oxides are worse from Four Corners than from what’s ahead, what’s ahead is thousands more acre-feet of water that could just as well be Indian irrigation-project water, taken from the Colorado River system; millions more tons of coal stripped, because now (if the companies get what they want—and let’s face it, energy projects as the Sierra Club man said are like apple pie, God, mother, and country) it’s gas—gas by the German method of chemical transformation—the Lurgi method, how does the name grab you? why aren’t you busy at your particular job in your niche, your stall, your compartment?—where you add oxygen and steam to an oven-hot pressure-pot of coal to make a gas composed of hydrogen, carbon oxides, methane, some sulfur compounds, then take away the wastes (which you sell while they’re fresh): which leaves low-heat-content "town gas" which before you shoot it to California gets refined again to make good old pipeline methane —a long, quiet, interstate fart—which was your object—a synthetic natural gas! Which is what this beautifully named process is all about: "gasification," the one simple object of all this.

This trip, his copy’s going to be pretty brisk.

Meanwhile he has made it here to Ship Rock alone only then to feel (for no place is only itself) eyes on him two thousand miles east as he put an open geology book on a table by a clear-glass bowl of water with pink and white petals in it (but now he saw only the water—which those very eyes had said would be—if you could only wrap water—a very nice present to take to Kyoto—she said it was a Jap poem). And he thought he heard a car from far off toward the town of Ship Rock (spelled as one word with a small r, he later noted) but then it might be the vehicle that he’d seen but now maybe can’t see coming slowly back over the curved, rutted track from the Rock, and so did not hear the car.

But then did—all around him like that hollow whole of his son’s stereo at college.

Or the equality of all places. Haunting him.

Well how did we get here? blinks an Indian woman.

Think up a story to tell her quick. Wing it.

Father Sky run roughshod over Mother Earth? Only in some families.

Blinking against the sun that he forgot to curtain out when he came in from the motel bar last night, blinking early this morning against the phone, blinking against two car doors clucked shut by marital voices outside the next unit, two voices, the memory of coffee ahead. Woke to the phone ringing Ship Rock out of his crumbling head, sleeping head, so that he need not pick up if he no want to, while last night’s drinks swung, hung together into one swaying deposit as deep as stories two engineers in invulnerable Stetsons told at the bar, which was not very deep, until he rolled one bed-creaking shoulder to grab the phone (feeling the void of another purpose than his own approaching his ear) and found his heart pounding through as if he had a hole in his ribs and heard instead something pretty nice, and the hope that in his report he would tell the "whole ecological story" and if we can’t stop these people, at least get a strong reclamation provision into the new law—make the bastards replace their divots, he thought, and if they don’t, then fine their asses, and if they don’t pay up, then check who’s buying their coal, but he heard himself say "Get back to you," and out of a dream of sailing round Ship Rock he thought he told her he wanted to go there, voices in the increasing shadow of his bladder—but for the first time (like a pun that only he had missed, carrying it, but missed only because he’d daydreamed it, no doubt to forget it)— "shipwreck."

This message. But one the messenger carrying it can’t know.

The Albuquerque lady anyway woke him with her call. But he thought he would not call her back. (O.K.? he asked, asking himself.)

She was not waiting for him when he came out of the shower onto—

More telling still, if by old practice he must speak aloud the message: words he knows in his sleep and told his daughter and son with more or less success before theirs, their sleep, of the Eastern Princess who went among crystal labyrinths (that sort of thing) and unheard-of flowers and rode a giant bird past the pyramids of Egypt and the bright hot springs of Iceland, saw the ritual slaughterhouses of five continents and a healer who with an invisible knife parted the skin to let out bad thoughts—and this East Far Eastern Princess whose royal father had shown her all the monuments of his country and all the love and all the young nobles that he and his loyal wife could muster, had given her this growing bird of a giant species noted for its traveling powers, but having caught and gobbled a cow here and there on the great plains and up into the desert among the greatest monuments of the earth that the Princess had yet seen, her bird found down across its track an animal faster and whiter than it had ever seen and flew at it and caught it in its beak and secreted it under its left muscle and flew on. But at that moment was spied a creature never seen before, or so it seemed in its solitary white-and-dark-dappled speed, nor did the Princess’s bird see that the speed of this western horse was a sudden reaction to the bird’s own course. And the bird caught the white-and-dark-dappled horse in its iron beak until a call like none the Princess had yet heard came from a crag on the horizon, whereupon she saw a herd of similar wild horses and above them a burnished prince upon his own dark, tall horse calling, in a language she knew without taking thought, calling to her that the wild and fancy young horse her giant bird had beaked could be hers.

There was more of that story if he did not think, and if he did not fully wake up. But the Albuquerque lady woke him with her call. He thought he would not call her back. (O.K.? he asked himself.)

She was not waiting for him when he came out of the shower onto thick dry carpet, the shower’s pleasant dream, nor waiting in the dining room smelling the steak-and-eggs platters sailing by, nor in credit car, into which he did not quite disappear, to flow secretly back through the wide streets of this boom town of Farmington (boom? boom? average, wide-streeted, middle-of-the-road boom) honked not boomed back to his senses and the right side of the road after catching sight of Ship Rock thirty-odd miles ahead, thinking maybe it was the Albuquerque woman following, who on the phone had offered her own car. Turn his in, she said, cancel his plane to Albuquerque, she was going to Albuquerque anyway, going home, her voice hesitated in order to be insistent, like his daughter’s voice somewhere very far east of here, probably in Washington, drowned out by her motorcycle; and he wanted for a moment to have breakfast with the woman but was able to say, "Get back to you." Shoulder creaking, hung up, knowing in the heart of this heartfelt clarity of knowing that he would take his own car and drive to Ship Rock by himself, hung up and found the woman’s voice between his legs in the motel bed.

Passing the turnoff to the Navajo mine, he turned off and drove the few miles up to see it again, leaving the power plant around the lake where it was. An Indian family were picking up pieces of waste coal in shovels and buckets, children, grandfather, woman bending over in a long skirt, a little boy swinging a huge shovel, all specializing. They were alone against the low, dark tumuli of slag, and down in the valleys smoke slowly rose from some of the strip-mined craters, a gleaming pipe down one path in the bank, a crane at rest, power lines nearby, crows cawing. The family watched him turn.

Between the family and this Rock he drove the rented car; and the Rock was in the side window, then in the windshield, in the other side window, in the windshield again, while he floated into the Agency town of Shiprock ten miles by air from the Rock, sparse and spread-out reservation town with wide highway for main drag, Route 550 from Farmington, but before he hit the supermarkets, before probably pregnant women easing out of the drivers’ seats of pickup trucks they’ll be paying for, before the Bureau down a side road, before employment offices, before more than this, he negotiated a violent U-turn and pulled into a gas station. So for a couple of clicking, ringing minutes he listened to the Navajo attendant explaining that one day he will come back here with a law degree and work for DNA (young, glasses, skin pimply, long hands eating a square of process cheese peeling the plastic back just before the teeth reach it). DNA? Oh, D.N.A. The only organized opposition that gasification has experienced. (Words to be dropped down a well but recovered in future at what level?) Could you write that out? Sure, got a pencil? The hand that peeled the cheese, pens at the car window Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditahe, Inc., attorneys who contribute to the economic revitalization of the people. Well, not only opposition to the strip mining; remember the ad hoc groups and the Indian Youth Council.

So long and—hello U-turn and—on the right bearing out of town the Navajo Community College branch, pale stucco (what is stucco?), before he hit the bridge over what’s left of the San Juan River that’s come down from the Colorado mountains and into which the Chaco (which is more river bed) turns, extending south to be joined at least on the map by Coyote Wash down past Sheep Springs, the direction of Gallup, road to Albuquerque too.

Ship Rock at this stage increasingly on the right. Until here’s the right turn off onto the Red Rock road.

But no place is single; he was always doubling back. Like to Farmington, mile upon mile behind him, the motel bed-telephone (new invention) and the Albuquerque environmentalist woman somewhere in Farmington last night, sounding together, "needing" him (she said), she had to see him before he collected his thoughts, his reactions, before he wrote his "report," before he went back East (please?), she’d drive him to Albuquerque, she had an Indian engineer friend right there in Farmington. Even return your car for you.

But Ship Rock got closer, Farmington further, and with it the Four Corners Power Plant and the Navajo Mine, the family digging in the dark piled-up surface among the billows of coal and waste.

Until he turned. And left the Gallup road and went a few miles west along the Red Rock road, past a single hogan with curtains in a window— hogan, hexagonal earth-roofed or wood-roofed Navajo dwelling, more like the real thing than the SHOE HOGAN billboarded back in Anglo Farmington, boots for Indian and Anglo alike, like Prairie Schooner Steak Pit, but more like Igloo Kayak Center a fast paddle inland from Boston (but whatever happened to the Chicanos? let’s achieve a little racial balance, they wear shoes, they eat, they live, they remember the Mexican War, some of them around Farmington believe that all of that land belongs to all of them from olden times, and they have no Chicano reservation)—and at last onto the desert-dirt track roughly with the great dike-rampart on his left now, and he stopped two, maybe two and a quarter miles from the Rock to catch up with himself, and as if he hadn’t quite meant to be, he was here, having passed through not much more than himself standing here for half an hour, forty-five minutes, usefully alone, finding now a smoking cigarette coming out of his mouth between his fingers, also now thinking he has to get all the way back to Farmington to return the car and take his plane, and rubbed the wrong way by the separation of that hollow wholeness into now two accelerating sounds, the camper he saw coming from the Rock closer and closer, the outline of the crown and brims of the driver’s hat and someone on the left with him, and the car he turned and knew he’d see coming up behind his own with a woman driving and a man in the other front seat, the vehicles closing on him until he wishes for a blanket door he could throw up and disappear by.

A bleached beer can stands upright near a low bush and a candy wrapper.

A truth is that Ship Rock isn’t so alone as it seems. But it is so much bigger than any of the other igneous intrusions that are within a twenty-mile radius that this Rock is what it seems.

(Throw in a couple of oil-drilling rigs.)

Has the god come and gone?

Several, of both sexes.

And went away together bickering about who was the most beautiful and terrible.

He’s between cars, cars on top of him. He looks above the camper truck coming from the Rock and the Indian in the driver’s seat with big hat and trooper’s sunglasses, and his girl with him—and looks beyond to Ship Rock which recedes; and then the camper comes to a stop looking at him, and the car coming up behind him comes to a stop, and he hears a woman—the woman—call his name here in the desert and his hackles are up and he can’t not turn to her, thinking of the past and of his dispersed family, to say, "What brought you?" and she answers, like a former wife who still bears his memory, "You did."

He looks still harder at Ship Rock. Time lost and running. Time looks through his eyes. At the possibilities for him.

Shipbuilding, for instance. Prime instance of the wisdom of the division-of-labor principle in the pursuit of the wealth of nations. Adam Smith or someone similar in those days thought so. Two hundred years ago. Eighteenth-century shipbuilding.

Rock men, red men, rich men, energy men, workmen, women, and men came here with him yet were waiting for him here; but having consolidated into a whole company they disperse now like family.

Look at Ship Rock for the last time.

Because—for God’s sake—he’s just seen this—or heard it said inside him—for God’s sake, the Rock doesn’t look like a ship! Doesn’t look like a volcano either, nor the stuff coming up out of a volcano—word’s "tuff," he thinks (but only after it’s hard, he thinks, so he’ll have to ask). The main thing is that the Rock doesn’t look like a ship, for the moment.

A discovery earned. But he won’t labor the point. Divide the labor; he did the discovering.

He is the center of a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere, three vehicles, gangsters, agents, famous kidnapped South American economist being handed over. But the camper has cut around him—what’s a road, out here?—and is detouring cross-country for the moment and he hears music from the car and he recalls what followed "hy-po-thet-i-cal" on the jukebox last night and it was "des-ti-nation."

Drop words into welcome well, draw up silence: fair trade: silence to the People.

He looks away toward the other car and sees with the Albuquerque woman an Indian—portly, young. He’ll know what organization the letters D.N.A. stand for. Something about lawyers who contribute to the economic revitalization of the people.

She herself is dark blonde. In her thirties, watching him from beside her car.

She’ll know if it’s just a myth that the plume from the power plant drifting south, drifting north, holds together for hundreds of miles, or has at least been seen hovering near Albuquerque.

She understands he’s looking at the Rock.

But it doesn’t look like a ship.

But it brought him here.

And it will get him home.

still life: sisters sharing information

How it happened?" exclaimed the fair-haired woman. "How it happened?" she said, looking past her companion who sat with her back to the street window. "I don’t care how it happened. It happened."

"But if you don’t care," replied the other woman, who was younger, "how do you keep it from happening all over again the next time?"

She had hesitantly introduced herself to the fair-haired woman only to be invited to sit down; rather, she had found out who she really was after she had sat down.

"Don’t worry, it could never happen in the same way again."

"You wouldn’t kill him by the same method?" said the younger woman and put her finger to her lips.

"Oh, I told you he said that—that I killed him."

"I thought you did."

"He always was a braggart."

"Has he recovered from being killed?"

They smiled. "He’s immortal, that’s why he’s boring," said the fair-haired woman, whose name was Maya. She reached across to touch the other’s hand, looking past her as if easily distracted by the street. "I’m better now," she said. "He pushed me into this free-lance thing like he pushed me into the book. I’m better now."

They seemed to tell each other in the corners of their eyes that the large man two tables away was listening to them at his leisure. The younger woman felt this modest challenge from the man, who was bald but had bushy red eyebrows and a mustache to end all mustaches.

"That book was everywhere," she said. "I even saw it in Burlington; I saw it here, of course, and do you know I saw it in Albuquerque."

"Oh," said Maya, "it was everywhere for two or three months, and then suddenly you couldn’t find a copy anywhere. A lot happened too fast. I thought he was being supportive. He said, ‘Behind every successful woman there’s a good man.’ "

"Yes. In her past," said the younger woman.

"Sounds like you know from experience."

"Other people’s."

"Saves wear and tear."

"Saves time," the younger woman said.

"Why don’t I believe you?" said the other. "Oh hell, one picks up what one can."

"Maybe so," said the younger woman, "but I’m never sure what it means when I first hear it."

"Well, I overheard it," said Maya, "that thing you mentioned. ‘Behind every successful woman . . .’ "

"You mentioned it, Maya."

"You’re right," said the fair-haired woman, in response to the familiarity. "We were at a party and he had his back to me when he said it. He was wearing the burnt orange sweater I bought him. I remember how he looked. Tall as he is, he looked almost slight. But then it came to me: Second-Generation Pig, that’s what he is."

"Second generation?"

"A generation’s only about five years these days."

"Listen," said the younger woman, "at least he wanted you to do something with your life." She cast an eye at their neighbor, the man with the red mustache; he had received a large puffed pastry powdered with sugar, and he tilted it in his fingers curiously, like something outstandingly large, before biting into it.

"By that time," said Maya, "he wanted me out of the way; that was what he wanted. You’re nodding," she said to her attentive companion.

"He wanted you out of the way?"

"But nearby—how about nearby? Happily surviving—how’s that?"

"What’s nearby?" the younger woman asked. "Same house? Same neighborhood?"

"You really ask the questions," said Maya.

"They can be painful to ask," said the younger woman, nodding, nodding.

"Especially if you know the answers already. There, you’re doing it again," said Maya.

"All I know," said the younger woman, "is I’ll be glad to live in this neighborhood for a good long time. It’s not at all depressing like the West Side, and it’s realer than the Upper East Side."

"I couldn’t agree more," said the fair-haired woman. "It’s where I’m happily surviving."

The younger woman uncrossed her legs and recrossed them the other way. She leaned sideways on her elbow to sip her coffee. "You yourself said he wanted you to make something of your life."

"Why, he was proud of me. He bragged about me as if I weren’t there in the room; he reported my originality and my talents as if I were someone he happened to know. You’ve heard that story?" The voice eased into faint curiosity. "You’ve heard that one?"

For—as if to say, When will people ever learn?—the younger woman was slowly shaking her head, smiling with sisterly resignation: "Yes, I’ve heard it."

"Granted, it’s always nice to hear about yourself."

"There was nothing about you on the book jacket."

"You noticed."

"Suppose," said the younger woman, "the awful truth is that he’s right and you are talented."

"Listen," said Maya, "to hear him, you’d think I was consumed with ambition."

"What were you consumed with?" the younger woman asked, and then, surprised by herself, she laughed.

"Let me tell you," said Maya, "the Second-Generation Pig comes to you supporting your every endeavor. He wants for you what he knows you half-think you want. He tells you you’re loaded with talent, you’re incredible, you can do anything you decide to do. He’s a feminist, right? Wrong; he’s a closet pig."

"But this guy," said the other woman agreeably, "when I first sat down here, he sounded kind of special."

"You’re nodding again," said the fair-haired woman. Her fitfully blinking blue eyes looked away, undecided as to how lightly her needling had been meant.

"I mean," said the younger woman, feeling boring but smiling more or less good-naturedly and nodding hopefully, "the way you said he still phones, and he gave you the picture of yourself you didn’t know he took when you were working, and he tells jokes on himself, and he got that woman interested in you. He probably still loves you."

"Of course, he loves me now. Good old Dive."

"Dive?"

"My English for Dave. He did a lot of business in London in the old days. I guess it’s a term of endearment."

"Maybe it was once."

"He did take time off," said the fair-haired woman. "I mean, during the day though he’s a businessman."

"To do what?"

"I’d meet him here for an hour."

"Sounds nice."

"He scheduled me."

"Still, it sounds nice," said Sue. "I mean, you lived together but he took time during the day."

"One day—just like clockwork, one day a week," said the fair-haired woman, and actually looked at her digital wristwatch. "I’m talking too much. I’ve got an audience. So listen, Sue," said the woman with some touch of confidential humor. "Sue is your name? I just got this message from you: you would like us to be silent for a minute."

It seemed true. They looked toward the rather gross man with the brilliant mustache munching on his pastry. He raised his eyes to them from his paper.

They looked past him, past the marble tables on the ironwork stands, to the Gaggia machine in good, silver working order. A small woman firmly pushed down the steam handle. She wore a yellow T-shirt and she had fat upper arms. Between the accelerations of the afternoon traffic outside, the man could be heard chewing.

The minute of silence was passing. This was the best table; it was in the front corner formed by two broad street windows. The two women, who didn’t know each other except through a mutual acquaintance, raised their cappuccino cups, which were glasses in metal holders.

She had come here earlier than she’d planned, and she had recognized this woman and been invited to sit down. This was the unknown woman Sue had once seen across the street walking with the leader, star, and proprietor of a workshop Sue had attended. It lasted four weekends, it was called the Body-Self Workshop, it had been a bit of everything—terrifically tense getting out of the elevator, later a relief, a weird, quite happy relief. It had been really a mind-bending (literally naked) overload of rap, sympathy, information on food, eating, yoga, habit patterning, marital muteness, role constipation— just about everything and anything from speculums and sex-after-marriage to how the ancient mysteries celebrated the reunion of mother and daughter after the daughter has been raped during the harvest. So Sue and this woman had that in common—same workshop though not the same sessions.

But a moment later, when she learned Maya’s name, Sue couldn’t get over it. This was the author of a book she had bought and read, a book that had won an award. It was a small, wonderful book about the author’s weekend attempts at art and the spoor of strange signatures, monsters, and angels of patterns that weren’t there the first time you looked, the tangled clench, the struggle secretly recorded and perhaps actually dreamt by these amateurish oils and watercolors leading back, or was it forward, to the intrigue of the author’s own odd, half-free self which more and more looked like the true creation.

That was the book and here was the author, with a fresh tan from Trinidad, taking an afternoon coffee break at an Italian pastry place in the neighborhood. She had been meaning to come here.

She couldn’t get over it. This woman was the author of the book she had on the shelf in her living room. Maya’s book was a book to reread and see the author finding herself and sharing it.

"My boyfriend is named Dave," said Sue and stopped.

"It’s quite possible," said Maya, "and it’s quite possible he’s not a bastard."

"I don’t know how it’s happened, but he doesn’t appear to be," said Sue.

"You’re funny," said Maya.

"I mean," said Sue, "sometimes I think he’d just as soon not talk about it, but he’s been through quite a lot."

"My Dave hadn’t," said Maya. "He met me and made it up as he went along."

Sue opened her mouth. What came out was "I haven’t known him long. I mean, it’s been long enough. I really love him. We just bought a beautiful canoe."

Maya frowned. Sue nodded. Maya continued. Once upon a time, Maya was saying as if she were telling a story she’d told before, this Dave had had a mother, a mother and some brothers.

"Now that’s interesting," said Sue, who did not ask how many.

This mother had sent Dave out into the world trailing clouds of family pride. Maya told it from such a distance. This mother had told Dave to come back with first prize, otherwise forget it, she didn’t want to see him.

"Are mothers like that?" said Sue.

"I don’t follow you," said Maya.

The woman in the yellow T-shirt brought the man with the russet red mustache a small white cup of espresso and took away a cup. He opened his newspaper and refolded it.

This Dave had won first prize all right, Maya continued. Yes, indeed. He had done O.K. He had $300,000 in municipal bonds by the time he was twenty-nine. His mother was a beautiful person, he said; that was where he got his drive.

"Maybe he needed to explain it," said Sue. "I can understand that."

And so, of course, Dave had always needed women, and he had met Maya one afternoon when she was running up and down a train platform looking for her stolen suitcase, and later he wanted her to change her name from May to Maya after she had toyed with the idea. And he always sort of liked women, he listened, he asked questions about what they did and about their parents, and he touched them.

"Touched?" said Sue.

"He wasn’t very funny," said Maya, looking past Sue. A child yelled in the street. "But sometimes he had a jokey sweetness about him, and he did seem to listen."

"It’s nice," said Sue, who knew what she was talking about.

Maya frowned.

"I mean, it is," said Sue, but Maya’s frown, aimed at her cappuccino, might have nothing to do with anything but distance and with this story of Dave with its sense somewhere beyond even Maya—and a sadness that half-included Sue.

And always in that glass house he had built for her, there had been that mother. Well, he kept women on the far side of his mother; but this beautiful person, this ever-dark-haired, amber-eyed mother who never changed and when she was sixty-three her hair still looked like a painting, well, he actually didn’t see much of her, this great mother of his, even though—

"Did she live far away?" asked Sue.

—even though for a long time she lived close enough to drive to for a weekend (Maya had seen her the first time from a car window and didn’t know it). Later Dave’s mother sold the house and moved out West, right?

"What do you mean, ‘He kept women on the far side of his mother’?"

"What do you mean what do I mean?" said Maya, distracted.

"I guess I know," said Sue, and couldn’t look at anything but the metal cupholder in her hand. "I meant, what did he do when you saw this?"

A pale shadow went over Maya’s face as she looked past Sue over Sue’s shoulder, and the long window behind Sue seemed ready to expose Sue if she turned to look. It wasn’t that Sue was irritating Maya. The man facing them two tables away gulped some water.

"It wasn’t what he did, it was how he did it," said Maya.

"There you are," said Sue, "the how."

Maya frowned at her and looked past her out through the street window behind Sue.

"I only mean," said Sue, "it’s like I said. I mean, if you don’t want it to happen all over again the next time."

The pale shadow went over Maya’s face again. Her mouth was speaking. The story had a mystery missing from it, something left out, some act undone.

On a Saturday when Maya was at her table in the study, Dave would tiptoe down the hall like the dog moving over the floorboards, then stop at the verge, so her heart would start pounding, and she’d get mad—she admitted it. Then he would push the door open a crack and watch her, so she felt she was being checked up on and approved of; whereas, if he had knocked and come in asking if he was interrupting anything . . . oh, it was all in how he did it. He made her feel like a well-endowed slave on display, when all she was doing—

"But no one can make you feel like that unless you’re willing to," interrupted Sue, recalling the workshop.

—when all Maya was doing was her own work although, mind you, it was stuff he pushed her to do. Like, there’s encouragement and there’s encouragement: "some encouragement is like alimony—deductible."

"But," said Sue, "when he came home for lunch when you weren’t expecting him, and he brought two splits of champagne—"

"A bottle, I said," said Maya, "didn’t I?"

"—it’s the gesture that counts," said Sue, "however he did it."

"But I wasn’t going to drink at one-thirty in the afternoon. I’m not his mother. I don’t even look like her. He even pointed that out to me."

"But champagne," said Sue, "an impulse."

"Maybe it would be different now," said Maya. "I really don’t know. His mother drank champagne; that’s all she drank. He sent her a case of French champagne at Easter and Thanksgiving, probably still does. He used to quote her—"

"His mother liked champagne?" said Sue. "So do I." She smiled impishly at Maya who frowned. "I mean," said Sue, "I’m not at all extravagant. I’m quite careful about money. When I wanted to buy a canoe, he was going to order a bark canoe although he would have had to go on a waiting list, but it cost thirteen hundred dollars, and for me the main thing was just that it wasn’t aluminum."

The newspaper crackled at the neighboring table and the man with the red mustache was heard to say, distinctly, "Good old Dive."

Maya rolled her eyes upward, lowered her voice a notch.

"He did bring home a couple of splits once."

"You see?" said Sue. "He doesn’t have a bushy red mustache, does he?"

"He appears to have changed his looks with the times," said Maya dryly.

Sue and Maya seemed closer. The woman in the yellow T-shirt leaned her elbows on the counter looking out toward the street.

Sue wanted to know how long they had been married.

Maya thought it over unhappily. She and Dave could be said to have been together, all told, for the better part of six years.

Sue said that Maya must really know the neighborhood. They identified the apartment houses where they lived. Sue got Maya’s address. Sue’s phone number was in the book with the initial S, she said.

When things were breaking down between Dave and Maya, rays came from him; he was hating her for knowing him, yet she kept reasonably quiet about it. She knew him, that is, too well.

"You kept quiet?" said Sue.

Later, more than earlier, it seemed to Maya. Dave seemed to think she didn’t know he was seeing someone; he couldn’t imagine that she would be angry only about how he was handling it.

"I don’t understand that," said Sue.

Like he was putting one over. For example, walking the puppy all the damn time. As for Maya, she didn’t want to know—that is, who it was.

"But you must have been angry," said Sue.

Maya looked past her out the window as if she had more to look at than Sue did.

The fat man exhaled audibly. Fresh cigarette smoke reached them.

Anger—it was a matter of degree. Of how things got said. Things had seldom been calm. Maya got a letter from her mother with advice on a particularly sore point. Maya determined to ignore the letter, not tell Dave; but then she left it on her table and, of course, Dave saw it and told her he sympathized. Then they got into a fight about it.

"About what?" said Sue, feeling the neighborly red mustache facing directly her way.

Maya’s not telling Dave.

"About the letter? A fight about the letter?"

"Isn’t that what I said?" said Maya.

She and Dave were close enough, and in the beginning Maya had never minded being dependent on Dave for love—wasn’t he dependent on her? He was so proud of her, didn’t want her to work, didn’t want her to clean the place until she said, hell, she had been used to doing her own place. However, it was two floors now of this brownstone he owned. And then she found him to be a greater slob than she’d first seen; he’d walk around the apartment first thing in the morning, brushing his teeth, his mouth full of toothpaste—and talking.

"Walking around?" said Sue, "talking? That’s . . ."—she shook her head.

It had indeed been something to see.

At first Maya never minded being dependent on Dave for money, but not because in those "preinflationary" days she’d thought of her housework —her "homework"—as bringing in a portion of their income; his income was high even when she first knew him. Money was only money, and it wasn’t as if he had cleaned up at someone else’s expense—a chuckle came from two tables away—and if they had needed more money, she would have gone out to work again. But they were rich, comparatively—even not comparatively. She wasn’t saying it right.

"But I understand," said Sue, who had the slightest physical discomfort and was afraid the conversation had to get somewhere but might not. "You’re forgiven," she said to the other woman.

"You’re funny," said Maya.

"It’s behind you," said Sue.

"But money isn’t only money," said Maya suddenly. "It’s how hard you have to hack for it."

"Where in New England do you paint?" asked Sue. "I don’t think the book said."

"I don’t paint," said Maya. "I never had the slightest gift. It was Connecticut at first, Vermont later on. There was a problem about my getting a driver’s license."

"What was the problem?"

"I didn’t get one."

"How come?"

"I happen to think driving is insane," said Maya.

"What about being driven?" Sue asked. They observed the man with the red mustache licking his fingers.

Well, Maya was of the opinion that it depended on who was doing the driving, and Dave was perfectly adequate, so why pressure her?

"Really/’ said Sue, supportiveiy. But there she was, agreeing; and she added, "It’s hard to understand women who don’t drive; I think someone said that. But I couldn’t imagine not having my license." Again this was not quite what Sue had meant to say.

She felt she was overhearing Maya, who went on musingly, seeing from far off by private surveillance some poignant map of motions; see the women pulling into the train station parking lot at sunset in the springtime; see them busing the children to school; see them unlocking the back of the station wagon for the cute supermarket boy to unload the cart he’s wheeled out for you—a silver basket with a jammed wheel. Subjugation came step by step, not all at once, and suddenly there you were, you were in the picture, drawn in by some drug of living with others.

"That’s eternal," said Sue. Which came out flattering. "But don’t forget the women cab drivers up there in the front seat."

"Will you say what you mean," said Maya. She looked back across the room and smiled at the woman in the yellow T-shirt and pointed to her cup. The man with the bright, bushy eyebrows and the mustache to end all mustaches blew two smoke rings and would have managed a third but proceeded to cough violently, shaking his head and grinning as the women watched his paroxysms.

"Subjugation," said Sue. "Was it really subjugation?"

"No, for God’s sake," said Maya, "it wasn’t really subjugation. It was only in my head. Got any other questions? It sounds like you haven’t had your turn yet."

"I hope I don’t," said Sue.

"He sounds O.K.," said Maya gently.

Sue thought a moment. "I don’t know him too well yet," she said. "At least I can say what I mean to him."

"What you mean to him?" said Maya.

Sue shook her head and smiled tolerantly. "We’re more easygoing," she said. "I don’t ask him a lot of questions."

"About old loves."

"Right."

"Do you want to know?"

"Oh, once he had two girl friends going at the same time, and he was living with one. It didn’t make him exactly happy."

"Poor thing," said Maya.

"He did have," said Sue, "what he called a long misunderstanding with one person he really loved. I believe she was beautiful—I mean, I’m sure she was and," Sue shrugged, "he got really terribly confused, I gather. I didn’t much care to hear about her; I didn’t make a point of it, but he understood."

"I would have gotten every last detail," said Maya.

"Would you?"

"No. Yes."

"He said he was afraid she was suicidal, and once when they’d had a fight to end all fights, he felt suicidal himself—whatever that means."

"Which ain’t much," said Maya.

"But he said they could never have agreed on a suicide pact; he wishes he had made the point. They might have had a good laugh about it and parted more like friends."

"So he had a good laugh with you instead, right?"

"Right."

"Have you ever hated him?" asked Maya abruptly.

"I can’t say I have," said Sue.

"It’ll give you a rush," said Maya.

"I don’t follow you," said Sue. Maya had said the same thing to her.

"It’s liberating," said Maya.

"Well, I got a lot out of the workshop," said Sue.

"My dear," said Maya. "I think you haven’t smelled rock bottom yet."

"That’s true," said Sue bravely. "I haven’t been that desperate."

"It isn’t like any workshop," said Maya. "No one can tell you."

"I’ve listened to everything you’ve said," said Sue. "I’m hopeful. I’m getting married to my lover. We’re buying an apartment in my building. I’m pregnant; I didn’t say that. He’s glad. He’s quite a bit older, but he’s never taken the plunge. He’s wonderful. He’s amazing."

Sue had said too much. So she added, "I guess I didn’t mention I’m pregnant. It happened during the workshop."

Sue and Maya had to laugh, relieved of a burden apparently not there until it wasn’t there.

"You’re pretty," said Maya.

"Thank you."

"I get sick of being blonde with blue eyes," said Maya.

Sue smiled—rather sweetly, she knew. She turned to look out through the street window behind her.

"But to be blonde with eyes like yours," said Maya, "or to have my eyes and your hair—Celtic—that would be the thing. But what are your eyes?"

"Sort of brown," said Sue.

"Better than that," said Maya.

The man at the other table had a fit of coughing that wouldn’t go away until the instant before the woman in the yellow T-shirt paused to clap him on the back, coming with Maya’s cappuccino.

"That’s better," said Maya.

"But subjugation," said Sue seriously.

"You’re really asking for it," said Maya. "Remember, I can be held responsible for what I say."

One could use other words than "subjugation," according to Maya, if one wanted to split hairs. Anyway, this was how it had happened—in a nutshell.

Maya told it so Sue could practically see the man—she knew she could—through the words of this woman she’d run into in a cafe that her own Dave had given her the address of, that she had been meaning to come to all by herself until he had suggested today. For a while her time was going to be her own. Maya’s experience was not her experience, and she didn’t especially need to tell about herself. Actually, she was ready for Maya to go.

Maya’s words felt more directed to Sue than before, and Sue signaled to the woman at the Gaggia machine. There was a harshness that had been in Maya’s words that Sue recognized as now missing. The words were uncomfortable.

"He phoned from his office and asked me to meet him at the movies," said Maya. "Dinner was all out on the chopping board. I put it on hold. Take a break from cooking, he was always saying. Or he phoned from Chicago— Chicago! when I thought he was twenty blocks away!—he hadn’t known he was going until the last second, and he hadn’t been able to reach me before he left. But I’d been home reading, right? Pack a bag for both of us, he said, we’d have a long weekend with his friends in Montana. I said, ‘Montana?’

Sue felt the word "Montana." That is, sung from a familiar guitar by an easygoing voice, an already beloved voice that had recently taken up the guitar. Vm goin’ to Montana for to throw the hoolihan. She didn’t know what the hoolihan was. It was a type of cow or horse cowboys used to ride, she thought.

Sue said, "I would have gone to Montana."

"That was a weekend," said Maya. "I forgot my diaphragm, and Dave got paralyzed on top of our host’s roof just when a windstorm came up."

"Did you travel a lot?" asked Sue.

"Of course not. I was thinking about a job. And how would I travel with a job? And anyway, weekends aren’t traveling."

"So what did you do in between?"

"A lot of reading," said Maya. "I was reading science; yes, science. I sat reading from first thing in the morning till the middle of the afternoon. I used to get a phone call twice a day for a while. A variety of dirty phone calls I called a Sadness Call or a Tragedy Call: I’d pick up, and all I’d hear was someone weeping. I didn’t ask, ‘Who is this?’ They would hang up and the line would start buzzing. It sounded as if maybe not the weeping person herself had hung up. I told Dave and at first he didn’t believe me, but it was true. He paced the living room in front of the couch where I was lying with a drink in my hand, waiting for the timer to ring in the kitchen. He said my reading gave me fantasies. He got so he wouldn’t sit down."

"You were thinking about a job," said Sue. She was ready for Maya to go.

"I was reading geometry. Yup. Then I was reading economics; I was sick of hearing people talk about it."

"I know what you mean," said Sue, "but no one really understands it."

" ‘Why do you read that stuff?’ Dave said. He wanted to know what I thought of Delius’s ‘Florida Suite’; what did I think of a Dylan song, where had Dylan gotten it from? But then Dave would talk about economics after all, and he wasn’t over my head. The only advantage of public-venture-capital companies over private is liquidity, as I recall. It’s like those phone calls. I almost dream them. ‘Are you still getting those phone calls?’ he’d ask, as if he wanted me to bring up my insane fantasies. One night he said, ‘What are we going to do about you?’ "

Sue imagined him standing doing something—she wasn’t sure what— but straining his muscles putting out effort, a tall man.

"He demanded to know why I didn’t take my painting seriously," continued Maya. "I told him I enjoyed it, fooling around in a field, getting everything in that field except the horse, which I always left out because I can’t draw horses. Or sitting on a stump trying to get the color of a pond at five o’clock. He said that I should do something with the painting. He used to frown seriously as if he was really thinking about it.

‘You, you’re just waiting for something to happen,’ he said. I said things were happening. I was getting those phone calls. ‘That’s what I mean,’ he said; ‘you’re at loose ends, you don’t think enough of yourself.’

"One Sunday night in Vermont I was packing a bag. I mean, that’s what I’d do Sunday at that hour, like clockwork."

"You said that," said Sue. "You said you met here like clockwork."

"I meant on one particular day of the week. Guess which one. Well, that Sunday in Vermont, a picture of mine was lying on the bed. Suddenly I hadn’t painted it. I could see it. I don’t know how long this went on before I was aware of Dave standing in the doorway with his new safari bow."

It was so vivid Sue looked away. She saw the man wedge one end of the hunting bow against his foot and decisively bend the top end down to hook the loop into the groove. She saw him occupied. She saw pale stubble along his jaw. She saw rimless glasses that she wanted to change for Polo horn-rims but she couldn’t make out his eyes, which were aimed past her over her shoulder.

"He knew I was aware of him. Then he said, ‘Do you want me to pack?’ I didn’t answer because I knew what he meant, but, you see, I didn’t answer because I was in that picture of mine. I resolved to be nice and to the point: I said, ‘I’ve done something here.’

"Well, it released him from the doorway. I can visualize to one side of that door a photograph. I wouldn’t hang some dribble of mine, not even in a cottage in Vermont. He stood beside me. ‘You’re going to have a show,’ he said, T don’t care what you say. Compare this stuff to the stuff they sold at the outdoor show in August.’ "

"What was the photograph of?" said Sue, wishing to be alone.

"I never got to tell him what I’d started to say," said Maya. "I said I was going to settle for what I’d already completed. I let him misunderstand. I said all I wanted to do was look again because I had found some buried treasure in those pictures, if you could call them pictures. ‘There you go again,’ he said; ‘of course they’re pictures.’ Anger—I’ll never forget it. I was smelling him differently. Do you know he turned that bow into a sort of person who was with him."

"That first picture," said Sue, "in the field you found hands going at each other."

"Four handfuls of fingers, that’s right—"

"That’s how you got it."

"And nose-like things inside the still grasses, point to point. The eyes came later, but not real eyes—the land looking back. I found a pretty good horse standing inside the pond with lily pads for a saddle."

"I remember," said Sue, "you didn’t leave it out." She was feeling the weight of her legs so much she needed to stand on them. She remembered actual words.

"I told Dave it was a relief finding myself in those third-rate, little weekend smudges."

‘They weren’t third-rate," said Sue.

"That’s what he said—and how would you know?"

"I mean, not after you’ve read the book."

A distinct snicker came from the man at the other table.

There was another cappuccino in front of Sue. "I don’t know why I ordered this," she said. "I don’t think the first one agreed with me."

"Isn’t that quite normal?" said Maya. "You look a bit pale."

Sue wanted to ask Maya what her ex-husband had looked like. That had a mysterious way of showing you how to take other things.

"I felt the change," Maya said, "but I didn’t take advantage of it. ‘What do you mean "therapy"?’ he said. This is art and there’s someone out there who’ll pay for it—you said yourself that money makes work real; I didn’t say it,’ he said, ‘you said it.’

"So instead of peddling the pictures, I told on them. I loathe writing. It’s my frustration threshold."

"I always forget," said Sue, "does that mean the threshold is low or high?"

"It doesn’t matter," said Maya; "experience, I have learned, is frustration."

"It isn’t that bad," said Sue, "you should try other people’s."

"Because," Maya went on as if she hadn’t heard, "without it there isn’t any. I mean, I’ll say this for frustration, it’s always reminiscent of the next thing."

"Didn’t you write that?" said Sue.

"I wrote about this poor freak who was trying to reach out but was getting clobbered every step of the way. And that I did not write," said Maya. "I got so I could hardly see the original blob of my pond, my tree, my field; it was like taking your glasses off; you had to wait for that old scenery junk to come back, and even then it was a strain."

Sue sipped her coffee. "You said in the book that he encouraged you to doit."

"He found some pages I’d written in pencil. He said it was like a mystery. So I kept going."

"You had to," said Sue. She felt pale again.

"Steps came to the door of the study at midnight and went away."

"You were usefully employed," said Sue.

"Right. He asked if I would read it to him some evening."

"Maybe he had a hard time with your handwriting," said Sue, tilting her head to one side.

"So one day, the first thirty pages were missing. I had a daydream of being relieved. By sunset the pages had reappeared. I was so mad I couldn’t speak. I mean, I couldn’t think. One night he came home all excited. Someone else had been reading me."

"He’d Xeroxed them?" asked Sue.

"Susan, how did you guess?" said Maya. "He had them typed first. My confession. My salvage operation a piece of myself, as they say, in the hands of, as it turned out, if I do say so, a very smart woman. She wanted to see the illustrations. Everyone checking on me, right?"

"It sounds like help," said Sue.

"You understand how good I’d been," said Maya. "Keeping up the family tradition as if it was mine to keep up."

"You mean, come home with first prize or don’t come home."

"That’s it," said Maya. "You’ve picked that up. Oh, Dave joked about them, his family, but there they were."

Sue had only to wait for what she knew was coming; it came from that distance that had seemed to be Maya’s, but it was other people’s experience that had to be Sue’s—it was time.

"There they were," said Maya. "Dave’s father a legendary metallurgist, his grandfather a judge, great-grandfather an infamous, wall-eyed general."

The words were grotesque. She couldn’t stand them.

"But they’re Dave’s family; they’re not you," she said.

"As for me," said Maya, "Dave couldn’t talk about anything except my project."

"He got it published for you, for God’s sake," said Sue.

"What do you mean? What do you mean?" said Maya. "What’s the matter with you?"

"Did he ever brag about doing that for you?" said Sue. Sue put her hand on Maya’s wrist; Maya’s wrist felt warm; she withdrew it.

"Just the opposite," she said. "He didn’t have to talk about what he’d done for me; he knew I would."

"I’m sorry," said Sue. "I’m sorry for you both."

"I’m not," said Maya, "and neither are you."

"Let me cast the deciding vote," said the man with the bushy red eyebrows and mustache.

"This," said Sue, "is the sort of thing my fiancé would go out of his way to do for me if I wanted him to."

"Your fiancé " said Maya, as if that did it.

"And if I had your ability," Sue finished.

"In my opinion," said the man at the other table, "these are two entirely different men, a second-generation chauvinist pig (although ‘chauvinist’ was never the right word) and a somewhat battered third-generation."

Maya stood up and found a five-dollar bill in her bag; she dropped it in the middle of the table. "Who does get your vote?" she asked the man, "since you’ve turned out to be a male suffragette?"

"Oh heavens," said the man, and contemplated the flame of his lighter for a second before he lit another cigarette. "I’d like to vote for all of you."

"Why was it subjugation?" said Sue, having been paid for and feeling distinctly sick. "I really want to find out."

"Listen, Susan—"

"Sue, if you don’t mind."

"Were you ever ‘Susan’?" said the man.

"I was christened Susan," said Sue, not taking her eyes off Maya.

"Only the names have been changed," said Maya, sitting down.

"You women are turning out books right and left," said the man.

Maya rolled her eyes upward but seemed to accept the man. "After the book, Dave said I had to follow it up because people knew my name. I said one book was it. Then I got this free-lance design job through a pal of his."

"I’d like to get hold of your book," said the man. "Do you happen to have an extra copy? How do you feel about it now?"

"It was a wonderful book," said Maya.

"Where was the subjugation?" Sue persisted. "I don’t see what it was."

"The book," said Maya. "That’s where it was. It was me by me, forced by him, maybe I should say pushed by him."

"It sounds bigger than both of you," said the man.

"Each thing I did," said Maya, "had to lead somewhere, right? But I was happy as I was, wasn’t I? Dave had to show me off, the gifted lady he lived with. Then that wasn’t enough. He had to give me the gifts."

"I don’t get that," said Sue.

"Neither do I," said Maya. The woman in the yellow T-shirt made change at the table and Maya left a dollar. "Thank you," said Sue.

The woman stood there; she thanked Maya for the dollar that lay on the table.

"But this began quite a while ago," said the man at the other table. "If Dave was a second-generation pig, wasn’t he ahead of his time?"

"He transcended it," said Maya.

"You’re Elsa?" said Sue to the woman. She nodded agreeably.

Sue then didn’t ask what she had been going to ask. She felt sick and asked for a glass of water.

"This is hopeless," said Maya, getting up. "You have to find out for yourself."

"Maybe I’m a second-generation feminist/’ said Sue. "If we have problems, we’ll talk about them."

"I hate all those words," said Maya, turning toward the door.

"What were you doing in Albuquerque?" said the fat man. "You saw the lady’s book in Albuquerque."

"It was still sitting on a bookseller’s shelf after two years. I was on my way to visit my fiancé’s mother in Santa Fe." She stood up wearily.

"What were you doing in Burlington?" said the man.

"Dave has a cottage outside of Burlington. Why are we talking to you?" said Sue.

"And when your child is born," said Maya, "you will have a use for the inevitable extra bedroom."

"I have heard unconfirmed reports," said the man, "that marriage and love make doubtful bedfellows."

"But what else is there?" said Sue.

The man looked at the three women. "Maybe what I’ve been hearing about is first love and first marriage."

"You can’t tell by her," said Sue. "She was a victim of subjugation."

"You’re right, you can’t tell by me," said Maya; "Dave and I were never married."

"I thought so," said Sue.

"Ah," said the man, "the sore point."

"So maybe he’s still interested," said Maya.

"There are different kinds of love," said Sue. Then the fat man said, "You’ve seen him recently?"

Maya said, "What—fifteen, twenty minutes ago."

"You were here" said Sue.

"I was here," said Maya, "and he passed by and looked in the window. It happens."

"Dave," said Sue.

"He was right behind you," said Maya. "I’m sure he couldn’t handle it."

"Handle what?" said Sue, because it was the next thing to say. But this wasn’t the workshop. She hadn’t bugged anybody at the workshop, she hadn’t learned how. You could speak, and what came out was in you and you didn’t always know it except that it would be terribly obvious when it did come out. "But these two men named Dave we’re talking about—" she turned to the man at the other table— "why couldn’t they be the same man? There’s a lot to people."

The man was contemplating Maya. There were tears under her eyes. Her hand held the doorknob.

Elsa shrugged. "I don’t see your husband for a long time," she said.

"He hasn’t been here," said Maya, who held out her hand to Elsa as Elsa moved away from this no-man’s-land without having realized that that was what it was.

"Call it coincidence," said Maya to Sue, with a lot of eye contact.

"That he passed by when you were here?" said Sue.

"You too," said Maya—almost the very thing the Puerto Rican at the deli said when Sue told him to have a good day.

Maya pulled open the heavy glass door, and Sue was waiting for her to step out onto the sidewalk. "Maya, you said Dave had changed his looks with the times."

Maya thought a moment. "Yes, I see he wears a gold stud in at least one earlobe; I can’t blame you for that." The door swung slowly shut. Outside, she turned the other way; she didn’t pass the window. Sue thought they would never meet again. Then she thought, how could they help knowing each other?

"Dave seems to have recovered," said the man with the red mustache. "A man with a gold stud in his ear."

"Actually," said Sue, "it’s a tiny fourteen-karat mushroom."

"Conspicuous but discreet," said the man.

"It’s my Dave. You know that."

"There seems to be a lot of him to go around," said the man. When Sue did not respond, he added, "I mean there’s a lot to him, obviously."

"Do you think he’ll come back?" she asked.

"Oh, he’ll come back," said the man. "But maybe not today. Glad we got the mystery settled. Put two and two together, some days you get three. For a while there, I thought maybe he’d killed himself."

Elsa said, "You want your lemon ice?"

"Trying to get rid of me?" the man said.

"How did you guess?"

"The lemon ice is a work of art," said the man.

"I’ve got to get home," said Sue.

"You mean you want to get home," said the man.

She had been standing, and she almost sat down again. She lifted the glass of water to her lips.

The man said, "I feel I got quite a lot for my money today. But even if we now know that the two Daves are the same man, there’s still plenty to talk about."

At the door, Sue turned to him. "Other people have been through so much," she said. He nodded and smiled.

She was waiting for him to say something good.

"Tell me one thing," he said. "Why was it ‘amazing’ that Dave walked around the house in the morning with his mouth full of toothpaste talking? Maya mentioned it and you said it was amazing."

She was feeling queasy at the thought of that second cappuccino she’d had one sip of. "Now that I think about it," she said, "I was right. He doesn’t do it any more. At least I haven’t seen him."

The man raised his espresso cup. "Good luck," he said.

Her Place Is There

It’s a shower and it’s morning you can report and it’s not just any shower you’d write home about. It’s a shower slow as weight, deep as you both are tall; fast vanishing, steady as the fastest light. A warm-hearted thing, this shower! Shower-power—who cares how it happens dreamt up out of our future into the present? She just reached in behind the shower curtain and turned it on like going to bed, your two hands as near to her as if they were giving a supportive touch to the small of her strong back, this lovable Independent you choose lightly with an unsaid word "Angel" and, taking a shower with her, size her up and she is missing nothing or is anyhow like a question you put off as you take on this glassy fiber, two-for-one insulation against cold, against dryness, this. A show of New York’s famed drinking water on Election Day being economically purified by flowing down over two lovers before draining into all the stone-based drinking fountains of our coastal city’s parks and all the ceramic ones indoors in our hospitals and schools, bless ‘em. Plus through the shower head is coming hot-poured something, you don’t get a handle on it, does she? does Jean (or Barbara-Jean as she doesn’t prefer to be called). She knows her Hot, her Cold; adjusts her valves with the whole day in mind, voting or not; and no more could you get into words (at least before brunch) what in old New Jersey your once-upon-a-time quirks-and-music but then bottom-line/suicide-magic mother said (according to your grandmother, who survived her): that angels on the margins turn into us and out of us along their spiritual curve while voicing what they seem to need us for—and voicing also what you hardly know is in you at rest.

You left your name out there beyond the bathroom let alone the shower. Brought your light in here. Oh well, here comes the old water down onto the both of you. Your lighted skins grin. Water’s a new element always that does us all a bit of good and she seems less of an age under it, this youngster Jean (or Barbara-Jean). A woman, maybe she know what you not know, she like the water ultra-hot and maybe your bones need marrowing. She’s a near scientist, a science journalist unquestionably contractually, a cook of record, and with some less used ("-car") savvy of remembrance you get in your adopted New Yorker.

Hinterlandsperson come to sound the coast, she felt you were shadowed at the movie house last night by the nameless ponytailed Spence: hanging around there? or a one-night-stand Manhattan moviegoer? Maybe on the job armed, like some hobbyist, to the teeth, though you don’t tell that to Jean— and still haunting the Chilean exile-economist with (you understand) a deal for material on Middle Atlantic banking involvement in Dr. Allende’s brave downfall through level after level of intrigue like burning warehouse or as through stairwell down past deck after deck of ignorant oceanliner—yet Spence knows always about you some trace of you you don’t guess you bear, though you go on pondering the Chilean.

You’ll have to go back to bed, with her or not, because of what the water doing to you, it’s got the shower-power formula let’s protect it if we can. Maybe it is she that’s talking to you, not you (or "Mayn" as you prefer to be called). "Hi, Jim," she does say, for a second not touching. Oh you see she was touched by your saying "Angel" wordlessly; yet more than one female lurks loud in brain-speaker hot to reincarnate, bless ‘em, it’s a strange fashion in the air nowadays, so someone’s got to be there to receive. But which reincarnation? One that makes sense: like at the last instant of approach being in the shoes of what approaches you.

Now you do say a word. "You’re quite an old angel," you croak way down below crust of earth, which just now has levitated to this porcelain-lined above-the-ground floor of a city apartment, bring it up from under your bare toes. What’s in the women-and-men air along gravity-balanced libration points out along Earth-Moon curve? Canny Independent that she is, does she think anyone’s leaning on anyone? taking advantage?

Next question: What does she want of you?—the question you put off. If it hit her that you—He—try to take over a position that she has taken up in advance so it can’t be occupied without aggression (and our only referee has been internalized, which keeps the payroll from getting out of hand), could she kick you—Him—out? But if you are the one being occupied, could you kick her? But if you’re the one being occupied where are you?

The last time you looked, it was her place—the round, dining-room butcher-block table (‘case you need to chop up your dinner by candlelight), and right beside magnum gun-metal bookcase packed tight with the largely paper spines of anthro-historico-botanico-technologico-linguistico tomes is a low, square Mission-style easy chair luxurious ancient relaxer—if it was yourn, you’d plug it in and let it vibe like the motel bed in Buffalo does for a Buffalo quarter; no, it wasn’t your place the last time you looked, not to mention those four-dimensional pictures in the windows of the outside world, across the street fire escapes being farmed and a sight of the sky ploughed by helicopter.

What’s she want from you?

And if you knew, would that mean you had it to give? If your two grown children are truly grown, then you got more spending (-type) money but Jean (Barbara-Jean)’s a young star that gives this original-model but not light-years-seared old space-ship position. One tine of spray now flips out from shower head, walleyeing its route to drill your eye, and you’re not all here, though you woke half an hour ago in bed smelling oil and onions elsewhere in the building, which is the City, which is Election Day ‘76, which is today, onions, oil, a crisping side of unidentified fowl, Jersey chicken, prairie hen, and give yourself to the grandeur of a bulge of cliff, under which a thousand people so much part of the Rock it’s a vein of the cosmos have invented an apartment house: and they live together—nice!—and you’re getting there, they’re almost Indians in territory now belonging to the Federation of Arizone or Holy New Mexico, but you didn’t quite make it out of the shower westward yet.

Italians one floor below her have got a cousin running for office, and it’s not prairie hen cooking; in reality, it was her almond-shaded skin, her shoulder bone bed-shared to your mouth and eyes like sound that opens all the other sounds and sheds them to music; and now, looking again into the water that’s a degree too hot, you guess it’s her shower however much rented because it is her place; she got the keys—two pair.

Meanwhile, back in the bathroom, it’s a shower for sure, the water’s free so long’s you’ve got the good coffee to purify it. It’s a shower but, over her low voice saying, "I like having you here," the flow’s thick like whirring wheels in sun, so when you step back the water you thought was falling turns into legendary Rising Geyser tapped from the automated thoughtfulness of the community: she soaps herself fast like light you hardly follow, let it be, and low down out of sight and upward shining a-grin, her grin as large as last night in the dark you ran your fingers along to find out Is she smilin’? when you’d made a joke—under the canopy of bedroom ceiling where one by one she’s stuck the heavens embedded in all exact constellations each with a future and a message that she knows like she knows better than a man sometimes twice her age happens to know why the orbit of Skylab that you two shared months and more than months ago at Cape Kennedy, decays—or at any rate (speed-factor-curve-plot) both saw fired—and she knows how fast, while at dinner she told of a bone-marrow disease they’re trying to lick, that knobs the bones and swells ‘em closed upon the nerves—of hearing, of sight; and the grin of well-sexed soap now joins her divided flesh there out of sight (if hands and fingers couldn’t see) to your own comfort and surprise, while she so complete next to you soaps you as if she’s found cleanliness aped in her science by the godliness of sport telling you a dream, asking you, imagining you joked about not dreaming: looking with interest, then eye to eye where, in her streaming eyebrows and happy teeth and the blithe little (is it) sinew (?) of play that stares naughty in the round brown (God! violet-flecked!) eyes, you find a message like "Lookee here"—until you hold her shoulders and see right down at what she’s doing (two hands) so that she can happily seem to be self-conscious, for what we buy when we buy soap is tenderness, for she has discovered how to make it rain inside, keep dry and bright outside— but warm and bright inside, too.

It’s a shower, that’s all, but over her low voice saying through the flow that if you did dream what would you dream about, and that she likes having you here (whom she called Recycled Man at dinner last night) the water when you step back almost out of it could be rising, and this geyser and her voice’s backdropped distance reincarnate your belief that you’re in not just a shower in New York but two places, wait and see. Is that why you’re here? Give or take a few inches between your head and the shower’s, for to tell the truth you and she aren’t quite so tall as the shower is deep yet are deepening all the time and helped by the shower. She’s right under the heart-gush of the water while she’s soaping you with her eyes half closed.

She’s reached the coast and is imagining it, but behind you there’s another place and one of the two voices there behind you, the voice of portly, sport-jacketed Navajo Raymond Vigil is saying down through some bending drone of your still arguably if evolvingly human bladder, "It’s gonna happen." Voice of the Navajo.

You pick up graying lights of water turned yellow and blue through the shower curtain by a misty light bulb—this coastal weather, what’re you going to do? The shower bombarding her lags her busy motions a hair but one of two things are known for sure: not whether she has a boyfriend (inconceivable, considering), or is between boyfriends; only that this wonderful leak in the roof is O.K. and you’re taking a shower with a body on Election Day in New York, which must mean it’s a particular year, you saw a sign in Spanish, No Electioneering, and now hear a boxed shout through the bathroom wall from the next apartment, which God knows may be where those cooking smells originate; and while you’re still waking up to this Election Day in touch with this young woman as you have been for hours, you’re letting go unstable particles of energy such as ye meson here, you muon there, and grinning in your minor stand-up dream as your old chosen journalist colleague Red (of face, that is) Harley, possessed of a speaking voice so lowdown deep it sounded acoustic and should be slowed down by outmoded electrical wiring, sounded the ancient warning of his college swimming coach—sounded like old, tobacco-proofed crust but the vocal cords under the crust had turned to bone, for haven’t seen Harley since running into him and your tall-as-a-rusty-iron-post friend-in-another-and-now-immortal-category (dead) Ted walking the aisles of a train, Ted’s stark profile permanently fixed by its association with plane seats, though here at the moment on the Washington train—Harley’s coach in Indiana who was also called Ted calling down the gaping years words like your own New Jersey coach’s on a November field of stone-cold earth mashed and imprinted by teenage men in cleats, "Don’t stay in the shower, boys, sap ya strath," hollered into the shower room through Red Harley’s memory from the brink of a wintry pool on the Indiana border tiled with bricks of age-old blue-green ice long before Harley learned that he was to spend his life as a bass-voiced newspaperman saving time by spending hours on the phone, following history or preceding it, as he told Jim after a professorial dinner in Washington they’d both got asked to. Keeping one jump behind, added Jim, and they got into some nuthouse laughing—in relief after an evening of Gross National Product yielding never to plenty of tasteless roast beef but, curve upon curve, to Net Economic Welfare floated still on statistics denying the wisdom of an incomes policy—and when the nuthouse laughing ran its course they decided, getting into the elevator at the hotel, to go to church in the morning in Georgetown; agreed on this plan two or three times until in the carpeted elevator a bland or was it blond actor with long saffron sideburns and a silent girlfriend a hair taller than he asked himself along with them. But he was nowhere to be seen next morn, as almost neither were Jim Mayn and Red Harley, though heard deeply croak-voiced wading across the hotel lobby.

Oh ancient showerer, you are wet by the flesh-inch, stubble to stern, but, in the timeless shower (which nonetheless you know she will someday turn off), not all here. What did she mean by Recycled Man? You are a couple of hairy shoulders, a still evolving chest solidifying its sternum; you are a bladder like a balloon brain; and you recall being a monster along some grand mountain shelf where there were no angels and no dreams in those days. You are still one who does not at least remember one solitary dream. But you are being soaped by someone else’s dream and soaped intently while the good New York water hung tine by tine to the shower head’s silver disk is talking to you as if she asks no more of you than you being here:

What Does She Want Of You?

You’re also in another leg of yourself and you’re so awake the young woman here doesn’t know that whatever time you’re in, Standard, Pacific, Mountain, or Water Time, or new east-west time vein fibered through you on a tropic curve off to a stage across the north lid of New Mexico lagged three, four degrees south of New York City—hearing information, stories (one you retold yourself)—were they the runaround?—you’re in two places at once, you see neither one works without the other—an acceptance like divorce from someone you really love—but the truth is that you’ve been in not the present sort of stuck in past but in the future looking back like crazy to the present which you’ve brought into existence again through undreamt-of particles in you that make you a window you fall out now and again.

"It’s gonna happen," the Navajo Raymond Vigil’s purpose tracked in his Spanish-rounded easy-West-American body of voice just behind you on the floor of the desert goes on like there is no today and you’ll always be standing here (now again in a New York shower) hearing a fission of our Indian past and future; for Ray’s detailing hopes for breakthrough of resource revenue as if the brown stalagmite that’s risen hundreds of feet sheer up into a cave of sky isn’t there to absorb you and your eyes and as if the other person, this healthy-’n-well-off-looking woman Dina West from Albuquerque who was so nice but wants something, wasn’t standing there on the dry road also; "it’s gonna happen," says Vigil: what he means is ("up-ahead") more sensible control of Indian uranium and oil currently rented out. Wind brings a smell of rock into your throat; you saw the wells back on the Gallup road, the oil pumps right here a mile from Rattlesnake Wash and two miles from the Rock, and your organism slows down sensing it might not get a drink for hours, and if plants thought, what would a cactus for all those weeks between desert deluges—"—but listen, Jim, you wait—because this leasing the rights when we should control the whole operation—I thought I knew who was behind it in the Tribal Council at Window Rock but now I don’t know—maybe you know" (Anglo news-hunter visitor from everywhere else but here), the flat spaces of continent beginning to get ripped by this senseless wind, "not to mention the geothermal—"

"—geothermal! the country here’s not right for it, Ray, you don’t have any deep steam around here—"

"—wouldn’t be so sure, fella, but we deserve our cut—show me an Indian on the payroll at Los Alamos."

"That’s only a pilot project, hot rock drill you know Spacelab stuff."

Feel him pointing off to the right thirty miles where you know the colossal stacks of the power plant govern space as you go on staring here at the fourteen-hundred-foot Rock in front of you and at it only but those stacks don’t go away any more than Consolidated Edison chimneys horizoning the blue New York sky so finely rust-rinsed it’s a movie of itself what do you need to spend time going out West to see some Four Corners New Mexico gasification project with vast, near, dark, strip-mined hills of slag that at this distance in a New York shower two thousand downtown miles under the brow of the continent, where they take the deep surface of coal and turn her into "natural" gas to pipe to California, there to keep body and soul together, and would generate new gas-powered TV sets by next year or at least by 1978 on which to look eastward at their fuel source, were not the new upper-air electricity soon to be tapped by the cloud-needle project exploiting the grand and ancient cumulonimbus formations traditional to the American Indian airspace.

"—more jobs over there at the plant for Navajos than they’ll admit; more than before—and the irrigation project is coming along slow, but right here the uranium and oil still belong to us, well the coal does too but we won’t revoke the lease—say who told you there’s no geothermal here, some Anglo geologist?" It’s a good-hearted joke in the middle of nowhere, where the Nowhere is that he doesn’t know what he wants from you.

Who said there’s no geothermal right here? Well, it’s sort of a fact, like that some Indians aren’t talkers to speak of (you told your daughter in a letter, who passed it on to your son), but that’s Navajos—out in the desert in shacks or isolated hogans or navigating a pickup truck with a fifty-gallon drum of water in back, and talking little even at one of their own rug auctions—but other Indians talk much—the Co-op People, for instance, in a nine-hundred-year-old rent-controlled multiple dwelling under a cliff though granted they phased out that cliff site, and the multiple dwellings you had in mind are Pueblo and the co-op family-owned, but we let them keep the nine hundred years.

"Geothermal’s California, Raymond; geothermal’s Hawaii; geothermal’s up North."

But Los Alamos that day only a week previous: work on geothermal’s begun and wouldn’t you know we’re back at Los Alamos, where once upon a time they got toward the heart of things, but now they’re shooting for clean magma power, keep the deep steam from getting away; not even a press briefing, thank God, nothing going on but daily work, yet you’ll get your breakthrough assignment one day soon like in the as yet uninflated farming of wind some year soon—press handout cum voice-over tells all you need to know except who’s turned the profit into some other mystery of Nature before you can say, Hey that’s joint property acquired during the marriage (i.e., between us Indians and them Entres, short for Entrepreneurs, that just didn’t work out but there’s marital property and extramarital and the marriage was naturally here first)—your old pal and croaking colleague Red (of face-nose) Harley sounded like a Marxist with his Phillips head turning the wrong way when you ran into him on the train until you don’t hear his words n’more and others shower inside the general brain: corporate psychosis—spending into a black hole where competition sucks back inside its own abstract the screaming scam that at a slower rate sounded for centuries like grown man’s insured drawl—cannot last another decade, he said, the corporate psychosis: the only hope is cooperation: Veblen (Mayn had heard of him) didn’t predict hunger and atomic power (or did he? Red asks himself) (Mayn didn’t know) but Veblen said technology’s neutral: that’s the place to begin if you’re going to really own it; it’s no monster in itself (though was not sure: all that menial repetition coupling with the surety that you’re powering some Important Thing . . .) and what color tax will a corporate structure pay to a revenue service that we’ve (Harley merges with Mayn to adopt the word of this pair-showering girl) "internalized" to hear inside us the corporate voice incarnal spinning off its true power at all the centers far be they from us, that, hell, so much of their take goes down the ruling sink might’s well be socialism:

Gossip and theory on a train commuting New York into Washington down the fine-toothed density of the coast, but now in the love and steam of a shower recalling Ship Rock and a week before it Los Alamos, the name or two you knew of people who were here ahead of you and maybe hacks no less than you that an information officer mentions in passing under the Los Alamos sun toward the high library, for instance, the buckskin photo-info agent Spence, whose high husky words are in your daydreaming ear a week later at Ship Rock along the breath of the Navajo Ray Vigil who mentioned Spence, and a year or more later in the truest showerbath of the decade— Spence lapses out of sight, then, until you hear your own name, and on his mouth or teeth talking still earlier in Florida when you first met this girl: and who was he ever to adopt that ponytail tone so fucking quiet and friendly its alertness is saying some hustling thing to you, but what? (Acts like there’s something on anybody you want to name, and if on you, what’s he want?) His name is Ray Spence, you wouldn’t want to know him though would say not even that to information officer signing you up for a P.M. tour of the hot-rock drilling, who tells you Spence actually asked after you—had you been to Los Alamos recently?—following you maybe like you knew something no one else knew when, ‘far’s you could tell, the opposite was the case—thus following you by preceding you as he did months-into-years-now ago to absorb the attention of the Chilean economist at Cape Kennedy who turned up in New York soon after his scholarly friend Allende went down in history: but maybe this Spence expected you to have gone to Los Alamos, or had been thinking of you—you never gave it the thought it no doubt in any event did not merit. Spence was out for a buck. But at Los Alamos? Nothing happening on the Indian geothermal employment front lately you told this young woman who is in the shower with you who knows twice what you know about it anyway, and hasn’t been there. Spence’s name mentioned at Ship Rock too, preceding you there, if not in Ray Vigil’s affections.

All of which means nothing but that you are boneless on this Election Day and not even in the happiness of the shower that window through which somebody else might trace an information or curve of face, your job—except now you recall your grandmother reporting (as if it was her job) that a young woman who was your mother said she knew nothing about Indians except they were the last Americans with a native sense of design. People been at Los Alamos thirty years; design a bomb like that one, the only way after it is in. Some of the same folk enclosed by their Los Alamos classical-music station are working on geotherm, fast forward, the radio didn’t hold the band—car slips over the white line, what a radio will do to you. Why Gods your future (a voice homes on the billowing straight road between Albuquerque and Santa Fe)—which train you on, brother, the radio voice rises, you’re with the others, ain’t ya, in the rear car looking back at the speeding landscape while the engineer ain’t up front in the locomotive no more and you feel this but you don’t want to ask, right?, just a train (they’ll probably take it off service presently) just another train loose down the track with you and all the rest looking out the rear window of the rear car with enough supplies of fast grub and cardboard-soft cans of beer so we’ll never run out, that is before we hit bottom ‘cause God could be your future, you let him aboard, but this morning he ain’t.

Not here beneath a reverse geyser on Election Day massaging two slippery Manhattan selves nor there in her dry bedroom with a regular rug of a towel, a soft bedroom and two sets of keys on the bureau this morning where hadn’t she set down one last night when they came in from late dinner?, geothermal feels clean but hot and in the miles of downward piping maybe the jobs aren’t so many for Anglos or Skins.

"Maybe you’re thinking I mean the old volcano that was here at the Rock, these dikes out here for miles, lava once, heat underneath—but," Vigil had gone on, "forget that and think of the magma chambers simmered down centuries ago but maybe below all that is an ocean, an ocean of power on the bottom line."

Who, then, has first rights to Lower Space? The wind across the bright plateau, listen to it come. And against the sudden grid of agreements in fine print shadowed by gasification lobbyists lurking within grainier shadows of strip-mine futures, shadow grids of revenue-sharing partnership statistics floated/buffered/spaced-out with the figured factor of good will, you say, "O.K., O.K., just a second—let me have a look at this," where you stand two miles away from Ship Rock, which rises solitary fourteen hundred feet up off the floor of the mesa, where desert is a memory of wind and quiets the two voices, male and female sounds behind you, so you feel them scarcely more than the three points of your shoulder blades which with the small of your back hold in place the late-model car parked behind the three of you, so you wonder not where you are but why you listen to the two different things that the two people behind you are asking, and of you, as if you could give what they want—the talking Navajo, the Albuquerque businesswoman Dina and her passion-like commitment.

"It’s gonna happen," Raymond Vigil insists, less certainly; "you can help us."

"I’m not a lobbyist, Ray, but what’s going on over there at the plant’s worth reporting."

Stand on a lava flow gazing at a fourteen-fifteen-hundred-foot-high throat, a volcanic neck that gagged once upon a time and you stare until the material it was made of stirs as if to rise like wind in the alleged ship’s soul looking for a sea, the stuff once molten inside the pipe of the volcano that hardened before it could get out and now is all that’s left because the conduit / pipe / cone / actual volcano / outside slope has been worked away / blown away by continents of wind. It isn’t hard to explain, is it? What’s left is Ship Rock, hugely visible from the Four Corners Power Plant thirty miles away as the plant is from the Rock.

"Look, I’ve been up to my ears in gasification this past week," you hear drawling out of you—"let me just look . . . look at this thing. Can one get up there?" Your fingertips feel the rock turn to sand.

Albuquerque woman Dina swaps a story about the Rock with the Indian Raymond yet then they’re arguing—and stories about stories, free location for TV westerns, or do you pay rent by the hour for using landscape? or by the mile? Your eyes, meanwhile, want to reverse the flow and give back the blast of fiery froth that bombed down to become so viscous it didn’t get out.

But stepping back under the shower’s waterfall, Jean’s now saying—not the blonde, middle-thirties, clean-tanned Albuquerque businesslady Dina West but the Jean whose New York place this is is saying—"I just saw you all over again."

Dance-like she cocks one leg out to the side, soaps herself, and you find the other cake which is thin and bends, but around what? And you reach through the steamy water and soap her moving arms, which stop moving.

"We’ve hardly met," you say.

"Because you’re condescending. You’re a funny kind of condescender and if I were you I still wouldn’t be able to know just how you condescend to me, and it doesn’t matter much now."

"I said," you threaten, "we’ve hardly met."

"You do a job but don’t know why," she says as if water weren’t cascading screening you both from the times and from dryness. Lecturing: "You’re O.K. at your job. But why were you at Skylab? You were mumbling in my head and I was half asleep and I know it had to do with why you were at Skylab but it wasn’t your job and I woke up the next morning feeling like you’d let me sit in your home but I didn’t take advantage of it—and Skylab wasn’t your job but it might have been. You know? And why you were at Skylab is like the other part of why you’re here with me. Is there something going on? I’ve seen you four times in three years, Jim."

"We’ve hardly met," you say in some other body which she would refer to as He.

"You’re not married, isn’t that so?"

"Not right now."

She turns her shoulder away and seems to be thinking of all that lies between you/him and the prospect of turning off her shower; it is hers.

She scrubs her face under the water without the soap running off: how does she do that? If you can talk to her you can stop being in two places at once (which is O.K. to be if you’re one of a growing number of gurus with multiple commitments and not enough time). She’s walking a beach in Florida with you; then last night on concrete here in New York months and months later and on that heavenly ceiling.

"After dinner you gave me hell not too sweetly."

"You thought I did."

She was coming to you closer and closer without moving in the shower, so you did not have to make her up looking back from the future, which was your combat status and is a capability lunatic to mention. Being in the future and being able to live back here in the present only by making it up. Jim Mayn and Jean stepped off a curb, the back of last night’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel gently crowding them down into the alley of old Lexington Avenue, a men’s shoe store all lighted up behind them, this little range of the city no harder to make up than grandmother Margaret moving up Park Avenue in a carriage at the turn of the century, for you—he—look past the corner up the crosstown street to the hedges of Park Avenue.

"I know we hardly know each other but do you mind if we go to a movie?" she had said.

"Sitting in the movie will be like lying in bed."

"Thanks, Jim."

"We’ll get us a paper."

"No wait—" as if he was about to leave her to go locate a newspaper —"I want you to know why I want to go to the movies."

"I want to know."

"There was Cape Kennedy and that pool table and the motel and the canceled launch; and there was once in Washington; and we had some phone calls which I really liked; but I feel like the Other Woman—weird, I almost don’t give a damn about you, and I don’t talk like this, you know?—and I feel as devoted as the Other Woman is: as if we had been seeing each otheron the sly all these years a couple times a week and there’s just time to have a drink, dinner, and go to bed."

"Tomorrow’s Election Day and you’re not going in to the office till late."

They walked realistically hand in hand to get a newspaper. They made to cross the street again; Mayn let go her hand, he stepped off the curb looking at a hurtling, disintegrating cab coming at him carrying ancient authority, knowledge of this New York City, so that the driver thought here’s a guy, he doesn’t have to raise his hand. But, the brakes crying out prophetically, the high-slung real yellow chassis skiing in toward the curb, Mayn raised his palm (Peace or Stop), felt good, shook his head, but the driver, abandoning his brakes, now found the light changing to red and, against his normal practice of running the red, had to stop since he’s confused, or felt he had to.

"Wait," she said; "I want you to know why I want to go to the movies even if you already want to know."

"You’ll tell me even if I don’t."

"Wrong!" she claimed, laughing anxiously. "I’m not necessarily going to."

"Please tell me," he said, stepping back onto the curb and looking down into her angry eyes—were her eyes so young as she?, the colors had been put through much thought.

They opened to the movie timetables. "I feel like I’m already there," he said, and, as if they had made a movie decision, he closed the paper and kissed her, their two soft, closed mouths moving a little upon each other and she opened her eyes so she knew—was that it?—that he wasn’t looking over her shoulder. She said she would like to take a shower, and he murmured that there was a movie near here where you could do that, and she murmured that he had been out of his marriage for too long. No sweat, he added. He felt, through her hands, his clothes on him by the material yard, yards of thickness.

"Oh," she mildly disagrees—and reaches out again under the hot water from her own shower head in her own bathtub in an intimacy created by her own chosen shower curtain.

Oh you believe in the two of you, here in an O.K. shower, you don’t have to pinch yourself, only her, and she pretty well thinks you are here, and you don’t believe in people who indulge themselves thinking they could be in two places, particularly since today, Election Day, you don’t have to be anyplace.

"You voting?" she asks.

"Nope." But all she knows is that you’re reclaiming a place in the City that friends are letting you reclaim because they don’t want it any more, they’ve sublet it from you while you waited to buy it, a family of friends, friends of the family, living there but now they’re leaving the city. Not out for a week yet. She knows this stuff and that you’re coming from Washington, from the West, from really not too many places, newsmen don’t travel incessantly, but you don’t speak of South America, it’s not too vivid.

She doesn’t know your daughter’s phone, nor that it’s a new number and in Washington, or how old your daughter is; but there’s a thumping on the front door, isn’t it?, but this young lady hasn’t heard.

You’ve made your living off information often from those too willing to give it, and reporting it like income, and for too long your aim has had to shift. You’re awake enough to feel the water altering you; it’s what it does so much better than cleaning you off; like the soap making us slippery.

"Pair-shower time," she said; well, it’s the age she lives in like a place that keeps getting away from you, into you. It might be the age she is.

"Lower."

"There?"

"Hold it—I mean, right there."

"I know my place. Have we reached it?" she asks.

"Did you hear someone at the door?" he might seem to change the subject.

"Did I?"

He would turn on the cold if with his eyes closed he knew which faucet. "I think we’ve ..."

"Hey, oldtimer, you with me?"

"I think we have broken through ..."

A kiss from you seals two mouths from the shower’s bombardment, ties them with a soapy hand below, until you give that hand of hers a remote-control bump and she smiles you off. You’ve got a mile of rope in your lower back and a coat hanger in your shoulders and you must stretch.

But you don’t get clear of the two places, the two at once, and you’re the window, and she’s looking at you from one side like she thinks you’re getting off somewhere else by soaping her own dear breast; but she says, "Are you in the thick of something? Why do I feel it’s so close?" and beyond New York or the dead lava of New Mexico’s earth you feel the shower head is spacewise transpondering you two, and when you audibly recall her words, "I just saw you all over again," and you thought this angel wasn’t particularly romantic you step away from the steaming shower that’s talking to you out of its silver disk-head, and, looking behind the shower curtain to the damp yellow tiles and a huge black towel cloaked on the door like a bathrobe and the toilet and the mirror now steamed that in another bathroom you briefly shared with her in Florida, once said, "Look me up" but here doesn’t know you—you hear now in the shower the woman’s voice as long ago as Joy your lost wife saying, "What’s the matter, did you hear something?" and you think you may not be here after all but through a bend of light seeing it awfully clearly.

She rounds her palm on your hip to slide on around and soap-finger you at the point of your tail—for you are some earlier thing’s future.

You cough and cough. She frowns and rubs your slippery back; she knows a good cheap hypnotist who’ll get you to stop smoking, she’s almost unhappy (she’s frowning so).

The film she wanted to see had gone on already, fifteen minutes’ walk away: take a cab (you said), and it took fifteen minutes of sitting to get there, next to each other arm in arm—while you listened to her and told her she could be apologetic about bringing you into a movie half an hour late if she liked—so she, after thinking, said you meant you liked it and why didn’t you think why? But the point was, you were going into a film half an hour late and it was the film she wanted to see even if you didn’t mind, and this was the point—and not that she was apologetic.

You had said her being apologetic was very sexy; your daughter said very like that. The cab had arrived and Jean wouldn’t let you pay, she was forward on the edge of the leather seat, the woman in the box office was talking on the phone, an old garden-variety clock your father would have on the bedside table beside the glass of water and the yellow-labeled bottle of aspirin and Wood’s Thoroughbred Racing Illustrated, and a clock here with green hands and a yellow face stood beside the opening at the base of the cubicle’s window, and after Jean said she had been in this situation before about paying, you won a compromise you didn’t care about: her movie, his cab fare: but, you explained, because in her paying all or part (well, dinner would have been going too far, and at the Pressbox at that, where she’d gritted her teeth and enjoyed her prime ribs hadn’t she?, dinner would have been letting women into the lockerroom, you said, though you understood there were coed saunas hither and yon nowadays, or at least a Tasmanian economist and his myopic lacrosse-star son reported same at the gym-pool complex of a prominent Middle Atlantic university), you found some sweetness of knowledge in her knowledge of you, and found this right through the paying at the box office where (like a nervous host figuring the tip while the waiter stands near) she wanted to take you up on Apologetic being Sexy but there was a static-fresh ten-dollar bill peeling away from the packet with the bank’s fifty-dollar paper band around it and four ones wrinkled and curling and skating with reverse wind back toward the hand that she said made her feel like this had happened before and pounced on them and slid them outward again as if not wanting them, and this girl you’re with (whose apartment you were already visualizing from under one of her bed pillows which was how you in an occasional crisis slept) was suddenly excited because the time given in the paper was in fact for a prize-winning Eastern European cartoon so they had missed less than twenty minutes of the feature, and as a boy tore the tickets right-handing the stubs to Mayn and the bright, dark photograph which was their screen was straight on regardless of the slope that took them down the narrow house like a movie theater in an Italian movie he thought, quite crowded; and, putting her hand on his shoulder in the darkness of other people’s hands and laps and legs as they tried to see two seats, she whispered that she had always wanted to see this—forever—and he loved her then because she hadn’t remembered to ask him if he had seen the film.

He looked at her and at the screen now darkened and there on the screen three people he knew were standing face to face alternately talking and silent, and she drew him in off the aisle, and as he came between the screen and three people whom they had to step on, one of the characters on screen broke silence and spoke and was speaking when Jim and Jean—Barbara-Jean her parents called her (long-distance)—sank into the audience and looking at each other’s perfect faces both began to whisper—He: "I love—" synchronized with but halted by her "I love black-and-white," but he heard himself substitute as silently as what she had halted, several adequate covers for the vinous, garlicky "you"—such as "coming in in the middle it’s like getting it twice"; "New York sometimes"; "these people"—onscreen, that is, for they were still there as they were one teenage afternoon at the Walter Reade Strand Theater in a town near the Jersey shore called, in the high-colored atlas of his secret pacts with his grandmother, Windrow, and he’d gone with a couple of his friends and had run into his kid brother and his brother’s shy little girlfriend—not that he hadn’t known they would be here, and his pale brother had looked past him as if he hadn’t been there, because Jim had not worked that morning for his father at the newspaper that was running itself toward liquidation run mainly by the father who had married into it—when despite his calm demeanor everyone especially Jim’s younger brother knew that Mayn Senior’s suffering over their mother’s being gone and dead was too great to bear alone. And on the screen that was finally revealed by two traveling curtains that parted for the cartoon and a newsreel and closed again in order to rattle open once again, these actors and a couple of actresses who had already appeared once talked frankly and dangerously to each other as if even when they were afraid of being caught—hurt—killed, they went ahead with their way of moving, looking away so that the screen losing their faces darkened, looking right at another person so you the onlooker might have been the trick mirror they looked through (though Jim didn’t know about such things at that age), these people who were getting ready to pull a job went ahead with their way of just sharp, abbreviated talking so the silences in between might have been all the admiration they were receiving from the unseen, unknown, silent while candy-crackling audience including Jim and his teenage friends—one of whom said out loud, Oh cripes I thought this was gonna be in Technicolor.

Admiration that Jim wouldn’t have to announce personally to these apparently normal-size actors with names and with ways of talking and characters he knew no matter what action-packed mystery they appeared in, with cigarettes in their fingers and tough distrust of the world including the audience if they had included it and Jim, which without knowing it they didn’t, so that arriving outside at 4 P.M. in the wild, heavy-as-air daylight of East Main Street, three dusty pickup trucks parked across the street, this Jim who was suddenly again a part of the town which in his absence from it in the theater he’d still been part of but more grandly eavesdropping on the real life of the movie and without having to do anything, could feel satisfied that their good criminal world which he wished to enter and had, unknown to them, entered like a relaxed, off-duty ghost, was all set and completely to be seen without him, and lasted for at least fifteen minutes walking up toward and past the small newspaper office front where his father who’d been glumly p’d off for years it seemed before and irrespective of the Tragedy of Jim’s mother could be seen typing some letter or leaning over a table staring at ad proof or quickly grinning on the phone so he looked through you if he saw you but he would look through Jim anyhow as if Jim were not his son except he was better to other people’s kids. (Hold it, Jean said at dinner, how in the middle of his life, I know you’re being funny but are you sure he was pissed off for years?—she’s had two drinks and feels her charm; and his might need a little molybdenum, that’s what they strengthen steel with for cars, doll.)

The young woman whose elbow you long ago conceded the glimmering armrest to, gently slipping your elbow off and raising your shoulder more against her, stretched at the end until her arm came up athwart that shoulder, the back of her hand finding your cheek, smiling as if, eyes half-open, she’d woken up happy, said, in the twilight between showings, "Well, I’m ready for this thing to start, how about you?" so you weren’t quite sure she had liked it.

Was liking it; for the ominous, all-purpose real-life music that came at them more personal and closely closeting of whoever they were than the perfected world of the black-and-white drama now theirs, then it quieted down, and the silver-gray, menu-like ground with the plain-printed titles and credits was readying you for what was probably real life coming and she found your hand for this half of the show as the story began and squeezed your fingers when two Manhattanites in the squeaky seats behind you started suppressing laughter of recognition, doubling up it sounded like, and you ran your right hand along your roughening cheek concluding that inevitably you knew someone here. She was at once absorbed you could feel it in the unchanging grip of the humid palm.

Then you didn’t want to be there but you did want to be with her, eyeing her in profile the way you used to catch your mother doing who didn’t go to movies but came with you and Brad and your grandmother when it was Errol Flynn or Fairbanks; so Jean tears herself away for a moment to gaze at you but she has work to do and presses your hand and lets go and is looking at the screen again, and so it goes—good film, soiled screen.

A film that as it turns out has a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of because when the time comes for you and the girl to walk safely up the aisle get out of here, you and she all by yourselves—as incognito as the angels way inside you and way outside you that you of course wouldn’t know gimbal an essential window domestically unbudging amid the shuffle of your usual being—long before the show’s over—while, granted, nobody was exactly standing occupying a position ahead of you the way your stocky sidekick Sammy who played quarterback until high school who’d thought the picture was to be in Technicolor stood suddenly in front of your brother Brad coming out of the movie in 1945 and, though none of Sam’s business, said, "What’s the matter, Brad, ain’t you speaking to me and Jim?"—so Brad parted from his girl and tried to get around Sam who moved his unbudgeably occupied and waiting position with Brad—you saw last night like a fact leaving just ahead of you an older hippie type with a ponytail and some kind of jacket that in the lobby light proves to be rough-side brown leather fringed and braided and designed with deliberately rough-looking dark-orange and acid-gold cloth strips, a man you know, it might be him that little crook talking to you in one side of your routine (the girl you’re with will know which side, right left right left right—you had a good home but you left)—a man instantly known to you whom you wouldn’t want to know and you don’t know and never will know whether he got up out of his seat because you and the girl did, following you visibly from in front rather than an unseen shadow behind, you didn’t see which row behind you he came out of but you weren’t going to run up behind him, and you liked him less when he turned out to be a contact of the Chilean’s that night of the final moon launch (that you told the girl about, the time she was about asleep), and there’ve been other coincidences but ("Cripes," as Sam used to say) it’s natural in this job after all like running into your old Associated Press pal Red Harley (such a profession for plain brevity, get in get out) intoning his character by deep voice-print on the Metroliner, who called when Mayn passed him, "You gotta execute, fellow, execute," and Mayn, turning, had said, "Don’t stay too long in that hot shower, boy, saps ya strenth," which wasn’t what he meant to say though then on the way to Washington did say to a man he liked—not this bastard in the complicated western jacket leaving the movie house by coincidence right ahead of him and Barbara-Jean, and alone, which wasn’t out of character really but ("Do you know him?") since he had always seemed to be turning a trick wherever you ran into him, and had no off-hours, what (again) was he doing here?—in that old backwards-half-and-half flick which you and Barbara-Jean ("Neat, eh?") (though you didn’t analyze it like the heavies behind you) had put together independently and side by side having come in in the middle, in which you found a lot less than the past of twenty-five, thirty years ago to make you think of, because on that Saturday afternoon soon after your mother was dead (which at dinner last night before the movie you found yourself interrupting a couple of other stories to mention to this young woman who’d said testily, "How do I know your father was pissed off for years before your mother died?"—then made a face to take the prickle out of what she’d said)—that Saturday afternoon of this movie of last night (plus a second feature in those days you can’t recall probably a third-string western with very very white ten-gallon hats and not much more), the gangster movie would not after all stand on its own apart from all the terrible time which Jim (aged sixteen) had cordoned off, that terrific movie of men in double-breasted suits and fedoras, also complete without him, which gave him that afternoon some escaped sense lasting at least fifteen minutes into (four-in-the-afternoon-daylight where you carried preciously the other light of the movie) re-entry, at which point, beyond his father’s newspaper-office storefront plate-glass, reflecting or transparent depending, and the Jersey Central tracks and the red-and-gold firehouse, he knew now under a friendly bathroom shower with a hand pounding his slippery-slapping back for he was coughing, that he would leave that town, and knew he would leave his family that, like what he’d been durably watching go on between his parents for so long (though nothing much to watch), was complete with him or without him who could not be complete himself except without it. She said he was quick in spite of himself and he said, looking at her, that he had to be; and there they were outside the theater stepping off the curb, and even an old stone with a hole in the middle of it yields a trace of mineral radiance irrespective of erosion factor in such company.

You could feel her rubbing your back already, and you were hours away from a morning shower. Why was the guy coming out of the movie ahead of you like you were following him? Well, he had gone in and must come out: but it is Spence, who would make you feel drearily important, the way he is a retrieve-all of data so personal it is as unimportant as everyday life itself. You look up now on Election Day at the shower head of the hostess throwing its ray of weight upon you two together; and knowing like a good witness the dates when you were in New Mexico and when you were heading south through Bogota (where Spanish is as svelte as Florentine Italian) and in Caracas once heading north from the unconscionably disproportionate length of Chee-lay, and knowing just when you ran into the girl at Cape Kennedy, and just when the last time was that you were here in this city whose name should be Manhattan—though not knowing exactly when you decided to move back into an apartment you sublet unobtrusively for years—you figure that that jerk Spence knows such things on instinct, not because he is using you, much less following you—and, well, you can roll up that time belt, for the zone stripes run north-south the way the atlas always says, and you know the difference between Eastern Standard and Mountain, so just turn your face into this shower of Greenwich Village time and check out this smart kid whose keys you’ll leave where they are on the table, after brunch or whatever, and you see yourself doing it.

"Do you have a sister, Jim?"

"Brother. Married high school sweetheart. Took over her widowed mother’s haberdashery."

Just turn your face into the talking tines of the silver disk of the latest-model shower head that foretells the imminent absence of both of you from this curtained bathtub—you first, your will says to her, its eyes shut; and hearing a stiff rustle of plastic and the slide of rings along the rod, then back along the rod as if she is tucking you in, your bladder tight-hot inside the watertight skin of your wet body’s belly lets go blind, down the watery drain, upon which you hear an "Ah" behind you, which is not some spirit wind upon the New Mexico plateau but Woman who exits right then reappears left, where she has peeked back in at one she probably loves but can’t see what your blind eyes feel bombarding your eyelids and you will not pass it on though terrible there in the shower head. Because you would not be believed.

Would not believe yourself. Would you? Don’t answer. It’s not at this late date a mother’s suicidal disappearance, it’s more a future you’re in from which you’re obliged to make up the present, you got the technology to do it (and it’s got you).

If this is the Void talking, well how come it’s got so much to say, an Empty Void (ha ha). To say about you is the answer. Now the girl got you into this hot shower and you can’t get out; but you do and she’s gleeful and now:

you’ve dried her, she’s dried you—you’ll keep—he and she. But each puts the finishing touch to themselves, with corners of one big draping towel which he feels is now legally part-his.

Then launched by the bathroom light switch you’re getting just off the ground into a new hall and into a room which, with its bright shades all the way down and except for the bed, looks darkly neat. The bed, whose own tossed wrap seems flat and simple like other beds, speeds you in your flight while the girl’s dark, pale room (but now with the pad of paper, the book, and the spot lamp on the night table on the near side) is a deep window, yes, that’s right, the room’s a window.

Is it the Void that tells you you will forget?—forget being in two places at once while you were in the bath’s tent of steam raining down through slippery light? (Do you believe in One Void?)

Or is it the girl, who, having flown you from a damp bathmat into a hall and over the pine-green pile of her bedroom carpet by a bureau with a deluxe blank check pastel-imprinted with a manageable landscape of butte, flowering desert, rose-tinted rock ridges, gullies, arroyo—into a flat cloud bank of cool bed, is asking if you wear gloves even when it isn’t cold, saying, "Hey I could borrow a car today, what about it?," while your palm rubs moisture down her shin, in the slowness that may catch up with the stillness of the window in you, and you wait for her to do something about that thumping on the front door that comes and goes and you’re beginning to think is future syndrome you’re in for, now that you’ve let a decision to come back to New York come to you.

No, you have not fooled the Void, you’ve used its flow to let yourself forget for a time not any new and unheard-of time belt beaming its numerous at-onces through your wet navel here, say, to your dry ears off at Ship Rock, say, hearing a Navajo sheepherder’s son turned tribal-spirited hustler brief you while you stare off at the Rock where the ghostly sun stands on the sheer brown face of its lower lofty sharded cliffs with all around it the sky that the businesswoman behind you says is supposed to be turquoise, male if clear, female if mottled, it’s business information nonetheless, and you think of breakfast, three brown eggs scrambled with sweet red pepper and mushrooms and onions and nutmeg and salt. What the hell is this Void you don’t get out of your head?—run for office like Lincoln to forget the Void but who is going to capture thirty votes by spending an afternoon cradling wheat in an Illinois field as if the men he worked beside were candidates he ran against? no, you’ve used its flow, alloyed with hers soaping you and flying you, to annihilate the shower head, latest model, steam needles you gargle, tines fine enough to breathe like a scented ozone of coke dust ripe for gasification, a hot-and-cold bombarding massage combing your skin as each arc like a drawn line dissolves its color into mere water of rivulets and drips and eddies.

But what about the shower head?

That it talks? or talks to you?

"It’s gonna happen," the Navajo said. "You could help." Tell the world, that’s what you newsmen’s supposed to do—that was what your father on his front porch said: ‘77/ tell the world": if someone asked if, say, he’d seen his cousin’s daughter’s new boyfriend, the sulky-driver from upstate New York—and now here come the Indians, stealing a march even on the archaeologist Indian watchers in their cubicles in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the engineers down at Socorro—yes here come Indians turning turning turning beyond a burst of arrowheads far out in the cloud-feathered cradle of the sky hooped and woven in smoky inertias by (hey!) the first Indian women astronauts hunting happiness the grounds for which may be achievement, and right behind you this Navajo promoter turning beyond to what’s down not up, what’s right there underfoot—well, not right there but far down—the geothermal tap, the well of energy-steam which, given a shared technology, a Navajo operation proposes to mine.

Meanwhile, the blonde, serious Albuquerque businesswoman you smell behind you waits to renew her quiet theme. Her pitch isn’t like that of Raymond Vigil the Indian. His is a shade hidden by the ail-too-well-aged tale he tells as if you hadn’t had it already long ago in a life where you were a reader, he’s selling it and now it’s another story, the Enchanted Mesa of his cousins (Incorporated for better flow—a hundred cars a day comes to twelve hundred dollars a week American to support the pueblo as an institution, literally, no joke, you’re adding it up not counting private enterprise—and now here comes electricity). However, the Albuquerque businesswoman’s story hides less: what? her? what else? not her kids who go to bilingual school and whom she took to lunch at the Western Skies Hotel yesterday, and not what she frowns about, shakes her slightly silver-sheened blond-ash (good) head at, and just about breathes (out as in): the environmental impact of an airport they’re talking about for smaller planes under twenty thousand pounds: but (no) hides what else? a tender, firm, speechless sight of what could still happen in the land if only the river flows clear, if only the horizon can be tilted another way so the strip-mine boom (read bomb) towns may slide elsewhere whose concept breathes its (can that be chlorine-rinsed) air-conditioning off the drawing board’s horizon or off the wall onto the very neck of Ship Rock—and if only the toxic output from future plants can be solved not by water of San Juan River but by decision, by foresight—yet in this so abstract nation (of men within men within men) her tender freedom of sight equals also that American speechlessness you knew in the car coming out here through a reservation so great it can be comprehended only on a map or in the cleft lines in the blooded faces of sun-banished Indians your ignorance mixes up with other burnished Indian faces, and she said, "These little farms—it’s a museum! But the blood’s still here if we leave them alone."

New Mexico is more outside-controlled than any other state, yet in itself more foreign, magically foreign, you’re pretty certain the economist in Farmington said to you at the moment your eye sockets began to feel anesthetized from the mescal and thawed-out orange juice, and you saw this gentle old leftwinger from the McCarthy and even Roosevelt days now day-to-day studier and teacher of Indian resource economics (to Indians out at that underfunded outpost community college in the town named for the Rock Ship Rock) as a great man—yes, quietly and factually forewarning that in two, three years they would need more two-thousand-megawatt generating stations and you figure twelve new strip mines roughly for two stations, but is "out-of-state" anti-Indian? yes, because the supplier and profiter is non-Indian—even if he was here first, your bad knee jokes paining you—while the economist mentions a rug auction tomorrow evening and you both get into family and he speaks factually, not wearily, not intensely, of a still undivorced wife a little too near, and a daughter and almost imaginary grandchildren too far. He thinks the economy is history, he has a steady view, but he isn’t where he was a generation ago and the western world might wind up devaluing via police-state order and rebuild on the Austrian model and maybe nobody important wind up dying of gold hoarding: but he doubts that scamario, he thinks the corporate cooperative will have to self-destruct rather than rebuild out of world poverty and he wonders if you could design a nuclear device that would confine itself to non- or m-human target-structures—but he isn’t interested in black-humor technology, he is for local economics, the irrigation project—it didn’t sound like overall history, which you have always declined to take a view of.

Farms—the environmentalist lady dreams of—encased in this transparent air you’re not used to taking in. You know that she, here two miles from the astoundingly near Rock, has a sense of you, that you wouldn’t get sentimental about legend/religion, yet that you have not yet refigured how to do your work so that it matters. A sense of you, she has, you (well) might skip the trip to Socorro, get the volcano man on the phone, maybe he can talk a more layman’s geotherm. You’re serious, she guesses (hits upon it, lo acierto). That is, serious about something else which may be volcanoes or idleness or privacy, but may be something to one side (both sides) of this assignment that’s your job, so much to either side of it that she’ll have to be framed by these margins of yours or she’ll just have to take off her public environmental concern and let the craziness the two of you are giving off speak to eclipse this infernal garrulous Navajo whom you do ask in self-defense to return your rental car to Farmington and you’ll go south with the woman, Dina, and why doesn’t he get going where instead he’s totaling you with the high place accorded the Navajo woman: she rules the hogan almost; yet where are the hogans?—show me a hogan—these pole-supported, earth-covered mound-houses, where are they? (are they the polygonal wooden cabins you see?)—north pole is Corn Woman, south is Mountain Woman, west is Water Woman, east pole is Earth Woman.

There’s a void fading out and you a reciprocal window fade nakedly in, into just a shifting weight of plasm, it’s what you are on this New York Election Day, plasm recalling in of the girl Barbara-Jean’s voice up there on the pillow that she said at Cape Kennedy she was there for a magazine that you now know more about but last night she hardly talked of because she started you in a western direction—you feel a slowness, greater and greater, turning you back into the rest gap inside you, groups of powers gimbaling the window far away in you, computerized adjustment with an equally far away outside—what groups? they are in communication—fades out, leaves one dark twinkle in the hair of her puff, primes this globulet of light there flowing through her legs, but it’s shower water, there comes a thumping on her front door again and you taste rose-flesh in the drop of her shower water on your tongue, determining to have what’s here—the margin is the center, forget Spence in the movie and the Chilean economist three, four years ago at Cape Kennedy—so long as the girl isn’t responding to the door. And so you won’t talk now for a long time of circling her as she circles you, turning the bed warm again, and the interruption once tight with the touch of chill for a moment between bathroom and bed crossing the palm of your old hand, now gets bigger and softer. Void fades out and the silver-disk shower head is no more the brain and no more that mutation beyond terror both future and past that could not be believed if voiced to this girl who’s of a scientific mind for a journalist, and would wonder what you thought you were laying on her, what being in future reinventing the present meant and as for public events threatening to be news, there’s private life and public life and always was.

Didn’t she do that at dinner before the movie? Not his westward grandmother Margaret who passed muster but the negotiator Karl immune from search who packed a very small Japanese pistol into a room in London that was right next to the room where erstwhile presidential timber Stassen of whom she had but dimly heard went even further than the long way the mythic little bit of him was said to go in 1957. He’d gotten the Russians actually interested in a couple of aerial surveillance plans, but then on the day that Karl had the pistol, Stassen spilled one of these schemes to the Russian, forget his name, and the West Germans and the British found out and got mad— they hadn’t been told; and Eisenhower’s face was red with rage because here we were with the Russians again and he was trying to soothe the British after not backing them on Suez, and Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State as you know, had for his beloved West Germans all kinds of Presbyterian good manners in the breach of which created by poor Stassen’s jerkwater impulse Dulles aimed at Stassen a backfire that blew him right out of a job. (But "How could this Karl get into the talks with a pistol on him? I didn’t know the Japanese made pistols"—"Same thing in Stockholm I think it was and there he was assistant to one of the sub-principals entrusted with the most finely boring technical details, you know"—actually in those days less the unmaking of weapons than making them on a rational schedule of rationed balances.) Mayn’s westward grandmother Margaret on the other hand: she saw the Statue of Liberty in pieces on Bedloe’s Island in 1885, she must have been twelve?, and her father, who took her on these short trips from the New Jersey town where the family paper had run weekly since at least 1834, sent her in ‘93 to Chicago to cover the World’s Fair. ("The World’s Fair? Fve got pictures of the ‘39 World’s Fair, my father met my mother there, they were standing outside the Finnish Pavilion and some kid’s green balloon with Minnie Mouse on it blew by and Dad captured it and returned it to the kid, who was French.") It was called the World’s Columbian Exposition, and Mayn’s nineteen-year-old future grandmother took issue with a famous reincarnationist named Carl Browne whom she heard hold forth and he introduced her to the famous Jacob Coxey ("Who?") who organized an army of unemployed to march on Washington the following year.

("But why didn’t you take over the paper—what was it called?") the Democrat, and up to when Margaret’s grandfather became publisher in 1854, it had weathered many attacks beginning with the scurrilous and unspeakable and dastardly charge in its first months that it would publish only until the fall election, that being its only aim, but the attacks came from the same landowners who thought Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States was a left-wing stampede to anarchy, the same who had been known to pay laborers with notes below par value on a bank seventy miles away, and the same who agreed with Justice Story, who was one of two pre-Jackson dissenters on the Taney court, in ‘37, that to build the toW-free bridge, the Warren Bridge, across the Charles River in Boston was tantamount to raping decent monopolist stockholders of the already existing bridge at a time when the political routine of exclusive charters granted (as they put it) to businesses meant that—well, the editor of the New York Post was saying, The City is trapped, we can’t get our potatoes, we can’t get our fuel, without paying some damn monopoly that’s finagled a corporation charter out of a clutch of crooked legislators in the statehouse. (Lawmen, newsmen. "What, Jim?") Newspapers don’t give away a million loaves of bread any more, like when Jacob Coxey’s Army of the unemployed moved on Washington in ‘94—the New York Herald, can you believe it? ("The promotions have just gotten bigger, Jim, I got news for you! But . . . your grandmother went to Chicago at nineteen?")

Something like that. Of course by then it wasn’t just your advertisements that showed you what was going on in town, for in the 1830s and ‘40s it was Congress, the legislature, politics, foreign news—not much local news; and she used to show me the ads for the stagecoach even before her own time that took people, her grandfather’s subscribers, to Hightstown to meet the railroad train, or to Key port to meet the steamboat. ("What river was that?"—"Oh it must have been the Delaware.") That is, if the steamboat made it. ("What railroad?"—"The Camden and Amboy; big inverted-cone stack, two pair of high wheels back by the engineer’s cab, two pair of little wheels up front by the cow catcher, and the big wheels came right up inside the railing with its little brass posts, twenty that ran clear round the engine"), and even fifty years later it was Chicago those subscribers wanted to hear about in the Windrow Democrat ("Windrow . . ." Jean says the word—), June 1893, headlines THE CHICAGO FAIR—Two Windrow Girls Visit the Great Exposition—An Interesting Account of What They saw—A Labyrinth of Crystal Rocks— Fooled by the Mirrors—The Germans Everywhere Ahead—("The World’s Fair"—"Yes, and she and Florence were almost afraid as they wended their way toward the New Jersey building . . ."). Margaret wrote,

I had heard words of censure about this little place, and at last we were told that it was just ahead of us. To be sure it is just a handsome old Colonial residence and not prepossessing in comparison with the others. And it may be my entire loyalty, but I thought it was just too nice for anything. There is a drawback in that no one is around who appears to have to do with affairs except the colored servants. But we met Mr. Walter Lennox, the Secretary of the New Jersey Commission, who made us feel very much at home and showed us the rooms—banquet room and sleeping apartments—which are not open to all visitors. Of course the first thing we Jersey girls did was to devour the register.

("Crystal rocks?"—"I think that was over in the Horticultural Building. She described it for the Democrat: a pyramid of tropical vegetation in the center towering up to the glass dome, and grassy knolls with fountains and pools; and avenues; and orchids from Short Hills; and under the pyramid a pint-sized model of the Crystal Cave in South Dakota—that’s the labyrinth in the headline.")

It sounded proper, like her report of the light show one night over the Lagoon with one building after another illuminated with hundreds of electric lights, and the searchlight making the water throw gold sparks, and something called "The White City" there in the dispatch but she never talked about it or much about the Fair, Susan B. was there to visit the Women’s Building displaying handicrafts and Mary Cassatt’s mural of modern woman "plucking the fruits of knowledge and science," Margaret declined an invitation to attend the opera in Milwaukee because she had only just met the people who asked her, who were from Madison, Wisconsin and had an Irish name: a vivid correspondent but then in the next weeks an errant daughter. But the white city under the lights fulfilled "the most alluring dreams anyone ever had, with John Philip Sousa’s band playing dreamy Spanish airs, and, later, car after car passing with people hanging on like swarms of bees." ("I can see them." "Bless you, baby, so can I—one foot on, one foot off. T hear Mark Twain is here, but no one has seen him, which is hard to imagine,’ she wrote, I remember. Do you know, she gave a full account of Coxey’s friend’s reincarnation theory: chemistry came into it, and Christ, and Congress too. Newspapers aren’t what they were, thank God, but Easter 1894 the New York Herald gave a thousand dollars worth of clothing to the Coxey marchers though I happen to know one of the California hoboes named Jack London did not wish to change his clothes.") But she really went West, you know, and Florence got sick after they spent a day at the Cudahy Packing Company in Omaha, visiting one thousand hanging carcasses, and the man who gets five dollars a day for sticking ten hogs a minute (a job which in some states disqualified a man from serving on a murder jury), and the children packing smoked meats, and the process of making butterine mostly out of tallow to which is added some small amount of real butter and the small amount of white waxy waste left after the golden mass got pressed from it was used in chewing-gum factories and Margaret reported (!) the only thing not utilized in the whole plant was the squeal of the hog—and what happened then isn’t clear except two other New Jersey people persuaded Florence to go home with them and Margaret remained with a family in Omaha for two or three days more. And then, incredibly, she kept on west. ("She must have had something amazing in her to go away across the country like that—Victorian girl correspondent." "Or she was homing on something amazing she wanted to get. Long skirts, hat—you ought to see the photograph of her on a bicycle I have—she might have bicycled the Colorado trails!" "No.")

Oh she came back; but she went to Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, well I told you we don’t know where all she went. It’s in the dispatches. ("You mean you haven’t read them all? I guess I can understand that, Jim— Jim, dear.")

Margaret had her own stories when Jim was eight, ten, eleven, twelve. ("You don’t pretend to know much, do you? with your Taney decision of ‘37 and your Amboy Railroad"—"and the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Fair if we can come back to it, where according to her report she saw the Cairo Street with donkeys being ridden by Americans, and a Dahomey Village with fifty mud huts and grinning natives with next to nothing on and a witch doctor who cured rheumatism by cutting a slit down your back and rubbing powder in it—" "—in her long skirt and her hat . . .")

Stories she told were something else, and this girl Barbara-Jean hardly interrupted except in some mental way during two sudden fragments offered during dinner before the movie, before the night, before this morning shower of love geysering down from pipes that otherwise rose up from far below, except to say she was disturbed by a feeling of . . . traces, the word just came out—traces—traces in him like a grain giving off vibes (sorry), some Thing that’s, some Power that—I sound like Total Woman—you’re not aware of it—it’s—

Was it animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Well, since he asked, it was more mineral, but speaking; and it was acting at long range.

A few voices ask inside Mayn, So what’s to be gotten out of this?—all this matter of Chicago tipping westward and the rest?

Answer: The reason why two places there in the shower (New York shower; New Mexico plateau) laid upon each other a congruence that wasn’t bad at all, unlike the reason behind that merely mental union—a late-model shower head that has taken James Mayn, and others in his recollection, from the future (whoever happens to be with him in the cube of the future) and has done what is done to the two of them by what the shower head at once reminds him of and foreshadows, both; and as the void fades, a porch-rooted father, his own, is saying, ‘77/ tell the world" and that nowadays you get one for the price of two. The son’s earth-odored flame of anger sprouts only in the rest of the body, not in mouth or eyes, and later he remembers this—this ore.

But they fade apart, the girl breathing, Mayn breathing, the girl asking, "Do you ever get high?"—he answering, "I get drunk sometimes, but intentionally." "Do you feel there are things you remember only when you’re . . . ?" "I do." "Because when I was drowsy this morning before we got in the shower, I started remembering the time I was half asleep, really a long time ago, Cape Kennedy." "Too long ..." "Yes, but I didn’t mean that; I meant that you were talking in the dark and I saw your face; why was that?" "Guess it happens." "Very funny. I think it was about Chile, I know it was, but I think it was someone from Chile; and you talked on and on, and I saw you being tossed over your own shoulder: why was that?"

You talk back to her at the risk of an equal falling backward through the foreign arms of that Navajo windbag and that Albuquerque environmentalist woman into the cracked Earth whose storms tossed up Ship Rock into time, a wreck sailing its gray-blown iceberg through a landfall.

"I’ve got some jewelry from out there," she says naked and thoughtful in her bedroom; "the men make it mostly, the women are starting to do some, the poverty gets to look like landscape if your car is running smoothly; it was spring and I saw some dry-painting, the real stuff you’re not supposed to be able to see (perhaps that’s sad), and I wanted to pay the people and one man surprised me and took my money. You know how they mix charcoal and vegetable pigments, I mean isn’t that right?, on a background of buckskin or sand, so it’s sometimes called sand painting. It’s ritual, it’s a cure for sickness; when were you there?"

She wants to know about geothermal energy, what he knows about, just like a woman—tapping the Earth. Mayn remembers her all over again from Cape Kennedy, she has conviction. Oh she’s in a gap, she’s free, sharp, charitable, in place; will travel when she has to for her magazine and when she wants to, and she wants to know if the geothermal Navajo is in private business and has he dropped all the names he must have acquired—Spanish, European, Christian nicknames, and a secret war name (traditional)—she has a brilliant Bolivian cape, eats Japanese and vegetarian though is into brain parasites lately and may sometimes throw back (all these details of not-yet-knowing-her) the raw fish though they’re pretty when they’re served curled and nestled like white rose petals with beads of quince-colored roe in the middle like a bloom; shares the check but won’t make a fuss if she gets taken; plays squash; does the Plough but not the Headstand; studied physics and banking; broad forehead; plays Rolling Stones and the B-Minor Mass without being well-balanced. How is she so gentle, so accurate? She has avoided losing out. She’d know what to do in a Baptist church, hymnal in hand, or in a high church Whiskopalian. Or when a male neighbor’s thumping on her front door twice in an hour. She has nonetheless just let a second set of keys just appear on the pigskin knuckles of some gloves. How can she be so finely unconscious, naked here? His problem, not hers.

But if (she’s thinking)—look—fine if you’ve got a magma chamber a mile or two down full of molten rock swelling up through a break in the crust, even granting you could have when these sites are inactive volcanoes—and granted hot water under pressure way down there will stay liquid at much hotter than a hundred centigrade, maybe double that; and granted if you bring it up to the surface it’ll flash into steam which you can harness: still, what if there’s no water to work on? And where exactly were they planning (hoping, figuring, fixing) to drill?

He nears—no; hears—the Albuquerque environmentalist lady but in Mayn’s own words retelling to the Barbara-Jean girl in New York some sentimental passion for Zuni grandmas belied by efficiency and the long, taxing drive down through Gallup and its glittering pawnshops full of Indian silver and to Albuquerque. Oh I hear it in our wonderful air out here, Mr. Mayn, another airport poisons the air, wrecks the ears, and what of the Earth itself, Mr. Mayn?—"what of"? she is sounding Indian for God’s sake—I felt the Earth alive right there on my front seat this morning so I want to reach way down. My hands know. And I’m not especially religious, any more than selling time for TV-radio is my religion either, a woman has to have a job—I think we need gas—but the Earth is the Lord’s and the Earth is alive, so how can it listen to us if its drums are busted? Spider Man told the Earth Surface People a ringing in the ear signals death or disaster, and the Earth is one great ear that hears more than what you say; it hears what you mean. I don’t mean you yourself. Ray Vigil tells some of this: you’d be surprised. Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.

There’s a second, indefatigable wind the plateau ignores that passes through Ship Rock and Window Rock and crumbled (two centuries’ worth in two minutes) the stone ladder so three Pueblo women got stranded up on Enchanted Mesa when the men were out hunting, close to but not quite the story Ray’s father told him and he told Dina who told it to Mayn—who finds that Jean knows it already, even in his version simplified and alloyed with a certain hydrostatic compulsion: story of the Holy People below the Earth who once upon a time down there were driven by flood and that’s how they came up onto the surface. Like Spider Man and Spider Woman who taught Earth Surface People to weave, but many other Holy People do not speak, and many are not always friendly to Earth Surface People and must be given songs and dances, the Wind People and the Thunder People and Fringed Mouth and Coyote (listen a witch once impersonated Coyote so my own father fell off his horse that everyone told him not to herd sheep on and he wound up in Ship Rock hospital with concussion and delirium); and we cannot forget in terms of our growth potential that the Hero Twins did not kill off all the monsters, so the blood of the dead ones that is dried up into the lava you stand on is not all the blood of the monsters; likewise while the Holy People up here travel on the echoes of the flood and on the Big Screen of the Rainbow, and on the Superwatts of the reldmpago which is lightning in the language of Coronado who came seeking the Seven Cities that were gone by his time but held under the Earth for the future, and the Holy People as they move about now among the Earth Surface People that they created are helpful or dangerous for life is dangerous for it bends into other life, though full of natural resources which matter to the future of Navajo people, these spirits—these Holy People—travel on also shafts of the sun like the wind, you better believe it, for this is not just their speed, it is how they keep in touch with the Holy People who stayed below, yes, oh the professors down in Albuquerque and Tempe think they believe this, anyway some Holy People stayed below through the terrible flood while most of the Holy People rose to Earth Surface through a reed that soon became clogged with viscous, sandy noise, Jean, for the fear of death—there goes the door again—seeped down from above, and Spider Man taught that noise in the windpipe is one of the four signs of disaster—

—You’re not the type to tell this, but there’s a reason you’re into it and it’s not culture and it’s not hobby and it’s probably not insanity and it’s not copy you’re turning out—wait, there’s the door.

Well, those that rose became spirits, and those below have heated that ancient flood with elements given by the Sun, elements like, hell, why not electro-magnetism? until the time when a Navajo will come with a business sense and with vision and with roots deep enough below the dried blood of the monsters and will tap that energy source and bring all those stranded but worth-watching Holy People up to the surface so we’ll have more Spirit and a new time of gratitude between Earth Surface People and the Holy People and the Sun and Moon that ask one death each per day, and above all we will have a Navajo geothermal power source.

Navajo-Ute—get facts straight; think you can lean on the man at the other end of your wire to pick you up?, so it’s Navajo-Ute, you said yourself, didn’t you? Something for everyone. Male and female at the dividing line concentrating to keep the Earth from cracking, one knee, one thumb, one jawbone’s like another, even one tail if you don’t get down too close to the bone, but here she comes again like an intelligence orbiting you or you it, she with her knowledge, though knowing her only from our brief docking and recovery at Kennedy Space Center, I’m not inspired to pick an argument which is how the sexes got separated if not created according to Void’s Book of New Navajo—Is it that you’re Divorced Man who confused this with history like secretly getting religion? No, that’s not it. You were created after a geothermal super spat under the Earth so the sexes ceremonially separated. Then the females of the Holy People bore a series of monsters whom it thus became necessary to murder, lynch, subject to a "rolphing"—which the erstwhile editor of the Democrat tells his son meant lynching in 1934 when it was not Indians as a century before but Negroes—eliminate, waste, blow them away, or, as an interested party, ask for their death. So here came the Hero Twins to do the job with a minimum of words and a maximum of lava stamping so hard the plates down deep in Earth’s crust came apart and magma from Earth’s mantle gurgled, welled, bent upward. But where did those old twins come from?

From Changing Woman, Mr. Mayn, explained the Albuquerque environmentalist lady Dina, sure I’ll have another Manhattan, but we should eat and I have to call my husband—

So here came the Hero Twins to do the job, but go way back before the power of this Earth we saw today began to suffer erosion, before breaking sound barriers had to be noisy instead of just a slipping through between, if you see, and we find First Man and First Woman who I think must have created the universe together, but the Navajo don’t say so though what they think is anybody’s guess and might be something else.

No, lady, we think First Man did the job. But don’t sell First Woman short, Mr. Mayn, for she was right there behind him like a shadow that wheels off the south corner of Ship Rock even much later when Earth Surface People learn how to tap the oil, the vanadium, knock power out of a rock, and if I can’t give you this blue-green silk shirt off my back may I buy you a beer? —you know what they say about drunken Indians, and now it’s the anthropological chemists.

But Blessing Way, Mr. Mayn, you might be interested in coming here when they have the ceremonials. Blessing Way is the one that recalls the meeting organized by Changing Woman at which Earth Surface People most of them created by Changing Woman learned about horse and gila, yucca and the storms in the sky and how to use the wind without building magic carpets that carry their own vacuum cleaners you can’t switch off if your husband is a TV sports commentator, Mr. Mayn, with his own plane and I should call him.

But Jean here on Election Day in New York knows stories—the same ones—our Indian heritage inspiring internal decor plus thought about native American history when natural resources become unnatural by excluding Us —and there’s Changing Woman, they say in the ceremonial that Changing Woman is young and beautiful, Miss Universe, and she has this fantastic home on the Western Waters, which is a prophecy of the coming of the Geothermal Spirit—

—Now you’re being facetious, Jeanie.

And since, Mr. Mayn, we are stopping (Dina of New Mexico had said), you can learn the word for gas—chidi bi to (‘‘car’s water"), they speak the language more than write it.

But, Dina, where did First Woman and First Man come from? That is, just to get my facts straight, did they sail in on Ship Rock?, this would have been when it was active. I can’t keep all this from getting practical.

First Woman and First Man were transformed from two ears of corn, it’s what the Navajo say and it’s easier for an Anglo to believe, a white ear, and a yellow ear, white for woman.

But if I am to cover this story I have to know for sure beyond a tincture of doubt who was the father of Changing Woman’s Hero Twins.

What’s the matter? (a nearer voice asks like a pillow) did you hear something? Do you want the answer before brunch, old man?

Raymond Vigil, portly, young, beamingly serious busybody, and Dina West, cool, kind, healthy, melancholy, Anglo environmentalist lady speak at the same time in the void of your head: I am no Mattie Grinnell who at a hundred and one went to Washington on the Poor People’s Crusade and was the last full-blood of her tribe but her Indian name also meant Many Roads, and what’s around now is a new type that sees the land not only as what the treaties took away with only promises to pay but what lies under the land and does not only lie but shifts its energy and is in turbulence.

God I’m sick of energy.

My grandfather got mixed up with that march of the unemployed in 1894 when he went out looking for my grandmother who was only twenty and wasn’t even his fiancée yet. There was at least one Indian on that march.

Well, there is something in that story you know that the great She lay upon the Earth in anger, scratched it with her nails until the minerals, the coal, the mica, silver, gold, and vanadium were heated up into her by a process whose secret has been lost but was fed by all the desire of the Holy People Left-Behind-Underground, who raised such an upward pressure of passion for her which came together by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost that new coordinate shafts of magma dikes formed so she grew hard with minerals radiating into her which came together yet by a process the secret of which has been temporarily lost fell apart in her, giving off two fields of flesh which grew to be the Hero Twins.

Sure, Mr. Mayn, if I could speak I’d say we could drive all day all night in my late-model Dart into the sky, my husband has his Thunderbird—

Wait, Jim: no one interrupted you; go on, what are you waiting for, your breakfast? What about an organic Bloody Mary for Election Day?

My ex-wife’s dad drank dry Manhattans.

Wilhelm Reich drank Manhattans.

I think church organists drink Manhattans.

Maybe they like something special.

My wife’s father played the piano, I’m told.

Nonsense to all this mineral cookery. Changing Woman conceived those Twins by the mere advent of puberty. What traffic needed she with a male? What mere equality?

I hope you will do something with the airport question, Mr. Mayn, local though it is, yet readers in the East could put it together with their own priorities.

We hope you will do something with the joint geothermal technology-sharing project possibility, Mr. Mayn. Did the car rental take your credit card?

Nonsense, Jimmy—the true story—but what about your grandmother? She went out to the Chicago Fair and came back with Coxey’s Army marching on Washington?

Not "Jimmy," please ... no, she knew Coxey and met the reincarnation man Carl Browne and some blood-medicine seller from Chicago, who was called the Great Unknown but so far as we know she wasn’t on the march, she was back home in New Jersey long since. I think she said the march was at least one-third correspondents.

O.K. If not "Jimmy," then not Jeanie. The true story is that Changing Woman was impregnated by the rays of the Sun and by a shower of water: I’ve been out there. I have a silver and turquoise buckle.

Well, I been down to Ecuador on my way.

"Scrambled eggs are up!"

On my way where?

Something special. An onion for sure, and the dark mushroom oiling a touch of sweet invisible as a spice’s membrane.

You couldn’t get out of your head the bones removed of sacred enemies, and what they did then. But you reported mainly business so you would not get into what they did then (with the bodies).

"I scrambled six big ones."

Well, two or three bodies anyway, dried to perfection in hot hot sand, then smoked. Get a new slant on yourself, one’s body. In the forests of Oriente in Ecuador. No other white man has seen it! Indian bodies softened up and then remolded. By hand.

Hand around the empty, red-filmed glass, while thumps speak against the front door.

"I juiced the tomatoes. You want another Bloody Mary?" She’s realistic.

"I want one just like the first."

"You shall have it."

"Now we’re getting somewhere."

"I thought so, Jim. But I’m trying to find that Bolivian beach we’re sunbathing on. I think of you letting fly in the shower grinning up into the water with your eyes closed."

"I thought I had my back to you."

"Maybe I imagined it. I was daydreaming like crazy. It’s the overflow the last few hours."

"Shower power to the middle class. You’ve got a good shower there. That means you got a good landlord."

"It works better on two bodies. It’s very reliable almost all the time except at eight in the morning Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday."

"Hey, you mean you were daydreaming in the shower?"

"Only because it was so great being there."

"Where did you get to, angel?"

"New Mexico, the usual places. Hey, you can stay here until the people are out of your apartment."

"It’s too comfortable here."

"Do you think Bolivia will get its coastline?"

"They been talking about it a long time, Bolivia, Peru, it’s a shame to have to earn a coastline. It will change the weather."

"Having a coastline?"

"Some crank theory. Coastal configuration-outline, instability of moisture front above coast. Maverick weatherman I tried to get a story out of. Lives like a hermit in the Village."

"A hermit?"

"Oh there’s someone with him, an old girl about his age but her mind is babbling to her from a long long distance away. It’s a railroad flat—a long hall each next room opens into. He’s not interested in being known, but I think he’s confused on that issue, and I’m picking up some terrible risk in what he’s figured out."

"How old are you? I would rather hear about your nineteen-year-old grandmother and the Great Unknown. Did your own mother travel around a lot?"

"One at a time. I guess my daughter would say I’m pushing fifty. She wants to keep me in my place."

"She sounds like she loves you."

"Did you stand on your head while the water was boiling?"

"No, I like to take my time whatever I’m doing, and then I find there is time. It’s like finding you know more than you think you know."

"I know less, always."

"You’re kind of stupidly modest, aren’t you?"

"Look, I’m not on assignment all the time."

"And nobody knows you’re here?"

"You saying someone does?"

"The landlord’s nephew came to the door while you were in the bathroom."

"So the landlord’s nephew knows I’m here."

"He wanted to remind me his father is a ward leader and hoped I would vote today. He mentioned your name."

"The nephew?"

"Yes. Someone came by this morning asking if I lived here. I mean, my name is on the mailbox. The landlord’s nephew said Yes. The man asked if you lived here with me."

"Sounds like a divorce detective."

"Are you one of the flippant ones? Are you only part here?" she gets serious, youthfully, pompously.

"That would be ungrateful."

"You mean I’m ungrateful?"

"No, only the top gurus get to be in two places or more at the same time."

"Why are you so flippant? It’s not funny."

"Who asked for me?"

"Some guy. A Puerto Rican in an army jacket."

‘‘But I have a perfectly good address. It has a street name and a number."

You reach out a hand toward her and she moves her arm. "I’m familiar with your address," she says. "There’s a rather well-known woman who runs a workshop there that I don’t happen to go to, I go to a workshop someplace else."

"They seem to . . . work. I mean they do."

"Because they’re so easy to make fun of."

"The self-help?"

"The support system," she responds authoritatively, but then "—just ganging up on the guys sometimes. It’s O.K."

"As for me I would increase my competence in science if I joined a workshop."

"You in a workshop, Jim? Pardon me, but . . ."

"Or I would increase my competence in those areas I now have some competence in—don’t laugh—such as the politically sluggish issue of ocean geothermal energy which is in a way the opposite of land because the surface is comparatively warm while the water deep down is cold where I gather they pipe the water from to the surface where they get the good passive solar energy though they have to run the pumps, don’t they?, but now if we pollute ourselves a new ceiling to greenhouse the planet, we melt the glaciers and up the oceans, but how fast does new glacier water really sink because what if the surface gets cold in that case?"

"O.K., this is my opinion, Jim. You are locked into some obsessional reluctance, and it comes out sort of meant and sort of not meant. Do you know who came asking about you? Was it connected to the man you saw ahead of us at the movie? Are you involved in something?"

Mayn has seen the streets of Santiago grooving into slippery sluices to acquire momentum-wise the passive energy of people-bodies in the manpower sense sliding toward consolidation into a new power base as if a dictator without imagination could open national resources and reserves without being one himself, or are these "bodies" sports fans? for the tilted streets all sluice toward the Stadium (its inherent grandeur captured in the name of sport and even the social), while economy dictates that via compaction technology a percentage of those who gain entrance through their togetherness among all others are not seen to leave the Stadium.

"Where’d you buy your shower head because it’s a powerhouse."

"I’ll tell you. And if someone is following you, I don’t care. Because we’re here having brunch and if you’re here that’s O.K., and professional intrigue is anti-family—it’s an anti-family bomb out there way at the outskirts."

Sure, sure, he’s familiar with that one, his own family go way back into the mists of continental trek, and (agreed) if at this point in the century extreme left and extreme right be no different except in religion (whose entertainment is openly embraced on the right) and in the style of wealth-holding (which on the left requires more pomp), what is there for us except private life? Yet to agree with her and (who knows?) her hormones might confess that political power is more and more a South-American-style spectacle you witness from the orchestra or upperdeck practicing your job of fact discreetly: which has been for donkeys’ years the policy he reached precisely through giving up on family, not political, history. Yet she didn’t mean, Forget political integrity-action; that’s not what she meant. She meant intrigue of surviolence: what? wait . . . violent surveillance, paranational pastimes like assassination, more the spirit of participation in these, boytime with no more Caring for History than a disciplined hit man’s automobile accelerator explosion whose anger is perhaps lost in the shoulds and distances of some father’s disapproval or some mother’s or just overarching miasma of absence. Yet—

"Don’t you have a buzzer?"

"There he is again—the buzzer’s broken. Weird: he was knocking before to tell me it was fixed."

"That was three things on his mind: the election, the Puerto Rican, and the buzzer."

"Your sweet stuff distracts me."

Tall girl in white terry cloth, hair dark and damp—she’s looking down at him—you—in his shorts. What is this? She’s getting younger before your eyes. Does she now have the technology? To colonize space, that is. She falls from a beautiful height upon your—his—neck, his shoulders, chuckling through her hair and into his throat. She wants to know his birthday. Same as his grandmother’s, etcetera. "That thumping," she looks at him cutely, "that thumping on the door won’t go away."

"It won’t?" he says. "Better find out what it is."

She rises away from him leaving him feeling naked, and turns to leave him but the thumping on the door reminds her: "You weren’t really serious about not dreaming. You sure you don’t?"

"Answer’s still No," he stubbornly leavens his reply.

But if he did dream, she ponders, moving away . . .

He would dream, he answers, maybe all those books he tried reading one chapter of, you know.

She says it doesn’t sound right. She’s gone away to answer the door, leaving him with love and, well, technology beyond el toaster and her anxious suspicion of fiberglass adrift in the lining of her oven—call in two hundred thousand ovens. What history will he find if he truly enters Spence’s life. His own? Her apartment is like his head today, and there’s a danger at the door, potentially historic, hence with its tedium to work through. He would rather discount it and weigh her breath spilling him forward, for at his age he is in love-again now with a person other than his one-time wife, so a front of private life spills forward, though he knows he has been followed lately, though it’s perhaps par for the course, like some shadow of bomb-war or throw in disarmament with the shower water. He meditates in his shorts upon the shower head, for it has taken him—you—a ways into the future from here, and the weight of the water’s raying wash has turned to a force that can so re-matter what the rays hit that you wonder the water can be so real. Except that you don’t wish to ponder that future force that deconstitutes and works on two not only one, a shortcut toward colonizing space transferring two into one—the thought makes a relation that is so rough you’re thrust into where you are, like future forced you to step back into the most alive.

"Did you ever see that movie?—I mean, you know, not coming in in the middle?" She’s here and sits down hard on his lap, tall and subtle enough to carry his love into the Great American Question Who was here first? and beyond.

He doesn’t want to get around her. "But is weight slow?"

"It’s steady," she guarantees. "It’s steady?" she asks the void.

"That’s what I was thinking in the shower."

"We had a great one. Slow as weight itself," she says. "Do you ever feel," she wonders, "that we fit into a large life that doesn’t much know us but—holds us? And that this is better than its being more aware of us?"

"Well, let’s not tell it about us," he seems to agree, and she puts an arm on his shoulder and frowns.

"It is beyond understanding us," she pontificates softly.

"It’s still fun being here," he is going to say but instead out comes, "I think I have to go and ask it a few questions. It’s fun being here, Jean."

"It is," she agrees; and feeling her legs across his all over again, he finds that she doesn’t yet know what she wants of him, so he brings the question inside himself, switches the sexes to protect the innocent, and now sees he’s had the question in him all along. To be sure, it’s shared, but at the moment he was here first.

the departed tenant

It was a distance from her place, but he often walked home. The hours were insane to be leaving her. What did he think he was doing? Along the glowing, blank streets, where the cab at 3 A.M. or some face, above a wind-breaker, of a man going on early shift at five had less than nothing to do with him, he imagined he was married and bound home to his wife. He could imagine this because he had been married. Yet when he had been married, he hadn’t been unfaithful in this way. Unfaithful? But he wasn’t married now.

Sometimes he stayed overnight, but sometimes he didn’t. But he liked staying overnight with her, so that when he didn’t stay, it lingered, like a bad time. It wasn’t a bad time, but you might call it a bit dumb. But it was his life.

She didn’t much question these departures in the middle of the night, except to complain a little and maybe make a joke. Like did he have a paper route? Was he moonlighting as a milkman? There are no milkmen any more, he told her. Did he have another girlfriend, a daytime girlfriend he went home for? You’re my daytime girlfriend, he said. But that’s the point, she said— you’re not spending the night tonight. Oh, but I do, he said. Oh well, she said. Because it wasn’t worth arguing about.

She might switch on the little globe-shaped light beside the bed and get up and pull on her bathrobe and hug it around her while he put on his clothes, which had been lying on the floor, or on a chair, or once—his socks—on the keys of the upright piano she kept in the bedroom. The bedroom was bigger than the living room; she thought she wanted to move. Sometimes she stayed in bed while he dressed, and told him sleepily that she’d had a good time with him. Then the darkness and slight strain of what he was doing, going home when they could have been sleeping, seemed to make her say less than she wanted to say, as if, in ‘he dark, she mustn’i. even ask his name or he would vanish; and so there were words in the air between them, and perhaps it wasn’t clear who was thinking t m. What on earth did he think he was up to? What was this? Who did he thinK he was, doing this to himself? Really to her was the equally unspoken reply; to her, if anyone. (Forget it, pal, she 11 survive was surely in both their minds.) One time she laughed and said, Well, did he have a wife he hadn’t told her about? No, not one he hadn’t told her about.

He said, "I only have two bodies. How’s that for fidelity? Mine and yours."

"Well, I should think so," she said quickly, without feeling. But generally she was easy on him when she was with him. She was smart; in fact, she was artistic. She had a happy influence on him.

When he got dressed in the dark, he might find himself back on the bed for a moment or two, the covers and his coat between them, his mouth on her cheek, her eyelid; her mouth, thank God, smiling in the shadows while he told her the same things he had told her before, but now he was dressed.

They went on like this all through the fall, and while he wondered, listening to her play the piano, he knew that eventually she would act if he did not. They were shadowed by a sense of humor which sometimes seemed a longer shadow of events.

She knew what he had done, or what he meant when he said it, which he did at length. She had heard all about it, and she listened with such attention that she might have been taking him literally. He said quite seriously—so she had to smile—that he had killed his wife. All right, not killed—merely destroyed. Yet not her but her life. Or their life. That is, by not leaving her. (She had left him.) He said all this as if he would recall, and recall in order to amend. But this long crime against womanhood, this murder, had it not required an accomplice? he was asked—asked more than once, and once in her dark, lovely bedroom.

An accomplice? She meant his wife, of course.

Well, nobody had caught him, nobody had put him in jail for it. So forget, forget, forget.

And, naturally, his girlfriend was right, but he shook his head, staring at the ceiling in the dark room. Her hand found his face and covered it firmly. "You see, they changed the law. We’re on the honor system now. You punish yourself."

"Don’t want to be on the honor system," he muttered, but she didn’t change the subject.

"John, you’re still half married."

He looked through her fingers into the darkness and made a satisfied sound; the hand upon his face was delicious. He kissed the hollow of her palm and turned to look her in the eye.

She asked if he minded her calling him half married. He touched her mouth and he remembered that she had said he hadn’t really thought about that old marriage of his. Think about it, forget it, think about it, forget it, she seemed to be saying. They listened to a neighbor’s stereo drumming deeply, distantly. She gave his forehead a long, soft kiss, which was like when she whispered in his ear, whispered until the finest-spun words became breath.

Once, on the way home, from streetlamp to streetlamp, past gentle, lurid light, past probes of flashing cabs winging downtown over potholes and heaves of the avenue, he thought that he had not really been married after all. Across the street, the blonde prostitute who was always zipped tight into the bright colors of her costume stood dark-eyed and pale at the entrance to an alley, so that she looked like she had the key to its high iron gate. His hands were cold, and he stopped for coffee in a place he had passed many times—a little hole-in-the-wall newsstand cafe. Why had he wanted to stop there? Nothing much—it was at the intersection where he turned.

He would come along in the middle of the night before dawn, following a coastline, and then, across the street, through the sidewalk service window, he would see a woman pouring coffee from a glass pot that seemed to hang from her knuckles. Three or four men leaned on their elbows at the cramped counter inside. A nurse in white stockings and a dark coat would come along—or, once, an off-duty cop with his satchel—and stop at the window and pick up a paper if the early papers were out, fold it, and hand the money through. The woman, who looked Puerto Rican, was framed in the service window and gave change or passed out a pack of cigarettes, and she might pause and look out across the avenue. At this intersection he would turn and walk the rest of the way home crosstown. But this one night he went in and took the remaining stool at the counter. There wasn’t much room inside. Someone must have been right behind him in the street, because the woman went to the window with a brown paper bag. She must have had it ready. She handed it out to a man who wore a knitted face mask. The man laughed at something she said, and she came back to the counter and poured John a cup of coffee, assuming with a smile that that was what he wanted.

A cup of coffee was a cup of coffee. Yet staying overnight with his girl wasn’t staying overnight unless he had breakfast with her. So didn’t he like her, that he had left her and come here for coffee on the way home? The coffee was almost strong; it was rich and had a faint, natural sweetness to it.

His girlfriend slept easily. Once, he had phoned her on the way home and she was already asleep and brought the phone slowly to her ear while he imagined her dark bedroom and the dark living room beyond it. He had left her there in the middle of the night. But he loved her and he loved having breakfast with her. She talked of moving. He thought of a better life. She had said at the very beginning that he was her other body. Well, she was his. They had met at a fund-raising party given by her radio station. Her name was Linda.

He kept her to himself. He did tell his friend Harry how he had danced in a deserted subway station with her and had spent the night in a tent on a small mountain in New Jersey in order to prove to her that New Jersey did have mountains. And one Sunday at the pier he had slowly—keeping an eye on her—drawn a pencil out of his jacket pocket and surprised himself by doing a picture of her. He never drew—he couldn’t draw at all. "You see?" she had said.

"Linda sounds pretty and she sounds nice," Harry said. "When am I going to meet her?"

Harry lived forty minutes upriver by train. John and Harry met at the gym, where they put on the gloves but seldom boxed. Light gloves for the punching bags. He and Harry had reached a point of skill at which they could talk while working the speed bag, one resting, the other working, snapping the small black Everlast bag up against the circular platform it hung from. It sounded like tap dancing when the timing peaked, the hands went faster and faster, the bag twice as fast.

Harry was much heavier and had a full English mustache. He told jokes while he worked out. Sometimes it was an awful joke you wouldn’t repeat except to someone you were very sure of. All the time, he went on striking the bag in front of him, single-punching, side-slapping, or double-punching fast after the bag hit up against the far side and before it hit the near side again.

Harry invited him to come up with Linda for the weekend. He asked Harry for a rain check. Sure; it rained all the time up at their place, Harry said. John laughed, and Harry said it was all very well for John, who wasn’t always tied down to his office, but a weekend for him was a weekend. Harry was not a friend to tell you what you should do; but " ‘John and Linda’— that sounds pretty good," he said, and just at that moment the member of this mythical couple who was present was overtaken by a yawn so true and deep, opening across the eyes and the spine, across the shoulders and cheekbones, that he flubbed his timing and sent the speed bag glancing off, and stepped back to complete his yawn, which then seemed to find further depths in him, while Harry stopped the bag and took over. He got going at once. "She cutting into your sleep?" he said, going about his work and grinned at some still point in the midst of his target’s blur until he suddenly finished off his sequence with a smash that practically blew the bag off its swivel.

Harry wouldn’t volunteer advice, but he cared about John, and he listened. "I’ve known you a long time; if she says you’re still married, she’s probably right."

"Then I’m a bigamist," John said and laughed. Harry was a lawyer.

"The worst kind. They can’t do nuthin’ to ya."

"That’s what you think," said John.

John told Linda what Harry had said, and knew he shouldn’t have.

"Harry and his wife knew her," she said, and, in a catch of her breath, she was about to go on, but she thought a moment, distracted in the dark when John moved. "I wonder where she is," she finally said.

"Don’t," said John, wondering if she thought he knew.

"She’s better off where she is," came the voice in front of him in his arms.

"You make it sound like Heaven," he said.

But then she unbent a leg and stretched it, his thigh against hers. She snuggled back against him. "We can’t all be in Heaven," she said, yawning.

"Then there’s the real bigamist you read about in the paper, who really and truly has a double life; and that is a lot of life," he said, as she listened in the darkness of her bedroom.

"I don’t believe it," she said.

Linda found another apartment. It gave him pause. She couldn’t wait to get out. The new apartment was a dozen or so blocks uptown and would be better in every way except the rent was more. John was going to help her move. Then, a week before the end of the month, she got a call from the departing tenant at the crack of dawn to say, with humor, that he had already departed. She phoned her new super and decided at once to take the day off and clear out. She called John and told him not to change his plans, she had phoned some friends of hers—a couple with a van.

They came over, and the job got done in three trips; the move was all finished by mid-afternoon. Just as they were sitting down to have a beer the phone rang; it was the former tenant, asking if everything was cool. Thanks again, he was told.

For the time being, only the large kitchen needed a paint job. And that was where Linda was standing all by herself, thinking, when, at six-thirty, John found the front door unlocked, pushed it open, and politely touched the buzzer. He had seen the place once already but not in its present mess. She came out to greet him. He gave her a kiss on one tired cheek. Her stomach made a hungry sound. They gave each other a lot of little kisses, and she was so friendly holding him that he could feel words forming in her mouth. Her arm lay along his shoulders; she thanked him for sending over the plant, which he saw out of the corner of his eye near the piano—a heroic plant, large-scale and formidable, with a very simple Latin name he had forgotten.

She was happy with the bare brick wall across from the piano. Did she need another table in the living room? Well, he said, what about one of those swing seats that hung from a chain bolted to the ceiling? She laughed at that. Keep the furniture off the floor as much as possible, he said. They contemplated the loft bed in the corner of the living room by a window. The former tenant had built it, but he hadn’t tried to get any money for it or for some beautifully made bookshelves with sliding panels. He said he had to give up the place because the landlord wouldn’t let him sublet. Linda had acquired an official, though obsolete, street sign marking an intersection near her old apartment. The steel-framed, blue-background style signaled a neighborhood of fire escapes and steeples and great quantities of flowers passing on a horse-drawn wagon, all of which John recalled as clearly as he had heard the man on the wagon calling up to the windows, a man in a cap—though that horse-drawn wagon creaking down a city block without a lot of parked cars was much less his to remember than his parents’, who didn’t live in the city now. Linda’s street sign was a collector’s item: where had she found it? Oh, her friend with the van had given it to her.

How did the piano sound in its new home?

She told him to listen for himself, and she played a hymn standing up; without the pedal it had the briskness of a march.

He stayed that night and the next night. She had the lock changed and gave John a key to the apartment and one to the street door.

He said he would keep them for an emergency. He wouldn’t use them. He wondered what emergencies he meant.

Walking home from her former apartment, he had felt that that was her part of the city—her city, though she had come to it not long ago. When she lived there, he had walked uptown and over, and it was a shade less safe than walking from the new apartment. This new route was crosstown, past a public school, then up two blocks, then crosstown. Both neighborhoods were new to him, both old, both more Hispanic than ten years ago; and if he occasionally phoned on his way home, he wasn’t checking to see if she was asleep or O.K., he was extending some happiness he had that she was there in that place.

On the new route, he passed a Spanish restaurant with a big guitar worked into its neon sign, unlighted on these dark, early mornings. The fancy plasterwork was like the facade of a Spanish restaurant in Linda’s old neighborhood; they had never eaten there. He missed the old route: the dilapidated stoops; a cleaner’s with a lighted clock and a gloomy poster that said "New Suede" above a sheep with long eyelashes, walking (or standing) happily in its sleep; an office building with a dingy marble lobby, where, behind two sets of doors, the watchman sat with his back to the street, reading his paper, a Thermos on the table beside him; then the rather nasty drugstore displaying a clutter of skin remedies and bottles of headache remedies and little propped-up advertisements and, seedy there in the light from the street, a bulky carton slightly used and askew, containing some prosthetic device. Then, a couple of doors down, past the meat market that had a rabbit and an unplucked bird hanging in the window at suppertime but nothing at three in the morning, there was the delicatessen with the powerful all-night cat lying on its side in the space between the plate glass and a crate of large, thick-skinned eating oranges, which were directly below a hook-load of bananas blanched to a sharp pallor by exposure to the solitary light of the streetlamp. He knew all these private landmarks, right down to the pay phone on a concrete post next to a steel-mesh trash basket. He missed that old route; it went only as far as the intersection, where the newsstand cafe was. From there on, his route home remained the same.

Two doors down from the brocade-curtained window of the Spanish restaurant was Linda’s new fish market, a pillow store on one side and a pet shop called Fin and Claw on the other. The white enamel fish trays, more vacant than the plate glass, seemed to slant more sharply than when they were full of gray and coral shrimp and white layers of fillet.

The restaurant people had gone home; the fish people would be getting up to go to the wholesale market across the river. The married people were traveling in their sleep, but together. He tried to imagine his one-time wife in Heaven. It was like failing to get a phone call through. He felt that Harry and his wife knew where she had ended up. How terrible, but he didn’t ask. He could imagine only real places like Hawaii, at the other end of the world, except Hawaii was very expensive.

Linda got mad one night going down in the elevator. "So what if you did kill her?" The door slid open, and suddenly they were facing the lobby and the superintendent, who was all dressed up, so the dark glasses he always wore looked different. "So what if you did kill her?"

John shushed Linda, and they all laughed.

"So what if you did kill her? That was her destiny. To leave you. And your destiny was to survive her."

The super watched them go out. Linda was mad, all right.

"I think of her in Hawaii," said John.

Linda laughed. "Don’t think of her at all," she said, going through her bag out on the sidewalk. She had locked herself out; but there was the super. But John had the keys.

One morning John and Linda were walking arm in arm into the cold, glaring winter sun. A truck in front of the fish market was unloading long boxes of glittering fat halibut, striped bass, red snapper, and silvery blues; the name in large red letters on the truck was not the fish market’s name. So the fish came to the fish people, he said, rather than the other way around. He knew she was looking at him as if seriously he were the village idiot, but more the way she did sometimes at the movies, so that, turning to see her amber eyes in the light of the screen looking at him—it was like opening his own this timeless morning to find her leaning above him, bare and warm, the sun on her neck and on her arm and in her hair. Seeing her was living.

He had yawned and smiled and said that he had overslept. Slept, she had said, not overslept. She had run her fingers along his jaw and rubbed it lightly, busily. He recalled finding a new part of her body during the night; he told her he wasn’t sure now exactly where it was, and they amused themselves by being slightly awed at this.

When they got up and got going, she talked a lot. She had woken by mistake while it was still dark, and she thought that he had to get home and it was her fault that he hadn’t. John watched her drink her orange juice and said he had certainly dreamed, but all he knew was that in one dream he was in bed with her, hugging her and listening to the piano.

Wow! She liked that. Linda put her orange juice on top of the piano and sat down and played a song fast. Except, she went on, in her dream—and she slowed down and looked fondly over her shoulder at him as she continued to play—in her dream they were high up off the floor and she hadn’t minded. John had the answer. "I was in your old bedroom, and you were in your new living room"—he pointed at the departed tenant’s handiwork—"and there’s a bed and a piano in each."

She played the song again, his presence evident in the sway of her shoulders. Hey, what time was it, she called, and went on playing. The phone rang, but she didn’t stop, and by the time John got there the person had hung up. He lay down on the bed for a moment and listened to the music in the other room, as if he were alone.

When they went out, the light was miraculous against the winter cold. He felt they were a couple. But then she said, "We make a good couple." What could he say? She started making conversation, and he hated himself —almost.

According to Linda, the former tenant had phoned her again to ask uncertainly if she had had trouble closing the bathroom window; she could get the super to fix the sash if she could find him.

When was this?

A couple of times: once when she was playing the piano before she left for the office, then yesterday as she came in the door.

So that was him this morning.

She wouldn’t be surprised.

Can’t go through life not answering the telephone.

She didn’t propose to.

But she hadn’t this morning.

But generally she did answer. Plus she’d had company.

"The Departed Tenant is nostalgic," he said. "He can’t seem to tear himself away."

"The Departed Tenant was heading for New Mexico originally," said Linda.

"Where was he yesterday?"

"He had to dig up an extra dime; he was in a pay booth."

"He talked an extra nickel’s worth?"

But the other morning the man was definitely calling from a home phone, Linda said. Bach was playing in the background, or a reasonable facsimile, and it got a lot louder for a moment, as if someone was turning the wrong dial.

"Or someone picked up a phone extension right by the speaker," said John.

"He’s staying in touch, I guess."

"With his old place or with you?"

"Maybe New Mexico will come to him," said Linda.

"I’d rather he went there," said John.

"But there would go my Departed Tenant out the window."

A week later, when John stopped at the all-night cafe on his way home, he was observed closely, provocatively, by a familiar man for whom the woman was pouring a cup of coffee when John came in. The man seemed tired. He was about John’s age, but his uneven, stubbly beard made him look older— maybe younger, too. He wore a broad-brimmed, high-crowned western hat and a white woolen parka that was extremely dirty. Except for a scar-like crease along his cheek above his beard, as if he had slept in a trench for days, his appearance agreed with Linda’s description of the Departed Tenant. The woman kidded John about being late, as if she kept track of him. She didn’t seem to know the fellow in the hat. It came to him, like the sudden leisure of insight, that the most powerful way for you to shadow anyone would be to have him follow you. The woman again said he was late, and she smiled at him. She had on a heavy, jacket-like sweater with a heavy, rolled collar of the same thick black wool coming up behind her neck under her rough, dark hair. He returned the renewed glance of the guy in the hat and was going to ask him what was on his mind, when he stood up and put some change beside his full cup. He had big hands that had knocked around and worked and seemed at rest and seemed the only thing certain about him. He moved past John to get to the door, and John smelled paint and something else milder to do with work. The woman plucked some muffins out from under the grill, talking over her shoulder to a broad-shouldered little man on the next stool whose every movement John could feel. The man was smoking a cigarette; he was not going anywhere. John sat for almost an hour and bought an early newspaper. The phone rang as the woman poured scrambled eggs into a small black frying pan. He paid for two coffees and left.

John filled Linda in on her new neighborhood. A mugger had been going around spraying Sentinel in the eyes of women late at night, as if they were attacking him. They couldn’t remember what he looked like afterward. John had learned about this in a cafe a block beyond the public school one afternoon. Two men on a draped staging were steaming the front of a town house across the street. It had been a rooming house for decades and was being gutted. A woman in a wheelchair had entered the cafe talking not quite to herself, and she stopped at his table by the window and cheerfully called for her cup of tea. She wore dark glasses and had a streak of green through her dyed brown hair. She had been talking when she came in, and she divided herself between calling like a deaf person to the nodding Oriental behind the counter and quietly telling John what this counterman, Ralph, was thinking. A fat boy in a painter’s cap wearing white overalls with white paint stains on them looked up from his magazine and said, "Nirma was reminding Ralph of all the crazy no-goods who had lived in that block and in that brownstone they were looking at across the street; her husband was contractor for the extensive work being done on the house; it had been bought by two men who designed ladies’ shoes." Finally, John asked the man, Ralph, behind the counter if all Nirma said was true, but Nirma had apparently concluded the conversation, because, turning her wheelchair around, she rolled to the door and then was helped out by the boy in overalls, who had gotten up from the counter to leave with her.

"I know her husband," said Linda that night. "He’s the local locksmith. What were you doing here in the middle of the afternoon?" They got in bed and Linda turned off the light.

"Becoming a degenerate, of course."

Well, it was about time, she said, and got on top of him and pinned him. As a matter of fact, Nirma’s husband was a licensed electrician, did moving, and had a free-floating crew of guys working for him.

"One of them helped to float his wife out of there this afternoon," said John.

Linda laughed, and murmured, "She don’t need no help, honey." There was something in the words, something missing.

"Hard to believe that’s his wife," John said.

"You haven’t seen him," came the words in the dark, and here it was again, a quizzical harshness as clear as the touch that accompanied the words. Then her touch became as light and hard as ever. She could bear down on his head to massage the hair by its roots off his brain in the dark room; meanwhile, some soft spot around his stomach found another touch of hers so light-fingered it was hairlike and, growing here and there all over his body, felt good.

Languorously, softly, and so slowly that he heard his lips part, he asked if there had been further word from the Departed Tenant. She moved her hands and clasped him in her arms. (He could put his hands over her eyes when she was playing the piano and she would go on playing.) Yes, she said, to tell the truth, she had heard from the Departed Tenant, again calling to say that he would be glad to fix her bathroom window himself; the super, according to the Departed Tenant, was a nice guy but he didn’t do spit, and he wasn’t there a whole lot, because he had two other buildings, if not three, because he needed the cash flow, y’know. John could hear the very voice of the man. But the completeness of Linda’s love at this moment made the intentions of the Departed Tenant only a passing mystery, like her humor. For her humor had taken a turn. It sounded like a private joke that might be with John or against him.

Was she getting ready to turn away from him? Not possible. The next evening she told an odd story or two about the neighborhood, and the way she talked seemed unlike her; she sounded as if she were making up what she told him, but she wasn’t.

Nothing like getting to know your new neighborhood. Well, now, she said, an unusual body had been hidden on the canvas-draped staging that the men had been using to work on the brownstone. John asked what was unusual about it. Oh, it turned out to be only sleeping, she said. He asked if it had all its limbs. As far as they could tell, she guessed; it didn’t breathe for quite a while, but it must have been saving its breath, because it was quite a presentable body and finally it decided to breathe. And move on? he asked, in the living room, hearing her in the kitchen. It was one of those no-goods the locksmith’s wife gave tidings of, said Linda.

"Some Departed Tenant," John said.

"Not mine," she said from the kitchen.

"Yours hasn’t departed," said John.

"Any day now," came the answer, as the refrigerator opened and closed.

"He calls when I’m not here," said John, sitting down at the piano. "It’s uncanny: he only calls when I’m not around."

Linda pounded something. "I told him enough was enough, I was going to speak to you."

"In this day and age you said that?" said John. But Linda said that she had said a bit more than that, actually. She had said John had a temper.

"He misses this place," said John, and played the first notes of a song which were also the first six notes of a scale. "And for a Departed Tenant who’s sticking around, that’s heavy."

Linda came out into the living room to smile at him. She had an apron on over her bluejeans, and he knew there was a joint in her apron pocket, because he had felt it there not long ago. Lately he wasn’t sure what was going on. She gave him some respectful warmth that he didn’t quite know what to do with, because it was as close as his body and as separate as his clothes, as if he had a new authority that still wasn’t power. He just wasn’t sure what was going on.

She had a hammer in her hand. She was going to staple in the wiring for a second set of stereo speakers in the bedroom; dinner could be ready in ten minutes whenever they wanted it. John said he would staple the wiring, but Linda said he didn’t have to, and they sat down and smoked instead. He read her mind and asked her if she loved him. She said that was her line, why had he said it, what did he mean? He said very very softly and, he thought, humorously, "Oh shut up." She didn’t quite love it, he saw.

The next night they went to the Spanish restaurant for dinner. He was going away the following afternoon. They finished a bottle of wine, bickering a bit over whether they were splitting the check or not, then speculating whether the shrimp and mussels and the pale rings of squid came from the fish market next door, and then arguing about which way the neon guitar was pointing. He had reached for his wallet and paused, distracted, his fingers in the inside pocket of his jacket. She laughed in a more silly, distantly silly, way than he had heard her laugh before. She said if he would let her pay her share of the check she would let him pay half the rent. This set her off again; it was more than giggling; the tears shook themselves out, laughter tears—his grin got fixed—and when she calmed down she asked him like a little girl did he have to go to Houston? Couldn’t he put her in his pocket and take her along? Couldn’t he put off the trip?

Oh, he really couldn’t, he said, laughing with her.

What, not till sunrise, my darling? she said.

Oh, certainly till sunrise; maybe the Departed Tenant would call.

Oh, he never, never would call when John was there. The giggling began again.

Man sounded like the refrigerator light. There only if you opened the door.

She never opened any door for that creep .

Didn’t favor degenerates?

A select few only, she said (as a microphone got touched); degenerates could be fun even when they were not very observant.

The waiter came back with the change.

Did she mean degenerates who forgot which way la guitarra pointed?

Since he insisted.

Well, there she was definitely wrong, so they rose to go out and look at the sign and settle the issue.

The tip lay in the waiter’s little oblong change tray. The waiter gave out menus at another table and turned his head to say goodnight. But now, without warning, the live music began with a beat of chords. A smiling man and woman in black now struck such a proud, harsh dance out of their instruments that John didn’t quite identify what was odd about the couple. He took Linda’s hand and with his other hand on the small of her back drew close, and they swayed for a few moments and turned and turned again under the tolerant eye of a couple who were eating their meal a few feet away, until a waiter approached with what looked like dinner for half a dozen people, and that was that, as far as the dancing was concerned. John looked back at the guitar players, who were still smiling, and it was not until he and Linda got back to her place that they realized they had neglected to look at the sign. She said it didn’t matter, which made him wonder if that had been after all the thing degenerates weren’t observant about.

"Anyway, I did notice that the woman was left-handed," said John.

"I think it was the man," said Linda, hanging up her coat.

"No, he was on our right."

"Oh, you re right," she said shortly.

"What?"

"You win, friend," she said. He couldn’t believe it, but she walked away irritated. He thought of leaving; he thought of the elevator coming up to meet him and of the crazy sign by the button panel that said, "After u P.M. Return Elevator to First Floor."

"Hey, wait a minute," he called after Linda. But then he kept whatever it was to himself. He remembered the guitars were pointing toward each other, and the man was on their right, therefore fingering with his right hand and strumming with his left.

Had Linda been getting along with John even at the restaurant? He was deciding whether he liked all this, when the phone rang and he stayed where he was. If you fingered with your right hand, then you were a left-handed guitarist. So why had Linda said, "You win"?

He heard her say in the bedroom, "You’re not my friend, but I will say goodbye. Please don’t call any more, O.K.?"

John felt the very slightly delayed "O.K.?" in his heart. "Just don’t call," said Linda in the bedroom, but he didn’t hear the phone go down. Then he did.

"Just tell him not to phone," John said.

"I did."

"You were a bit polite. You said, ‘Please don’t call any more’ and then you added ‘O.K.?’ like you were asking permission."

John went and looked at her. She was sitting on the bed. "Listen," she said, "he hung up on me."

"He should be apprehended if he hangs up on you," said John. "We should call the authorities."

Linda went past him into the living room, into the kitchen. She came out again and went and sat at her piano, her shoulders slumped. She got up and took something from the top of the piano and brought it to him; it was a color photograph of herself. She said, gently, that he hadn’t seen it, which gave him a shiver, because she didn’t know he had another one just like it in his pocket. It was a Polaroid—with that flat accuracy that looked too accurate. She was always beautiful, but here she looked as if she were hanging around waiting to be photographed for a commercial. His arm went around her shoulders. They stood there admiring her picture—anyway, he was admiring it. She was in her office at the radio station, and behind her was a blurred chart that, he knew, showed what music was going to be played during the next two or three months. In her posed composure, in some sign in her eyes and the set of her face, John felt that she wasn’t making as much money as the person taking the picture. What was she saying in showing him this Polaroid photograph here, now, at this awkward point?

It was as if they were in bed, quiet with their shared secrets. But they couldn’t get there for the time being. They were mad at each other, but he had his arm around her, and she must know he was breathing the fine odor of her face. Linda had a mole under her eye high on one cheek, and in the picture it looked like a perfectly applied beauty spot. Her dark-red turtleneck sweater with the silver horse he had given her pinned on the side seemed as permanent as the camera’s light. Didn’t he want to go to bed with her? He didn’t know how she felt. But elsewhere, apart from the phone calls and the restaurant and anything bad in the past, they did always want to love each other; they always had wanted to.

Linda was looking at him as he stared at the photograph.

A woman knows how to wait, he had told Harry. You said it, replied his friend, but she’s a beautiful girl, so look out—someone else will marry her if you don’t.

What about her marrying them?

Sure, sure, that could happen, too. Let’s set a definite date for a weekend.

The Polaroid held them there, in the middle of Linda’s living room. She said the picture really captured her; she joked about the dumb look on her face. What she then broke to him quietly, while they looked at the photograph, was that the Departed Tenant had not only not finally departed but had visited this apartment recently at least twice, she thought.

He what? But the lock had been changed. What did he get?

Well, actually, he left something.

Linda went to the loft bed that she hadn’t yet decided what to do with. She reached up and put her hand on a quilt folded at the foot of the bed. She lifted a corner of it—diamond-checked, dull green and white, with ribbons sticking out here and there.

What had he left the second time? Had he improved on the quilt? Was he getting ready to move back in?

Linda didn’t think that was funny. She had asked the super with his perpetual dark glasses if he had let the former tenant in, and he had opened his mouth wide; he seemed mad at her suggesting such a thing, but he was the sinister one—he smiled all the time. John said maybe he was remembering what Linda had said getting out of the elevator: ‘7’ra the sinister one. He heard you call me a murderer."

Linda shrugged. She had asked about the Departed Tenant. The super said there had been four of them, sometimes more; he would see someone he never saw coming in downstairs and would know they were going to that apartment. One girl was a waitress at the rock club next to the church; one of them made jewelry out of junk and sold it in the street. There was a tall girl from upstate who had a bicycle and drove a cab sometimes. Two of the boys were housepainters, carpenters—when they worked. Then for a while there was just him and the girl with the bike. The super would see them with their groceries, and once, when he was putting out the trash, he looked up and saw the two of them at the window of the apartment. Then lately there was just him, the super was a hundred percent certain. He’d seen him the other day. He was waiting for a friend of his who was working on that brownstone that was being redone. The super would speak to him if he saw him again.

John asked if Linda had told the super about the bathroom window.

Oh, he had fixed it; and incidentally, there was no way the Departed Tenant could have gotten in through a window five floors above an alley, no fire escape, no ledges to speak of—

And carrying a quilt!

And carrying a quilt. To lay folded on the loft bed that he had made a point of saying he was giving to Linda, which was worth something to the room beyond the three hours’ labor and the lumber that went into it. He wasn’t going to make her pay for the loft bed and he wasn’t going to take it down.

But he came a second time.

This time he took something.

It was getting later, and Houston seemed not so far away as the airport John had to get to tomorrow afternoon to fly to Houston. Houston was why they had had dinner at the Spanish restaurant tonight. The quilt was in his hand, the bed just above eye level; Linda was looking at him, the window behind her.

The Departed Tenant had taken two things, as a matter of fact.

John was asking just when was this second visit, but in his thoughts he put the last couple of weeks together—himself the least vivid neighbor in these places where the man with the crease on his cheekbone got up and left, and he sat down in front of the other man’s coffee, so that a woman with improbable blue eyes could tell John a couple of times that he was late, and take the coffee away, and another woman, with amber eyes, could look at him with concerned anger, he thought, while he looked at her photograph with some anguish against his heart. She had said, "O.K.?," as if to ask leave of the Departed Tenant, who had apparently been breaking into this pad of hers, where not only had the piano that had been in the old bedroom moved into the new living room but there was a bed high off the floor as well, and now a quilt. He didn’t like hearing her talk to the guy, but as for his real anguish, it wasn’t here in this place; John had left it somewhere else.

He heard himself saying to her that maybe he ought to move, too.

"What’s that got to do with that man getting in here?" said Linda.

"It’s how I feel when I go back to my own place," he said, and his heart was thick as a hundred sounds at once.

"Stop smiling," she said. "Or tell me what it is."

"What did he get away with?"

"You couldn’t care less," she said extravagantly.

He laughed, and she said that when he got back from Houston they’d have to have a talk. He said he’d heard that before. He bobbed his head sideways at the bed above them—an unspeakable crudity, at this moment, that sent her into the bedroom.

He turned out the lights and put the chain on the door. He went in expecting her to be sitting on the bed or lying down staring at the ceiling. She was standing beside her bureau, absorbed in a magazine. He held her shoulders and looked at the article she was reading, and asked what the intruder had gotten away with. She put the magazine down and didn’t speak until she was in bed. He had watched her, and now he stood there with his clothes on.

The neighborhood led to her front door and through it. And out again, home again, he envisioned, and he also saw that—after her apartment had changed again, a third apartment, a fourth apartment, and he was walking home in one new way after another, but always through the intersection where the Puerto Rican woman with the blue eyes sometimes had the night shift and once, well after dawn, was being helped by a little girl who had her hair in two braids—he would himself move to a new apartment, so that between his place and Linda’s there was no point in passing through that intersection.

"Please don’t tell me you’ve heard it before," she said. She did not ask if he was coming to bed.

"But I have heard it before," he said.

"And you’ve heard your wife say she was moving because you wouldn’t; and you’ve heard the stereo blasting out the Beatles or Beethoven as you put your key in the front door and your heart fell because you felt it was your fault she was boozing, but you would never tell her it was your fault. And you heard her say When you get back, we’ve got to have a talk; but so what—so what?"

"But when I got back, she wasn’t there," he said.

"I really wouldn’t know," said Linda. She shifted in bed and raised up on an elbow. "She must have been there sometimes. Maybe she’s there now, for all I know."

"I’m going," he said.

"What a sucky date this has been," said Linda.

"Do you think he’s dangerous?" said John.

Linda laid her head down on the pillow. "He’s got a hammer," she said.

"He took a hammer?"

"It was right here on the bed table under the lamp, with the two Polaroid pictures of me."

"That was his hammer," said John.

"But I was using it."

"Listen, I really meant to staple those speaker wires for you."

"I’m glad you didn’t," said Linda wearily.

He moved out of the bedroom. "You creep," she called after him. "We’ve had that talk, so forget it. Lock the door on your way out."

He took the chain off, and as he was letting himself out Linda said, "He took one of the pictures."

"What?" said John across the dark space of the apartment.

Linda raised her voice. "He took one of the Polaroids with him when he called, but I was afraid he’d try to return it." John bet himself that Linda didn’t think he would go. He closed the door softly behind him and locked it.

In the elevator he was relieved. Linda would have to have the lock changed —and by another locksmith, not from around here. That was the answer— of course!—to how the Departed Tenant had gotten in. And the door didn’t lock by itself, so he had to have had a key to lock up when he left. The Departed Tenant had a friend who worked for the contractor, who was also the locksmith in the neighborhood, and he must have done the job or had it done by somebody who worked for him. The key must not have been registered if the Departed Tenant had gotten hold of a duplicate.

The story went on in his head. He came to the lobby door and leaned his head against the glass. It was cool against his forehead, and, staring at his shoes, he remembered again the snapshot in his inside pocket. The tension or whatever it was passed without a sound, and he imagined, there, with his eyes shut, that his hand on the doorknob felt the polite force of somebody on the other side, coming home.

The restaurant was still very much open. He’d been right about the sign. The pet shop and the checks-cashed place were shut up tight. He wanted it to be later. A couple passed, and both of them were chewing gum. He’d seen a girl running for a bus this morning chewing gum.

He approached the corner where his former route joined this one. He saw the bearded man in the big western hat, who might have been the Departed Tenant, cross the street in front of him and disappear, walking south. It had to be the same man, though he wore an army jacket, not the grimy white parka.

At the corner he turned south to follow the man, who stopped down the block at the pay phone. And John stopped, as if, at fifty yards’ distance, he was waiting to use the phone when the man was through, while the man was looking at him as if the call might go on for a long time.

Two large trucks came racing uptown side by side, and a cab was trying to get around them. The man at the phone seemed to be talking. Now he put the phone back on the hook and strode off. John stood watching until the man broke into an easy jog and turned west at the next corner. John went after him past the phone on its cement post and the wire-mesh trash basket.

At the corner he didn’t see the man. The man could not have made it all the way down the block, but he had been going in the direction of Linda’s place. John ran back along the pavement to the phone and dialed her. She wasn’t answering.

He needed to pack. He would scare Linda if he went back now. He made the turn at the next corner, wondering if Linda had put the chain back on. She had an excellent sense of humor. So did he. Sometimes, she said.

At the cafe-newsstand intersection the traffic light was turning red when he saw Linda. She was wearing her purple coat, and she was crossing the avenue half a block ahead of him. A cab passed, and then another.

He stopped, and then he went on. On the far sidewalk she looked around her—everywhere except behind her. And then she went into his cafe. He called to her, but she went on inside. The way she had looked around uncertainly, she hadn’t planned to go to the cafe. What had she planned for the evening?

He would surprise her, but when he crossed the avenue and came to the takeout window and saw that the Puerto Rican woman hadn’t come on yet, Linda was at the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk and shook her head at him, smiling.

"They don’t have a pay phone," she said.

‘They don’t?" he said.

‘There wouldn’t have been anyone home."

"I hope not," he said. "I should get a machine."

They looked each other in the eye. He invited her in for coffee. "How did you wind up behind me?" she said. "Your face looks funny."

He didn’t like that. "I went down to my old pay phone to phone you."

"Why’d you do that?" she asked. "I was trying to catch up with you."

"Did you phone the police?" John asked.

Of course not; the Departed Tenant wasn’t dangerous. He had been phoning earlier, when John was there, to tell her he had reclaimed his hammer, he needed it, he was on his way at last.

"With his master key," said John. But he didn’t know.

She was having the lock changed tomorrow. John told her to see if she could have the key registered. She had thought of that.

"Fair exchange—a quilt for a hammer."

"Not a great quilt, but after all the hammer was his to begin with," she said, and she kissed him very lightly. He felt his heart race.

"The quilt went with the bed," he said.

"It stayed," said Linda.

"He must like you a lot to leave you the quilt."

"I think he liked her a lot. The girl from upstate. The quilt went with the bed."

"But not the hammer," said John. "Hammers are expensive if you’re an itinerant carpenter going to New Mexico."

"I think he loved her," said Linda.

"Will he show people your picture on his way west?"

"What would he say, I wonder?" said Linda.

John produced the picture from his inside jacket pocket. She looked from the picture to him and back again. She was pleased. "I knew it," she said, surprised. She put her hand on his shoulder, and they both looked at the photograph. "This makes better sense," she said. "When I left for work yesterday, there were two pictures. Now they’re all accounted for."

"If that guy had taken one—I mean as a souvenir—there would still have been one left for me," said John. "By the way, the hammer certainly wasn’t on the bed table, so the Departed Tenant must have been and gone."

"What were you doing in my apartment in the middle of the day?"

"I’m a degenerate," John said. "But you gave me the keys."

"I’m particular who I give them to," she said. "Didn’t you know that? No wonder you’re not married."

"Not even half married?" he asked.

She touched his hand. "No, not even half married. Unless it’s someone I don’t know about."

They decided not to have coffee after all. On the way back to Linda’s they discussed the Departed Tenant. Had he really, as he’d said, hoped to keep the apartment and sublet it to someone but couldn’t get permission? Whatever had been going on, they agreed that he had meant well. They agreed that he had moved out of the apartment because he had to.

Larry

The word one heard was "homework," heard sitting at one’s somewhat small but new and not-cheap old-fashioned roll-top desk, the only word one heard aware that one’s mother was leaving was "homework," not "housework." Her last sentence (oration in espahol, a language for New York and for today, one’s father has assured one, for today’s complex horizons while the bilingual subway skips the horizon and goes under it) was heard only in that last word "homework." Like she’s been speaking in some next room.

Well, she had been. And with one’s erstwhile father. But like soundproofed with the door closed, and she seemed to throw it open for that last word homework which now therefore (though no echo) felt chock-a-block with housework, the code-word key-word clearing the voice-print of one’s mother’s ongoing discussion if that was the right word with one’s father who was in the habit of settling pre-contract differences with her out of court until it was too late for any kind of contract. Except, well, you know, a contract. Marriage contract. For a kind of new marriage.

Upon which both together seemed to laugh and she said low in this direction not the phone’s, "Oh Marv you know what I’d really"—succeeded by a murmur, and if not any more a liquor snicker or a courting snort at least a fickle chuckje and a pretty heavy sigh—"You look radiant!"—that came together into Jne untranstonguable impact in the next room the sincerity of which one did not wish to witness, having failed oneself to receive the incoming phone call (failed to make it one’s own, failed to will that it be from Amy), while forced to witness one’s parents in the next room in any case or along any curve clothed or unclothed, because one had acknowledged one’s existence by answering the "homework"-ending sentence "Yeah" (the cornerstone of one’s active vocabulary yet not one’s private).

Well then, ‘‘ Yeah," one answered, letting it slide off into the other things to be said to one’s mother or for that matter to one’s father if one had found the thoughts to go with those things. Not "Yeah, Ma" or "Yeah, Mom," which she, naked or dressed, nude or unnuded or denuded, objected to, but not "Yeah, Susan" (which she wants) either, because one does not feel right saying "Susan," which one’s Dad quite understands, and which one undertook to explain to him one Sunday morning amid much nodding of heads, first his, then one’s, then his and his again and yet again, then out of pity one’s own —out of pity or in time to Dad’s rhythm, one’s own head together or not quite, yet not with his then or now because often these days of raised consciousness he is too busy nodding, naked with one’s mother nodding, nodding, naked together spooning yogurt together, spooning, dripping a blob of white-filmed apricot like it had a cottony mold on it off the end of his yogurt spoon, nodding so as to transcend one’s own "Yeah" in answer to one’s mother’s mysterious oration depicting the life of her leader like that explained fathers and husbands, climaxed by the word homework, not assignment.

But one says assignment—one is in the big league if not big time, no longer in high school where assignment was also said, but college, for one is on the production-possibility frontier fully employed trading off guns and butter or highways and housing along all the points between no butter and all guns (dry) and no guns and all butter (sticky), the frontier (also called product-transformation curve) along whose arc are targeted all the points of well-oiled trade-off whereby one may surrender so many guns to get so much added butter or produce ten less butters to get two more guns, and on this menu of choices, this curve of output pairs—two million tons of food to fourteen million tractors, four million to twelve, six to ten—on this range of combinations, a week or more may be spent in the big time, the big league, firing one’s rounds of animal fat (leading one’s moving target) while spreading one’s arms as wide as there’s bread to spread them on, staying busy on the production-possibility frontier, not falling away inside it where point U marks the warning flash for Unemployed Resources, big lag, let’s say.

For one is in college, one is in the flow now, one can split one’s mind and, for a second, step outside the Gross National Product of which one is fast becoming a part and see that GNP equals Consumption plus Investment plus Government Expenditure and see that if Net National Product is GNP less Depreciation, that’s what one may also be joining, for, big time or not, one feels the onset of time’s warp, and if one’s tennis forehand is improving one yet feels a depreciation in, as one’s father will say over his cocktail-hour joint, the quality of life, one sees this concretely and without bullshit in the cracked handball wall against which one lashes one’s forehand or in the new distance from any such wall when one is at the Manhattan apartment of the revised junta and not in Port Adams though this has to do with the changed equation between one’s married parents, and apparently not to do with what is no less true, that one is in college not high school any more with its occasional substitute teachers yet only in truth a potential continuum of substitute teachers, for one enjoyed modular classes in Port Adams, yes the school was often better not worse than what one’s got now in the big league so that one is inclined, like one of those lines the man calls a curve, to shoot up one’s arm saluting the schlock of collective education and when recognized by the amazing short man in the black shirt up at the blackboard ask a very general question about the point of it all.

But one is only inclined.

The short man at the washed blackboard—one has described him to Amy when she phoned from work and got one out of one bed or another—Manhattan or Port Adams. The phone’s voice so warm that Amy’s employee cheek seemed pillowed on one’s own—even on one’s own breast, or chest, patiently listening to one’s unemployed description of the amazing Professor Roger Rail until this employed twenty-three-year-old older woman radiant Amy warming one’s whole body from cheek to pyjama pants must say, "Got work to do, Larry —oh by the way, babe"—asking for information de pronto (suddenly)—de repente! (suddenly)—impulsivamente, Latin passion oh beautiful Amy Hispanic heat sin la reflexion debida—"oh by the way, babe" (she says), "what’s the name of that nice newspaper guy who’s taking you to the game?"—but not before one has made her outgoing laugh come in along the phone wire bathing the whole side of one’s somewhat unshaven face, for one has been describing Professor Roger Rail. Assuredly an amazing customer the man in the black shirt at the washed blackboard who starts to write upon that tabula rasa only to abort his oracion, stop his chalk, lean on it and push pensively off into the vertical space just off its surface, and give the assignment for next time, which means the next day that one and one’s fellow classmates with him in Economics meet, but not always the next day from this, he not in a suit but in black shirt and long black sleeves so his white hand fingering his chalk looked there like the pale bald tonsure his scalp makes against the bristling black or dark of his remaining hair. The bald area is time, a time in his life, yet one that has now passed and is surrounded by the hair remaining. He is the medium of exchange here, he is the potential speed with which one’s class leap through the many used but virgin copies of the sacred text, he moves before one a bound variable furnishing the classroom with his unavoidable circulation, he is the velocity of circulation multiplied by M, which stands for one thing suddenly with one oneself and another (Money) with Rail—who thinks in other velocities but not this that one has oneself begun to dream.

And he it is who says, "One may wish to substitute one good for another if . . . well ... if what has happened?" and who says at some later point in the morning’s curve, "One may frame, yes?, a law of substitution which will embrace equality of price, yes?, between commodities, yes?, as well as the phenomenon of increasing scarcity," and who says, "given an extra dollar of income—a raise in New York, a rise in London, yes?—why one may choose to spend the whole dollar or spend some part of it—and since this dollar is in addition to one’s normal income heretofore, one may call it marginal, yes?, and since what happens to it in one’s hand or purse or under the mattress, eh?, or in the tight back pocket of your preshrunk bluejeans or a slot in the old money belt (he tapped his paunch above the silver horseshoe of his western belt) depends on one’s own personal inclination to hold on to it or blow it, and since to be inclined or favorable is propendere in Latin which one may safely bet that less than one percent in this room would read even if they could, why one calls the amount of extra consumption generated by an extra dollar of income the (yes?) marginal (yes?) . . . pro . . . pens . . . i . . . ty ... to consume—or MPC—which one may picture . . . like so"—the chalk consuming itself like a comet, the graph squaring and lining and dashing itself off before one and one’s male and female classmates on the heretofore washed blackboard as if what moves the chalk were that Invisible Hand Rail speaks of, which a great thinker named Smith said guides each individual through his own mere wish for "security and gain" to use his capital "to promote an end which was no part of his intention"—namely, the interest of society as a whole. So let him alone, let him be—and a roomful of hands write down the words (but did he say them? and is this, then, telepathy?) laissez-faire, which is the same in Spanish. Yet if embedded in everyone else’s property one’s property is one’s own, the shtik is more co-op than condominium— face—"One may plot," "One may represent," "One may argue"—and then like magic his back was turned, and he said, "One" to the board chalked erased chalked erased, washed with the manual action of his mind into soft, gray-white nebulae of layers—his thing, one thought, his world! one thought. And one said it to Amy, whose soft, pale hair surrounds one by surrounding her ear and her receiver at her end, which is a desk at a foundation—foundation, the word attracts, envelopes, envelopes and erases all the curves one can think to draw between the vertical and horizontal with their reminders of the hypotenuse of junior year in Port Adams, that shortcut to Diane’s through used-car lot, church playground, shopping center’s parking lot where Mother Susan’s trunk was rifled while she was in buying a last-minute buttondown for one’s birthday with, under the rear collar button, a fag-tag loop Diane with Visine clearing up her eyes crept up behind one one day and snipped off—a beeline, no curve like these curves a professor sweeps away with a black-sleeved thrust of himself and all his Ones enveloped by Amy’s foundation, which is her job, from which at twenty-three years old in the morning from eight miles away her invisible hand touches one’s unemployed pyjama cloth, augments one’s marginal suspense, propounds yea extends one’s capacity to hunt down the curve of one’s desire, down from up where hovering hung-up above the landing pad, strutted, outstretched, and hang-gliding, flapped and blown by winds from the window of the sky, one seems to reach one’s base for the first time, to make love, juntarse (for love is reflexive, one has found out for oneself not in the book), consuming the reflexes as Amy’s real job consumed (when she called at nine-fifteen in the morning) consumed and erased the picture of the ecognome skating his thing, his thought, across the slate walls of a carpeted cave, the bell you see but don’t hear of the mountainous bell curve showing the normal symmetry of error, and the tilted long-tailed

skew capturing the odds on oddity, yeah, those far-out deviations that may upset the science of one’s laws, her real job nine to five consumed one’s own ragged schoolkid schedule and one’s late bed and one’s eighteen-year-old unemployed pyjama cloth and until she then asked for information and one felt a flickering substitution of the older man in question for oneself, and one said, "James Mayn," etcetera, consumed even almost the black synthetic cloth of the amazing Rail’s shirt susceptible to butter more than bullets until now just nightfall at one’s roll-top desk angry that the phone was not Amy, hungry for peanut butter in the kitchen on the far side of one’s parents’ secret junta of sounds and lingering here to feel, if one can, one hand through all one’s assignments, one modulus through Music, Spanish, English, Physics, Eco, a curve (say) that’s coming from far off and that when it gets here doesn’t meet either of the two half-lines half-framing it notched vertical and horizontal which Dr. Roger Rail likes almost as much as his curve, a line with dots on it, scheduled stops on a crooked airline’s great arc of route, spots of double quantity where vertical and horizontal by thought’s invisible lines intersect on their way elsewhere.

"Ships in the night," one’s mother is heard to say to one’s father, who says, "Well, not quite," and then without warning, "Oh Suze!" Then, "Let go of dependence, Marv." "Oh Suze." "It’s hard, Marv, I can’t do it myself sometimes, it has to be hard." "Suze." "Friends." "Friends."

The husky voice is made naked of its huskiness—its husk, one adds, reading, "As population doubles and redoubles, it is exactly as if the globe were being halved in size," but wondering if the globe is not also a template constant and unbroken and even like the temple of one’s home limitless if understood—hearing, "Can I make you a cup of tea while you’re getting dressed?" and "But Marv, we’re surviving, and risk is always, you know, painful—no thanks, I’ve been on a juice trip all day—and Marv I don’t feel I’m being, you know, had any more—you know?—hey I am dressed, I’m going like this." So one thinks of the clothes of her date, wondering who phoned.

Fading down a warp into dark dimension not like humor, no, not like humor, a curve by the amazing aroused unsuited professor, but the curve itself maybe not amazing with dots on it, etcetera, then suddenly a new curve crossing the northwest-southeast curve southwest up to northeast, but, unlike Rail, his curves obvious, oh Amy the whole thing obvious to the point at which it might fade out on you—on one—into such a rolling tilt (trick of the eye or not) that the first curve’s point escaped up the black sleeve of the bald man’s shirt just as he said, "Concave," and was saying, "One may plot . . ." and bringing the chalk toward his mouth so that concave became an elbow’s right angle at the instant that the unknown but not nameless girl (just a hair more voluptuous than likewise blonde twenty-three-year-old Amy who is worth a hundred of her who though unknown is also known elsewhere in the space-time of the classroom’s fall as Mary Minsky) outlining and again and again outlining her name, decorating her name in soft pencil in her notebook near one’s elbow so that one moved one’s desk closer to see, suddenly crossed her orange legs—snug orange tights for November—as if she were getting ready to start filling up an exam booklet: upon which instant of rising value the attention of the hunched vertical maestro (teacher) at the board and that of one’s sedentary own horizon met from two distances at what would have been an equilibrium (even given the difference between one’s own side perspective and Rail’s frontal) had not some doubt come into play as to the behavior of the variable in question, for had one here an instance of suddenly increased demand causing the price of equilibrium to travel right up the supply curve, or, since the quantity of what was available had perhaps (though one couldn’t tell for sure) not increased, had one here (had we here) a supply shift where the commodity or good becomes harder to get (whether really lessened or artificially lessened) so that equilibrium price now traveled leftward up the demand curve?

Was she, in short, more in demand or was there less of her available, as the eye ran neutrally landing here upon all her points curving always through the locus of all her possible points into the void of one’s own surplus shortage opening around one a space of fifty-minute hours bound into an autumn of weeks during which the class’s course deepened and was the same, was nothing next to all that came between each gradually numberless class meeting, was also one room one went on in from one point to another, straight or around, until against the trips between two parents in one home, between two homes instead of one, two domiciles with one empty ceiling on what to expect, between two parents become one-at-a-time-in-their-lives, the points thrown out by the amazing Rail could sometimes seem one conscious curve of all history—resources, costs, alternatives, the menu of choices along the production-possibility frontier—at the same time that as one smiled at his salt and gusto and the pomp of his sheer brain, his One everlasting and his fraction fractured by fractions, the incestuous blackboard deepening from rasure to rasa (while cielo raso, ceiling, is now not above but adelante, before), and his secret yen (he said) to open up the Rockefellers, dissolve the mysteries of distribution and oligopoly pricing to see strange profits rise during recession like energy made of nothing, new pride out of depression, one might fall inertly or grow into the inner or under concavity described by Rail’s waterfall contoured down the big blackboard with such alegria, such potencia, such Latin heat and so repente that the snap of the chalk split in mid-course released from the class en conjunto a laugh of relief that, across the cosmic vacancy of the board he had been moved to saltar de gozo, leap with joy—exalta-cionarse if one’s dictionary can hold such a word—pouring, precipitating, sending that curve down that slate sky to transcend, beat, swamp, wipe out points and show concavity itself, that the maestro may muestre how a bowed-out, concave curvature of the production-possibility frontier depicts the "law of increasing relative costs." But the waterfall was due to retract its short life, for the red-faced bearded student Donald—Donald Dooley—who came with knapsack crammed to the seams and topped by a tight-rolled down sleeping bag as if to pillow him against tripper’s whiplash was always challenging Rail.

Let there be curves for all events! cried Rail—the tool, though, has no more use than its user gives it.

I have a vision, however, Donald the knapsack man breaks in, I see a geographer in his tower formulating countries by their shape.

Meanwhile the economist, says Rail, cannot conduct controlled experiments.

But what, says Donald Dooley, will this neutral policy-science of yours do for those unknown statistics that don’t get their fair share of the gross national theory?

The question all in all joins one and one’s fellow students for a moment uneasily against the man in the black shirt and on behalf of the guy who with his knapsack has come in out of the urban wilderness to ask what he has to ask. But Rail has a southwest-northeast curve up his sleeve and out it comes. But not a curve at first sight—a straight line he calls a curve which then vibrates and loosens into local hammocks stretching and bowing while that straight line from corner to corner holds firm. For one has here (yes?)—the words are withheld for a moment of awful possibility during which someone at the controls on the other, the far, dark side of the blackboard seems to have thrown onto it the lines of this possibility that, having overlooked what will now be shown one, will reveal to one that one is a prisoner concentrated in one’s own home, though which home one hasn’t time to see—the one within striking distance of golf port and air course or the one near the long, narrow women’s restaurant with the big plate-glass window on a street in the City.

"No tools are neutral," Rail was saying—and the point would go on into the next week if week is the word—and de repente one saw form on the board a second southwest-northeast hypotenuse hammocked below with saggier bows likewise labeled with national initials—"Put these in your provisions for the long trip, Donald"—for here were graphs of injustice, graphed inequalities, on one side income distribution, on the other concentrations of wealth compared to yearly earned income. Rail’s points were two (but do they fade as one makes them, Amy?): first, that pre-industrial economies showed more inequality of income than advanced economies while holdings of wealth were spread less equally in advanced economies than are annual earned incomes; second, that these inequality curves implied in advance a wish to guard against extreme inequality, yes?

But while all eyes turned to Donald Dooley’s quite electrifying "No!" and to his combed barba and his blue-eyed iron and the lumps and pricks and metal-looking edges packing the khaki knapsack occupying the desk seat beside his, one’s own eyes found in the silver horseshoe bell curve lying on its side buckling Rail’s belt and half hidden in the stress of his paunch the making of new equals, like equations so weird that like digits on the same Invisible Hand their kinship was the void with which they threatened sight. Hey!

And while one heard the campus camper Donald the survivor al campo raso, the viajero y autostopista, retort in another medium but like a standard metal template laid down for pattern, "You’re telling us those curves defend the workingman under capitalism but you know as well as I do except it doesn’t freak you out that they secretly annihilate socialism, and those curves whatever you call them are next-door neighbor to that Italian Pareto whom you yourself would never call a Fascist maniac" (laughter set loose in the room, rising like hope, falling like breath, like eyes before staring power) "yes that Fascist statistician who made those charts you know that show that income is distributed the same in all countries no matter what political institution and tax system you have, and as for no controlled experiment, Doctor Rail, what about the man in the big bank across the river—what’s his name? you know—who says O.K., guys, we raise the interest rate tomorrow morning, and Doctor Rail none of your equations is telling us that the workers spend what they get and the capitalists get what they spend and telling us that we own seventy-five percent of the world through multinationals and if you want the GNP of Iran your same old equation C plus I plus G ought to be divided by CIA—because the CIA rents Iran, mon," one found Rail looking at one and saying what he then seemed to see that one knew (though perhaps not able to imagine one looking back to the night when one had leafed beyond, leaped ahead of, next day’s assignment through the skewed and sacred text like a diviner celebrating chance), "Lorenz curve, Donald, Lorenz curve," but Dooley cried, "What is economics, Rail?" and Rail, looking all around the room while simultaneously up the warp of the girl’s lap next to one, said quietly for a laugh, "It means ‘housekeeping’—Greek for managing a household," and when Dooley groaned and reached over and slapped his knapsack, Rail turned his attention to one and said, "Larry, I haven’t seen your hand up this term, what do you think of these curves?"

Well!

One might have answered,’ ‘They are a convenient method of representing the difference between income property and income from work." But one found oneself thinking that though of course Rail could not know that according to one’s mother Susan one is "too fucking smart," somehow Rail knew one’s name—wow!—and thinking that by some new math to divide C plus I plus G by C plus I plus A might yield G over A, one actually said, "I think these curves are a way to get from one point to another point and back again," to mild titters male and female, while then one shot from life to Eco and back as between Adam Smith the father of the Invisible Hand and Adam Smith who retired to take care of his mother knowing as well as the capitalists he left to their own devices that to fleece the future of its true unknowns the employers clipped the present to make it come true. But, following the normal bell-shaped curve of error, one’s concentration turned so repente through the horseshoe buckle edged by plump puffs of stress that one reached Lorenz through an unprecedented equals sign between the elastic modulus for Volume-Receiving-Stress and the form of Rail’s Velocity of Circulation. But Lorenz!—the name—it rang a silent bell in oneself. And whatever Rail said now of pure economics in this class this time or next time or several-times-this-class, or whatever he said of the apparently neutral theory that reducing income inequality won’t increase saving among poor people—one could not help contracting (if not shrinking) toward one’s home or homes where, being their product, one then felt the talk of one’s parents touch one so that like a snail’s raw lip one sucked back out of sight, or like a turtle, spider, or person of one’s acquaintance retracted liable limbs and contracted in or out of the harsh light that was invisible to parents debating the marriage contract that one sensed must be so late—"God, Sue, next thing we’ll be on a regular budget"—that when one’s female parent said a year or more ago, "Every other week, condoms," one must question what they would be for—the condoms. For even if, as Mom said, "we spend the same whether we budget or not," Susan and Marv who once were supposed to have been one seemed now two, as if a template had got warped between the first and second print —do you see, Amy? Yet these two people, Susan and Marv, one’s parents, were so contracted into one oneself they seemed to be oneself until, by a heretofore unheard-of trick of substitution without trade-off, one economized on action, put Amy in a class by herself where no longer employed by a foundation on research into right-brain projection for the handicapped she spent her days finely, subtly, warmly outlining one’s name in the palm of her hand like a model of something in the invisible and intimate void separating one from her only for the duration of the entertainment, which turned heartfelt stress into such storyteller’s speed, sweep, and volume that all one spent one saved, and a beautiful hand, a girl’s strong hand, a father’s empty hand to grip at a distance, a mother’s rule of thumb were one that put together such amazing tales by wielding a modulus, an elastic modulus of common ground between the change that stress gives a body’s volume and the velocity of circulating money which Rail could make circulate—blood money—circulate through all the curving continents of a globe that is believed but not seen except by the unseeing totals of that blood which one has paid and might again to unclench one’s parents from what’s bigger than the both of them, the ruling junta of their Open Marriage.

"Larry ought to get laid"—the word issues from the junta like a bulletin, like the ring of a bell telephone, like a parent, like a digital stat. A breach of their own open laissez-faire, for justice sake! But who said it? The junta en conjunto? Or one’s own congruence waiting elsewhere like an Unknown Soldier? Or a Buenos Aires cab’s exhaust pipe? an exhaust pipe which James Mayn was once invited to screw, having asked a man on the street where he could coger (catch) a cab when Argentine coger means something else also. Or did those words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the right or creative side of Amy’s beautiful mind dropped out of college and learning her living in the air force of the employed? Or did the words "Larry ought to get laid" come from the grin and nod on the far side of the eighteenth green of an IBM golf course—not exactly one’s favorite game—after one has said, "No, you go ahead, Dad," who might smile at home after the aforementioned words "Larry ought to get laid" and almost but not quite bring himself to say, "Leave him alone—he’s not indifferent to sex." Or (yes?) did the words "Larry ought to get laid" originate somewhere in the anger (yes?) jumping from an unexpected level of what proves to be the next room in spring twilight in what used to be one’s only home when one (one then tends to forget what it was that one) said, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?"—a question, a query, a fair question (yes?), a fairly clear question, not a queer query, not a demand, but oh an error, a dumb error that multiplies the more one thinks, for she wants us to let her be, for at the moment that one asks, " ‘There any eggs, Ma?" she is standing on her head doing the sunset naked and looking just as young as some of her seems more upside down than the rest of her, for "Look, Larry" she has had (O.K., O.K.) and out of a ("Larry, you’re living in a—") vacuum she has been addressed by her son as not-Susan, an address she has changed in her head and will soon change in fact so the future can come true, though for these uneconomical months she’s living at the old address, and Dad’s the one in Manhattan though as he has said (when a third party asks), "I come and go and so does Sue"—which is what in this future night at a Manhattan roll-top desk open to laissez-faire one hears her doing, coming and going, speaking on the phone to the Unknown Date whom Dad has answered the phone call from though one oneself, twisting or rising or shaking free of this domestic freakdom (yet not free), still hears with mixed feeling above the fractions and equalities of Rail’s extra-credit problem, in which hunting for the investment multiplier that makes a drop in the nation’s bucket expand like liquid oxygen in the vacuum of space one kept backsliding down the more than forty-five-degree slope of the Marginal Propensity to Consume because one could not get hold of why Rail called MPC and Marginal Propensity to Save "mirror twins" when they were so unlike each other, the female voice of Amy now doubtless home from the foundation asking whatever she likes to ask—anything, Amy, anything, my constant heart, mi corazon, my hot Hispanic hand—the name and address of the man (Mayn) you saw me with who—genius that Mayn is beyond that inkling one has that he has been here before and has seen it all happen that’s now happening to one— has two extra tickets for the game, not just one extra, and so Mayn will be going with one and Amy.

Or ask what a modulus is, Amy—a constant, expressing like a steady fraction of itself how much a certain property is possessed of something, or a constant factor—a multiplier! for the conversion of units from one system to another (yes?). Or Amy ask to be made to laugh because the last time Amy came—the last time you came, Amy—one felt in the hand a mixed feeling, a tender chill and in the gray-green eyes something put in place of something else, and she wished to know how well one knew Jim Mayn, politely anxious, not just trouble-at-work but, in the line between what showed and what didn’t, a void or nerve (of fear?) which one could not figure, just as, to be frank with oneself, one hesitated to broach the question of sex.

And so between the propensity to save what has happened to one yet to spend it, one found oneself so close to one’s blonde twenty-three-year-old potential girlfriend far from the harsh junta’s bulletin of progress toward independence, found oneself telling her a tale of the long day—como le va el dia? how goes it?—dreaming for Amy’s entertainment that one memorable long day—when the new network of the mixed market mechanism seemed to go haywire or beyond itself joining what, among random appointed curves, had not been seen to be connected. For the Chief himself on some royal and ancient green with just the shadow of satisfaction in his frown that somewhere his advisers are handling the economy as a strict father balances his family budget—purses his lips and bends over his makable putt. He has, he thinks, stepped secretly inside his own production-possibility frontier to let the world slide on without him while he takes a bit of recreation. But he does not know what lies baleful between the putter’s ridged-steel face, the dimpled ball, and the cup no Secret Service could have thought to check out beforehand.

And so the Chief starts the ball rolling along a curve he has foreseen for the ball should break left; yet some presence is missing, he must ask his advisers, some gravity—for long before he can send the ball on its way, a "big board" (they nostalgically call it—a big board down Wall Street way) has so previewed this event through sequences that can yield it that the Chief and this event have been pre-established as actual. Now, this "big board" (which actually has almost nothing in common with the old Stock Exchange) is neither one board nor a board. Instead it is a new global network constantly creating itself in numbers, template curves, possible consequences, and desirable equilibriums, as the locus of all Congruences filling the mixed-market mechanism. That one-time mystery which Smith had said to leave alone and Keynes had said to intervene in now by its mutual Mind constantly projects its own destined Congruence which at each "big board" center is all plugged in but actually more conceptual to the touch; do you see, Amy? Each misnamed "big board," then, is not at all two-dimensional except in samples momentarily abstracted for experiment—say, the effect of womanpower relocation-and-job-training plans on the stubborn Phillips curve that ties decreasing unemployment to wage hikes—not two-d but a system that predicts and that is known by those who know it best as a field of all possible curves whose constant changes occupy like a position that roughly resembles a headless, torso-less human form, armed and legged, a four-d field of intersections always but secretly mindful both of the crossings of such old slopes as the Demand and Supply, and the absolute refusal to cross one or another of the curves (or schedules) that compose an Indifference Map—

an Indifference Curve showing one’s inability to choose between, say, dinner with one’s mother at a feminist restaurant and six holes of golf with one’s father, or two such meals and eighteen holes, and so on; or, along another Indifference Curve, one’s inability to choose between one pro basketball game at the Garden and the promise of one phone call from Amy, or two games and an actual call, or four games and a call in which one consistently interests Amy even in the name and address of someone else, an older man, a journalist whose relative substitution value may be greater because since he may travel to any point on the globe at an hour’s notice he tends to be scarcer than oneself. On this future day, then, the "big board" constantly reconstituting itself all over the globe, simultaneously reaching every direction with mutations potentially infinite yet hugging the Earth’s globe of flat horizons, outdoes itself, transactivates its parts to plot a collaborative global act by which both Gravity and Government are divided by both Agency and Anarchy.

One’s father peers through the wall of the next room and through the back or crack of one’s head trying to shine the hint that one take a two-hour break—an economic pause—from all this homeboundwork to "take in" (one predicts he will say) "a flick." He cannot envision much less see the dark-eyed blonde who hears only one, not him.

Now normally these electronic models plugged in to one another across the nuclear family of nations rule the mixed markets by foreseeing the multiple effects upon, say, Velocity of Money or upon the Global Consumption curves, of any event such as a drop if not a plunge in steel or water production or a local change of Mind. Amy, where is your heart, your hand?—this system devised by forethought beside itself, which controls, say, the arms while seeming to leave free the hands and digits, has so impressed the multinational oligopolists with themselves that they think to transcend those wise Quakers who are said to have gone to the New World to do good and ended up doing well, and they have ceded to the new system a strange measure of what would otherwise have been the Business-as-Usual Profit, fifty-five percent on a new transcontinental Third-World Sewer, one hundred percent on turning surplus soy into air, five hundred on a compact laundropod for nuclear waste. All such foregone! foregone! Forget the Phillips curve—the period’s competitive but transcapitalist. This global grapevine and decision system forestalls the old demand-pull inflation in which a certain curve goes too far and spending exceeds what the economy can come up with; and at the same time the parallel concept is available in the economatriculating templates of the system’s constant Future—namely, it forestalls any ghastly increase of Money, hence of MV in the exchange equation Money times Velocity of Circulation equals Average Price Level times real GNP—for as Rail says to a class suddenly still but for the mixed whisper of pencils and ballpoints chasing him along blue notebook lines, in this type of old-fashioned inflation too much money chases too few goods.

But wait—in a future where buyers’ inflation would be only an all-too-easily-contained beginning, this simul-system, Amy, this world manifold of instant models filled with instant information, can be trusted to expose and defense against cost-push (sellers’) inflation too. Here wages get forced up by unions despite widespread unemployment, so employers raise consumer prices before the worker’s spouse with five extra bucks in her purse consumed with what is to be next grabs someone else’s pushcart and starts down the aisle to the strains of free music. But this inflation, like other mishaps including unemployment itself, can’t happen under the new mutual controls; and while some argue that all the foreseeable futures created by the conceptual templates in conjunction with the vast input of productivity data, infra-red photos of rivers and mountains, and weather-satellite prediction have turned not only a mixed economy into a steady state but life itself into economics, still the system contains not so many future threats as it itself might have been expected to foresee and may be prey mainly to a normal human desire (in some people) not to see what’s coming.

And this globe-net of centers engrosses from Capetown to Kansas City, Brussels to Kyoto to Santiago, all data which the econometric projections and new random models embrace while registering results of events so fast that within certain templates of right-to-know publicity-pattern—and so in the minds of many—the events-to-come have come already, do you see, Amy? (You, for whom one’s fantasies may never be translated out of one’s right brain onto whatever handicapped digital screen; you, whose research in your real daily salaried job yields research that will help, say, cerebral-palsy victims speak and learn with a richness and rapidity heretofore impeded if not just bleeped off and schlonked out by the honchos of the industry who have been more interested in the first two days of birth-defect kids than in the void of boredom and solitary confinement that yawns out like an expanding universe for disabled unknown veterans of the theater of debut, Amy.) So, then, a given new model of consumer behavior, or model of models, may embrace, say, first, such events as, say, these three: may embrace, Amy, first, the impending takeoff of a plane containing pre-flattened, mildly yellowed, but cute orphans from a point in Asia; second, may embrace the plane of plate glass fronting a long, narrow, moderately multinational feminist health-food restaurant where a lean and hungry, hard-to-read young man whose pale, jutting chin contains two subtle scar points of what the mujer with him abruptly calls acne, and whose thoughts (he is aware) undergo breathtaking transformations, sits eating his companion’s sesame roll and butter and facing over his menu a depth of field which embraces both the glimmering plate glass twenty feet away like a lid upon the longish, noisy, aromatic restaurant room, the older woman opposite him who is asking him what he’s having for dessert and is herself torn between two desserts, and on the other side of the glass as if in a next room furnished with an orange compact car, a parking meter, and a hydrant, three persons, two women and a man, who appear bent on destruction; and may embrace, third, meanwhile, hours away, the Chief, who, having lined up his putt, grins, shakes his head, estimates the slope and the break, and with a rhythm that is all sensitivity, putts.

The jets of Operation Adoption somewhere in Asia whine down the curve foreshadowed by the rich click shared between presidential ball and club face, while for the multinational eater, about to be pressure-cooked by means of not sealing but of breaching the gasket-bedded lid, what matters is the parallel, staggered trajectories of bomb and fire and bullet to be launched from the three outside, not that these curves actually come from the projections loomed template upon template by the housework of a system as if its thinking has rewired the world. But to take second things for a second first, where are these events coming from? The system has surveyed Asiatic futures to see what best return can be had from the long-term but now terminated overseas investment there of machines, material, men, bombs, and, more vital, demolition knowhow: what return will be suitable on such an investment? Friendship with those who have been ploughed had been run through the conceptual templates, likewise an agribusiness feedback and cultural exchange such as music and dance groups and eastern theories of peace cum Buddhist child care; but the only future seeming both to approach the desired congruence with the original input and simultaneously counteract certain domestic trends like guilt and the decline of marriage is a transfer of orphans which will fill a near-unquantifiable lag or gap or absence. Yet the system’s economy is to multiply consequences both in scatter-parallel and sequence (like alternatives in sentencing the convict to concurrent or consecutive death penalties or other terms) and the system foresees an East-West secret junta so dead set against the orphan solution, so certain this substitute is not the destined congruence of prior investments, that it must liquidate the moderately yellowed, pre-flattened contents of the plane as a counter act.

Elsewhere the steel industries will have agreed that with the decreasing leverage of unions a few union leaders still powerful because early in the game they were foresighted enough to diversify themselves will succeed in urging a certain bloc of workers that the compounding of steel-substitute and rubber-substitute production, whereby (though only a few know which) either rubber-sub will be made from steel-sub or steel-sub from rubbber-sub, is destined to make the industries so much more invulnerable that unions’ traditional interest in getting a bigger wedge of the pie within the newly stabilized economy where durable-goods sectors no longer show cyclical swings has no more chance now than a chronic slump or for that matter one Indifference Curve to cross another.

Therefore, since the Chief Executive (drawing triangle deltas on a pad to represent the finite increments within his variable putt and his invariable program) will be inclined—can be foreseen—to certify with a very slight hike in steel prices an experimental temporary downturn-to-come in the economy; and since increased prices will not affect demand, so the coefficient of demand elasticity for the products in question is virtually unity, as seen in the influential equation (good for elasticity of supply or demand); and since armament futures are sticky if not in a state of international instability over the effect of these events on mutual exports; and since new domestic disturbances, some even within union families where wives tend to be non-union and work harder for less money, put unions (even marriage) in an all-time popularity trough—the system conceives an explosive resolution to the moderate pressures bearing against the new stability: a dramatic assassination traceable to those in the hire of union honchos and international forces, dependent both upon a substance which (active for no more than five minutes after exposure to the air) explodes when touched by a golf ball that has been in contact with, in this order, a steel-faced putter and a stretch of Bermuda grass, and upon the Chief Executive’s habit of sinking putts only of such short distance that the consequent explosion in the eighteenth hole can comfortably reach him.

Elsewhere, a model restaurant contains, among twelve tablefuls of women plus (and including) a complement of men, two former golf widows, two known underground journalists—man and woman—getting an underground interview with a distinguished but generally unknown South American economist-in-exile who, consenting to be approached, had picked this spot because of his absent wife who knows of it in turn because of two new women friends who know and admire the proprietors who, through many turns, are a couple no longer divorced from each other having reopened a marriage if not a barricade supplied in part by the man’s lucrative lobby against toxic fertilizers including some from South America, and in part by the woman’s organic farm in Dutchess County snatched with a windfall from stock in a body-scan company bought and unloaded during the ten months of her divorce—my divorce, she says; my divorce, he says. Now, sets of sequence set in motion by the global system can break down, and the bombing of the restaurant now so vividly envisioned as to be actual seems in its train of causes—a new Invisible Hand—to be as much too fast to follow as it now seems deliberate, while diners reach gently for a second half-piece of crumbly stone-ground bread or, on a consumer’s whim, some broccoli tart or an earthenware vessel of spring water—or nod and nod and go on slowly munching while on the other side of the plane of glass the three plotters having been so actually plotted along the template curves of the global prediction sequences sidle by the still furniture of the street outside.

Yet if the system has outdone itself by projecting these three events congruent less with the "handiness" of Adam Smith’s old-fashioned limb the Invisible Hand than with its twin trait of being as out of sight as the old and ancient system behind big-board stock exchanges, it yields still in its own until-now unforeseen precreation a mind-blowing safeguard. For having projected instantly a consequence so real as to be actual, the system hence provides itself, to its own actual surprise, with both base and time for countervailing action backward from the projected future which has become as good as present, while these unprecedented redaction sequences (now conceived by the system) seem a prudential future. For the disasters now beginning to satisfy the functions of their prior and apparently independent sequences now are held back as their concepts bend back into this unforeseen dimension, so that with the new future-system working the world is ready for the new laissez-faire. And the waitress makes her way toward one’s table where one and one’s mother (who once forgivably said one ought to get laid but now seems nervous and looking about as if about to see someone) will order carob ice cream. And some amazing stuff goes down. Yet also, as you’ll see, does not.

(Oh Amy, why did you ask one if Mayn knew any Chileans? You could ask him yourself.)

For the giant orphan plane, having lifted off from its Asian field and lost altitude with dramatic suddenness, finds near the water a huge, dry cushion of air current that should not be there and is due to weather activity at a distance, both satellite-observed and program-stimulated—and along this cushion the plane slides horizontally round to limp back and land for repairs.

And the Chief Executive, having reached the lip of the cup, receives a message from his mujer, his esposa, who’s been playing tennis she says, and he thinks for a moment and walks abstractedly away to the edge of the green, before smiling then to his now distant caddy, who holds the flag. Then the Chief Executive waves the back of his hand, upon which the black man who was substituted only at the last moment before the round began picks up the unholed ball and hands the flag stick to the second caddy and follows the Chief Executive, who now remembers, and turns and approaches the black man to shake hands.

One’s audience does not exactly answer—though radiant, she does not answer—she only outlines one’s name again and again until it is barely visible. She is not one’s mujer. Is she indifferent? One senses the curve of her attention, and one finds one has forgotten why indifference curves can’t intersect because this would contradict preferring more of a commodity to less. But she smiles—she is amused! divertida! The hair so different from one’s mother’s. The starts she’s had, too. At least from what one knows of Amy, who, already older than one’s mother when she fell into marriage, has a chance to live from month to month now without that half-visible arc of outside control one heard of like an Invisible future-Hand when one was young, writing on the wall Little Wife, Little Mother, Little Woman, be faithful, be fruitful—and which Susan, one’s mother, speaks of—and which angered her for years and years.

The front door is heard. Open and shut. One is at times like one who has been deconstituted to a scatter of frequencies to be flash-transferred to another place—which once seemed to be one of all those places the older man the journalist James Mayn had been to so that when one spoke of that deconstitution into a scatter of frequencies he shook his head until one said, "Wait, Jim, I think I got the idea from you, didn’t I?" and then he stopped shaking his head and stared through one, as if he knew what came next—for, the scatter of frequencies having been flash-transferred to another place, lo there is no receiver there, or it’s there but, like some Third World depot waiting very lazy for sophisticated lezie and fairey technicians to come to operate it, they haven’t installed it, they haven’t even ordered it—or wait, its concept is there waiting, which is all that’s needed to take delivery.

One hears one’s father sigh. At this point one’s father no doubt thinks Larry is less valuable than Susan, but by a corollary of the law of substitution Larry is cheaper and more plentiful. One contemplates what the Eco class isn’t up to or probably even going to cover—the Coefficient of Cross-Elasticity! The phone might ring. White parents still wait at the airport of an advanced economy. (Did you mean, one’s audience in a class by herself has asked, that some of those adopting parents were having trouble with their marriages?) One moves between two homes that are becoming one—this one in Manhattan, where one’s father is.

Disaster forestalled. Headed off, yeah. But where did these events come from? Far back. One becomes the system for a long second, one finds the Chief Executive’s uncertain wife, his mujer, sitting in a New York health-food restaurant incognita, thinking of broccoli and the smell of a certain face, only to be handed a note as she reads her menu that the young meteorologist she would love to help has been pre-empted by an unforeseen future-emergency. Rising angrily, she leaves the table; she elbows someone in order to flag a cab; she takes the cab two blocks to a phone booth where she dials a distant golf course collect wondering if carob is an adequate chocolate substitute, while the driver knows he’s seen her somewhere. But one steps now outside of the system and into the beautiful face of one’s potential girlfriend, Amy, who is asking a question which one cannot hear through all the outlinings she has made over one’s name and through the sound of that now silent telephone containing the voice of one’s mother’s date. And so one is thrust between some echoing openness of fucking minds and, on another hand, a taxing institution with a capital M one cannot get away from—while through the traffic and smoke of one’s name is asked, "Are you saying that these three events are linked by something like marriage or the breakdown of marriage?," while one substitutes an Amy for oneself asking—but one can’t make the words—asking—one can’t say them—while, ah, for that weird equation between Volume-Receiving-Stress in physics and Velocity-Conceived-Under-Stress in economics, substituting another equation between Lorenz curves that correlate income distributions in economics and the (note the Lorentz, with a t for) transformation by which space and time in physics may be coordinated between two frames of reference at relative velocities.

So that—the bell will ring—so that—the bell will ring and the audience disperse, the class disperse—so Eco can be transformed into Physics in another space or in another space translated into English where another maniac wielding a borrowed ax by Walden Pond can huff and puff, "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools"—so one’s father can enter one’s room and one can ask, "Who was that on the phone?" to which he answers, "You don’t know the half of it," but he has entered one’s relatively new room to ask if one would like to go out to eat at the Middle Eastern restaurant—so one’s family curve adds to the National Net—so the bell can ring in one’s absent mind, the vacuum between Openness and Marriage, two possibilities locused at the phone bell which may ring from Amy in one’s absence if one goes out to dinner now with one’s father who is not happy but is being reasonable, cool, yea scientific—about being open and married. So one makes an effort when he says, "What may I ask is this Coefficient of Cross-Elasticity?" And one answers that it’s the arithmetical relation, see, between a percentage change in the sales of a substitute like tea, yes?—while at the bell which in the silence of one’s vacuum has saved one for the higher cross of Rail’s science and his curves, one knows one must not be saved, even from the crazy tale one admits to an Amy who has not phoned except this morning to ask for James Mayn’s name-and-address (when she must already know—though maybe not enough about mineral cartels, Mayn’s interest in)—to an Amy who is not present in one’s room at one’s roll-top escritorio bought by one’s mother—not present, not here, as one’s father looks down at one’s textbook graphs and says, "Well maybe the bookkeeping stuff will help, but if you get a job in business you’ll have to forget all this and learn some real economics"—to an Amy to whom one says almost but no longer with the scientific fiction of the impersonal "one" which one can’t maintain any more than one is Rail or would wish one’s first name to be Lawrence, "I think I am the reason my folks stuck together."

I am.

But if they have not stuck together, what am I?

I am.

If they have not stuck together I am not the reason.

I am Larry.

I am.

the future

After the event he will have his story and she will have hers. The event Lwill amount to little more than a brief, unwelcome scare. They’re the same people before and after the event, the mother and her twelve-year-old son, her "twelve-year-old." They are still there. They won’t go away. But he will have his story and she will have hers. After all, they never were the same. There they are at the end of the day, at seven-thirty, quarter to eight, when she swung open the front door and he was waiting for her and tonight not on the phone but right there in front of her standing in the entrance to their living room. He was sort of smiling, as if he had seen her coming. He was wearing the pale-orange collarless shirt she’d about decided he didn’t like, and his new, expensive sneakers. He had combed his hair wetly, having apparently taken a shower. Waiting for her there between living room and front hall, he made her think of times she had come home from the office thinking, What if he isn’t there?—aged ten, aged eleven. It was his sneakers that made her think of those times. And she knew now, in the instant before he said, "Can we go out to dinner?" that, getting in ahead of his mother, he was going to say what she was about to say. Her keys in one hand, in the other her shopping bag from the fruit-and-vegetable market, she went and kissed him and seemed to walk around him and into the apartment. "Shall we?" she said. She put the two pink grapefruit and the beautiful bluish-green broccoli and the watercress in the refrigerator and the bananas in the wooden salad bowl on the kitchen table. Had she really been about to say, "Let’s go out to dinner"? She remembered the large, unripe avocado in her leather shoulder bag on the chair, and she removed it and put it with the bananas, laid it within the curve. She had not paid for the avocado.

In the small, narrow restaurant are two rows of tables against either wall. At one end, the kitchen; at the other, the street window, maybe fifteen feet from their table. Tonight she was facing the street.

There was the door to the street, to the vestibule, actually, and between the door and the first table, across the aisle from where she and her son sat, was a nook for the cash register. This was an ornate, old-fashioned thing that, if you looked at it, maybe didn’t go with the fresh, elegant plainness of the place. It was a French restaurant, but it was cheap. A black man who she was sure wasn’t French worked in the kitchen and the owner, a tall, gray-haired, gently tense man who looked as if he had been in another profession for years, did much of the cooking. They served mainly crepes and quiches. The tables were set with green-rimmed butter plates and a flower in a cheap glass vase. All around was a composed look of care and economy. Her son usually faced the street window and she faced the rear of the room, which gave her a view of all the tables. Tonight he put his hand on her elbow as they entered, and she went first; so she was sitting with her back to the kitchen and to most of the restaurant.

She would see her son and herself before and after the event. The event itself will be in question, come and gone along the greater event of their life together, which is also in question, and she will know that she could have predicted this—she had the power, the experience; for a long time she let her power be.

They are quite content together. On several other visits here, they never once found this table occupied; it was their regular table. When she and Davey sat down together here at the end of a long day, she didn’t care about anything, not even—but in a good sense—the questions she asked him about his day, his friends Michael and Alex and the others, homework, the cleaning woman, a thank-you letter he was supposed to write. These questions he answered. Actually, tonight he had been talking since they left the apartment about his weekend arrangements. She always wanted him to tell her what he was feeling when she came home at night. It was important.

The waitress, a young Frenchwoman, who wore a white blouse and a black skirt, brought a glass of white wine and a Coke and the menus. The wine, like a lens, held a pale-saffron transparency, and for a minute it stood untouched between the butter plate and the flower in the vase while Davey drank his Coke and, changing the subject, told his mother about a new record. He had only three dollars left from his allowance. She smiled with skeptical indulgence. She liked reading the menu, which never changed.

Davey had it all planned. He laid out the weekend and she listened. She sipped her wine and thought about a cigarette. He would take his suitcase to school in the morning and he and his friend Alex would be picked up in the car by Alex’s mother. Alex’s father came out by train in the early evening. They were going horseback riding and deep-sea fishing, and Alex’s parents had a tennis court and a pool. The pool was empty until next month. The weekend was a fait accompli, Davey’s mother was going to point out to him, for she had not been consulted.

"I see we’re getting something for the money we’re shelling out on your tuition," she said.

"Yeah, Ann, you’ve got the weekend off," he said.

She liked him. He was surprising. "Yeah, Dave, I’m glad for you," she returned.

"For me?"

"For both of us."

"Are you going out?" he asked.

"Haven’t been asked," she said.

"You poor thing," he said.

"But I don’t need to be," she said.

"But you’ve got stuff to do around the house, right?"

"Don’t I ever surprise you?" she said.

The waitress came, and Davey had what he always had, cannelloni with meat sauce—not exactly French. His mother decided to have marinated celery roots first, and then a vegetable crepe. Davey asked the waitress if they had avocado. The waitress smiled and shook her head. He had developed a taste for avocado.

The waitress came back with the julienned celery roots. Ann tasted some; she held it in her mouth like wine, and her stomach seemed to contract. The taste swelled in three or four distinct waves.

Two couples came in together but sat at separate tables. The place was quiet and private. Davey asked his mother if that stuff was any good. She nodded. He broke off a hunk of bread.

She was feeling O.K., she thought. She let the marinade dilute along her tongue before she drank off her wine.

She told Davey he could have asked her before arranging his weekend. Call them, he said. She certainly would, she said; he would need money for the horseback riding. No, he said, the horses belonged to Alex’s aunt, who was in the hospital with arthritis. You don’t go to the hospital for arthritis, she said, and wondered if that was true. Alex’s aunt had to go, said Davey; she was having an operation. One horse was a palomino.

Davey looked at the bread he was nibbling, and kept an eye on the kitchen. His mother offered him the last forkful of the celery roots, but he pulled in his chin, shaking his head. The waitress paused to see if Ann was through and discreetly crossed to the cash register and wrote something down. She came back and took Ann’s plate.

"So Alex’s aunt has galloping arthritis."

"My God, that’s sick," said Davey, shaking his head and sort of smiling.

"You, my dear," said his mother, "mentioned the operation and the palomino in one casual breath."

"It’s what Alex said."

"It’s what you said."

"Well, ‘galloping arthritis’ is what you said."

"That’s true."

"You just don’t want me to go," her son concluded.

This wasn’t true, but she didn’t say so. For a moment they looked over each other’s shoulders.

The waitress came with Ann’s vegetable crepe and Davey’s cannelloni. She held her tray and with a napkin put Davey’s dish in front of him; it was an ovenproof dish with raised edges. "It’s hot," his mother and the waitress said.

A year of weekends, a future of learning the deep seas and the American trails. A back flip so slow above the blank tiles of an empty April pool that the diver holds virtually still among all his dreams of action within unlimited time, and before he finds the pool below him it has been filled.

She raised her empty glass and caught the waitress’s eye.

‘They have a diving board," said Davey. "I told Alex you were a champion diver."

‘That’s not true, dear," she said, startled.

"Well, you did it in college."

"For a while I did."

"We’re going to a drive-in movie Saturday night," said Davey. "They’ve got a drive-in right near this golf course, Alex said."

She’s already there, but it’s somewhere else, and she imagines a couple passing on an adjacent highway, and the giant heads of the two romantic leads stand high to the left at an angle like that of a door ajar. And she has arranged for this night highway to run in the opposite direction at a speed of fifty-five miles an hour, so that the couple can keep driving and still see their movie from that tall and curious angle all the way to the end.

"If I give you money for the movie, you won’t spend it on that record, will you?" said Ann.

"I was thinking of giving the record to Alex," said Davey. "You know, as a present. I know he wants it."

"Why don’t you give his mother something; she’s picking you up and driving you out there."

"I don’t know what she’d like," said Davey.

Ann did not care any more than he did. They were enjoying the advantage of the menu’s variety, as they would not be able to do at home, where an avocado was slowly ripening and watercress didn’t need to be bought for tomorrow night’s salad. Her hand dropped to feel her shoulder bag hanging from the back of her chair by its strap. She had enough money to fly to Boston and leave Davey in front of the TV set watching the game; the Yankees were on the road in a different time zone. She’d fly to a city that was part Boston, part San Francisco, and fly back before the game was over, as if Davey couldn’t put himself to bed. But, once begun, the picture would not stop, and something stirred in the kitchen of her dark apartment and she heard him get out of bed and go see what it was. She kept forgetting what it was that was in Boston and San Francisco, and she kept falling asleep when she knew he was in the kitchen alone with that sound that didn’t stop. It was the avocado sprouting from its pit—hard to believe but easy to hear—and he was having an educational experience in the middle of the night watching it, but she couldn’t keep awake she was so mad.

"I’ll give you fifteen dollars and that will be your allowance, and you can pay for your movie and you can buy them all ice cream Saturday night," she said.

"O.K., Mom, thanks. How’s your crepe?"

Her vegetable crepe was better than his cannelloni, she was sure.

While she listened to him volunteer a progress report on what was going on in school—what was going on in science—which he almost never did, the avocado pit kept shedding light by means of the tree that grew out of it. She was sure. The light opened up the apartment house and flattened it and spread it out to become something like land, but it was more like time, and time that there was no way any more of measuring. And the answer was that this new variety of avocado could either ripen or at its heart be totally and with unprecedented richness a pit, all pit—hence the tree, hence the light, and the apartment house turning into a land of new time. Picture all that, she thought.

She thought he was being nice to her, telling her what they were doing in science class. Yes, she knew about genes and she had heard of Mendel, but she had forgotten that it was pea plants he studied. It was about inheriting traits, and it was all about dominant and recessive. She thought of chins, she thought of personalities. Davey talked fast, looking over her shoulder, and she told him she thought he had it just slightly mixed up but she couldn’t remember for sure. He said that that was how Mr. Skull had explained it.

Mr. Skull?

Mr. Skull.

She hadn’t heard of Mr. Skull. Maybe they presented it differently now, she said.

Well, according to Mr. Skull, Mendel was a monk and a schoolteacher, and wasn’t known during his own lifetime, and eventually his eyesight started to go; but what mattered was that he took the next step. Nowadays, they knew that Mendel didn’t have the whole truth; there was a lot of stuff he hadn’t gotten up to.

"But you will," she said.

"But it won’t necessarily be true," said Davey, and as his mother reached in her bag for her cigarettes he opened a book of matches that had been lying in the ashtray, but she put her cigarette pack on the table and shook her head.

"True?" she said, remembering words. "Truth is just what two people are willing to agree on."

"It must be more than that," said Davey.

"Nope," she said.

"Who said?"

"Actually, your father. He said that."

"He did?"

"Yes, he did. I can assure you he said that."

She didn’t like her tone. Alone with her son, Ann had gotten used to being very alert, yet she lived also with this single-minded sense of hers that she wasn’t seeing everything. Yet she knew she was a good mother.

She hadn’t seen the door to the small vestibule open. She was mopping the last of the oil off her salad plate with the last crust of their bread. Then she saw the young man in the white doorway. He wore bluejeans and a leather jacket. He paused, she felt, to give a person he’d come to see time to see him. He was looking toward the far end of the restaurant, where the kitchen was—the far end of what was really just a room.

The young man passed their table, and she said, "He didn’t come here to eat."

"How do you know?" said her son. "He probably works here."

"Either he’s the dishwasher or his girlfriend works here," she said.

"Well, he’s talking to the waitress," said her son. "She’s sitting at the last table and he said something to her."

"You see?" she said, observing Davey, and chewing her bread and holding and gently tilting her wine glass. She knew that the man in jeans wasn’t the young French waitress’s boyfriend.

"She’s pointing," said her son, and his mother raised her finger to her lips in case they could hear Davey back there. "He’s going to the phone. There’s a phone on the wall right by the entrance to the kitchen."

"Well, that’s what he came in for," she said. "He’s not the waitress’s boyfriend."

"Isn’t he a little young for her?" said her son.

"I wouldn’t be surprised," she said. The young man had long ginger hair, lank but carefully combed, and eyes like those of some animal so rarely seen that its ordinariness is what is most striking during a brief moment of exposure; his short, light-brown leather jacket looked as if it had traveled, and there was a touch of color about him she didn’t identify at the moment. She looked into her son’s face and was tired for the first time today.

"That was a pretty quick phone call," he said. "That was a quickie."

"Maybe he was calling his girlfriend," she said.

"He just disappeared, if you want to know," said her son. "He must have gone to the bathroom."

"I bet that’s why he really came in here."

"But he asked the waitress for the phone."

"That was what he was thinking of when he first came in."

"Hey," her son remarked, looking toward the far end of the room, "that was quick. He came right out." Davey stared intimately or absently into her eyes, so she knew the man was approaching. She felt the vibrations in her feet and her chair.

As the young man in the leather jacket passed and she smelled a smell she couldn’t quite place, her son looked around over his shoulder and watched the man leave after pausing once more, as if the brass doorknob in his hand had made him remember something.

"Did he get through to the person he was calling?" she asked.

"I don’t think so," said her son, as the waitress came to their table and the man left.

The waitress told them what there was for dessert. The boy turned around in his chair to look at the table by the window, where there were some fruit tarts on two plates. His mother knew he would have mousse. The owner was standing by the cash register, and the waitress excused herself and turned to him. The owner raised his hand and pointed with a finger that seemed to have just pressed a cash-register key, and she went back toward another table. She returned with a twenty-dollar bill and a check.

Music got turned on and off. Ann knew Davey was aware of her mood; otherwise he’d have forgotten their little discussion about the weekend except as part of a general mulling-over that he probably didn’t spell out.

They were going to have chocolate mousse and apricot—no, strawberry—tart. The waitress went to the kitchen, the owner right behind her.

"Alex’s mother swam the English Channel," said Davey.

"She did not," said Ann. "That just isn’t true."

"All but two miles, coming from France; if she’d been swimming the other way, she would have made it."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Alex said so," said Davey.

"Well, I doubt it," his mother remarked.

Behind him, she thought, was her dessert, on a table; behind her was his dessert, in a refrigerator in the kitchen. The two of them might be having the littlest of fights; no outsider would be able to tell. The young man with ginger hair appeared again in the doorway and entered the restaurant.

"Here he is again," said Ann softly, looking Davey in the eye so that he turned around and stared at the man, who looked at Ann, who, when her son turned back and put his elbows on the table facing her, said to him as if she were talking about anything but the young man, "Maybe he’s suddenly developed an interest in the waitress."

"Atom," said Davey softly, embarrassed.

The young man was waiting for something to happen, she was sure, but it wasn’t clear what.

"Can I have a taste of your mousse?" she said.

"If it ever comes," said Davey.

The young man strode past them toward the rear of the restaurant.

"What’s he doing?" said Ann.

"He’s got his hand on the phone and the owner’s telling him not to keep coming in here using the phone."

"How do you know?"

"I can tell."

"Well, what’s he going to do about it?"

"It’s a free country," said Davey. "I’d call the police."

Ann laughed and for a moment found she couldn’t stop—it was all over her face and in spasms in her abdomen. Davey smiled with grudging modesty at his remark, keeping an eye on the far end of the room. Ann started up again and stopped. She drank some water as if she already had the hiccups. "You’re good for a laugh, kid," she said. Her impulse to laugh had passed.

"He’s talking to the waitress," said Davey.

"What is le patron doing?"

"You mean the owner?" said Davey. "He’s talking to the black guy in the kitchen."

"Where is our waitress?"

"She’s talking to the guy who came in. Or he’s talking to her. She smiled. At least, I think she did."

"She what?"

"She doesn’t have my chocolate mousse."

Ann felt the treads coming along the carpeted floor, and the waitress and the young man in bluejeans passed, and the waitress went to the cash register.

"You see?" said Ann, and Davey turned to look. "She is his girl." For the man, who had his back to them, had put his hand lightly on the waitress’s shoulder. The waitress wasn’t doing anything.

"You might just be right," said Davey, glancing back at them and seeing what his mother meant. He shrugged.

"Or his sister, maybe?" said Ann, who turned instinctively to see the owner, at the back of the restaurant, step out of the kitchen.

The ginger-haired man now brought his other hand up and gripped the waitress’s right arm just above the elbow, and she jerked her head around to the right, as if the street door were opening.

"No, I’m wrong," said Ann, and Davey, hearing her voice, turned to look and half rose in his chair as the man standing behind the waitress at the cash register drew her back and pivoted her away from the register and around to face back down the length of the restaurant, as if, breaking the restaurant’s privacy, she were going to announce that there was a call for someone—or no, that there was a fire, no problem, or something had been lost, or the place was being closed down and the money would be refunded. And as he spoke, sharply and low behind her, there was a close moment not of ventriloquism so much as intimate agreement, when his command seemed jointly to be hers: they were about the same height, he was the roughly dressed brother or consort, and the composed life of this pleasing place derived from his behind-the-scenes industry.

His information that they were to go into the bathroom was as clear as the angle Davey’s half-risen body cast in relation to his mother facing him and to the close pair on his right, three or four feet behind him.

She said, "Sit down"—was it that he was trying to be brave?—but the man, having spoken, looked away from the rest of the restaurant at the two of them and particularly at Davey, as if he could do more than speak. Ann felt the chill. And Davey was not sitting down. He had pushed his chair back and was standing up, turned to the waitress and the holdup man.

His mother had, she felt, received for them both the news that they were all going to the rear of the restaurant, into the bathroom, which was the place where you waited out this mandatory drill, which was to see how well it could be done. There must have been words; why they were so low she did not know, but what was happening was clear enough. Davey stepped away from the table and stood contemplating the young man and woman up against each other, the one somewhat hurried and scanning the room, the other rigid, and Ann for a moment didn’t reach for Davey, in case the man did something. The man was saying, Hurry, with his eyes.

In one movement she rose and stepped around the table, hearing others behind her moving—she couldn’t look back quite yet—and she got Davey by the elbow, his arm firm but not muscular, and drew him with her away from the waitress and the man. The man’s hand, his left hand, was definitely up against the waitress’s spine, and his forearm had seemed turned, as if a knife handle was gripped in his palm.

Ann had her leather bag on her shoulder. She was startled not to remember taking it. She had her arm around Davey’s shoulder. The five or six customers ahead of them moving politely, as if there had been a power failure to be patient about, were people she’d hardly noticed when she’d come in. Now, following them, she found them even less real to her—all except a blonde woman in her fifties with a lacquered bouffant—less real to her than they had obscurely been in the privacy of her dinner with her son. Tonight Davey had the view.

She remembered nothing and prophesied little, but she had seen finality in the alert glance the young man had given Davey. It didn’t matter who Davey was—he was a person who happened to be there and then, from out of a field of chances. And a sudden killing in self-defense followed their backs as, the last customers to file to the rear and turn right and crowd into the bathroom, she and Davey were followed in by the owner, who shook his head gently at her and the others and raised his palm—as if any of them were going to do anything.

The little bathroom was unexpectedly long. Davey’s hair was up against her nose and she put her arm around in front of him across his stomach, and she turned to look into the eyes of a short, bald man, who instantly frowned and turned away from her toward the toilet end, where there was a small, half-open window. "Where does that lead to?" he asked importantly, but the owner, whom he did not look back at, continued to shake his head. The bald man said, "Excuse me," and edged between the others and reached around them to the toilet, leaning over it. "Anyone else want to leave your wallet behind the toilet?"

A dark woman in a dark turtleneck sweater, whose shoulder was against a dark man, also in a dark turtleneck, with such firm tightness that you knew if you followed their arms downward you would find them holding hands, said, "What if he wants your wallet—what are you going to give him?"

"I got ten bucks in my pocket," the man said.

"Ten bucks," said the woman. "Are you kidding?"

The waitress had not appeared. The owner was shaking his head, but now to himself. They were close together in the narrow, longish lavatory, yet exposed by the peculiarly high ceiling. Ann didn’t count how many were crowded in here. Davey whispered huskily, so the others heard, "There are ten people in here."

The dark man in the dark turtleneck looked a bit scared. The blonde woman, whose lacquered bouffant seemed to be in the wrong restaurant, had pursed her lips, but she bent around and gave the bald man a kiss that just missed his mouth. The black man at the door turned on the basin faucet and turned it off. The two young men who were at the rear by the toilet and the window had given way for the bald man to stash his wallet. One of them now said, "Are your lunch receipts in that register?"

The owner hesitated. He seemed to have a clear sense of what was outside the room where they were. "There’s always a first time," he said, and his accent gave a poignance to his words. "Well, it’s too bad," said the other young man by the toilet. "It really is." His friend said,"My spinach quiche is getting colder by the minute," and the other said, "Remember Greece— they said you should never eat food piping hot."

Davey leaned the back of his head against his mother’s shoulder and growled softly, "Where’s my mousse?" He said to the owner, "Somebody ought to see what’s happened to the waitress."

The owner opened the door and seemed to hear something and slipped out.

Ann hugged Davey. Her arm came around his stomach. "Did he say, ‘Everyone into the bathroom’?" she asked and she looked down at her bag, its flap covering the top but not fastened down through its leather loop.

"No," Davey said, "he said, ‘Everyone get into the back into the bathroom’—that’s what he said."

"I guess he doesn’t want us," said the woman in the dark turtleneck.

"Beware of pickpockets," growled Davey in his mother’s ear.

A terrific sadness descended upon her. The black man eased himself out the door.

"I don’t think I want my mousse," said Davey.

"We’ll ask for the check," Ann said. She put both hands on Davey’s shoulders. When this is all over, she meant.

"Do you want your strawberry tart?" he asked.

The owner appeared and said the man had gone.

The man who had hidden his wallet asked one of the young men to pass it to him.

The restaurant, when they came out, seemed especially empty, because the waitress was at the far end by the window, sitting beside the pastry desserts, huddled in the chair, and the black man was comforting her. She was quietly hysterical; she was not quite sobbing. She looked as if she were waiting for someone. There were half-empty wineglasses and salad plates with forks across them and chairs pushed back. Someone said, "I wonder if he helped himself."

It had been over so soon that Ann couldn’t think, except that with a pistol the young man could have made them go with him. Or killed someone just like that, so the person wouldn’t be around to go through the mug shots at the local precinct. She didn’t know the address of the local precinct. She didn’t know the address of the local precinct or what number precinct it was.

The waitress sat in the window crying. People were sitting down again. Ann told the owner she would have her coffee later. This sounded as if they were having hot dogs and beans in a diner. The check included the chocolate mousse and the strawberry tart. The owner subtracted the desserts.

The waitress stood up and smiled. Now it was the waitress Ann was paying; the owner was outside in the street. Davey looked up into the waitress’s face. He didn’t say anything.

"Are you all right?" said Ann as the waitress put down on the table the change from a twenty. "Have you ever been in a holdup before?"

The woman shook her head. She had shining blue eyes and rather curly brown hair, and she was tall and had delicate shoulders.

Davey said, "Our money is all that’s in the cash register."

Ann, being a genial, alert parent in the waitress’s presence, said, "Then where did she get the change from?"

"That’s a good question."

"Have you seen him before?" Ann asked the waitress.

The waitress shook her head. "I hardly looked at him."

"I’d never forget him," said Davey.

Ann heard herself say, "He was wearing a turquoise belt buckle."

The waitress excused herself. Ann left two dollars and as they got up to leave, Davey asked what percentage that was.

"Something over fifteen percent."

It was the very same restaurant, except that the owner, like a neighborhood Parisian, was standing out front, looking contemplatively down the street. A cab turned into the street and came very slowly by with a passenger looking out the window.

"Do you think he was dangerous?" Ann asked.

"Mom," said Davey, embarrassed.

"I think so," said the gray-haired man, his eyebrows raised.

"How much did he get?" asked Davey.

The man looked down at Davey and smiled and shook his head, but it didn’t mean he didn’t know.

"Are the police coming?" said Davey.

The owner gestured toward the street. "That’s what they said."

When Ann and Davey said goodnight to the owner, the holdup was all his. At the next corner Ann looked back and he was gone. Some people seemed to be looking at the menu in the window.

"Why did you shush me when I asked if the man was dangerous?" Ann asked.

"Because of course he was dangerous. He had a gun."

"I think it was a knife."

"No, it was definitely a gun. I saw it."

"I don’t see how."

"I was even closer than you."

"But they were still behind you, and when he pulled her out into the aisle his arm, his forearm, was turned around the way it would be if he had a knife handle in his palm."

"I know I saw the metal of a gun."

"I’m sure you’re wrong."

"I saw it."

"You saw something."

They crossed another avenue as the light changed in the middle.

Ann took Davey’s arm. He didn’t crook it at the elbow.

"It’s going to be a good weekend," said Ann.

They walked in silence.

"I got to call Michael and Alex," said Davey.

"You’re going to see Alex tomorrow."

"I’m going to see them both tomorrow. I’ve got to tell them about the holdup."

"Listen, it was real, Davey, it was serious."

"You’re not kidding it was serious," said her son. "We could have gotten killed."

"Well, I doubt that," she said, "but I was afraid he might reach for you, Davey, and he might have if the police had arrived." But it wasn’t delayed-reaction fear that seemed now to be overtaking her.

"How could the police have arrived?" said Davey. "No one called them till after it was all over."

"You know what I mean."

"This was my first holdup. I want to tell Michael and Alex about it, O.K.?"

"We’re not even sure what happened."

"I know what I saw."

"In the bathroom?"

"In the restaurant."

"But before and after the holdup."

"And during."

"But we can’t even agree whether it was a knife or a gun."

"You can’t agree."

"Look, let’s go back and ask the waitress."

"Mom."

"Why don’t we phone them when we get home?"

"That’s fine with me. I don’t know why you don’t want me to phone my friends."

"It was my first holdup, too," she said, taking his hand and squeezing it.

But as soon as they got home she went and ran herself a bath. It was what she should have done in the first place this evening when she came home from work. She was so tired it had to be in her head. She stepped outside the bathroom and closed the door. The water pouring into the tub seemed larger at a distance.

She listened for a moment and went to the bedroom door. She knew Davey; she pictured him. She heard him open the refrigerator, and she was sure she heard the freezer door unstick. She did not hear the refrigerator door close, but she heard a plate rattle in the closet and a kitchen drawer open. He was looking for a spoon. She heard the voice of a baseball commentator come on, and a moment later she heard Davey’s voice, talking fast and excited.

She was sitting in the tub, leaning forward to turn off the water. The door was open a little, so she heard the voices in the living room.

Davey called. She called back that she was in the bathtub.

The voices continued.

Then it was only the baseball commentator’s voice, rising and falling. She let it stay where it was. Somewhere in the silence around that voice, an icepick was being hammered into a stolen, rock-hard avocado. The hot water was almost too hot to dream in. She’d had the money for that avocado but would rather shuttle herself by astral projection to Boston/San Francisco— not that anyone was there any more.

She heard Davey’s voice again; it didn’t sound the same. It sounded as if he were phoning the movies for the times, but the call went on longer.

Then there was only the TV again, then a knock on the bathroom door, which moved, but Davey didn’t come in. "You were wrong," he said. "It was a gun."

"Well what do you know," she said quietly from the still tub.

"No, I’m only kidding, Mom; they wouldn’t tell me."

"You spoke to the waitress?"

"No, he wouldn’t let me, and he said they weren’t discussing the matter."

"O.K.," she said very quietly.

"Hey, don’t go to sleep in there."

She thought she heard steps cross the carpet. In a moment she heard Davey on the phone again. Which friend would he have phoned first? The picture wasn’t clear. He was closer to Michael; their lives had some big similarities, like his father not living with him.

The bath seemed to become deeper and deeper. Her legs came up in a revolving jackknife and she did a two and a half, a three and a half, an unheard-of four and a half, the way she would do slow-motion somersaults underwater at the deep end of a pool in the summer while Davey would hold his nose and do underwater somersaults with her, though he couldn’t really stay down.

She didn’t want to go to sleep in the bath, but she was damn well going to. If she’d taken a bath when she’d gotten home from the office, they would never have had a holdup. They would have had broccoli and melted cheese, and green noodles, with garlic (which Davey now liked). And strawberry ice cream, which he had just been eating anyway.

She might have been asleep when she heard Davey call from the middle distance, "Are you asleep in there, Mom? Are you O.K.?" But she felt she had had her eyes open. She didn’t want to talk about the holdup, didn’t want to think about it. She closed her eyes. The water didn’t have quite the hot fixity it had when she first stepped cautiously in. But it was good to her and she let the questions called to her go unanswered. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sleeping. She heard Davey come across the carpet, and though she heard the door move, she didn’t think he was looking at her. She felt the water stir subtly about her; she had willed it to move for her benefit. She knew he had gone away. She massaged her dry face, and her knees broke the surface.

She listened for a while. The TV was still on. She heard Davey’s voice, its quality of inquiring esteem for the other person, its habit of waiting humor. For a second she thought of her son’s, any kid’s, inspired account of a brush with violence—And then you know what happened?—and she smelled in her soap, melting somewhere near her leg, a sweeter apricot smell of freesias. (They had tried to charge her six-fifty for a small bunch last week at the supposedly wholesale flower market.) Within the scent of freesias there was a hidden, earlier, heavier vein of sweetness that she now identified as aftershave but didn’t want to think about. For some moments Davey hadn’t been speaking, or not so she could hear, but the TV was still on, so he hadn’t gone to bed. And yet the silence beyond the TV wasn’t quite silence. He would be getting away from all the city noise this weekend. A lot he cared about the noise.

She got herself out of the tub, and against the wash of the bathwater listened again. She ran her arms damply into the sleeves of her terry-cloth robe. She pulled open the door and put her wet foot down on her bedroom carpet.

Have a nice evening, lady, the flower man had said. Have a nice life, he said. The pale-apricot-colored freesias were doing pretty well on her bureau. The man had let her have them for six dollars.

Halfway to the door leading to the living room, she was on the point of calling to Davey that it was time for bed, when she heard his voice. "I don’t know whether I can," he was saying, and then there was a pause. "Maybe I’ll ask her." Then, "I will ask her; I definitely will." Then, "She’s O.K." Then, "Fifteen dollars, including my allowance." Then, "Yeah, I love you too." Ann knew the voice at the other end of the line without hearing it; but she owed Davey his privacy even after he said goodbye and hung up. The commercial between innings ended, and the deep-voiced, happy commentator was back on.

She stood in the living-room doorway. Davey was sitting over near the entrance to the front hall beside the phone. He could see the game only at the narrowest angle; he could hardly see the screen. The light gave her back herself naked on a rug and not alone and feeling upon her curved body the lunar radiance of the TV preserving her love.

Ann went to the set and turned it off. "Time for bed," she said. Davey just sat there by the phone. They had divided the evening between them.

She had to give them both a break, so she said, "You didn’t need to call collect." They both knew what she meant.

"How did you know I called collect?" Davey asked.

"I’ve known for a long time, but you really don’t have to."

"Thanks," he said, and stayed where he was, still dressed for the restaurant.

She didn’t tell him not to thank her. "You’re welcome," she said.

"So are you," he said.

"So are you," she said.

BETWEEN HISTORIES: BREATHING

BEGINNING TO BE HEARD

Yet we didn’t need to go outside the home to change, we had a set here and one in the next room where a child is doing homework and some of it on the screen, so we have dual screens if we can go back and forth between the rooms fast enough.

To stretch a point. On dual screens wall-eyed twain. ("Bleeps," adds the interrogator in some South American brogue, meaning blips, meaning points, we know by new intuition having internalized the interrogator. Points of light on a vintage radar-substitute we picked up at God prices everybody and her uncle can charge.) Not content with one set. Some inner leap between two separated screens being essential before we end the century in question seated upon the shoulders of Einstein-over-Euclid-man, if not over the shoulder (read soldiers).

But we meant more than weather-air-and-traffic-controller receiver-monitors-you-can-live-with, two screens in every relative home itself tilting always tilting round as we approach. We meant renewable duals between newer screen substitutes that for a day trip or night might accommodate Grace Kimball (who is more or less the multiplier of her workshops) and James Mayn (with his by our calculations parallel and intersecting populations) hear the noise, duple music from two really wonderful people as human as any angel-san could role-model, though two who may yet not meet in person to make (and brand name) exploratory history Recipro-Cal.

But happy with any proven home, we don’t argue with that femoral limb they share: thigh in the beginning angles cohering among the legs holding assembly under that conference table where agreement was general that a power vacuum was a real possibility: power vacuum a daughter found in and (para) for her Dad, but gap of such inner route it sings beneath your skin as if it thinks it’s that quaint spawn the worm we have been out of contact with: not our fault, it’s its turn to phone us we sort of remember on principle. For the one who calls, needs; but the one who is called, is that the strong or the weak?

The mother who left those sons or double-son is still somewhere and so is the promise she left behind that not she but they were the ones to leave. And if receding, she could still be reconstituted at a later libration point ‘tween pulls, because one looks after one’s mother, too, though rebirth’s what we were into, winging it or waiting on it, and if you are going to start taking responsibility, you might let your relations know.

Whatever. It was an intrahemispheric tapeworm yet slower than a gas-sped bullet spun out the rifling of a Colt revolver’s barrel belonging to the Mayn family: a tapeworm slower than the ready-to-eat horses loping down a western valley of red, brown, gray, and darker stone, past a thousand natural sundials, cantering so gently it’s in a slow scale, side by side mindful unmindful of their riders—the East Far Eastern Princess upon her gift from the Navajo Prince, as she called him, a compact black-and-white pony the Princess’s pale bird refrained from consuming; the Prince beside her upon the midnight-blue Mexican mare, his own thick-withered, tempered mesa-bird, whose land of monumental stone and desert-sea, of spring firmament starred red, petaled white, spread blue-violet, among the green of owl-eyed cactus and sinewy pihon scrub, and of winter space, finds its own four corners infinitely outward-bounded god-given; while still further, but, in the gridthink of territorial plot, less than a generation away from a state called statehood, the Four Corners are also, for administrative (read white Anglo, which is—just in case—redundant) clarity, ordained interior (the better to clear you with, my dear, my Laughing Antler, my own Doe Water escaping me yet lingering) and that administrative intersection neat as four joined squares of document paper or an idea in someone’s basic-four-color brain, where the mapped lands of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, abstracts in an infinitely vanishing cross divisions within, willed from a distance remote as that departmental will must always stand from the far corners of the Prince’s cosmos that’s held like his people in his heart where one day this cosmos of his is in part told to the visiting East Far Eastern Princess, who knew only then what she had come to understand, and thought the Indians had something—it all worked together quite sensibly, the forces were visible, by and large—but she thought, too, that there was something more the Prince himself was after.

And to go on (against the returning undertow of an interrogator’s interruption—had come? he demands, had come so as to understand? he complains as if he had not the wherewithal to implement his feeling by juicing our embedded electrodes: you spoke out of both sides of your face): to go on, to bypass these continental sentimentalities Mayn was clandestinely formed by until they questioned themselves one day, our noted tapeworm, intrahemispheric spawn though slower than trajected bullet or breathing horse, has, in case temporarily forgotten, other speeds, other inferred breathing like sound we picked up with our ear to the thigh of the divine that could make us, who now breathless need somebody to recapitulate by, forget that it was just any old fish tapeworm to be flushed out by gently acting bacteria prescribed by him who’s been your G.P. since not even your dying great-grandma can remember; a tapeworm taken out of Minnesota’s thousand lakes by air accompanied by the Ojibway medicine man’s diamond squint (now increasingly embedded in, if not pegged to, the soft swells of the dollar sign), this tapeworm arrived via the Manhattan physician’s fond attention to his diva, tapeworm extraordinary, which was perhaps not hers alone to do with as she pleased, for even after it got flushed away down the diva’s silver toilet, its track clung like experience to the insides of the slowly self-understanding society we’re in that’s capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale world views, even after it had been flushed by the afternoon diva, the swinging, well-sung songbird (read mezzo, read mezzo persona) from her soft system during the two hours between the exit of the brunched, rueful physician and the intercom announcing the elegantly lapeled, mustached, infamously gifted mufti officer whose hands upon neat-cuffed wrists delegated in his other, political sphere to marginal interrogators themselves trained in the best amputation may have crashed clapping through the earshot of friends of her father’s and perhaps her old father’s own amplified earshot head (faraway under house arrest) tortured but not by doubts. But this mufti officer’s elsewhere delegated hands have also here in New York (these very hands alive with knowing knuckles) clapped for her at two performances: Rosenkavalier we remember and (with a significantly different audience) Norma, the Druid priestess—slimmest she’s been during this several-weeks diet campaign, rather dangerously slim as danger approaches across the footlights of opportunity in the officer’s passion and across the intrahemispheric league-upon-league in awesome fear for her outspoken father back (down) home in South America where she the diva no longer hangs her passport, she of the divinely resonant (formerly-until-last-week tapeworm-echoing) thigh (daughter, priestess, officer’s lover, and, in today’s last act, beyond biweekly physic brunches and the hard-core soft-wear spawned much later over every half-lighted inch of her shared bed, now, in her brisk but high cuisine, sacrificing her stomach to her ringed pyre’s flame and a ghastly multiple spawn—(Norma’s little children-san to eat—) she offered in her Manhattan apartment to the military but naked appetite beside her at the stove, his breath upon her shoulder, trading for the omens of her duplex kitchen the real love she’s had of him in her own hemispheric-feeling bed)—where his hands that were out of sight she felt but hands right here, not delegated, also clapped for private performances where each of his "strong-arms" moved each hand to clap on its own in a silence not Zen-proof though contemplative because heard in the warm light of the diva’s bedchamber by the twain. And self-helped by feedback, awareness nowadays gets refined in some adepts such that the soul picks up within the common thigh a noted tendon’s oath that the next rash stride around this jogging track around New York’s Central Park reservoir will cost this lonely jogger a pulled hamstring, but through this oath that the soul picks up it can send back its fine tune to monitor the blood pressure risen expressly to this occasion of two independent observers watching the jogger if not his blood pressure which has risen to turn the neck muscles bound to the shoulder slope to stone (to lead, to consolidated scrap metal he an economist has thought) which in turn made him throw forth his middle-aged knee with a kick so his hamstring foresaw itself about to be yanked and thereupon flashed its elastic oath into that soul-center that’s everywhere but nowhere, and a painfully hobbling hamstring pull was spared the tall, bald, distinguished foreign jogger-economist who’s being watched, he knew, through the sunny trees and rocks of Central Park by the mufti naval officer and elsewhere by the journalist James Mayn, who, unknown to the jogging exile-economist and his enemy and fellow-national the mufti officer, came there to watch the officer as well, whose subtly callused palms even at this moment of political action (read surveillance, read commitment) hold the memory of those dual clappings joint and one-handed in the diva’s bed as, elsewhere in this city which is also an articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, that dimpled, divided, but stereo-attuned buttock-life he clapped also remembers: as when, in turn, bent into a spinal twist in a basement yoga class, the diva’s body complained, except then she could not be sure where the complaint was you know coming from, her upper thigh apparently all kinked but a pulse banging along her other instep thence brinked spaceward—across the room, the roof-like carpet, the floor under the carpet shared by the others of her yoga class—space anyway outside herself like someone’s coat hung in the hall while her soul’s complaining she’s not together.

For, figure it out, you’ve had more than enough time to take responsibility for what you see, even if you now think all you’ve been doing is waiting to remember. For see the diva’s (the lovely songstress’s, the recently officially Swiss-passportable transplant’s) painful if prolific, faintly lyrical, divisions of heart and head: think of it, there was the infamously gifted general officer of a South American navy whose regime’s unspeakable intelligence arm—to its own music—endangers her loved, outspoken father; and here was (in mufti) the graceful man who touched her even with a Japanese ballpoint which left its impress with code-like interruptions upon her satin thigh backstage the night of Rosenkavalier; yes and, to go on, by the same dual but separate-scoped oscillation, there thousands of miles south was her broad-faced, silver-mustached widower father guarded by that navy like an electrified coast to the point of apartment-house-arrest; whereas here, in New York, which is an articulate structure accommodating for her a multiplicity of grand commutes to Munich, Vienna, La Scala, Covent Garden, Adelaide or Sydney-Melbourne (anyway Australia) where Lohengrin and Otello are housed by two turtles copulating if you’ve ever looked at that opera house above the water and if they even bred above water—here in New York, she grants that her operatic life and body fill to bursting with small-scale honesties accommodating her career, her flow of breath—of blood—the breathing of her thought, the honest ungated thinking of . . . of—but, to enlist the lyric of that American wartime hit, is it all of her?—of all the range of lusts even to the faintest infidelity of plot-twisting thrill in sauteing for her naked Chilean visitor in her seldom-used kitchen, which is duplex and balconied, the pink, dense shad roe her old friend the Boston-born Manhattan physician had brought her earlier hoping to tempt her for brunch, her own family G.P. if she had a family.

And what is the yes or no answer in question? Do we take all of her or don’t you? It sounds like rape, we mean a little light rape, rape in hopes of romance—but wait a minute, we said nothing about a yes or no answer to that song?

For we move if not exactly from war to peace to war, still from question to question, through long or brief the light makes equal, we move well together, you are magnetic. Yet if meaning something is (really) like goin’ up to someone, as the philosopher saith (to unquote the lisp of some grownup who, hearing the wind the far side of an obstacle drawing us toward the obstacle, hears not the noise of the wind but a song because leave it to a grownup to hear a song in the wind), we now know how to lighten that wide load of going up to someone: what you do is answer a question with a question, a trick used by endangered peoples under interrogation (older far than the manipulative modern Can I ask you a personal question?) but you talk to the question, point to it, and you promise it all the feedback it can hold of questions that readily come to mind, like would any Us worth its self settle for being relations?

Which turns her stomach—though she doesn’t catch on at first why—toward her lover where—this third visit to her well-loved apartment—he stares softly at her bedchamber’s birthday-cake ornate whipped-cream ceiling considering her much more than she thinks amid her post-coital wonder (that the tryst goes on) and a premenstrual void that feels like a dressing room that keeps out a dozen people she’s got to see in short order, which is not now but tomorrow when her week begins, not now in the cushioned interstices of this fantastic love meeting, her stomach against his arm, her mind upon his which she can’t quite hear until he speaks: and then what she hears in his idling question upon question may be not some hunt for information but a funny comfort with her, in her, for her.

The war between the women and the men, was his New York tourist question out of the corner of his supine eye while against her the rest of his arm comes into being—yes, this much-advertised war, was his question, does it really go on here in 1977 in this advanced city? And she softly, huskily answered in the twilit room where colors like the force of his eyes hold some reserve of precision, "Well I suppose that by temperament and by professional independence I am hors de combat."

"Because," he went on, "I sat near an older man and a young girl who I’m sure were not related last night, there is much of this in this city, I think, or is it like arranged marriage," he quips, "without the arrangement?" (Is the demufti’d officer making talk? His murmur passes on relaxed to whatever the smell and gentleness of her yields in his happy spirit at six in the afternoon) "... do you see people in the audience or just see the mass?"

She hardly answered, "I see friends sometimes if I know where to look." Is he probing her relation with Clara and her husband?

But the next question leans over against her. His far arm runs along her shoulder and for the moment triggers nothing. She recalls well his question ten days ago (hours after Rosenkavalier, two in the morning, three in the morning), How is your father?—which was the question she wanted to ask him, about her father, for he’s the one who’s just come from the padreland, the madre-earth, the nation that’s in the news, the long place she’s never really toured, never seen the ice, the desert, though as a child she visited the primitive Indians, the mapuche prehistory, the villages with the one abandoned house vacated for the use of las dnimas, "souls" you say—and she sensed that her lover’s question How is your father? meant she could get no answer to her question How is my father? and she answered, He is in a smaller place; he is himself. Perhaps you know him? No? I guess he is O.K. (She would not ask this man; why’s she lying here with him? to inquire for her father?)

And now ten days later when she’s let herself be interested in this young Fascist admiral if the navy isn’t only a cover for whatever he’s doing here in New York, his next question, "Were you looking at me the first night?, it seemed to me you were, and yet we had met only at the consulate I think," brought out of her with languid clarity just a hair too soon—so she regretted saying—"No, there were two friends of mine near you, I didn’t know you were there" ("my dear," she adds) remembering already that at the next performance {Norma) those two friends of hers Clara and her exile-economist husband had changed their seats (which they had insisted on paying for at Rosenkavalier but were the diva’s gift at Norma) because the wife Clara, her particular friend, had asked for the change; and they were better seats; but then they had not come.

And why, she murmurs—moving one thigh off the other so he on his back staring at the symmetrically swollen raised plaster design on the ceiling—a free clock of space, she wonderingly heard him call it with some casual touch of intelligence she warmly adores—floats his fingertips over to her nearer thigh—why, she murmurs, or how, did a man of good family find himself posted to the naval base at Navarino, the end of the world?

The southernmost inhabited place if you don’t count weather stations, he informs her softly. Oh, it was seven years ago, he now whispers, everything’s changed; whispers so very privately: the South Pole is indeed hollow, the stories were right, but the lingo of the Fiery Landers down there is not hollow: They have a verb for kneeling in a bark canoe with a hunting spear poised to launch at a sea otter who is especially elusive so they stay poised ready for minutes at a time to make their move—one verb for all of that.

He sits up and bends his head to her thigh like listening. There’s still room, he says, for grand opera. All the music—it spaces it out.

She will not get depressed. Is she a traitor to her father? Why did she seduce herself with this military man her father would despise, would kill?

Have the Fiery Landers a word, she asks, for wanting and not wanting, one word for loving and despising and fearing and at the same time being delighted and wiped out and soothed by?

The man’s ear warms to her thigh. I didn’t get that far, he dimly answers, listening still upon her thigh, speaking so slowly. They don’t think that way, he goes on. Therefore Darwin dismissed their language. He found it simple-minded; in fact, it has a matchless grip on things; but then he was fooled into accepting answers that those he interrogated thought in the generosity of their imaginations he wanted; thus though they did not eat dogs which were useful in hunting otter they did eat old women who were of no use and were smoked to death, their meat a very delicate texture.

When you are here with me, she asks, are you outside this apartment also? Are you in the other places where you do whatever it is you’re doing, on the phone, in the park, at a consulate, for all I know your work may take you to the opera.

No, he says, resting his whole head upon her thigh, the edge of his dark mustache on her skin, I’m only here.

He keeps his thoughts a secret, she translates aloud from what he may or may not know he heard in Italian last night, and the man alertly drowsing his blue eyes up into the folds of her body lifts his eyebrows, and upon the skin of her thigh a corner of his faint smile moves and she’s certain he doesn’t hear Norma’s Ei face I II suo pensiero from last night right after she’s answered Clotilda that she does not know what strange fear moves her to send her children away, for diver si affetti I Strazian quest’alma, and she loves her kids, she hates her kids, it hurts her not to, or so she sings. And knows she could be no angel, let alone what some sexist flatterer suggests, because angels already are in her, welcomed by her as they come and go bearing no brevity for brevity but only for becoming, like interior clothes.

They have a word for "depressed," he whispers, undermining what she feels she’s undertaking; they use the word for the crab when it is soft-shelled. Have you hunted crabs with a long-handled net off a dock and just when—

Yes, she mildly interrupts, I did that with—

—and just when you spot a big, hard-shelled grandfather sashaying away (her lover speaks this thrilling, menacing English, always, a love code in lieu of their native Spanish), you find in the corner of your eye down through the dark, clear water the motionless thing you really wanted, the fat, skeletonless, defenseless one, its body gone to sleep, female, slightly swaying with the living water (you know what I’m talking about?)—

—if poets have to be in some way criminals, she thinks, nowadays criminals could try being poets—

—its shell sloughed off until it can grow a new one, its body all succulent meat, and you could catch it with an espatula, just lift it up like an egg out of a pan, it wouldn’t slip off. Mmm.

—with my father, she finishes, I did that with my father.

She absolutely will not be depressed; and along a route as unclear to her as what she can find to do with her fellow countryman’s head picking up nothing but the luxury her leg likes to give his cheek (his ear), she will persist with her interrogation looking for the right question that will tell her what she probably knows already about this intelligence from a land where her father lives, a planet in essence long, that a tall (too tall) young American woman poet told her is a shadow cast by the overlapping sea which is the silence of the world breaking upon the southern continent, a ghost coast this Chile like a mapmaker’s lost lore, words at a gathering in New York, standees boycotting the Queen-Anne-imitation chairs, but whether the young poet had been to Chile or not, it remained the remote, 125-mile-wide 2,500-mile-long world where the diva was raised, where once she stood breathing (picking up a tincture of the preceding night’s tobacco smell) beside a grand piano that made her singing into music; for she was singing, although in those days it was more a very big business of your coached attack-plan of breathing of which she was often more aware than of a bar of Bellini or of Iago’s love scene with Otello drugging that dark ear to know Desdemona is untrue; and there was another scene she can’t at this moment find, an opera that didn’t get put on, a very old one, a scene for which she produced a breath control like ambition itself, singing beside a piano near a painting of Chile’s first woman lawyer, 1890s, friend of the family, and while she sang hardly seeing out a tall window (with curly molding) a park, a wide boulevard, and the Pacific raising light back into the air it came from, as high as eagles she never saw, and a mountain of thorn she and her father and brother once found paths through, a mountain with year-round snow she knelt in.

But she never really explored her long coastline of a country so narrow they had to find its richness by mining downward and could not answer the young poet’s question What became of Neruda’s library? But she will find the question she needs, interrogating this man her lover whose head is suddenly in her hand for his head began to stir from its listening rest and to decide; but she holds it where it is and its momentary frown pulls at the temple which tickles her skin, and the living blue of his eyes might be saying not a thing blinking open and drifting closed again while he goes on listening. And what was the scene she can’t recall? But he has called her an angel.

A system big for her, though her own, and for a second she can’t hear all of us inhering in her and ongoing; and so she has a clue that we were. That is, going on. Which, realizing suddenly her unsupported nature, she hadn’t known, though has felt more, no question, than this community of us in her, though relations including her—whatever these acoustical divisions in her were; we find that to breathe is to feel, perchance to think, and in this resumption we almost have not heard her breathing till now, and while we had thought that in our angel quest we had minimal designs on her, bony and abstracted as we feel, this diva with all her paraphernalia has gotten she feels quite real—we hadn’t been looking for it, she was our transit, and now it has just happened, as she recalls the forgotten scene from that Hamlet opera by the Chilean woman who could not get it put on.

Who says? And is this increasing community heard in so many of us what was meant? And was it only a thought of this community that angels sought to evolve toward human, toward potential, and used our bodies? For that late Chilean woman composer seems to reach out—northward—toward the diva and her attached cast, even to the Ojibway with all his moving, American-related background, our Ojibway-Sioux medicine man, now matriculating thanks to his sporting acquaintance the diva’s Manhattan physician in that aeronautics program at a Minnesota college within shooting distance of Lake Superior together with several youngish fellow nationals of the Chilean diva’s (forget if we can her Swiss passport) and of her officer, who by a convergence often wrongfully identified as accident or as the Indivisible Hand was considering the culture potential now opening at home in the huge import of TV sets duty-free by order of the junta’s ruling general, just at the instant when in the diva’s mind an unknown man’s face would not go away, who, with a girl, had sat somewhere in front of her adoring officer yet behind the two vacant seats Clara and her husband were to have occupied; and after the first-act intermission after Norma has arrived in the sacred forest with her fellow Druid priestesses and, upon praying to the Moon for peace and cutting the mistletoe, has harangued fellow nationals of hers here in Gaul who instead of waiting for her prophecies to come true of corrupt Rome’s inevitable fall want to revolt now against the Romans occupying Gaul, and has at act’s end guessed that a "tall brass-helmed" Roman soldier her novice Adalgisa has confessed inspired in her a blasphemous love is none other than Norma’s own faithless Pollione who deserted her and their two children whom she now both loves and hates—oh how can you hate a child unless you have first stabbed it?—the diva’s unvirginal priestess Norma recalled Flagstad ready to sail from New York when the Germans invaded Norway, and returned at the opening of Act Two to her house intending to kill her sleeping children only to find the orchestra seats that in Act One were vacant of her friend Clara and Clara’s exile husband, the distinguished economist in the wonderful Dr. Allende’s regime, now occupied but by strangers who’ve no doubt assumed that the ticket holders absent for Act One would not show at all.

But now she found nearby a new vacancy of two seats roughly equidistant from her exhilarated officer and those house seats she’d reserved for her absent friend and spouse. And this new vacancy she now, in bed with the officer, filled, but with a face she didn’t know, a large squarish face, rather strong, not old but with a thick shock of gray hair and broad shoulders. For, unmindful of mysterious convergence, she let the picture unthinking come at her—broad shoulders touching on one side whoever he was with—oh, a girl—who like him was absent before the curtain rose on Act Two’s awful business of the silver moon goddess turned green with jealousy and rage. Luna verde, she breathed in Chilean next to her love from the terrible planet of her birth, and found herself weeping, with those words of her revered, long-traveled poet, who meant not jealousy but the shadow cast by the silver of that earth rich with wonders not to say workable minerals: yet she’s not sure, and she needs to see the poem again and can’t lay her hands on it maybe for the very reason she’s thought of it; she lent the book to Clara for Clara’s husband, who gave up his personal library when he left Chile and travels light, and taught the entire poem in question by rote to Clara, who recited it to the diva who already knew it but not by heart, and who now in her companionable bedroom breathing luna verde wept, wept, but not wholly without joy. Meanwhile we have the ear of the officer’s thigh-connected head, and seem to speak through that well-turned ear though he thinks that it’s from her, her thigh, that he hears "James Mayn," whose future he knows quite a while ago found cause to shadow Clara’s husband—

—that’s the name, that’s it! exclaims the interrogator in torture country looking up from the bare ankles next to the floor-anchored chair legs, to the bloodshot eyes and ringing ears swaying above the bound arms and wrists they have grown out of, that’s the name! exclaims the interrogator, forgetting that his job is that of questioner tapped by those above who have the real responsibility for, say, adjusting import duties and exporting good old-fashioned surveillance, while this anonymous interrogator who represents a system the mufti admiral is higher up in has the job of taxing the bloodshot subject’s trick of ambiguous speech: for example, that the East Far Eastern Princess, when the Navajo Prince one day told her his cosmos, knew then (we quote) that that was what she had come to understand—

—Wham! comes the sneak hand on the subject’s soul which is everywhere and nowhere, and the bruises don’t show unless we peel off a layer of soul fat or fat-oriented Fleisch, or, to the music (if you call that music real noise) dimly heard in the next room where a child does its Rotation homework (so it stays done!), the torturer’s bruise-cruise leaves so little evidence that all we have to go on—

—Wham! Kthunk but we have to go on because—

—all we have to go on is the subject’s tic-like tendency to stammer forth nought but D.T.’s whose ambiguity now seems to welcome more and more of punishment’s teaching—

—Wham! we did it that time to ourself, we stick indiscriminately to the same rules as we do others, here to have our delirium tremens and in same breath render from Romance language "double tenders." But if we’re doing it to ourself does that mean we have within us that delegated interrogator who takes responsibility for taxing our after all human not angel trick of saying two things at once but only in order to get out of the subject information he the interrogator and his system are, well, already in possession of?—

—as Jim Mayn (journalist known to have met the exile economist) knew was one odd evolution, that is the future capacity to communicate things outward through the ear as, in the century in question and other surrounding centuries, we spoke through our eyes even more than down our noses. Evolution? Or mutilation?

Yet to the demufti’d officer, his eyes so nearly touching the length of the thigh his ear’s against that he’s apt to be not seeing what he’s hearing, which on these strong currents is pretty much the music of the hemispheres he has often applauded without really telling his left hand what his right was up to. That is, it isn’t the tapeworm’s track he is able to hear or, if he could, to guess that its track in all its now two-way flow is all that’s left of the tapeworm, as the diva last week flushed it out, to the nostalgic dismay of her fond physician, at the risk of putting on some more poundage at a Hispanic restaurant the same evening where she and her mufti lover sat near a small, once-dusty correspondent-woman who by some near rule of highly metabolized convergence was half-oblivious of them.

This woman Lincoln was chewing the mussels, shrimps, squid, and other fruits of the sea in a rich, peppery and suspiciously inexpensive mariscada that upstaged the sweet salt of her cactus appetizer, while she pictured deserts of New Mexico.

Is this true—what’s just been said? We promise so. For she had gone a long way in her own right, right into now a veritable granary of shared information that she was finding in a women’s Body-Self Workshop she had attended out of (for her) the strangest despairs. These she had woken up to one morning long ago. Or might we mean "recently"?—and save the "long ago" for her sense of time passed since her Asian assignments and her sense of South Vietnam lost ploughshared into what (unlike a native American desert) you couldn’t at last even give away—a war lost. Still, the records of her dusty work remained, even to voice tapes of children unwrapping candy bars and speaking English, and of a monk burning while she herself spoke into a tiny, bad-tasting mike as softly as a golf broadcaster talking through the tube to her father. She now found that the women of the workshop sitting naked on a great expanse of brown carpet told their despairs in the language of hers, her despairs. As if she had never been away across the world, so had she been performing actions in her sleep, the way she had heard a monk say? (If you want to cross over the world, whatever that meant, perform actions as if you were asleep.) Yet now it had happened without her willing it: never been away across the world but on a parallel track—very parallel, if she could round it off like that, because the other track was her job which she had always been good at. Still, sitting among those women on a New York carpet, no problem: she had always liked this imperfect female body, quite apart from quite good orgasm that she seldom let herself miss wherever she was, though didn’t bring it exactly with her, it had to be white men, some were co-workers, correspondents like her. She always lived in this painless cramp of knowing she of course would have a child but aware that her ability not to have one was fairly great; and now she was talking about it amid such shared facts of women who needed a second car and didn’t always have one, and women who even if the kids left the silver in the sink felt that added time spent evened out the lonely difference between how long dinner and how long eating it—which got multiplied and at once weirdly divided by difference between time spent by husband earning money not withheld and his eager indifference to how fast the expensive food they ate at night disappeared—and so Lincoln could see also how lucky she had been to have her work. But also, so what.

Which, like her contemplation of those New Mexico deserts that she’d never checked out in person, went a long way and beyond the truth that that was what she was thinking about while sopping her sharp-crusted bread in the juice of the garlic and peppery red-sauce of her sea stew in this small, cheap place a pass-along recommendation by the woman Clara in her workshop who had ultimately though pleasantly shown little interest in seeing her socially after the workshop ended.

The correspondent-woman could take rejection (T.R.) she thought. In fact it seemed to yield a historical clarity as, among necks and shoulders that seemed to belong to foreign bodies that had nothing in common with the cellulite-dimpled inner thighs of the same person (as if a given woman’s body gazed two ways at the same time), she recalled the very woman who’d told her about this Hispanic eatery who in the naked rap sessions said little about her own life, speaking later while they were getting dressed of the Vietnamese philosopher from another century who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers, and she spoke with such rehearsed calm that the very wind in the grasses of the country’s narrow midland spine and the once future wastelands in the upper-west sector of the Mekong-Bassac Delta that that woman had never seen but her listener had came out as visibly as her account of the Hoa Hao sect the correspondent-woman herself knew all about but couldn’t talk like that about: except that if she had it right the Hoa Hao’s Buddhism with its practical, no-frills privacy and its sort of you know eclectic turning toward educating the little people that high rents were not the inevitable condition of what she nonetheless understood to be an unavoidably conditional existence, and its eclectic (she threw the word around like others did "additive") turning toward some old village solidarity connecting the large sky of timeless time and the constant soil—all this, without the other movement’s, the Cao Dai’s, Masonic eye of God enlisting as amnesties or saints everyone from Moses to Joan of Arc and for all she knew if they had looked far enough west (or was it east from there?) Sequoya himself, all this now (though she didn’t mind eating alone, consuming her food alone) strangely kept if not her eyes which were on the vivid couple at the nearby table (the man never smiling yet ever adoringly humorous—how did he do that?—the woman with her auburn hair piled all over the place in marvelous, hurried flair, ringing that bell again in the normally infallible memory of the correspondent-woman), certainly her mind’s eye upon the deserts of New Mexico, but more than those places (because she’s never quite, in all her jaunts, been there, though she’s told Clara, last name unknown, who recommended this restaurant, to visit those same high deserts), her mind is in the word Navahu (hear the music but she’s no poet she prefers the noise of its original meaning) great planted fields, dreamt by the all but deserted dryness "reserved," as the man who’s in her mind more than Navahu, said, for the Indians alone converging upon this of all reservations so vast we in advance of the correspondent-woman, who’s just been stared at by the diva, can’t suddenly tell if maybe it’s the reservation that’s converged upon the nomad Navajo (read Navahu, "great planted fields" ye gods of baby cacti grown for shipment to eastern restaurants—but wait, not in New Mexico), so she, spooning up her juice mariscada because she’s almost out of bread and inadvertently blindly watching the dark very glam woman who’s just been asked by her escort (along whose forearm as if to erase its dark gray flannel sleeve she’s just run her hand) who it was that recommended this place so the woman catching her eye stares back as if the correspondent-woman is waiting for her answer, when really her thoughts have converged upon the letter a nice man—he must be—named Mayn sent from the West to—and read from to the correspondent-woman by—his daughter Flick on a cold eve in Washington, only read from, as if the daughter Flick was herself an obstacle to his current of meaning, which was perhaps that he missed her while he was writing to tell her he’d been to the Rock that Flick, from her own travels with her boyfriend had forgotten to tell him of, his work had taken him to a plant nearby and anyway you couldn’t miss that Rock (unless you wanted to), that Rock the Indians called a ship, though he was not really to his daughter in his words but—aloud to the other woman, in the daughter’s ironic voice—awfully hard-boiled, Daddy is, you know, but if you know him he’s a big faker: he was not a landscape man.

He was not really a landscape man.

The correspondent-woman heard the daughter read it: he was not a landscape man, never set out to be, he went on, but he’d stopped before this fourteen-fifteen-hundred-foot old Tooth waiting for the sky and had felt just how long he’d been going—like the highly metabolized correspondent-woman herself, who reached the thing in that letter she (excuse the crass practicality) could use but in some other track went on beyond it which was as bad as being on really a separate track, so much slower that she also had not reached the thing in question; and, moving more and more slowly toward what anyway she was also beyond, she heard the daughter Flick’s three or four passages piling obstacles sought out of all our life and obstacles also necessary to the thing she thought she had heard Flick read at the very outset so that the subsequent stuff (which told you more than a little about this divorced Jim Mayn, the father) tried to shed a load of daylight like a cover covering up and half-forgetting that first dream thing, whatever it was—

—I know what’s going on, a child supposed to be negotiating its homework in an adjacent room says distinctly—

—he would, he’d said, like nothing to witness any more, that’s what he felt standing a couple three miles off taking in the mountain-like Rock but m^m-made ship, Ship Rock, whose history he’d heard bits of from an economist (Anglo), a filling-station attendant (Indian), a nice ash blonde (environmentalist), Flick’s dad gave its specifications, on balance he’d about decided to give it back to the Indians but was it too late? and probably some common ground could be reached.

The daughter, the young woman, the girl Flick, read from the letter very well but tilting her head like at any moment she’ll put it aside, sail it onto her desk, float it floorward, but read on as if amused: "Well, Daddy’s awfully hard-boiled, you know, not at all religious, my God, ‘geologists call it,’ " she read, ‘"a plug, a neck—a plug neck—of"’ (the letter sort of rambled on) hardened lava without benefit of volcano any more while some Indians talk about monsters from inside Mother Earth and see those four-five-mile tentacles of connected rocks as the congealed blood of Hero-Twins who put the monsters in their place; and from strip mines and the Four Corners Power Plant the Rock is a touring hallucination especially after the clowns I had a few with last night, and oh yes the Rock’s a ship and I tripped-out on it for a few minutes figuring how the geologists are right and the Indians are too, and I’m right, it’s not a ship at all if you look at it but it got me here, and there’s a secret here that your great-grandmother Margaret whom you never knew got hold of when she was out here in the nineties and a secret I think I had but I left it somewhere, dear Flick, and, all kidding aside (smile), it’s that the gods are or were here and that they are a little helpless too, the more the merrier, but it’s about time (see how I write through the ring of the cold beer can on the motel stationery) about time I went back and caught up with them, I have further to go because of where I’m coming from. (Words to that effect.)

"Well, Daddy’s gentle enough, but really—I mean he’s not at all religious."

"It’s getting to him," the correspondent-woman Lincoln had said; "sometimes it does at that age."

"I don’t know," said the daughter, "I think he doesn’t know why he got divorced from my mother."

"No, that’s you," said Lincoln.

"Oh is that all," Flick had said, but the correspondent-woman, who had wondered if Flick’s father was available, had read the mind of the letter and held it to her mind’s eye as, now, days and nights later, the glamorous couple got up from the table across from Lincoln, arose grandly, and from one look into each other’s eyes turned as one to look at the irrelevant correspondent-woman, whose lips puckered with the remembered words "The Future," which was how the letter from Jim Mayn, transient in Farmington, New Mexico, to his daughter Flick in Washington, D.C., was headed, which meant maybe the strip mining and the process of turning coal into natural gas to be piped to California and which meant the Four Corners plant, O.K.

It had meant also, Lincoln was sure, some profoundly previous other thing. Oh she lost it, as two stories slid together, complementary scopes, the Rock that absorbs, versus the Ship that transits you plus all those immigrant Indians on the escape—the Rock, if you’re some stolid, lunatic being, knew this like a new country propelled into being by the force of meditation, thus the Rock’s an obstacle to going on versus (because she was thinking this way) an obstacle in turn to the Rock, the two people who drove miles out to the Rock in order to, in the middle of extreme northwest New Mexican nowhere, lobby against the mine’s peeling of the landscape and the Four Corners plant’s alternative ozone if we may so call it because we’re hastening to say, through the person of the correspondent-woman who has of late a new reason for cooperating, that for the longest time we’ve been needing a new atmosphere, a new air, or was it that we needed a new us, that is to breathe it. But obstacle supplanting obstacle, it’s more than the dark view and the bright view of things held in one eye, O.K., it’s more than that old dust of existence itself measured with and against the advanced production of sulfur dioxide shared by volcanoes and coal-burning operations which is, as sulfur dioxide alone, curious enough when it hooks up with the particles in all our smokes of unburned fuel to go on a killing spree in 1930 in Belgium’s famed Meuse River valley to name but one—but with ye old water vapor and sunny-sun-sun it becomes distinctly gamy sulfuric acid which can (we bleep thee not) give you a new set of (not to mention inflamed) lungs, even in signal instances make ‘em burst with or into flame, while yet more lasting damage—Que lastima, murmurs a tourist catching up with the marbles of Florence, Paris, Prague, Toledo, Ohio, Argentina—slowly wears thin the fabrics of great cities submerged in solution. It’s—she sensed—more than this alternation between apparently exclusive views, it’s also—forgive vagueness—one thing after another: so that while we seem to lose what we had a moment ago, we already remember what’s so soon not here any more. The correspondent-woman, recalling her godawful tape of the monk burning himself up, has fallen in love with the man who wrote the letter to the daughter Flick like thinking out loud. The correspondent-woman was a mere means to a greater end (which was what she suddenly saw her years in Vietnam to have been, incidentally informing her about Buddhism, about fathers, family, children, and taking notes, some mental) when she sat with legs crossed naked at Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop among her New York if not sisters surely kin who kindly exclaimed at her God-given first name Lincoln. President’s name! But like the diminutive correspondent-woman, we see only the immediate means by which she (we still can’t help predicting by old habit actually less angelic than human) will recall at last what’s been here with us so long we had more than a chance to see but now seem to have been waiting to remember, whereas we don’t hate birth, do we?

Not birth of relations, comes the answer but from where? from us or others conceivably not angel but likewise evolving toward human, though if an angel is trying to change, it must have a long way to go—light years, some informed soul says.

Yet as the auburn-haired woman and the wonderful Latin man moved around their table and rejoined on the far side and touched arms, he speaking into her ear, she raising her shoulder and snuggling her head to it like he’s tickling her, the correspondent-woman on the point of salvaging the thing she needed in the selection read her from Jim Mayn’s letter found one more intervention in the person of two or more scope-size stories sliding slow toward each other and toward her, unless one was the waiter coming to rescue her oval mariscada dish before this highly metabolized and busy customer bread-polished it "licking-clean" enough to fool the waiter into lightly laying down upon its white mirror a jiggly dessert, but not before she knew more than she was able to know: that the father Jim’s letter had drawled its way into taking the Ship Rock literally, so it’s sliding through the Earth, masts breaking the horizon; so the Earth—this man reasoned like telling a story to his little girl now grown to irony—was softer, kind of fluid in those days—make sense? —so that when he told of lovers going up the Rock together and coming down separately at accelerated velocity, and reported the volume of American new-lyweds visiting the actual Four Corners twenty miles or so from Ship Rock to stand on an ugly metal plate that she did not like one bit where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico met, he seemed to have an easy grip holding that earlier, fluid Earth together for such newlyweds as held on to each other standing on the plate to be in four states at once but were by some design of theirs in collusion with their future and with the literalness of this man who seemed not the type to think himself "between histories." Was the joke some new mixed-blood religion? For was he preaching layer by geofirm layer down to each seashell in its thousand-mile-deep coast where the current of the sea of the gods listens to itself in the dry fires of the plateau? This man will take legend and geologic report, and, as she understands it, it’s history as common in the invisibly slow violence of the land’s change as in the cities of the sky invented upon high mesas by the four-dimensional grid of mind with which the People lived their respect for the forces that made the Encircled Mountain a four-petaled flower or told a singer when he was strong enough to sing a healing and when he’d better not. Well, she had put aside what she hardly knew, to find there were many paths all in her from one uninterrupted breath to the next and many even the face of the Earth was consuming. This all came to her, as the woman with the abundant auburn hair leaning into the embracing form of the Latin man she was with, cast back upon the correspondent-woman such a look of tension it darkened the prospect of dessert, but the waiter came between them. And as she ordered her dessert and saw her shiny mariscada dish pass away, the correspondent-woman heard her own frank voice questioning her profession. Didn’t newspeople just multiply wants? The preceding week, looking across the semicircle of naked women at the woman Clara who had not really rebuffed her but seemed to prefer not to carry "it" beyond the (naked) workshop, her voice was saying right out as if her whole body-self made her understand, that she had stayed single because she did not want that trip, it was stubborn of her, she knew, it was uncooperative and over-metabolized, it was unwilling: but two people boring into each other? slipping closer into unmentioned disaster she couldn’t put her finger on, her fault no doubt—

No, said one woman; and, not at all, said the woman named Clara; and stick to your own body feelings, Line, said Grace.

—but the point was that now as a new contingent of five diners rather silent came into the restaurant, her unwillingness brought on a fellow feeling, but who was it with, who was it with? and she knew it was with the father who wrote to his beloved daughter (hoping incidentally that she wasn’t going to find herself high and dry when the funding for her job ran out, and could he do anything? he knew any number of people in Washington), wrote of the rock ship barreling through the once permeable (fluid) Earth and also of the numerically real couples, newly wed two by two but maybe really experiencing four states hand in hand become one for the future.

Until she half-loathed her life alone while sliding forth to meet not the waiter who approached and whom she momentarily slid through, but what lay well beyond, and it was as if the unwilling landscape man Mayn had actually told her this was what would happen: that two persons perhaps without even a vein of bias as to religious or sexual origin might one day disappear literally into one: but the point was not that this need happen each to each in their frequent troth but that under some latest utility dome two persons stood Indian file content because awaiting transport to another section of their future: there, having here been reduced to frequency and thus transmitted hence, they would reconstitute and see each other at once in their new home which would be an Earth-Moon-space colony with native-silica drapes, a lawn on top of the living room, altogether a new consumable life, running, say, a waterless fish-farm where beyond gravity gills won’t collapse, she understands (space spouse).

When in reality through the matter-scrambler utility dome the union of these forward-looking couples was to be sealed literally in a one-for-two eco-switch dreamed up by population-consolidation programmers who cover with the old romance of loved union a new unknown singlehood: that is, the Earthling couples demattered domeside turn out, when reconstituted thousands of miles forth in space in one of the colonies, to be one person now, no longer two.

O where was this coming from? Mariscada chemicals? Glamorous couple? (just exited—awesome; dangerous; partial, she had to feel). But more coming from herself, like wind within, drawing her out in all directions, she thinks grandly. To where? Away from that place in her that fired off messages home to friends beginning "I’m sitting on Al and Ginny Kaulilua’s balcony on Statehood Day overlooking the Pacific and somehow at peace listening to a Society Island canary sing in its swaying cage." Or toward the gist of two persons transpondered to an elsewhere of one, like shadow cast back from future. She didn’t carry it further; but she almost did (recalling her reply to a man she momentarily didn’t, because she couldn’t, name, when they were lying in bed in a hotel contemplating shadow shapes on the ceiling made by a sunset among nearby trees—which was "Bliss"—which he then called the highest compliment any gal had ever paid him but she didn’t tell him it wasn’t just that—and she didn’t because she was still touched by his question, which was, "What are you feeling right now?"). And as she did almost carry it further now, she heard the line in the letter Flick had read where the man, Flick’s dad, whom the correspondent-woman Lincoln decided she loved, had said, Look I’m no landscape man (she heard his voice coming down in his knowing who he was) and she asked how could she ever have taped the self-burning Buddhist monk whose peeling colors—dervish flames drying out the personal pockets of life in the still being of that after all non-renewable person who had had no fat on him, much less cellulite—who was news: and so she scraped onto her spoon’s oval blade all but a trace of smoky caramel dark from the flan whose mold stood once trembling upon her dessert plate; and, wanting that last trace, she might through that girl Flick have felt, through near-relations leaning toward her or toward becoming as human as she or toward becoming her, or her and Flick, have figured out that her play-by-play taped Statesward many months ago in Vietnam for a pool of reporters had included in its stored radius the very man Mayn, of whom had been said (by his grandmother) what had been said of the correspondent-woman Lincoln (by her late mother) from field-hockey days when the grass kept growing under her furious feet, to her last visits home from further and further away—that she must have a tapeworm inside her. But thinking her new mystery-beloved’s disclaimer when really he was a landscape man meant that he might want to become the landscape—spread, disperse himself into it, which was kind of threatening, especially to someone wanting to locate him and meet him; and contemplating the last dark molasses swipe from her creme caramel; and reminding herself that a good Buddhist stays put and plants a tree like her father who planted on the other hand thirty postwar Jap red pines all at once the year after he had given her her Christian name over her ma’s dead body —she had to see that after a given two people were reduced to frequency, matter-scrambled, and sent on like a message to a better way of doing things in that hibiscus-flavored diaphragmatically breathing space colony with timeless sunbaths that might make her impatient ("No one can make you impatient," came a voice seductive if you love being taught things)—and there was only just the one of you when you materialized again in the Earth-Moon-space colony, and you found your head half pillowed by inner gravity or aware of some god in you or an angel or the memory of one with a permanent reservation in some of your newly compounded gray matter if it was really gray—well, which one of you was it that wound up on your feet? (as your parents predicted, in spite of their anxiety, which was for themselves?)—and which sex (to get down to shared thighs)? and would you be meeting a new, well, lover soon who had been done likewise?

Fair questions. Did he want to be done that to? Did it mean our feelings would wind up even more mixed, our memories fuller, our sex still less plain (and what about the women-women pairs, and the men-men)? What happened to chromosomes when turned into frequency? Just another male idea, she heard a female group-consciousness verbalize. Yet Lincoln had some lightness or light in her—was it non-serious? So she imagined again these couples compacted and transmitted as a frequency and recreated in the promised land as one person not two, and thought, Did it mean each new person would be even more the song of its parts, but where would Jim Mayn be? would he be internalized in her and she would have to live with that fo’ th’ rest of her days in space? But what if ... ? But, seeing the waiter approach and seeing just why this hypothetical man Jim Mayn could be right here—look out!—is also anywhere but here, for she is thinking him—oh God she didn’t know the man and never would, unless Flick his dear daughter mentioned Lincoln by name, which could stick in Jim’s mind, a woman with such a name: she took hold of her dessert plate, it had a thin dark blue circle painted round its rim, and brought it up to her face like a comfortable mirror, and, protecting her handsome nose by the length of her tongue, she saved the last curve of caramel from a final meaninglessness of trace, from the dishwasher or the swift fingertip of the waiter, whom for a second of bliss she blotted out with this mirror too close for anything but taste.

Where was she? Where had metabolism left her? Beamed to this instant of her life, lowering her plate she found herself neither with the waiter, who’d seemed to be bearing down on her, nor not with him, for he had detoured to the table of five in the far corner and, except for a darting glance out of the corner of his eye, no one seemed to have seen her "getting it on" with her plate as Grace said to "get it on" with your fingers eating your salad greens, as in conversation, as in work (as in "-aholic") for Grace taught that work was addiction like past, like romance, like sugar, like love.

As down the wormhole’s wind-tunnel evolving we recede from correspondent-woman, too, as she has glimpsed relations looking at her the way life holds you if you let it care, though looking back at her at the last second we couldn’t help it between bodies, we just could not. And we see her looking right at us but she doesn’t know us from Mayn, whom she is really looking at but doesn’t know it’s him there in the restaurant with the party of five others, and we who can’t help being angels, strive though we do these days toward human, had best leave her for this tunnel opening not inward tubewise like being de-born or digested but opening out from an endless circumference of where we’ve been. We "can’t" say, because, looking back at her who helped us get where we are, we relations touch an independence there as if although we have seen her off going hopefully on terms of Mayn, why what group of angels striving to evolve toward human can surely know what that "gal" (as her mother in St. Louis called her own oldest woman friend) is thinking while waiting for the waiter to bring the check? newly wondering where she’s coming from; yet breathes, breathes, and calmly like the diva who saw Jim Mayn in the flesh in an orchestra seat at Norma but knew him no more than she knew his name or than she knew here the softly sinister, fluffy-haired tiny woman wearing, we already remember, one simple unsewn length of saffron (acetate), her sleeveless arms free to beckon the waiter, who in the course of appetizer and entree has looked at the cloth often to dema-terialize it but could not know that her name she has lately come to accept and even (instead of the mere initial L) use in a by-line is her first, or Christian, name provided her by her father who scarcely knew what he wanted for a daughter of his loins but in the void of this he had her christened Lincoln, hoping, we’re now in a position to say, that she would never wed, but intrigued by the prospect of her unfettered and professional independence so much that Dad’s void or concept became that of his daughter. She, though, went so far beyond him as to aid a Hindu lover in graduate school, her first on all scores, grow quickly out of what she didn’t know till later was called "prematurity." And now, to get beyond the three stars on the framed, enlarged restaurant review out front in the window beside the menu, in a joint where the refried beans are good at gluing the expansible corridors of our r’evolutionary intestine, she has got her own void in hand. And not a hell of a lot to do for the next few minutes, the no-man’s gap where she ensures herself, and the dear link she has divined between her and the man on whom she meditates even to the extent of asking the waiter not for the check which he’s about to give her anyhow but for a third Mexican coffee: thinking upon this man Jim Mayn she imagines she has never seen except in essence and now so close to her (can’t explain) so close she liplessly mouths syllables like digestive grace so they can seem kinda beautiful: special, desert, creativity, reincarnation, relativity. And the coffee comes—a new cup which before it lands is but a cup whose liquid weight a waiter mimes, bearing it ever toward us, an obstacle that contains openly our belief, and she knows in the back of her mouth and in a chill down one thigh that she doesn’t want it after all, it’s the obstacle she couldn’t help asking for but at least now she knows she don’t want it: and she opens her mouth, her whole face, to ask for the check, but the waiter makes it out then-and-there with a wrinkled forehead (though that’s all she can see), we don’t know any more than he and should not have looked back but she made us.

But no one can make you do anything, not even relate. But these words we thought had come from us came from the interrogator, a real learner, whom we in any event ignore in order to concentrate on the spurt of juice he has given the funny bone in our groin with his ‘lectric button ostensibly for having either answered a non-question or having said two things at once which make no sense over the short run but across the long curve of our possibilities prove absolutely exact.

This we already remember. As if we hadn’t been told. Listen, what we remember is important, it’s all there is.

Her presence has drawn things to converge upon her, as witness the threesome (for two of the starting five, two women, just got up and left) at the corner table (and now a young fellow leaves the table to make a phone call by the service bar), so we’ll return to her along some track less smooth than the levity of a tapeworm’s nostalgic footholds in the diva’s aborted weight-loss project. And through spiraled circumference spinning our wind-tunnel ‘tween histories, we’ll see the correspondent-woman now without looking back and share with her the state of being between Mayn, no sweat.

A sage said all troubles arise from trying to broadjump inside a telephone booth. Oh well, the multiple youth Larry, like the economist his godly madness turned him into, forgot that a great leap upwards within the booth, even of joy (that is, after hanging up after a call during which he received kind words from the older, four-or-five-year-older woman Amy) might shortly hit a ceiling. Which returned Larry to the floor of the booth or to his feet (whichever came first) and made him wonder again if old Mayn was his rival or his adopted friend, not to say back-up father function/media connection. He’s had this trouble before, the two-on-one he calls it for safekeeping cum portability, it’s where the Dreaded Modulus comes in and expresses one system in terms of another like he knows chez Brain that Mom/Sue didn’t literally mean "Larry should get laid," because mothers don’t talk like that even in the future and Sue’s expressing one shitload in terms of another, and yet even his oF Brain will tell him you got to sometimes give Modulus oon rest and feel that both given shitloads are your given life and it’s all the same ballgame. (Right on, Larry, right on, sweetie, he hears Grace once say to him in another context.) But should he pack a backpack and go to Europe for a few years? but where would Amy be when he came back? living with oF Jim? of course not, probably in Europe herself! but where will Jim be? Is this the two-on-one trouble again? It’s a shitload faster coming at him than an unresigned end-game with a bishop and a knight against just a knight (which Larry’s given up with chess itself at eighteen); is it more the lone guard against a forward and a sudden substitute you don’t recognize tearing-ass downcourt? Got to make your move because if he doesn’t the one with the ball will go all the way and up for the shot which for greed’s sake he may do anyway: but it’s all also inside Larry and he would talk to his father if his father didn’t have enough on his plate already and to his mother if she had not once recently reduced his life, telling a friend that Larry has to get laid: and while in the corners of his eyes the two enemy players divide their distances to the basket so he would prefer switching to instant-replay mode to put it mildly, he figures he’s divided his talk option between Father and Mother, next between yes-Mother and no-Mother (opting for the no-don 7-discuss-the-two-on-one-with-her), then between no-Mother-One (which is no discussion but no hard feelings) and no-Mother-Two (which is You’re so one-track-minded nowadays you’re a jammed terminal, Ma, it isn’t funny, we can’t get a decent discussion going about this two-on-one thing of mine until we get past the sex gate which can be jumped only with the correct Yes or No response, that is we have all first got to be sexed like little kittens and then our eyes can be looked into). Yet as the no-Mother-Two option gets branched, Larry can see his mother Susan gain perspective through distance but is it hers or his he’s pinning down? all he knows is she gets smaller with these divisions yet doesn’t bug him less.

That is, without the two-on-one being submitted feedback loop.

Larry says to Mayn, If I could be another person, she could be.

Mayn says, It doesn’t matter, pal. You’ll be another person someday; she might stay the same. You mean, asks Larry, she’ll go on as she is?

Probably go on, is Mayn’s reply.

Stay married, Jim? Larry laughed. Oh, said Mayn, you need more than one sometimes.

"I know what’s going on," an all-purpose child contemplating another nap who was apparently absorbed in educational television is heard by some resident adults adjacent to it to say. Adults getting equal with kids; seeking girlfriends and boyfriends. But not in response to Larry’s fine Either/And, which he would talk to Mayn about if Mayn weren’t already a motion within the reference frame of Larry’s life so how do you get an external fix?

Larry’s dad one night, turning away from his personal TV when Larry came into his room silently wanting to talk, gingerly identified changes in lifestyle they were being buffeted by, ‘cause Lar’s old enough to hear. But Open Marriage (which is more like the U.S. Open than open house, though it’s that, too) gives you permission to stick it out. But Larry doesn’t say this to his father. Even if it is ‘76-’77—you’re never in a single year, it feels like, and he dunno if he wants his mom to come back—I mean, who the fuck cares?

But Larry’s life feels like escape. And someone else’s escape that Larry figures in and has been drawn if not sucked into.

Well, as for him, he works with the Modulus, Dreaded or not, that constant factor, it converts units from one system into another, which might be its own, so all potential partners in an extended marital system may observe laws of all divisions and games going on inside Me, making Me sometimes Us. Bumper stickers used to say Carlsbad Caverns, Howe Caverns, Pioneer Village. God, these married older people, they don’t have any standards any more, negotiating clean breaks and all that load of crap, and codifying power games like Who Called Who?—well Larry could pile right through a naked workshop recycling women and leave them scatter-cornered, multiply der limbs lying in his wake watching his stern lights fall back into the night with just enough glamor of wake to yield a bumper sticker that says, Have You Hugged Another Woman Today? and so also that, some nights, oddly when he’s on the phone with this older guy he really likes, he wants to be the one to say a whole lot of unrelated words, shit, fuck, cunt, asshole (asshole doesn’t mean anything any more although you wouldn’t want to be one), cocksucker, mother-fucking turd-master, chew-sampler, pimp-spread police-dog-screwer, you run out of those words.

Were they funny once? he asks Mayn.

Funny? oh yeah, sure, we used to call each other cunt lappers—what else?, scumbags.

Hey you still hear that.

Muff diver. Scum bucket.

That’s pretty sweet.

And during the War, when we saw all those movies, what was it?, I’m afraid it was the syphilitic afterbirth of a Japanese gangfuck.

That’s not even sick: it’s not possible.

We probably didn’t know what an afterbirth was.

Well, it probably could be syphilitic.

It’s history.

Yeah.

Larry still wasn’t telling Mayn the two-on-one problem. Yet how could Mayn be a rival? Obviously between Mayn and the unique Amy who is old enough to be Jim’s daughter there can be nothing save professional researches and contact-expediting assistance—people she knows (?) through the place where she works, but Lar’s not asking. He doesn’t sense that Mayn’s into Amy’s interests, right-brain video-projection hardware used by handicapped to make themselves understood, plus reading-playing-manipulating a console-operated screen—and though anything might happen in the weeks since Amy phoned Larry to ask if he had Mayn’s number which she either could have discovered for herself or already had, in which latter case, she was letting Larry know, Mayn might be using her.

Oh Larry’s eyes hurt; they know how to turn into marbles; and his head hurts on one side—purely conceptually: he’s resisting a crowd inside him (well at least he knows and acknowledges—even welcomes!) that’s relations and all he can do is look back and forth between two eyes. And often now makes his phone calls from a pay booth, but rarely jumps as, booth-high, after the Amy call.

And he would not get into hating Grace Kimball, she’s friendly y’know—y’know?—y’know the multiple child’s next-room door is closed and among other emblems on the door is "Love Ya," and not so loud— whose sway has swung his mom Susan who wished she’d been named Sara, no h—into quite a new life which she thinks she’s asking him along on, which sets her apart from Jesus freaks and other groupies of the Ideal who want no part of their parents but he feels, he feels . . . (and, like using the Modulus, suddenly conceals his life) "this friend of mine he’s freaked out, Jim, his mother thinks she’s a Lesbian, what do you tell a guy like that? he doesn’t even want to think about it." ("Nothing, I guess. I would just say, Hang in there, you know?") ("Hang in there, Jim?") ("I mean I couldn’t handle it. There’s nothing you can say, if you like her—if your friend likes her—so hang in there—it’s like what your negotiators mean when they say, At least keep talking").

She wants to teach him No Dependency: see, you don’t hang on to any particular person (so the theory goes—Grace’s theory yet in words identical to others uttered by a dark man with no shirt on as Larry switched TV channels and just before a commercial break to the effect that if the winds of attachment continue to blow, the light of true knowledge will never be kindled). Yet act, he had heard, so as to benefit others. Yet have, he had heard, no desire. Yet Larry was ready to believe the words; they were now his. Don’t anchor onto particular mother, spouse, or lover, you hang on to instead where they came from, not the person in question: keep the standing reserve from your miles-deep soft wear dream-lab, it’s your permanent credit cord to the ocean, keep that and let the actual persons come and go. Yet go for total sensate focus: what did that mean? Your toe massage might trip you up the common thigh: it’s the sources in thyself you want to glom onto, definitely not the particular persons who are thrown up like visitors to your real past and come and go, or so the rumor spreads, and Lar’ has this shitty feeling right in his (yes, actual shit in his) head that it all has assumed great weight and point, greater than in any rap: he hears oh what’s he hear?—workshop raps of Grace Kimball; fond talk and joking talk of Susan and her "friend" in a next room at mid-morning one weekend, really getting along; and so lest there appear ground for suspicion, he’ll go his ma one better and will not bust out to this guy Mayn who is now for a moment a total stranger but Lar’ would ask him what he thought it meant to say you withdraw hearing from sound, for God’s sake, was it to listen to other sound, or soundless things? well Larry would buy that, too, it sounds like at least an effort to shake things up a bit.

—(hear the song—song that’s just naturalized American noise, Lez-bee-in; once said, so what—the foreign plural of a visitor from an olive island. But all that funny material or its sources isn’t why he wouldn’t get into hating Grace Kimball. For she’s funny; O.K.? And she’s open (as opposed to—are you ready?—closed), but Larry thinks her book of changes, one a week minimum, had better not get too into ideas, even if where else is it at?— because as the energy level does in a roomful of people jerking off or in their heads, so the room leans its sides in on each other, driving the other equally parallel pair into slant formation, the room is energy-shimmying and maybe the building’s being squashed or at last looking like us to think as a whole building which even then may be but one of those parts of units within units capable of being accommodated in the articulate structure Mayn woke up in to hear a visiting economist preaching decentralization many months ago, but as the energy level of all those people in the happily collapsing room going public rises to some great explosion, you’ll smell the sandalwood but Larry thinks that in the very Near East (right round the corner, maybe) or Far East where some of this stuff comes from, the sandalwood and all the postures in our New York picture book may be easier to smell—and haven’t they relegated the shit to a book of pictures?, although in a western vein among fellow discussants Grace’ll talk about bowel movements (squatting heel-and-sole on traditional horseshoe seat or traditional buttock-contact support) as if they’re a recent layer of awareness which is what Larry means, speaking to himself more than to this older guy Mayn, when he says G.K.’s O.K. if she no slide into Ideas: where she has, she says, done the Freud Trip, the Art Trip, the Marriage Trip, the Separation Trip, the Booze Trip, the Romantic Love Addiction Trip—the addiction number, how she makes the long trip equal the short trip: well, says Mayn, is it destructive addiction or not, would be what I would want to know—while, however, the best seedless grass is not addictive, Larry happens to have heard, for just you look, whatever she says about dudes, at the black truckers downstairs in the middle of any Monday through Thursday afternoon taking you know their break to breathe a king-sized Caribbean back-home-style baseball-bat(ty!) joint biggest Larry’s seen so fast their eyes can turn blue ‘f they didn’t wash the stuff back with Colt 45 you know and you can be sure they don’t rinse their eyes before repairing homewise, what would be the point? calm their wives and girlfriends? Wing it—and if Grace talks a lot it’s in a naturally fertilized voice—and to you— for she rides in on other people’s energy wings too, she flies them too, so it’s like she’s listening to your feedback as she herself says, while meaning only that she wants a supportive opinion for, say, her still-on-the-drawing-board nation(-cum)wide women-bathhouse chain: keep the sexes apart for the time being, just a working model, teach ‘em the wings they fly ain’t only yr joint wings twain bonded in the ground of birth, and Hey Lar’, she asked, where did the sexes first split? (I think it was the Paramecium, I go check the book or was it Jim who got it from the prison inmate appendicularia zooplankton that house themselves in their own mucus (read imprison self in own ideas), the more I think appendicularia the more I think Paramecium, ah go check mah book, want to get outa here—I know you do, baby, but come back soon, it’s just an elevator ride away—all this as noisy as your own mind).

But we see Larry, and he knows Grace’s mere wish for supportive reaction even better than Grace, but he doesn’t know how much he knows, and knows the feedback mechanism is sometimes a homunculus-soul of Grace sucked actually back into him to listen to herself; but also she listens in the customary sense and in a jiffy would be naked almost without your knowing it and execute a hatha yoga number resectioning her old abdomen to music (if you call that music real noise), resectioning it in ultra-deep ripples that’re waves and are erupting muscle pregnancies now-you-see-them, but Larry won’t let her listen to his two-on-one oscillations, he knows he is no crazy after all, and everyone else probably has this same ballgame going, where there are long like pauses, your weak forces when things break down, or are in low-low-energy configuration, then will come like the strong force but you’re not getting them together, there’s a jump going back and forth, but Larry won’t show himself this scramble-minded in talk with Mayn (though there’s another person quiet and clear beyond the scramble and it isn’t anyone else but Larry, he knows) but he’ll guard his gourd, which was what they called your head in Mayn’s day, a day that sounded, when spoken of by the visiting man himself, physically rough in that old New Jersey township where he grown up, up—not that the man bragged—quite the reverse, don’t you know, but a lot of semi-serious sparring and shoving went on in his memory of the edges where everyone lives day to day not in the midst of what once was thought of as history, according (casually) to Mayn: edges where (though his father in this scene was on what you call the sidelines) Mayn drop-kicked a football for a field goal on a cold day that smelled, as he stepped forward on his cleats, of apples and cowbarns and a horse’s hide right under your nose spun magically to him at the twenty-yard line on the breeze curving around the recent brick of the high school and perhaps around his father too, where, to give another example (and another and another, for Horace Greeley, founding the New York Tribune some fifty miles away and but a few short years after the weekly Mayn-family Democrat burst upon Jackson’s strong-handed but anti-central-izing scene, believed "news" to be plural!), Jim Mayn got an unexpected lip, an enraged foul swipe on the mouth which he had to return though he knew he would smash his kid brother Brad, who was justified in his anger at Jim the older (though now to Larry Jim went on to something else, and didn’t quite tell what had been so important about) observing (through a mother-load keyhole) less than he could hear and hearing less than he felt he understood and understanding less than he had words for when he accosted his little angel kid brother Brad about the overheard scene with their mother in the music room, an intimacy with the scrawny Brad when Jim regarded himself as the preferred, the admitted animal of the two sibling species but though the admired animal of the two siblings not the child she would sit with in the closed music room, and that was Brad.

No head for music, Mayn told Larry; an ear for noise, all kinds of sounds shilling about in the gourd, oh maybe back home in Grandma’s old brass-ring-handled highboy chest of drawers, and Larry felt something personal in the introduction of that piece of furniture and did not wish to be Mayn’s equal yet. No stamina for the opera, you know, Mayn said, speaking of noise. Mayn’s mother had played chamber music. It’s intense, said Larry. I’m told it’s like talk, Mayn said, and I believe that. And it’s nice, I won’t take anything away from chamber music.

Mayn is in on something beyond Larry, maybe the Us that Larry feels invading; and Larry is tired and ready to be put on hold, an eighteen-year-old who really hears those three, four, five lone singing boxes, high-strung cabinets of explanation playing and singing, in a music room of a shingled house in a corner of a county seat, a house where Jim Mayn grew up on a street where trees had been put there by your ancestors and their chamber music or anyway beautiful homemade tables and cabinets: Yes, chamber music, said Mayn into the phone to his new young friend. Mayn was partial to supperclub numbers such as "Lush Life" ("the axis of the wheel of life") or "It Never Entered My Mind." So that Larry, listening hard and talking silently, drawing words out of Mayn’s mind to work into thoughts of his own, could have said, If you don’t have any head for opera, why didn’t you let me take Amy Tuesday night (answer? the tickets were Amy’s!): the words are coming Larry’s way. We see how Lar’ feels, camped above a receding economics assignment, or, where lately when his father stays home to work he makes many of his phone calls, in one of the two booths around the mid-City corner from the apartment, face (then) to voice with this guy Mayn who’s in his late forties. Oh well, Larry would broach the Two-on-One "Quantum Regress" to Mayn, if Mayn didn’t instead talk and talk—this distinctly listening kind of guy—interesting to Larry because two so different impressions, and Larry is weirdly feeling long-established, whose long-time mother thinks that she is a Lesbian and follows Grace Kimball in supporting all those desiring to get out of relationships— though wan’t desire wrong according to some doctrine itself paired with one that there is no right and wrong, which Larry shrugs roughly in favor of— and he vows to consolidate his gains of self, if only voiced in mind but voiced no less so that we already remember his words I am, and he complains to himself that Mayn, who’s supposed to listen, isn’t he?, is instead wiping Larry out just about, so Larry’s mere ear complementing one of the City’s earphones, a voice but we hope with eyes, for Mayn must at least see eye to eye, he couldn’t not picture the Lar’: a conductor of information indirectly to or from a voice third party possibly named Amy decorated in the old-fashioned way with a body—whatever his function, that’s what the Lar’s been reduced to, a presence included in Mayn s voice and a function brought into being with all these Mayn-generated bits that are interesting stuff just in their own right.

And a rueful energy comes across from Mayn to Larry (you take it, Larry) in word Mayn brings of an elder meteorologist now working "out of" a Greenwich Village railroad flat whom Mayn visited on impulse having heard the man had been blackballed as a maverick and Mayn could not fathom— only pass on, now—the coastline of that man’s theory: but Lar’ did not stop measuring it ‘gainst what he already knew: and so while Mayn and he went on, Lar’ yet reviewed that Maverick Mastermind Weatherwright’s theory— namely, that some new force roughly west-to-east is now altering the modified sine curve which said Maverick long since worked out for the relation between sea/air temp, differential along selected coasts, and consequent updraft deflections of air current; but as this sine curve of late alters erratically, so does the configuration equation for the coast itself which the elder meteorologist worked out by a math he would not trouble Mayn’s mind with except to say the equation for the possibly limitlessly wrinkling and, perhaps literally, broken coastline in question felt like a Canadian sine curve worked out for the coastlike pattern path taken by our own neurons retrieving memories yet sensing always that, traveler, there are no paths, paths are made by walking: in short, the Maverick Meteorologist is sure something else is arriving, apparently from the West, and collaborating with coastal configuration perhaps by some odd congruence as if a possibly metallurgic radiation affected temp, and pressure differentials along coastlines, affected in fact weather, through indirect congruence with coastline itself possibly complicated anew (or even broken) by this same radiation not to be confused with radiation as in radiation fog where radiational cooling over a land mass reduces temperature to around dew point: yet Lar’s mind swarms, now, with coasts, and now margin seems so central, there seems no boundary at all to this promontory or island as its successive discoverers invent words for it and Lar’ feels drawn toward maybe weirding-out an equation relating the (possibly due to radiation pollution) variable coastline and—

and while Larry’s feeling a shade less Real than, say, he had planned to, in this and other phone exchanges, the stuff that’s piling down the wire out of Mayn is (granted) told like conversation along a well-tended bar; like chat in transit through the Happy Hour, while conversely what’s this guy doing, where’s he coming from, ‘z’he just like Larry? and why why this absolute stream of talk taking for granted that Larry had no other reason for phoning than to be there: for example, to hear what one knew already, that standing on the subway platform in Lower Space doing some last-second drifting so as to end up in front of the subway-car doors, you never knew any more which half of the two doors was going to open since now only one did; and before long (the man Mayn spoke as if he’d been away from the City a long time and was coming home, well he was moving back into an apartment he had once lived in) the (said) subway doors wouldn’t open at all and hopeless passengers would turn into a new mode of expectations, stand hopeless on the platform in Lower Space, watch linked cars roll into the station, stop, and slide out without opening their doors, and, interjected Larry, if you looked hard into one of the windows you would see two workmen inside the car sitting legs crossed chatting as if there wasn’t a platform with its dim exhibit of stalled passengers outside, and a toolbox on the floor of the car near one workshoe, and a kit at the belt, and a length of rope. Mayn remarked that his grandmother had taught him to look at things and had traveled widely in the last century when the family newspaper in New Jersey had still been going strong. Larry said he was envious. But no news can be good news, said Mayn, for Andrew Jackson in whose behalf the Democrat was founded went right ahead, first week of January, decimated countless seasoned British troops because the news of peace signed Christmas Eve didn’t reach New Orleans for what is sometimes known as a fortnight, so that for Jackson no news was good news, otherwise known as first win the war, then win the battles—Larry, there’s a key there if I could only find it, for—(I mean history has its laws, said Larry)—If so, said Mayn, I haven’t spotted them, they’re like the laws of a humanly lazy if insane visiting despot, there’s just no telling, except they are barricaded behind Fort Nightmare which we can pass through and never feel, like books almost read in one’s youth such as the heavily grandfather-recommended Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens—while, thought Larry, was he kidding about his grandmother at some pre-twentieth-century age maybe still in her teens (he certainly seemed to like her) traipsing off to the crystal fountains of Chicago’s World’s Fair then changing her plans and traveling West further than the eye can see, fields of globe mallows and all manner of southeast Utah and Colorado May flowers, magenta, darkening violet, down to the very finest royal purple locoweed swaying not far above the ground— but Larry’s phone is lost to that We that’s bigger than the both of them—that drives a whole canyonful of color-blind Indian horses to the winds of princely addiction and was known once in the beat of its digested purple to penetrate through her soft Indian gift-saddle to the actual blood of its noble rider the East Far Eastern Princess who must have sat her horse at least as well as this Mayn’s grandmother Margaret tripping out there a decade and less after the botanist Marcus Jones negotiated the terrain on a bicycle who, when he ran out of names for all the specimens of locoweed he found there, named the next one desperatus, bicycling such rockland!—the cliff-dwelling circuit— (Wait a minute, breaks in Lar’ like an emergency operator, a nineteenth-century botanist bicycling hundreds of miles through southern Utah?—but Larry’s always got the little-known Modulus, it will be known as Larry’s Modulus, it came from math but made him its own, working turning and remixing.) Mayn’s talk into-onto the good old screen closer to home so if Mayn persists in not sensing that this phone call was because Lar’ had a thing or two on his mind, Lar’ will do the understanding for Mayn—cliff dwellings, Mayn went on, I’ve seen some of them; apartment houses call them, the sun shines up against them and makes shadows that seem to wander way way back into those apartments: one of them had eight hundred units but whether the Anasazi six hundred years ago had co-op ownership like your modern Pueblo Indians (and the pueblo at Taos is thought to be nine hundred years old) I don’t happen to know, and just about all I know about anything I just happen to know. What are you doing out there in a pay booth? did I say I had basketball tickets? I’ll call you back—and Lar’ thinks Mayn hangs up without having been told the pay number. Larry is absorbed by the thought that Mayn himself passes easily between one thing and another, the peculiar Princess he’s got one or two low-profile stories about—a guy whose interest in meteorology, perilous dusting of our atmosphere in, for example, the Junge-layer of aerosol particles above the tropopause, and the mother-of-pearl night-lucent clouds and the "twilight" effects first pondered when Krakatoa blew a shitload of volcanic dust into the stratosphere, takes him two thousand miles west to check out reports of sky scraping windmills, though it’s one of those somewhat technical though probably not boring assignments of his: a guy who has done, for his boss, as much homework on arms limitation as, if not more than, the government guys whose fringe personal habits he’s got anecdotes about as if he doesn’t want to deal with the "bolts" (for example, one missile delivery system he specializes in, he knows all about that one, yeah); a guy who flies from a Vienna conference to Stockholm, where the disarmament information center is, but then to New Mexico in order to examine strip-mined land at first hand to see if he believes the corporate claim that that landscape can be duly re vegetated within twenty-five years (for whom?), while he stands thirty miles away scratching his head afloat upon desert in front of a giant rock-thing through which he passes himself hardly thinking about the Four Corners coal-into-gas plant but of a red convertible automobile driving across the water of a New England lake once when he was in the vicinity of his daughter and his son, at any rate a man (whatever his unknown personal life) up on what’s being thought right now even though just a journeyman journalist, he claims, and inclined to keep lowest possible profile, anyway a journeyman, an "adult," really into the East Eleventh Street "sweat equity" windmill, called by local Puerto Rican kids "the helicopter" and by the East Eleventh Street older residents "the fan": yet so easily, with Larry, this guy Mayn seems to—What’s "sweat equity," Jim?—Oh, fancy talk for, well, more fancy talk . . . "urban homesteading," Puerto Rican low-income tenants’ tenement renewal, do it yourself, in this case a five-story disaster area becomes the pioneer wind-energy installation if the thing doesn’t fall off the roof, don’t forget New York’s a harbor city—so easily seems to, yes, switch between his son in college who doesn’t talk to him, and his daughter in Washington whom he gave an old white "auto" (he calls it), and an environmentalist group in New Mexico urging him to come back and report in "depth" what strip-mine interests are doing to the land—(which Jim says means "their side of it"—though granted the right side) so where’s the chance Lar’s ever going to broach with James Mayn the Two-on-or-in-One Quantum-Regress shifts, when Mayn’s got not only QR shifts of his own but Larry as a mere function of it, so it’s more germane to ask where is Larry in this momentary empty breath along the phone connection, i.e., where (to wit) is Lar’ except in the husky space nearly guaranteeing Mayn is there still, and Lar’ names the numbers: so now Mayn rings back, which in the middle of the visible noise of the City gives Lar’ the illusion of inventing a way to beat the system and more of being able like a pedestrian who flags a vacant vehicle and is given a free ride which the materializing driver will be repaid for elsewhere in the system and not necessarily in kind, a sense of being able naturally to use the public furniture of the City, a comfort subtler than mere economy.)

Oh the ancient apartment houses, continued Mayn, a day later face to face, they spread south from Utah but in Jones’s time the Anasazi cliff houses, not to be confused with the Pueblo co-ops, had long fallen vacant but for a hermit occupying one unit six months of the year in northern New Mexico; it was a multi-year summer plan he had, I mean a hermit from the City of the East, remarkable man whether real or made-up. Unusual, no doubt, but your hermit needs a break once in a while too, though not necessarily in terms of seeing a whole lot of people (You mean, said Larry, not necessarily a vacation from himself?—Yeah, that’s it exactly).

But Larry’s not sure if Mayn said this line of hermits included this Hermit-Inventor of New York. But could Lar have made it up? lately he thinks of invaders in his bloodstream (maybe they’re good) but then they aren’t the We his mother Sue’s always speaking in—(We feel that only through money can we achieve power) but (God, maybe) his own We, but does that make him wacko or a vehicle for these bloodstream visitors to (what? "get real," as his own mother puts it, even when she tells him he lives in his head and ought to—) feel, not think. Yet this hermit is into quite threatening meteorological thinking and it has made Jim Mayn reflect upon a certain Hermit ®f New York who befriended Jim’s own grandmother not quite a century ago when she came down through canyonland a timeless Victorian girl-explorer with a box camera and on a horse brimful of locoweed at one point so it leaked (and beamed and radiated into her legs and eyes) full filtered through the bliss of her temporarily insane horse and, as a consequence, Jim told Larry one evening meeting at a newsstand beside the cafeteria where half a dozen cabs were pulled up, she could see just what she wanted though with the help of a fine young Indian who had given her her skin-and-dyed-wool saddle and her horse and some high-class guided companionship to boot (though Jim deep down felt this Navajo princeling had come to a bad end because of her eventually)—he was sort of a brother and perhaps husband-at-first-sight and Jim wished he had asked his grandmother more about him though he had gotten the impression that the Hermit of New York had kept an eye on her: so Lar’, who’s thinking Why’s this old guy (well, not that old) kidding like this in the middle of well what else? until Lar’ feels, yes feels, that this young woman of the last century, Jim’s grandmother or person beyond her, could see in the high-up and far-targeted reflection of the cliff-vacationing hermit (whom she couldn’t see except for his eyes like one eye, one platinum ingot) someone else entirely, astride this Indian pony (God, thought Larry, looking into the window of a furniture store all alone the following morning on the way to the subway to go to college, this stuff is driving me loco and all I get from Jim Mayn is this sense that he’s a down-to-earth not very intellectual regular guy, divorced, yes, he did speak of that as if we’re—what?—equals? like Grace said, speak to everyone as an equal)—till Larry’s telling this ancient story himself, Guess whose reflection the visiting Princess made out in the pin-glint of platinum light from the hundred-foot-high tier of cliff caves of that centuries-old multiple dwelling of the departed people who had once had a sterling culture of pots and cloth, and larders stapled with corn that some said had been transplanted hundreds and even thousands of miles from the original southeastern soils long gone of this continent the Princess was discovering, plus dry-country native seeds help save Africa from famine, a woman friend of Mayn’s is seriously thinking of giving up her career as a journalist to work on this—but guess whose reflection the Princess made out.

Oh, why it was your grandmother’s obviously, said Lar\

How did you know? called Mayn, laughing elevator door closed. It just came to me, said Larry, who saw Jim for an instant as a family man coming home, though Lar’ knew there’s nobody upstairs. (Or was there?)

Platinum don’t come in ingots, is that what you’re thinking?

Somewhere through these days and mostly phone talks after the two had met when Lar’ had by chance heard Mayn discussing basketball in the lobby with the doorman in Spanish and had joined in, Larry became attached to Mayn, maybe because he had been places and was cool. Until Mayn was in Larry’s head often, like opinions, and Larry, who did not ask Mayn about himself, saw the fact, one night, hearing his father come in, and could not imagine why Mayn’s college-age son didn’t want to be in touch with Mayn, because while Jim did not think at all the same way as Grace Kimball, he was funny, like her, and heard what you said, though she maybe made up what she said (though out of what?), did she really think her kidneys spoke to her brain and generated dreams?, but the man whom one of the women in her workshop reported had never dreamed must exist, though when Lar’ was going to raise the question of whether it was possible not to dream, Grace told how the woman was ready to be in love with that undreaming man sight unseen, which was a perfect example of love addiction. This relationship with Mayn was easier, though Larry woke up in the middle of one night, hearing his father come in, and remembering soft joking in the next room long ago between his father and his mother—and now recalled Jim Mayn just now saying in this dream Lar’ had been having, "Get out of there, Larry," Larry driving through a three-sided bowl of rocky mountains, desert deserted for days of a poor man’s travel, "Forget it all, Larry, forget the family and try thinking something new," whereupon Larry asked something, and Mayn said, "Never dream": until Larry at once grasps the light where some modulus of the dream has vanished but leastways it’s light and has come to rest and is what’s between the two men, and Larry knows he’s Mayn in the dream, so maybe dreaming for his friend—has become this other person while simultaneously being, well, almost-Larry, but he is certainly not the women who arrived as the dream was curving away around a tree trunk or down the Earth just barely held by gravity to the surface: they were his mother and a band of others like her: he was in his clothes on the bed, but his father wasn’t about to open the door, and dreams thank God were garbage, all these angels and his mother were pleading with him, "Let’s be real, let’s be human," as if it’s up to him, when it’s no more up to him in some dream than when his mother said those very words out loud in the next room to her friend Evelyn so Larry heard. At least not talking about him. Or telling him he thought too much, which was a hard one to answer, he was working on it.

Yet he was talking to Jim Mayn days afterward only to know that on the night of that garbage dream he had had a theory as clear as if he could say it: it was a reincarnation theory that was true this time but must find itself in Larry before it could be clear.

Larry wanted to ask Mayn a direct question about escorting Amy to the opera when Mayn said he don’ like opera.

All very poor out there, says Lar’ from a phone booth and digs for a nickel, comes up with a quarter, all he’s got, then remembers Mayn called him back from Mayn’s home, did Lar’ pick up a signal?—responding anyway to Mayn’s claim that certain Indians of the Southwest come all the way home hundreds of miles from boarding school for the weekend and nobody knows how they make the trip, they disappear into it and materialize hundreds of miles later.

Mayn had a relative who went out there before the turn of the century and stayed almost too long and when she came back an Indian she was mixed up with followed her clear across the continent.

There’s hardly anything to fill this break between the hard facts he speaks of (such as water, and the litigation over it against heavyweight Anglo lawyers talking water so that Indian irrigation plans, their own and those of others for them, go only partway, everlastingly partway, poverty and water)—this break between the hard facts and such allusions to that relative often a grandmother but then allusions to lore that feels true like dug-up-bits, including a Princess from elsewhere who had a protector in a hermit who sat up in high tiers of wind-hollowed niches (also believed to have been the result of the actual rock’s thought) and she would catch him far far away and high above her watching her and recognize in his platinum hermit-eye the grandmother Mayn recalled so fondly.

"I mean," Mayn went on, "you can make hunger dramatic, it’s got good bone definition, cheek, chin, ribs, for those who don’t share it you know, and so when the Princess turned into her reflection at a later time," but as Larry put it together still later, the grandmother must have been really someone, whoever the Princess was, because she criticized her Navajo "protector" and his people, who weren’t too well off themselves, for having driven the Anasazi people out six hundred years before (though it may have been that the river had cut so deep down into the earth that the irrigation ditches were amputated high and dry like reverse waterfalls that can’t draw water up any more).

Larry later felt Mayn had been entertaining him.

Apartment tiers as vacant as the sunlight: when she looked again, she thought she saw one hundred, two hundred scrawny physiognomies with blanketed shoulders, blanket-hooded heads, looking out of that cliff dwelling answering like tidal creatures coming out of the shadows that lined the fingers of sun bent and crooked because of the openings.

She looked again and saw but one hundred. But arriving at the ceremonial sing where the Prince’s people tried to find a way into the Prince’s mother’s trouble through a hole in her forehead plain as could be but full up with demons that left little extra space but didn’t leak, the East Far Eastern Princess asked how the two hundred had become one hundred—those impoverished, derelict Indians back in the "apartment house," did they have a way of making people and things fewer, like the one used in her father’s East Far Eastern land of Manchoor? There, far away, her father had taught her to ride on the worst giant hill-sheep of the Manchoor Mountains he owned, when he was not gathering information about other countries. She would never ride like a Navajo sheepherd no matter how long her fact-gathering visit. Contemplating the two hundred or the one hundred, she asked herself, What of excrement? But Rivertalk, who was the Navajo Prince’s second mother, was surprised, for didn’t this fluctuation of numbers just happen? It was either death, a natural result of living among the unseen presences; or it was that when you weren’t looking, half the people went back into their cliff apartments; or it was that two became one just as one became two in many ways, hadn’t the Princess seen one hundred before she saw two?

Larry was happier for having spoken to Mayn—and catching the eye of a tall blonde girl in a locoweed-purple outfit passing, so she leaned back and stopped, friendly, reminded by someone in the mid-City using the booth that it was there and she needed to put in a phone call. Larry, by now possessed not only by interest in the dual histories of this man who wrote news but didn’t believe in anything you’d be ready to call history, but also by the need to speak what he had called Mayn in the first place to say but had not been able to, along these last mutual minutes curving by swiftest increment away from Lar’s prepared question to nonetheless keep faith with the undeniably parallel tracks either side which happy parallels sloping off into the sunset over the Jersey cliffs he is moved in his abstracted heart to see behind these darker people going to the subway outside his booth, finds all turned now into the face of the blonde who’s waiting.

There’s someone waiting for this phone, and all I wanted to know, though thanks I would like to go to the game, is—

Listen, Larry, hang in there, you’re a good playground talker yourself, the formulas (was that economics or physics?) I probably couldn’t keep up with you, though that’s fun sometimes, but when you said you’re a good playground talker backpedaling one-on-two waiting to make your move—

I said that? asks Larry, as the blonde looks at her knuckles. He had thought he had only thought it.

Well, all I called about—oh gee I got to get off the line, there’s someone waiting—was, well obviously Amy is into work that connects with your work, right?, and it isn’t the right-brain video research for the handicapped, I know that, and she phoned me once to ask for your number which didn’t make any sense; so is she in some kind of trouble?

In Mayn’s mind, Larry knows, come answers unspoken to Larry’s unspoken question Was there anything between him and Amy? Mayn is saying "We" about when they are going to meet for the game, and Larry is saying "We" about a couple of events scheduled between his father and him, like going out to dinner tonight and maybe going to swim at a pool they have a family membership at and they haven’t gone in a while. Mayn has said, Well, Amy’s a real pretty girl. But he has balked, Lar’ knows, at the bottom-line negative, adding, You say you got a lady waiting there? Jim’s saying, Between us, that Chilean exile I mentioned to you who’s . . . modestly shrouded in the folds and folders of the foundation Amy works for as a research assistant, Larry understands, and that Jim prefers not to say more—so that, realizing that Mayn don’ wanna reassure him that there’s nothing of a sexual nature between him and Amy, nor ask him to keep under his hat these mentions of the Chilean exile-economist, Larry separates the perhaps nothing political implications of his present rush and concludes that, O.K., maybe he is being used by some higher power (as Grace Kimball said once, using the Alcoholics Anonymous formula) and if the higher power someway equals his new sharing with Jim (or anyone else maybe), then try to flow along the curve of this whatever it is, because it is more than relationship softly resounding words like "We" through Lar’—it’s another type of being using him toward—what?

Hanging up, Larry, tall within the booth whose roof he once hit his tender fontanel upon concluding oon call with Amy, understands that the blonde girl’s eyes are on him alone when she says, Well I almost gave up on you (though making no move for the booth)—when he doubly realized (having not till now guessed) that she is—but no, she is not a hooker, definitely not (she is wonderful, maybe) and much as (what with the gate swinging open, gate beep gate beep) he wants to get started at once exercising the dreaded Modulus upon matters shared through Mayn that are falling into place, still he toys with the idea that this girl and him met once, she’s a friend of a friend of his father’s, or of Grace Kimball’s, or she was seen doing water polo in an Olympic pool at Port Adams, Long Island, or she was profiled lovely against a sludgy oil on the second floor of New York’s famed Metropolitan Museum of Art where the gross ornate gilt frames were once gifts to some potentate or are the sculpted coastlines of some old rich room’s ceiling Larry would like to lie down in at twilight. But no, the answer is easy: Larry and she Have Not Met; she is just plain here, plus it’s late afternoon of a day when Lar’s father’s been working at home at home at home, but will be going out presently to his group that he’s always on the verge of telling his son about (which suddenly now means to Larry that Marv has talked to the group about Larry—but that’s O.K., his father has lost love but not heart, but for cool feedback cum companionship you gotta go elsewhere).

So what’s Lar’ going to do? suspects he’s lucking out, for a second hallucinates Mayn kept him phonebound so long, exposed to your curbside traffic and to self-preoccupied yet happy homeward (but of course it’s quitting time, they have punched out) wage earners for as long as he did because Mayn was sending this girl.

But Lar’ has heard us, and (confirmed by the converging difference between the speech of a skimpily shorted jogger passing mid-Manhattan gridlock traffic-stall and behind and then ahead of him a high-stepping blackish sprinter in jeans who tears by and nearly runs down a bike that’s running a red light) Larry must cut out from the phone booth at once in defense of his own privacy, he’s got to make himself scarce from that booth, has heard us relations before we actually say in the voice of the Dreaded Modulus or we take the form of the resident child that reminds Lar’ of his youth, O.K., let R (for rotation) equal any number; having found that R may be positioned between two things in order to (through turning, looking, and merging through converging) make them equal, we suspect that R means "equals": hence we have the child’s R neatly inscribed between the two terms PEOPLE and MATTER, which together the child has heard from his immediate ancestors and seen in the culture so often as to mate the two terms and identify them: which the child therefore calls R (Lar’ recalls from a dream he had of working in a moving house): hence People R Matter, which might muddle itself slightly if the R be merely heard and not seen, since then it might come out as wr, or some like speech d’effect (not to be confused with "Drive-Ur-Self"), whereas sounding just like the word "are," the letter "R" works O.K. to mean "equals." But what bugs Larry is some half-received words themselves or emotion afoot in Mayn’s friendly chat, that the way Mayn’s diverse informations have been given is telling Lar’ two things at once on separate but equal machines-like, you cain’t luck into both at once ‘cept by a mode he has only dreamed of, and the two things are: PEOPLE MATTER; and PEOPLE equal MATTER.

Larry feels one of these people disintegrate around him, it’s his too-young-acting mom, while around him in the terminal that he doesn’t travel through much nowadays living not on the Island but here in Manhattan, people hasten to get their train, and Lar’s humming of course at the premise that beyond this gone-to-pieces capability they will put themselves back together later. If Lar’s mom Sue one-on-one with or without possession took the court now, she might find the classic one-on-one upped by all the don’t know about her son Larry (though Secretly Can Come To Love) who like all the rest sees Life, does Larry, as backpedaling, backpedaling, and couldn’t Larry be seen by Susan as a divided and conquering Ewe-man Be-in not one but two sons to babysit (to diaper, to lift, to look into, to hear yelling clearing yare iddle lung, haroong harangue, to suckle mebbe two on two but maybe not) when by contrast she had been all but certain the unknown kid she looked forward down her front to seeing shoulder its way out of her, slow-diving ‘thout benefit of arms (don’t worry, it’s got arms, don’t you worry, they’ll come, they’re there below the tiny shoulders I thought; they’ll come, they’re there), was the one baby that she wanted and the only one, she said.

***

Yet a Wide Load—to pick up Mayn’s words—a Wide Load coming out is what Larry believes he was: because, though no hysterect Sue (unlike her friend Lucille who, perhaps since she rec’d her hysterectomy right after an abortion, never blamed her hysterectomy on the size of her by then eleven-year-old red-haired son’s given head at birth), Lar’ sure got the idea somewhere along the line that the parameters of his own capital (though maybe all that was inside his head) split his mother sorely enough to sever a faith years later acquired by her through a book, to wit that the mother ape (read baboon), while readily losing interest in a babe of hers if it die, loves and tends ye a live one for all the world by instinct to not remember the pain of childbirth as soon as it’s over yet as if that pain through some semen of amnesia remembers to beget mother love like an opposite of the pain, and so the Earth grows more rational.

Yet did she feel mother love just in order to neglect (read forget) the kill of Larry tearing headstrong through her? (We can’t blot out a sex flick of the late century in question, and the star stud’s creamy baritone advancing his own original pleasure-pain theory to the featured lady above him slowly centering down around his disappearing X-erected membership also baritone-arm cartridge.) For then Susan, if we now are even still with Susan alone, might after all not have felt truly mother love but only that the obstacle-pain was a presence to get past until she was sheets to the wind yonder and knew oh that she still loved her husband after all: but then only if she was still really she, like the century in question, there within our accommodating Us where many women prove to be like her with her very same problems to her relief at Grace’s Body-Self Workshops—and they prove to be like, but prove as well to like—for it’s Important, it’s Important, she found out and cried out after years of needing mothering more than to be liked by men, which was what she had thought it was all about, namely what she fell out of bed into each tense, dream-rewired morning of her one-time life, namely that ‘twas men she must needs be liked by, she had thought. And Me too, she heard all around her, intimate not falling away or apart, heard it from other women awakening in the new workshop world until some sweeter obstacle dropped away leaving her in another female presence and her within ours among other women she felt herself among, who had not seen the porn film aforementioned except for—in this wall-to-wall Body Room—the room’s "owner," proprietor, and presiding spirit Grace Kimball, who had, with her young, delicate, stern friend Maureen, who went with Grace to the film with a small party of Grace’s friends so that later Maureen and Grace in unison in Grace’s Body Room during a session of the women’s Body-Self Workshop in unison like an octave had the same things to say about the film—the absence in it of authentic one-on-one masturbation but in all fairness the goodly stress or indication through close-shot focus on her requests that a woman might Run the Fuck, though granted directorial close-shot she-focus isn’t necessarily acknowledging the goddess nor is it any substitute for, though also no obstacle to, that adjacent ideal of directorial play, and when you come down to it sex was viewed as bounty kindly deigned by the male.

Viewed upon the permanent screen also of a Manhattan movie theater at differing times by such others among us as further universalize our Sue, who is Larry’s mother but has or had the abundant dark hair of more than one other of ours changing from angel to human and had the occasional though not so lyric or so satin ("onstage") inclination of a known singer to dress now and again in men’s clothes: viewed, as has been said, on one screen at differing times, the now syntactically (tapeworm-?) digested anatomical film above mentioned lived a little in the minds of some of the current women we have bothered to respectfully discern within us, as if we were each of them looking back and forth multiplied by unresolved dreams between let’s say the inner, many-factd screen and the moving color cinema screen in the dark movie house of afternoon couples equal we see in number exactly to (two for one) the slouched, sporadic single men (no female singles) and all like communicants with the light they’re shadowed by, which is also the woman on the screen, a Miss "Jones," making up for (we’re asked to believe) her long-lost time and multiplying it with the support of a small cast of players coupling or even trebling always into her one.

The diva saw it with her lone physician one afternoon long before the naval mufti put in; and she dressed up for her escort in longish gray silk, her giant supply of hair up, her mother’s lace mantilla drawn across a high comb like a veil chaperoning her girlhood, and her annually leased amber Porsche glowing in the garage waiting to be driven to Connecticut for dinner at an inn (by her there, by her escort home). She was having an afternoon off apparently from some articulate structure such as Norma or Rosenddmmerung able to accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale acts but comfortable in another such accommodating structure, her relation with the doctor. This relation she suddenly risked later in the self-same eighth decade of the century in question. For, having always, in and out of costume/role/voice, seen herself rather comfortably as many women—not excluding the patient who treats her doctor to a feast of stethoscopic auscultation, she came one day to risk all that and without a supporting cast: pinned herself down to two, all by herself—though she was in bed with her officer (i.e., pinned down now to two women): the one who casts a quiet hand upon the military man-in-question’s tough and interesting inner thigh whose mufti lies otherwise draped upon a chaise as fealty to this woman who would later contemplate sauteing him the slick, pink, gland-like sea roe left by her brunchen-hearted physician of the brioche chamber the medicine man where medicine is the man who, like the French physician Piorry whom the diva’s doctor’s own idol Oliver Wendell Holmes extolled as poet and percussionist expert alike in rhymes and in the chest-tapped "resonances of the thoracic cavity," unites the dual languages of his love (does the diva’s doctor) in listening ever and ever for the breath of his diva’s heart in all its grown chambers now reduced or maybe grown (half-beknownst to him her friend who really cares for her) to two chambers— which are threatening to be (equally): the One who casts her fingertips upon the sense of his chamois-soft sac easier to know than what floats so unknown within it while the self-same sac she will presently use her very sex to find lightly arriving and kissing regularly and softly the edge of her love, his against her, sealing each time the lip of her; yet also be the other woman of her new two, who turns interrogator as if only that way can she ask what on earth she means taking up with an officer of the motherland regime that casts her father as a danger man and does his grocery shopping for him once a week so he must miss that flower honey he loves.

But what good could her presence do her old father? She’s a Swiss citizen, imagine! If she flew home to Chile and they let her in, it would be on condition she sing:

sing near the harbor that her voice teacher’s piano once reflected through a high casement window and, facing it across the old room, a single round mirror which was the pivotal depth turning the coastal brilliance to a sound of sweetest history upon the grand piano’s shaped black top large as Brazil, as the whole continent, or inanimate as the future and firm as the Latin her teacher had her study.

She could imagine her shoulder blades where his hands gripped her coming up along her back and over the top for a while, and, dislodging the flow, thinking of him for a moment where he now was, down below the deep breaths of her breasts to which his one blind hand goes passing back and forth—and with a delicacy of blindness brushes across. She thinks of him at her mercy, too—or of him being asked questions he could not but answer though he had heard if not them, something already, listening in on her thigh (what? some political infidelity)—she would then entirely take in this crossed cadence and the flow which after all hadn’t lessened!, so that she knew she had it in her power to be made to come: until, having once again hugged this power of hers with all of her legs and a brain in her belly that clapped its high slick pillows, she lay rolled now on her side, happy, and heard herself monstrously try him with questions. Power she all but handled while she swept aside her ignorance of facts that whispered with dangerous constancy while she it was who now asked and he answered, and all the time she feared and proudly feared what he might hear of what she’s thinking coming from inside her thigh.

Which is no more political than dear Clara’s exile-economist husband, just as English as a Chilean of his class can be, quoting Chaucer or Shakespeare, or the American Emily Dickinson who has music but frets so—that one might Waste—what? those Days we thought unwisely we could spare; or the dark kindness of the Scotsman Hume candled by love and such excellent amiability that that depth might some evenings find itself all alone emptying within covers of a small and economical tome, quoting others of that island and time from some vast anthology of English sound, so that one would never have thought Clara’s love an economist laughing his tall way through exile private more than incognito (and "I would I were a weaver," he was heard to say, with Falstaff, and Clara said, "I would you were, my love," because she knew he said a lot of things to entertain her: to which he retorted, "I am your love, my love, ‘And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, / When all the breathers of this world are dead,’ " upon which Clara laughed, no only smiled beyond laughter, thinking how far her children were from her upon a globe you might nowadays just fall off of—upon which her husband the exile-economist sang some American songs in a Hispanic-Oxford accent more poignant than authentic, more close to her than foreign—"Love O Love O Foolish Love," "False-Hearted Lover," "Irene"—that seemed no more out of place than English rock groups with the drive-shaft twang of the Bluegrass in their coke-cooled nose or the drawl of northwest Carobama or new Arkansoma.

Yet proudly the diva feared still more that her officer would hear some price upon his head in her soft interrogations of him, post-ecstatic, pre-prandial, so at ease in (as her widower father would say of her mother’s long convalescence) "a darkened room" that, asking the demufti’d paramour a fine thread of questions like Clio of all her Antonys floating past the Moon-implanted pyramids, the Manchoor Mountains, the roof tiles of Florence and Paris, and over the Nine Ten Eleven Bridges of Nueva York, Where were you a minute ago?—and where an hour ago? I have won you naked and dressed, have made you my body and made for you each charming accident and endearing blunder the art of love hath care of, and still what are you thinking?—if you don’t love me I will not love myself, she hears some other voice of powerful relations seeking at our expense improvement, say, and she repeats it dismayed that she is some kind of angel if he says so, but she knows, troubled, that her lover does love her and did ten days ago with lust and admiration when he was principally at that time in her view an officer of that regime that broke Victor Jara’s guitar hands so he could no longer accompany himself except down the runways of the sport stadium where Neruda had read poems in 1972—regime-officer-someone this young opera goer who might hurt or help her father. But now ten days later she’s flirting with one answer to two wants (how did any man ever kill two birds with one stone?), felt in the devious track coming out of her some evidence that she didn’t know after all this very body of hers she was so happy with here, pre-menstrual; so close with and so happy with that it and its cosmic environs of bed and chamber had forgotten each other easily for minutes and minutes upwards of an hour-and-three-quarters of such love!

The friends of mine who sat near you? she murmurs, you knew them? you recognized them?

He makes a sound—or is it a touch—upon her leg—that’s all.

At Norma, she adds.

At Norma?

You obviously knew them, the man and the woman.

At which performance was this? he asks with the soft humility of a killer who knows what he may be called on to do, and he specifically does not say Rosenkavalier, which they both know Clara and her husband were at.

Oh at both, she lies (and nothing happens, unless the tapeworm track way above the thigh his ear’s to reenacts the ghost worm itself in some notion that gives her away).

Which friends? he asks.

The only ones I know were there, she lies—near you at Norma, where do you know them from?

Norma is the opera, he mutters as if he is under a pillow of many years of marriage, Norma is the opera about the Druid priestess and the Roman soldier, with a modicum of suicide at the end, I think, he murmurs, jokingly double-checking that it wasn’t Rosenkavalier and the silver rose, and the satin breeches weren’t the sacred wood, the threatened kids, the funeral pyre, the hated Roman occupation.

The ones you mentioned, she persists—the man and the girl.

They were a mere socio-sexual phenomenon of older-younger seen in New York quite a lot, last season and this, comes the reply from his mouth but apparently from his ear into her thigh’s live bloodstream, and what she thinks of herself at this instant she would rather not think, and not even "lest he pick it up" down there against her.

And so he moves upward like waking, like remembering, seeking her up here where she’s a soft eye to kiss and a long, warm surface of neck, while she, a good She, gazes over his shoulder. And, blocking the thought of this as a political scene, she finds and describes better than she knew the man with the girl, though not the half-observed movements to and from seats, nor that the man’s bold, squarish, weighty face turning, with an older courtesy more than once to, she remembered now, the girl beside him, hove forth into mind emerging right out of the blank obstacle which is her refusal to think what the present scene with this Pinochet officer makes her, and she can’t think how she saw him that square-faced man in the orchestra so well, she didn’t know she was looking that hard—because she wasn’t.

Socio-sexual, she softly scoffs out of Spanish now into English—you know who I mean: the man with the heavy head of Spanish-gray hair, and heavy, broad shoulders, who seemed to look off over the audience.

I know only, says the man at her neck, that the two vacant seats near me were occupied only during the second act, and not by this man and the girl you are . . .

She sees those seats during Act One vacant of Clara and her husband, who after all didn’t use them; whereas in Act Two some seats are full of other vacancy . . . : two women?

Two young ladies with goggles.

Goggles? Surely not goggles.

Policeman’s smoked sunglasses, a bit big for their fine faces, maybe they had standing room for Act One.

But, she says insistently, her powerful lips at his ear, her eyes way past it, but she doesn’t see what she’s looking at for a second on the wall. Those two, the man and the girl, she begins again, they left after the first act: you made a point of asking about them: what do you want with them? I don’t know their names. I don’t even know their faces.

What would I want with people I don’t know? he sighs.

To know about them? continues the interrogatress.

You are making something up, he sighs; I thought you felt good.

But as she notes the poster, her poster with concentric squares that she was looking at over his shoulder, and actually bites into the upper rim of his ear, he cries out, and then he says, All right, then, they are important if you want, they are probably key figures in a master plot to infiltrate the opera.

And his interrogatress is so ready with her next question, But what do you want? that he lets her hear him think (and say), Not them, and adjusts his ear to her shoulder, dear that he’s willing to seem.

So she wonders what her relaxed neck and shoulders betray to his listening instinct when, fearing for Clara and her important husband and fearing for her own father (whose imported sweet cigars she can smell from here), she finds in the framed poster on the shadow-like wall only that same man—or his face—the man who was with the girl for Act One and left for some reason which is probably as plausible as she to herself (upset plus pre-menstrual interrogator of her suspect, close-up) is not plausible, and she must know why that man at the opera is behind each idling query of her breath against the blurred, gorgeous, close-up demufti’d young fascist admiral who’s less bent on landing a nuclear submarine for his country than in adding to the bank of its intelligence, which is not adding to him—and the sum of its vile subtractions (she works herself up), and has she dozed off into his ear for an instant?— she has—in order to needlessly say, I’m asking the questions—but he, at rest yet drawn by her words, asks (and it could have preceded her own words), How am I supposed to know these friends of yours? what are their names? maybe that will shed light.

Their names are no concern of yours. Or mine, for that matter.

Easy enough to find out, he says.

I’m sure it was, she says, but feels the exchange turning awful.

Can’t we be in love? he says.

I am asking the questions, she says with soft daring.

If not their names and faces, which I do not know, he insists, their connections—is that it?

That’s why you singled them out?

You, not I—and why did they walk out of Norma? Opera is the most democratic of art forms, he adds.

Rosenkavalier? she asks: personal preference, perhaps, she answers— and has made a mistake, forgetting to be true to her lie.

That was what you said. Therefore, it was my presence that drove them away from Norma after the first act—is that it? is that what you are suggesting?

But he doesn’t care; he draws his hands down her back and she is confused, not hopelessly, not hopefully, and what is democratic about opera here? the opera house is right smack in the Puerto Rican tenements you might say. She can’t ask him to arrange for her father to leave his home and come here because, even if the regime agreed, her father would prefer to stay and the regime would not agree, because her father would speak louder than any act except his silent murder some night here in the free world. And thinking of anything but this, she contemplates the absence of everyone, of the middle-aged man and the girl from the second act of Norma, the absence of Clara and her husband from Norma altogether, the absence during Act One of Norma in the two seats she’d given Clara and her husband, into which the two young women with glasses had moved for the second act: until, as he moves down her, letting go of her shoulders and she finds behind her closed eyes the bristle of his mustache on her hip, her rib, along her stomach until his mustache disappears, she finds emerging the face and long hair of the mere girl whom that broad-faced, middle-aged man with the rather harshly striking thick gray hair sat with and leaned toward, in the seats she left for her friend Clara and Clara’s husband—the girl who hadn’t mattered before with her broad forehead and fine cat face coming back to mind having never till now been seriously present, and the diva, left alone with her own abandoned neck, lips, ears while her lover nuzzles her, and softens his own aim gently to a fault where she is wet so that, pre-menstrual for what her desire might not hold back, she starts to say, "I wouldn’t if I were you," but supplies instead of the last four words that would warn him of blood the other words "be surprised if it was the girl you were after."

Whereupon, confounded by what she has called forth—a snapshot of Clara’s husband with three of the staff at the foundation in whose sanctuary for the time being he keeps "a certain profile" (he says), a snapshot—a snapshot that she’s sure includes that very girl, as if the diva onstage were ever absolutely sure of who is in the house, her sight flowing over and ignoring them like things in her when she is singing . . .

. . . confounded by all this somewhat as we are confounded of whom she is a part by her wholehearted breathing that starts up a little light of blind relation, even to the diamond squint of the Ojibway tapeworm trapper now matriculating in his aeronautics program within shooting distance of Lake Superior but she knows she had not the pain in the head and the pain in the belly and the throw-up sweating behind her tongue after all, but then, glad he’s where he is, and glad she is not him and need not close her chamber door, for no one else besides the two of them is here—no children, no old folks—she feels him breathing like his shoulders are inside the flesh of her legs, which they are, and knows that beyond her closed eyes he looks at her, because he chuckles, and takes a little swipe, and chuckles ancora, and rests his ear lovingly ‘gainst her leg to say—with a first trace of bright blood on his mustachioed teeth?— and perhaps he is here (in New York) only to discuss acquiring from the United States a submarine that she has heard spouts (and she sees it along their lone coast) like a whale (beloved, patient coast long enough to berth that U.S. aircraft carrier our Allende was urged to invite for a visit and inspired then to announce publicly the invitation to the aircraft carrier only to have it declined by the U.S. President whom her friends in Paris used to strangely respect for his support of the NATO alliance)—Is that girl (he asks) therefore a friend of your friend Clara? I know you are asking the questions and that is hardly a question, but—

No, she stops him, I hardly think the girl is a friend of Clara’s (and the diva finds his question is about to turn her off, and her stiff answer too could turn her off—which then has an opposite effect, for by an oracular chance she has heard again by memory or tapeworm track or co-female unconscious Clara’s brave remark down the thread of this last, turning mouth, to wit that Clara’s elegant exile husband (who can sing "The Midnight Special") does have a friend or two here—one a girl at the foundation who is devoted to him—and another thing or two Clara said about what’s going on hangs back in the diva’s remembrance like a real thing she forgot to do, or a face not her own).

Therefore, her lover murmurs, her fascist argonaut, her other body, murmurs muffled somewhere—therefore (he says unseriously or drowsing, or half-dreaming of her), your friend Clara and her husband . . . who likes music, and would have a box at the opera in another country ... do not see this foundation girl Amy ... are not in touch with her.

And the diva experiences a fixed shiver at these words of the man dreaming practically inside her. Well, her interrogation of him has brought them to a connection unforeseen, and saying, Amy? She is really feeling she may have endangered her friends—when all she wanted was to arrive at her father about whom she therefore now asks, What are you doing to him? tell me, what are you really doing to him?

She hears herself say not "they," which would mean the regime in general, but "you"; she might as well be proud she’s charged this naked man as part of it; she might as well, though all she will get from him is charm perhaps.

She rides the gentle shrug of his shoulders now in partial answer. She smells the vanilla smoke from his hair and she is nearly dispersed by some future feeding inside her but she smells dry, sharp unsmoked cigars, more acrid than their smoke, above the paternal hearth upon the mantel as many years ago as she once walked kilometres up a thorny, gravelly mountain behind a famous father who gave her a pair of black heavy hiking boots higher than the high shoes her anxious mother kept her in through the beginning years of her piano lessons though not a Sunday-afternoon song recital when she was no more than a child and her father nodded and smiled fifty feet away by a tall, ornate door, and later unseen by her disappeared leaving only a blank in her mind, disappeared with three tall men all about six inches taller than he, and handsome—one (it came back to her) a sewer architect and another a fiery-eyed, auburn-haired scientist, a Popular Front man of course who had been in the South when fifty thousand souls had perished in the earthquake, their heads emptied of the Front’s election slogan Bread, Roof, and Overcoat, so that, years later, though at this moment she, a goddess on a king-dolphin, can’t help seeing the great door ajar to the hallway that led to her father’s study, and finding an aroma of sweet cigar, and a door ajar where three men of her polite audience had been a moment ago—smoke rises from the vanilla of her present lover’s scalp and, in the midst of him with the violet of her own roof overhead meeting her vague, breathing eyes, she finds that whatever that unknown man in the orchestra at Norma (with the girl—Amy?—who works at Clara’s husband’s foundation sanctuary) means to the diva’s spiraling heart, she arrived at her hard-to-talk-about father only to see he was not the end of all her languidly irritable interrogation (no he was another obstacle sought, in the midst of these words of her naked admiral’s Your father is under house arrest and only he can hurt himself; he is fairly safe, he is a great man in his own way and he is, of course, old).

So she sees what she was about—though it too will change as she reaches it weightlessly, daughter, spy, counter-spy, counter-daughter, so totally at ease with her skin-and-bone-gripping arms and scrambling fingers and her neck and shoulder slopes as to prove the ease with which she does what she does so as to absorb the chambers of herself into one amorous whore just in time then to feel this role pass away with who but the broad-faced, broad-shouldered, unknown man in the orchestra who impressed her only upon his absence so that she thereupon became another woman whom the prostitute exploring some secret sign of her own celebrity inch by inch could never buy: and she suspected she might never tell this military man who was all over her like a boy overwhelming her in their joined breathing almost to the last, he was her other body known only for a couple of weeks growing two limbs onto her (his calves, she thinks, amused and clear) for her to plant the soles and heels of her bare feet on—of course they’re bare but what about that long-ago-felt "little swipe"? we remember we wanted to know and to be—never tell, never tell, never tell him that after their dementedly affectionate clasp ten days ago as naked inside as out, she was bound by bodily vow to miss her period and why the devil not?

Or telling him (for she has a reputation after all—and a trousseau beyond all need of a husband to go with it, yes telling) would be a thing she would think about when (and if!) she got to it among remembered phrases of his love—remembered, the way to a man’s stomach is through his heart rerouted via such doctored slick sea eggs as brunch is made for—for she doesn’t see him clearly in her future (not certainly as that We the young wife speaks for herself and her husband that takes on a wholeness sure enough to invade their dual humanity to appropriate it, is that it?, have we approached the fact?)— no, she sees him only as "a blank that will be in the way if we could but find it," some reasonable invading voices, mysterious We, angel perhaps if there were angels anyplace but inside us, saying the words she hears.

And now the diva, swaying generously toward a duplex kitchen and the light in order to rustle up a dish of roe, can be again less than a story in herself and once more part of a greater Breather capable of accommodating implicitly not just her mind but her body with its memorial maps where at least one tapeworm left its narrowing track converging unknown to it or its bearer upon a future point of self removed as soon as reached, flushed atabriney from the scene to show a possessive, solicitous, though friendly physician a thing or two (yet give a body a chance, as even this knowledgeable auscultocrat of the brunch board believes) with all his pharmacopoeiac chemistry floating in his head for his old Boston idol to walk on or—for such is the power of the great American doctor Holmes—to ride across in his wonderful one-horse shay discoursing on Ricord, "the Voltaire of pelvic literature" and (not to be mixed up with Tussaud, who was a madame) Rousseau the therapeutist who professed medicine as an art (read experience) as much like making or like love as history’s obstacle quest where an American Indian tapeworm (or Indian-processed tapeworm) gives way to another blind appetite or two beyond being "with" tapeworm or with father along an always narrowing future which— like the thing or two told her by Clara that hung back in her friend the diva’s mind about what’s going on with them (all these people illuminated by us quite possibly and perchance engendered by them, which includes Clara and her economist husband), their stranded, witty life—was not at the forefront of Jim Mayn’s, on an afternoon in New York when (for he was always thrown back shadow-like by the future he’d been in and so he’d actually witnessed and felt its narrowing) he tried to interview an old loner maverick with a beat-up face who talked about everything almost except what Mayn had been drawn to visit him for. This was a new coastline meteorology this man had made up which had unfrocked or unemployed him, hermit that he almost is, here in a quiet, multi-room "railroad" in a pretty high-rent neighborhood in the lower Village. How could Mayn, e’en with his non-position on history, not wonder that a maverick pressure-front analyst across Mayn’s path could prove also a hermit of New York who had done his share of invention? Was it that we were always thinking—we have to help each other out—of the next thing, not this?—like what is in the next room or apartment? And so because Mayn kept losing the skinny beat-up polymath’s name in favor of adjacent data, substitute epithets, and because this loner with the inventive mind don’t like to be interrupted—distinctly not!—Mayn can’t shift gears and backpedal but is aware of being after not just the elements of, well not just a new meteorology but a new weather new enough to have unfrocked this hermit crab when, as a weather specialist with a national service, he began introducing his own thing into reports and surprisingly was not picked up by the wire services, but stays busy and alive among the red-and-black diagrams drawn on areas of brown paper, split-open supermarket bags taped together on the wall of the final room of the railroad flat, diagrams of weather levels like coastlines and he’s talking about what came out (or went in) as, Mayn later told himself, "obstacle"(!) geometry but Mayn didn’t register it until hours later, having groped for a name he was renaming this old man as mottled and chipped as the fortified walls of his railroad flat until, with another word coming in his mind instead of "obstacle," he nonetheless voiced the term "obstacle geometry" to his phone mate this good crazy overintellectual kid Larry who is coping, he really is, at this transitional juncture of his life (though Jim Mayn hasn’t got the full story) coping with the busted-up marriage of his parents which he really as he says feels won’t last—that is, the bust-up—though he didn’t say where his mother was up to whatever she is up to, and Larry (all ten of him) was on the point of telling what felt like "all" (though Mayn isn’t receiving dossiers of that luridly commonplace sort because he knows enough about contemporary marriage to forget a great deal and still have a rich backlog and standing reserve), and so Larry at once picked up (before Mayn could find the word to replace "obstacle") the term "obstacle geometry." And Larry said he’d never heard of "obstacle geometry." "Oh well if you haven’t heard of it—" "I mean I can figure what it is, Jim, I can figure what it is—" "—//that’s what the man said" said Jim. "Who?" said Larry. "The old genius." "What’s his name?" "Is it the Hermit-Inventor of New York?" Mayn asks, but of whom?

But he hardly had time to be startled at that old monicker from grandma Margaret’s talk, it isn’t as if Mayn don’t know from his grandmother Margaret the Hermit-Inventor’s name—that is, the H.I. of N.Y.—still he is a hermit and he is an inventor, and "of New York," no getting around it, plus Mayn hardly thinks about his instinctive nickname for the frugal meteorologist whose unified-field weather got him tossed out of the government-funded concern that had put up with him for just so long, and when next Larry spoke to Mayn, Mayn found that obstacle geometry—"optical geometry?" Mayn hesitantly asked his young friend— "—well it would include optical," said Lar\ "which I have heard of, but it’s ‘obstacle’—" "Well, did you make it up since I last talked to you?"—"No sir, it was there in what you said," said Larry.

The kid’s in his own world, hermit of the pay phone booth, private even from his apartment when his folks aren’t there—but Obstacle Geometry, misheard from optical geometry, can find its own way from day to day and call to call. And it warn’t why Lar’ exited laterally rather than through the roof of the booth, gently taking and shaking the surprised hand of the amused young blonde woman, while she feels that his gentleness seems overconfident though all Lar’ can get through is the words "You were waiting for me?" to her "You want to come home with me? I live four blocks down—" to which he, still one line from what his offered hand had meant, replied, "You probably live in my building . . . four blocks?" But she laughs, shakes her head with very friendly authority; has a shopping bag in which he can see a bottle of wine with a red cap (of vino, his father would say) and a bunch of celery, leaves greener at the top, and the darker shoulder of an avocado—so she is not a prostitute; her clothes are a little mussed, she’s been working; she’s not a prostitute, he repeats to himself waiting for something to happen, for Larry then regretfully smiles friendly to the blonde whose bra shoulder strap under the loose knit of her dark sweater passes palely on its way—sweater or blouse or whatever it is, and says, "Really, thanks—I’ve got a girl and"—he shrugs with aeons of masculine understanding in his sensitive mouth but she says, "Oh," so softly, "whaddayameaj??" as if she uncannily knew that that other "older woman" (Amy) isn’t his girl but only would-bz.

As she surely won’t be if she hears Mayn mention that Larry cut short his call because of a ladyfriend, though, once more home at his desk amid the empty apartment because his father’s at a men’s group tonight over at Hudson Guild where they get info on loving their bodies and (Marv smiles) brushing their teeth, Larry thinks of the loaf of French bread sticking out of that girl-who-tried-to-pick-him-up’s shopping bag and he should laugh at this but all he can do is leave his mother-bought roll-top desk that he rolls down roughly every other night to cover up the neatness with which he leaves his books, pads, and a diary he hardly keeps and his father would never think of getting into—and wander to the phone to ring Amy’s ringing ringing ringing phone thinking Grace Kimball is entitled to her views and Larry is the last person to damn her new Open Marriage law that has had such consequences in his life, whether or not he would point out that she herself having first closed out her marriage never got engaged in Open Marriage except as extended sexual partner (ESP) no longer called Other Woman. But as for Larry, it’s the whole works or nothing, and, listening to not even a provocative busy signal off there at Amy’s number, he visualizes the blonde girl smoothly two-handing a record down onto her turntable and then removing from her shopping bag with those friendly hands of hers one avocado, one crisp loaf of bread, one long bunch of celery, one dark bottle with red cap, and he can’t think what except he is convinced with a rising mist of intense interest that there was a chicken in there, yah he is so clairvoyantly certain a roaster was waiting down in ye bottom of ye bag that he dials for a moment his mother’s new number on the Island and hangs up in mid-ring and dials Mayn’s and a woman answers with something heavy in her hand, he’s sure, and Lar’ presses his finger down on the cradle-bar rather than let her hear.

That is, what’s going on at his end. Which is not only but also marital bust-up (read single parents’ divided homes, read Susan’s got a [read] friend [read] going through a stage, take a book any book, book equals read, but equals equals means, and since read means means, clearly son-Larry means —hence, equals, hence reads . . . matter—read Mayn because Mayn is "good people" (his phrase that Larry now uses) and People R Matter.) And what Lar’ reads is something he’s got to settle, and before he knows it Lar’s over there only a six-minute walk at the apartment of the girl who, yes, woke him from the longish magic of his call with Mayn, and to Lar’s mind she has now changed out of her loco weed purple into what he can’t see because he in his mind is animatedly telling her this dream he had of waking in a moving house rumbling down a highway in the middle of somewhere almost definite but it’s March and everyone out here is asleep as he passes, although when he lets the shade up to see the moon there’s also a helicopter silvering in on this wide load of Larry’s house that he’s woken up to moving (for crying out tears, as his dad says) and Lar’ can’t object or even speak, which makes the blonde girl in her bathrobe (but you can’t make anyone do something) feel something and at her open fridge door nod to Larry happily. Yes, she agrees, that’s what happens, you want to cry out or something but you cain’t even request directions, like what state you’re in or where it’s going, because the house isn’t only your house now. Except what comes next’s too private ‘n crazy to tell the girl, and he loves her, but beyond her waist in the lighted inside of her fridgerator he sees a whole familiar two-part thing/amenity that fades the second he identifies it as a telephone, well you don’t know what other people like girls keep in their refrigerator (read icebox, as Lar’s dad calls it) but this fridge phone naturally isn’t a pay-type but a "home phone" and thinking to reach and call whoever it is that will come to him when he gets hold of the phone and is ready to poke out the number adding up to get a result at t’other end, he feels the phone lose mass, let it by modulus be a piece of angel cake fading through mouth water, into the night-white of the refrigerator’s ambience, for hasn’t the blonde closed the door? and how’s he going to make sense much less have her like him for telling her how, when randomly turning away from the parlor window of the moving house in his true dream whose wide load he has woken into in the middle of the night, he finds framed on the wall a digital sampler stitched with tracks of chickens crocheted from real fingers if not from the heart, and framed on the wall behind the davenport—all of which keeps constant (as our wide load like yr mob’l unit rumbles through any continental region) bedded upon the great wide-load (house) hitch trailer (itself a long ways from the slanting Indian travois dragging the horse)—the sampler says not HOME SWEET FOLKROOM HOME much less SHOULD MUSIC PROVE THE FUEL OF LOVE LAY ON OR IN GOD ‘A WE TRUST BUT PEOPLE R MATTER (hence ticklable! it comes to us): and the girl in purple and her home phone are gone just like that; and Lar’ is at least left with the current obstacle to their union, and he doesn’t want to tell about either the Two-on-One Quantum Regress, or the Dread Modulus by which one system can be turned like the tables to another, or about the individualized screens that tell Lar’ two things relatively at once; trouble is you can luck into them only by a mode he’s on’y dreamt, which, try as he will, he must know through refiguring it, while anyway what matters is that the two-thing-at-once is what Larry feels he’s been told in Mayn’s informations vouchsafed to Larry in a stream of talk.

What was this information? And told how?

for one thing the eight-hundred-unit, Mayn-mentioned, ancient Indian apartment house that was cut like its myriad portal shadows out of and into what’s already there under the sky that was hardly without would-be dust pollutants, if altogether less fragile in those days;

and for another thing, that hermit from the City of the East occupying one of those eight hundred units for a few months at a time in that ancient multiple dwelling in New Mexico, who befriended Mayn’s grandmother or the East Far Eastern Princess (who had been no doubt overly influenced by locoweed her horse consumed and her veins embraced through the softest of saddles), or both grandmother and Princess, for after all it was the grandmother that (Larry is well aware) the Princess saw herself distantly conjoined with in the glint of the hermit’s eye up there in his niche;

and for a third thing, the odd economical conjunction of changed patterns of rainfall evicting the cactus-tough Anasazi from the wondrous cliff they lived in as if it were a body, with the epic cycling through all the kinds of locoweed (plus one) by the botanist Marcus Jones roughly a decade before these events and roughly—with an approximation about as useful as the eleven-year paralleling of sunspots and economic cycles—roughly at the time of Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption mentioned by Mayn which opened up to scientists the night-shining mother-of-pearl clouds fifty miles up in fact and the twilight effects, and, behind the cosmic New Mexico sunsets, the stratospheric layers of aerosols whose infinitesimally particled optical properties became a central thrust of atmospheric research which, if it does not include Mayn emplaning to Colorado to the Weather Center or to a barren rock in New Mexico near three other states of the Union, does include Larry maybe someday going out there, having been propelled by his elder new friend Jim (who in such an easygoing warp unloads on Larry these scrambled matters for Larry) to refigure:

an eight-hundred-unit Indian cliff dwelling; the Hermit from the City of the East mellowing out high "upstairs" in one of those units marked only among the blanched sheer face of cliff and the portals of shadow by his glinting eye observing spiral wind playing with native snakes; then the rough intersection of Krakatoa’s upburst circa Marcus Jones’s botanical bicycling jaunt in those parts; and, in Mayn’s minimal maundering, the rain that did not come and did not come except in the pattern of its change spelling disaster to those Anasazi Indians who must quit their multiple dwelling and move elsewhere.

Was Mayn telling Larry something? Marcus Jones the epic-cycling botanist ran out of names for locoweed—a hermit in motion, he was like the plants he found, a navigator among driest shrines to wind and sky, the rain that came and was saved in memory of need, and, centuries before it, the rain that for one mere decade did not come, whose absence plus perhaps a few enemy Apache scaling ladders made the Anasazi by the hundreds vacate the premises not questioning this edict of Sky and Earth: Lar’ can see it, while he stands still in a room that may be no huger than a transparent phone booth and he feels like one messenger in the world who stays put, but can’t take the next step to account for this curiosity of the messenger who is borne down on by the message, but that’s not it—Larry sees the lone pedaling botanist content though running out of names; and Larry, for the purpose of hypothetically modeling whatever may prove to be there, creates a one-greater space frame that can appropriate territory south of Jones’s dry run of floral Utah thus take in a multiple dwelling looking out for rain, and Larry creates also a freer time frame to please find—in the same great elastic year—both Jones’s botany looking out for locoweed while looking inward for new names for it, and Krakatoa’s upburst with its long weather fallout—so, with these model space and time frames, Larry arrives at Mayn meaning a woman envisioned escaping via some reciprocal rotation of a distant mentor’s eye into another story: evidently Mayn’s grandmother, who entertained him, had been in this history and had escaped to or from the West with the aid of some male solitary or other, and the rain that an unthinking child will tell to go away, go away, come again some other day, could not be counted on to come again yet wasn’t gone either, not over and gone as if forever after but was elsewhere in a similar hemisphere, the rain that left the Anasazi high and dry found new forms in the rocketing riot of Krakatoa’s eruption that rained magnificent nuisance far and wide upon its island and the sea but rained also permanently upward arbitrarily to help create those twilight aerosol and mother-of-pearl clouds noctilucent as the dream’s wide load which then in later life newsman Mayn pursued in the form of upper-atmosphere meteorology he occasionally reported on, especially long-range decay factors though even with his own normal quota of two evolutionarily-rather-small-lungs (chest expansion be damned) he’s hardly on intimate terms, he said, with nitrogen-oxide-measuring instruments (he’ll let the air-flow cylinder do the driving, and the reaction volume and the purge volume) though he is sufficiently cozy with Savage’s gadget aboard the ‘75 U-2 and is on friendly terms with ERDA’s Ash Can program balloons.

Well, a little knowledge used to be a dangerous thing which is why we have always been in danger, as Larry’s economic mentor and interrogator said, always never out—but now a lot of knowledge is as much more dangerous as Larry’s twin-twain two-thingama-screen personal system matters more than where in the end this Mayn’s really coming from, or the true whereabouts of Krakatoa to whose foot Lar’ thought he should have come having imagined Hawaii’s leper colonists not wiped out so much as re-pondered by a record tidal wave gushed from the sky directed by Larry himself from a high, pastel sea-view balcon (corbelled out over the beach from an elegant dark hotel room behind him where his parents weren’t quite talking), or the actual position of ten-thousand-to-twenty-five-thousand-year-old Midland Woman lying patiently in Texas waiting to be discovered in 1953 under much younger Folsom Man and the remains of his half-wasted bison all of which Mayn had deleted from some New Mexico copy of his as a subtly irrelevant look southeastward from Ship Rock to that postwar oil-boom town (you guessed it), Midland, Texas, upwards of sixty miles east of the New Mexico border that in ‘53 made it onto the Digger’s Map of Ancient Time though all that Midland Woman gave was her good head, long and delicate, small-toothed so Lar’ imagined beneath the unthinkably deep-set eyes of her precious skull a glistening tongue that could do what his mother Susan could with hers—a big thing with Lar’!—fold it to a long-tubed music-flower yet flute the edges of this scrolled and folded pipe—what no one else in the world would do.

Yet why, then, does the little knowledge he has of Mayn get in the way of all that Lar’s, well, "got" on his mother Susan who has left her normal bigamouse-spous playing with Larry-son and Marv-el-housbond to live in the house on the Island?—so while she’s the one who went, Larry-son feels he is the one who is now successfully out of the way; he’s got no name for this except that in his active sadness that ("If I could be another person, she could be") his mother has split, no kidding his real sorrow, his black-with-brown-letter-and-trim Raleigh ten-speed bike’s sweetest (though deceptive) swiftest uphill gear catches—good, he’d been concerned about it—or the chain catches it, and, even against the wind, frees him of that transitional threatening clank (like some hideous thing wrong with your car) to vector between the united product of gravity raining invisibly down through his shoulders and the steep incline at the point of Tenth Avenue. But he’s not looking for locoweed in Utah, he’s just out on his bike thinking his way between double-parked trucks with potential open doors and sour pedestrians crossing ‘gainst the light until they run out of sotto-voce names for him gearing himself seventy blocks uptown, eighty blocks down like a hired messenger, then forty blocks uptown and several east to wind through the other dimensions of our Central Park with its labeled trees and so on, and nothing will stay still. For although your Mississippi catfish nine foot long with God knows what all in it contains, they say, the word we are waiting for of whether the fault from New York to Tokyo will divide and crack and bring the Earth to its knees and skyscrapers will scrape the ground and fire our well-rehearsed salute to the Sun, the two screens twain can’t bring a future Tokyo earthquake here to New York and Larry knows he’s pretty free and could be relieved if he would let himself be even if things won’t stay still: for he thinks for a moment of the woman his mother is staying with whom he likes and how she rides a bike bent way forward and now his mother Susan does—God, he can’t keep up with them any more; and he might like to think further upon this stumbling block in the way of his life but, on the contrary, here comes the gearless two-wheeler of the botanist Marcus Jones in 1883 bumping, jarring, careering, cutting his way through the living locoweed of all the names he could think of for new varieties, ten years before a Victorian-American girl Margaret of nineteen or twenty (secretly and premaritally at war from herself) exceeded her mandate to cover the 1893 Chicago Fair for her father’s Windrow Democrat, particularly the (as we remember it a century later, "low-key") New Jersey exhibition (plus twenty-seven nations and remcarnation a la Carl Browne the populist spellbinder who could not spell but peddled a breathtaking theory of our—as we might say it a century later—soul "bank" drawn upon by each newborn according to its incoming and ongoing needs), yet Margaret upon completion of her Chicago stint in summer ‘93 kept going as if she could not turn and return home to (her parents, her brothers, her implicitly betrothed) Alexander who, one score and one year later, went with his wife Margaret through the last dull glow of October trees in Englishtown, Red Bank, and Rah way to Carnegie Hall, New York, to hear the Pankhurst woman shock American suffragettes crying that Britain was fighting Germany partly "for you," and Germany "hacking her way through Belgium" was as much in the wrong as "we" were when "you fought us" on what proved to be the good suffragette claim of no taxation without representation, and Alexander carried the report of Christabel Pankhurst’s anti-neutrality speech back to Windrow where his father-in-law was even more reluctant to run it than Alexander to leave Margaret in New York to "cover" Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s pacifist pleas to America at Carnegie Hall five days later splitting the suffragettes and precipitating the Women’s Peace Party of New York and splitting, as Mayn hardly knew and his grandfather Alexander never would accept, a female wing of his own family, though Margaret’s daughter Sarah, Jim’s eventual mother, subtle in her own mild, needling jokes and pleasingly soft ‘n sweet upon the violin at the age of ten(-and-up) must have had deeper reasons for turning pacifist and vegetarian against her mother Margaret, who was a minor New Jersey celebrity-militant. Later, Sarah actually amused Mayn’s father her putative husband (who really and truly dreamed at night of owning a white Hispano-Suiza touring motorcar) by observing that the Vote was the least of the complaints of her sex and while votes for women might matter even to the point of electing women one day, suffrage was suffered to be a substitute for a lot of other things. Witness her own once-militant mother Margaret’s relief at not being returned state senator in one run that she had been coerced by a bunch of men into making in the days of Coolidge. Who’s Coolidge? Larry asked. Mayn said that without knowing the French or the English for the proverb Emmeline Pankhurst quoted in honor of her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in hopes of joining younger women with older, Calvin Coolidge would have approved and would have said, "If youth could know; if age could do." And Larry, feeling he is not alone in this individualized history and doesn’t mind passing it on to other minds if it’s there already because he intends to squeak to a stop at, economically, a Tenth Avenue red light where there’s a transparent phone booth and phone the young woman of his dreams at her office in an area so different from the Tenth Avenue small Spanish shops and garages and a public school and a bar—weaves through a decade of Krakatoa’s debris dodging forward and backward in time to find Mayn’s grandma Margaret in her fifties in Windrow-town, not hitting the ceiling but waxing, if not quite flummoxed at least so fiercely angry at some electrical contractor Bob that Larry couldn’t help recalling that it was this Bob’s view that government without newspapers had much more to be said for it than the other way around because where would newspapers be without gov’ment to go on about, which Larry coupled with a wrong notion voiced by Mayn that if there had been newspapers the news of the 1815 peace would have saved hundreds of British soldiers in New Orleans from becoming mere material to be shaped into a mountainous monument to War as Fun by the sword of the very Jackson, Andrew, whom the Windrow Democrat was later founded to support—where what was lacking warn’t newspapers but rapid communication. Which in modern times we have but always had, as Larry thinks (shifting into a heavy-pedal gear) breasting a hill headed north through real-estate values inhabited by an active if not ever-prosperous Hispanic working class who are getting in his way thinking yes rapid communication we always had in order to take such assembled data as Mayn’s news of Fort Nightmare that you can pass through like a shadow or like a machine-gun spray shot and never feel that fort you’re passing through.

And such assembled data as the Navajo Prince’s mother for whom a ceremonial sing was being held in order to find a way into her head through a hole chock-full of demons, and this old all-purpose hermit, Margaret’s ally, who needed a break once in a while and went out West to occupy one of the ancient units of the Anasazi multiple dwelling but not necessarily a break from himself:

all of which super-rapid communication joins simultaneously as a tear of anger blinds Larry’s eyes as he shifts to low gear approaching a light that’s still his so that two lunchtime Riquenos (or who knows "what" they are?) slowed down if not quite on hold or the worse for wear join in Larry’s tear for him just as he half brakes then accelerates between their merged units and, clipping a coattail, an elbow, a hand, feels the merest swipe of a furious limb as little as a finger or two upon his shoulder as he passes and, heading through the intersection wondering how he could do such a thing yet seeing, as clank gives way to whirr, that Marcus Jones when he couldn’t think of yet another name to call a new variety of royal locoweed called it after himself, his legs so weary, his porous mind desperately interested which at this moment of near accident that wouldn’t make the papers Larry (who has grandparents only in California) finds the grandmother Margaret was as well—desperate—now where did he get that?—but on the locoweed breathing into her from her soft-saddled horse or from some horse or some prior anguish wherein, for sure, that hermit in his portal-shadowed high unit gave her his eye to pivot her from self to self.

So, as the two Hispanic pedestrians, lurching—nay, lunching—across against the light, close ranks behind Larry’s bike, he feels the two of them like one kindred gap he’s passed through when they weren’t concentrating, feels their flesh by way of, first, one cluttered storefront window (in the next block) with two TV sets angled toward each other, one off, one on, as a hand reaches over a partition and switches channels—and second, a couple of seconds later at the other end of this new block, another storefront and another TV set being watched from the sidewalk by a broad-shouldered woman with two loaded shopping bags that like buckets and for balance’ sake she hasn’t set down, while the same TV’s watched from inside by a man sitting in a corner of the storefront window beside a Messenger Service sign, the man for that moment as odd in himself (his dark hair thickly threatening to grow down his short forehead to join forces with the frontier of his stubborn black eyebrows) as Larry, seeing on the screen Grace Kimball in boots (one of them crossed, man-like, across the other trousered knee) and a broad-brimmed hat beneath which she talked, knows that the screen with entirely other contents that he’d seen barely a moment ago at the other end of the block was switched to the same channel. Now how did he know that?

Well, it might be important, he hears—it might be important, Larry, the words say, voicing a female presence that he had an appointment with twenty minutes ago, a motherly voice that catches up with his silences to irritatingly say, What are you feeling, Larry? it might be important—and to say later, You’re irritated, Larry, that every little thing matters—Yeah, that’s right, that does irritate me—that you’re one of these people that every little thing matters to you, it’s, it’s—What, Larry? can you say it?—Oh shit it’s heavy, it’s, it’s, well greedy—But we deserve it, Larry, we’re working together for it, we deserve it—Wait a minute: who said it’s both of us that every little thing matters to? who said that?—Maybe that’s what we find out, Larry, what we’re always finding out, that every little thing matters—Greed is what my father’s paying thirty bucks into, but you’re getting all this stuff you’re going to use, you’re using it already, it’s greed doubled if you ask me—O.K., Larry, what’s wrong with using it?—You’re so moral: that’s what’s wrong—Wait, Larry —Laying down the law—But I’m not an authority figure, don’t make me into one—That’s it, Martha, you’re greedy and you’re moral about it—That’s good, we can work with that, Larry—You go right ahead—But every little thing does matter to you, Larry . . . Larry? Breathe—What if I don’t?—and we hardly know each other and already we really have something to work on—But I don’t want to pay you my father’s money to attack you; after all who are you?—Why not?

The voice of Martha, in her ripe thirties, receded when he turned left; he rolled a block west, silently, fluently, and cut south down Eleventh Avenue (a narrower-feeling two-wayer with a divider), and the voice picked up when he turned north again until the moment when he cut between the two Hispanic lunchers threatening to be one who unanimously could offer him bilingual abuse, which helped to shift him recycled from between them and past the changing light into the new block, to be visited then by genius (I’ll be thinking of you, Larry, said Mayn, who also said that you wouldn’t get him on one of those things in today’s traffic)—genius? because now, at the very moment Larry’s wasting his black Raleigh bike (ouch) on the topographical feature length of Manhattan’s theoretic island, the ruts, crevasses, minor lakes dammed where a landmark sewer’s backed up out of sight and his naked tires can’t see beneath the surface the sharp mean trowels of broken glass (tooled from last week’s jettisoned boddles) he finds what he wouldn’t have if he’d kept this third date with (read the Electric Chair, read D-D-D-Destiny) Ma Therapist, Mahtha by name she’ll answer to ‘n come runnin’ while yet seem to stay where she was a minute ago at home curled stockin’ feet in her soft mobile chair who his father (who he wishes would stop thinking of him) has "brought in," though it’s Larry who’s being brought or biked in to the therapist but en route though receding from the therapist, has found, namely, the real action and Larry finds it is laid out for him somehow while the ground plan of it is half asleep there below him and his emotional bike dozing like only a city can doze, steady and gapped, like breath when it comes only faintly, don’ you know—

But we do. We are. Angels of change, seeking human limit.

So saying, having been told to go ‘way yet retaining (like fluid) the stored (if irretrievable) impression that she had been the one to depart: and, thus, so saying, we betray in the best sense, that is to oneself (because we don’ need no one else to criticize us we can do it well enough alone), that we are we in two ways—a 2-folded we like him and I, and a all-type we (Do you mean, asks the interrogator all but forgotten except by our hellishly independent Pain, do you mean we all?).

But as soon, thinks Lar’, as that grand ground implied itself to him through the tight-sprung folds of a twenty-two-buck bike-saddle, it found itself obscured by the small tip of an elbow appearing just within the operative TV screen in the first storefront window of the block, before that silent screen was rechanneled to a segment of swarthy marchers flinging shouts, cries, arms, hands, bottles, one at the camera enabling it to pass to a revolutionary man or woman face down in the gutter one bent arm at rest along the curb. So, having registered the well-clothed host on the previous channel and the bright elbow resting on a talk-show chair arm right next to the host’s ribs, Lar’ could hear the broken English abuse projected bilingual rehearsed so often as to be now unrehearsed after him by the guys he’d nearly hit (hence distinguished for a moment one from the other). Which was an improvised audio for the swarthy marchers on the news channel especially since they were at once replaced on camera by the body holding its breath in the gutter. And a moment later, riding past the storefront TV displaying Grace Kimball like a message of wares within, Lar’ knows that the elbow was Grace’s elbow in the other TV in the first storefront where he now already recalls there were two TV’s angled half facing each other and one TV wasn’t on.

So that, coupling if not cubing the two operative storefront screens with the two different channels employed and the second, unemployed though not necessarily inoperative TV in the first storefront plus the man inside and woman outside the storefront both employed and unemployed, Larry turns away from the nice lovable therapist his dad fixed him up with who at this instant of her full day is "with" somebody else, not Larry and his wide and klutzish shitload of half-life dream which to tell the truth he isn’t bringing her because she would rather he told her his daydreams, some less in him than he’s at large in them who himself for all he does know doesn’t know that between him and the therapist (who’s on a high floor) is somebody at street level waiting to waylay Larry and bother him, a fact at least three people know but not Lar’.

Who now—as if his front wheel were his vehicle—turns away and must cleave to his own route, obstacle or no. For Mayn did half-know what he conveyed to Lar’. Such historic debris as might slip between the twin screens twain or just wipe them out: yet Krakatoa, from which arose stratospheric phenomena in which Mayn would one day find (if such a man—though ever off-handedly—ever found) cause for inspiration—Krakatoa 1883, which Larry not finding in Hawaii has quickly moved to Indonesia where it belongs, volcano and island near unto congruence, blew up and killed people married or unmarried on the shores of neighboring Java and Sumatra as if they were so much debris to be incorporated, were matter smashed by the continuum, sons, daughters, families of matter, Larry hears them in the shouts of the two men who left just gap enough between them for Larry and bike like the wind to startle them into spontaneous commands to do something to Lar’s mother; so that he with his running shoes stirruped in his pedals’ toe clips can see those People in the light of Krakatoa mattering, and angels, being in Larry, are shown what we cannot escape—such as the tip of the elbow, as they say: and that goes for when you can’t see those People well too—although an elbow that talks louder than words on one TV set turns into a Grace Kimball on a set down the block almost at the next corner where nearly causing an accident Mayn’s hermit’s blank gray ingot of an eye high in that Indian cliff dwelling returning young Margaret to the gaze of the East Far Eastern Princess (for one screen deserves another) takes Larry out of a tubeful of womb-men to his sole self for a time, he hopes, not being thought about by anyonel

Therefore, wishing to be Not Thought Of, Lar’ cut then as diagonally as the city let him back toward the East Side south, pumped so alertly through El Parque Central and beyond that everything he saw signified, and yet was, nothing, though the City’s dormant ground plan had begun to stir, to move Larry—ipero adonde?, but where?—well, clear to the busy image of Grace in flesh emerging punctually (it goes without saying) from their multiple dwelling strutting gaily out, her arms swinging as if powered by the small, red, water-resistant, mainly empty pack on her back, so that Larry gallantly risks running her down and brakes at the last second while she grins welcoming him ne’er doubting he will stop, and he understands through a channel-shaped elbow and with a happiness like unexpected basketball tickets or quiet praise from his mother that "frees him up," that the bright patch of cloth on one screen back there on Tenth Avenue was the funny bone of none other than, in the flesh, "Kimball" (as Larry’s Mom Sue called her sometimes), an elbow corner of a puzzle getting you to the other screen where, as TV talk-shows show (even with audio off or behind a storefront window) People Matter and the headless elbow traveling fast as a bicycle made of thought (or light that’s itself at rest) takes you simultaneously to both Grace’s hand and Grace’s face, the one lightly and joyfully slapping, the other telling host, audience, and tube of some mouth-watering surprise that came to her one day as she’s succeeded in living her life, fighting the Habit Patterns, ever making new friends, turning an audience on to how sex and drugs bound to go together in a guilt-ridden patriarchal society, how else can we bear to have sex (—But is there that much in sex, a devil’s deviate (southern) woman host asks) but we’ve got to take a break but we’ll be back even younger!

And Grace’s smile—suddenly, de repente—meets Larry’s in a kiss under the apartment overhang.

He’s home.

"You can really travel on that thing," she says, and "take me away from all this, darling," flinging her hand across the intersection but oops checking her wristwatch as Lar’ sees his handlebars are out of line and he’ll have to tighten the stem by loosening the expander bolts when he gets upstairs, and so (thinking, "If I could be another person . . .") he sees with one of his heads the neatly-zippered oblong black-leather tool kit on a shelf near his desk in the empty, the absent apartment, and with the other head catches in Grace’s interested eye an understanding question which ran from her hand flung to the winds across this city intersection to her wristwatch to her bright gray-eyed glance, and he feels for his wallet that may have worked its way up in his hip pocket—and for the first time thinks—so he smacks his cheek in ascetic alarm—that if you miss a certain appointment you pay anyway whether it’s the real you or not. And knows then as surely as that he’ll not ask her, that Grace emerging from their multiple dwelling a las uno y media or one-thirty P.M. also knows when his therapy appointment was.

Yet in her eye he finds himself liked and loved, what the hell!, and passing a meridian where all parallels imagine meeting with the speed of love which is beyond speed, why Lar’ unpenitent recalls what he never could have if he hadn’t run into Grace through veering away from the immovable obstacle of the nice therapist, who is west and north of here (and more than nice and more than pretty), a dream he had last night—"Breathe"—or this morning —"Breathe, honey!"—in which looking right at his mother he finds he can see his face and hers: but now with Grace’s hand upon his hand which is upon the upper part of his racing handlebar dynamically hard in its very bend and hanging temper, he opens his mouth and breathes like a sigh of relief: to know that Grace has a mother and so does Mayn, and so does Martha, who will charge Lar’s father Marv the thirty bucks (show or no show) and can be heard in one half of Lar’s old brain pushing pushing saying, "Sure the rest of us have mothers, Larry, but it’s your mother you’re talking about, give that all the dignity it deserves, it was your dream and it was about your mother" and a tear blinds the single, warmly clouded vision Larry-son gives back to the woman Grace who squeezes his arm and is off to market, for Martha in this daydream has after all shared his nightdream—which, for he gives in to us at last, means who knows what to Martha, who has or had a mother; or to Grace, whose mother she’s phoned urging her to rediscover masturbation— What do you mean "rediscover"? came back the answer hundreds of miles away—and promising to send her a Hitachi vibrator (change one letter and you’ve got a Japanese import on five thousand multiple-dwelling balconies on a June evening charcoaling what’s left of their buffalo as a seasoning for their veg kebabs) and, to continue to Mayn, whose grandmother’s East Far Eastern Princess’s Navajo Prince had a mother for whom the ceremonial "sing" was held the night the Princess arrived and in whose poor head were untold tiny holes but one greater hole full up with demons cramming the entrance so only a special sing might get past them, seeing through her head to all parts of her most real realm.

Well, Grace strides away, turns and blows (like speech) a kiss, strides on and rounds the corner of the building. She never would have asked "how it went" because she knew last night, when Larry’s mother’s new housemate in Long Island who met Sue through Grace talked to her on the phone, that Sue, who’s anti-therapy, was upset and was all set to meet Larry outside that shrink’s building when Larry arrived at one or thereabouts for his appointment with Martha {Martha, Martha), who through Grace’s funny bone and the two screens of one channel and the gray, blank hermit-screen which in the first storefront the funny bone’s screen turned half-toward in some angular reflection before being rechanneled by hand to violence in another hemisphere yet revealed in the next storefront to be colored matter became a person so familiar Larry felt encouraged to drop therapy. But O.K. let Marv his real father pay thirty inflated dollars (invested in ‘77 think what they’ll be worth in five man-years) for the inspiration of a detour round an appointed space of time—Larry damn well earned it. And as the doorman inside the large glass door’s wind-pocketed differential gravity turns away to seem to call to someone somewhere deep within the lobby as Larry therefore himself shoves open the door and draws his Raleigh swiftly through, missing the returning door with his rear wheel by a whisker, he is bound upstairs to work out the details of this Obstacle Geometry he has arrived at—by Obstacle Geometry itself. And hoping to be for a time not thought of by others, he can gladly quote his mother Sue quoting her own dear Grace voicing doubtless some farther sage: "To earn what you have had, empty your hands of it"—so the thirty bucks is nothing!—hold on to that, Lar’, hold on to it, fella, for aren’t sometimes people the matter, people not letting a day alone, fucking up a sunny bike ride that might as well be spring, as Marv and Sue once distantly sang off key from their closed (from the closed geometry of their) bedroom in the good old days.

He’s already there, although the broad, large-eyed female face like a dream come round again that comes toward him at the elevator only waits for him to come to (more’n halfway to) it, if not to woo, and he addresses her smoothly by the name of his mother’s consort Evelyn and walks his bike along the lobby’s tiles telling her not to hold the elevator, he has to check the mail, being as cool as he dares, till she, his mother’s live-in friend in the ol’ fambley man-shun in Port Adams, tells him glowingly that he missed Grace on TV, and thence Lar’ sees that athletic Evelyn is getting out of elevator, not in, and knowing Evelyn’s been in Grace’s apartment if not his, and conceiving how many many new walks of life taken by such ladies as Sue converge in reverse upon Grace (the genius of that place you are coming from) he abruptly asks, "Is my mother upstairs?"—meaning in Lar’s and Marv’s place (dere all-purpose batch-pad)—and then, ignoring the mailroom beyond the elevator, he angles his bicycle in past Ev’s arm pressing the button, who smilingly with the richest, generousest smile, tanned mouth, tanned gums, tanned tennis forehead, allows as how she thought Sue was downtown purchasing theater tickets but a shadow passes into the health of her face, no doubt Lar’s ambiguous karma that redounds to him in solar plexus as he arranges his wheels comfortably in the elevator car hearing her say inanely, "You look great, Larry" (to which he mutters, "I’m changing my life"); and thinking he can’t be absolutely sure she has like married his mother and murdered him or his father, he mutters, "Go to hell," as the door slides shut and Evelyn’s "Add-in" voice is heard outside and then below him at about blowjob level saying, "Say that again?" but ye lift can’t be anchored or reopened—he’s off—and all he knows is that, mother, non-mother, or no mother, there is a massive body that draws him independently two-headed and agreeably monstrous at high noon to the laboratory of his thought lensing it toward new conclusion if he can only for a while Be Not Thought Of and by the time the car stops at his floor have his real, if potential, privacy for this Obstacle Geometry— which posits that bending around the massive object yields the object itself. Yet something’s wrong, he’s overearned his father’s thirty bucks.

The city’s dormant ground plan stirred and now, even if it’s moving in its massive, historic sleep, it has raised him up floor by layer through Mayn’s hermit’s ingot eye: there lives his grandmother and Larry-son’s Sue-mom where no one can reach them, not even the Mayn quasar idling on quite interestingly about his detour from Albuquerque following Ship Rock but prior to New York, no one’s going to reach them not even the Apache ladders which aren’t exactly eloping with those ancient Anasazi cliff dwellers but have become distracted not by canyon dogs barking but by the seeds of a two-hundred-year-old bush whose triglyceride oil eased in-depth Indian tumors and childbirth and may before the end of the present "in-question century" yield such many uses (lubricant additive, transformer oil, protein feed supplement, acne clarifier, sedative chung gum) that this desert plant may supplant the sperm oil of the great wet whale grazing like buffalo the endangered deeps.

which leaves—oh wow!—Larry in the instant before the elevator car attains his motherless floor, free to formulate, doubtless prior to Obstacle Geometry yet secretly embracing it perhaps, Margaret and Sue’s eastward kinship by way of his painful, painful, oh god isn’t there another word?, painful strength to see his strength, to know Sue wouldn’t have left—would she?—did she? did she leave?—unless she knew him to be grown and moderately safe in himself; and so, because the elevator divides quasar-slow the space twain him and his floor as if some kids had pressured all the buttons, Lar’ have the rest of his life to reflect, which is longer in absolute terms than Marv—and so concludes:

if she was why I moved here into the City, then am I why she’s out there? am 1 why she left? did I a free man give her the spur to wing it?

And thinking that it was he who left, Larry yielded the floor to Obstacle Geometry, yet flash instanter Amy’s work phone; then with his floor still unachieved he thanks God for Mayn whose grandmother and the East Far Eastern Princess have drawn him parallel to Mayn, and to what’s lowering now toward him (and his patient bike), the threshold matrix of a unified O.G. theory that will comprehend how motion toward (obstacle) is motion around (it) but first how one obstacle gets dreamed up in order to lead to another, yield upon yield: where "People R Matter" is a reciprocal for "People Matter": and since Redreaming a Way that two screens can be viewed at once has already become identified or paralleled to Descrambling, it must also (in its fulsome bending) be parallel to O.G.; but the work for this afternoon is the thing whereon he’ll latch his real self-home; and yet we, while honoring Lar’s prodigal wish (to be for a while Not Thought About), cannot go along with his Jeffersonian creed that the inventor develops his idea himself in the Open Market (O.M.) system: rather, we hold that the reality of American profit is such that to implement such idea we need our incorporated articulate structure capable (as we have been sworn) of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units—you can’t go it alone—and "cant" equals "mustn’t"—in other word, don’t—and instanter flashes inside us (but outside Lar’ so he can about see it) a sharp green-water stretch or stripe made by a sandbar so that the surrounding sea becomes more blue—a vacation insight but slightly sad like the leaning of someone else’s long-time thought toward your own.

Until, at the moment that his floor arrives and Lar’ knows Mayn on a floor just passed won’t be home at this hour and, conceiving parallel impacts of Mayn and Grace on his life as a son, he knows or has heard those two lines of Mayn and Grace may converge all they want and still not necessarily meet, Larry hears music the new super rigged somewhere in the ceiling of the elevator for his grand opening as if Jefferson with his interest in enslaved women and pursuit of happiness had invented the elevator while playing on his violin, so our thought may turn to aria set to the catchy beat Lar’ only now is aware of as its absence filled like the ultimate empty obstacle instantly with a warmly rapid-fire Spanish-speaking voice machine-gunning a commercial which Lar’s brain pick up the musical flow (‘n that’s an order): and what’s the difference what phone Mayn’s at, if any?—he’s Mayn twenty-five hours a day.

But stepping onto his own floor and willing to be Not Thought Of for the time being, Lar’ looks down the astringent-smelling gleam of the hall past one apartment door with a brown airedale-bristly Welcome mat and further on across from it a second door with a New York Times in front of it and has to step back into the elevator and press Mayn’s floor, and upon being there he looks out to Mayn’s place at the end and there’s an envelope showing under the door.

Then back up on his own floor Lar’ looks to his right "close to home" at his own apartment door close to the elevator; and he is then so between histories (his parents’ and Mayn’s and Amy’s and others’—and his own— between his own history) that, unknowing, he passes himself and his bike through, into his and his father’s apartment and vanishes past his threshold unto himself like any practiced apartment dweller (even if with the slightest fore-flicker not coming to him but darting from him to find evolutionary evidences of his mother here in this free space where history is the story of libertad, but whose?)

Until, turning (his head) upon the axis of his bike he finds an envelope just inside the door with a diagonal postmark on it and, watching it, as he carefully props his bike, he isn’t angry at all and visualizes the handwriting inside the envelope and the handwriting outside on the other side, and reaching for it he identifies the postmark as his own bike-tire tread and, turning the envelope, he sees only his name, "Larry," in block caps, and feels inside the envelope a stiff oblong the size of a ticket and a slight complicand of paper doubtless doubled about the ticket, and he puts the past behind him and, with the envelope from Jim Mayn in hand, disappears once again.

We knew perfectly well that curiosity isn’t caring, and who’s home and who isn’t matters less than Shakespearean syllables rolling and trembling from the basso rotondo’s unmistakable voice not so far away accompanied by absent-minded music: or so it seems to us as a body and suddenly unplugs our ear to the unrhythm’d height of (is it?) "to your/ather (father father), But-you must know (you-must know, know-know) your father lost a feather (father father) and that father lost, lost his, and the survivor (the survivor) BOUND—" the title escapes because a door down the hall has opened the music to us at the instant the singer lapsed out of the words into the horn of his great cavity’s plenteous colorabuffa; and a young male spark backs out of that doorway hauling one end of what appears to be a loveseat but getting longer and longer, laughing and jibbering to someone who has the other end apparently not the pianist or the singer unless the singer served as his own pianist? Is anyway deeper back in the apartment since he has not cast off from the words and is tuning up, hence not moving furniture until now he breaks off his wordless melody to holler, "Roslein, dumb ducat, stubborn boy, you can’t get that thing through there like that"—for, be it exile or home-going, the choice ‘tween Wittenberg and L.A., Elsinore and Off-Broadway, isn’t easy; but has the basso rotondo given his power to be used by a very young man who bosses him? and who is called by him Roslein after the Schubert song if these details mesh.

And as through the peephole of Larry’s front door (which Lar’ himself is not the type to tiptoe to if he hears action in the hall especially now, when he would not see too well!) we see young Roslein amid laughter and many-tongued abuse stop backing and move forward now, ushering the both wise and unsuspecting loveseat (or what we have seen of it) back where it just came from—

Is it angels of sympathy in us or our community’s own mere power of relation that questions what you don’t know can’t hurt you?

And is the mere question here a power? For hearing Larry feel, it’s like us he feels, as if he could just up and leave his father’s house and live outside in the community he has heard peacefully at work inside him, witnessing meanwhile the aria tidbit (God it’s Hamlet, sort of!) sung by that large, unseen singer who does not know the man named Mayn (Lar’s new friend) who recently moved back into this building, bringing knowledge of sky-high windmills on electronic Wyoming pylons or of whirlwind-induced sickness brought on among the Navajo that only the singer with his ceremonial chemistry may cure, but was only half sure one morning in the apartment-house mailroom off the lobby (one man coming, the other going) that the bronzed bust-of-a-man beside him trying with a stammerer’s persistence to trick his relocktant(!) postbox open was the priest in that opera the other night—but he was (and a quick check of house-phone list, yah yah, that’s the man all right) the one in the first act draped in a robe-thing out there on the stage telling the assembled sacred and military arms that the great gong (well, Jim conceded to Lar’ he’s not much on opera, y’know) marks the rising of the moon and so his daughter, the star priestess, will come—to cut the missiletoe(!) Mayn’s young companion of the evening Amy had pointed out: while here in the apartment-house mail-room, Oroveso, the priest (right?) was decked out for the day like a native tycoon on his way to work, a portly ship-of-a-man in double-breasted camel’s-hair overcoat and wide-brimmed brown fedora (Lar’s seen him) plus to Mayn’s mind a corn-pollen sort of glaze upon his tan that (well Larry has gone back to his desk and could care less and is suddenly lost and envisions a Place of His Own out in the city so /mpatiently that relations otherwise proud of him feel more comfortable in the old humdrum company of the journalist Mayn, in whose helpless head is now being carried a cabaret tune locus’d from "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" to "I’ll Be Around" (by the man who gave us the instrumental "Sea Fugue Mama")—plus a scent Mayn couldn’t place except that its freedom, like an obstacle he skis to both sides of (ouch!) with his son or daughter or wife once upon a time behind him, takes him to the end of the world:

Which end was supposed to be when the People forget the Blessing Way that positions the Earth and the Moon, the mountains and the sky, the He and She rains, and lose power over the winds and lightning and over the great wolf we had rather not see and the nuclear coyote den-bound its entire first year waiting to be fed by its parents but quite competent to bring disease in a dream: this threat doubled, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York (whose own depth cared not a whit for Indian lore as lore), if besides the coyote you discern the deer the coyote runs at, at night where the mountain relative to the long plateau stirs unfelt by those who move around upon it— but what is doubled, the disease or the dream? for the Hermit-Inventor of New York and his other appearances in the century in question has it both ways and doesn’t answer questions except those posed by himself in what is left of his railroad flat in Manhattan which Mayn, a conservative newsman, keeps separate from grandmotherly fables of some last century and this current Hermit-Inventor isn’t available for comment to interrogators or their delegates who don’t even know they would like to ask if Margaret Mayne found the East Far Eastern Princess glinting in the ingot of the vacationing New York hermit’s eye in 1893 or the Princess passing on her new horse found in that eyrie glint Margaret.

For the interrogator like the diva’s officer betrays that special personal neatness of the police, and can seem our personal interrogator with the seared earphones bearing terrible frequencies in honor equally of lie or true. Still, like a breathless stammerer, he asks where we were coming from and what our thrust was when we reported that the diva whose tapeworm once just about obscured her its host is acquainted in all those opera cities with so many exiles better than herself. And we, who have sometime felt the burden of the interrogator’s thrust have gone out of our way to save Mayn when it was he who casually told Lar’ that this Hermit (in his 1893 manifestation) from the City of the East was remarkable single or plural.

Only listen to what comes out of you. Because Waste Can Be Recycled, this truth has made it onto afternoon TV even when no one is in the room to watch, although why can’t Mayn see how what he is takes him right off a bar napkin, that is right off the diagram he draws on it of wind-force in terms of length:

Which can’t express that one wind if it tried except by some second diagram (or sometime four-color map) of all the words that ever used to substitute in that family for feelings that were its history: where a mother unhappy but mysterious about it left, but had already left before she left.

Larry had pointed out that the Hermit-Inventor had, O.K., taken his five to six months’ vacation from New York but not necessarily from himself. But if you listen to what comes out of you—as if you knew much real history— you risk hearing not just breath, which is also spring air dividing around the man Jim’s father, the young man, dressed up (cutaway and mustache) for someone else’s vintage wedding and (on the running board of a vintage roadster coasting like a figure skater)—but you risk as well hearing your own voice which can contain incarnate that once-young best man five minutes before meeting and being introduced into the future of a young woman who was ever after thought to have wed him because of her family newspaper the Windrow Democrat (exactly nine months to the day before Jim, the first of that mother’s two sons, came two weeks early to light—but doesn’t that mean a whirlwind romance, or something?)

But your voice can contain also conglomerates of seemingly grandfather-generated facts: such as that William Heighton, editor of the Mechanics Free Press in the late 1820s and the founder of the Philadelphia Working Men’s Movement in Jackson’s time, had been a cordwainer, and, regardless of that, that cordovan itself (from that Spanish city of leather, Cordoba) was either goatskin or split horsehide and, unlike morocco, holds its natural grain (when tanned and dressed) and regardless of this, continued Mayn’s grandfather Alexander

(who went out in vain to wait for Margaret or seek her where she did not expect it when she returned in early 1894 from the West stopping, stooping, finding in Ohio and Pennsylvania detours from the myth of her journey near its end as if, fearing (which she really did not) her father’s reaction to her being months late coming home, she flew in on a wind only to target some penultimate capillaries by which, having blown in at last to the great City of the East, she took her strange time winding down to Windrow fifty miles away)

Hakluyt in his Voyages refers to that costly Spanish leather Cordoweyn cargoed with "figs, raisins, honey, dates, and salt"—

—and for a moment we who have stood back in invisible company with the interrogator and his ready whip must add through the thinking fingers of an unseen-composer-furniture-mover-part-time-boyfriend to the basso rotondo adding them in an aria central to the climax of his original soon-to-be-privately-showcased comic opera of Hamlet (with music so strangely derivative it might be from an undiscovered score of the Otello-Falstqff’master) nine rhymes, one for each year of wear that according to the gravedigger the unusually waterproof body of a tanner will last (like Shakespeare’s problem child through upwards of a score of different tragic operas) after and beyond burial but this time with one mystery-guest star-singer whom he (tough little unknown Roslein) has leaned on and maybe another star who would be the curious diva—

: an illustrious craft, cordwainery, added Jim Mayn’s grandfather, who knew good shoe leather and who kept a curiously successful Odds and Ends & Second-Hand (mainly American war) Books shop diagonally across (the Jersey Central tracks) from the firehouse—and we hear, he said, in England of the cordwainers’ craft guild in the City of Exeter suing for favor to the Lord Mayor—

"... who was sometimes a Yard," said Margaret—"Bob Yard’s father’s family, very important in Exeter before they came here, even if Bob’s more like a Spanish pirate with those wall eyes."

Which was neither here nor there, said Jim’s grandfather, who spoke facts like a tongue and as if he fancied them plucked free of causality’s warp or cured of any fleeting convergence with others.

Yet this was just his habit. For, by contrast, witness the Mayne family pistol, i.e., what Grandfather Alexander did with it by way of tracing it but never in Jim’s memory holding it along two alternative dumb courses: the ‘‘mantelpiece," he neatly called it before Jim knew "piece" was a word for a hand firearm—where it rested above the parlor hearth pointing at a couple of finger-like cigar containers that were monster fingers of course. The serial number on the left side of the cylinder supposedly dated its manufacture well prior to the 1847 run of one thousand Colts rushed down to Mexico for the Battle of Chapultepec, an order that had revived if not rejuvenated Samuel Colt’s business at its new factory in Hartford after it had failed in Paterson a few years previous.

Now, in 1894 the Navajo Prince told a blonde woman by a Pennsylvania river bank at dawn that he had found the pistol some two years ago in a cliff by the light of the double Moon upon that retired medicine man the last of the Anasazi people. He was so old he was likely beyond death or mere life and in weight as light as, according to Grandfather Alexander’s own estimate, those six-hundred-year-old Texans breathing the purest air there was, in the time when the guerrilla Charlie Quantrill with the lynx eyes preyed on Kansas abolitionists, killed twenty-eight (he said) of his brother’s murderers, and vanished into East Texas to be afterward the brains behind Jesse James whose appropriation of federal funds was to have enabled the redleg-Abolitionist-hating Quantrill to reopen the Civil War which would have been another effect of the Texas "pure" that kept some Lone Star elders alive six hundred years until they dried up and were wafted away eastward where they might have mingled, leaf-crumble-like, with the crude oil and snakeroot used as a last and Indian resort after emetics, cathartics, "cupping," and opium to bring round old General Harrison whose Inaugural Address of March 1841 though edited, expurgated, and violently abridged by Daniel Webster still ran too long (at one hour and forty minutes) for the brand-new President to survive without an overcoat or survive as a historical power (for unlike the body of the immortal Tecumseh the body of General Harrison was not at once secreted mysteriously away so that having never been seen to leave, it might be expected to return). A woman naturalist in the Southwest who was thought mad not because she, a Chilean far from home, claimed a blood bond with the Anasazi medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince had taken the pistol but because she had developed white lips exactly like those of the fierce javelina (or peccary), the only wild pig native to the Americas whose habits and in particular curious scent glands situated in the rump she had been studying on foot all the way north from some teeming point of the Chile-Argentine border, reported that the late medicine man had been given the pistol in question by a many-fingered mestizo spy who had coveted it but upon acquiring it had been uneasy with it precisely because he had been told he mustn’t "unload" it on (or divest himself of it to) anyone except a dark healer at least a century old. Or so he had been assured by the young Englishman with white or blond hair who had let himself be hoodwinked in a game of chance the night before the Battle of Chapultepec in September 1847 in return for recovering his speech which he had lost when questioned some days before about a German visitor (perhaps a spy) who had left with him a map-like, abstract-chart-like thing executed on a square of paper and had then disappeared on a road north toward Guanajuato’s silver-veined hills—questioned the young English person had been by one Marion Hugo Mayne with an e usually, whose western diaries had come into his distant relative Alexander’s hands years ago (read years later) from a friend of Margaret’s, and, bound with them, an account in brown ink in a different hand but with a curiously similar manner and vocabulary, of President Jackson’s use of a safe widower Martin Van Buren in gaining some measure of social acceptance for Peggy O’Neill Eaton, a tavernkeeper’s daughter whose second husband, Jackson’s Secretary of War, she had had relations with prior, though, to marrying him, all of which irked Old Hickory up to and beyond his angry reaction to Henry Clay’s attack on his bank policy, which in turn pushed the President to shift large deposits from the Bank of the United States to "pet" banks just when these claims must be paid out in gold for western lands so that the banks were, so to speak, financially embarrassed when then forced to meet the sudden demands of English banks for repayment of short-term loans. And so it went, as Alexander’s grandson Jim Mayn more than once told a late-evening colleague in a bar of some American city—and Van Buren got stuck with the Panic of 1837.

But the year before the depressed winter of ‘37~’38 when Greeley wrote of "filth, squalor . . . want, and misery" in New York’s Sixth Ward, who but the cordwainers led the way toward federation of local craft unions convening leatherworkers from all over including Philadelphia whence notably the aforementioned editor Heighton, not to mention the Mayn family founding editor of the Windrow Democrat, a Mason who had been pressuring President Jackson to explain his interest in a village attorney’s daughter from upstate New York who had pursued her lover William Morgan all the way to New York and Philadelphia after he had been in a way expelled from that upstate village by being thrown into its local jail for promising to reveal Masonic secrets and had been then sprung secretly one morning by a supposed friend who had disappeared after having allegedly tried and failed to shoot Morgan on the road.

"Cleopatra’s Nose," Mayn’s grandfather would muse—the fine trivia that workaday Mayn and his "ilk" dumbly overlooked—but his grandfather had once mentioned it when Jim had asked about the wanderings of a pistol and there was a gun-control law somewhere in the speculations of his granddad’s memory, for Jim had never known him to hunt or target-shoot, or to touch that pistol on the mantel, and one day Jim might get back to figuring it out because who else was likely to trace the firearms of that earlier family history—unless it was one of his brother Brad’s kids back home in Windrow a million miles from those ancient rainfall fluctuations that may have converged upon the Anasazi cliff dwellers parallel with (and independent of) the Apaches climbing their lethal ladders (as the East Far Eastern Princess compassionately learned) up into those sun-annealed apartment-house honeycombs with not just rabid blood in their hearts but with undreamt knowledge of a magic oil that the Navajo Prince’s irritable though ventriloquially musical mother (for whom the ceremonial sing was in progress the night he arrived with his newfound Manchoor Anglo girl) would apply to restore if not her temper (good or bad!) but the hair to that part of her head where the appropriate people were chanting the Night Way to heal her head-hole in and out of which cream-colored demon-types moved and from moment to moment settled or not. That is, apply—apply, we said—an oil from a bean from a plant that survives only in the driest earth: water is sealed into its leaves by a film of wax, and its taproot goes down thirty feet—a waxy oil the Indians used as a coffee substitute before they knew coffee; as a wax for women’s eyelashes; and to bring on labor contractions plus halt skin cancer in its tracks.

"You mean," said a late-night colleague—"there was an Indian in your grandmother’s life?"

but Mayn himself, recalling his grandfather at least on this score less than what that gentle, well-shod browser actually said, had figured that in the larger sense—

"What sense?" came a neutral warrant of a voice (Spence’s) from the end of the bar like your own unnecessarily self-critical afterthought.

History (which also might turn fundamentally upon whether, at any crux in question, small talk had been possible) was accident pretty much—a bunch of haphazard collisions, and if you’ve got fortuitous stuff like that and little more than fortuitous, how can history be worthwhile?

"—Wait a minute?" came the same voice of a man Mayn didn’t like, who then and later, with his thin, curly sideburns, figured in the current ongoing (though questionable) century—"What’s this oil you’re talking about?"

"What’s it to you—a bean, a seed—going to be good for lubricating high-temperature high-speed machinery, anti-viral penicillin stabilizer, shampoo, sun screens, face oils, you name it, solvents for producing polyethylene—"

But not unhappy exactly in the multiracial structure is the very Ojibway, diamond-squinter, whose grandmother stored oil in a sturgeon bladder—but not the oil in question—nor is necessarily one all-purpose angel-unit asking, But whafs this seed?—a peek of a voice at the tip end of the bar (read time’s tilt) which Mayn seemed to ignore. As did his late-night old-friend journalist colleague Ted, who smoked unheard-of cigarettes and lived in a five-room half-furnished Washington apartment when he was not less solitary traveling; who did not tell stories, and who now said, "Cleopatra’s Nose."

"Which Cleopatra?" chimed in the itinerant photo-journalist Spence, hopeful of company.

Mayn did not acknowledge this leather-fringed man Spence, reared doubtless hydroponically or unconsciously out of the oil he was inquiring about like a scavenger, a Spence at the end of the bar and not even pleasantly unlikable. Mayn answered Spence that the bean had been named in the Lower California desert a century and a half ago by a naturalist named Link after a colleague botanist who had died eighteen years before—"but the breakthrough came in 1933 in Arizona."

"Which Cleopatra?" said Ted. "The one whose nose would have changed history if it had been a hair longer but wasn’t—anyone called Cleo in your family, Mayn?—that’s what your granddad must have meant!"

—while along a bond of humor joining the two colleagues in the same bar in Washington in the early seventies flashed a vacation-beach insight of green-water stripe made by sandbar so the surrounding sea mo’ blue thereby, which equals sad but we can’t tell why, we find only a collection of sunny bodies on a beach and add on two more bodies that are non-present but implicit—one the best man of (then, in 1944 or -5) thirteen or fourteen years ago (Jim’s father, Mel) who is at work back in town at the family newspaper which is soon to pass into history, for he doesn’t like the beach; the other, the grandfather Alexander, who is back across the road beyond the beachfront row of cottages and on the bay side peering (if he’s not snoozing) down into the water off the dock for crabs, for the slow, rich, helpless softies you eat it all.

What had been happening? For what did happen when she got sick later made him wonder what had been happening but all he could come up with was her and his father—people, what he felt they were like—but not events that proved so. Nor had this event that was scattered across the sand at still-unsullied Mantoloking on the Jersey shore maybe a forty-minute drive from Windrow shown itself so he could follow its start to its finish, which was elsewhere; and he hadn’t felt even it until long after: so that he couldn’t be sure, and so he felt dumb, and then, in this order, he thought maybe there’s nothing to understand; or if there is, it’ll come to him as time goes by, the way grandfather Alexander slowly travels the five-minute walk from the beach to the bayside cottage thinking for a time alone about a very fresh chowder for supper with unavoidably a couple three guests thrown in, the Bob Yards, and this old, coughing, until today unbelievable and basically non-existent sonofagun-figure of Margaret’s past weirdly materialized from New York— it’s ‘44 or ‘45—so ancient history has been only fifty miles away all these years.

and one of these, Bob’s wife, is suddenly in the bayside cottage with Alexander saying hello with quickness, familiarity, and anger not directed toward him but doubtless toward the beach, so that he turns his shoulder in order not to deflect it because he knows Bob Yard’s wife well, and their childless marriage filled by their good talk. And feels more than he can put intuition to, and thinks there is something going on on the beach and is told by Bob’s wife it is the old acquaintance of Margaret from the western days who has arrived in the Yards’ car, but Alexander has his chowder to consider, the boys will eat two bowls, Sarah none.

But the double Moon? What meant the double Moon upon the old medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince got his pistol? comes a voice or a unison of voices from the next room as a divider partition explodes lightly in the laughter unseen onlookers give either the reappearance of half a couch moving back into its apartment or Larry reflecting after a long, deflected bike ride.

Mayn recalled more than he told Ted his steady-eyed elder colleague, though the info-dealer-hunter Spence (who came to mind with some sheen of mold on his face) was not present and would not have heard; and besides, Jim liked Ted, yet before he got through telling what little he told, and remembering the larger thing of which the telling was a part while being told by a part of himself out ahead, not telling the larger matter affected the memory of it in a way quite different from a fact that he had withheld that night in 1969 just because the Spence character-sleazy-watchman-photo-journalist was present and he didn’t like the guy: to wit that in ‘33 a couple of researchers discovered that that desert seed oil bore amazing similarities to the legendary oil of the sperm whale whose sea-acres of flow could never have been thought expendable until now sperm whale oil twenty-five years afterward had been slapped with an import ban.

Call it an uncaused event, he heard himself say into his old-fashioned-glass low-ball to deep-jawed Ted smoking quietly beside him who had praised surprisingly (for humdrum work) his series of three articles on the Delaware River engineering, and from there they had digressed to family pistol which Ted said could seem like more than one, the way Jim outlined its provenances—and digressed to the State of New Jersey and what could and couldn’t be done taxwise, and to whales that were still to be seen from the Jersey shore, which had gotten ugly since his own late childhood much less since his grandmother Margaret’s day when they had a cottage in Mantoloking long since sold which brought them to the beach where you let yourself go, with your fishing pier and the long breakwater all on the sea side and a bright hilly beach where took place the phenomenon that belongs maybe not to the history of junior pickup baseball but of sand or angular gravity; and, come to think, it was several figures in the bright day walking, running, standing literally (we think) rooted, and one lying eyes closed though not silently. And the non-causal event—

—You mean "miracle"? the friend said, whose voice was sometimes in recall what Mayn got but not the face, with its deep jaw and its cigarette.

Yes, like Cleopatra’s Nose—arose from the well-known primarily beach game called "Bases" where two basemen throw the ball back and forth trying to tag the base runner who runs back and forth keeping away from the ball —and in which Jim was engaged with his friend Sammy who’d come with them that day from Windrow—and another guy who wore a green sateen racing-type bathing suit—Sammy and Jim thirteen, Sammy a bit tiltingly taller with a longer reach which he wouldn’t use on Jim because Jim would outshove him but could sometimes kick Sammy in sideways preview of the import of eastern modes of violent aggression a generation later, which made our western combat almost overnight more meditated—while Jim saved for the wintertime when they had their parkas on a punishing hook to the ribs which he had thrown maybe three or four times—and the guy in the sateen jockstrap-type bathing suit was running back and forth low to the ground between the "bases" and Jim, who could run, and Sammy, who could take a throw and run, were trying to get the kid out but he would skip sideways between them, and the ball would wing past his head and Sammy get it right back to Jim who’d run up to within a few feet of the guy and toss it to Sammy before the guy was safe and the guy would slide under Sammy’s tag or jump and go the other way and be past Jim before Jim got the ball back in his hand—a tennis ball, an old one, long before the yellows, and so napless and smooth you couldn’t tell if it had been the Pennsylvania ball belonging to a girlfriend of Jim’s who played tennis, and you could curve it.

But in the middle of all this, with Jim’s grandma Margaret walking down the beach and Jim’s half-pint brother over digging near their mother, who lay face up on a black towel with her arms exactly at her sides (ready to be launched elsewhere) and her very dark but sometimes very faintly (in memory) auburn hair still up and wearing a flowered but very dark bathing suit with a skirt—the guy in the middle stopped and walked away, didn’t seem to hear Sammy, who said, "You’re out, you went outside the baselines." And Brad, with the deep-socketed eyes as if he were digesting a great deal that he had recently learned, turned suddenly, small-shouldered, from what he had seriously been doing and yelled, ‘There are no baselines on the beach," and Jim said, "For Christ’s sake," as the guy in the green sateen suit walked obliviously up the beach—had someone summoned him?

So they had to use Brad, who had been trickling sand over his mother’s instep and had been piling sand in earnest over her shins.

What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice but for that moment not Sarah his mother’s, for she was as she had been, rigidly receiving the sun (if non-looks could kill) no doubt thinking her way through a sonata until a few notes of it came humming out of her, but how did you hear the sound with her mouth closed?—answer: through the nose (try humming, mouth closed, and just stop up your nostrils—then it’s out your ears or through your eyes)—

What are you looking at? came a voice again but now like little brother Brad’s but Jim was looking now off a hundred yards downbeach at his grandmother Margaret in conversation with a sort of old geezer, not decrepit but an oldster, who had materialized in beachcomber’s khakis and a white shirt, dark, dark glasses, and a white sailor hat opened out like an inverted bowl; but a familiar bawling greeting came from nearer by and, beyond his mother, who was now leaning back on her elbows and staring at Jim, Jim saw the fully clothed figure of Bob Yard the electrical contractor—evidently having driven over to the shore from Windrow—and then Brad came running over to run the bases, and Jim and Sammy lobbed the ball back and forth high enough so Brad scampered all the way to the other base, sliding in, though he didn’t have to, Jim told him.

What are you staring at? distinctly came a voice which we know Jim was correct to believe he heard as if down the road a future comment on Brad’s preliminary trans-mater excavation concepts were not being given grounds for utterance: ‘stead of digging down, youse cover the thing up; then level off and keep at it a few ages and my goodness you’ve d/seroded th’ Earth surface as much as several inches all around, which renews resources if anything.

What are you staring at? distinctly came Jim’s voice the eve of the U-2 press conference. But the strong hand on his arm counseling him not to bother about the Spence character who’s as good as lost at the end of the bar silenced him—or his voice—while his long-time colleague-friend Ted’s actual voice went armlessly on quoting the famed pilot of the Yankees in response to his interrogator right here in Washington a couple of years back:

... I have been up and down the ladder. I know there are some things in baseball thirty-five to fifty years ago that are better now than they were in those days. In those days, my goodness, you could not transfer a ball club in the minor leagues, Class D. Class C ball, Class A ball.

How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads then would take you to a town you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club?

But, what are you staring at?, said an all-purpose voice, a few short years later when Mayn and Ted (agreeing they needed a vacation) found themselves in the same hotel bar moderately amused by their light, disintegrating discussion of what was technically known as "hardening" a land-based missile by sinking it into an underground silo: lo, a process which (who knew?) the next century might extend to what the well-tanked thinkers down the street called "soft" targets such as cities, if there were such by then (i.e., either distinct from a densification along the seaboard, or after a "greenhouse effect" due to pollution-rich atmosphere above, lidding the healthy glow of our Earth breath below, till our destined glacier melted down and the ocean went up and swamped Philadelphia and its boating clubs along the river there and Venice-ized New York)—for the now western-wear photographer and infor-mation-transacter Spence had answered (for him pretty point-blank) Mayn’s this-time light query What are you staring at?, with the same words with the you stressed, and Mayn shrugged it off this time without the actually more irascible Ted’s help, Spence was so sleazy, well there was something about him that just wasn’t worth putting your finger on: but who cares if the Devil’s up-to-date barter-economics drew the line at making unrefusable offers here, because Spence was in another room downstairs making his own deals.

Yet again, What are you staring at? was Mayn’s line and as warped as his retroactive view of his mother—not worth talking about but if it ever came up, her tragedy, ununderstandable as it was, he talked of it naturally but said out loud that he knew nothing really about it, about the awkward marriage and the annihilatingly downplayed disappearance as if the war ending was what mattered like being strong, and hardly heard Spence say, "I never had a family to speak of—or maybe you just remember yours—you certainly got me guessing—I mean, I never had much in the way of family, O.K.?"

—You mean it was natural to talk of it, or he talked of it in a natural voice? we hear the multiple interrogator like a multiple child having to ask—

—Well "What are you staring at?" was what, long ago, ball in hand, he came back at his mother with:

... for his mother, the Sarah of his remembered moment, had been staring in Jim’s direction as Bob Yard, somewhere behind her, hallooed high falsetto cum deep feckless baritone brashing his way across the beach toward her and her alone, Jim understood, while she was really staring at Jim yet at the horizon over his shoulder too: oh shit, Jim knew she liked him even if in Windrow he stayed clear of the house most of the time "from sun to sun," though he lied when he joked about her practicing and even wanted to hear the interruption no the interrupted phrases of her violining cross slowly, backtracking in order to go ahead, halting upon a gap, her whole self or life, or just music, get it right, go back, go back, go back again and get it right not at all like voices in the evening bursting now and again through the pillowed atmosphere of the roomy house in Throckmorton Street only to disappear like hallucinated messages into what might as well be Jim’s mere thought process, which was like his grandmother’s house.

What are you staring at? said Bob Yard directly above her, a little bent over like in a cave. His charcoal eyebrows vanished under a straw hat as he looked down at the woman who laboriously sat up hunched and swung half round to look up at the noisy man in green chinos who was now not talking, unless he was humming words that Jim didn’t hear.

Up the beach Margaret and the old man were approaching in heated conversation—the oldster maybe not so much older than Margaret—and Bob Yard squatted beside the harshly pale woman—Sarah’s shoulders helplessly conversing with the profound sun, her dark hair defying his arrival, glossy hair, straight hair, her face bending kind of stupidly away from Bob, and her body—her body!—hunched like she didn’t have headroom—

—stupidly? or struck dumb?—

—so Jim knew what his mother was like: she was not just beautiful— and at the very moment when she was warped by an indifference, her look aimed—aimed at him?—so that with Brad and Sammy (who grew younger) and the endlessly plunging breakers pushing Jim to throw the goddamn ball and get the game going, he found himself to be a man:

a man twice told—(he wouldn’t voice that one to Ted no matter how close they were, in i960, 1963, 1972, or 1975, when Ted got sick)—but why Jim was this, he didn’t just know, but knew it was her looking both truly at him and yet around him, while Bob Yard raised his biting voice a notch, "He’s that crackpot Indian hustler-scientist from the old days or a relation maybe— isn’t he that old pal of Margie’s she talked about that helped her out when she was in that tight spot in the old days? He was sitting on the front steps like a veteran when I drove by"—which was why Bob Yard said he had driven down to the shore on impulse (nice day, here’s this old friend of Margaret’s—or is it a relative?—or the old friend, that is—looking for her because he took the train up from New York to Windrow, didn’t phone; said he doesnt)—while Sarah bestows on the man in chinos the intimacy of very cold indifference, but answers—but as if Bob wasn’t there: "Margaret’s romantic adventures are catching up with her"—Sarah’s plain words, but what did they mean? had the oldster appeared here to tell Margaret something? or maybe to ask her.

No wind to scatter the controversy, we add, to convey the potential lightness of the picture, and at that moment Jim had to shy the ball at wonderfully wall-eyed Bob Yard (who seemed like a north pole to Jim’s mother’s south, though not in direction, in some bump of touching and unpleasant barrier), but Jim didn’t throw it after all. The voices of the bathing-suited mother and her chance visitor rose tightly, but in their duet had only a funny sound (like strange vocal cords, not human maybe); and Jim imagined them to his chagrin fondling each other, to make up after this raising of voices. How could he? Because he could see that though his mother had been right here in his sight and, earlier, in the car on the way here—the dark blue Buick with the breezy straw upholstery and the knob on the steering wheel that when Jim was Brad’s age he would sit in the driver’s seat and grab—she had been "here" all the time: yet some scene between her and the principal Windrow electrician, Bob Yard, had come before what Jim was witnessing.

She turned away from Bob Yard who stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets, and she looked past Jim, catching his eye so he knew he was part of that extent of sea that, when he turned to see what she was looking out at or looking off to, proved to have a slow freighter passing from right to left he could tell by the bow and stern (he had never seen a convoy, they must not come this close to shore); and facing what she was looking at, he let go a pure, healthy sigh, knowing that he hadn’t been breathing and he would breathe for both of them—live, play, eat; and the words of his grandmother and the old man in white sneakers she was with came to him like the target within the larger bull’s eye, and—

And he heard—he hears his half-pint brother Brad like he’s getting out of hand with a parent (which he never did) insult him and later he doesn’t recall how—that is, the words of the insult—except that they made Jim feel cornered.

Except no one can make you feel anything, says of all people the interrogator who has heard these words underwater in a health-club pool or during an intermission at an obscure tryout reading (pre-production) of a new opera, a private opera, pressed upon a major basso by his young beloved the composer where the interrogator had thought to find someone to interrogate after the show; or in a therapist’s anteroom, underwater or not—

—made, though, Jim feel transfixed by both couples, his grandma in her bathing suit raising her voice at the geezer from New York, and Sarah lowering hers to Bob. So Brad, having uttered his insult to his big brother who felt the sunburned sand tightening and dyeing his strong, contented arms with its dust, danced away a few steps toward Sammy and came back so close to Jim that Jim drew his hand back across his body to his opposite shoulder. Obviously he is about to back-hand his half-pint brother, but Sarah’s voice rings out saying Jim’s name. Whereupon our Brad snatches the tennis ball from his brother’s other hand and darts away with Jim after him angered, relieved.

No, Jim didn’t want to have a fight with Bob Yard, he liked him; no, he liked his mother taking care of herself, and the newspaper would fold one of these days, it wasn’t competitive with the Transcript’s advertising. No, he wasn’t just mad; he really didn’t like little Brad. So there they were, for a moment of four, five, or six steps—the baseman pursuing the ball and the base runner in the over-all picture of Mantoloking, New Jersey, the blistering landscape of beach, the horizon out where the water gave way to wind—and Jim, skidding into a little ridge of sand, snagged his brother by the waist of his trunks pulling them and him half-down but letting go just as his mother called his name again, and he knew—though he couldn’t tell Ted a generation later—that he at thirteen had missed some point before when he turned away from her to see what the heck she was looking at so he’d warped her and himself into a real fix he would never get out of, oh it was his future he’d have to go to and look back from, or be only a means of doing that—be used matter-of-factly by others who saw what he did not.

And at the instant his brother lay stretched out in front of him, Jim leaned over him so the shadow or human window fitted Brad exact, with no overlap onto the sand. And before Sarah’s angry voice cut through a tissue of his feeling, Don’t touch him, came her shout—Jim had already in fact stuck right there in the sand, and Brad screamed.

Jim said to his old professional friend Ted in the bar of a Washington hotel, "If you can beat that," knowing he’d rather be talking some second-hand factual matter to him about the Sprint missile (a favorite of his despite or on account of its mere twenty-five-mile range)—"ewioatmospheric" because it intercepted the enemy missile only after it reentered the atmosphere (last-minute stuff, twenty-five miles, highly personal!).

"What do you mean ‘stuck’?" said his friend.

"I mean I was at an angle sort of one-quarter leaning like the vertical of an L-shape over my little brother—

—a drunken L-shape—

—slanted, and I should have fallen but I didn’t, and my feet weren’t that deeply into the sand so nothing was holding me, I was operationally extra-gravitational."

"What were you leaning on?"

"My ankle, my shin, my stomach muscles, my own back."

"Something was holding you up. Didn’t you ever fall?"

"A moment or two later, Brad decided he wasn’t going to get killed, so he rolled away, and I pulled a foot free, I think, and backed to a standing position and I guess we played Bases."

"There’s an explanation somewhere," said Ted. "We need that little wise guy Spence."

Suddenly here was Margaret in her ample bathing costume, her hair loosely bunned, her face prepared to pass beyond whatever discussion she’d been having with the man she introduced them to: "Must be fifty years ago he told me to go west. I was at Bedloe’s Island looking at the inside of the Statue of Liberty’s face where they’d uncrated it." Jim didn’t recall much more except that Bob Yard seemed to be absent, perhaps receding toward the beach houses and the little road between them and the bayside cottages where Alexander was in conversation with Bob Yard’s wife. Margaret stared at her daughter Sarah on her large towel now again lying down looking up under her cupped hand—"Black and white and red all over" (for you wouldn’t yet see the burn emerging from her daughter)—and Sammy, who was sometimes but not now like a brother, in a rundown trying to tag Brad, had called out, "A newspaper!" "You had more clout if you didn’t beat up on him, seems to me," said Ted, in their bar in Washington, who had had "the most boring family, you know, in the world" except for his father who they all knew had wanted often to kill their mother but had never understood "how to have clout by not killing her," though in fact he had not killed her, not that he’d not exactly had the chance.

In war there was no substitute for victory, Jim Mayn supposed, paraphrasing General Mac Arthur—quoting him!

Good talking to you—good talking to Ted—well these historic moments, the Russians leaving Finland alone, Jim remaining suspended like a sundial pointer above his half-pint brother, is there a power vacuum to enter or isn’t there?, he was talking to his own child, his daughter Flick so grown-up now in the middle of the eighth decade of the century in question and unlike those of us who are angels of change and jump from relation into being to think Naturally he doesn’t know she saves his infrequent letters, a form of grace that never occurred to him with his wastebaskets all over, though he does genuinely want her to know him, wants to give himself (no Indian giver) so she’ll know such stuff about him as that he went to that ‘60 press conference the morning after having a drink with a man named Ted who next morning after Jim’s heavy steadfast non-dreaming he felt might after all be his best friend who by midnight of that precedingly bibulous eve had turned into a Scot for when drinking he turned toward argument not song (while it’s rank error to think either that newsmen are, like sailors, hard drinkers—much less sailors like newsmen—or that Jim and Ted would never set their views to music), though there had been song encouraged (come to think of it, maybe inspired) by a South American woman journalist Mayga, who had been listening:

that is, to Cold War history as self-fulfilling prophecy (if you want a theme to hang your lost anxiety on), you tell me what my global intentions are and sure enough they will be inspired to prove you right; or more likely you will be moved to prove yourself Rightly Responsive as the Silesian Conference and in particular Malenkov’s speech declared the Truman-Marshall plan part of a global putsch to enslave even remotest South America: after which remarks, it was inevitable that Stalin (who was the real speaker at the conference behind Malenkov and Zhdanov in this non-humorous "Can You Top This") would answer the provocation he dreamed on his giant’s self-fulfilling diet designed to make him mad topped betimes by a dessert of suckling satellite and be confirmed in his prediction when Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg signed "Western Union" the same day Congress was asked to breathe life into the draft, St. Patrick’s Day ‘48—

But, countered this lady Mayga from, as it happened, beautiful Chile (who was, as it turned out, ready to sing a bit), the enslavement of South America was true if you gentlemen would kindly recall how American business often moved their obsolete machines down to Chile and put them to work and depreciated them all over again— If they worked, they worked, said Mayn — Put millions in but take billions out, she went on without missing a syllable of his, and often in capital-intensive technology that does not exactly improve the unemployment in an underdeveloped nation unless to increase is to improve (Ted laughed some smoke out of his lungs) because for some belt-tightening programs it is.

Mayn had liked her fineness from the time he had known her and didn’t know how she did it, he was a male snob not to take how she was for granted, she did not overdo the power in her eyes and was quiet without seeming to be an Intelligent Woman Listening or a patient debater waiting to pounce when it came her turn. They had mad coincidences, too.

When you have your day, what will you do with it? said Ted, like an observation, and before long, having paused one moment over the nonetheless quiet lady’s gentle attack on the sentimental violence of which the nationalist imagination was capable as witness the poppycock voiced a few minutes ago by the man who has disappeared from the end of the bar to the effect that the altitude of that slender U-2 plane they were going to hear about tomorrow gave to the plane’s eye a multiple of extra destructive energy in the form of a light too potent to see with the naked eye unpeeled—the three of them here in the bar of a Washington hotel Ted, Jim, and the round-faced pretty woman Mayga slanting toward one another somewhat open-endedly as if the departure of the Scavenger Spence in his fringed deerskin from bar’s end had given them leave, drifted into song.

Such as?

"I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby," and "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and, in honor of the velvet-cheeked guest from the Southern Hemisphere, 4tAy, Ay, Ay, Ay! Canta y no llores, / Porque cantando se alegran cielito Undo los corazones," a border song known even to a young aunt of the Ojibway healer of the Mille Lacs region not far from Lake Superior (whose grandfather, the diva had told Clara at lunch who had mentioned it in Lincoln the correspondent’s presence at a workshop, had sewn with a needle fashioned from a marten’s penis-bone, and with thread that once helped make the back tendon of a moose)—for songs are audible over the greatest distances even like the greater abstractions, but songs especially, as James Mayn, asleep in a friend’s vacant apartment off Connecticut Avenue, may have sensed: but if from the distances of the resolute non-dream that he thought there’s therefore nothing to remember of (except for the challenging voice that asked what was this "double Moon" by which the Anasazi medicine man in possession of the family-pistol-to-be could be made out by the Navajo Prince?) or from the distances of the next day’s prospects opening out before Jim—beneath him, if we will, like the Pole below Admiral Byrd’s mysterious plane caught by a painter hovering glider-like with the American flag painted on the middle of its wing—why then he recalled what he had not witnessed his grandfather Alexander discussing, first, crab chowder (its prospect) with his unexpected visitor down at the bay side cottage, the wonderful red-faced blonde, Jane Yard (Mrs. Bob), and the quantities of softshell required for such a chowder should the three who had dropped in from Windrow elect to stay for supper, assuming, second, that his fair daughter Sarah and her old friend Bob the esteemed electrician husband of Alexander’s visitor made up their difference of yesterday whatever it was—

Oh dry up, Alexander, that’s blarney and you’re not Irish, said Jane mildly—

—were now speaking to each other, that is—having had words yesterday that must have spoilt her day and spoilt his if he was half as downhearted afterward as she—

—Oh come off it, Alexander, you and Margie always spoiled hell out of Sarah—

But the bald, white-haired, tall, paunchy man laughed abruptly as if after all he did know a little something more than the obvious, and he said he thought Margaret had been pretty strict with both girls and asked what had brought Jane and Bob down to the shore today.

Then she told him who they’d brought, feeling like relations.

Meanwhile, beyond the resumed Bases game where Braddie soon got tagged out only to become the middle of a Keep Away game that Sarah ignored, cupping her hand over her eyes to stare at the khaki-trousered ancient whom her mother Margaret had (at last) introduced her to, a new noise succeeded the disappearance of Bob Yard over the dune: "Did you see his face!" said both Yards in concert, for she had come up from the cottage toward the beach and met Bob—it was the childless Yards in concert—a childless couple either makes up for it with a lot of noise or talent or has trouble with other people’s noise—voices lifted somewhere between the beach and the path to the bayfront cottages with their stilt-supported little dock, Alexander making ready to commence to begin organizing a crab chowder for six or seven, not nine, a decision precipitated by Jane Yard when she heard of the recent to-do between Sarah and Bob and said she and Bob at least would not be staying.

Which like a historian of the early forties Jim’s daughter Flick put together like two and two with an evening in New York the next winter when Sarah had tickets for herself and Brad to go up to New York with Margaret to see Carmen, Brad’s first opera; and when Margaret got a cold and would not be seen in public, the unheard-of happened and Sarah’s unmusical husband announced he would tear himself away from the paper and make a third: then Bob Yard said he would drive them all, because he and his erstwhile wife Jane were going in to New York for dinner at Rockefeller Center ice rink and then were going dancing at the Hotel Taft, although Jane called it off at the last minute after speaking with Sarah, then changed her mind again as if in 399 order to have a hilarious argument in the front seat with her husband en route to New York with three Mayns in back.

Jim told Flick as little as she wanted to know, then left her to put it together; and once in the midst of these matters he wanted to ask if she planned to have a family—none of his business, but . . . but didn’t ask her. But then she knew of a philosopher who had said our way of being civilized individuals is to want children rather than ourselves, the future rather than life now: so she had, like her mother, rendered his question unnecessary. Then she had said, But what about you?

Like her mother?—the question poses itself apart from any interrogator. Well, her mother answered questions that way, too, that hadn’t been voiced. Flick his daughter stayed close to him for a time after the unraveling of the marriage, by being combative; unlike her brother Andrew, who was gentle and decent yet absent. Flick took her father up on two-thirds of what he said, though mostly over the phone. The marriage was fractured on a long-term basis, till death us do join: Well, are you joking or aren’t you, Daddy?

And when he told how the U-2 press conferences years ago in May of ‘60 had turned him on to weather but at the press conference was the lie to cover the prime issue which was illicit surveillance of Russia, there came Flick’s loved, sometimes husky voice on the phone, "Whaddaya mean?— meteorology? or that it was the lie? and I thought the newspaperman sticks to the subject."

He wanted to tell her he was half-kidding, that the weather reconnaissance was solid information, you knew where you were, it was history. He said, 4’No gray areas there—you don’t have to speculate if the man’s giving you a half-truth."

And when he was driving with Ted and Ted’s fifty-year-old girlfriend; or checking the street number of a house on a breezy corner of Brooklyn Heights within shooting distance of the harbor and the lighted Statue that turned its back on New Jersey when you drove in over the Jersey flats though the Statue was in New Jersey if in a separate United States of elegant debris; or when he just missed the bank one thirsty afternoon and thought he would cash a check at the athletic club (and it was the wrong time to phone Flick), he would so much want to phone her that it was all he could do to stop feeling a dumbbell more than a father-man, and might phone anyway although he knew he didn’t need to heal the pains of his and her mother’s separation (growth pains, our ass); he found he didn’t talk to her like that but made fairly good conversation into a credit-card pay phone to the intimate point of Flick then complaining (now from Washington) that sure she was interested in his routine work on the dioxin scandal, but less that it caused acne than what happened when we sprayed it in the sixties in Florida and dumped dioxin-contaminated waste oil to keep dust down at those Missouri horse farms, and this dioxin’s the cleverest poison ever synthesized and so unearthly good at what it does it’s more poisonous than the most poisonous person and has the brains to fool itself into waiting several weeks to kill you—than she was interested in his emergency bulletins about Thomas Jefferson (who might have been a casual relative as Mayn dropped the information) writing with his left hand to the Frenchman Le Roy accounting for why the east wind off the ocean having no obstacle penetrates the settled deforested Virginia coast more than does the inland wind from the hilly wooded west which, like the landward ocean wind, rushes into the heated coastal zone after the air there rises—and (he didn’t mind Flick’s rather exercised criticism confusing his conversation with his "priorities," he was proud enough of her!) she was—O.K.—well —very interested in how dioxin traveled freely through the food chains in the Vietnam ecosystem through to catfish and carp, but mobile as it is dioxin really settles into the cells and twelve years after spraying in northwest Florida where you get rain even during vacation time, it’s still as good as new in birds and insects (and your favorite eating-lizard) her father added—but she was less interested, she had to say, in Jefferson’s left-handed speculation on the chain reaction of the Gulf Stream to the east wind as a result of which— though "we know too little of the operations of nature in the physical world to assign causes with any degree of confidence"—let’s let the Gulf Stream, said T.J., finish biting its way through the continent and let’s just open a token cut in the Isthmus of Panama and let the Gulf Stream current do the work for us which would lessen pressure elsewhere from the once-dangerous Gulf Stream because calm and safe it would no longer throw vapors, as Franklin argued, northward to be turned by cold air into the fogs on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland which harass mariners from as far away no doubt as Russia. But, come to think of it, long ago in i960 on April Fool’s Day, a month before the U-2 press conference, Mayn had followed the first orbiting of a weather satellite, and for a time forgot he remembered the cloud photos, for where the clouds were was where you’d find the weather front—why, listen, the sky changed just while they drove down to the shore on a summer day—

Is it true a ring around the Moon means rain?

True in the forty to eighty percent range.

What, then, of our double Moon illuminating the Anasazi healer who passed the pistol on to the ill-fated Navajo Prince? asks an interrogator so familiar that if we know the magic words we may already have "internalized" him together with his ideal clarity never mind the healing effect of information.

We can reply that the double Moon was a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties visible in the Four Corners region where an unobstacled view of the sunset horizon was had during the brief years that housed nomad demons in and out of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head-hole which a visiting Anglo hermit advised the med’ciners not to cover with the government-issue muslin there seemed to be considerable supplies of, and at sunset the demons were visible if you knew how to look mto her head, demons dark-earth-colored, mobile-brown and glittering gray, but colorful, even creamy, as much as muscularly material, whereas she who could not stretch her eyes to see into the hole knew them to be most tumid blue and the sharp orange of those ancient volcanic apricots still visible every fourth August—except, on the nights of double-moon-rise, when the demons were another color—that is, when for a long stop like the original sunset that may last for years after a volcanic eruption one multiple demon flashed pale green to erase all others and their colors:

and on such nights when the green flash was seen at twi-set between "the history of the day and the history of the night," the Moon would double or twin in some regions of Sky or Earth or both. And so the ancient Anasazi healer whose real medicines had taken him for years away from his faithful wife and children so that he threatened to become a witchdoctor who parts, say, the husband from the wife if in luck so not even snake root helps the man, or instead of giving soapweed mixed with a special cactus to help the mother in labor when the baby won’t come, administers it much earlier and differently so the gal aborts and afterward is unable to know if she wanted to or not—the Anasazi healer felt the Moon double him with its light or be seen by each of his eyes individually.

Nevertheless, the white-lipped female zoologist Mena, studying the fierce javelina all the way up from the southern hemisphere, had met the botanist Marcus Jones (of whom no visual record remains within us) pedaling down through and beyond the monumental debris of Colorado seeking yet one more new type of locoweed—and she claimed that the doubled shadow he cast upon her when he got off his bike to greet her where the light of night brought the desert closer about them had before Jones was gone become hers to convey until her next human. This was the ancient Anasazi who, because her appearance at the top of his ladder caused the pistol in question to throw two shadows, had seen two Moons and thereupon had admitted he was not sure if the pistol had come from the mestizo spy years after the Mexican War or alternatively from a half-Sioux Thunder Dreamer (one of that clown elite who must act out their least-appealing dreams in public even to the point of turning themselves literally inside out) who claimed he had been given the pistol by a dying white settler prone among the wind grasses of southern Dakota as a charm to tame that religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance with which the Indians in despair hoped against hope to stop the increasing pain of invading bullets though in particular it was each individual’s transcendent guardian richly painted on the Ghost Dance shields on government-issue muslin that must memorably refract these currents of detonated daylight from their course, while the community on good days intuited through custom—long before law got round to firming it up—the difference between bullets and light, the sign that detours you off onto yet another course and the true way of the explorer that bends if need be to circumnavigate a route that may in the end prove more direct.

But what prisms of sight carried the mother and with her a divided son, left out yet asked along, from the active Mantoloking beachhead out to a horizon more northern than could be explained?—for our sailors tell of those high-latitude mirages whereby the land below the horizon levitates if it does not invert into sight, and we see where we are going before it sees us.

An explanation—little more than that—as that light entering a different medium promises to bend—or that a mother we already recalled before we had gone far enough in our research to reconstitute her was the one who left her sons with the promise that they were the ones going away, a mirage factor that keeps its distance no matter how we go on or go back, to tell us something past mere satisfaction as the shine of a distant desert lake meets the shade of some earthly substance over the hill of our New Jersey still-wartime sea.

Facts worth their weight in gravity if they can only carry a tune to get them to the noise the tune hides in case—ti-dum-whung-lu—it needs to be moved fast and be in not Sarah’s open case but Thomas Jefferson’s violin terminally cased while in a next room he wrote with his left hand to Le Roy in France about the weather (Seasonable in Monticello; how makes it at Mont-pellier?) if ‘twas the same Le Roy (in the history of rain, the "humid" Le Roy) the Le Roy who in the 1750s (so it couldn’t almost be the same one) discovered dew point by sealing damp air not in a painted can as we did 1950s New York City air for tourists and Paris air for the Clignancourt flea market, unless you could hold your breath for the lag of your homeward leg there to transfer it to the tunnel of a loved one’s mouth and system, but in a bottle where the temperature was falling, until drops formed like tunes to Le Roy’s eyes, and in measuring this degree of the air’s saturation he brought all of us closer to the causes of rain. And found, with his improvised hygrometer of goblets indoors and out, that where he was the dew point varied with the wind direction—further, that the northwest mistrao and the northeast grec are not so dry as the north wind, nor so moist as the south wind from the sea, and dry and moist are relative in air so that dry air on a summer’s day may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But (and we turn to the child speaking and rotate so’f we was in a Choosing Configuration we’d just go on spinning)—But he wasn’t the inventor of rain, right?

Right (we are so happy to give a Yes or No answer to a child, the slight smile upon its face or certain parts thereof)—No, my dears (for it’s a multiple child!) he wasn’t. Nor, fifty years later, was he likely to have been the Le Roy to whom Jefferson, having broken his right or violin wrist on a walk with a mere acquaintance wrote a rambling letter with his left hand and never had the strength to play again, though four days later he attended a concert and the following night went alone to the opera, our all-purpose Jefferson, and never once stopped taking notes, as witness less than two years later his observations in Europe both of windows that admit air but not rain, and sawmills that run on wind, not to mention his having instinctively grasped the modern dream of urban sprawl proposing a coastal Thru-Way from Nice to La Spezia, an Alps by-pass for travelers entering Italy whereby, as T.J. said, "all the little insulated villages of the Genoese would communicate together, and in time form one continued village" ahead of its time along that route.

Which had been, to cite from Larry what Jefferson six generations or so earlier could not have termed it, his personal Modulus to give back to world civilization all the energy-to-burn that had fractured his wrist. And could have led to his discovering in Inner Choor with its long seacoast-like range proto-nomads landbridging to the Alkan-Yukon fields, had he the renowned polymath T.J. trusted his naturally swiveling instinct finding not just slender black-and-white solutions at any hour of his epic day/night but oceans to bestride with a compass whose points were out of sight of each other wading in the watery sphere; hence had T.J. surveyed on Euclid’s drowning angular shoulders such sunlight shed in Earth’s seas as to discern long before the synthesizing of uranium that flesh itself, beneath the skin but even in the varicolored skin with all its history of light, if barraged at its nucleus (take for example the seven hundred individuals that were the nucleus of the Georgia Colony), could blow sky-high, clouding the horizons of events themselves—and the whole shmeer turns upon how we (a natural senate maybe only in birth and potential) apply our knowledge of the light (for is the tune the secret force celled in the noise or is the noise what waits in the tune’s fine track to blow us away together on Independence Day?).

You mean, asks an internalized interrogator drawing through us like an un-snappable lanyard looking for a grommet to lash and presuming to be our Modulus when unbeknownst even to us sometimes we are it—you mean that young Jim, shunted back to his Bases game upon the white-hot beach, might have found upon the horizon what his mother, anguished at the man Bob Yard, had looked around Jim in order to see—if he had only been smart enough to see that it was her life she had somehow lost and not a son whom she divided into two that they not meet? For in lieu of deciding that it was that uncomfortable day at the beach that decided Sarah (no middle name) Mayn to disappear, in which case he might have stopped her from doing it, he ever after discounted the conjunction of all this with what proved to be the old New York City geezer’s farewell to Margaret, and fixed his memory on what he knew for sure, which was the miraculous fact of his violently rooting his feet in the sand leaning then suspended against all gravity or other explanation, which saved his little brother Brad from receiving violence.

Which would never "do," while Jefferson’s violin healthy in its case so appreciates in value by the warm sheen of its workmanship, as by the shaping into a constant future of all its remembered music, that we, who are only relation, let such parallels as deterrence and disarmament meet, like being in one place yet being at once in two, and put Euclid over Einstein for sanity’s sake and not to overanalyze the unspeakable of a mother’s absenting herself from her sons. Whereby Mayn could mention matter-of-factly to his daughter Flick, or, soon after she was born, to his friend Ted, the night before NASA’s director of public information Walt Bonney indicated that a faulty oxygen line probably caused the U-2 pilot to black out (prior to slipping into Russian airspace), that Jim’s mother Sarah had been less sick than depressed during the year preceding both the tragedy and, roughly, War’s end, and that even on the summer’s day when the man with whom (though Jim didn’t know it any more than his brother Brad could think it) Sarah was or had been on intimate terms turned up unexpectedly at the shore forty minutes from Windrow ostensibly to deliver Margaret’s old friend the geezer who as it happened was supposed to be dying, Sarah in Jim’s later-articulated view had begun to think seriously about removing herself from the quiet, ordinary life she lived with her two sons and the husband she did not know how to speak of—

—and thirteen years earlier, or fourteen, Ted gently responded, "Excuse me but were the two sons both by your father?" to which Jim, contemplating still the horizon toward which (as he once upon a time years later began to try to make Flick his daughter see) he’d more than fallen, quipped, "By? By? He wasn’t no author, he ran the fambley paper, married into it, was an editor, Honesty was his middle name, not a bad guy, not necessarily a winner, maybe, but I never put my finger on just what was slowed-down about him, he could make you feel he was raising his voice, though he never did and maybe I felt he ought to but he didn’t much lay a hand on me, he would now and then take my mother by the shoulder and it didn’t matter if they were facing or not, and give her a peck on the jaw; he’s still very much alive—and that’s something."

—mention such stuff matter-a-fackly and all, und jet und jet . . .

What was the Hermit-Inventor of New York—that is, doing there that day upon the strand? and why was Bob Yard not serving his country in the armed forces?—in fact as an electrician if that career information had reached the right ears.

We’ll get to those questions, replies the spokesman, using the "Agency We" for he’s on tricky ground and had better just release the prepared statement on the Lockheed pilot Powers and his "sniffer"—that so-called "flying test bed" totally unarmed and slower than the speed of sound for God’s sake but heavy on the instruments designed to measure, well, gust turbulence at 55,000 feet, also "sniffs" radioactivity—you hang out a sheet of filter paper to check the atmosphere, that’s all there is to it but NASA categorically denies that this U-2 was packing any radioactivity-detecting gear, for there’s always tomorrow up to a point until Walter Bonney is saying on May 9th or 10th—

—Well, which?

—he’s saying, "I thought I was telling the truth"—for his official statement re: this particular U-2’s work during a round trip of three hours and forty-five minutes of fourteen hundred or sixteen hundred miles (for both figures have been mentioned) identified "gust meteorological conditions" as the purpose of the flight, and Walt Bonney got his original statement from Air Weather and they got it from information supplied by the Second Weather Wing at Wiesbaden, which in turn was supplied the information from Turkish channels since the takeoff point was Adana airfield near the Syrian border, the officer in charge none other than Colonel Bill Shelton, low-profile but all business, commander of the Second Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. Do you see the trouble you get into when you already had the Tiros satellite launched a month previous with fully automated eyes and touch which the Russians had no interest in pointing a rocket at (because for one thing they can share the data with us later), but beyond subsequent admission that this U-2, unlike the ones in Japan, California, New York State, and other, or all of the above, was engaged in necessary surveillance of missile sites, etcetera, we do not hesitate (so to speak) to (we proudly declassify, hand over heart, two hands for beginners, even three for those who have evolved that far into the race’s unconscious future Body-Self, the information in order to) acknowledge that from our U-2 we have learned that our bombers have nothing to fear from turbulence when refueling at high altitudes.

Like a contemplative and detached student of the stock market, Mayn followed the missile do-si-do in ‘69 to the point of getting quite fond of the Sprint missile that waited till the enemy warhead poked down out of the upper atmosphere at which stage it made a dash for it. But Mayn had been turned toward the more lasting field of meteorology, namely the comparatively "small talk" of weather that NASA had chosen to cover and to be its high-altitude lie. And Mayn was known to have studied the stodgy U-2 and its gadgets: for wind shear, ozone, and water vapor; for spotting would-be typhoons; and for looking into the dynamics of convective clouds. All this before he let go and went on (if someone had to speak for him) to less ambiguously administered manifestations of meteorological inquiry and application, straight stuff, journeyman work—

Yeah, said a daughter, yeah, said she who also did not see because he hadn’t completely told her what he had come back from like a shadow to reinvent: yeah, yeah, she said; straight stuff, Dad, hard information, right, Dad?

The energy-efficient home, he said . . . putting waste heat to work, he half-grumbled, hearing her add, Where homeowners can sit around and think what?

and later the U-2 ten miles high could see through the smoke a mountain on fire to map the perimeter of that little hole, that brief, wild sea-bomb, of light. He couldn’t say those words but felt them because we relations could release them to him, which we could do because he was capable of feeling them, which, thus, we might learn.

Flick would get a little mad but discount it with that voice of hers, that little demolition of the area immediately around her, all of it an irony of hers, and he would tell himself he couldn’t follow her meaning unless it was that she thought he should use some power in journalism that he was reluctant even to look for; she would make fun of his pedestrian reports, his "straightforward" assignments when he was back with AP but then he left again to work for the group of papers in the East owned by the South American supposed genius Senor Long, and Flick made fun of these stodgy reports that she half seemed not to know zilch about, so she got Jim telling about the hail-suppression work in Russia and in Argentina and where it all started at the end of the War (Right, she said, "The War") after the supercooling of high clouds was found to be why ice formed on aircraft wings which themselves proved to be the trigger that froze the cloud water—so you introduce a cold rod or —aha!—dry ice and god-like or in the guise of a sympathetic medicine poetess of the early American desert called Cloud-Water make snow at fourteen thousand feet over Schenectady (ever been to Schenectady, Flick?) and one thing led to another and the pioneer in this, Schaefer, got some input from a fellow researcher named Vonnegut—Vonnegut? said Flick—to try silver iodide crystals which don’t make the cloud water any colder but each crystal grows ice around it like a nucleus, grows and grows and then it bursts and you get a chain reaction (Oh that explains everything, she said)—and with the chain reaction the next thing you know—

"Oh Daddy! Snow! Thank you, Daddy!"—they were in a restaurant, she was seventeen, there were a moment’s tears in her eyes quickly ironed out—"Snow, Daddy," so he had to laugh but didn’t know all she meant but loved her almost for her confused desires to (what?) make fun of him?, to make him more political?, but not to get him back with her mother—

—Right! (his shoulders felt stiff and good) so they figure a pellet of dry ice the size of a pea can make a hundred thousand tons of snow—

Who figures? came a voice back (a voice of a daughter) (multiplied by us)—yeah, so who’s this "they" that "figures"?—a multinational oil-insurance corp.?—but it isn’t coming to anything, admit it—they don’t control the weather except in their Men’s Dreams of zooming into a zero-visibility cloud and blowing everything out of there!

Well the Russians have shot rockets into thunderclouds their radar said were packed with hailstones, said Jim.

She would eat her dinner and suddenly ask why the winds came from west to east. This led her father into air masses, their personalities and so forth. He drew one for her, on a paper tablecloth in a little dump in Boston where they had crayons in old jelly jars, drew a picture (with commentary) of the prow-shaped slope of the cold front, its hundreds-of-miles-wide keel bottom frictioning slowly across the land, a very wide load.

She’d drive toward some point, maybe of truth—across land that was water, do you understand?—Yes, Jim, we understand though you didn’t say it aloud to yourself—then shift into another type of love, because it was (we’re sure) always that—love and the incestuous anger-humor/humor-anger all mingled of wanting to send up a parent or two who a bit too easily granted their failings especially her father, though when he was tempted by affection, drink, and food to tell her where he was literally coming from he couldn’t because she would be puzzled as if she believed him (that is, that he was in the future) and in the current present only by leaning like a long-necked proto-pelvic closet-biped ankylo-soaratops into its brained past.

I know what you mean, she said to her father, but he didn’t mean the acceleration of time’s hardware that she meant, tossing her long straight light-brown hair back (and what would she know about how dreadful the future was?)—that is, that you might go and teach Peace Corps in middle Africa (there’ll always be an Africa), but listen Dad the overall grid was haywire, she felt, and run not by Decent Thought or even a collaboration of crooks but—she didn’t know—it had run away with itself—the answer was, she said, socialism maybe, but not the kind we had, with the corporations half-owned by the government that they more than half-owned in turn, and the only point in going to college—she had been accepted by a formerly men’s college that had just gone "public" (joke) and offered excellent skiing close by—Was to study and know your enemies: not men, no, not men, but—she would quit after a year mebbe and go to work for Nader, do obsoletely anythong he needed, but she ought to be a lawyer, but it took too much time, and did she want kids young?, but that wasn’t what she thought, it was her father.

The future her father had sloped out onto was like us the slope, static but for the shadow it threw, which was him, back upon Now, the Present, which was really the past from the vantage of that future he had gone into like a shock of memory which gave off a desire to return to what was a void and had to be reinvented, namely this present: God! he thought, it wasn’t him, this future position, it felt causeless, caused by an absence of cause, it came at him a sure home, not someone else’s.

Like when he woke up one night, and it was the night he walked out on the landing to find Sarah his mother wending her way upstairs with a book—and come to think of it her grandmother’s large comb—in her hand, reading. And a flashlight made like a candle.

But when he woke at first he had heard certainly his mother, her neutral though now unusually explaining voice, upon the ground of Brad’s crying coupled with his sort of whining word-sound, and she was telling him it wasn’t a bad dream, it was a good dream; his "terrible" dream (certainly) of the whole town going back in reverse into a volcano it had come out of, but— for reasons that were people in the dream that Jim missed out on because he couldn’t really hear—a "very moving" dream, a good dream, Braddie—she wouldn’t have minded having it herself—which made Braddie laugh and sob-snuffle at once, and something else that caught Jim but he didn’t catch, for what was it?, he only got out of bed. He could have run off the roof into space the way he felt but he had heard the train leaving Windrow getting up some speed headed for Little Silver or the Shore or Trenton; but he opened his door to the removed but spread light from the bathroom down the hall, which his instinct told him was empty. Turning to look down the stairs, he saw his mother on the way up with book and comb, reading—the big brown-and-black-and-golden-orange comb. But later on he thought it might have been her ghost, and he could allow the possibility of ghosts because he had ruled out dreams (though not for others).

All this more or less O.K. until—wait a minute—the next afternoon he heard the very same conversation through the slightly ajar music-room door, and Brad was even doing a bit of crying, same whimper-type really and the little shit couldn’t have just had the dream because he had been at school all day: Jim could guess it was lava boiling down out of the volcano in the movie the previous Saturday, even standing the other side of the music-room door, that gave his kid brother that dream of the town reversing itself to flow back into the volcano with everyone boiling back with it like stuck in the tongue of a titanic snake (sheep and people and even a farmer hoeing unconcernedly, etcetera), then his mother saying a "terrible" dream but a "good dream, Braddie," and Jim knew what came next before he heard it, which was, "It was a good dream Braddie because it was your soul rooting for you, telling you what’s inside you." Jim hadn’t ever heard his mother say "soul." But how had he known she was about to say, "It’s your soul rooting for you," except for her having said it last night when Braddie must have woken up out of a bad dream and she went in to him?

But she had been downstairs!

So was it that Jim could see the future? Or hear it! And so right then, surprised at himself outside this door, he thought that his mother coming up the stairs at two or three in the morning—with the book and the great comb he recalled combined so the comb was extending out of the book she was reading as she slowly came up the stairs—had been a ghost.

Though they had exchanged words.

And she had not really said to get back to bed, it was like they were meeting like friendly acquaintances downtown. Oh, hello, Jim—what a nice pair of pyjama bottoms you’ve got on today.

So later, after she had gone down the drain of the sea you might say cruelly, he looked forward to seeing her ghost again, because this other night when she was alive and Jim could have sworn had been just heard outside in the hall or in Braddie’s room sort of comforting Braddie out of his dream, she had evidently been a ghost out of the future. Of course as well as what she was. Which was reading late, while Jim on the landing had been hearing his father’s snoring and so you could feel that the breathing of one parent passed through you and met the nightwalking or breathing of the other parent. Were there thoughts there, too, along the breath-junction you made? He didn’t know. All he knew was that she said at least a couple of times that he only didn’t remember his dreams; it wasn’t that he didn’t have them. Until he once got mad and, yes, chilly at the same time, so didn’t say what he hoped to but did say she didn’t know what she was talking about, and some people definitely did not have dreams, like some did not see ghosts.

Was it her ghost? He got quite sure of it. But there was no proving it so he put it behind him.

Did he see ghosts where others dreamed? And had history repeated itself downstairs, or what?

He had little to go on, putting his mother together out of his later life. Until one day he regretted not asking people who had known her about her. Why hadn’t he? Because he thought it was up to her?

He went for the definite. Yet he did once see her later on. She was resting on her oars for a long time. He was playing squash in his freshman year at college in a cold court defending the center with hip and elbow and killing perhaps his partner’s very mind targeting the angles to make him dart forward or long-alleying a wall-hugger so the black ball found a home in a dead rear corner, yet always as if his variant wrist knew the future independent of its lord—and this was when he once saw his mother resting on her oars for a long time before some change that came would end this rocking pause.

He "decided"—how?—that she had felt herself not fit for relations with people, all these relations—was that it?

He had seen her row once, and off the beach at Mantoloking, which was crazy and fairly dangerous, and he, a child, had felt it. Though she had gone with a grinning lifeguard, who had shoved the boat, a white and high-bowed small boat across the barriers of magnet-strong low breakers to dig further into the swell. And they both got up onto the gunwales facing each other and grinning out there in the immediate distance of the boy’s watch kept for her, and then they both clambered down and she insisted on rowing. Why did Jim think "insisted"? A secret of the line between where he was and where she was, and the line between them was a foreign shore, and he knew he heard her speaking inside him or maybe him inside her—yet not then, but much later, after she was gone, he recalled this inside business and knew it had been felt by him then. He caught a follow-through of his partner’s racket on his right knee and was never the same again, though was playing two months later and played even better the following year though moving sideways was a bit risky. Out-thinking his "partner" was all it was, and yet he was there doubled in a future of the next second before it had come, it was waiting for him awful as a lost traveler’s inertia, you wouldn’t tell this about yourself even to the multitudes of eyes watching you from the totally imaginary Ship Rock of the northwest New Mexico desert—this future he couldn’t do more than joke about—with his daughter, that is—though once with the South American lady who had wandered thoughtfully into the bar of the hotel the night before or after the first U-2 announcement: and he and Ted were talking (hell) history, light history (Clear, two-plus-two causes; or Just Plain Accident; or the secret rooting capabilities of New Jersey beach sand and mid-1940s bare feet; or history’s trick of happening elsewhere if you paid close attention: well then, didn’t Buddha say speak only of what you know) and Ted had known an ancient relative of Greeley’s, like an old, comparatively valuable pistol, a tea-totaler incidentally whose great-great uncle had lived for a week at the semi-utopiate community in Greeley, Colorado, that Meeker and Greeley founded, and the ancient relative in question when living remembered sloops racing each other out the East River and to the other end of the harbor to the Narrows to meet an incoming ship and whip back to Manhattan to peddle the hot foreign news in the newssheets they had in those days before the great man had founded his Tribune partly to purge journalism of such obnoxious attractions as medical advertising of that day—

And Mayn—and Ted too—and maybe partly in the presence of "their" despised end-of-the-bar auditor Spence with the cruddy sideburns both bushy and patchy and the hide jacket frontier-fringed—showed off to the newcomer, the lady perhaps six or seven years Jim’s elder, a round-faced beauty with an exacting kindness waiting in the eyes, and independent; and she did put three fingers to her lips listening to Jim pass from the wind of sailpower running the news business all the way back to the 1680s when the law said no one might ferry across from Manhattan to Brooklyn when the sails of all the windmills were rolled up or in a rowboat ferry at least, which led to the friend of Ted’s who had grown up in Brooklyn Heights with a view from Grace Court of the ferry lights moving away from the Battery in the early evening and wanted never to look at that vast harbor again and had moved as far inland and slightly southwest as you could get without coming out the other side, and while one thing led to another, the foremost thing was that after the official NASA statement the next day that nobody believed, they had all foregathered (as Jim’s father would say)—pasf-gathered was more like it—here before Ted had gone off to dinner with an economist from Puerto Rico, and Spence, when Mayn had looked away for a moment from his exquisitely trustworthy interlocutress to whom he hadn’t mentioned he was married but wanted to because he was going to be friends with her, had seemed to appear—and for a horning-in moment inquired so incredibly what was the bean with the limitless oil that Mayn had recently been heard speaking of that’s like sperm oil and the planty bush survives up to two hundred years (which Mayn didn’t recall saying because he didn’t actually know how long and now said so, somewhat angrily, to this sidling character who shied away doubtless into his hole as Mayn turned back to the South American lady hearing Spence say, c"d you think I dreamed that?")—so incredibly, yes, that the woman said, Who is he?, as if she’d detected Mayn holding out on her:

—that is, he told his daughter Flick years later (when she could be told things to was it before or after college?) the barest facts of what he had told the South American lady in i960 but did not think Flick would believe him and anyway cared much more for her than for conveying what became so hard to credit that it was a shadow whose very source had been cast with it—all this both a species of but distant possibility maybe of madness, and a vulgar violation of his most ordinary self.

This, Flick might have partly picked up, for she said to him (admittedly the evening he came to Washington to be met by her, and not in his gift to her the old white Cadillac she had that very weekend sold as a collectible), Well you aren’t exactly ordinary, Daddy, the places you’ve been, but this business of our living in the future, well, I’ve never seen that transparent bubble and the plate that people stand two by two on to get transferred into space.

She worried her feeling; she said she didn’t want to talk about the therapist she had been seeing for three months in Boston because it set up a triangle though she knew he wasn’t like that—just paid the bills, right?—but she was trying to hold on to some feelings she tended to discount, it was easy for her to let them get away: one was that she herself had been a reason he and Joy (she named her mother) had stuck it out as long as they had—she and Andrew, of course; and this made her more sad, or she tried to think but it was really more mad since she was thinking it had been her business when it had been theirs.

But it was her life, and he was relieved to feel equality between the mad-sad point and how in late ‘76-early ‘77 she went on about not the maniacal aliveness of dioxin tinting pale cells palely and promising like a habit only the future chance to look back (dioxin in the food chain thus not the point but held to through her pedagogic rhythm which was her own well-known stubbornness now made into policy). But this label of "ordinary" her father gave himself. "Ordinary"?

But the future he was literally in . . . well she sort of chose not to see and he loved her too far to have to make her see he meant literally this four-dimensional picture that included him that he had hardly more than once or twice stated to anyone—stated to his wife, who almost believed him and was frightened to think he was not speaking out of craziness, and so did not quite believe him, at least quite early in his marriage.

But he could state it all to the South American woman Mayga so persuasively that almost at once she was giving Locus T Transfer of Two Persons into One New Libration-Colonist back to him like a reporter checking respectfully fact upon fact, template to jointed template of radiant, matter-turning force, while she was even lowering her voice (so we pick it up) when Spence had returned to the bar from having taken a call in the hotel lobby (Mayn knew all this without looking up), and Mayn said that though the lingo couldn’t have been there in 1945 or ‘6, he was sure he remembered Locus and some mid-space balancing of forces or powers which he had never in fact had any interest in except as factual-type matter that came like the dream he never had at night, though he had been told it was the memory not the dreams he was missing out on.

Had a lot of people instead to reflect on. So that Larry bicycling his own Manhattan Project north, south, west, then sternly east might bury all his toy suicides as they came into his unhappy head by the side of the road where journeyman suicides are s’posed to be buried even when, hard by a type-green traffic light, the pothole in question won’t any too soon have claimed the axle of a cab whose driver wasn’t lucky enough to carry as standard equipment an instant camera to record the waiting ever-empty insatiable grave:

So that his new friend—the joy of new friends, of a "new friend"!— Jim Mayn, before Lar’ was even thought of—may joke his way through and almost out of an evening with the lady Mayga who will hear him out beyond his staggered jokes designed both to stop the folly of what he’s revealing to her and keep him going to the end, well we remember the terrible fine blade of grass in the voice-over concluding Hollywood’s first atomic-energy movie for this was seen by him his senior year in the Walter Reade theater in ‘47, so powerful an ending that the audience were perfectly evenly divided two by two and one to one between those who were physically transfixed and paralyzed and those who were only mentally and did not hear themselves chewing or obliviously tearing wrappers off candy bars they should not have had left at the end of the first of a double feature, such a single blade of grass as whose atoms alone would power your beloved car (your first car!) from coast to coast of a continent as sentimental as it is adrift from an external point of view. So, scrambling his message a trifle, he nonetheless blew smoke by joking but literally from a cigarette first her way unthinking then in the other three directions thus all four (i.e., of the traditional Indian—and not just Indian!— directions, east west north south), like one of the People ceremonially beginning a journey as he recollected from somewhere as remote as the recent information that one day U-2 planes would see through forest-fire smoke.

The South American woman observed that as for such phenomena of nature or science, it was "one of yours" who had been interested in such only as it might have lain in a person’s experience for a time: but it was she who persisted: Now, the transformer bubble these people stand under before they are turned into frequency and . . . recombined, is it? at those distant points of Earth-Moon space—

—Shared.

Sure ... at those . . .

—libration points—

Yes, those are them, she said. This method of dissolving people, their. . . mass, is it? . . . how does it affect them when they arrive at the space colony and want to get back to themselves? I mean out of frequency and back to their regular bodies. Are they cleansed? improved? She smiled, but strangely not with doubt. You said two to one, like odds; it’s two to one they do get there or they don’t, or do they get there and then it’s two to one they rema-terialize?

Here was humor, but she clearly did not say to him, Where is this belief of yours coming from?: and he was glad. The kindness stayed back in her eyes ready. She must have known Spence but not that he was always turning a buck with somebody’s contact, and twice he went away and came back to the fine old bar and sat near the curved brass divider that looked like the top of a boat ladder setting off the small service area of the bar: he came back and once slid up onto a stool much closer to Mayn and the South American woman, but that alertness of hers was less than her plain attention to him, which said she would be interested to know more of this actual place or time he was coming from, she gave it a foreign dignity he didn’t resist except to make a diversionary joke here and there as if to say, You don’t have to, you know—and once looked at his gold-banded wristwatch but she must have understood this was less offhand than curiously gallant even though Mayn did not make a habit of looking at his watch when in conversation with anyone, let alone a woman. Even so, the woman he had married sometimes neglected to let him have the credit of his behavior if she plotted, across his eyeball, some brief gateway, a glint that your normal observer would either not see or would have to wait for weeks, or travel, to see, like the sunset green flash.

Like the universe to itself—which, while not We, approaches (always a mile or two too late) the receding idea which proves that We ourselves are neither that universe, nor it us, nor are, very much of the time, that articulating commonalty heretofore capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, which, it has occurred to us as we have curved through the bodies of our history a work without a gear, locate us as (no joke, no future joke) what is within Mayn and within the elsewhere-busied Grace Kimball and others as what they don’t know they know about each other and a world, which "there" is outself-growing, too. Hence, a hotel in i960. Hence, speaking out as perpetual insiders collected as a concept, which is that our speech is a hypothetical indicator of the other, likelier, theory of our overall silence. Or we are what is sealed inside these people in order to reach forth, even like fourteen unbroken eggs in the remembered recipe for angel-food cake once, twice, three times magically made by Sarah, mother of Jim Mayn, because unlike much other food it melted.

You are a journalist, Mayn said to the lady, yet you believe what you hear.

She had said that it seemed to her that in his account people were being turned into something communicable.

This was worth laughing about together. Yet she was laughing because the humor was true.

He explained that what "was" taking place at this future time was in two places at once and—and—he was a sane man, a journeyman male who played a bit of basketball, still ran and swam, and worked out on the light striking bag when he remembered to in the clubs of half a dozen cities if not countries, a bit of a social boozer and not averse lately to a social smoke though he had never rolled his own joints nor carried a lid like a pipe smoker; was not a particularly imaginative person, he thought, a newspaperman with hardly a view of history (its coming or its waiting or writing) who had gotten away from his hometown where his family had run a weekly paper until it quit during the War and it would not have lasted even if he lived on beyond high school and college to go in on it with his father who, though he had the same last name as his bride, had married into it—

—the two places, she interrupted, and for a second, though he had no middle-range insight into the future and didn’t want whatever bond with action it might confer, he knew that this fine and dear woman was going to be hideously interrupted herself one day, yet no one would ever know if (or not) it was because she had interrupted him in order to keep him with his story as if there were power for someone in it.

The two places, he said—well, it’s going on in the future, this thing that might seem strange to you but I know that I have been in it—and again he felt himself for a second in the middle-range future and telling someone else about this far future and the place it enacted and telling someone, as he was doing now in i960 with her, without concealing the fact (for it was) that he was there in that future. And this radiance, he said in i960 to the South American woman who knows where they import it from?, I’m just as ignorant there in the future as I am here cast back from there, but it’s tied into the magnetosphere cascades, cascades, did I say?, no one ever told me about cascades out there but that’s where they are at, strictly speaking the territory near the magnetopause on the earth side I’m told, where you reach the limit of the earth’s magnetic field where the sun’s wind presses against it hard enough to squash it—while those cascades, which are right there in my head though I have no right to them and haven’t been able to let them settle, are some reverse radiance flowing off from the magnetosphere like fish upstream into the solar wind but that isn’t really it because someway the earthward wind draws these cascades of field from the direction of earth, I guess it would be sunward wouldn’t it?, but yes! the point is that they can draw this radiance off from the magnetosphere in this future place I’m talking about, and have harnessed it, so the place isn’t entirely bad . . .

She laughed and made a note.

Oh it comes down out of the jointed plates of the—

—the bubble around them, said the woman like a partner in discovery.

That’s it: you got it: you know as much as I do.

She laughed and so did he. Her laugh made him think of the very short dress she was wearing, though he was looking at her eyes and her skin, though feeling unfaithful about her angelic sympathy with certain crackpot ideas.

She laughed because she was acquiring a language as different from Romance or Anglo-Saxon as Japanese . . . where they stand, he said, one in front of the other, an Indian-file twosome and they are transferred a hundred thousand miles or so out to the torus, it’s a colossal doughnut, do you have doughnuts in—

—the libration point, she put in—

—that’s where it’s at, he said—one of them, one of the colonies they would build by spraying metal coat by coat layer by layer on an inflated doughnut two, three miles wide, maybe more, a balloon in the shape of what they call a torus—build up the site by rotating this monster inner tube past the spray gun firing metal froth—

—Assembly line, she said.

—Endless, said Mayn; you know how Henry Ford got the idea from the Chicago stockyard meat choppers who worked off overhead conveyors.

Do we know for certain that’s where he got the idea?

There’s plenty of ways to build a colony, and that’s how they do this wheel-shape torus at that libration point between gravities out between the Moon and the Earth, a circular balloon is how it’ll begin.

You’re way ahead of me, she said, and they laughed again. He didn’t fall in love with her. He saw her bend her head, turning her neck stiffly or politely in a show of trying to understand; he admired her and did think of touching her along the two parallel lines of her wrists. But he was already in love, and Joy was pregnant with his son.

Someplace in the seventies of (we add) the century in question, on the same day that he heard of a Chicago intellectual who had said, 4 4No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country," Mayn was able to describe the vacuum-vapor method of squirting boiled aluminum onto the Relevant Inflated (i.e., the Appropriate Other, we intrude but only on ourselves), for they had the process by then. But back in ‘60, knowing a son would be born to him and knowing he the father might never be able to say the truth of where he, a shadow, was being cast from but not like the flat shadows of the Moon’s newly televised dark-side Sea of Dreams (the Russians named it) he was yet incompetent to see into the middle future and see his son going to college in the seventies, and leaving college to be a scientist, a lawyer, an architect (please not another dumb one)—

—an astronaut, she said.

And he continued with what he could see: the distant future, where, to answer her question, the two people standing on the titanium plate under the bubble of jointed electromagnetism when they rematerialize at their libration point far out from Earth are one person.

Aha, she said, and wrote a word or two down on her small pad beside her half-finished margarita, and then felt free to laugh briefly: What sex? she asked.

That’s what Larry asked seventeen eighteen years later, and we hardly remembered he was still (read here) there, he’s consented to be given a new Atala ten-speed by his father though he liked his old beat-up ten-speed Raleigh from the Island and now has an offer of a hundred dollars for it from Grace Kimball—he breathes so little in order to bring all he can bear upon his internalized systems, none at all finished we understand, many started like variant radii aimed in at a locus of centers where may be found backward a hermit-inventor’s new weather precipitated possibly from alterations in the charge-field of coastline configurations, not at this late date by that north-polar wind shift (you’ll have sensed by now) that turned the clouds and altered rainfall shapes in the time of the gifted, hapless Anasazi six hundred years before the East Far Eastern Princess met the Hermit-Inventor in New York and saw herself in his glinting eye whose new weather at our aforementioned locus of centers got carried on by the hermit-inventor nephew of that old khaki beachcomber who came to the Jersey shore to speak to Margaret before he should die of what whole-grain toxins trekked through his system for years of breathing fire and smoke of bodies flying by his tenement windows, of using alcohol and tobacco, of pouring through himself all sugars of the City and all salts of the elaborate harbor where weet-wit weet-wit the purple sandpipers hosting their southern kinflock of turnstones even more lost than they await the beaches of an earlier day, yet that earlier Hermit-Inventor managed to store one horned metabol adrift in his viscera drawing the rest of his substance toward it like a lip or a flower or flume. Upon which he took the train to Windrow, was found by Bob Yard the electrician sometime lover of Jim Mayn’s desperate mother on Margaret and Alexander’s porch, and was driven to that shore point Mantoloking and to Margaret who was walking on the sand alarmed for her daughter burning on the black towel, Jim and Brad’s mother, yet Margaret recollected still the bridges of New York that now by our reckoning in the eighth decade of the century in question come to nine majors not counting the lighted statue through which the Hermit-Inventor of New York in late 1893 or early 1894 or at least once upon a time conducted the East Far Eastern Princess reportedly as a mist, and secreted her toward home and safety in the East as once some years before in the presence of the then as yet unassembled parts of the giant Statue he had put young Margaret in mind of westward travel and transformation.

In fact, girls are interested in westward transition, though don’t worry it’s not your responsibility, we’ll get on it, checking all hitch-hikers between here and the roadblocks. Flick Mayn and her boyfriend united by his small car were seen to cross the April Mississippi and had been passing westward for miles and miles previous to this. Once the community’s infra-red satellite momentarily distracted by the unforeseen detour of its principal responsibility the Pan-Continental Wide Load, for which our road network was built only to become its baneful pressure to widen and expand, lost Flick and her boyfriend at Niagara Falls. They had to help us pick them up again, when, on our scope, they veered violently north to attend a tragedy at the Shakespeare complex at Stratford, Ontario, entering the bustling town as the sun fell.

Later, on their way (resumed under the infra-genic velvet dew of an Ontario dawn) to Midland, Michigan, we didn’t need the satellite to learn that Flick so asked the information office at the Dow Chemical plant there near the confluence of the Chippewa and other rivers with river namesakes elsewhere what it thought about dioxin’s suppression of immunity in guinea pigs, and what this thing was that dioxin did to mice exposed between the sixth and fifteenth days of gestation, that the voice of the information officer when it extended itself with suppressed anger informed Mayn’s daughter that agitators went no further than here and could apply by mail for information.

Yet Flick and her tall, dark, wired-up boyfriend, a former sometime actor on soaps, heard in the voice of its own answer that cleft palates aren’t caused only by dioxin, whether or not subcutaneously (or was it—torture-wise-san —sub-cuticley?) administered. And we hear the interrogator’s mind working overtime in multiples of Larry (who knows about Mayn what others without knowing might think useful). But the interrogator has said, not, Is it administered under the skin or under the cuticle and/or fingernail?—but has said, Sue (while others nearby are overcome by old lyric ceremonies of Navajo voices:

Far as man can see,

Comes the rain,

Comes the rain with me—)

"Sue . . . sue" the interrogator voices name exact but weighs which over which we can’t tell except in knowing we are the available relations— "you have admitted there was a room, there were traditional daiquiris in it, and it is quite long ago as the hailstones fly if we divide the labor of remembering a lime-green surgical blouse and matching trousers by reported dramatic weight loss, yet" (Wait, a budding community breaks in half-truthfully, that was the next room, the next room was where the green was surgical), "and a woman" continues the inquiry, "who had given birth yet wasn’t so sure what had happened, which is what you get when you go for this really un-natural, anti-traditional childbirth that irregardless promises the people hopefully increased consciousness of their personal histories"—and in that daiquiried room there was a Martin or Marvin—or both, in this age of plural priorities, if we make up our collected mind to go for both—but both, though it feels right to us, does not feel right to the interrogator in charge, who turns its potential he has no time for into the heated grin of a headset earphone fusing our ears with the molded plastic remelting them like they are same plastic family to be remolded, until through what we painfully hear, as our ear becomes the headset substance and is hard to tell apart from the sound of our own, well, torture, we hear the unmistakable pangs of a digital hand coming to birth from an analogous ear, why don’t we freak out? is it the revelation of it, the breakthrough transplant? why can’t we decide if this persuasion torture inflicted on us for having spoken out of both sides of our mout’ is real or not? was there some experimental anesthetic clocked into our re-system? we just dunno—and particularly about hand reborn from ear: it’s a new thing but our own, and the hand in question isn’t any garden-variety hand, or throw in a tree if you are all that confident, or human baby that like the coyote pup puts in its first year dependent on its parents: but is a hand that’s ready to go (to ir, in Spanish, fortgehen, which we already remember from our transplant meant Us, or go away, in aller-Mayn) which is why the interrogator with a generous, headsman’s execution basket suitable for dirty or clean laundry but just now full of exam questions for the hand (not afraid of being shot or chopped down) to take one cryptic potluck pick of, suspends the grabbag rule and with the utmost condescension as if we were black and white to be opened and shut asks what question wed like to be interro-gated on, for Martin (or whoever asked the newborn mother if she would have another daiquiri) may have been the name of a diver who cooperated with the police and a freelance documentary team trying to TV-produce out of New York’s East River the body of a girl-researcher and former Olympic swimmer reported with terrible inaccuracy to know too much about an impending prison break with hemispheric repercussions, but the diver and his man-hours came up only with a report of an unknown sound, he had been hearing in fact things down there (the Brooklyn Bridge groaning in its crypts via ghosts of the bends) and if girl-researcher lost in her strangely attractive low-gravity sleep down there manages like some women to "get herself found," she will still be an unknown saved (if saved)—while Marvin looks like being Larry’s father, the sometime husband not yet finally divorced of—

Sue be it, the interrogator jokes, reading the mere slip of a question which by ear-hand we fished from the bloody basket: to which our answer is that Sue, formerly of Marv, Sue, and Larry, would not have been at a party so pair-bound as all that: therefore, the woman who was heard to say "Sue" names another of that name or is urging action upon her hearer.

But the Dow information officer complete with company cleft palate has been relieved by another who would hum these westward kids Flick and boyfriend a lullaby if he didn’t have all this information on tap: e.g., that some nine years ago the British producer of the chemical that dioxin inadvertently derives from thought of closing the plant since, like, they had an explosion and some of the help developed diversified complications—got things—erupting as chloracne (Flick doesn’t need to take notes)—acne (no joke) pustules, inflammation of the hair follicles, heart trouble, bronchitis, spleen rift, liver lesion, what had you, excess gravity in lower limbs, we just want to get back to breathing and more—but here at Dow-Midland we have what we call your "Fool-Safe" (Flick does take a note, her phrase): say, a disk ruptures in a reaction vessel, the reservoir discharges into a holding tank larger than your original reaction vessel so your reaction would be quenched with water in 105 percent of cases. So there’s hardly anything actionable in our—

—but dioxin’s a pesky beast or herb, it will take a rain check for a few man-days only to return in the form of—

—rain itself, for will not the wings we flush away with prove the thing we fly?

But this stuff that clears up acne, the bean the nut the bush—whatever —said Spence years before at the far end of a Washington bar where Jim has met the South American woman (his son now having been born) and enlarged upon his prior answer to her question, namely, What sex? Far as he knew, the colonists two into one wound up with such deep memories of the other sex that such memories are built in!

—this stuff that’s going to revolutionize acne, quietly calls Spence from his position, I gather it thrives on no rain, right? (and no doubt he has gathered the name of the magic bush, plus a way to peddle news of the bean though Mayn won’t give him the time of day, he and Spence are so different) so why don’t we grow the bush—

—"Only God can create a cleft palate," the father wrote the daughter in reply to her account of the chemical plant written to him from a campsite on yet another Chippewa River, this one in Wisconsin, the lights of the motel over the water promising rest right here where they were, with their green Coleman stove open for business: and the trees and the stars and a hundred and fifty miles to go to a region of a thousand lakes but, for now, free of the wide highway where we cannot add to that loved campsite a Wide Load’s tracks free and full of cash on delivery.

Which same chemical-related "cleft palate" the little woman named Lincoln recalled as she sipped a new cup of Mexican coffee, the forgotten woman perhaps, contemplating the new "table," since the glamorous Latin couple, the woman of the marvelous piled auburn hair, the elegant, hard foreign man in gray flannel, have gone away leaving still the small bell of recognition in the correspondent-woman’s memory which is then only the dull disappointment when the woman Clara kind of snubbed her at the Body-Self Workshop saying that this restaurant was recommended by a singer she knew: until now the group of five impending diners before her became a group of three, a heavy set man, a tall young woman, and a dark-haired boy-man talking intensely to the man but for the girl; and Lincoln, watching them over her coffee cup, found the singer in Clara’s comment yielding to the thought that things were summoned in order to be cleared away (or us from their presence), like of the original fivesome the two somewhat older—the smaller, dark; the taller, flaxen-fair—they quietly detached themselves from the other three (who had been a group to themselves coming in like they’d been doing something together other than what the two women had), and when they three had come they had first signaled, more by a contented not-talking than by, then, a burst of intense comment from the dark-haired youth, that they (the broad-shouldered man with the gray hair and the girl and boy, both around twenty) brought into the place a fun that was like gossip: though now that the two women had gone (the dark one having given the boy a kiss he didn’t expect though didn’t not), the man and his young people weren’t talking much again, and the correspondent-woman watching them in her unused extra spoon felt that one of the young ones was "his," though who was it?, it shifted, and he was father to neither.

So that the correspondent-woman found the Chilean economist’s wife Clara blocking her—not with that snub but with her elect authority picturing for them all during workshop a magical area of "Cambodian" Vietnam where secret societies flourished like the crops which earlier colonists had striven to establish, all as if to enable her to cite the Cochin sage who foretold that men from the West would come as destroyers. So that the correspondent-woman wished to be at the other table sharing with the man the company of those nice kids and not to part with her own senseless memories of Mister Guerrilla Prisoner-san, barefoot flying twice in twos neatly bound, down from the sky into the land-like dark cushion of tree-crowns and out of the blare of choppers noisy as creation’s opening day and out of the experience of their pilots.

But, the South American woman asks, two days after Mayn’s son’s first birthday, in 1961, it is quiet in these libration colonies fixed between Us and the moon? because it feels quiet—the great torus sealed up, the cows safely grazing down the spokes of the wheel, individuals fathoming their origins in couples that were dissolved on earth.

They chuckle with reciprocal memories.

Why hasn’t she ever questioned his sincerity in all this? begins Mayn with a seven P.M. grin, he’s been telling her he’s actually in that future whatever he’s doing here, and the colonists will be doing their future farming under ideal conditions getting eight hundred and fifty pounds of grain per acre per day and just like the desert greenhouses on the southeast shore of the Persian Gulf speed-picking tons of potatoes grown with unsupported roots—vegetables prospering on Styrofoam boards and spin-off colors spraying the roots that hang down below. We’re maximizing milk production using tomato-vine-fed goats that weigh a tenth what a cow weighs but give a quarter as much milk which will be all the sweeter if you keep the billies back on Earth and inseminate by space shuttle.

Why not scrambled messenger?

The matter-energy transit works better with two.

The two messengers.

Not to mention fish. In a weightless farm where gravity wouldn’t collapse their gills out of water, they could be raised without water. Yet since we’ve got artificial gravity, they’re raised in phosphate ponds that recreate the food chains we’ve snafu’d down here.

It all sounds possible, the woman said. And your place in it?

Mayn had to shake his head that she believed his basic report. Fantastic as his mother’s presence, that fantastically had never felt (whatever else it was) skeptical to her son.

And we in turn, like the diva, have to ask the interrogator (right back through our newly violated ear), Do you question the whereabouts of Mayn’s mother Sarah?

—and we get back not even pain through this torture device.

Do you question, we add, that she looked at him that day on the beach also to look over his shoulder at the horizon of the sea?

From a distance the interrogator does answer now, like he’s at home or at some other end of our body and he is murmuring with a lover’s assurance, a superior’s shrug: Was there ever any doubt that he turned and followed her look out to sea?, knowing that come hell or high water that was the nothing she was bound to, irritated, caustic, and anemic, deeply watchful of the boys they always felt, and there on the beach that day setting sail for where her sense of humor wouldn’t have a chance to—

—You mean this came through? but to even speak of her we need more of a handle on what she’s like, I mean wasn’t she involved in the War effort? the War was going to end soon. (Yes, she played with a Coast Guard pianist at the Coast Guard station at Manasquan, some violin sonatas and some old favorites.)

So that to see what she was looking at, he had to look away from her, the younger Jim had to turn at least his head if not his sporting body one hundred eighty degrees around to look and see for himself.

So must we resist the temptation to be judgmental?

Yes, but mental even more.

Yes, our body-selves will sing to one another if we let ‘em.

So let’s stay here and see if help comes.

What if she was waiting for a fugitive submarine to come and take her south?

—trouble was that very soon afterward Sarah the mother sent—or told one she was sending—her two sons away, one to be human, one to be an animal (were these the same? the same-san?). But has a woman the right to talk like that when she won’t come right out and have a fight with her husband?

Why must to be good mean to be angry, however, dear ducat, oh why not keep your opera light and save our steam for cleaning up the neighborhood? Pursue the provenance of your text and you damn well will find yourself in some Chilean household of the last century but who cares. Are you—dee dee dee dee—inspiring me to stammer more, damned ducat, oh!—sein oder nicht sein, stubborn boy, designing boy, your music comes from my heart strangely, too—unpack my heart, Roslein, design or not design—you’ll have your Hamlet opera in your warehouse with one great voice if not the two, but I’ll keep trying. Oh it’s the neighborhoods we have to clean up, you dum-dum ducat you, blares the basso rotondo, not the true source of your stolen light masterpiece, ya little bitch, that’s why I’m moving out of the apartment. Hookers on every corner. I ask you, Roslein, asking me if I’m going out tonight, of course I am—with you—though I know they are goodhearted, those women in their hot pants, if you could scratch them. And please don’t get depressed because your opera’s sorely needed and don’t ask about One More Hamlet opera when the real question is, Let’s Have At Last a Good Hamlet opera, wherever it comes from.

The neighborhood problem (comes a voice we don’t buy or, having bought, don’t use) is potentially statistical, therefore reassuring. And it may be stated: What is the ratio of prostitutes on the job to potential prostitutes?

Let’s stay here and clean up the neighborhood.

There are more things than are dreamt of in your whore-ratio!

The moment or phenomenon of thirteen-to-fourteen-year-old Jim’s sudden sticking in the sand on the point of falling upon and perhaps doing away with his half-breed little lust-bred bro assumed by most to be his real—

—baked meat, dear ducat, bawls the basso who incognito rotondo is to sing two and only two performances, as a favor to his ducat, of an unheard-of newly resurfaced Hamlet opera in originally envisioned former bank branch converted to a darkly echoing Baths tiled with abandoned Coney Island landmark ceramics in which Hamlet Senior (father of the good news) comes back to life for love of his brother Claudius, and Hamlet-son (whose madness is supportively encouraged to work withm the system of Shakespeare’s mere working original) is reunited for whatever it is worth with his mother Gertrude both settled in Wittenberg for a season—

He heard music late that night as if his mother sang to someone. Brad had been sick on Alexander’s chowder, frowning from spoonful number one. Alexander, free as a cook after hours, did not drive home to Windrow with them but remained reading and dozing in the Mantoloking cottage as on an island content that a boat would come back, though missing his cribbage game. It hung—the music—the song—Jim’s mother’s—at the margin of Jim’s remarks to his old pal Ted in ‘63 and later they discussed the possible explanation of young Jim’s sudden down-rooting in the Mantoloking sand arresting his fall all but his shadow upon his little brother, Brad, the good little son of a bitch: it could have been psychic hesitation, you did not really want to kill him and your brain bone connected to your stomach bone and thus held you poised out there above him; it could have been sheer convergent accident, your foot found a shelf in that no-man’s land to brace your ankle, an ancient spar weighty as your all-purpose iron I-beam; it could have been a miracle, Jim—

Let’s exhaust other explanations first. He got sunstroke later in the afternoon.

I believe you, the South American woman had said in ‘62 at this same Washington bar that the creeping, odorless, lank-haired, would-be hip-Western photographer info-scavenger Spence had just appeared at the lower end of, for the place had a higher ground where Jim and Ted were, that after many drinks you might start to slide from, don’t you know: I believe you, she had said the preceding year, I’m more interested in what the place is like or is to be like than how you get to be telling me the truth about elsewhere, if you see what I mean: all right, you have come back like a cast shadow of light, she had said—and he had known that that was it—but is it that you are warning us about that future from which you are maybe a reverse reincarnation, Jeem, or are you really telling me of a place that’s fascinating, where—

for with charm to spare, he had expounded an actually wet oxidation process that heats wastes to 500 degrees at 100 times atmospheric pressure for 90 minutes to yield rich water yet a purified gas as well whose carbon dioxide will feed the space-farm plants to supplement what our compound colonists breathe out.

And the song Jim at fourteen heard late the night of the Hermit-Inventor’s last words with Margaret on the beach (if it was the Hermit) was "I Hear Music When I Think of You" as an unfettered sweeping, and as professional as on the radio Sunday night, only this was piano: and it was his mother and she might be singing to someone and so, as we say, he "stole" downstairs past the great real-copper Indian-head calendar, past the yellow sweater with the buttons, folded at the bottom of the bannister, and stood at the closed music-room door, his brother asleep, his father downtown at the paper, a sweet scent of tea-biscuit crumbs and, he could swear, iced tea—and he didn’t know what kept him from falling into the white-painted wood of the door he stared at and listened through, as if its oblong within oblong of molding directed him to his mother’s meaning; for she was alone, she had to be: until Jim, not wishing to disturb her with a knock, took hold of the doorknob and slowly turned it and let the door open, and let the knob all but silently return, until he could see her, and later knew he’d had a message for her retarded because it was inside him and could only be gotten by her not given by him, he didn’t know enough. Well, he didn’t really know at that time that she had been loving Bob Yard, who was comic and rough, but nobody (wasn’t he?)—

—maybe loved only once, because that’s all it takes—

—and the rest of the times they were . . . what? . . . lying side by side under the midnight sun communicating by profile—

—until she said to Jim breaking off the song alone there at one in the morning unsurprised in the music room, Are you a fox with your hair all up in the air? (for he had been sleeping) your hair’s been dreaming! so he suddenly knew all over again that, unlike other people he knew, he did not have dreams of the night variety as if knowing replaced remembering—or are you a bear standing on your hind feet?—you better go away and find out what animal you are. Jim recalled the funny small moment as making him a little too young, as if he had skipped that state or she had leaned away into another.

Which leaves room for growth. Which we know through him, but know through others. For from our own words when asked and even when not asked, we learned that we were as many things, live and other, as we were willing to divide into and be partial and patient through; be sometimes overriding yet only through leaning upon what moment’s Body-Self we could be like; or contenting us with being the marine varnish that brings up the amber grained in a plywood slab; in short we were relations, that was all, or the fork a baby playing with it above a rimmed dish of pancakes finds a use for, and upon raising a piece of pancake is praised by the whole family, oh they are all wonderfully there, and thereupon baby eschews the achievement, waves the implement above his head beaming and takes the cake off the prongs and flings it on the floor, the wide oak planks where a circle of milk stands near a toe print of banana: and these would word our presence if we needed to tell that we found being in the fork, the praise, the act of giving away the achievement which may be digesting it, assimilating it, divided by the name of the floor (which equals home) and the brown, cast shadow of the small puddle of milk-white telling us in turn all the co-laborings that gave this child room to breathe, some actual abstract, angelic disappearances into the body of a universe even Einstein plus or minus Euclid would calmly grant to be flat for purposes of love: while we, in or out of such words, knew only by being known, and became in our very own absence the tree in Central Park growing out of our thereupon absent eye or via our ear when its potential pollutions waxed shapely enough to make a tree, unless that destiny came out of us, an interrogator internalized off duty dreaming of the diva’s desert succulents and sugarless polio sundae under the eye of a woman at an adjacent table who must have known who the diva was but might well be a what-you-call-it, a tail, following them: and yet the diva feels she had been waiting for them, she for them, which the diva, if not the still green memory of her dream-tapeworm, far sidewinder gobbling where it went, great as a winter whale blowing the Chile coast, can’t understand quite, except to hang on to like a new stateless passport because she has to get through the wings of a theater that’s putting on an opera she is supposed to agree is unknown—Verdi daydreamed of it and may have felt it in his angry hand but hardly wrote it down—until if she can’t ask the internalized interrogator (for he had been that in her and he is breathing, we hear him, feel it on our silent voice) and she can’t sing, because he is dozing against her throat and they two are to be mentioned in the same breath so she can’t kill him quite, though he is what he is and his superiors or he himself may have asked her lone father far off in Chile questions that answer not words but body language such as shortened fingers or temporarily separated testicles: and so she disengages herself from his breath together with his cheek and chin, and gives in to the desire of her life and, as normally as if she were going to the bathroom to sit upon the John (though not like the new acquaintance of Clara’s at that workshop who according to Clara squats with her feet on the seat!) and as normally as if she the diva (daughter, priestess, lover, unborn mother) might "light" the refrigerator to pour herself some orange blood, instead with an art evolved by long unconscious history of need, of human hope to find the bit of courage to take the next barefoot step—

—Quit the corn, we got a funky opera to put on, and the main actor’s traveling incognita (ha! ha! ha!) Speaks aria darkly hinted to be the great man’s fragment abandoned in anger when he fell out with a librettist on how to liberate the musical nightmare from Shakespeare’s edgy depth—real fragments of reputedly Verdi’s Hamlet text—eased away then (could he care less?) from Verdi by the young friend Muzio who toured Civil War America laughing all the way until they hit him with a tax (was it, within the larger inarticulate structure, a particular logical tax on Italians?) and somewhere out there he unloaded or purloined such sheets folded and refolded of aria and scene as threatened to summon from Hamlefs gravity of relations two triangles past and present pivoting wife/sister-in-law/mother Gertrude into deep, rainy par-allelogrammatic refractions of male poetry/love/power: so in Muzio’s wake were to be found unrecorded frontier traditions of some Latin’s wild horseless yet familiar opera—Amleto? Amleto did some Mexican-Indian divisible into one Mexican and one Indian call it?—performed in a southern Colorado saloon with, the story went, a mathematician’s daughter in the lead: and these traditions dispersed themselves during a rare symmetrical tornado in Navajo country in the eighties, only to appear as folded pages in a Victorian melodrama in New York not read but used as part of the insides of a prop, to wit stuffed desert javelina, its head and shoulders crisped with blood guaranteed by the naturalist wife of a commercial saguaro-cactus exploiter to be female human blood not shed by the javelina whose hind-mounted scent glands puzzled South American zoologists and travelers for decades until one of them nurtured an idea slowly northward following the javelina hundreds and hundreds of miles till in some wonderful dependency the tracker, feeling and at last smelling that she was tracked by what preceded her, knew so surely and doubly that she was and yet was not the momentum of the sparse herd ahead of her that she foresaw a moment when she would gain traits of theirs in exchange, possibly, for some collective mind of theirs situated who knew where, outside us all maybe, for as a system like war or love marginal to one eye may to the one next it be viewed center-stage, so will one day an immigrant cook come to teach natives that desert-fried javelina chops may bear their stuffing owfside:

—chemistry that, on its way through systems able to digest its clouds and pellets, carbons bows milks and staggered scaleless explosions, so becomes its course it reincarnates mere myth into day, a coastal day in ‘94 when the sometime Princess was turned by the Hermit-Inventor of New York to an experimental mist, to be secreted in that great, once upon a time dismembered Statue carrying a torch for the elaborate harbor, the Unknown State, in which meanwhile at other places a brave lover-scientist Prince ran up the steps into Miss Liberty’s folds about the abdomen and the might of the virgin wind-cooled sun-heated breast and felt in him a touch of her as of the entire continent so prodigal in finding its way to the wrong home at last that the only memory is ahead, the only work is a change made of knowing you will never come such a distance again from your People in the West and must now only internally howl and yell for a girl who took from what he had to give, took love, then self-protection, then more love and power part pressed upon her then acquired till she flew away under her own power, not wings of a father’s loaned bird circling in the skies above the Four Corners of a universe: so the skies themselves seemed spirals feeding on species with no compass, no princess, no crystal monitor to fly it back to Choor or the whereabouts of the Princess to whom the king had entrusted the giant bird as he had entrusted her to it:

—and the diva who has her part in many operas secretly picks up a phone in her dark duplex kitch, and because her totalitarian beloved is nearby is glad it’s a pushbutton and "dials" her friend Clara to ask her what she and her exile husband know of the sexual officer still mayhap asleep in her otherwise directionless huge bed or watching from some wonderful naked limb of his equipped with sight.

For the correspondent-woman, who tried and tried to hear the bell that rang in the void of all her memory’s trained convergences, while she kept an eye on the man with gray hair and the young, intense-talking kid and, of course, the girl, who paid as much attention to the man as the boy to her, recognized in the fresh absence of the auburn-haired dramatic woman’s elegant escort none other than the man in the park last Sunday his back to a tree beside the interior road where color-fast joggers, like all the different dogs there were, came contentedly by, passed by racing bicyclists who though they passed them seemed to stay with them as if the bikes circled the same center but further out (yet speedwise further in!), while for her part the correspondent-woman had been going through (on her park bench) being stood up by a man named Spence whom she had never seen and whom she had not liked the busy, riding-falling sound of over the phone (as though it was his phone, not hers), and to whom she had given a description of herself so he would know her, assuming he would give one of himself (when he didn’t), till a whirr of glimmering spokes soared past like force sweeping the last of the joggers past—and the Latin man leaning against the tree had a visitor out of nowhere, as light had tumbled into its shadow, a loose yet tense type of man in a ponytail wearing a fringed hide jacket glazed with some substance, maybe use, who craned his neck forward (so his neck was abnormally important to some rest of him) speaking: but looking once around the tree, he never moved his hands to express his aim, so that the correspondent-woman, intrigued, forgot she had been stood up by an unknown contact named Spence who over the phone had asked her if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where the correspondent-woman had attended a women’s workshop run by one Grace Kimball.

Attended also by a woman named Clara, yes? . . . suspected of helping to spring from a New York State prison a supposedly anti-Castro nationalist:

So that this trained agent could supposedly find sanctuary in a South American nation. But why had a man such as her phoner said so much to her on no acquaintance?

The aforementioned anti-Castro anti-Communist with cousins in New Jersey all with thunderbolt emblems on their cigarette lighters was then to operate against that very South American, junta-ruled (what else was new?) sanctuary state he was supposedly sympathetic toward, by liquidating a key general officer of the junta and abducting a famous old socialist presently under house arrest (in this case apartment house). A nation, it is learned, recently redesigned to replicate the tough-money model generated by the Chicago Institute but a nation also where the thousand-mile-long surf coast often pondered by a maverick meteorologist moves like a would-be shadow as we think about it, listening for breakers, for breakers breathing, recalling the silence of undersea boats passing or pausing like evolved creatures, silence remembering sound, bearing music.

And now, having identified in a Mexican restaurant the mustached Latin man leaning against the tree last Sunday as the departed escort of the woman with hair whose rich auburn might drip blood, the correspondent Lincoln left the place certain the gray-haired, powerful man’s eyes were on her—she would gladly have made a foursome—he had obviously had it with the kids, yet loved them.

But she did not stop, nor look back, convinced that she had figured something out only to find behind it the obstacle that had been keeping her from it.

Which was that she had reached this awful point before, like stalled full circle, nor very full, at least of love, like knowing all the souls in the world who had had this sentiment, but not knowing any of them as friends—for "full circle" (we recall In Jim) said Sarah once, and took her long hand off the lower keyboard of the piano bringing it to join her right hand in her lap, when her son, her older son who took his life as it came and didn’t need as much as little Brad, pushed open the door long after midnight. "You woke me," he said in a friendly way as if she had given him some help.

She was playing, she said—had broken into song—come full circle, Jimmy, singing to myself again.

"You ..." said Ted in the bar of the Washington hotel, "let’s see— you knew—?"

"That Brad was my half-brother?" said Jim. "I don’t think I knew."

Does Bob Yard love you? asked the son like a soft pistol shot, that kept going.

Bob probably did, said the mother.

You didn’t love him, though, said Jim as in a normal talk.

Not today, came the answer challenging the boy to go on, and that further point was exactly where he directed his sense that "it" was not full circle she had come; and she seemed to decide he wasn’t saying anything else and without warmth yet in a friendly fashion not saying the obvious which was go on back to bed, she gently raised her hands from her lap—she had a very prominent beautiful nose, so she was always "created," "drawn," and she dropped her fingers upon the keyboard giving them life to play into the large Chickering piano a thing he’d heard often—his little brother would know the name of it! but well maybe he wouldn’t!

"Well, you got away," said Ted ("Clean away," said his friend), and Ted finished his highball as if by "you" he had meant "we," and she hadn’t done what she had done, which few mothers did.

But then as Ted left Jim in the Washington bar a decade and a half ago (and Jim couldn’t later recall if Spence had been in, that night, for he could be a couple places at once besides Mayn’s mind, live in a burrow economizing on oxygen while he made a few phone calls) the South American lady came in. Jim hadn’t seen her in a while. She had a son and had a snapshot of him in his scout outfit far away. He stood at parade rest, squinting, smiling up from the southern hemisphere. He wore his neckerchief tightly furled into more a tie, so it showed striped red and blue hanging down through the neckerchief holder, and he had blue tassels on his high socks. Pretty tough-looking kid. She was going back home to work in the national airline; her husband was expanding the airline’s operations and wanted her to stop being on the move all the time. Away, more than on the move.

And this time she didn’t ask Jim about the practical successes of the dream colony—the opiate-receptor molecules chemically tranced so that old ingestive habits were erased—curious enzymatic persuasions between brain and belly so that a colon ate only what he/she needed and gradually might achieve through mental concentration like a springboard diver’s single act the elimination of all waste or residues which one day would ironically reduce the water supply which had relied on recycled human waste which had itself grown such a pale tan as to be transparent like your jellyfish that’s had its sting bred out of it—

—but instead she asked if there were other space-station shapes besides this spoked life ring, this torus in the great lake of nearby space, this doughnut generated by a circle, and were there compartmentary sealer-walls—they’d have to be vast—that would drop down, that . . . (she drew it in her little notebook) well, what would happen, asked the South American woman, if the pie een the sky came with its own slicer and one day it swung through the libration point in question and cut right through the life-ring torus . . . ?

Oh, the trouble with compartmenting (said Mayn reacting how?) is it interrupted the passage of daily life through the torus wheel but you know the doughnut’s is not going to separate into two pieces if in the event of a break you could equalize the gravity-pressure differential between outside and inside but surely the shell would crumple. But it had never happened; and anyhow, the real heavy traffic was in those equator orbits where they put the weather and earth-resources satellites.

However, when he began to speak of other shapes—the cylindrical and (on the dark side—of Earth) the boomerang that bent light and made it lurch toward it—her question got between them and he saw his mother’s so self-sufficient eyes, the musical mind of her queenly nose down which she looked upon the neck of her violin until one day Margaret his grandmother became his shield in the absence of his mother who was the shield in the Indian custom his very Margaret told him of: a shield, a painted buffalo-skin shield that he had, it seemed, against taboo heinously let touch the earth on the way to the horizon notwithstanding—the shield with deerskin cover and green turtle depicted there. But this earlier shield of his mother had seemingly left him, not he it. So you look after your mother particularly if she has left you with a leeward conundrum that takes ya breath away and is beyond you and so you set out to obtain information to outweigh your absent breath, not having seen that you had the message upon your person all the time until, having found the barside woman’s question an obstacle leading to that other woman Cleopatra’s historic nose—

But then Ted—in the thick of his idea that history lurches from one womb to the next womb by small talk and hence is written with the left hand since the right is busy handling hidden impulses which nonetheless is how you Jim partway levitated above your brother prone upon the sands of the Jersey shore, the sun casting you—

—upon the place beneath—

—beneath you where your brother lay—

Mayn saw he had had pity on his brother Brad and could not have hung at peace with gravity if he had known the pity: so he said to his friend Ted —in ‘63; no, ‘64—wishing to get on to something else, for Spence, the only other occupant, was at bar’s end watching with his ears—"I threw my shadow on him, that little bastard, instead of strangling him in person." Why was there no one else in that bar? An answer was somewhere on the way.

"But it wasn’t your responsibility to kill him," quirked Ted.

"What year?" called the vagrant tag of a man Spence from around his glassless beer bottle, missing Ted’s humor, until Spence looked older than he had ever looked—made up, perhaps, with the herb and pulverized-mineral hues of the earth down where he had his moldy little hole.

"If we knew the exact direction Brad was lying in," said Ted, "we could know the hour, given the day—or the day, given the hour."

Jim knew the day but a cold weight in his stomach worming through his brain like his brain was everywhere in his body made him know that Spence was listening with his eyes now, as if Mayn and his family were promising news.

Jim said instead that that had been the day Mel Mayn, his father, with a fresh gray brush cut, had come palely, plumply home to find them arriving from the Mantoloking shore and had proceeded to the kitchen to make himself some iced tea and a peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwich and soon afterward addressed his sun-blushed wife Sarah (whom he would rarely and rather gently yet with faintest insult call "Sorry," which was not her middle name) on the subject of Franklin Roosevelt’s new pay-as-you-go tax plan, concluding with the curious surprise that the newspaper would have to cease publication within the next year or even few months.

Sarah for her part told her husband not to worry and to take it up with Margaret, she was the one who cared about the paper, though of course she had preferred running a family to running it.

"There’s a word for you, suspended above your little brother like magic, Jim," said good close friend Ted, who perhaps because he could not put his finger on the word at that moment interrupted himself "—oh by the way," and Jim felt something coming, "the Chilean lady we used to see here who went back home to—" "Yes. Mayga." "Why she was killed last month, I heard it from ..." Ted had discovered the weight of what he was saying. He went on deliberately: he had heard it from that colored guy, covered South American trade for a wire service (who, Jim in a dazed pocket of timelessness remembered, therefore had not seemed so colored, so Negro).

Mayn would not believe it. But he would believe that this was the way you heard. He wanted to dispute her death, or pretend he had known.

She had fallen from a cliff at Valparaiso (the manner of her death not under dispute). Somewhere behind that semi-circular bay so much more fine than the foul city important in direct proportion to its ugliness (where Darwin during the latter half of 1834 having disembarked from the Beagle survived a several-weeks bout with a worming ague induced by the wine of the country). The Chilean lady had been climbing in company with her husband, who had that very day arrived back surprisingly early from a business trip to B.A., and a third person, a rich printer from the North.

A what? gets asked somewhere communally way inside Mayn, who by habit takes information as matter, as grist.

Named Morgen—with an e—a printing magnate, North American, more recently exporting paper products from Jacksonville; kept an eye on things South American; was a humble descendant, Mayn already knew, of that mythical Alsatian mathematician who in the last century arrived in Chile from the California Gold Rush. Already knew because Mayga and Jim had shared these coincidences that barter themselves sooner or later and may seem mad or silly or nothing depending on how people feel no doubt, though he did not tell Ted, who saw still the feeling in his journeyman friend and must have felt the factual coinciding, etcetera, suddenly covered the shock of sadness which itself wasn’t at all unsayable because Jim said words to Ted at once, though aware of Ted exercising discretion in what he let himself imagine had gone on between professional acquaintances, that nice woman and this fella Mayn he’d known for donkeys’ years.

Arrived in Chile from the Gold Rush—from the middle of it, you might say: though having entered an American desert and for a time found no exit from it, at last traveled on one of the steamships licensed by ten-year monopoly from the senators in Santiago to that Yankee projector William Wheelwright, who was said by the Chilean lady’s friend Morgen (the math-man’s descendant) to have inspired Wheelwright to move inland of that country’s indefinitely (and in a later fractal meteorologist-maverick’s theory mfinitely) long Pacific coast so problematic in Chile’s economy. Wheelwright, having listened to his inner ear’s itemized interest rates all converging on the number five (percent), saw drawn on a perfectly good tablecloth (in the very tavern where Darwin had drunk a toast or two to Nature out of a local bottle with a difference) a somewhat numbered design (the original lost up North but remembered) depicting with lines that angled outward, like very slight arcs generated by the Earth, lines that felt like railroads to join among others two towns one of them coastal in a desert province where the great silver mines had been discovered.

"But you knew her really well," spoke a tinhorn husk of highish voice, downbar, and it was not that current curious old meteorologist of New York no doubt (someone else must add, since Mayn would not credit such coincidence) carrying on a late uncle-counterpart’s weather work that Jim’s grandma had described the East Far Eastern Princess experiencing in 1893 or ‘4. No, the voice was the photo-info dealer Spence’s, the year no less than 1963, some soiled-pollen aura of Earth tunnels about him as if he had been reared underground. And Ted replied, "So you did," as if adding only now the known times when he had left, or found, them together, Mayn and the round-faced striking lady with the high color, Mayga from Chee-lay, who had put down in her notebook some facts of that future Mayn was convinced of. Did he remember what women said more than men? Had he drawn her to him? Of course not. Did he believe in coincidence, convergence? But what belief? He was here because of his job but also he was here because he at the moment had not tried hard enough to be somewhere else, some hundreds of miles elsewhere.

But in these fugitive, not deeply bibulous chats he and Mayga had not found out why he had happened back here out of that future that, by no principle at all consistent with his habits of mind and happily pedestrian imagination, was present to this reimagined past (which went under the name of Our Present (1962, ‘3 and so forth) than they had reached Marcus Jones (visibly clearer in the narrow shoulders and wiry torso and rapid legs than from the neck up) bicycling the locoweed circuit of Colorado and adjunct lands.

How on earth—? (Ted’s topographical question)—

That’s it: on earth, his grandmother had stressed, fact-wise, and not in (Mayn observed) the domestic sky where run-about "outboard" rockets never quite made it into the consumer economy oh the minithrust type of moderately priced spinal rudder job’s O.K. for a quick hop to a rooftop supermarket, but, when it came to it, no more competitive against the new microbattery of the late century’s mirakelectric tri-wheel automobiles than bike copters on which old heads got high: whereas lean Jones, so lean that his head at some approaches to recollection approached two dimensions, took his lumps obsessed with unknown varieties of locoweed until, the night before he found his last one —which was the night or late afternoon he ran into the woman naturalist whose white lips testified to her own devoted acquaintance with the fierce javelina —"Marcus" (as younger followers of botanical history readily called him) found the famous bike’s hard wheels at last weirdly cogged right into that grand terrain like cog-mesh teeth seeking but finding an answering surface in the land: we mean the battered but undying experience of his wheels had come to fit what they met until, with things at last adjusted, Marcus thought he didn’t have to worry any more: contemplate tomorrow’s variety, and this morning s lone sunray, an ordinary western wildflower, wasn’t it?—but, wait!, with a right-angle-growing stalk!—yet same gray-green leaves and broad yellow head—but no! this ninety-degree bend in mid-stalk! So that, trusting the unlooked-for sign, Marcus altered course to roll on toward whatever the stalk and neighboring events must point to. And never gave it a thought: until in the twilight of the Four Corners’ vast vicinity, the moons of the lady animalist’s lips looked more and more particular (yet not smaller!) as he approached so smoothly that his bike sailed through the land. She called, Who was he?, her white lips navigationally fixed by an unidentified ground-level glint—which could be a shard of the dying day—but only if, Marcus Jones thought, ‘The sun out here in the West sets in the east—that’s it." And she asked him who he was on that bicycle, and if he had seen a hermit of the East who on vacation out here fed animals so carelessly as to upset the natural food balance supporting the fierce javelina whose study she pursued.

Whereupon, with a glint conscious in his eye as if she had said the word, Marcus Jones leaned his vehicle ‘gainst a waiting cactus (fleshy-speared cardoon-o’choke, New World style) whose eye was the eye of an owl—which thereupon turned around and shat its guts out—an elf owl that went on shitting blue particular guts out from strength to strength yet then to weakness. Marcus humorously and like a cavalier told how he had been directed to this convergence in the middle of nowhere—the bent stalk asking for (what?) some new significant existence—the right-angle bend an unusual growth in botany—

—"A gnomon!" said Ted, out of the crossword muzzle he could tighten round his mind lest it tell his long, lumpy body, Be sad, or, Be sick, when, as now with the late Chilean journalist-woman, it captured something elusive and/or disturbing—"a gnomon!"—upon which Spence abruptly left the bar for all the world the way he left when he had a phone call in the hotel lobby. "What’s with him?" said Ted; "he cuts in and cuts out—"

"He’s a creep," said Mayn and ran his hand up his neck into his hair that he certainly wore longer than in the high-school brush-cut days: "I know him a long time. He photographed a divorce-murder once that got into a Newark paper but he had some deal that he never got called by the People when the case came to trial. He parlays and parlays. People owe him."

At Mayn’s urging, Ted explained his gnomon. He drew it on a bar napkin that ripped. The thing wasn’t quite clear anyhow except in his words. "It’s the thing on the sundial that throws the shadow, the angle iron, the thing that sticks up; there’s a word for it ... do you—"

"Gnomon?" said Jim, Caribbean, and they laughed, and both looked at their watches.

"No, I mean for ‘gnomon.’ You sometimes farm out your sense of humor; how do you do dat?"

Jim wanted only to get back to his wife and kids who at that summer moment sojourned in western New Hampshire—full days without him—and whom he swiftly then left the bar to phone, as the disreputable Spence curiously reappeared, brushing him in passing, returning from the lobby and no doubt the phone, so their speeds were to be added together, Mayn’s and Spence’s, in opposing directions. Spence’s irritating voice rising with verve, greed, a deep-creep-rooted silliness re printing tycoon Morgen: for "Morgen has a brother in Philadelphia, a left-winger, a job printer whose uncle once carried a card—the brother’s just a common, garden-variety job printer and there’s his tycoon brother friendly with Mayga and her husband has the national airline, a piece of it at last word . . ." as if someone’s nose would be put out of joint by whatever Spence was trying to say.

But how on earth—?

—did we get from there to there?

—Well yes; but you—how did you?

—We aren’t there yet: there’s so much in our way—

—As long as it is your own by which you get there, right?

—Leave it to us—

—Getting there your own way is all.

But you: what of you?

Indeed, adds the interrogator, what means the U in the contemporary saying "U-2"?

Don’t worry, it’s not your responsibility, anyways. We’re not up to there yet, observes your all-purpose child in the memory of men who over a series of years are always getting back to the family along a curve of more and more advanced homework until one day a girl child who swims like the wind in the summer where there is no homework reveals to her father (is it a float to be built?) a rectangle without firm braces—or with the nails coming loose— that tilts sideways in order to become . . . a parallelogram!—good, good—

—while (to jump the gun) the information that a son went suddenly in search of (for himself and for his brother) after being left in that "lurch" immeasurable except in games by a mother who seemed herself (having told her sons to depart) to have been the one to go—this information has itself divided and divided like some difference between a good, strong, honorable person and a disreputable hound of a trash-purse slew-handed if not lunatic information-salesman investigator loose in the vitals of a divided history which the, well, more or less good guy all honorable and aforementioned acknowledges, with a jigger of calm and a twist of resignation, harking in his daydream and, here and there, in person to some sequence of loving his grandmother Margaret and of her love of a variety of truth—that may lead between a Princess who came imperially on a huge, pony-consuming bird from an unquestioned mountain sovereignty of the East Far Eastern Manchoor cum nee-Choor and a doughty young last-century woman named Margaret who, dispatched by her editor-dad from New Jersey to Chicago, thence sent him dispatches that by the time they reached Windrow no longer came from Chicago’s famed World’s Columbian Exposition—and to and from whom goes more due than she would claim were she alive now and not a lucid, "terminal" suicide in 1950—a superior mother making her own daughter’s life come true, we may say, jumping the gun.

So that—in 1964, in the bar of a Washington hotel whose sidewalk turning right yielded a view of the front porch of the White House—Ted, Jim’s colleague and friend, might answer Jim’s guarded sorrow for the late South American lady who had "believed" all his stories and took notes to prove it, "Why, hell, we always knew history was made up!"—in between the now serious dispute over how many runs the left-handed-hitting first baseman of the Senators batted in the summer of 1957, who for better and for worse went with comparatively light-hitting Washington when the franchise moved to Minnesota where he might have wound down his career fishing Mille Lacs with the Indian descendant of that part-Ojibway half-Sioux Thunder Dreamer who passed on to the ancient Anasazi healer the revolver he accepted from a dying white settler in southern Dakota with hope between them if not in pure form in either the prostrate owner of the blue Anglo eyes of the dying or the timeless custodian of those faceted orbs set against the brightly narrowing sky—

—So that we, on whom Mayn hardly knew he was too proud to draw, might from time to time feel blindly (if we did not actually make up) the prospect of a certain non-sweet nothing at the rough or no-man’s-land center toward which were pointed, still, many of these that we take pride in having known: the printing magnate Morgen who was at Mayga’s side when she went to her death largely without help; libration colonists each one of whom twain Earth and Moon leans like an inhumanly extensible shade back to where he or she once upon a metal plate was two; not to mention the Mayn-family founding editor of the Windrow Democrat who vainly asked Old (Seminole-and Cherokee-baiting) Hickory (who, once, in the absence of information that war had ended, ended it all over again with his wild gusto) why he had met as if in secret in a dark coffeehouse whose front was half blocked by dark kegs of flour the village girl who had followed her lover William Morgan from upstate New York where he had been imprisoned briefly for vowing to tell Masonic secrets and then on being let go escaped death by ambush; not to mention the welcoming mother of the Navajo Prince whose head was the subtly gaping issue of the Night Sing when Margaret arrived, saddle-sore but in love—and who instantly gave her an amulet and said to this visiting pale-faced princess Won’t you come in and bring the bird with you, upon which Margaret smiled and looked into the gaping but unwounded hole in the lady’s head and then quite coolly looked about her until she sensed in the periphery of her vision not right-or-left-cornered but in some higher margin a movement in the sky and she rolled her eyes upward and bent her head with the gentlest ceremony back to catch it; and not to mention Alexander either, the young man waiting in Windrow and later grandfather, who poked about in his shop where he had for sale or inspection tables and chairs and things on them such as small objects in small boxes, and had for sale also framed things and well-preserved cloth-bound tomes of travels and battles with pages you would not bend a corner of to mark your place for fear of cracking brittle paper or a rusty note inscribed, even a clef’d line of song from women we relations utilized more than once to infer an entire articulate structure even when words aren’t music, thanks be—Alexander, toward whom with his own half-forgotten gladness the family pistol from its twin source via the Anasazi ancient points, who despite rank, baggy, navy-blue, beyond-shiny worsted trousers with the cuff bottoms worn through, and a khaki shirt that must not be ironed, and a gray-green (apparently gray or green) clip-on bowtie that belongs in a fatly rounded attic trunk, walks always in a pair of size-thirteen dark burnished cordovan brogues supplied him each year by his younger grandson Brad, who keeps the haberdashery establishment and is kind enough to recall a William Heighton who in 1828 was an editor in Philadelphia and led the Cordwainers’ Union (isn’t that right, Granddad? cordovan?) but not that William Morgan, the President’s rival for favors or secrets or both, set type at Heighton’s Mechanics Free Press—a memory whose fault Jim’s life-support (luggage) system can, externalized and unbeknownst to him, supply. We and our multiples had looked into the incarnations we had so needed and curved for and found; but once in them we some of us or parts or branches felt these bloodstreams and fibers of true feeling and stomachs and eyes and bone-play to be bodies we for one had already been and left. And this was a sensation so unlike leaving one another that we or a breathing majority proved what we then saw we had known already, that we had no angels keeping our curve just and our histories and our fluid breaths pure of interruption—for we were those angels and being so we must become ourselves forever, which meant losing those incarnations in order to guard the curve of consciousness, even thought, if not pure gold. Which in turn, though we accept the truth we speak more than take time to know it, the people aforementioned such as Clara or Mayga, the physician and others, untold and unportfolio’d physicians, have learned to breathe quite regular now in the workshop where we take responsibility assez hopefully for ourselves though with baited breath and less the lung kind when naked, for except for the buttock places on the kitchen stool all the naked points are of breath, the body’s bait to whom it may concern, asleep as the fellow-countryman-lover admiral ashore-intelligence observer he’s supposed to be, and unlike the reputed anti-Castro Hispanic inmate reported scheduled to escape really is, as she presses out Clara’s phone number, the stab of current beeping in her ear, yet then as the phone begins its purr and she knows that besides asking Clara what she knows about this man who Clara just possibly might guess is with her now and growing, oh she’s thirsty for her father’s safety so what is she doing with this mine of a man reverse-mountain she doesn’t know what she feels the thorns and hot stones of something more like love than torture melt the balls of her feet in her mouth and she is thirsty for watermelon not really danger and could drink whatever the poet says, cataracts of dark blue night, could drink the South Pole even if with her feet here in New York she would be upside down, she wanted also to say certain words of poetry that she can’t just recall (though grasps) to this lover whose flesh she suddenly knows so well she knows his soft sinewy armpits have creased the night atmosphere of her flat as he moves, and the fingers of his hands are reflected in the next room in the piano’s darkness and the balls of his fine feet cross her living-room carpet where he could stand on his own feet in English while in their own tongue it is wings—to stand on one’s own feet is to fly with one’s own wings—yet his skin tracks the carpet in that next room so lightly he is almost here as Clara answers the phone and words come to the diva after all that are the most beautiful words she would give up music for and this man too, who is perhaps a terrible person whom she never imagined murdering for she is using him and, surprised, she believes he is using her (he likes to be with her) for love half understood—which is at another diameter (completely) from the love that is itself fondly half and yet is wholly understood, with her Boston-grown physician to whom she haltingly said some of these lines in English that now months later in her own tongue she doesn’t forget so that having near her the all-but-breathless yet not odorless idea of her lover all but beside her behind a threshold and not present here in New York to manage the clean seas as a young admiral should (except they cover all that he is truly doing as a visiting intelligence), she is heard to say in English to Clara, the exile-economist’s devoted wife, "Forgive me for phoning at this hour—yes, it’s Luisa—I could not sleep trying to remember the lines that come just before . . . Listen, what is going on—do you know what is going on?" and, since he has followed Luisa this far, he is not in the bedroom to pick up her other phone, which she and Clara would hear, as Clara asks in Spanish why she speaks so softly, and Luisa recalls then all the lines (and then, with a suddenness, that Clara’s man visits a prison somewhere—a kind man yet with some curious purpose there) and Luisa recites, like some American or English verses,

"that on the coast scattered with wild rocks

the sea the fields come together, the waves and the pines,

petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.

Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,

watching how they fly? They seem

to be carrying the letters of the world . . .

. . . something something . . .

. . . pelicans . . . like ships of the wind,

other birds . . . like arrows, carrying

messages from dead kings, viceroys,

buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,

. . . something something . . .

and seagulls, so magnificently white,

they are constantly forgetting what their messages are."

She weeps, and she hears a man’s voice near Clara, who says, "I don’t know what is going on. There is nothing between ‘las costas andinas’ and ‘las gaviotas,’ ‘made of whiteness,’ ‘of purity’—but what comes before all that?"—she asks her husband for the book that’s on a table in the room across Central Park from where Luisa sits on the kitchen stool, one hand warmly snugged between her thighs—"but I remember . . .

‘Tu me preguntas donde estoy? Te contaré

—dando solo detalles utiles al Gobierno—’

por supuesto, Luisa, el no quiere decir eso ..."

No indeed, details useful to the state are not the sea and the fields, petrel and the meadow or even the sun’s atrocity upon the nitrate miners, but why an (albeit officially Swiss) opera donna should permit—why, is there a Swiss opera, as there is a Swiss fleet high and cold upon an angelic peak at the upper end of the world looking for a flood to float a lone whale to give their navy sperm power? The answer, my friend, lies in some Protestant comedy night that asks the question what nationality is the Pope’s gahd?—why, that is, a Chilean opera star (to continue) with a father under house arrest in the land of her birth, the land the earth the ground, permits an agent of that Chicago-model balanced-budget economy to take from her gently her clothes (read gently tug, read peel away from the very skin of her, life within life without end, slide down the grand pout of one buttock or up the soft give of her back while a thumb along the groove of her pretty spine keeps, with the operative fingers, love’s parallel compassed and gratuitous), the Druid folds of her priestess, the spangled shirtwaist of her barmaid’s Golden West, the silver rose from the auburn abundant hair of one who took off the satin breeches long ago and the white wig and doesn’t really like her lover to undress her anyway—oh what’s doing? she has to get out of all this—but would rather find her own way to the bathroom and come back smiling partly at him, partly at Clara reporting a new archaeological massage that you don’t have to wish would go on and on because it makes you longer(!), her robe of bright toweling open to her stomach for her not him, and yet for the first time she thought in her life wanted this man half lying half sitting by her bed table, his plain, uninteresting black shoes flashing, his necktie lowered almost like some more significant garment, opening the pages of a book she rereads at night that lies upon her tiny gilt address book {libretto!), to sort of follow her toward the bathroom having removed his shoes, his socks, and, leaning on the doorway or sitting on the edge of the bathtub watch her pee, her back thoughtfully arched, her eyes in his—but he lets her go her way though stares at what he’s reading with a close attention that to her feels affectionate as she recedes— follows herself—across her bedroom to the John, all but too absorbed in him to think (except she does) that she has the great silly Ford North’s unlisted number under M for Momo (her great bell of basso rotondo, her dear stammerer who finds his tongue in song, canto bell songo, and must phone to tell him of course she will not play Horatio to his unprecedented non-tenor Hamlet in his boyfriend’s three-night-stand opera (with-some-talk) (mysterious of origin, by repute) (J ... I Just want to die . . . I Sometimes you are so pitee-ous and pro-found) at the one-time warehouse owned by a ritual friend of course not, por supuesto, he asked her about it at the very moment when she was considering her naval officer on bended knee backstage finding a place to impress his Japanese now ballpoint upon her satin thigh, but Amleto, Amleto, what a lousy opera the real one had often made, Boito, Hignard, ho hum—in the absence oh what an absence of the only one for the job kicked by his priest as a no doubt cute young acolyte down the altar steps into unconsciousness (during which he might have imagined the whole nineteenth-century opera of American life if he had chosen), kicked into such near-immortality that if, long past his Requiem for a novelist, he wrote Otello at seventy-three and Falstaff at eighty, why not at ninety La Mestizia del Danese if those windy young waters ‘tween Elsinore and Sweden didn’t rush too wetly neither to be nor not to be for the old field marshal’s baton (for we know in all our keen relations that death don’t either want or not want us) . . . if in fact some text of Hamlet was not written years before and scrapped, dispatched, appropriated. . . Hamlet’s mixed-blood upon the stale promontory an angel swiftly interprets, but no—mestizia means just "sadness," or, if we will, "melancholy.") So that—so that, lengthened like malleable shadow, this moment when Diva Luisa fears again her lover’s absence more than anything else (for she can’t hear except in imagination and memory the breaths she knows are calmly being taken and absorbed by his naked chest in the darkness just beyond the dark of her duplex kitchen) comes to contain the presence of another man so briefly in Clara’s closing words that when a click occurs along the line all that is left is the man’s name.

So that for us, collecting in and around such organism, what young Jim was in fact put through, that summer night of interrupted wartime sleep, can converge upon Mayn’s naming by an exile-economist’s mujer, yielding blindly a new brief obstacle to the three who heard the name, the lithe man who had gently uncradled the bedroom phone, and the two women who felt the intervention in their very hearts and therewith said, not in the Gluten Nacht or Buonappe-notte tongues of gran’opera but in good, honest Anglo, "Goodnight," yet not by a long shot American "G’night," or, literally—with the additives restored—"Have a nice day, tonight."

So that while Mayn in ‘63 or ‘64 (no problem) insisted that Roy Sievers had batted in 114 runs for the Washington Senators in 1957 (well before Washington was, lock, stock, and barrel, moved to Minn.—which means, observes the dictatorial interrogator with an accent of the sea shadowily awash in his syntax, that Sievers subsequently did not equal that personal best because with Washington in Minnesota he was himself to his own distraction permanently within shooting distance of the famed antler’d pike-whale of Lake Superior which our own nationals matriculating in the aeronautical program near that thousandfold lac, have been warned of by an Indian with a squint valuable enough to be worth preserving who exchanges such warnings for such information as our nationals have to offer, such as relocation techniques or disappearing acts used for certain anti-Castro Cubans now variously resident in our blessed coastal economy, its sovereignty cast like a shadow by the overlapping sea, a subject Mayn had to be interested in until the involvement of another whom he could not respect returned him to those routines by which he had made his living. He preferred to judge as waste-coincidence the convergence of his own route and that of an exiled Allende economist house-ticketed to an opera one of whose principals had a long-term relation with a simple, cuff-trousered Park Avenue G.P. who had fished with a Lake Superior Ojibway Indian with the same given name Santee as a diamond-squinting aeronautical trainee who relayed information about Cubans being relocated in Chile via an underground North American route more direct than if they’d traveled overland or underground from Cuba right to Chile. If not purely coincidental, at least impurely: which however hastily inhumed in lurid likelihood Mayn would leave to others to bring to light which when it came wriggling forth might have an ageless Spence coiling and coiling around it as if it were money in the pocket more than history on the make with or without that moral "eye" or epicenter Mayn quietly eschewed to own was his.

Leave to others? Like one misled.

By what? By what had stopped his mother singing? A ringing that surrounded her voice? But then him—well—her son with the reddish hair that in one month, like overnight, a year and more later began to go very dark like dye or through that gravity between colors that bled the red away.

But misled more by words of his mother Sarah, that threatened to forget themselves but he didn’t let them as he took himself and his in-spite-of-what-that-strange-woman-said not very foxy thick shock of exploding strong-springing hair that she told him had been having a dream so he ought to go away, she said, and find out if he was fox or bear, well he hated that kind of talk, he wondered if when his father gave her a little kiss on the cheek he kissed the mole near her jaw, all Jim wanted was a bit of information because that would have been just unintense and friendly, but little Brad whom she talked music to and had a tenderness toward (out of all proportion to that little begatten nothing’s deserving) she didn’t have a respect for (that Jim did get but didn’t know what to do with) so he took it out of the music room, her strange respect, at past one in the morning and left, ten stairs at a time, to leave her where she was downstairs—that woman, his mother—and he dived into his T-shirt and kicked into his chinos with a few stiff paint stains of glossy gray porch paint on them, he touched them, and he bent to finger his moccasins back onto his bare heels, and went into the frame of his window unhooking the lower end of the screen to bank it out just far enough so it didn’t come off at the top when he slid out onto that side of the sloping shingle roof and was on the ground smelling the leaves of summer and fresh-turned earth of a flower bed that had a smothering dampness of rock about it and a sweetness of hands, of hide, of the milk of humus; and he could recall being on the roof and being on the ground, but nothing in between, except the words of his unsatisfactory mother that tried to forget themselves, like forgetting her, their utterer.

So that he was out of the house and on Throckmorton Street’s broad sidewalk of great natural slabs of slate washed and rubbed free of the blood they had attracted in falls and minor kid fights. And he ran fast through the quiet night, joying in the extent of his speed, the length of his bounding stride.

So that he was at his grandmother Margaret’s house too fast ever to have seen what he later found had seen him—his father coming home under the maples and elms and serried streetlamps of that moonless night of Throckmorton Street past the steep little cement ramps leading up to each house’s gravel or blacktop driveway, that is, had seen him come loping round the side of the house and out across the grass as if toward a football field’s sideline which is the sidewalk in tonight’s fresh opportunity to forget our life if we will because you want to run and like crazy sometimes.

And he is on his grandmother’s porch near the swing couch and the white-painted woven-wood chairs remembering that his granddad Alexander’s snore could be heard only at a distance of twenty-five or so miles because he was still at Mantoloking, he hadn’t come home with them that afternoon. Jim felt the wooden pillars supporting the porch roof luminously personal with the streetlight beyond, and his right hand was on the ornate front doorknob before he thought to raise his left to the doorbell for he didn’t call on Margaret at this hour, when he heard an angry—wasn’t it angry?—surge of words garbled from inside the house like the only sound within half a mile and he didn’t ring. He took two soft steps to the broad window where the dim light came from the little sitting room beyond the front parlor with all the furniture and the mantelpiece with Alexander’s cigars and two long bookshelves and wonderful long tubular sort of velvet cushions in the corners of the couch, he could smell it all through the window but what was going on was beyond this in the little sitting room, through the door of which Jim saw his grandmother and the wiry, shaky old man from New York who’d come to see her at Mantoloking beach that afternoon, and they were not at each other’s throats but holding each other at arm’s length laughing like before or after hugging as Jim had seen her do with her husband.

And Jim had a good look at his grandmother’s face changing, and then she seemed to turn her back to him, it was to the window. She wore a light-colored summer dress, there were beads across the back of her neck—which was the way Jim remembered.

Her legs were pale as he had never before seen them, and she seemed dimly to have said, "... may need you . . . time comes"—or words to that effect, whatever it was—words with a murmured vagueness at this distance and the window between, that betokened great clarity at close range, that is for the Hermit-Inventor of New York to whom she spoke and who didn’t have his dark glasses on now but the old man’s eyes or one of them, the one that was visible, seemed to be looking at Jim and her at the same time so he felt something not terrible about what parents don’t feel they have to tell children.

So that Jim left the porch, stepped down the steps one by one, went down the walk, and heard his mother’s words and then his own eardrums pounding his brain. And turned away down the sidewalk but stopped to look back at his grandmother and grandfather’s house and a figure standing now in that window Jim had been snooping through. And the figure, just some townbody like anyone known, or on the other hand the Hermit-Inventor of New York whom Jim had always heard of but never before seen except now when (if it was one and the same and it possibly wasn’t) he was very sick but had a nephew, he’d been heard to say at the beach (though Margaret had said precious little about the funny old guy in his khakis and his sneakers with a concave chest and long white eyebrows). He was the Hermit-Inventor of New York, and after Jim with irritation stood his ground and stared back without real connection at the face he couldn’t see, he broke into a run back toward his own house but slowed up when two late cars passed slowly like Sunday up the wide street in the direction of, perhaps, the race track or beyond it Lake Rompanemus in the woods where the "piners" lived in poverty. He stopped and found himself walking as if nothing had happened, and the cars passed, and he heard his mother’s words again and looked back at Margaret’s house and then the other way at his own, which he could just make out the lights of. And he looked at one and the other, back and forth. Until he heard a slight ringing in his ears like when he drop-kicked a field goal, smelled horse manure on the cool fall air, heard pounding feet not blocked out by Ira, the Indian halfback from the other, not the race-track, end of town—and got hit in the head as if he were ball and runner by the little enemy guard who moved like crazy, the one weapon the visiting Toms River team had, but the ball was on its way, a tremendous drop-kick field goal which actually Windrow didn’t need in order to win—a day when Jim’s father stood on the sidelines and never made any response when Jim looked at him in those days before protective face masks, but when he came to, he found his father above him with the same look on his face. And so, wandering between the two houses of light in the quiet street, he got around his mother’s awful words to what it was that had first woken him. It had been the phone and he knew his mother was saying, downstairs, what he had heard her many times say but couldn’t remember what, except that it meant that his father was just leaving the newspaper and was walking home and would be home presently though some part of his home he would never reach.

And hearing his grandmother Margaret call his name down the street, for he was almost home now, he kept walking and didn’t turn back toward her and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, never guessing then that his father had phoned Margaret but assuming rather that the Hermit-Inventor had seen him at the window and Margaret had come out on the porch.

So that, understanding what had first woken him up, Jim said out loud the words that were trying to forget their utterer: his mother had said, and said to him who was the son she could depend on to look out for himself she said and whom she loved, and loved maybe more but not the way she loved Brad, her only other child: "I have to get out of all this. I just want to die sometimes. I could just disappear into the sea. You look at me as if you could kill me. Don’t worry. It’s not your fault; it’s not your responsibility; it’s not your life."

"What do you mean?" the boy asked. "Oh your grandmother said she had to talk to me tomorrow," said Sarah. "So what?" replied Jim. "You’re right," said his mother.

But the dashing, languid interrogator lest those words of a generation ago forget themselves if not their utterer asks, What wasn’t his "responsibility"?—to kill her or to keep her alive?—the words let’s make no bones about it cut two ways if we should wish to implement them, the interrogator adds with the century’s signal neutrality at his fingernails knowing that the torture he can give for fucking around in the words that we use to answer him gon’ hurt us more than him.

So that, on an evening with two young people still young enough to be "his own," Mayn spots at a resounding city intersection a foreign face that tells him what it could never guess it bore; for, a generation ago, on that night so many months before Jim’s mother did disappear into the future of the sea, the father who phoned Jim’s grandma Margaret downstreet to check that the boy racing whitely across the lawn and down West Throckmorton Street like some thief (but which one?) was headed her venerable way, had been in his slow-moving, only apparently hard-working (right?) march toward the void (not like me or any of my family, was Sarah’s line) so unlike his son Jim in Jim’s sharp eyes that Jim imagined some alter paternity; but then the returning walker saw his father watching from the porch and understood that his father had come home, as usual late, and was no doubt taking a pleasant breather thinking about things, maybe concisely separate news of other people’s lives, before penetrating the awful suspension of his own house—a reliable person, "kind of like a brother to me," Jim’s mother said; and Jim felt (though it then got thrown away—a shadow—into the future of a New York intersection and beyond) that if between two dimly lighted silent porch fronts he himself had no alternative parentage, he must have something in common with that impassive father.

Alias Missing Conversation

On this noisy night corner of New York he would say her name out loud almost, but to whom? Did not Chekhov the doctor say a He and She is what you need? How well he knew love’s labor.

Clara, the mind calls, so clear it’s felt inside the mouth. Clara. Without his wife, he grows specific here on this giant night corner of New York in a fashion that could put her in still more danger were she here. The equal, his Clara, of some Shakespeare lady stronger than all the others if the mysterious stagehand had lived to write her down out of the light in his eye. Clara, he hears Shakespeare call, as if to offer them help here in New York City, or (chuck the husband) help only the brave dame. He had seen it all by the time he passed fifty, fifty-one, more scenes than one might slake a shtick at: yet if he could steep the globe of his teapot to dimaxial Carib tempests, why not a pastoral history of some Chilean kingdom by the sea? Used Verona, Venice, Vienna—a very used Vien indeed (and wasn’t there a Polack in there somewhere?)—so why not The Damsel of New Netherland, why not Fluellen of New Yorkl The great stagehand, spurred by a moment’s clairvoyance or by his own warlike name, Shakespeare, replies that, Ay, he has visited New York some time after Hotspur’s rejuvenation and while composing simultaneously those "Co-supremes" the Phoenix and Turtle-dove and a major work Gertrude s Revenge and in fact had named that small island village of Canarsie Indians New Ork (a few short years later mispronounced by Hal Hudson as New York but in any case ignored by his Dutch employers just as the Florentine John Verrazano’s "New Vera" had been ignored by his French employers) but anyhoo has visited New York but does not know it well, his time was limited and he desired to visit the Painted Desert, the Mesas, and those terrible Mines that when you’re not looking move their mountains from place to place not with kettledrum or bray of traffic but by rumor and dangerous richness of vein, and on returning a few short weeks later to that strangely crenellated East Coast had had to get back to London for rehearsals, though America was a great place to visit . . .

Clara: he wants her here with him on this street corner across from Penn Station. So he could nod west toward the glimmer-glass colony escalator’d like some insect civilization and cylindering in light the sports-arena complex: and say to Clara who holds his whole history in her heart collapsing or extending time at will, "Scale model" ... or "Do insects play?" So she, a citizen of his exile very watchful lately, answers whatever will bring what he drily sees more to life.

But she should not be here. Not tonight. Not right here, where it is unclear. Unclear if something superfluous or terribly risky wants something of him—help, even. He would like to speak to someone and fears the dizziness as if it comes to lone tourists endlessly self-conscious in foreign parts. Silence is the real crime against humanity. "Here the Earth still shakes from the old battle—" oh, that Russian lady Akhmatova and her friends they really had it bad, dizzy inside the stomach of the monster capable of accommodating even them, or dizzy just from hunger. Phone Clara to tell her that. But no; make not a phone call.

He takes up position alone out among the night lights of New York City, never in all his visits only a tourist; and now a resident for—four years, is it?, years measurable even as minerals are measured whose sale might (as the Americans say) "fund" the noble Doctor Allende’s posthumous terrorism or so thinks its putative recipient Pinochet whose name Clara plays on, on and on, her only tedious habit.

Now tonight a tourist again, when anyone you run into tonight might be a visiting limb of your lamented nation’s intelligence that’s changing its name—going through Changes, as they say here in New York—so even the Chilean navy is getting into the act tracking down the doctor’s son Pascal.

He takes up position to receive a letter from a man in a New York State prison: Foley, who always has a thing or two to say but this time is passing it through a private mail service.

Not the one he has conceived that would compete favorably with the U.S. Mail. But one that’s operating now just for privacy, or so this privileged (foreign) correspondent here on the outside figures, standing steady 20/20 but, on this huge avenue corner, always looking out for a dizziness inside himself he would rather leave in the doctor’s office diagnosed by its French name, a distinguished dizziness if the doctor’s right.

Standing like a domestic tourist from Akron or Tulsa, or a scholar from San Antonio surveying river cities of the world, now on a Sunday night in the nation of New York having taken up position where agreed, he commands Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street. This is it. He wishes he were in Boston, in Cambridge, for a moment in a Chilean friend’s house discussing skiing. Why did he permit this mail drop to be private to the point of clandestine? It might tell the wrong people if they are watching that he communicates secretly with a prison where in turn there is someone they are interested in, though not this merely "interesting" Foley.

"20/20" the prison inmate Foley ranks his own insight into life and the world, and seems to expect his correspondent the economist to think constantly like an economist—which is how? But one was moved by Foley. He got to one. There in some margin of life where life occurred and political acts aimed at stabilizing things instead doubled or locused that great margin where NATO Nixon thinks of Einstein as just home folks playing classical violin and Einstein while thinking only of his own vast difference from God descales his model universe and, at a stroke, decreeing this Far to be equal to that Near, sees it whole, we are told.

On this side of the street the enclosed subway stairs into the ground generate people—that’s what they do—to eat the cardboard-contained fast-fodder at the adjacent chrome door in order then to be seen by family groups in pastel-colored ready-to-wear (already-/?^mg-worn!) garments slowly issuing out of the hotel under lights of a rehearsal they are self-consciously half aware of. Across the street a hundred functions housed all under the massive complex: mainly, though, the sports arena and the railway terminal you would not know by sight—all seen through signs that say nothing of a mighty athlete, a discus thrower, an ancient pugilist, and now an African giant bombing a net-skirted rim Americans call a basket—signs that also tell nothing of a night sleeping-train smelling of comfortably used steel and carbon afloat in the dreams of passengers upon steam buoying out under the platform—all hidden by the complex—taken for granted, like home.

Solid people are cutting through three, four lanes of Sunday-evening cabs and cars, ruling out risk like hunters, daring the world’s in all probability mad reflexes, occupying sudden positions against the will of yellow horsepower southward.

He has the tweed cap on, he’s exposed, and he’s at the northeast curb as agreed—where the voice on the phone said to stand. Tweed cap, his idea, English. As he sometimes in the past has quite been. Though never to look at. Though you do get English who’re Latin-looking, tall, moustached, because he’s seen them. Walking the fields, from a train. Dangerously private. Walking streets in black suits and capped, bird-crest fashion, by black knobs of bowlers.

Folding his arms he surveys whatever could be watching him wait, his consciousness strolling on and on yet lingering, worded. But this is no such place. He can just about feel the slide of home fingers after dollar bills in his trouser pocket, his Clara against him telling him to pick up a stick of butter if anything’s open on his way home, and did she wonder tonight if it was just their neighborhood he was heading for? Tonight she is further away from him than she would wish. Younger than he, slightly and magically; less foreign to New York—is it because she’s a woman?—though half-English, which is also foreign, yet not like Chilean.

So fresh and trustworthy: oh, he wants to phone her and say so.

He found her this afternoon half-dressed posed in the mirror. He came back from nowhere, alone on a Sunday—feeling official and uneasily at home but especially childless, walking with the river, sitting on a bench. Two little girls were hugging and hugging each other, giggling, and those gross apartment towers across on the New Jersey palisades are the "settlements" you get today.

Inland to Broadway, he had found the pay phone free that he had been directed to in a previous letter by Foley’s in all probability gratuitous code which was just close enough to real thoughts so you must pay heed to it, though it seemed to invent life when we had discovered enough to work on already surely: and then received the call right on time from a man called Efrain. And then went home to Clara feeling technically unfaithful.

To find her half-unclothed before the bedroom mirror.

"Thinking of changing your life," she said, as if she might be the one— ‘7 know," but did not ask where he was now emerging from.

"Our life," he said, which they both knew was true all around, for they were in love and had no internal passport restrictions and could go anywhere in the States where he was invited.

So full-length, she was: skirt off (or not yet on); gartered stockings on, he was glad to see; no slip; stocking feet with silken insteps. Not those gymnastic tights revolvingly displayed in supermarkets (like postcards) next to tall cans of pineapple juice on sale or in drugstores next to a stack of painkillers. And after years of essentially the same body in roughly the same full-length reflection, itself a place they took with them into the countries they lived in, he didn’t know entering the bedroom of a rented sanctuary in New York whether she was half-dressed or half-undressed. So they soon found out. Oh, the Kimball women’s group she went to which did a lot with mirrors, pelvis rolls, "love-your-body" techniques (that doubtless he could use) began in the mystery (for him) of why Clara went at all, and has turned two degrees to what was always there: Clara herself. A woman who had only those secrets from him that made them more intimate and said of the workshop, "Consciousness doth make garbage of us all."

She had not found out until the dark green candles were lit and supper was on the table that he had to meet someone this evening, this night. He and she are so allied by good humor, by potential disaster, that she may have felt the public facts of oppressed female life here on New York’s famed battleground bending her own private but political exile toward some fresh distance she wasn’t telling him about. But she had no need to be that species of feminist with such real risks nearby and the tragedy of their country as near as their very bodies remembering what they had escaped suffering.

He hears her being tortured for a second; hearing is all he can bear. They were lucky. His luck spins again for a moment. A French disease a presumably good doctor said. Meniere’s Syndrome. Stress, ear buzz, counter-clockwise spin, look out. The sidewalk trembles, someone sidesteps him, and a block or two down across Seventh Avenue (which the dark blue-and-white sign names Fashion Avenue—which is news to him, as they say here) the no-numbers clock above the entrance to Penn Station gives him in its passing design the message that he’s ten minutes early. A bicycle floats before his eyes, it goes with the Jap clock, the black boy in his lane at the edge of the packed, three- or four-lane traffic takes his hands off the handlebars and smooths his wondrous long face and crosses his arms in front of him, patting his bike handlebars on automatic, his sneaker laces tied. The sidewalk trembles, and nowhere is there a tweed cap like the one that the young man Efrain was told he would wear. Through the music and the motors and the wheels he hears the traffic-light control-box an arm’s length away run its cycle of two double clicks. He is exposed. But to others’ vengeance?

But this is New York, not Switzerland with its passports, yet not Sicily, not a pueblo in Chile, not Ireland where the village grocer expects you to have a local girl to do your shopping for you; and not a Kansas farming town like twenty other grain-elevator towns at eight-mile intervals where they might know no more about you than Indians in Brazil measure how far a brainy anthropologist has come from his Paris desk; not the large Kansas college town he actually had received an "invite" from to make an appearance at and had been tempted; and not an Andean village where dark Asiatic faces watch and watch and drink corn until they don’t see much of anything, except mountains rearing in the mind; nor is it the mineral cartel that would not go away even after finding an inter-American association reciprocally funding and funded by his own foundation to be drawing on a D.C. bank account in the name of an agency which his photographer-journalist slave/master Spence happens to know is brother to one of the CIA’s sister laundries, and so it goes, the foundation seems conclusively as free of CIA as CIA is free of all ties by virtue of such reciprocal trade-offs as ensure that private life has a future, the only future. Which is not much more private than Asiatic faces reflecting the natural light of some landbridge long lost and invested in their bones and music and autonomic poverty system, looking, looking, deaf to a secret radio rebroadcast of Allende’s ultimate "History is ours, and the people will make it" speech from La Moneda.

Yet here in New York they do look. And look away. But stand on a corner, and call, shout, scream—though "scream" is what they say they do, when all they really do is speak rough. And probabilities are that passersby don’t look around to see if you have someone to call to, yet, with an indifference that is not bad but O.K., they sway you as they pass.

The tweed cap lies exposed upon his head. What if he looks afraid? He paid two pounds for it in Cambridge as an undergraduate. Good island tweed. For the wet. The chill upon the bald street of his head skin more naked yet less skin-like than the nape of his neck. For the long haul. A mass of woven yardage becomes a procession of cloth caps on Ellis Island an age ago, then grows into a mass on foot—but was there emigration from the west, then, too? He needs to speak to someone. Is he already observed?

Tired and muddled masses. Huddled for the long haul. Who do not care if you are a constitutional democrat distinct from Marxist socialist or a Marxist socialist paving the way for a secret police name-change, one hears, from DIN A to something less human. In a carpeted museum, somewhere inside the Statue of Liberty (or its pedestal), Clara had ventured ahead. She passed the tall glass case displaying women’s dresses—a turn-of-the-century her and companion him—the he, say, fifty, here in the glass case; she, say, a good forty, all very reasonable. Clara disappeared around yes a curving wall, he recalls just now for a Seventh Avenue street-corner voice says into his ear, "Goin’ out tonight, honey?"

And turning to the (truly) black girl his height who, against his eyes and his face, with a tall hotel rising behind her, is a flower of splendid eye rouge, lip paint, cheek warm tribal beige—he’s shaking his head vigorously, hearing the buzz in his ears again like torture in some next room, smiling No thanks, to make it clear he’s a person with an appointment, not in from out of town, yet adds, "I am out," for her to add upon her cinnamon breath and with a still grander smile than before, slowly, "Right" and lifts a hand toward his, and the curving wall of night and light round which New York bends and sweeps into a Beyond that’s right here curves into the carpeted Immigration Museum; seeing Clara that day disappear beyond the tall display case of long dresses and around a curved wall, he had not followed her at once. He would take bread from her hand, he’s taken cake. How far was she going? He had put a hand in his trouser pocket, felt some folded fifty-dollar bills; he and Clara wandered through a museum inside the base of the Statue. Folding money. Paper. Worth its print in silver. He never had to think how far his own would go, unbudgeted, half spent, stretched only as reimbursement as if for feeling under threat of death (possibly from competing intelligences!), so the slow middle-class poetry of being alive or at least for decades conscious comes to some late unexpected stage when in an hour your police melodrama lands on top of you and that’s it, a touring messenger from an office in Santiago could kill him yesterday or tomorrow in a cab or browsing at the newsstand or between furrows of a vast Kansas field so God-given at dusk.

And when he found her, his Clara, she was looking at where the wall gave way to show some drab, rust-green metal, just a slope of Lady Liberty, a section they were working on before they would put back the wall; but Clara said in English, "It is definitely her underwear and she can’t see us down here staring."

He had been in love on an island—that was it—Liberty Island; and he touched a palm to her shoulder, courting her. He hadn’t seen what this thing was that they were looking at. Now it was huge. It was part of the gross Statue.

Well, he’s an immigrant. A secret. A secret kept. By his wife, kept subtly alive; professionally kept, though, by a rich man he doesn’t know enough about—kept fed and occupied in the pyramid that that man’s foundation bestrides in which (a phone call once said) you always have a place, you’ve earned it and you can be as incognito as you wish until after aeons of quiet consciousness someone decides it is all over: and so, with humor and killer rage, he could shout out now on Seventh Avenue, secretly meeting this Efrain whoever this recent parolee Efrain is (who says he saw him in the Visitors Room talking to one of the Cubans)—now, though, on this street corner in New York shouting silently that he is here—as if They did not know he was here in New York: so come and cancel him, go ahead, he’s not protected by a pyramidally founded health and accident and whole life policy, and not by sharing some unassailability spun off New York’s singing no-hands bicyclists, nor by the ticking of the green light or the brujos his grandmother told him purred in the jungle bark and took off your head until you went crazy and then put your head back on—all whistling in her old teeth transplanted into the roots of beasts, a giant leopard cub being born in the crotch of a swaying tree to be lowered yowling to mulchy earth by a python that curls spring-like about the new cat only it is sprung from these coils back into the leaves full of ancestral eyes because a pregnant king is stumbling through the trees looking for his queen. Better in the quiet delectable terror of a grandson’s bedroom than in these lurid books flowing out of some South American continent zoo full of whimsy-malmsey not knowledge, not philosophy, therefore no hope except for another dream on tomorrow night’s pillow to sell a South American spirit that middlebrow New Yorkers buy the way they dream of Vietnam girls in some uniform of ripped camouflage, though that can be done more efficiently.

He is a secret kept, maybe from the city too, like death—or your personal Dial-a-Bomb frequency. A secret given the city like a hard figure to be absorbed in the long haul. Hard as drugs; solid as food; a dimension you lost track of in the longer run. Ingest now, digest later. Gulp down like a frog a fly; eat it slowly like a snake; drown it and swallow chewed-off pieces whole. New York is an open secret. For a talker with a community ready and already in conversation in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, he himself has done nothing but talk within himself. A he and a she was what was needed.

He often looks up out of a street.

Oh consciousness raised under the sky, look what there is tonight! Under the sky, the Hilton Hotel on this side of Seventh, what a system!—the Statlex-Hilton is six softly lighted pillars based high above street level. Gray curves glow above the marquee that drapes canvas to the sidewalk; then across on the west side of Seventh the vast Penn Station—Madison Square Garden Center marquee bearing upon it geometric shapes like a children’s advertisement for, maybe, dual-engine monorail hover-power, a clock’s bright wheel and a giant electronic oblong of changing words listing events he will never go to, not even soccer, which is catching on here; and then, risen above Penn Plaza and massively set down upon it, a lighted block of offices with a steakerie slotted oven wise above the street, but behind the building and to the right or uptown side what he now senses he’s been looking at all along from his angle, from the moment he came up out of the subway and tried to avoid the wrinkle of danger along his scalp and sounding inside his armpits, a vision, slanted parallels of light, doubtless the Garden, escalators lighting levels down one wing exposed by treated glass that dusks the down escalators so they glow the foreground and yield the traveling heads of people: oh all the lights and their spots of sheen make a night space of spaces in which he feels held by the whole city. Nations are not people, a nation is not people: is a conglomerate jumping the needs of people through parts to a whole that like an automatic attack-response system works on its own in the long run, works on—or, as thought, collapses what went into it, into fine unknowns in formula, but makes them go away into the generalization where they can then never be quite seen, unlike statistics, which in the long haul do not lie if you know how not to make them.

A streetwalker stands. A taxi joins her, and she looks around her.

He is out here but in hiding. Maybe he has stopped fighting until he finds himself in a fight again. It could be anywhere. Suddenly at a taxi stand. He did what he expected of himself once and did not lose his life, not even his livelihood if in another country; and now has for his trouble and study a counter-clockwise buzzing in his ears and brain and the painful power to think about his country and his grown children; and how they may have accepted the government—what fascist promotions advertise as a renewed nationality: while ancient property that’s no more than breeding thought its way to good sense and good sense to protein programs for undernourished children’s brains and to negotiations with the American mineral mind that led to southern workers taking over factories, but a good doctor when he becomes President needs more than medicine, more than character—until now he weighs earth inside him against property that in his own country is haunted like immense charcoal beaches by the absent owner of America who can be abstract and a man. Meanwhile breeding leads to music, to routine, to thought, to light if only light cast by the wit of love, or, beyond exchanges among prisoners outside and inside, to the courage to be only here. In the long run he is exposed, while danger heard in the next room—if only of his brain—corners him here but only the danger on this corner he came up onto from the IRT subway that he now finds again moving under the sidewalk of his shoes while pop lyrics grind and pass as deeply as the dizziness that pivots taking him with it and its French name to remind him that the stage he is on is perilous to the health. Yet has he planted the flag of Chile in these straits? On this corner he stands between a yellow control box for the traffic light and, on his right, a newsstand sealed for the night, a stained, dull-silver container containing unsold early editions and lurid weeklies, the real news. He has become a Hamlet of the Penn Station district.

A fine woman in paint-stained bluejeans coasts past on a bike, staring— an advert for Join the CIA and be a model; work for a foundation, ride a really good bike.

Some of the music stays still; some passes; and he turns to look behind him, he doesn’t get the words, he understands the cello, but not this, he understands viola, French horn, the Chilean gut guitar even when his beloved cousin played Broqua, stranded each Broqua mystery like minimal song of the understanding to affront the understanding at least of those who in the last century sat through an Alfonso Broqua piece that retimed and so puzzled their own expectations that the mystery was over before outrage told them to get up and leave—and his cousin with the downcast eyes and small hands could play Broqua, some said they did not know how, he sees or feels her fingers cut off, wafted through sounds of silence and agony in a stadium, no Olympic marks in sight, while here along Seventh Avenue in New York the recorded singers are either nuts or having their entrails drawn out to be fingernailed by bare nerves of concentrated electronic juice. Well, did he get here early in order to back out?

At this hour, two tall boys in blue running suits which are called "exercise suits": window-shopping outside a restaurant: blue figures in a whole block of aroma-to-go conglomerated: from trattoria tomato crimson to national blue-and-white of Greek open to the sidewalk so he smells in the walls of his stomach tight spits of half-grilled, grease-dried souvlaki waiting piled like it’s already inside the people; then the sedate break of an awning (Chinese) and beyond it a fisheria, and on the corner where a Puerto Rican (a Cuban?) trying to give out handbills reaches to one side and then the other, there’s a white-fronted hot-dog stop. Suddenly, as one, the tall boys in blue are running, but for the fun of it; and now a black man poses in front of the Greek place offering a towering white girl in a skirt like a rim of white ribbon the flame of his lighter. But he’s caught in the act of walking, lankily at large, swinging one arm back, the other (with lighter) forward, a soft-seeming black hat high-crowned with a yellow band, a shirt shiny for a racehorse, brighter than yellow, silver pants with a split-seam down the leg flashing black spangles in there. What would one have to give for an outfit like that? But what would it cost this black to get out of this circus? The girl’s price goes up; so do her clothes. A skirt to ice skate in. She’s ambling on her long, rather grand legs toward Macy’s department store, but how far can she go?

It’s almost time. He had to come. The name Efrain is Spanish. Everywhere he’s seeing Hispanics, same as the area north of where he and Clara, his half-English Clara, live so close that they might never try to return to the England of the Andes. Take up position, and the newsstand is in the way. He steps back to see the girl in the high skirt bend toward a car stopped beyond the Chinese awning.

Down the other way across Seventh Avenue, Penn Plaza fills up but the people do not seem to be traveling. He gets the dizziness again. Sixty blocks north of here someone is reading in a high window down by Riverside Drive, and he knows it is Clara; the cigarette goes from hand to hand, she holds it in her lips attentively turning the page. Or, no, she has no cigarette; she is wondering when this can end, when she can at least write letters to her aging children, who may not wholeheartedly want to receive them. He must be with her and not in mere sympathy, mere telepathy the plain truth of which is worth so very little that Let us act out some terrible consequences so we’ll have messages for each other that are important; and in his dizziness the southbound traffic bends eastward like a London circus bending his eyeballs, not knowing what its bonded recipient is going through.

Why can’t someone take his place? For he doesn’t know what he’s waiting for—he doesn’t know why he let himself get into correspondence with an inmate who was not the one he went to visit originally, except because maybe this inmate with a kindred Irish name (who perhaps dreams of escape to Chile twenty years ago into a new identity beyond extradition) wants no link with the man he did go originally to visit, not to mention a known Cuban anti-Castroid incendiary also inmate there, and so Foley becomes a cover if one was needed, but if you start thinking "cover" you lose it, exile survivor of a vision if it can be brought about again, though he here, on a street corner of New York waiting for a letter, is a cultivated man who tried, who happened to be out of the country in the Chilean spring of ‘73 to see leaves yellowing here in an American fall, who himself might now be spent by touring thugs, and who investigates curves of infant mortality and of unemployment recorded "within shooting distance" (as the shy sportsman physician of Clara’s opera singer put it one night evoking a Great Lake where he fished with an Indian) of Santiago where the low, low peso and low low customs duties bring piranhas within easy reach of any poor family’s budget—statistical curves scanned since 1975 in a New York foundation office with stereo and with sensitive research assistants with good manners and often only a first name, Amy, and such bleaching of the withered leaves of world money that like the new head General Mena of our proud secret police those who doubtless watch over him here on a giant street corner of New York might conclude that he has taken to heart a compatriot military lord with a pied a terre in Virginia who rather than liquidate this resident economist of a (late) mere medical doctor named Allende, says, "You have betrayed your class," and lets it go at that.

He sees the Seiko clock and in the crowd there at the entrance to Penn Station two women appear at the head of the escalator and move forward with their suitcases. The young one sets hers down and is swayed by the people who must be coming from some sports event; then she takes up her case again to follow the older woman who, her arm raised, her finger pointing upward, is moving toward the line of parked cabs. Both women in white—what’s the difference between them?

But he doesn’t get the chance to think, since a Puerto Rican family’s right here on top of him; they come five, six abreast through him with their late-night shopping bags and small, striking children, tired, wide-eyed pirate marchers, long-haulers; and then two more kids slip around the curbside of the deserted newsstand and get back with the family and generously oblivious of him they make him step to the curb and he’s almost forced off—kaput.

Two pale-brown young men with Afros and army jackets step off the far curb and he grabs at his tweed cap and has trouble with the flap of his jacket pocket getting the cap in, and he steps off the curb and is almost hit by a cab, glaring yellow paint—but before he can jump back from it, the cab braked. The magic of the machine is in his stopping it. But he steps back up on the curb and sees behind the shadowed gleam of the windshield the driver looking back over his shoulder through his cage at the people in the back seat and the cab’s street-side door swings out. The driver is black, with a round, happy face.

People in clothes are crossing. What game were Americans playing at the Garden tonight? He steps off the curb. At the far corner he turns left and crosses downtown, turns around and, passing people who don’t look at him, crosses back to the second point where the fellows in army jackets stood when he first saw them. And now he glances at the corner on the other side of Seventh Avenue where he waited for ten minutes—having told Efrain he would be there. Efrain had some tickets to unload. To scalp?

What game?

Efrain explained and it was not clear. He was going to the game but apparently not attending. He didn’t quite say. But he picked the location because of the basketball game. Two people converge on one place, not a coincidence in this city. His assistant, the girl Amy from the office, talked basketball just yesterday. Nothing more definite than the game in general. The positions. Taking up a position so you could not be run into. A great American idea perhaps. What you could not do. She had been listening to a man who was taking her—and whom she had taken to the opera with free tickets from who else but dearest Clara.

People pass that corner, pass through it as if it were an imaginary point. No one stops but a heroic-faced derelict showing a pale thigh through ripped pants who stops, turns as people pass in four directions, and is turned by them. Almost full circle. Until he turns slowly back round and, a stubborn old mechanism made to last, he looks down upon the sidewalk at the point where a man with a tweed cap felt the West Side subway rumbling underfoot—and at last turns down Thirty-third past the trattoria’s side window, pauses to look through at the two young men in blue jump suits, moves on toward the cafeteria counters.

People pass through that point Efrain was to meet him at.

No one stops.

To occupy that position. The girl, his assistant Amy, with the sensual good manners, told him about occupying position in basketball, which she had picked up from the friend taking her to the game, it’s who gets there first can’t be run into—

Talk to someone; he has talked well for hours, days; has done so in nation after nation.

He withdraws the tweed cap from his jacket pocket and pats the pocket hanging smooth; stuffs the cap back in and feels a coin as cold beside the fabric as a hunk of glass and would like to have to say words but move only from light to light. (Until he reached Clara, that is, with whom the eternal excitement of not having to talk makes all the talk they have so full of light.)

Yet one might just talk in New York to anybody on a corner, a young heavyset fellow who looks as if he might not move for a year, a flash of a girl who was hardly there, then fleered away into the street. The hell with "dialogue." Some casual talk instead. Risking being thought a kook.

Efrain will be watching that corner from his angle. The man who is supposed to be on that corner is replaceable. A substitute would just wear a tweed cap. What more? But who would substitute for him? But to him and only him Efrain is bringing tonight a message he half made sound unmailable, from Foley, whom Efrain was with in that other world so recently, Foley— the one and only Foley—who bypasses normal converse because the phone is tapped and the routes between minds are full of parallels to find your own way. Foley conspiring with his own odd head and now a foreign national who can’t see Central Park’s roads and spinning bike steel except as a terrible comfort of failure in his own life. Life after Allende, Clara said. Why, though, let a prison inmate hide you?

"Thank you for taking the trouble to answer me," an early letter from Foley began, without humility; "you are not American, but your name is pretty weird for where I hear you are from (yet I’m a learner). What’s in a name? (smile)"—the parenthesis so the other words wouldn’t see. American habit? Uneducated? "... it’s your choice of words, not your accent, that sounds foreign."

So quietly reading Foley’s letter.

Everyone has trouble but not everyone is in danger. You sit years of intelligence, of awareness, as if it weren’t a risk, while danger is in the next room. But not here—here’s a woman in bed, she doesn’t look up at him taking off clothes he never thinks about, and she’s all the more intimate for not looking up from her book as if she shares her pleasure with him. She smiles—at a page—something has touched her, he puts one knee on the bed. But the next room is the danger—the traffic light changes—he recedes abruptly from New York, lifted away. He wants to talk only to her. Weak economist! My God, will marriage in a life like this in the long run get to be an exile? The next room is the danger. A groan broadens to a test scream, non-audible threats, the interrogatory stab, no scrape of chair leg, no shift of shoe sole, the action non-visible that the tortured sounds record. The screams aren’t quite shouts; for who can think of help or rescue, or a long haul, the upside-down-hung genitals (therefore this one is not a female) clamped by electrodes, yow yow, penis head pink to rose exposed, and refractory testicles autonomously retracting ceiling-wards, actually toward the ceiling light, big toes near a light fixture and already yanked out of joint plunging into the medium that waters pain to keep it live and/or optimum—as he thought the Japanese masseuse would do to his toes here in the great substitute place of them all New York, for which, therefore, there is no substitute when she made snapping sounds pulling them, those toes he never thought about normally, but it felt good. He isn’t particularly good at having things done to him. But you take up position and you hold it, isn’t that what was said?

Which way you going—home? A young voice, a young man’s, a boy’s.

Alone: it’s an alias, "alone." You’re not there unless you bump Another. Let an American mineral cartel exposed or unexposed be immortal, let people be parallel to people curving off into a distance which is optical marriage. Private existence with Clara is True Value, no substitution, small-scale units of book and pillow case and hand, clear and loving, where love might exist like disembodied angels in the upper reaches of an opera-house repertory but her dry-wrung washcloth laid on the sink like a Peruvian rug upon an iron balcony in the Chilean sun, to Saturday-morning piano music in a large dusky room—there is the true unit that someone was looking for.

People brush past, and he finds one foot in the street. Three people among others. And as he jerks his face away, and a blast of steam barrels out of the street, then in animate bursts, he jolts himself with the twist he gave his neck, did she see him?, it’s the threesome, a gray-haired, very broad-shouldered, stocky man is crossing with a fine young girl (much too young for him) who holds her cigarette out in front of her and touches the wrist of the boy on her other side less like his girlfriend than his married sister, she’s so clearly detached from him, if it matters, while he tries for her hand but her hand has slid up to hold his elbow and he leans his shoulder into hers looking straight ahead, and the girl thrown up by the field of New York is Amy—Amy his assistant from the office who was the one who spoke to him only hours before a phone call brought Efrain’s voice from some subway platform, couldn’t tell if the train was arriving or leaving, and here was the girl Amy with the extraordinarily good manners having converged upon him from behind and never knew and he was wanting to talk to someone and feels uncannily certain that if she, whom he liked so much, had seen him he would be in danger— why?—a dynamo would go off in his French-diagnosed ear and he would never hear it, but Amy was not the point. The older man points across the street showing them something. Has a broad tweed jacket on. But he is not so much older as he is familiar. Known from where? Stops in the middle of Seventh Avenue like he’s come up lame—but no—Cape Kennedy?—and looks around right through the immigrant with the cap in his pocket and two fifties and two ones in his trouser pocket, and the boy who might be eighteen or twenty turns his head to look at the girl Amy, who has looked back, they’re like the man’s own children, somewhat younger than the immigrant’s own children, American-quick to finger the button of that old New World so they absorbed unthinkable contradictions unthought, and the girl Amy who has looked back has seen, one knows, her bald superior from the foundation office and will not call attention to him and perhaps because of this will do nothing but continue with the boy and the man, this gray-haired man crossing eastward away from him, having come up to him from behind without knowing it and walked, brushed, right past him as if he were a marginal growing thing, a bush, this gray-haired tough-looking man taking two grown kids for a drink after a basketball game—is that it?—knows where he is going now, it’s the Greek fast-food place. (Can there be a "place" describable thus?) They approach tableau, he should pursue them, break in on them and stop what might be happening because he knows it has to do with him. He’s seen the older man before, but not from behind; yet in weather like this; yet not with that jacket. Months go by, tabled on a prison calendar isolated into days and numbers and events to be then swallowed into a flesh of unending term.

He has seen the gray-haired man before.

So? a voice shrugs. This is New York, the long run. He does not want to hear himself think any more. He would fight, now.

Efrain—he knew an Efrem once—Efrain is not at the agreed corner. Even minus the tweed cap he may be recognized by Efrain. Isn’t this so by law of streetwise survival?

By another law, Efrain has got to be getting something tonight in return for delivering the message from Foley. Why meet like this?

It serves both sides, maybe. For what if Efrain had said he would meet him at the apartment? Clara saw in her husband’s face that he might shift to Spanish speaking to Efrain. Jobless parolee hanging out.

The Japanese clock with its yellow markers makes time itself an advertisement, and it’s not always there—do they take it away?—it’s so big!— cover it up? (he would know if so) . . . the long hand is past the bottom yellow now. But wasn’t the clock digital the last time he looked? If the tight-fitting tweed cap goes on now, something will happen to him. Where would Efrain scalp tickets? Back there by the entrance to the arena? The slow or endless poetry of being aware, of being conscious, will come after decades to some random rapid moment of active void of police melodrama violently making the life of awareness seem like slow suicide.

Exposed, one stays where one is. His hand—his pistol hand—is in his jacket pocket as if to keep the cap from working its way out. He is afraid. The point of the meeting tonight was him, he senses, he guesses, but how? Not the message, but him. So he is to get the message from prison (this time unposted) and in exchange gives up what?

Himself.

But this is why he is here. He is the one whose life Foley’s letters intimate. "Life" so final and indecisive-sounding a word in English. Faster than saying "Efrain." Life is what Foley could be doing. "Natural life" means no parole, does it? and once he wanted to ask what Foley had done to almost get it, but you don’t ask, and if an inmate feels inclined to tell, he will—which Foley did not, except to write once about "a guy who has a score to settle with me who stands watch, week in week out, over a row of garbage cans."

Life, then. Less than natural life. Foley got eight to twenty. Imagine not knowing.

When what he wants to know is real. What he must know is how can he be in danger and in a vacuum at the same time? It is a life, says Clara. For how long? Old New York from other years they have dinner in, but this trip reinvents their whereabouts though they are in the phone book: just in from Stockholm for a week, consultant in San Diego, semi-retired in the Carinthian Mountains of Austria an hour from Italy an hour from Yugoslavia (at your age? and the "children"?): to meet the children in Mexico City (one lie compounded to) or New Orleans, we met on neutral ground in a New Orleans garden (and the regime? asks the friend or his wife; where do your children stand?—don’t ask—a subtle lie, for he doesn’t know).

They see a play, a movie, an opera with a friend in it, two operas. He has heard tell of a Hamlet opera—a Hamlet of the Garment District with roles altered. Where does he know the gray-haired man from? They’ve turned left at the far corner where he was to have met Efrain. From England? from Chile? from Rome? from gatherings where he sits and listens and does not ask questions and feels like a Jew in a Cracow suburb? The old Nobel scientist from Florida—Switzerland by way of Florida where he lives now—stood in front of a blackboard and said there are no vacuums, and later was interrupted by a student bearing socialist manifestos, issuing garbled challenges by which the old man’s beautifully economical physics was not touched, for students here don’t cut through so—so fiercely, with cool passion—the way students back home used to—to the salient contradiction, the contradiction, the suddenly grasped contradiction!—though it is true, too, that the old man was good, very good. Better than a Nobel economist who comes to one’s mind at this crowded, empty moment who is of course right about money but about nothing else. And when Clara said on his return, "If there are no vacuums, what have we instead? What takes their place?" And he laughed until, like swimming in his employer’s pool in winter so in the long run he couldn’t stop, couldn’t stop swimming, but then dizzily did, he was stopped by the famous physicist’s answer which he passed to his wife Clara: "There are only areas of low energy."

A scene he’s absent from is what he gathers across Seventh Avenue. A theater set, the cast for a moment parting like a curtain, like the space between the great charges of steam wasting up out of a hole in the street, and the fatherly broad man with the greenish tweed jacket and Amy, her bright pale hair in a single brain, and the boy, gaining the far sidewalk, swing off left, so the eye moves ahead of them to the open-front fast-food Greek eatery to a dark-olive-faced young man in a khaki jacket, trousers, beret, all khaki but for one detail and he’s standing at the counter watching the sidewalk as much of it as he can see and Seventh Avenue and theoretically the unsuspected far corner on the west side where the eye watches him, seeing what he cannot see because it’s around the corner of the restaurant’s open front on the sidewalk; so the eye unclouded by a dangerous tweed cap that’s been pocketed, and uncluttered by the aching dozen of all different simultaneous thought clustering about the half-known name of the fatherly man with the two young companions, feels this group who now on the far sidewalk approach the open front of the fast-food place where Efrain, for it is and must be Efrain, waits with the one non-khaki detail visible upon his person, and the cars build up between the eye of the immigrant beholder who ought to be building something now himself but has left it in his native land destroyed and is touring some place that turns into scenes of his own absence, a scene across the avenue: the three reach the souvlaki place Giro II (!)—someone’s head chattering away against the vertical barbecue, la par ilia, which in Chile they may even toast you with—and are visibly hailed by Efrain who eases over to shake hands with Mayn—yes—and be presented to the two young people; yes, Mayn was the name, Mayn it is, the name as sure as his coincidental second materialization walking up the Upper West Side block five floors below the window of Clara and her husband’s flat and as certain as Mayn’s first appearance in Florida days after Allende’s speech to the UN months and months ago at a point on the planet’s surface free of visual interruption so one felt oneself standing on the planet, until late, late at night long after this friendly newspaperman named Mayn (who made you think the big events were not so big nor necessarily elsewhere) had—yes—asked if he thought people were interchangeable: while an old friend sat behind them at the Voice of America table beaming Apollo 17 information to, among other targets down the long continent below this one, a large room or a next room where an old good friend at last and still for a moment in power might turn from debt rescheduling which will always be with us to copper and back again but only to substitute one for the other and never admit a tie-in no matter what a CIA economist might urge, an old old friend a medical doctor with an inflated government staff who did not himself know how soon life would replace him.

The one visual interruption high, white, steaming on the face of Florida’s eastward-empty beach-coast lifted off above the fires that it and its voyage were based in and turned away toward that horizon that only instruments made manifold; and he had felt not at the outer top of the turning Earth as earlier that warm December evening but at a deepening bottom urged further by the presence by then beside him, on the infield at the Press Site (like a dig) looking off over the silhouetted heads of photographers and, across the inlet-river, of a man so unlike Mayn when it came he knew, he had predicted this other man, this journalist-operator Spence (who would be more threat than help before they finished because his proposition was important as well as an intrigue, and yet he seemed paired further with Mayn, this Spence: were they brothers in arms? for one didn’t know or want to, but Spence had concluded he a mere marginal economist with Allende’s precarious regime was knowingly in the employ of a foundation marginally central to the ongoing American war effort hence must know much more about a certain Santiago junta’s life-support system, spring-loaded to—upon re-entry—course-correct for target arrival, but Spence would find out even what one did not know one knew), would warn him against the agreeable, inquiring Mayn whom Spence had seen him in conversation with by the Voice of America table, for the old microphone was a finer power than all incendiary ignitions banging and cracking each other into a disappearing century’s nucleus. But that finer power of wave and vocal cord dissolves too in all the words using it, and many mouths mouth People Power but Clara laughs and he grazes her hand, and they talk, they have always talked.

Efrain looks across Seventh Avenue and with his shoulders and hands is telling Mayn and Mayn’s friends that a person was not here who was supposed to be here, but Amy won’t recognize Efrain’s name for him (if sounded), because it’s another alias, the name Foley knows. Her eyes were bright once—it was this week surely—when she took a messenger’s manila envelope, brought it to his office, and explained basketball to him. Setting a pick, charging, traveling, occupying a position before an opposing player charged into you, all most logical. He himself was once a footballer, he found himself discussing with her his assistant the fine art of centering the white ball from the corner so far away it was almost not on the field or in the game, curving the ball softly back into the heads and legs in the goal mouth, the whole mind of the goal mouth. An old woman on this new corner of his touches the immigrant elbow, a striking person, white-haired with a mole on her jaw, hand in hand with a tall, thin, glowering elderly man not as old as she but lined and stretched by the long haul and preserved in vinegar and by some long, possibly original, preoccupation, who steps away from her as she says, "What is your name?" A random man, asked what his name is, a verbal promontory who reads books from cover to cover all week in the midst of a life that feels like an interruption, he has Some answer or other for her, while her escort stands away, irritated, and the answer seems to please her: "Alias . . . Alias is my name." She sidles off amused, saying, "Alias, Alias"—a well-known and interesting name (not "Mayn," which he had almost said in the night light) and she’s nodding in recognition, and then the elderly man, compelled by community or by love’s hermitage, explains, "Her concentration span isn’t much now, you know."

As if he would know—and she goes off, taking away with her some message or glancing light from him, this random man. There are no random events, which could be as sad as our ideas of them. In New Jersey a group of Cubans stand in unison and snap into flame their thunderbolt-emblem cigarette lighters in honor of Pinochet.

While over there across the street, Efrain is charming those three. He’s recently released. Maybe he is the Hamlet of the Penn Station district.

The wait has upped the noise, the noise level’s a hood coming down over the skull and lowering over forehead and eyes to the bridge of the nose and tickling the rims of the nostrils until dizziness can be relieved only with something to eat or drink or some talk, but the four people across in the fast-souvlakia are not eating, and the boy is looking at Amy, who glances more cool than calm at her watch, she wants to go, but is this because she’s figured out who Efrain was meeting and planning to introduce to Mayn and has thought fit to miss the meeting? Mayn is the trouble, but how about Efrain, you don’t need talk to tell you that Efrain made the arrangement to meet Mayn. Efrain takes in all three, while the boy looks at Amy and she keeps looking at Mayn but not wanting anything. Efrain’s eyes see the street too, the far sidewalk far as the corner where a bald man with a distinguished mustache pushes his right hand into a bunched-up cloth cap in his pocket.

A man who now moves toward Efrain but out of his sight, moving east toward Efrain’s side of the avenue, moving across Seventh in a mob of basketball fans jostling each other quite dangerously, perhaps thirty percent returning to New Jersey. Amy and Mayn and the boy have come out of the restaurant. They have turned away toward Thirty-fourth Street, and the unknown or unseen fifth person moves without having decided what to do, moving with a crowd of shouting fans, young, strong, drunk, elbowing each other so that the tweed cap somehow comes half out of the pocket as they all make the corner where half an hour and more ago he was to have met Efrain.

Efrain now has turned left out of the restaurant toward him, toward this corner of Thirty-third; and what seemed in the mineral glare of the souvlaki place the one detail not khaki is right there in the pocket of his loose military jacket. But, perhaps under Amy’s backward gaze, a decision has been taken as five fans veer up the block and he with them as Efrain has to stop to let them pass and is so close that Efrain as they pass does not feel the long white business envelope lifted from his pocket nor begin (as yet) to imagine what the tall blonde girl he’s just met with Mayn and this highly alert youth deduces as she looks back again to see a man she knows in confidence to be a distinguished foreign economist pick a pocket—or worse—while the potential light of her sharp gaze is followed, even after she turns again and sees Mayn flag a crosstown cab, by the eyes of the boy, slight of limb though tall enough, eighteen or twenty with a load of cared-for, wavy dark hair, who thinks he knows what her cool eyes have seen and seems then to absorb her light and forget her in contemplation of a visiting tall, bald man with a known mustache, who meets his eyes reflectively—which is the most signal thing that has emerged in these glancing turns of event—and bends into a downtown taxi that materialized at the curb, the avenue is downtown, all taxis therefore.

He has felt at once the boy-man’s eyes seeing what there is of him through the cab’s back window, homing on his brain (though Clara would laugh at such imagination from him) and was glad of the round-faced black man in the driver’s seat, and has given the address uptown, thinking he didn’t mean to take a cab.

Foley’s envelope has the five-day return-address box number instead of "— Prison," or "Correctional Facility" the Americans say, though how many know they do? The envelope comes unsealed too easily. He will explode the taxi if the driver is his personal DIN A agent. The letter hangs fire. Is it the margin narrowing his private personal life to one last light that will not escape him even into the heart of his life’s companion and must turn toward political anger to see if it is in him?

With this secrecy of the code directing one to a pay phone on upper Broadway, this meeting, and so forth, who is Foley protecting? His correspondent? Efrain? Efrain said on the phone he had to stay out of sight but then was bringing people together right and left. Was the clandestine process protecting Foley? His letter this time, one felt, would not concern itself with the long haul, with the Utopian sewage or a free-enterprise postal system, or deep-Earth steam power lately Foley’s passion running nuclear coolers without coal(I), a nuclear-powered prison!, and running electrical transformers without oil, by piping water miles down into chambers of molten rock a thousand degrees hot to bring it back as steam to make turbines reel with rage and joy. Foley’s privileged correspondent replied that he could see the steam project erupting in volcanic magma spews loading the sky with geothermal plumbing exploding sky-high which if the pieces went high enough were reassembled for use in orbit. But Foley—at his end of this slow joke-by-mail never knowing when he might get a live visit—retorted that clean power was the only answer, one of his contacts had told him what was going on in New Mexico. Yet in the end Foley can see an ultimate nothing but brain power nakedly moving Earth by intercommunication. And if you wanted to talk about volcanoes Foley would be glad to discuss Hibok Hibok, or Paricutin which came up out of a cornfield, or, his mysterious contact’s favorite, Krakatoa in 1883 which blew stuff seventeen miles up into the atmosphere and created legendary sunsets for years.

Had the letter been opened? Or come unstuck? Let the letter not matter. Hungry people matter. In the short run, too. An educated Cuban who announces himself anti-Castro long before he finds himself in prison on a spurious charge of planting weapons in a Korean grocery in Manhattan known to be a Cuban socialist cell will not (should he escape) be denied sanctuary in Chile, it stands to reason, unless he is known to have Allende friends. Clara heard the rumors before her husband did but knew that the man he first visited in prison here was a friend of a friend, and that’s all there was to it.

The dizzy buzzing in his ears wheels right to left. He tucks the back flap inside the envelope. Heart running fast and heavy as two magnets. Cabdriver missed the light, he’s been doing something up in the front seat. Has a French name. What if he is Hamlet? And his district is in motion. Why have they missed the light? They’re stopped at a red light. He slides the envelope inside his jacket into his wallet pocket. He hears music and hums like Hamlet thinking.

And when he lies back easy in the leather seat and looks out the window, he meets Efrain’s body, and knows the letter could be trouble, like an engulfing cloud that wraps round him and Clara and the cloud is targeted, only the cloud, but that would be enough to include them in.

He finds Efrain standing above him on the curb apart from him staring past the cab he is in, looking around for a man wearing a tweed cap until he happens to glance at the cab under his nose, the cab of the unknown person in the back seat who doesn’t blink, as the light conveniently changes and Sir Isaac Newton jolts your vertebrae, and Efrain claps his hand to his side like a holster and digs his hand then into his pocket.

And as he wheels wildly as if to see the thief, the moderately impressive fact is observed that he does not reach for the pocket on the other side, the right side. For he knows where the letter was. Does it matter in the long run? An episode in Foley’s private life and fantasies maybe no more, no plot, no intrigue involving other inmates anti-Castro, maybe no Chile, maybe just a letter by hand.

"You are from Ah-ee-tee," the passenger says to the cabdriver, and puts on the cloth cap.

"Yes," says the man with a look up into the mirror. "And you?" A he and a he, and a hee-hee-hee.

The passenger leans so his nose is almost against the steel divider screen, and three hundred or is it two hundred and fifty years of what-have-you, sophistication, responsibility, family, and geography in the mind start to speak for him words he wanted to speak to that unknown Puerto Rican Efrain, and to the man he buys his coffee from, and to a neutral econometrist who says in the long run "it" evens out, and to Lord Keynes who said In the long run we are dead, and to the man Mayn who probably knows the words by now, and to one’s grown children but so young—Efrain’s age—wandering a muddy street past breeze-block housing named La Hermida, named Joao Goulart— but in Santiago no one wanders any more—or up against it in a sports stadium; blinking up from the bottom of a limestone mine that will not be mined; working perhaps for the regime—and to whoever wants him dead, if anyone—and the words are I am from Chile—yet the words turn into one spoken word: "Chileno."

"Lejos de casa," the driver says with an accent, turning left on Thirty-second, which is the long way to the Upper West Side but with lanes of cars to their right it would take him two blocks to drift across Seventh to turn right and get over to Eighth Avenue, which goes north. Escape the scene, but to do what then? Go home. Home is Clara.

"Far from home, yes," the passenger agrees. And smiles; and, feeling the American language close, adds to the man in front of him, "You know it," and it comes to him that he is over that dizziness, it will not visit him again.

Then he remembers, and tells the man, "Your parking light reflector’s broken."

And while the man knows, the passenger wonders how he himself saw such a thing in his haste to get into the cab.

known bits I

a. The bike stood there and had no business on the subway platform. Ten-speed blue Fuji with a lock clamped on the rat-trap for safe travel. Hands were on the bike and it was being pushed onto the Lenox Avenue express by a white man but there was no room for it, so it was not definitely being pushed onto the train. Gray-bearded man with an orange leather headband and black sweatshirt with the hood back pushing that definitely beautiful bike, the front (quick-release) wheel on the car, the remainder of the bike on the platform. Gray beard on platform holding the saddle and one handlebar. Georgie the owner of the other hands receiving the bike gladly onto the too-crowded train, Georgie smiling waiting to take delivery, while the graybeard jerk’s smiling on the platform but not because a bike’s got no place in the subway.

Other rush-hour people reached to get it onto the jammed car where there was no space, man in green beret holding other handlebar, girl in pink T-shirt with her hand next to his. And what Georgie definitely needed was a henchman on the platform end to distract the graybeard jerk-owner of bike so it could be taken from him onto the subway car in time for the doors, both operative, to shut, leaving the graybeard on the platform outside looking through the glass window at his ten-speed inside, not smiling any more then, unless he had been intending to make a donation of that bike to a world that was a good place. A bike to build on, though moving.

And Georgie in the army jacket and blue jaw-scar not seeing the one person here in the middle of the city from his block in Brooklyn, his neighborhood; but would never see—even on home block—the big big Jimmy jaw and wide eyes stupid-looking, almost never give a look to build on except once, Hey how’s Jimmy the retard? What’s happenin’?

Definites to build on. Even the biggest jaw per least words. Ten-speed Fuji, and a white guy taking it on the Harlem express but won’t go all the way, and looks like someone. Bike don’t change, space or no space.

Probable that people in the car would look after it and/or the motorman could take it to the Lost and Found at the end of the line. But would they do that with the Sony portable color TV in the carton there on the platform, possession of the beautiful blonde woman with the busted nose at that taking it home probably to her family? Probably it would not wind up in Lost and Found—any more than woman in white robe on her hands and knees by the exit stairs who stopped singing a religious song and started growling real loud and stopped. Probable is not definite, not known for sure, not fact; not a message to build on: though have now found out that it is possible to build even when in motion.

Georgie did not know he was being looked at by one of the freaks from his block far away in Brooklyn. All freaks to him. Often back in neighborhood he would not know he was being looked at, would look right through you, but no, not through, but, for a fact, just around you. On one side of bike now half or three-quarters into car was Puerto Rican or Cuban woman who was having a baby soon. Never saw Georgie away from the block before, someplace else in the city. Woman having the baby couldn’t move, and she was leaning on someone but someone invisible, the light overhead came down the pole and made her eyelids dark lamps for a fact. She didn’t have a seat to sit down. She could use a vacation out where it’s warm and quiet—where there’s space to turn around—turn around three times without pickpockets making friends before you know it and if she’s your sister you protect her if you have to against someone wants to make trouble for her, a sister it would be good to have sitting in the kitchen taking a breather, brushing her teeth in the bathroom in the morning with the radio going, a sister a little older, a little younger, that could be talked to, and let the mother go her own way for a while, a sister who would believe when told retard-brother learned all alone on broken bike in trashed lot months and months ago until they took lot away. A white messenger came by like a slow motor, had one smaller arm and a look in both eyes.

The next car not so crowded, there’s light between the people. It didn’t have all its doors functioning, either. Just the left half of the door or the right half would open; it’s the circuits unloading. Georgie a prick but no asshole; keeps mouth shut. Bike was being retracted from crowded car. But sometimes Georgie says, You retard, you retarded asshole, you jerk; you got yourself a job! But he didn’t see all the other messengers. Has big hands and a scar on jaw.

b. Some big manila envelopes heavy; some light. Some too big to hand-hold. Some stiff. Some bend. Some with art work inside; some with different important papers and cardboard moving around inside. Sometimes a long or small box to carry from one office to another.

Kid with fast hands standing beside the newspaper and sex-trash stand upstairs by turnstiles. Fast mouth: dumb mothe’-fuckin’ retard; asshole messenger; ugliest nigger messenger ever seen: they give you money to carry around? Hey boy you hear me?

Fast hands on a big manila envelope that’s already hard to hand-hold tight up under the arm. Tight’s better than fast—photographs and big ones inside envelope. Kid with fast hands fast mouth alongside approaching the stairway from turnstile level, he’s looking to take the big envelope for himself, but he don’t know lanes and he is not looking ahead and he’s in a lane just like everybody else in the city: ahead of him in his lane a transit cop’s wearing a stack of ribbons, and a collision is impending: cop pushes fast kid right down on his back and he don’t bounce up or roll over. He stays there, and lanes are where it’s at. Some days lanes blocked, some days lanes clear with elevator opening before the buzzer even gets pressed, and upstairs it’s two ladies with all their hair cut off waiting for delivery. Very important to them, like a telegram, and they take from the messenger even in motion, they’re big builders and they build on what they already got. The younger one goes and lies on her back on a blue mat with her legs and feet back over her head, toes touching the floor behind her head. ‘‘Brother, what would you like to have most in all the world?" the older one asked, and what almost comes out is Why?, but instead only W-w-w-w-w-wah—but a man with no clothes on and a scar right up his front came out of the hall with a glass of orange juice and said, "Leave that kid alone, Grace, you can’t convert everyone who comes in off the street." But she got her answer from messenger with a lot of b, and it was a bicycle, a bicycle was the answer to her question. "Abundance," she said, putting a hand on messenger’s wrist; "I know where one is," she said. The younger one on the floor said, "Do you get the minimum wage? Do you ever see any women messengers?" But the older one is ripping open the envelope and whipping out a poster with a picture of a naked woman with her legs spread open but it looks like outer space. "You ought to organize," the younger woman said. Both wearing their gray sweat pants. The older woman says, "Cliff, you’re going to turn orange at that rate"; then she turns and says, "When you stammer like that, that’s abundance speaking; it’s many voices in you." "Right," says the younger woman, her name is Maureen, and Grace, the older, says, "You’re an angel, Jimmy," but she didn’t know the messenger’s name, did she?—she definitely didn’t. "He’s what?" asks the guy with the orange juice. The young one is right—there are no woman messengers. Cliff says, "They know things we don’t know."

c. She didn’t sign for it because he forgot to tell her to. She was on the phone smiling and she was talking to someone called Amy but about someone else, a man. She had big and little pictures all over, photos and paintings and drawings like that looked like chalk. Some of Indians, one of an Indian kid with feathers watching a rocket take off like a white bullet, but it didn’t look like a rocket. And a photo of a bicycle racer with giant legs.

She got mad at the Amy she was talking to: she said she "loved him," whoever he was—and she was very definite and she looked around the room and then said thanks to Amy for giving her the name of the messenger service and picked up the Psychic Consultation card and stared at him and smiled and shook her head while the Amy at the other end of the line was still talking pretty fast—that was definite.

Back at the office his mother was phoning just as he returned, he could almost hear her voice but more than her voice in the air; and Goodie and Baddie went into the storefront window to fight each other because the old lady with the white hair and the dark mole on her cheek had come by, and Mr. Turnstein who had almost no jaw-chin but giant hair growth like extra head said he was sorry the mother-on-the-phone’s son had these problems, but his work was O.K. But he agreed there were sometimes dangers on city streets, traffic, muggers, and such, especially in light of the mental level— he caught sight of him coming in the door and didn’t finish: but obviously he had been talking to the mother and it was Jimmy they were discussing, and all he could think to do was attract Turnstein’s attention and wave at him very hard (like I can’t talk to her), until Senora Wing sitting at the table with the magic lamp but not giving any psychic consultation said What’s the matter, did he get back from a job?

He needed another in a hurry, to get out of there, and Turnstein, who was still on the phone but then didn’t know Jimmy knew it was his mother again telling everyone he was not able to work, just pointed to the counter where the order was written out with the GOING FROM and the GOING TO, and he took it and went out again and didn’t get his carfare but had tokens, he had tokens. But Senora Wing was on the sidewalk in her shawl and her giant fat arms yelling that he didn’t know how to get there. He turned and staggered and said sure he knew and Senora went back in the storefront while Goodie and Baddie who you couldn’t tell if they were male or female and Senora Wing had said they were once Siamese twins but were separated, went on like crazy in the window punching and pummeling and the old lady laughed but not the old skinny guy she was with and she was saying, Why it’s just like Baddie and What’s-his-name, Baddie and what’s-his-name.

The address was Twenty-fourth Street and he could see the block right away and must have known before even laying hands on the order where he was going, he knew that much even if he didn’t know what was in the envelope or the box he carried from one place to another. He had a long walk but above ground and if his mother talked him out of the job he was going to get another because in the city they always needed messengers.

It said a theater. He knew what he was doing. He was building, and he was going to advance himself and have a bicycle. Some messengers were not retarded but were very old and had leather bags.

d. Don’t tell anyone; they won’t like you. They think you know something they don’t know. Feel their jaws near your own very big one. So big the kids laugh, so you hear them say what they say; but you know your job and you are working on this thing outside while you still have to ride the subways. But don’t tell anyone what you know: which is,

First: that in some cars only one of the two doors opens;

Second: that when you know which one opens, you don’t stand in front of the other one;

Third, that it’s lanes the city runs on, and if a vehicle or person is coming up behind you in parallel lane and you got a roadblock ahead of you they won’t let you change lanes unless you plan ahead the way you plan for a back-up job if your mother makes this one fall through or buy some pears on your way home to keep on her good side, which is the outside as long as she doesn’t tell the social worker you can’t work when you got work and you’re getting places;

Fourth, told another messenger on subway who had a smaller jaw but eyes so far apart they left his forehead giant all by itself and he had dark soft fuzz all over his face and was a messenger anyone could tell—that this was how things ran, no matter who your mother or father was, no matter at street level where a messenger may find himself limping if no bike, or below the street where he will find himself sitting or standing: keep the track open and look out for places ahead in your track or lane already occupied; and allow for the possibility of the left-side door suddenly opening at the next stop when it was the right-side door that opened at this one;

Fifth, and more to come, to build on—including telling others what you know because you are safer if they know what you know and can help themselves, even to the point of telling about lanes and subway doors to Grace, who the next time she needed a messenger made a special request for Jimmy Banks and when Turnstein tried to give her Goodie because the messenger she requested was out on a job, she said she would wait—which is client loyalty even to those who cannot speak a lot of the time, or not well. Because you build on what you know. One door at a time.

Told this to messenger on subway; told him we should organize; asked if he looked in envelopes at what messages he was carrying. He had good speech powers but all he said was "Never."

Tried to tell him we should all meet, build an organization, a union; didn’t get it out. He said, "Whatcha mean ‘w-w-w-w-we’?" but he was making fun. Started to ask him if he knew the almost blind cabdriver who go back and forth just along Cathedral Parkway, no one know why he never had an accident except sometimes he has his little girl in front seat with him; he’s got to build on what he learns. White messenger with smaller jaw said he didn’t want to hear about it. But he had speech power he wasn’t using.

Tried to say Mountain has to come to Mahomet if Mahomet don’t come to Mountain, but couldn’t; but when he turned his giant envelope over so it showed where it was GOING TO, the white messenger got up and said that very thing himself. Train pulled into station and he’s a very big messenger in a big coat and big heavy shoes and he don’t know but he is standing in front of the door that don’t open because it’s the left-side door that opens, and when it does a few black women come barging through that left-side door and the white messenger can’t get out and he tries to get into the space but they push him back and in comes a Puerto Rican woman wheeling a baby in a little push car with shopping bags on top of the baby and a man with a saxophone behind her getting ready to play and by the time she gets in the door starts closing on the saxophone but the man gets in and the door closes and the white messenger gets his hand in the door but he’s weak and a black guy in a white robe and white round flat cap at the other end of the car is giving a speech about education and the messenger lost his seat.

Pointed to him and his envelope that was hoping to get to the same place—"Foundation"—where the girl Amy sent the big envelope to the woman Jean with the picture of the Indian watching blast-off and tried to say, We got to organize, you see? but didn’t get it all out, and white messenger said, "Whatcha mean ‘w-w-w-w-we’?" and said he didn’t want to hear. Looked in window and saw a donkey’s jaw. It can be built on.

e. He felt sometimes their jaws near his own very large one, their heads and hands unknowing near the subway door that he knew he knew. Which was two doors, not so hard to open as three cards shifting back and forth on the box on street where always pick the card it couldn’t be but still it’s not building on definites, like knowing from experience which door would open and standing in front of that one seeing insane people on the platform lining up in front of the other side door except there’s two kinds, this kind and the other, the long-haired earring guy who looked at him one day he was getting off at Twenty-third Street to take message of art work from the big boomer and his young boyfriend who live in the same building as Miss Kimball, and this guy on the other side on the platform waiting for the train looked him right in the eyes knowing he knew which door would open and was on a lane-track although granted it was jogged thirty blocks north where it continued when he got off and jogged one right or one left when an obstacle stopped or slow-moving appeared in lane ahead and he one day built on other definites to see that double parking wasn’t only law breaking like leaving your laundry in the laundromat top-loader beyond-cycle which was a problem for his mother who waited ten minutes by her watch before unloading the machine or machines —double parking was also occupying space till someone said get off it. Which he explained to Grace Kimball who asked especially for him, Jimmy Banks, and understood what he meant, it was a law that was in the abstract she said and she believed all motor vehicles should be compacter’d and evacuated from the city because most of the trucks carried either furniture, sugar-derivative and/or dairy products, sex-negative clothing, or machinery that didn’t satisfy your needs and sometimes did not work, and she said Jimmy, you know things we don’t know, and her friend Cliff standing naked beside the stereo inquired what the opera singer Mr. North was doing with a little theater on Twenty-fourth Street which it would have been violating the rule about not cross-involving clients with each other to explain to Grace Kimball that the opera singer in her building had seen him in the elevator coming from Kimball and had employed him, not knowing that the man who knew him at the Twenty-third Street station as someone who had figured out the doors and the lane-basics of the city knew Grace through a mutual friend and was interested in employing Jimmy, who himself didn’t know the further connection with this man but it made sense when he ran into him the second time. But then he saw that, like building another level on what he already had, if clients were in contact with each other through one messenger, messenger might build his own business even including people who just happened to be present like the man in the long hair and fringe jacket first seen in subway, later at door of theater signing for envelope from Mr. North’s boyfriend and asking if Madame Somebody the South American singer had not sent something along in the same envelope (which the messenger, cool and professional, had no comment on—the answer to question being No, but also by coincidence messenger in question did know lady in question) upon which the fringe-jacketed (no doubt) actor originally encountered on Twenty-third Street platform asked if he’d do a special job for him if needed—name, Ray Santee—Ray Santee would contact him if he would give Ray Santee his card (a new building block for independent business operation and messenger said N-n-no cards yet and Ray said, Well, whenever) and when Jimmy Banks tried to get out that Mr. S. should call, and failed, Mr. S. picked up the idea and said he should go on his own now and break away from the outfit he was with. Wrote down home number, tried to get out that Mr. Santee not deal with his mother but him only, because she was against him working let alone riding a bike, but he nodded fast, Santee, very fast, and really did understand without the words, when he took out Turnstein’s Messenger Service/Psychic Consultation ballpoint and wrote "Hope to get a Bicycle, Open my own Business"—and when Ray Santee said he would help ol’ Jim Banks, ol’ Jim got out the name Grace Kimball, but not the information that she was going to procure a second-hand bike to expedite transport of messages and building of self-confidence and clientele. And couldn’t get out, either, the info re: having hassle with Turnstein due to receipt not signed—when Ray Santee said, "Always want to get those receipts signed —you know, like from the opera singer lady." But shook head: Opera singer man. Had to write it down, but no time: doors opening, left side, right side alternating, mind over matter, supposed to be cutting down on power but this is doubling usage probably.

In evening, white messenger phoned home, smaller-jawed but with fuzz all over face: mother tried to deal with him herself hand on hip, had trouble understanding him, he gets his tongue out around his mouth looking for words left there. She definitely must yield phone to ("He can’t hardly talk to you") supposedly crazy son-retard-messenger to hear that Gustave got number through man met at foundation; Gustave felt Jim Banks was onto something with lanes and alternate subway doors, and Gustave would consider organizing. Meet at corner near Turnstein’s.

Where would bicycle be stored nights? Bicycle not yet definite.

"Jimmy, you have to accept that you can’t live like other people do," his mother said next to him at the phone when he hung up (like, look at other people’s ways and doings but don’t touch). "I’m an old-fashioned girl," she said. "Social worker said you retarded know things we don’t know, but I don’t believe it, sugar.

f. Higher required building wider, until a full messenger-service specialization minus the psychic consultation . . . build on two white/black messengers, three, four, and a bike to make the boss smile.

Two women noticing Jimmy Banks limping past the cafe smiled through the shining plate-glass window when he stopped to see them. They they turned back to each other but weren’t speaking, and they slipped out of their white coffee cups in the window which flipped into mirror-mode when a bus passed and Jimmy saw his jaw and the Afro he had just started growing that morning, and hastened on to Turnstein’s corner.

Gustave waited there like a tree, and knew two other messengers who would organize, but Gustave with all the fuzz on his face and after all a good-size jaw, was happy where he was but didn’t understand that Jimmy was a-a-a-a-asking if Gustave would come into Jimmy’s independent messenger service and Jimmy did not press it but settled for the organizing of all city messengers with retardation or physical problems by end of 1977, which gave them several months to work it out, and reported that a white guy named Ray Santee would help them organize and a client was procuring a vehicle for Jimmy Banks. Gustave had heard that name—at least knew a woman named Ray.

Gustave asked further re: lanes and grinned half the fuzz to either side of his face when Jimmy reported that the city was not about to make lanes the only legal routes, and so you had to be looking always ahead and always behind for double-parked trucks and oncoming others, but since the problem was underground for them so far pretty much, the lane you’re in could not be put on a map because you went uptown and downtown by subway and might be moving from a doorway to a turnstile, but your real lane was what began when you picked up your job at the office and in your head and you had to hold it there, but even more so, it was vital to see that if someone’s in your way you can shift the whole lane, if you know how, which was good because the former owner of vehicle Jim Banks was aiming to buy could move diagonal in NYC.

"A-a-ahh," Gustave shook his finger like Jim’s mother, smiling at him, and Jim realized he had not been stammering just now.

Senora Wing came out of Turnstein’s storefront and yelled at Jimmy Banks.

When Jimmy went into the office, Turnstein kept his back to him and wanted to know where the receipt was for the other day. The client Grace Kimball had asked for him back. But how about receipt? The boy-girl brother-sister combo they never did much work that you could see and were relations of Turnstein though he never said much to them and they were used by Senora Wing sometimes in psychic consultations, never laughed at Jimmy; they came and hugged him first one then the other, then went off and wrestled and fought and Turnstein hardly told them to stop probably because he didn’t know which was male and which female.

Senora Wing asked Jimmy did he know something she didn’t?—Well he gave an envelope to the wrong person, at the warehouse theater the other day on Twenty-fourth Street, he’s just too trusting but it’s O.K. and he could just bring some clients in for readings to make up for it, he was making friends all over the yard so how ‘bout he gets them in for psychic consultations. Turnstein not saying anything but writing with his ballpoint on a piece of paper, got a job and Jimmy’s going off to a lady who’s sending a script to a radio station but the light is cracking up in his head and turning into more business than even two, three messengers can handle. Senora calls on his way out, "Like the guy at the theater who took delivery, bring him in for a reading"—and Jimmy stammers as much as he could and stepping out on the sidewalk sees Gustave looking like a stupid old tree at the corner where he was before, and Jim knows he didn’t have to stammer to Senora just then.

g. Did not ask Grace Kimball if bike-to-come was hot. Did not know where to leave it nights, but did not tell her. Did not accept carrots from all the crates in hallway, did not accept mug of carrot juice because never had carrot juice. Did not know why stammer was gone.

Did not want to receive phone calls at home, first three more new messengers, then social worker saying report from Turnstein’s was good except for fucked-up receipt (later made good) and delivery to wrong guy but no harm done—and this information passed to waiting mother who took phone right away. Did not know if Santee was running maybe his own messenger service; did not tell him anything re: potential retarded-messenger union, but he’s not saying he can get a bike any more, only that he has access to safe place, he is a photo-journalist he says, so will definitely need messenger service.

Senora asked for business—said she was expecting some to be brought in from contacts referred to before; said it was expected; said she was going to call mother. Did not know what to do now except trust others: Grace for bike; Santee for storage; Maureen, the younger friend at Kimball’s, for plans for union organization and getting women retarded messengers; Gustave for taking phone calls at his room; and social worker for trust—but, no good, wrong lane—building requires next step first: social worker would tell mother and Senora what’s going on.

Saw a man go crazy on subway platform when the half-door on his side didn’t work; busted his hand banging glass; taken away by transit cop.

Senora Wing said Grace would meet a handsome gray-haired man.

Santee asked if a new messenger service would include marginal operations for him. And said, "You’re not breathing."

Mother listened in on three-in-morning dream, came back with cocoa: "What you doing flying around the Empire State Building? Planes don’t got brakes. Maybe that man’s right you know something we don’t know."

h. Saw jerk with gray beard and orange leather headband sail past on another bike, still smiling, a body builder in black leather T-shirt. Though white man, looked like father probably. Father so long dead now he no longer would describe family, son, wife, cousins, uncle: because after death the slow forgetting starts and the lanes no longer parallel but crossed and spread-out but don’t matter because the dead person is forgetting the living persons after about two years and later he couldn’t remember them if he tried. But why? Is it that lanes shifting so much makes roadblocks and dead person doesn’t need to go around them any more but without body goes through but is erased of memory data?

Felt other person coming through handlebars of new life. Grace had brakes tuned up, axles oiled; bought tool kit in real black leather case and when told she didn’t have to fix bike, new owner would fix bike, she said kit was his: thought of stammering but didn’t. Grace kissed me and Maureen got up from her exercises and kissed me; and Cliff, with jeans on, kissed me and first hugged me so I thought that was all there would be to it.

Santee was next on the schedule but not quite. Bike banged elevator walls with writing on them, but did not nick paint. Wheeled bike many blocks to park. Losing job being absent while Turnstein phones mother probably, mother phones social worker, Senora Wing phones unknown people she always talking about. Dogs watching in park. Bike seat feels too small, bike so light; world a bad place, can’t think about falling off, it’s counter-indicated. Pigeons got out of the way, no retards there. Missed bottle in brown paper bag rolling around on pavement like a rat was inside. Jolted by brakes, front brake, rear brake, tire dark from puddle; stud selling grass get out of the way, grinning, frowning; muttering to rider, Good stuff. Didn’t know rider had a limp, a mother, a social worker, didn’t know rider also has a way to shift from one mode right over to another but no word for it except the flow coming from handlebar grips.

But traffic is a hassle and the bike has had enough work with new owner so can be walked to Twenty-fourth Street base, sidewalk clearly laned, so, like right door and left door alternating along sidewalk, but lane faithful lane faithful, checking other bikes for sign of police registration, but no registration probable.

Santee gave key to small office near theater on Twenty-fourth Street: access; bike safety; offered to buy lock but refused; also phone! (Asked Santee if Turnstein’s very busy and what was the crazy people doing in window and who was the old couple that came by that storefront, did they know Senora Wing?) Therefore, did not tell Santee to go in for a reading. But stammers came into the mind, into the dreams and thoughts. Phone went, Santee answered, and in wastebasket was calling card with something penciled on it and, printed, the name Ray Spence just as he said, "Spence" into phone. He said, "Well I hear they know something we don’t," hung up and asked how long Turnstein job had gone on: said got idea soon after father died. Well, how long was that? Died almost two years ago.

Asked Santee not to tell re: bike park. He agreed. Thought he had one earring, but now two but in one ear. He asked if father ever seen after death? Said I had seen someone looked like him on a bike but white.

Told Gustave this on phone. Had weird way of laughing, not good for business. Union meeting with ten to fifteen possibles for next week in Maureen’s apartment. Possibles. Not definites.

Senora Wing did not phone mother. Did not speak of anything re: coming changes.

i. Dream come true but don’t blow it; build by consolidating operations within same lane. New canvas bag can be carried no-hands on back. Pay call to bicycle headquarters revealed first independent job waiting. Therefore, on trip for Turnstein-Wing to Compu-Grafics to pick up posters for manager of all-girls rock band office, taxied fast to C-G, then on foot above ground by good luck only one-and-one-half blocks to HQ of new independent messenger service coming into being with still something wrong in head but not clear, received from Santee envelope to go by hand to woman with same name as mother, Luisa, leave with doorman: cruised parallel to cab, cab tried to edge messenger away at corner and driver looked like Georgie—but, obeying bike law at light, halted while cab ran light and was arrested by brown-uniformed woman officer: biked in noise, in struggle with angel of death, down Park Avenue and around station to manager of all-girls rock band who was the smiling graybeard in sweatshirt with three bikes in big studio, stopped smiling before signing for posters; did not know messenger, asked where messenger’s bike had come from, had seen it before, and never forgot a bike, smiled again, dreamt of bikes; was beginning to lift posters out of envelope as departed.

What was wrong? No lock for bike, no time to return to HQ, flowed downtown to Turnstein-Wing’s block: old couple outside watching Goodie and Baddie fighting. Asked Chinese vegetable woman to watch bike, she said No.

Let Wing-Turnstein see bike? Not this messenger.

Light took over with its speed. Turnstein said, "You oiled your gears, what’s the rush?" Light flashed clear through brick walls of close buildings from beautiful spokes of new bike up against wall alone!

Senora Wing and her ongoing psychic consultation with tiny woman in trenchcoat with long yellow sack-type robe under it, nothing under robe, who looked at incoming messenger so eyes seemed to have looked at some same things as messenger. ("You have traveled to the Orient. You have worked there. You are tired of words. You will take off your clothes. You will change your career to some manual pursuits. Your first name is the last name of someone or something famous—which means you are building and going ahead, not waiting on the past.")

Twins by now on bunk bed half asleep panting watching each other. Light is spoking through building walls off bicycle outside, but probably bike still safe, though must see, though must see Turnstein and must go to bathroom. Something wrong staying in head but not clear; how can own business premises be own unless rented, while Santee is owner, isn’t he? Need for bathroom, need for pay phone; bicycle not for Gustave, if bicycle still outside where it could be taken, though if seen by those inside, can also be taken. Turnstein’s eyes watering, absorbing rays from Wing quarter; outgoing address-pickup held and held in Turnstein’s hand while he weeps only from eyes, no motion in face, except light from bike outside unbeknownst to Turnstein, twins, and Wing, light flooding Turnstein’s face from spokes, spokes moving by light.

"You’re impatient; maybe it’s too late for you to go on this job," said Turnstein. "Goodie or Baddie could take it possibly."

Felt bike move, like jaw shifting, and Wing’s client said, "Are those twins real? I mean are they male or female?" This small psychic client said, "You can improve your posture if you imagine a yellow light right here in your chest and you make sure it’s out front and you follow it." She was speaking to me.

Took order form from Turnstein and let it go. Felt bike being stolen and jaw getting bigger and bigger like stone that stayed. Go, said Turnstein, good riddance. (Went to bathroom in mind only.) You crazy, get out of here, said Turnstein quite silently. Yet heard Senora Wing’s words of threat, though with threat following upstream on rays of light from outside: "Bring in the business, or you’re through." As if she can’t see future unless through clientele. And heard other words recalled later, for now fell—fell out through door down hard onto pavement, holding order form. Old skinny weirdo helped this messenger up who shook off his hand and saw the old lady with the white hair and the mole on her cheek and talk talk talk crazies over by the wall with her hands on handlebar and saddle of bike, keeping bike safe, looking like she remembered nothing, but keeping bike safe.

Thanked her and put finger to mouth. And she replied, "Our secret," and she understood. "Are you my son, black boy?" she said—"because I felt my son’s hands in the handlebars or someone I could swear."

Flowed across manhole lids, around potholes, uptown, uptown. Spring-levered into higher gear, remembering answer to old lady. Just missed death when triple-parked car opened outside door—by truck double-parked by two motorcycles angled at meter. Was respected by nobody, shifted gears, remembering last words of Wing to traveler-woman, shifted gears remembering to pedal while doing so, as instructed by naked man drinking carrot juice. Remembered answer to old lady, passing through green light while sensors projected ahead to when red warned of oncoming vehicle and when light behind red was only the flow that cures limp, streamlines jaw, speeds recovery, but from what?

The need to think things through; to build not on gap of what was wrong—and what was that? Found no daylight between two cabs gridlocked and experimented with cement ramp onto sidewalk—for wheelchair cases— and found space between trees at the curb and half-crippled young guy with silver walker, and space between him and kid on roller skates playing her harmonica two hands for beginners, so had space to think, to flow, to build on.

Gustave has brought foundation account into independent messenger service and does not wish to use bicycle. Compu-Grafics are thinking about moving from Turnstein. Felt watched, but not by Santee, who waits on phone in headquarters and again says, "Spence," after long pause. Sehora Wing’s words still in mind—no envelope needed. Answer to old lady still in mind— she was kind. ‘This is your key," said Santee, with speckled wrists; "will you lock up?" He’s going around to the theater and then out of town overnight. "You understand?" he says. It came to me, it came to me, and was more than messages, even messages that I as sole proprietor of business might have to intercept in case they were dangerous to me. It came to me that I saw Santee by the light of my skin, and I could do this wherever I turned, and could bend around obstacle in lane. When the double-parked truck is ahead in lane, vehicle in next lane speeds up so you can’t move out of lane to avoid truck. Could not explain this to Gustave, who could use it even with subway doors, but may explain it at meeting of union of retarded messengers organized by Kimball’s friend Maureen. Santee’s feet suddenly not heard no more, like he stopped on the first flight down and waited.

Senora Wing’s words hold: "You know somebody who is going to Chile under cover of darkness, the land of Chile in South America, someone who has been a prisoner." Spoken to tiny woman with yellow light.

Desk drawer open showing manila envelope. What’s wrong is not something missing but something present in the way. Place belongs to Santee, but business belongs not to Santee, but he thinks so.

The business belonged to me. I found a double-lock on door and turned it. I opened desk drawer further and took out manila envelope. It was addressed to "Ray Spence" and inside it was two photographs: one was of two guys in green shirts and pants standing with a tall, bald man in a white suit, and they were all smiling; the other was an old picture of a young woman in a big hat standing beside an African pigmy, the picture was all yellow.

Santee was really Spence. Something was going on at the theater, and the opera singer Luisa was involved. I was afraid to use the phone. I had said to the old lady, "Yes, I am." I pushed the desk drawer back to what it was. I went over and touched the bicycle. Some people remove their fenders. I turned and fell down. If I had a few teeth out, my jaw would get permanently smaller. The sound of Spence’s voice was unknown, like. The need to think things through.

Instead of using the phone, I left the office and took the subway home. I met my mother at the supermarket. She called to me across the street. I crossed. She give me a kiss and a hug. Georgie there handing a joint to a white girl. "Where’s you bike, man?" Georgie asks. Mother says, "He can’t ride no bike." "Where you keepin’ it, Jimmy?" Georgie asks. I opened my mouth and tried to speak, and light was in my mouth and I saw I could speak if I wanted but I decided not to. I kind of stammered. The girl laughed friendly. "He’s ridin’ up and down Park Avenue on his bike," said Georgie. Mother laughed and took my hand.

CHARITY

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future. A thought that she was not dependent. The City, which generated its own noise and change, would not give her this. This thought. She must give it herself. Slowly, if need be. Did she think? Her feet weren’t so sure.

The pretzel man was standing between the push handles of his silver bin with its umbrella. He spoke to her and she smiled. The gap of some brief charge in herself she had no clear feeling for was the shape of a toasty, salt-roughened pretzel. But who would knead her lower back and rub her head where two aches kept their distance from each other unrolling straight ahead like motions? Funny, really funny, this emptiness or gap between the two pains would not change direction if she did, but had its own way and, like her other life that she would not want to live, would go on downtown without her—that is, if she and her upper and lower back pains turned west into Thirty-fourth Street as she almost always did.

So instead, feeling a smile in her cheeks and her teeth pinning gently her lower lip, her tongue at the corner, she kept on and heard the pretzel man say behind her, "No hungry today."

Couldn’t anyone read her thought? Her face could be pretty, but, she thought, pretty dumb, no secret. But whatever this year’s tax form said, whatever she read in the face that she was going home to now whether or not he was home in person, she was not dependent. Here she was on Park Avenue going home, a New Yorker, a person moving down these bricks of a beige sidewalk. People talked to each other on their way to the subway; she worked ten blocks from her home.

She was being leaned on, she didn’t look up above to her left at what her downward slope was taking her past; it would stop in a moment—the new office high-rise. Now here came a black man in a beige suit, and as he passed her he smiled, and she looked away from his neat nose to the green-and-brown handkerchief puffed out of his breast pocket. It matched the wide green-and-brown tie tied in a large, loose knot.

But she was supposed to be in a hurry, and she wasn’t getting anywhere. Her body had a name which made it foreign and unknown to all the things on her way that had not been told it. The traffic got louder when she tried to think. Would she buy a bottle of wine? The store with "House" in its name diagonally across the two-way pull of the avenue was not the store she had had in mind. She was relieved to be alone. She didn’t exist. Yet she had heard her name, heard it called through the now-turned-up glare of rush-hour engine fumes. So she’d looked back, back up the slope of this block, feeling its slope. She’d halted, awkward, to turn and see a bald man run across in front of a cab to make the curb on this side to reach a girl in a long, fine, brown poplin trenchcoat whom he hugged and patted on the small of her back so her behind was visible below and he curved his hand slowly down over her behind and the girl let go the handle of her shopping bag with a stick of French bread leaning out of the top and the bag dropped to the pavement and stood and then fell over. And the man’s harsh, husky voice seemed to say, "Hi," while he pressed his nose and teeth into her hair, and it was the voice even in all this grind of day that had called, "Norma," and though she wasn’t sure and was looking at the girl whose face was hidden because they might share this name Norma that she’d never "felt," she turned away as two oranges rolled out of the girl’s bag. The man smelled of shoes, slightly burnt food, acrid cloth—and celery, didn’t he?—he might have been under her nose.

Blocks ago she had passed a long skirt in a window on Third Avenue, and she wanted it; but she could not reach for the door handle, she could not get herself to go in and try on the skirt, no price tag, and she had to wash her hair so it would dry in time.

An orange rolled past her, and sidestepping it was a model in denim shirt and khaki culottes who threatened not to see Norma or the orange—what did she see? Whatever the model saw up ahead in the direction of the pretzel man, in the direction Norma had come from, seemed to help her see nothing; the girl was round-shouldered, it looked good on her, maybe it was not that she was tall, taller than she wanted to be, but that it was late in the day, and the forward curve of the thin shoulders looked so good Norma felt a palm brush back and forth across her own front, her own palm or Gordon’s palm that had once done it and stopped for some reason though not he but the rich boy in school in the desk next to hers called nipples clam tails. The model swung by with a little smile on her wide mouth, her touched-up eye shadow very dark, her portfolio skimming the sidewalk, she was operating moment to moment and didn’t have to think if she was going in a straight line to wherever she was going. Two men with newspapers under their arms parted to let the orange run between them, but a Puerto Rican delivery boy from Norma’s supermarket on Third Avenue went down for it and underhanded it to his friend who got it in one hand and with the other bowled it uphill right at Norma, who turned to see the man beyond her who was kissing the girl stop to bend down and snatch the orange just before it would have rolled into the bag alongside the bread. Then he righted the bag, dropping the orange in, and Norma passed the two men with their papers and then passed two older women in tiny hats and red wool coats who held, each of them, a folded evening paper, and the Puerto Rican boys broke off what they were saying and the one Norma knew nodded fast and said Hi, and his eyes dropped, she thought, to her mouth, where she was forced to recall lines deeper and longer than dimples.

Going down this downhill block was so slow, what was reversed? One night she had found fresh bricks under her sandals and the bricks tilted, so the ground had moved while the construction men with helmets and king-tall cans of beer were laying them, laying these cheap, brittle-looking surface bricks in ignorance of the vanished armory with its Palazzo Vecchio tower. Now the bricks were smooth. She thought she didn’t like going downhill. She rode a bicycle in the country. Was it the steep curve uphill after the low gradual run down from her parents’ cottage? She was thirty-five with a family, what was she doing riding a bike at her parents’ cottage? If she were going uphill past the new office high-rise and not downhill, she would still be ignored by everyone, but she wouldn’t stick out.

A person of consequence—the words were on the tongue—she sought them but they didn’t come. They were going home, and she had one for each, a word for each person, they were going home, and she wasn’t—or this was what she felt. Because she lived here in the middle of Manhattan and they lived in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, many of them, if they were truly going home. She didn’t have fat that shook; it wasn’t as if it was blubber, though she called it that to Gordon and the girls, and was glad the top half didn’t not belong to the bottom half like the woman who’d come into the office in pants today. She would have worn a beautiful dress, full and un-gathered. No, she stuck out because she was trying to think, and she had a headache in her lower back and a backache in her head, with nothing in between except a puffiness in her stomach as if she’d eaten salami—or, no, nothing in between the head and the lower back but this thought that should make her better, the thought that she was not dependent.

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future, but not like the thought of a son, the event never to come. Instead, it was the future, which meant that it itself was what it was coming from. The Neighborhood Council—which her peers and others were always saying Oh yes, they thought they’d heard of it—was turning her job into a paying job; she’d done a good job and she had to take the consequences: it was going to be real, and she hadn’t asked for this to happen—which, then, was how good things happened, when, here, she’d been trying to feel a neighborhood up and down these midtown largely business streets around Murray Hill for years. She wanted to say to herself the number of years, it was the age of one daughter Annie, two less than the other daughter Nancy’s, whose periods were the same as her own to the day, so maybe if she could say to herself what her weekly pay would be she could say to herself these other numbers, they were holding her back, the loud voice and calm body of Annie, and the silence and fidgetiness of Nancy were not holding her back.

But putting her feet one then the other down along the new squares and intersecting diagonal areas of brick sidewalk laid to extend the plaza-like pavement around the huge sandstone-colored building that she was escaping to her left, she knew in her back and her hips that the salary she was to deserve was no more why the thought of not being dependent had come to her than the bottle of wine was a sign of it taken home to Gordon—to Gordon’s knowledgeable face and voice.

The high-rise was bigger and bigger, she got down to the next corner. The height of the building broke into depth along this block’s downward slope, and if she looked up, this office tower pivoted eater-cornered, like the insane thought of the architect who doubtless was a man who knew what he was doing, she would see it sliding like an elevator into the ground but driving down before it even further down and away than she felt it now, the Renaissance stronghold it replaced.

National Guard armory. Regiment temporarily unknown. Renaissance Italy.

Where Gordon had taken her to the antiques show and to the cat show and to see Rod Laver play tennis. The Rocket was what Gordon called him, just like the retired hockey player from Montreal, he said. Yet to the antiques show had not Gordon been taken by her? A Frenchwoman that night of the tennis asked haltingly where at that hour her husband could find—what was the name?—razor blades, Norma had translated—and Gordon gripped her arm and said, "Speak to them."

But she didn’t have to now. The armory was gone. The quick grip on her arm, the command to perform—it was like Let’s go to bed, the way he sometimes said it.

But she didn’t have to.

It had come to her, like the new zest of stomach hunger she could live upon. And she didn’t have to give it back. Not at 11:25 P.M. after the News and Weather with Gordon getting up out of his chair. And not at rush hour going home, other people’s rush hour.

At the corner she saw across the street by a green newsstand three angry people pointing at an invisible monster on the sidewalk. She made herself look left at the base of the new building, for she had known what she would see. A woman in sneakers. This woman was often four, five blocks down from here walking right up the middle of Park Avenue traffic, or up on the island curb yelling to make them not pay attention to her but to the direction they were walking in. She yelled at air, sometimes at Norma. The woman was doing something at the bronze plaque. She was lining the raised letters one by one with lipstick—Seventy-first Regiment. Had Norma ever seen any color in her face. She had stolen the lipstick—no, found; for these women didn’t steal (why did Norma know that?). No color but the warm wash of grime and exposure-tan which smeared up into the woman’s scalp where the thin hair sprouted like new-grown fuzz; but on her legs it was different, it wasn’t this anointing color, it was dirt on white, her bagged stockings looked as if they had once been rolled below the knee; they had fallen around her ankles so that against the dark veins darting through her calves the skin was pallid and sooty. And Norma turned right to look away west across Park into the wild cavern of sun filling the far end of this Manhattan cross-street so that above the Jersey cliffs the Hudson River overflowed into the sky, and she saw a nice-looking boy from her building, late teenager, nice-looking, dark, standing next to a phone booth, she didn’t know his name, he had young, friendly-looking parents.

She had to think. She had to go from here to there. She had to get out of her clothes, the backache made her not fit here, crossing the street; but no one around her saw the backache—she was a gray pants suit, a woman of maybe thirty-five, making her way flat-footed across Park at Thirty-third Street or whatever the street had now become, into the sunset far off above Penn Station and New Jersey, with good news and a new thought. But drawn home so she didn’t have to make the motions herself. But she damn well did have to. And thinking and not thinking what she was going to do tonight that she had never done before in her life. Such a small, real thing but she wanted not to think about it, or only about Consciousness, not the other part that was a rule of the workshops which were held after all in a warm, carpeted room without furniture, and now she felt as unfitting as the cop on horseback (a huge-haunched horse whose haunches were the cop’s too, who) near a hydrant below the drugstore looked calm observing the people going home like a parade. But the people in front—check the two bicyclists cutting through them—could see her puffed tummy, she was thinking. Before I go there I better do something about it. But she had to think, since if she didn’t, the thoughts would find her. She felt Gordon was home, and he might have been home all day after what he had said in the dark. So she didn’t know how she would find him.

She was in the middle of Park Avenue South where the small stretch of tunnel came out that began just south of Grand Central, the bypass tunnel that made Gordon bawl a cabdriver out one night who took them the long way around.

A messenger, a retarded man she’d seen up and down Madison Avenue with wall eyes and a jaw like a shovel, limped by, carrying a manila envelope, keeping ahead of some black and Puerto Rican girls just off work in one of the lingerie workrooms and now laughing all the way to the uptown subway on the east side of Park.

But this thought that she was not dependent after all had come to her from living with him. A consequence. Oh God she knew who she owed the thought of her independence to, oh God she knew, for she saw ahead, for she knew, for then she saw Gordon get up out of his chair as the TV said, "It’s 11:23. Do you know where your package is?" Gordon was leaving the room. Then he laughed as if the joke came to him like a nutty afterthought or a belch. She was being stopped by a ragged man but looked past him at the same time to a curly-haired couple standing with a bike between them, grinning.

A ragged man in three or four coats loosely closed in plastic-wrap like what the cleaner used for finished work, and she had lost the word for this man. His eyes, against the annihilating sunlight, were the one clear part of his unshaven surface, his feet were bare, he had a white silk necktie around his adam’s apple inside his coats, and he was stopping her while others passed them going both ways. But the curly-haired young man patted the seat of the bike that stood between him and the curly-haired girl and turned and walked away, leaving his touch upon the saddle, which the girl then put her hand on, wheeling the bike off the sidewalk and getting the pedal right. So now in the gulf of blinding radiance from the west Norma saw the sun coming up, and that made her skip everything except what she heard in the gap after this unforeseen preparation coming out of the ragged bum’s blue eyes here as close as a picture: she didn’t know what to give him, she was taller than he, and she felt a blinking ahead—so she asked how much he wanted and heard his eyes with white gunk in the inner corners seem to speak again though it was people pushing past. Finding a dime, she put a wrinkled bill into his fingers and the blinking stopped but the color of the traffic-light words DON’T WALK was voided by the sun, and she and the bum stood alone with car horns firing at one another around them for they had stopped each other at the entrance to this Park Avenue bypass tunnel in the middle of Park Avenue traffic, she him as he her, and as she heard him speak of "Nice hair"—or was it just "Hair"?—somebody was shouting through the overwhelming light, "Get outa there, ya not supposed to be there, lady!" but cars were smoking past in both directions, she was being filmed, erased, or colossally embarrassed, and the bum took her elbow in his hand and when they found the curb from which he had come she was gasping, her eyes streaming, and she heard the same voice now above her and remembering the bottle of wine she smelled the policeman’s horse, or the odor of the bum, his body, his breathy presence. Smelled it through plastic wrap, and she turned to cross the crosstown street.

Yet when she got down to the liquor store she didn’t want to get the wrong thing. So she went on past to the two glass pay booths across from the next corner and found her dime again just as someone else whom she could not look at discovered the other phone was broken. So she aimed the dime and thought what she was going to dial.

But she had to think before she met Gordon, she had to stop being out of place, feeling that she stuck out in order to be ignored, which didn’t make sense yet it did, yet she wouldn’t know how to tell about it at the rap tonight.

In order to think, she had to speak. She could have spoken in the elevator this morning. To the gray-haired, strong-looking man in the elevator whom she hadn’t seen before who bobbed his head to her and muttered quite kindly, "Morning." She could tell he was kind, and she wished she hadn’t been in such a hurry because though she didn’t have to tell the girls to brush their teeth any more, she hadn’t washed her face—yet a soft curve of privacy at the far end of which she would touch his eyes softened her face toward him and it flowed; she knew he would have talked to her if she’d spoken first, he would have said something good with a twist of freshness and blurred by exposure to the morning. He’d been smoking, she smelled it with his shaving scent. She’d thought he’d spent the night with someone in the building—he was in shape—and she wanted to hear him right now. She was gasping again, but then when he had come out of the elevator behind her, he turned toward the mailroom and when she said, "It wouldn’t be in yet," she heard the words "Long time," but as she went out the street door she heard Spanish, and he and Manuel laughed—" mañana," she got, but the man was regular American, looked like he was away a lot, not focusing on these walls but carrying some presence of outside.

She’d been carrying the thought then of being not dependent.

Or most of it, for she’d woken up with it in her fingertips while the rest of her was aching, and she should have said it to the gray-haired broad-shouldered man who had come into the elevator out of nowhere, she saw now that she had wanted to, she just liked him, he had on a blue-striped shirt, the lines from his nostrils down past his mouth were grooves soft as leather, and she had never seen such eyelashes on a man—who then she thought might live in the building after all because he had aftershave on. And she didn’t speak her thought to him, that she was not dependent, it was so simple God knows what he would have thought. He had added to her his acceptance of the future like prediction, and from him she added to her thought that came to her the thought that what came to her came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future. She was probably dumb.

Almost hard to say, impossible to say to Gordon, who would think her a dumbbell. Which Gordon might claim he did not think—he who knew wine, and the law, and sports; who knew Complete Works—of Tolstoy, Gibbon, Auchincloss, and Waugh, Beethoven (almost), Leonardo (almost)—and for whom if she was buying a special bottle of wine what was she doing crying in a glass booth trying by plastic pushbutton to reach a law firm with half a dozen names. She longed for music, there should be a music number you could tap out on these buttons, the buttons made high, final beeps like a hearing test. She hung up, there was the dense waiting presence outside seeming to tilt and turn the fragile phone booth so she would have to look instead of listen, she didn’t want to get away from him, and couldn’t. She was smiling automatically with her teeth on her lower lip, the gray-haired man this morning had seemed to look at her mouth, but this man now she couldn’t turn to directly. She called home, and let it ring twice, and hung up, and then she used the dime a third time pushing the numbers of Gordon’s office only to be told that he’d left early. So he hadn’t stayed home today. And probably hadn’t done what he said in the dark he would do.

She wasn’t having anything to drink tonight before going upstairs to the first session of the workshop which was fairly hard to get into. With all those women sitting around on the rug. Letting it hang out. And Norma with them. Naked as they. Rapping. Sharing information, said Grace Kimball. Find out you’re like other women, said Grace. (Not unique, then?) Learn to breathe, said Grace, learn to use a plastic speculum (easy enough) and a standing mirror. Go public. (Norma had heard the words before, but where?) Here they were Grace’s words. But not Grace herself not Grace. Grace understood how impossible Norma felt. Grace had no furniture to speak of. She had phones; books of photographs; carpet, music, worklamps and workspace; but no furniture—she’d cleared it all out, she listened to what Norma could not say along with what Norma did say—so that Norma joined Grace in listening to Norma, who wanted to sign up for Grace’s workshop but almost had not asked, in the midst of the overpowering wind of garlic that Grace "cleansed" with and had just received a shipment of from a farmer near Taos, New Mexico.

Norma felt exposed.

It will come to you, said Gordon, when Norma said she didn’t understand something, and he wasn’t kidding.

"After what?" she asked, and heard, "What?" in the phone receiver, for Gordon was home and she didn’t have to ask about wine after all but if she didn’t she would have nothing to put in place of the question except what was happening. She was half giggling half gasping, and the man outside the booth rapped twice. She got a hot stoniness from the quick oversalted cheeseburger she now didn’t recall chewing, Grace was into chewing—Norma did not usually say "into."

"When are you coming home?" she asked, knowing he was home.

"For Christ’s sake, Norma, you—"

But she was crying anyway while the late light enlarged her and the space between question (Had she taken the checkbook?) and answer (Yes, she had) filled up the booth so she would not be able to open the door, and the man waiting to make a call would give up.

He is a black man in a gray pinstripe suit and for a moment he looks at her, wrinkling his forehead, looks away but in a friendly way that says he feels time spent in eye contact is time taken away from Norma’s phone business which she must conclude before he can occupy the position she now occupies. Is everything stopping?

People passed. A guy in jeans tapped the glass with his knuckles as he went past, she felt a breeze across her front. She was breathless, but she saw she wouldn’t stop, she had to cry through, spill through, and even if the name of her body was not known.

So the light changed and the policeman’s horse moved ahead, rocking the rather gigantic police rider so he looked handsomely like that was his job—to rock well. She turned past all the moving faces outside and looked in a direction opposite where Gordon was and saw sun glare in windows across Park.

Gordon said, "Who is with you?"

Her breathing rushed, and she wanted to say the building is a eater-cornered mistake and the Neighborhood Council woman Kate said the building is going to get a prize which didn’t make any sense.

"Is anyone bothering you?" said Gordon.

"I’m wasting this dime," she said. "The Council got some money, Gordon."

"You’re not still at work."

"I don’t think I even have a quarter," she said.

A sound came to her from the receiver and it said through her sinuses that it was a sound neither at her end of the line, where she couldn’t get her breath to ask if he needed anything because he was doing his usual tonight, nor at Gordon’s, where eggs would be hatching into omelets soon—but rather that it was between them.

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future.

And Gordon said in that sure way sweeping away all difficulties (certainly those stirred up by her), being himself able to do so, "What’s the number there, I’ll call you back. Annie’s out for dinner. I’ve got something to tell you but I can’t until you get home—it’s what I mentioned when we went to bed last night." This was slow, slower than the sunset. But her life eluded her faster than the slowness was slow.

So she started with the area code, thinking the black man outside the booth was kind—he had a kind mouth she wanted to say to Gordon; the black man had—she was saying, "Two . . . one . . ." saying she was sorry she was slow, she couldn’t get her breath, her voice was—"two."

Then when he said, "That’s the area code," she said, "I’m sorry, that’s the area code, I can’t speak now, I can’t think," and Gordon said, "O.K., Norma, only the numbers after two one two."

She gave them, and then she was cut off before she could hang up. As if she had been looking at him again, giving him one of her looks according to him. She waited for him to touch her, her feelings, and instead she was in touch with what he was thinking, never he with her except to screw the top on.

The spasms did their own gasping, she had no make-up on, she had cheeseburger grease at the root of her tongue, Gordon would phone back now and sympathize, and maybe she would introduce him to the black man who was waiting. The black man had a mouth he pursed as he looked again at his newspaper folded in one hand—his other held an attache case. She smiled and he looked at her. The phone booth was his if he took her with it, and her joke fixed his smile suddenly and he looked at the phone box register and shook his head, and the phone rang as she pulled the folding door and stepped free, saying, "You take it."

It rang again, she thought she had some sugarless gum in her bag, she reached back into the booth to lift the receiver an inch and hang up but she only put her hand on it. She gracefully dipped out of the booth, the man saying, "Are you sure?" and she walked away into a green light. She found a Kleenex in her bag and pinched it to her eyes without breaking stride, while he called, "It’s for you." She didn’t turn back, though she was crossing to the north side of the street needlessly, but wondered if the black man’s voice would come across the phone to Gordon. Gordon could be kind, but the black man had looked too kind to discuss her with Gordon, while Gordon was not so kind he wouldn’t tell her bluntly to think why she felt the way she did.

O.K., think back to Rhoda’s saying, "It’s different for you, you don’t have to work." Think back and see where your feeling is coming from but maybe what was there first.

While you look ahead and don’t have time to think. Certainly not that you wanted a son who would wear little red sneakers and talk to himself. And you would probably treat him like a prince.

The tall girls were out in their hot pants for the rush hour, and a big blue car with a cream-colored Jersey plate stopped near a restaurant doorway. Norma looked at a girl’s stilt-high, head-small behind, a girl who also had a large mouth, when she looked over her shoulder, a large mouth with pale lipstick almost white. What were they doing here? This wasn’t where they normally were supposed to be.

Three men wearing On-Strike placards stood across the width of the sidewalk. She would have to read the newspaper now because she had to be well-informed. Gordon had given up on her, she liked to think. Gordon, when they’d all been walking home from dinner, the men in front, Norma and Gordon’s friend’s wife behind the men, had been hailed by a girl, "Going out tonight?" and she and the other wife caught up and she told Gordon he ought to price them, they were neighborhood people, but he said, "They’re just interested in giving blow jobs," which Norma had an answer to but it would not be funny, he was always there ahead of her. But maybe there was more room on that point than just for him, and she’d said, "Maybe they like it," which she didn’t mean, and she wondered if he had heard. Or could hear. The Council’s new money, for instance. It dried her eyes right now. No one looked. No one looked away. She would not tell him she was on salary. He could ask about the Council’s new money. Let him.

"It will come to you," she thought, and the tall black pimp who stepped out not quite into her path in black, high-heeled boots and a high-crowned, insanely wide-brimmed hat that looked made of muskrat from one of the windows way over on West Thirtieth bent and tilted his head affably and said, "What?"

You will pass the Jewish restaurant, the Chinese, the Indian, the hotel, the church, the stationery store with the cleaner across the street. The girls and boys stand on the steps across the street, the steps of the acting school, waiting to go back in. Norma, you will come home from work by a route so invariable that the apartment house will come to you. The city thinks for you.

Gordon was inside her; but no, she had not wished the gap between the aches in her head and lower back to go on without her, so she hadn’t turned west on Thirty-fourth, but had gone down a block—then over to Park, then down then over a block but the gap was not just waiting for her as if it were last night in bed; it was with her now with the two pains that it was between. It was to be thought. She had to believe she had achieved a thing or two, this thinking that she kept with.

Her stuff was where she’d left it last night if Gordon had not put it away. He used to joke about putting it on his toothbrush. She felt in her speaking mouth that she had to think now on account of what had come to her—what he had communicated to her last night when all she could do was receive it, the thought, and hold it, but minus the future which had come this morning —but she had taken the white-and-blue tube of Ortho-Gynol out of the medicine cabinet but had put it back down on the sink remembering a night when she’d left the top off (next to the toothbrush) and she and Gordon had laughed about it in the morning.

The cycle of the household was where she’d left it this morning. Automatic morning that was once blind, blurred comfort. But automatic, too fixed to have room for a something it was waiting for, and Gordon didn’t hear her this morning when she took her pain from last night and with it the sound of his bath running and closed the front door behind her.

And so, ahead, she saw the apartment house, the restaurants (not the Jewish, which was in the block she’d skipped today), and the hotels, the church, stationery store, appliance store across the street, and the cleaner whose late Genoese father had been an actual tailor across the street on her side long before Norma had thought of New York. Once into the elevator she would be at the door of the apartment faster than she could think.

This morning the two pains, headache and lower back, received the two women coming at her from either end of the desk and room, Rhoda back from Washington—"We’ve got money for you, I didn’t want to tell you until we knew, and it’s a private source right here in New York, not federal money which is hard enough to predict but this is even crazier, apparently it’s right here in New York—we’re not asking any questions; do you understand what I’m saying? we’ve got money for you, two hundred a week"—and Kate, with a letter—"Hey girls, that building’s probably getting a prize, what do you think of that?"—she knew what Norma thought.

Norma couldn’t eat the cheese Danish that Kate put down on the desk with its paper unfolding. She had a job, though she’d been doing it for months anyway. So she ate the Danish but not lunch, and didn’t call Gordon. But at 2:30 had a cheeseburger with meat grease and juice rising through her cheeks yet did not find the gap, which she left to get bigger, until at 5:15, when she remembered she hadn’t gone to the bank at lunchtime, the shape of a pretzel sent her beyond the pretzel man past the prize building that pressed down on the old, vanished armory, and past an orange picked up by a man whose much younger girlfriend with longish, squeaky-fresh-looking hair didn’t know about the orange she’d lost. And so Norma through freedom of thought passed toward a thin, hurrying woman of indeterminate age (though Norma knew) applying lipstick to her stretched mouth as she walked along—and toward home, in all those directions that went on without her, toward Grace Kimball’s workshop where she knew she was to hear how hair is vanity so why not cut it all off and get in touch with your head, which is like your body and has something to tell you that men in 1976-1977 can’t, like Gordon now and last night, who said he didn’t care one way or the other if she went to the workshop, were all these naked gals in the workshop workshopping, he asked, were they throwing vases on a pottery wheel?, and she asked if he was thinking of the old women who in his old joke were up in the Bronx sticking the city’s pretzels together with their spit; no, wait, he said, the workshop’s your business, you know what I mean—he laughed and in his awkwardness a touch of color like fondness sharpened his eyes. Yet she had to think before she met him, for he was the source of the thought, and she had to stop being incongruous, not fitting, she’d lost two pounds up to last night and before today’s Danish and cheeseburger, so her breasts might be a shade firmer though they’d never been any trouble, they were smallish she had once thought but now she didn’t know—Gordon had once said he liked them, but he didn’t hear those voices any more or maybe didn’t know what to do with them any more, her breasts, and she’d read that prostitutes didn’t take off their bras; and therefore she should speak, for she couldn’t think unless she spoke, but whichever way she turned in the one operating phone booth she could not speak properly to Gordon, though she had saved that quarter she knew was in her purse somewhere. The unit call from Gordon at home cost less than a dime, and what with her magic new salary which she would be telling Gordon about in a few minutes after a day of unfaithful thoughts, yes, she remembered them like a series flashed through the city’s blocks but who could know what she was thinking? she couldn’t help thinking of what was in Gordon’s mind when he turned away from the eleven-o’clock news with its report on surveillance of foundations to look at her, his eyes blank, his tongue poking down in his cheek for a second as she then looked away and so did he, into the screen where CIA or FBI was being spoken of, but the message was in him more than the screen, like the shadow of the armory cast upward from deep below the ground where Gordon had told her to speak French to the woman whose husband needed razor blades, well only one blade would do, and then walking past the girls and pimps along Park she had tried to tell Gordon why English would have been better, that the French were not so patient as the Italians with foreigners speaking their language, but Gordon could always argue her down, and when he’d said, ‘They’re the foreigners, not us," she’d looked away at the long-legged black girls moving their feet around recklessly and laughing to each other, but she was going to be really naked tonight in the lights of Grace Kimball’s furnitureless apartment with jars and dishes of nuts and raisins and dried apricots on the window sills and candles celebrating the separation of the men from the girls who became women not girls.

What if a man came to the door? A messenger. A retarded messenger.

Norma had no further to go.

Only a ride up.

Manuel gone home, no one on the door. Any stranger could walk in, like the broad-shouldered man in the lobby waiting for the elevator. The man from this morning. Did women imagine and men think?

She was so glad to see him that she found herself shaking her head and saying, "Anyone could just walk in here." Her shoulders rounded toward him gently. Her day had curved back to him with nothing in between their meetings. His clothes smelled. Of amiable smoke. And he’d had a drink; he had thick hair, all gray but not dull. He asked what floor, but his hand was passing over the buttons as if it didn’t matter. "As you were saying," he said—and smiled.

Again, it was kind but automatic but fast, a kind mouth with a thoughtful pout.

"You said something in Spanish and Manuel laughed."

"Pretty raunchy Spanish," the man said.

"It sounded very fluent."

Kind wasn’t what she meant about his smile. She saw that, and felt good at the thought that kind was sexy, while he said, "I have to use it sometimes, but I’m always surprised how it comes—and I better not think about it, you know what I mean?"

They were moving and she had no time now to find anything out. So she asked right out.

And he said he went back long before Manuel. Same apartment? she asked. Kept it, he said. Things changed? Guessed he was supposed to say yes.

She didn’t want to get off into rent talk; it was like car talk.

She learned his apartment—9D—like getting a phone number. She thought she was quite a person.

Well, she was a mess—but maybe not. The crying had left her alive, and she didn’t give a damn, she was into the future, that was where she was coming from—and she’d come home feeling younger than she’d left this morning.

"Where are you coming from?" she said. She believed he was in danger.

The man’s pleasant face stiffened, twisting tighter against pressure. "They still using that expression?"

The elevator stopped at the ninth floor but Norma went on getting closer to her own, her legs went out to the man, she moved after he moved, and she was opposite the open elevator doorway where he stood, their arms opposite, his breath strong.

"I’m still there," he said.

"Please tell me about it," she said, and the door bumped his shoulder and bounced back.

"I will," he said, and she had the impression that somewhere he had already done so.

He had stepped back and let the door close between them.

But she was rising, as if the door had never opened and closed at nine —she had to deliver a message but wouldn’t know what it was until it came out.

She was already naked for her pre-workshop bath, and didn’t have on her the weight of a bottle of wine she knew now she’d meant to give Gordon in return, yes, for going to Grace’s for the "nude" workshop.

The door to her apartment was empty, the dark green door itself, numbered and lettered and with a peephole. She pushed her key at the lock and as she found the alignment the pressure already on the lock pushed the door in because it was unlocked. Nancy had been calling, "I’m not really hungry, Daddy."

He was in front of Norma. He extended his arms toward her, and she joined him (oh, a model that was fitted to him!). She smelled wine in his cheek and knew what he was saying before he said it: "I quit today."

You can always get it back, she thought, but he didn’t quite pick that up, and she murmured into his ear, "Good, Gordon."

His eyes skipped by as they had last night when he’d looked away from the news and seemed to speak, and looked back again at the TV screen; but the message she caught now along with other messages in his bony hands holding her arms was the same she’d heard in his mind at that moment last night.

It had said, "I don’t know if I want you."

She had known what was in his mind. Did he?

She had known; but how had she known? The power he had here was only what she had given him.

She had known what was in his mind because she had helped to put it there.

"Are you going to tell me you knew it?" said Gordon.

"You did the right thing," she said. She leaned over and kissed him on a crease of cheek. "Can I have a glass of wine? I’m a bit nervous about tonight."

Now why had she given him that? Why not.

She went to the bedroom. Behind her her older daughter’s footsteps curved away and seemed to stop. In pursuit of some intention.

"Is that all?" said Gordon.

"Speak," he said. "Did you cash a check today?"

"I will," she said.

He stopped at the threshold grasping the lintel above and letting his weight

go-

She went on with what she was doing.

She was not dependent. She wouldn’t talk about it.

"Is that all?" said Gordon.

She wouldn’t talk about it; she probably couldn’t explain.

"Norma?"

the unknown saved

He would sing out over his shoulder, Still there? She might be up in the trees, the way he tilted his head back, or in the sky, what there was of it—did this save her from having to answer?— and then again without looking he said over his shoulder, his heavy shoulder, Everything O.K.?

And he could be the one who needed help: she saw him up ahead, puffing, grabbing a sapling to get himself up, wobble, stagger, or along uneven ground appear to limp, humming, gasping through this shaded upper world of woods so she was concerned about him that this man who called over his shoulder (as if listening not speaking), Still there? could be himself the one who needed help.

Help, it occurred to her, once in the middle of mountain light. Not help from her, for she was only to ask what his symptoms were, that time, at the summit of a small mountain they had trudged and hauled themselves up and scrambled without direction except up, through an upward abyss of shade.

For they were very occasional weekend rock climbers. Scramblers. A dark pond at the top, they’d heard. Or an observation tower with initials cut into the gray wood, some still fresh, still pale or burnt-brown. A great rock, they might hear. A great view. A chalet with a player piano.

No, they were not rock climbers to speak of. Tennis players; well, doubles players, who liked to walk in the woods where you could hear yourself think and they would take a trip of a couple of hundred miles and when they got there walk, walk up a small, green mountain.

Well, Mount Everett (don’t smile), in the Berkshires near her old college. It had been old in her day—why not?—and offered a large nineteenth-century Gothic chapel. She came so near majoring in economics her parents announced it to their friends one Christmas. But she loved her history teacher and followed him from term to term taking all the courses he gave or recommended, actually had a term of Greek. The Berkshire hills was what the history teacher had called them; like a round mountain, she said, and her husband smiled short of laughter.

But the way that he led her along rock-impacted brook gullies and up through stunted firs thicketed branch upon branch that came back at her face, she felt that the snatches of lyrics he puffed out could be parts of a long song she wasn’t hearing much of, for he was sending it forward, an ongoing song, sending a message to the top to whatever waited for them, and she looked behind her and around her, and some came back to her.

Almost like, Everything okay?

And, Still there?

Through the trees off to the right, the paved road hardly existed, until a car motor crept close. And then it wasn’t toward them; her husband looked toward it, kept looking for two or three steps, you probably couldn’t see the car, it passed them at some point and it might flash sun once, twice, through the trees, as if to see these climbers; the climb was hot, so Hey why weren’t we as smart as those guys, she heard herself think (two in the front seat, whoever those people in the car were, or two in front and one or two in back, possibly one in front with two in back, but never one in front one in back)— yet she put her foot down on something soft and spongy no doubt his brain a mushy witch-blend of fir needles, stewed twigs, and the fungus of the earth, and knew that the Why-weren’t-we-as-smart-as-those-guys thought wasn’t hers because she was happy here on foot.

So it had to be his thought. Only because she knew he’d had it before. Thinking of his famous parents more than these folk passing in a car you couldn’t see, who on a warm morning made the ascent by car. He only spoke the words of a song now, he didn’t sing, for the tune had quieted down between the words "It looks like," he was saying, "it’s climb’m’ clear up to the sky." So she knew he had put the other thoughts away and perhaps recalled his one audience behind him, and she could almost lose him, knowing he was about to throw himself down on the steep rise to sit back on his elbows facing her but probably closing his eyes to the treetops and sky as she came up to him, sweat on his brow.

But he didn’t stop and turn, much less sit, he wasn’t there, he’s passed beyond the trees, through the last thicket into clearing and as if he was so motionless that she didn’t see him.

Or it was that a clearing had come to him, all around him, the clearing, she was angry and she loved where she was, she was fifty yards at least behind him in trees and thickets, if he got too far ahead let him go past the top, down the other side, completely round the world, he’d find her in front of him. He flickered back to her, a piece of green, green flannel shirt, he was in the middle of mountain light if that wasn’t putting it too strongly. They must be getting there. She couldn’t see how far ahead he was now, she was almost to the clearing, she raked her calf sickeningly on a bramble right through her jeans, old soft jeans, much machined, soft as skin. A distinct tread and small crash of crackling came so close she thought it was herself and she looked for a red squirrel, a bird; she put her hand on a birch trunk, a dry, tough-sprung curl of bark, and didn’t see him too well through the last growth of scrub fir and a tangle she had never seen before of bright holly and low alder (with two hands she pulled a tiny pine cone off), and if he did look back to see how she was doing she couldn’t tell until she thrashed through and her hand swept out away from her a springy branch, and she saw they still had a ways to go but out in low brush and rock up to her right.

The view plunged out to the left. The air hummed with space past and future, hummed like haze over the velvet of valley, the quiet land where there would be people. Listen, it all lived apart from her but she was in it and it didn’t need to be aware of her, its unheard gongs, a noon siren she absolutely knew was about to go off, the crows, the agitated speed like another sound she didn’t put her finger on, and then some cheerful greetings she imagined from memory between two women across a street was it?—no, between a vegetable garden, no, some rows of cultivated raspberries and an upper window of a sunny house, all preserved in a concentrated drop of distance, and she wanted to call to her husband, him, Hey turn around and look at me, Dobbie, but she called out, "Remember Austria? how we heard the farmgirls talking way down the valley?"

He was already half-turned, as she held this last branch bent before she stepped clear, and she held that bough’s pressure for a moment seeing what he would do, if he would look at her. She had a small rock in her other hand.

He was breathing shallow and fast and seemed to be in trouble, but he was moved, she could see, he was sagging, but he was feeling something. She felt the pull and knew she needed to, to be once more absorbed by him, but he needed help, but his beard now how did you neither leave it on nor shave it off, to be once more absorbed by what? Why, by his mouth of course.

She waited for him to do something; he didn’t turn far enough to see her. She was the explorer, not he, she was between herself and him. He said, so she couldn’t see his lips move even, "They said you can hear what you can see."

He meant in Austria, in the southern mountains.

"Do you have a pain?" she called to him, his breathing fast and shallow.

Absorbed also by his eyes once. And now his eyes turned nearly toward her, she knew she was in the corner of one. This threatened to irritate her, and she and her husband each waited for the other to do something, while she held the branch bent back so it pressed tight at her palm and she leaned against it, and as if with the catapult force of her branch lobbed her stone at him, which got bigger as it went away from her toward him.

Her husband Dobbie, who was wont to sing while climbing and to draw her after him as if he was the one who was the powerhouse, now dropped to the ground. If you can sit, the thought came to her, why stand; if you can lie down, why sit? He sat profile to her on a rock, so she felt he did not want to look at her and knew she would not move free of the bent branch until he did look at her, not knowing how close the stone had come to his ear though it was he who had made her just miss.

Hold everything. If he won’t look, fine; let him not look. He’s got thoughts, too, out here in mountain light whatever mountain light is, light’s light unless you’re doing stained glass or into taking pictures or you’re trying to get to the end of a field, get back to the house get through the chores before night falls and the corn sprouts under you in the dark. So hold everything. Cut.

Okay, let him not look, if something would happen if he did.

Slide back down the mountain to bed, or did we reach the deep pond at the summit and on the pond’s dark surface an observation tower floating and on the top platform the people who came up in that car are singing the breathtaking beauty of their view while as for us instead of driving off in their parked car we can’t stop as we reach the summit but skid past the signs, elevation above sea level, arrow to the restrooms, and pelt down the far side half a mile down and more, where there is also a bed waiting unless it has been brought to us where we are, where we’re dropping.

But cut. Back to bed. The bed—a long shot—can be anywhere since the lights are out anyway; the bed could be anywhere, you think for a moment: a double bed alone on the Mexican plateau guarded by starving jaguarundi, or under the roof of a small, charming wood-frame garden house in San Francisco up the steep, bay ward slope of Telegraph Hill, a beach hotel in Libya, April in Lima, except no, the cool, white, rough, clean-laundered sheet material in which the featherbed-like comforter gets buttoned in, that weighed them comfily down, is Austria, the cowbell clunking, no, please, tinkling, up the midnight meadow rising so steeply close past their second-floor bedroom it was the mountain in an adjacent dream, not the one they were on, and by the light of that bell there was Dobbie’s welt where a childhood friend had knifed him in the shoulder blade after Dobbie said his friend’s parents were ignorant as the day was long. He and she laughed about his ten-year-old language, for I will give my parents the business but you leave them alone, got that?

She put a fingertip on the bare welt and proceeded to press, because she wanted to talk to him she guessed. But he was the one who spoke as if she’d pressed a button and out came her name: "Freya?" he said, still facing away from her lying on his side and sounding in the dark room a grainy threat of inquiry that another woman would have taken for his being awake and thinking (if not ready for anything). But she wanted to talk. She wanted to ask why he had not once looked at her (she could swear) during dinner with the two from Philadelphia who had come all the way to Austria to the Carinthian Mountains an hour from Italy, an hour from Yugoslavia, to meet a couple from New York and they, first the woman, it was on the tip of her tongue, then the man, then she again, then he again, then both, had averred that they knew that name from somewhere, until Dobbie got the Philadelphia couple off onto the question whether the schnitzel, that in all its delicate thinness there was less of every time they looked at their plates, was veal or in fact pork, which he then had led into the question whether Wiener in Wienerschnitzel ever meant "Vienna" to hungry Americans (not to be confused with Vienna sausage) and when it was remarked that Vienna was more famous for other things, he coolly went on to speculate that many Americans might think that Wiener in Wiener schnitzel meant "wiener" as in hot dog or frankfurter, which could, though not necessarily, be pork, until the woman, who put the last piece of her schnitzel into her mouth and was deeply tanned under her makeup, became deeply moved or certainly erupted in ecstasy—ecstasy— announcing there and then because it had come to her the profession of Dob-bie’s famous parents.

And so now in the darkness of the bedroom he didn’t reply to his wife Freya that of course he had looked at her, of course he had (he didn’t reply —for what would be the point? he knew he hadn’t—as if he’d been afraid to).

But his quiet was not now drowsiness. She pressed the welt and spoke into the curly hair over his neck, but not what she absolutely had to speak about but—she didn’t believe it—how concerned she was and wouldn’t he see a doctor, well not here, that is not down in St. Veit, but when they got home, for this afternoon further up the mountain he hadn’t been himself at the moment when they’d heard the buzzing sound of a motor and she’d said, A motorcycle, and he’d said, That’s no bike, that’s a chain saw, she had seen he was ready to keel over into those Austrian raspberry bushes they’d found; yet "You weren’t having a heart attack exactly," she said, and she was grimly entertained now saying all this stuff which was not what she’d set out to say, "and it wasn’t what smokers get"—"how could it be? he murmured hoarsely—"and though you’re not overweight it might be high blood pressure, it might be anything. You were—" words came—"spinning into yourself, you know; you seized up, it wasn’t asthma, I don’t say it wasn’t the climb, but you were—" the words came—"transfixed, and I thought there he’s going to fall into the raspberry bushes and never be seen again"—"hopefully," came the droll murmur.

And at that instant—but God it was never at that instant, it was always long known, long prepared for, but kept in the corner of the eye as if hardly there till the mood took you to set a revelation to the words at that instant I suddenly saw—that, well, hopefully was how she had looked at him long ago—with hope for herself. Met him in an early health-food restaurant she didn’t officially manage but seemed to because the boy and girl dancers who waited on table came to her for everything, and before this bearded, logical-spoken customer had thought about ordering, this customer who couldn’t make up his mind whether to be aggressively shy or aggressively charming and recited Falstaff suddenly to her as she stood over him, and she suddenly saw he had charmed the forks and knives right off the table so she had to replace them—yes, before this customer had thought about ordering she had discovered he ran a small company that made documentary films for television, and he, if he remembered, had discovered that she did not live around there, the Village, but a subway ride away in Brooklyn Heights in a top-floor studio that was very beautiful, very tiny, and too much money, and where, he soon found, she had maximized her space by using cushions and reducing the furniture to the bare minimum although she liked to cook and not health food.

Sure the hope had been for herself quite apart from his famous parents. But she for her part had given him what, it turned out, he wanted, not to mention a lot of love. (Served him right.) So she was able to give up that job, high on her list of things to give up; and so she thought for years that he had saved her.

For what? A couple of growing children? A foggy day on a friend’s tennis court, a sunny day? Throw in a raspberry mountain in green Carinthia where the woodcutter’s—we’d say lumberman’s—wife and her children pick gallons of berries in order to crush them with liters of sugar so that thick raspberry syrup may soothe the toothless winter. For Dobbie and wife, a raspberry mountain in Carinthia and at its foot a midnight bed-and-comforter.

In which bed, lying on their sides, he before, she behind, single-file, each with the right ear to the pillow, headed both in the same direction, she pressed his welt and as it moved under her fingertip she saw that he had not looked at her because a voice in him had warned him not to for else he’d see for once who it was who had consented to be saved by him; and what then?

This wasn’t easy. She smelt smoke coming out of his scalp, someone else’s smoke, and with it faint vanilla, used vanilla, off the skin of his scalp moistly glistening in the light of a cowless cowbell—and beer—beer because tonight she had had wine because the white wine was cheap, not because it was local and good, well fairly local. But at this moment in history she wished to talk, not smell—and not the words she had just talked a moment ago like a wife setting up a doctor’s appointment because it was her duty to keep her man alive, to save him, say, from losing ten years of life expectancy with her.

And her head now curiously reached around the obstacle of him and bent round not so much to feel him where he was soft or tight as to see what he was facing in the direction of.

And at this moment hearing hooves briefly canter upon the sod out on the mountain along with the clink which she now knew was more than a memory of an afternoon cow that had gone down the mountain to those farmgirls at milking time leaving behind it only the ring and with a large upheaval of the one heavy, clean-enveloped comforter that covered them her husband rolled one complete half-turn, hand on hip, his hand, her hip, except the hip had sensed change and all by itself had rolled with the crunch, as he observed the very next morning ten seconds before they were suddenly joined for breakfast by the Philadelphia couple—that is, the hip had rolled with his roll so that the hip he reached for turned out to be not her left hip, for she had also turned and was no more facing him than she had been before, but her right hip, and now he was behind her single file and had said, "Hey," to which again, with a magic not all her own, she did not say what she had wished to say but said, "It’s not that you didn’t look at me, it’s—"

"—that" (came his voice) "you didn’t really care."

"I’m going to sleep," she said, securely wiped out by having inspired him to say what she did not mean.

Black telepathy call it, if he would only hear.

If he only heard himself think, he’d think before he spoke, though singing if you could call it that was what he did sometimes outdoors instead of speaking, but singing in place of knowing what he was thinking, and so to fill the silence which anyone knew wasn’t at all empty but full of interesting junk, Dobbie could sometimes speak too quickly with the edge of someone by turns sharply shy, actively charming, though she had never gotten around to telling him.

Though he did not sing on the tennis court.

Or at breakfast. That is, until, ten seconds after the Philadelphia couple had announced themselves and arrived to find that at the table of their new New York friends from last night two additional place settings had materialized which inspired the woman as if nothing had happened between dinner and breakfast to ask if Dobbie’s parents had had any other issue besides Dobbie, Dobbie’s wife now said the cream in her impeccable Austrian coffee was sour and disintegrating, whereupon Dobbie pushed his chair back, got up, and, beginning to sing softly, made for the kitchen holding the earthenware jug only to meet, pushing from the kitchen side, the girl with the coffee pot temporarily on a tray.

Hold it.

Cut. He was so good, so smart, at putting things, their life, together, remembering how it had been, summing up, cutting, dissolving the little scenes they had: come on, I know how you’re feeling, I know why you’re doing this: while she stared like a stone, and when he said how sad it made him when they had their differences she had to laugh at him, he wasn’t exactly funny, or quite charming, but suddenly he had her—recalling, that is, what they had done together once upon a mountaintop or were going to do tomorrow, visit the free-lance diver in his Manhattan apartment, fish-out-of-water footage. Cut.

To the kitchen of rich friends, a kitchen with familiar appliances, great farmhouse table in spring light with a green-stained chopping board and a slab of marble with flour on it, windows above the sink, the green boughs of trees out there, and among them, but hard to see, white shorts, white short-sleeved shirts of players rushing, back-pedaling, while the green leaves show of the tennis what they will and make the red earth and white-taped lines both far away and close, which she knows is what she has to want, but only flickers of the outside, a glitter of rackets, a flex of legs clearing the stretch of net she can see from here in someone else’s kitchen, why is she here inside in her bare thighs and tennis dress, sneakers on cool linoleum, feeling too good to put up with her own homicidal pique, in someone else’s kitchen that is better than her own because it asks nothing of her, why is she here staring into a huge refrigerator lit up like an enchanted robot proud of its sinister insides, and on top of the refrigerator stood the broad silver cylinder of a power juicer that will get juice out of a pit, butter out of nuts.

While out beyond the windows, out amongst the leaves and boughs, flicker blue and white sneakers, and suddenly the same legs as before hurdle the net now in the other direction—hairy, she knows from memory she’s almost sure but couldn’t care if she wanted to and doesn’t want to, and doesn’t want to be back there fifteen minutes ago looking into the sun double-faulting three times in a row—thrice—while Dobbie, at the net, his back to her, bends over his shoulder, waits at the net to put one away that never comes back at him because at this moment of history she can’t get it over and she doesn’t blame it on the sun. But then amid his silence she does get one in, an ace so modest it’s hardly seen, like a practice serve, a slicing ace, not fast but a fair ping off her easy unbent overhead swing but they’ll never know that at the instant of tossing the yellow ball up she opened infinitesimally her whole left side, her leg, shoulder, behind, to give the angle of instinct that would hit Dobbie in the head with the serve even before her follow-through was finished. Ah so—and yet the ball missed his ear by a whisker, just missed, and found the sideline tape for an ace, and he knew this, though did not know he knew; and he put his hand to his ear to feel the fuzz of her intent, so the friends across the net jeered.

"Sorry," she had called before she knew it, and the word looked back into her: "Sorry I missed," it said to her, sounding like she meant also—for she did—"Sorry I don’t know what I’m doing, acing, double-faulting ..." And before she could bounce up on the baseline tape at her left toe the one ball she had and serve at fifteen-forty, Dobbie had said, "What do you mean, ‘sorry’?"—fired it over his shoulders as if it wouldn’t affect her upcoming serve.

So she walked off the court. The friends called to her, "Freya? Freya?" Dobbie called out, "Hey!" So she called over her shoulder, "I’ve got a cramp, I’ll be back."

But she did not look back, which was difficult, until she had passed around the house and into the kitchen and then looked forth secretly through the green-leaved windows above the sink, one of them open, to see what little through their friends’ trees she could see of the bright sport on the tennis court, but then she became absorbed in the empty kitchen.

Until she didn’t hear Dobbie in his sneakers, for here he was behind her, she knew a split second before his voice carried as well the decision that she was not sick as the words "What was that all about?"

Without an answer that could be fair to herself, she said, "Oh, not turning around."

"So I could catch one in the face?" he said. "You don’t want to be watched while you serve," he added, "you don’t want to think about it too much," he was saying over her shoulder; but he often didn’t turn around, and she would not remind him but it was not even years we’re talking about, it was Saturday now that she was working, now that she had a job Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday that had been so high on her list of necessities she couldn’t see anything else on the list and now looked forward to Saturday as a day off from her own job not his, freedom to do what she had not been free to do during the work week when she had also been free, words did not explain all this freedom (her job was finding words!)—and this Saturday coming here was not what she wanted to do, yet she had gone ahead with it anyway. Dobbie arriving in the driveway of this large half-timbered house with an all-weather tennis court off through the trees, though it looked like ordinary clay, and a fairly clean pool beyond it, Dobbie getting out of the car, walking toward the house, calling for some reason, "Coffee’s on" and stopping when he realized she was still in the car, but not looking around (catch her moving!), calling back over his shoulder, "Let’s go," while she sat staring through the tinted windshield, able to not move, gripping her new forty-nine-dollar racket like one-potato-two-potato by the handle sticking up through her legs, the head on the floor of the car between her feet, her sunglasses propped against the windshield on top of the padded dash, where they still are, no doubt, the top half catching the green hood of their leased car, the lower half the warm black imitation leather. She had felt compelled to open the door of the car, as if he’d never again hear her from inside the windshield, she felt her right sneaker sole on the gravel shift the little stones first slightly forward and slightly back, she was standing, she had been standing, the open door between her and Dobbie, who now walked on, rising on the toes of his strong legs, only to hear her say, "I don’t know what I’m doing here," when he stopped again, looking still forward, tilting his head back slightly to look at a bedroom window, using time always.

"You don’t want to think about it too much," he said over his shoulder, and a familiar face had appeared at an upstairs window and she smelled roasted coffee.

So that—her hand upon the Acme juicer two sets and a few games later—she knew he would open the fridge door now in order to be doing something in addition to whatever they were also doing, which for a second must have been, unless he was deaf, hearing the pock and answering pock, which was what distance did to a close-up ping, of a long singles rally going on behind the trees.

"You don’t want to think about it," she said over her shoulder and fought hard against thinking of herself having a romantic misunderstanding two-thirds through a mellow old film, her proud, lovely back turned toward the male lead—her proud, lovely, vulnerable back, for everyone including their older child (child!) was saying "vulnerable" up to last year (wasn’t it?) but no one was saying it any more.

So she succeeded here in fighting off romance, and felt only that Dobbie had come unnecessarily into a kitchen where she was. He asked if she was going to do some juicing.

Why did he have to be here, why didn’t he go away into the shade of the trees, the blue-green of the swimming pool, the comfort of the car. She heard him saying, If you can sit, why stand?

She wasn’t sorry she’d walked off the court, she said, said it awkwardly, stonily, heavily, much more significantly than she wanted; but, seeing this, she saw that it wasn’t homicidal pique as she had been thinking.

Oh, he was saying, they were easy to beat after you left—with the fridge door, she was certain, still open—one against two, he said, why he’d been masterful, they were so out of position they were hitting each other with their rackets by mistake.

She all but laughed, but she didn’t, he couldn’t get to her. They both knew he was trying.

It was not homicidal pique. She wasn’t out to kill him. All she wanted was to rearrange him. Put the parts in the Acme juicer pushing the red oblong plastic pusher-plunger steadily down till it was all the way into its slot and for a moment longer juice streamed out the little chute into your glass, sweet pale celery, blue cabbage, dynamite beets, sweet carrot, apple, grapes, coconut, pear, if mixing veg and fruit didn’t screw up the enzymes and give you gas.

Until looking out the kitchen-sink windows she saw their friends saunter toward the house, leaning toward each other, giving each other a push, a jab, and knew she’d forgotten everything for a moment except looking for her husband out the window when he was behind her.

And, hearing him hum, she did not know what she’d turn into but knew he would not save her from it; and turning gracefully round, she could predict that he would look as he did yesterday standing on the city pier with his production crew and a helicopter making a racket rising behind him and three cops watching and an unidentified beauty and the free-lance salvage diver he was making a documentary of in a wet suit behind him standing on one leg to stretch off a flipper.

She was late, and Dobbie looked her in the eye while the sound man talked to him, and Dobbie had nothing to gain and everything to lose by saying loudly to her, "You knew when we were shooting," and she was glad to smile and shake her head at him like any other person—he knew it was her lunch hour, now she was working—and she had been just in time to see the diver surface and climb the ladder. The same man she’d seen on a Saturday morning in his apartment telling the camera of his need to be free, stepping back from his stereo and turning to the camera as the record dropped, Delius, Handel (don’t smile), Bach, yes a long way from the work he did for the police, yes, what he had to come back home to, while Dobbie—who kept to the man’s work and did not ask questions about what he would eventually let viewers of the film see for themselves—Dobbie she knew would splice in and play against the man’s quiet, hard, flat voice footage of an apartment where no matter how hard you searched you would find no children, although the unidentified beauty on the pier was so young, why who knew who she was with?

Dobbie did not let go of this little scene of theirs in the middle of his documentary: Where had she been?—he knew he was being dumb—where had she been, for God’s sake?

"It’s my lunch hour."

"Right, right."

"And I’ve been having lunch."

A woman friend with an impulsive voice and a hearty manner had helped her by listening to her. She was probably two or three years ahead of her and she encouraged Freya not to hide her light under a bushel. She told Freya, "Empathy, that’s what they don’t have. In the old days, I’m panicking or I’m taking something too personally, and my ex says he knows exactly what I mean, he’s getting a promotion from his territory back to the front office and all he can think of is his mother praising him to other people as if he weren’t there in the room or his father interrupting him sometimes in the middle of an idea and saying, "That’s what I’ve always thought!" So Freya wanted to get out and start using all this information that was being shared. The woman had said to her, "You thought that panic was yours and now it’s his. That ray of light at the end of the tunnel was your life, you thought, but—nope— it’s his, too."

She walked over to the sound man she’d known for years, stepped over his cable. Dobbie followed, she heard him talking and did not answer when he changed his tack and she heard him say behind her, "Is everything okay?"

She stood beside a piling above brown water, the city around her. She was between the sound man who was small with an Abe Lincoln beard and a cop in a bright blue shirt, a cop with a big mustache. And she felt behind her her husband under the waterside sun so close to her, to her shoulder blades, her neck, her ankles, that she could have fallen or been pushed in.

"Oh Bill," she heard herself say to her old friend the sound man, "you always were a sexist flatterer."

Behind her, Dobbie as if there were no crew no set no documentary-of-a-free-lance-diver said, "Is everything okay, Freya?" as if he knew her so well, as if he knew her so well.

So at last she turned to him, saying, "Still there?" only to see in his face—so she at once looked past him over his shoulder at the girl talking to the diver who had his glass face-mask high on his forehead where the black rubber helmet came down and who was looking at Freya, who he could not know had just caught fixed upon her husband the director-producer’s face— a stony mask of grief, of loss, not to be charmed away by the whistle of a tug or the sharp wash of its wake against the pier pilings, or the line "I don’t know you any more," from a romantic movie.

But he recovered himself sufficiently so that next day, in someone’s dream kitchen adjacent to a private tennis court, he was able when she turned abruptly to him where he stood by their friends’ closed refrigerator, to show the same deadly face—so that, many women though she now knew herself to be, she did not sing.

Gordon’s Story: The Year He Skipped

Gordon met Mayn as they came out of the wind and rain into the lobby. The new man was on, although you wouldn’t know it; he hadn’t come out to open the taxi door for Mayn nor had he pulled open the lobby door but stood safely behind the glass panel on the other side and nodded and grinned as Gordon and Mayn came through and Gordon, who didn’t really know Mayn, held the door for him and Mayn had a word with the new doorman in Spanish. Gordon recognized tiempo, "weather," but not, he thought, the rest, though he heard mas temprano and knew he ought to know what Mayn was saying.

Mayn carried an old pale-leather valise which he did not set down as they waited for the elevator. It hung from Mayn’s hand and he might have been about to board a train. Gordon was a couple of inches taller than Mayn, a couple at most, but Mayn was broader than Gordon and stood with some final, strong balance that was power that came from patience.

The unusual dark shade of Mayn’s uniformly gray, thick hair didn’t look like a younger color mixed in, and his square, roughened face made you think he couldn’t be quite as old as he looked, which might be forty-five or fifty. The elevator floor indicator stayed at 5, and the new man came and pounded on the elevator door, put his nose against the diamond-shaped pane of reinforced glass, and tried to see up the shaftway. He shrugged and said that it was coming, and went away.

While waiting, Gordon and Mayn talked of security in the building, the boiler, and a general shift in weather patterns toward extreme warm and extreme cold winters in alternate years; also snow tires—in particular, radial snows. Gordon and Mayn re-introduced themselves. Gordon didn’t really know Mayn, but Gordon’s wife Norma, who had greeted Mayn once in Gordon’s presence, said Mayn was a nice man; he had lived in the building once upon a time, had left, had now come back to the same old apartment which he had somehow kept, and was often out of town. According to Norma, Mayn had bought an old white Cadillac for his young daughter who worked in Washington. She had not received it with quite the sense of humor her father had hoped for. Or so Norma had told Gordon.

Gordon at forty-four had taken a leave of absence from his law firm. He had to think, and think also how much this leave was costing. He kept thinking of himself as around forty. He had listened to Norma speaking of Jim Mayn.

She hardly knew him, but in his wife’s mentions of Mayn the rather lone new but old arrival, Gordon had found a tremor or shift that Norma might be unaware of.

What had Gordon missed? He had missed something—another life, no doubt—and that was why he was taking an expensive leave of absence which his firm did not understand. He had missed what? It was why he was where he was. He had almost forgotten how to think; or that was what it felt like in the morning and in the evening, and yet that wasn’t it. He noticed the year now when he read the Times in the morning, they were past the middle of the decade of the ‘70s.

The doorman came back and placed both palms on the elevator door, his nose against the diamond-shaped pane, trying to get into the shaft it looked like.

"She’s coming now," said Mayn. The doorman stepped back, giving the elevator door a single bang with his fist.

Gordon said he was glad his own daughters were too young to drive; he wouldn’t keep a car in the city. He listened to himself say that indoor parking cost as much a month as a room in an apartment, and what did the Motor Vehicle tax on a newly purchased car come to now? Mayn said that his daughter had a car in Washington. Gordon thought, A white Cadillac! Mayn said, The government takes so much, it’s almost too expensive to work. Still, thank God for withholding.

Gordon pointed out that they withheld too much, and he recalled that once he had prepared a speech on taxation.

Mayn asked who had delivered it, had Gordon been in politics?

No, it was for a contest at the rather traditional boys’ day school where Gordon attended grades nine through twelve. There were different categories and you could enter only one. Declamation was one category: you recited a poem. Public speaking was the other, but speech had two categories, prepared and extemporaneous. The extemporaneous speakers tended to be Jewish and kept up on their current events like sports fans; they were given topics fifteen minutes before they had to go on.

"That’s the way it ought to be," said Mayn.

Gordon had taken a load of information from an article in a magazine of his father’s, and when he went up to deliver his prepared speech from memory he looked left and right and didn’t know what in hell he was doing giving a speech on a subject like that. Where was the point of it for him?

Mayn wagged his head agreeably and said he couldn’t help him there.

In the elevator Gordon invited Mayn to come in for a drink. Mayn was saying, "Well ..." when they arrived at his floor and the door opened, and he asked Gordon to have that drink in his place.

There was no mat outside Mayn’s door and there was a point of light in the peephole. In his foyer was a rolled-up rug with a tag attached to it by wire. Gordon listened for a sound. The light had been left on in the foyer, and the peephole’s metal flap was stuck to one side in the open position. Mayn said there was a hanger in the closet, and Gordon said it was O.K. and dropped his raincoat on an old white metal lawn chair, and Mayn draped his coat over Gordon’s.

A mild, astringent scent of paint carried faintly into the living room, where a window was a few inches open. Mayn excused himself and disappeared into the kitchen. Gordon heard water spluttering out of a faucet—into a metal sink certainly; it droned and bounced like tinny rain. Mayn left the water running in the kitchen and appeared at the far end of the living room, disappeared for a minute, came back to the sound of a toilet flushing, passed out of sight, made some metal-on-metal and metal-on-wood noises, turned off the water and reappeared with a small pitcher and an ice bucket; he seemed to have evolved from a life that was far from here. You can go home again if you have several homes.

Mayn had one of the few three-bedroom apartments in the old building —said he had lived here with his family. Gordon could see the suitcase where Mayn had left it in the foyer.

Mayn poured for the two of them. Gordon urged Mayn to have a Medeco lock installed in his front door. They sat in the living room. Mayn hadn’t mentioned Gordon’s wife Norma, not that he should have. There was not much furniture in the living room, and Gordon liked the effect, although his frankly erratic feelings lately gave this living space for a moment a curious play in his mind. Either the furniture was being moved in or it was being moved out; but Mayn had recently moved back in and so the furniture, what there was of it, was certainly not being moved out, but Gordon had the feeling, as an unemployed observer, of a living space that contained a lot of different times. There were three large, detached, tree-like plants in tubs, but also there was a long, trailing, ivy-like growth that looked familiar, in a pot on a shelf above eye level. It was distinctly more present here in this room than the three big plants. Later, Gordon noticed another large plant, and maybe there were still more.

How had Mayn kept this place so long when the landlord didn’t give sublet clauses? No problem, said Mayn; Gordon didn’t follow it up. Gordon said, Come to think of it, he didn’t know anyone on this floor. Mayn said he had had two sets of friends in the apartment over the last few years, and he had come back, and left, and come back again.

Gordon inquired what it felt like, coming back, and Mayn knew what Gordon meant and thought a moment and then shook his head—he didn’t know how to answer and he said "Like remembering about my family when they lived here ..."

"What they didn’t know?"

"Or didn’t say."

Mayn lifted his glass as if to drink. Holding it before his mouth, he observed that he had never lived anything like this, never gone back. He had always done the opposite.

"You lived here with your family," said Gordon and the odd, slight cruelty he discovered in his remark seemed to contain what Norma knew about Mayn that Gordon didn’t know.

"There’s a man in this building who lived here for years with his parents," said Mayn; "and when he got married, he moved his parents out and moved his wife in; he moved his parents over to Brooklyn, as I remember, and now he lives here with his wife and daughter, she has a friend named Valerie and they’re always yelling at each other in the elevator"—"I know them," said Gordon— "and when his daughter gets married ..."

"Imagine the dreams you get in that apartment," said Gordon, but then he felt he was really talking about his host living here in this apartment, in this three-bedroom pad. "I mean the vibes."

"I don’t remember dreams," said Mayn. "Never have."

"Well, this is the old homestead, for sure," said Gordon.

"I do get end-of-the-world daydreams after I’ve had a few drinks," said Mayn—"a few too many."

"How does it end? Or do you have to protect your sources?" said Gordon, and thought he shouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

"I can’t remember," said Mayn. "Probably someone forgetting to tell someone something." He sipped his drink and looked away toward the lighted foyer where Gordon could see the valise standing. Mayn seemed to speak, then, from a distance. The good thing, he said, was that in the end-of-the-world he was beyond it; that is, in the dream he skipped his own death.

An uninvolved observer, Gordon said, and Mayn, having sipped his drink, looked at it and said that to tell the truth he thought it was when he hadnt had much to drink that the dream came.

Gordon didn’t want to just agree, and he said that schizophrenics have end-of-the-world fantasies.

"Listen, there are lunatics out there that the doctors never dreamed of," said Mayn with tired authority.

"You’ve seen them in your travels," said Gordon, who knew there was nothing between Mayn and Norma but guessed she was quite taken with him.

"I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn.

"Yes, I know. My wife told me," said Gordon. "Fast-breaking history."

"Pretty slow-moving in my case," said Mayn. "Strip-mining leases in the West, disarmament contracts in the East."

Gordon said he had had a dream the other night, if Mayn was interested, of climatologists joining forces with nuclear "fissionaries" to explode the cloud cover that makes Venus a greenhouse.

"Nuclear what?" Mayn laughed.

"But with your dreams of the future," said Gordon realizing to his surprise that he was persisting, "isn’t history breaking so fast that you have to anticipate it?"

"What gave you the idea I was on intimate terms with the future," said Mayn.

"I didn’t say you were," said Gordon.

"In fact, I doubt if I’ll be there when it happens," said Mayn. "I mean the end of the world or the chain reaction when they set the atmosphere on fire by mistake."

"But I’m serious, I read the headlines just like you," said Gordon. "What’s going on? Why are things falling out the way they are? Is it greed? Corporations? Generals? Is it everybody’s death wish? Is it that we can’t remember our dreams in the morning?" Gordon felt smart and foolish.

"Greed and death wish for sure," said Mayn. "I don’t know about the other thing you mentioned. I do seem to recall that U.S. Grant couldn’t stand to watch the man—what was his name?—risking his life crossing Niagara on a high wire."

"Grant was better out in the field. He didn’t know what he was doing when he got to the White House," said Gordon, who knew what he was talking about.

"Grant was a vegetarian," said Mayn, shaking his head with friendly hopelessness at Gordon. "Wouldn’t eat a chicken, said he couldn’t eat anything that went on two legs, and he couldn’t stand rare meat, he’d seen so much blood when he visited his field hospitals and saw those kids—he had to have his beef done to a crisp."

"I thought he was a vegetarian," said Gordon. "That’s better as a story than as history."

"Oh, I’m a newspaperman," said Mayn. "I wouldn’t give you a dime for my view of history if I had one. History is words."

"That doesn’t sound like a newspaperman," said Gordon, who had again said more than he had meant to or than he’d known he would say.

"You’re welcome," said Mayn, as if Gordon had thanked him. But it had hit home, and Gordon, who could entertain himself, thought Mayn was sorry he’d asked him in, and he wondered how long Mayn had been away and if he left the light in the foyer burning. It was how Mayn uncrossed his legs and how his polished wingtip shoes, rich with wear like furniture wood, gripped the floor parallel and squarely. Also, there was the valise visible in the foyer. The man risked danger, Gordon felt.

Then Gordon saw Mayn stand up with a quick force that said that he was not going anywhere. What, asked Gordon, were the big things in the tubs, because Mayn didn’t seem like a plant man. Gordon thought someone strange might come in and threaten Mayn, but Gordon needed to talk.

Mayn took a look at the three great plants and pointed to another Gordon hadn’t noticed, a smaller one with dark, shiny, tight, strong leaves. "That one I happen to know is a jade tree, a young friend of mine named Barbara-Jean gave me that; said she thought I needed it to stand up to the three monsters. I don’t, to tell you the truth, know what their names are; my daughter and my son—well, really my daughter—had them sent here when I moved back in."

Gordon liked Mayn. It was too late to ask for wine, which hadn’t been offered. He said he wasn’t ready for a refill. Mayn came and sat down. He brought with him a long stretch of time, and Gordon felt less unemployed.

"If you’re away a lot," Gordon began but he didn’t go on, and with a shrug surveyed the room and the lighted foyer. Mayn looked at Gordon. Mayn’s hair was solidly but darkly gray and thick, the eyebrows not at all gray, face and chin very square; the eyes through largeness or the illusion of largeness, or through some lighter tint, were more a real color than Gordon had ever seen brown eyes. And he felt—yes—that the man would have felt downright alien had he paid any closer attention to what Gordon said. Or what Gordon was. For Gordon really wasn’t saying anything. He returned the wise or heavy look of his host. Gordon had ventured into this apartment for a casual drink.

Mayn didn’t know Gordon, and yet Gordon felt his life visited by Mayn like a whole way of looking at things, a friendly abstention, powerfully non-intrusive. It was the sensation of the drink and it was the sentiment of memory and it was another day away from work. Gordon had to like Mayn, and he now saw that his self-sought unemployment would end in a few weeks or months and he would go on living his life and it would change for the better. What had Mayn to do with it?

It came to Gordon—and came to him later as he then realized he’d known it would—that the one man, Gordon, knew he had taken the opposite view from how he usually saw his talk in all its intelligent volume, and so he thought he’d talked and said too much; and the other man, Mayn, who didn’t care what another thought of him, had known he was going to think he’d said too little, and had let this narrative go on from a man he didn’t know; which in turn wasn’t a matter of this fella Gordon subjecting him to something, much less mastering him—not at all, quite the reverse—but a drugged, sluggish (he had no right to be tired) feeling that he let his half-invited guest jumble his story, well lift one whole side of it from time to time so all Gordon said slid down toward one edge: a jumble Mayn let happen as if he were being a man to a man letting him talk—yet really offering an ear that was void. Oh Gordon was only guessing, but he felt sure of all this. Not that Norma really knew the man—she had only met him—but she had conveyed to Gordon some shadow that was now Gordon’s own intuition of this man in front of him.

"You would like another," said Mayn.

"Yes I would," said Gordon, and finished his bourbon.

"Knew it," said Mayn, taking Gordon’s glass, and the words stopped whatever spell had sent Mayn running through Gordon’s past a moment before to set out on Gordon’s future without Gordon having the chance to say goodbye.

Gordon spoke and did not stop for a long time. It might have been stupid. It was five-thirty when he began, and Mayn, this former tenant who had resumed residence in the building, asked a question or two and once got up to refill their drinks.

But Gordon talked straight through for what turned out to be an hour.

Why did he do that? Were they both wondering? Perhaps they both had the time. And when he stopped at last, he might in doing so have been anticipating the unexpected sound of a key in a lock that would have stopped him anyway if he had not already just come to the end.

It was more a school story, and after he was into it he would get uneasy telling it for the first time as if this was the hundredth (as it also was), but dismayed more because he’d thought it out so many times but now didn’t know how to end it. Gordon was taking an unpaid leave of absence from his law firm, but what he told Mayn was that he had taken a deep breath and had quit his job and was taking inventory; but Gordon didn’t need to hear himself tell anyone else, even a stranger, that if it was more than a vacation and less than real unemployment, he and Norma and their two children couldn’t live for too long without his working, and although his firm would take him back or he could always get a job—always, always—he also knew a college classmate who had lost his job as vice-president of an insurance company (or was it president) and seven months later shot himself.

Mayn asked a couple of questions that sounded like he was hearing things (or was it Gordon hearing things?). Gordon’s father? Gordon’s grandmother? Quakers? The height of a wall surrounding the roof of an apartment house in Brooklyn? Brooklyn Heights could seem a long way away from Manhattan on a cold, windy, rainy late afternoon.

This is what you do when you’re unemployed, said Gordon; you keep to yourself or you bend someone’s ear—someone who’s just come home from work. But when you begin you lose the beginning, as if maybe there never was a real beginning. You take up the piano. Not the violin, it’s too hard.

Mayn said he didn’t understand "when you begin you lose the beginning."

This particular business started with Gordon skipping fifth grade, but he had been in fifth grade for more than a month. But he had skipped just the same as if from fourth to sixth. And the event would be fully as important as his far-sighted father could foresee.

Mayn asked for enlightenment here and there, and Gordon saw the tolerant man Norma had seen, and this came into Gordon’s thoughts together with a magnetism that seized him as if all this stuff twenty-five years ago and more were easier and flowed better than the untenable future which was now. But he didn’t stop; he remembered that Mayn had covered arms-control talks and had a father in New Jersey and had recently returned, Norma said, from the Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and knew someone who’d been on the cover of a magazine—all this from Norma, who always remembered.

Not that Gordon didn’t; but here he had found himself unexpectedly in sixth grade and with a stranger. Gordon later didn’t know if he really had had in him at the time this suspicion that the event of his skipping a grade would be covered over and infiltrated by the years on either side of it and it would practically get skipped itself.

But an event when it happened: everything got drawn to it, and bounced back off it.

Understood later.

Mayn said he knew what Gordon meant. This seemed kind, for Gordon had been unclear.

As much too late as it was too late to know if the sixth-grade teacher with the rouge on her cheeks, and the quick movements, and the small, round face and dark eyes, Mrs. Hollander, had a view of life. Or what view may come and grow out of a time of horror into life again. The woman herself when she once or twice spoke of it, could speak of it so succinctly, though slowly, that her gathering distance from it could have been from the beginning a measure of time besides that first blindingly increasing space. It became overwhelmingly simple, a cause of understanding.

The roof of her apartment house had a comparatively low barrier-wall around it and one day her child, her little girl, not so little—which was why it happened—had tumbled over this barrier-wall where she was playing ball, and fallen six floors to the street where some boys were playing, and had been killed, though not instantly. And Mrs. Hollander was there on the roof and had called to the child to stop.

She said her child had been old enough to know better, and what she could not get over was that her girl’s last reaction to life had been—she didn’t know—"terror," she said, as if for a moment she were not the mother.

Gordon had known almost as soon as it happened. But some ten years later, after he had moved to another school, a boy’s school, and graduated and gone to college, this woman Mrs. Hollander said the very thing about death and terror to him that she had said to his parents, who had liked her for her strictness and humor and an awful bravery that was maybe a secret comprehension and control of what had happened to her in this incident of her nine-year-old daughter who could run so fast. Maybe the kid’s reaction feeling herself go over would have been simple shock. But Gordon wouldn’t have said so to Mrs. Hollander.

Gordon sometimes said too much. Mrs. Hollander had told him so. She’d known how to. She’d been good to him and he’d been a favorite of hers.

Mrs. Hollander was the sixth-grade teacher when Gordon skipped into sixth. He had lost a friend or two at the moment when she entered his life— or thought he had lost a friend or two. And somewhere in there he had almost learned to keep quiet.

Because at this time in his life some things unsaid hurt. But hadn’t hurt less when they got said.

One thing especially. Which Gordon had only thought he minded.

Thought? asked Mayn so quietly it might have been thought.

Well, he thought he minded, but later decided he didn’t.

Minded what? said Mayn.

It came out; it had to. You don’t say that kind of thing yourself. Which was why when Dickie said it as they bounced a ball between them walking down Montague Street, with the harbor in view out ahead of them, the thing Dickie said made Gordon feel like shrugging and saying, "I’ll see ya," and turning in at the paper store to see if a new Submariner comic was in—the sleek hero with the slanted eyes and the long, adept face.

He’d heard the words all day, that first day he’d skipped. Heard them in the boys’ washroom, in the playground where he was kidded about skipping and had good comebacks out in the open air. Heard them almost in the insect scratching of steel nibs and in the pauses when they were being dipped in the blue-stained volcanoes on each desk, and now and then a unanimous pause came as if the amplified insects had taken off.

"You thought that then?" Mayn said.

"I think it now," said Gordon. He’d heard the words also when he and his new sixth-grade classmates some of whom he’d already known had passed down the hall to the stairs and the floor below for Art at one-fifteen, passed the fifth-grade doorway and a couple of kids who were his classmates the day before looked up from their desks at this activity in the hall and saw him, they must have, and the change had been like nothing except in the greasy wood smell of the old, dark floors and the corn soup coming up sweet and humid from the cafeteria in the basement of the school, a decision had passed without his taking it—either sixth grade or fifth grade; not both.

But the actual words in the air hadn’t been said until Dickie said them coming home.

Dickie said, "So you must be smarter than me."

A heavy conclusion they had put together through shared thought.

Well, Dickie was a wise guy. What did you answer to a thing like that?

Gordon was a quieter wise guy. The right answer passed into his head, but he said, "There’s lots of ways of being dumb."

Yes, the right answer had passed into Gordon’s head and out.

Dickie swore at Gordon for the "dumb" remark, yet was kind of serious. "So you must be smarter than me."

Gordon said to Dickie, "Come on, that’s not what it means. I happen to read a lot—"

"—a lot of comics," said Dickie.

"—and I always was a good speller, and I work hard. And I read a lot," said Gordon.

Dickie said—and they laughed at this—"I mean, you must be smarter than I thought you were."

Mayn laughed. Gordon liked getting a laugh.

Gordon’s parents, really his father, had put the decision to Gordon the night before—definitely a Wednesday—and so what the hell, it was a decision already made. Yet then taken, he felt, by him behind his own back. His father said the teacher Miss Gore thought fifth grade wasn’t enough of a challenge for him (or was she fed up with his whispering?) and his father agreed, and sixth grade would not be too much for Gordon even with the year already begun; and skipping a grade, he’d be that much ahead.

They were into November already. His father pointed this out. Gordon had been thinking about the fifth-grade Christmas pageant. It had been cast and he had ended up an angel and not Joseph. It was by secret vote of the class but also by choice of the teacher. Parts had been announced by Miss Gore, and two girls had looked at each other and one girl who got what she wanted had put her hands over her face, and Gordon had thought Goddamn it he’d wanted to be Joseph and should have been, he was taller than all but one of the boys in the fifth grade, and he had wanted to be Joseph but was going to be an angel in the pageant instead. Or this was what he was still angry about when his father told him he was going to be skipped into sixth grade starting the next morning if it was O.K. with him. At the Christmas pageant the sixth grade would carry electric candles like the rest of the Lower School except for the fifth grade, who always played the parts and took turns reading out the Bible story at a lectern with one small shaded lamp up at the front of the auditorium, and those who had parts wore costumes and stood in a tableau of the stable and the manger, Mary and Joseph, shepherds, wise men, angels and two little kids from kindergarten to complete the picture. Gordon was out of it now. He didn’t mention this to his father and didn’t mention it to his mother.

So the next day happened, and so did the days after it. He was in sixth grade. Everything else was the same. Sixth grade was like new clothes, a new book. But seemed the same. It was like a privilege. One he deserved but now didn’t need to earn. Though he had to make up fifth-grade work he would now miss.

Mrs. Hollander helped him. He felt like her favorite for a while. His father corrected his answers and, checking Gordon’s scratch paper, showed him a trick for finding the larger denominator necessary for adding and subtracting fractions. It was pretty easy. His father said Gordon was careless, Gordon felt it was hard to argue that one, and yet it wasn’t fair, and there was one time when his father would not say what was wrong but sent him back to his room to figure it out. His father had stayed home in bed for a week in October and read the newspaper and said that we’d missed our chance with Willkie in ‘40, and Dewey was the next President, and when he got sick again in November he took to his bed again (and Gordon’s mother would talk for a long time on the phone to a friend of hers), and at school Mrs. Hollander thumb-tacked news clippings to the sixth-grade bulletin board every morning with pictures of Spitfires taking off against German fighter planes with crosses on them, and barrage balloons over England and maps of Europe, and on Monday she put up the Sunday Times "News of the Week" current-events quiz that Gordon’s father usually got twenty out of twenty on.

"Can I cut a picture out of the paper to put on the bulletin board at school?"

His father was in bed and said Gordon could wait till he was finished with the paper. Which meant the clipping would be a day late. But then his father asked what it was about and when he told his father it was current events and it was a picture of a tank and a map of Europe, his father said, Very well, if he cut it out neatly—and asked if they were studying regular history in the sixth grade.

No, Gordon said, social studies.

His father said Gordon’s school had always had a good reputation.

Gordon didn’t tell his father sixth grade was pretty much the same only more interesting.

Yet the girls, who were nice to him, were not the same. He liked them more. More than Sue in fifth grade, who smelled of banana one day and orange another; more than Margie, with little pigtails, who giggled a lot, giggled up and down the scale every time no matter what.

The sixth-grade girls giggled too. But had more to giggle about, he thought. He looked at them across the room when they went to get help. They helped him catch up on fractions, which were magical, and decimals, which seemed ominous and larger. The girls and he still compared handwriting scripts and when he read a story in class about a plane that crashed and the pilot walked through the steaming jungle for days and met up with a tribe that rode on crocodiles and ate flying fish that flew from vine to vine and had a medicine man that predicted the future when the jungle would be cleared for an airfield, the girls said it was the best anyone had written in the class, the natives would travel around the world to America, China, or Paris, and as for the pilots who flew into the new airfield, before landing they would have to learn the laws of the natives, especially if, as a new friend Bill Bussing pointed out, they were faking their own death to disappear and then collect the insurance.

Gordon’s father said it was good, and asked if he’d written his book report on Kipling’s Kim. The answer was Yes, and Gordon said Kim wasn’t interesting. Gordon really liked Penrod and Penrod and Sam, they were easy to get into, you wanted the book not to end. Gordon said he wouldn’t have minded living in a small town like Penrod’s.

Gordon remembered his drink. Mayn lighted a cigarette, inhaled, and said that he had grown up in a town in New Jersey and couldn’t wait to get out.

Gordon said one spring he and his mother and father went to a hotel in the country for a week where they had horses and a pool table, and Gordon who was always a ravenous eater hadn’t eaten for five days, more or less, while they were there and recalled no more about it except the place was nice and he couldn’t eat when he got to the table and the night they got home to Brooklyn his mother bought him a Virginia-ham-on-rye sandwich at the delicatessen the minute they got home to the city and he ate it as if he hadn’t tasted food in a week.

What was going on? Mayn wanted to know, but Gordon said he didn’t know—maybe something with his parents.

Penrod’s small town was a lot of fun, Gordon was saying, but the school Penrod went to wasn’t a good one, which reminded Gordon that his parents had proposed to him once that he go to boarding school. At boarding school you could smoke, but Gordon could smoke in Dickie’s backyard in Brooklyn Heights behind two old abandoned doors that leaned against two oil drums. Gordon went to Friends School. Mayn had known an ambulance man who was a Quaker, and his own father was thinking of buying into a very ritzy retirement home—actually he’d been retired for twenty-five years, in Mayn’s opinion—run by the Quakers near Wilmington. Gordon said that his school had had a Quaker meeting sometimes on one of the assembly days. A girl in seventh grade got up and recited a poem about humans that turned into deer and Miss Gore surprised Gordon and Dickie by standing up in the side aisle and, with a lot of emphasis, reciting a poem by Walt Whitman, who had used to live right there in Brooklyn Heights as Gordon’s father said when Gordon told him. And in between were the silences when you looked into space and tried not to catch the wrong eye and were supposed to be sitting silently and thinking. You were on your own, but that wasn’t what it felt like. Gordon learned years later that Quaker meeting was non-hierarchical—no leader.

All in all, the girls were different in sixth grade. Sixth grade was more interesting. He asked Mayn what he was doing telling him all this, and Mayn in a friendly way didn’t know. One day when he went home with the sixth-grade brain, Bill Bussing, who had the Erector Set that came with the motor, Gordon realized that Dickie hadn’t been in the downstairs hall when school let out because much later when he came down his street Dickie was playing football with the other guys including Chick. Chick went to public school and was Gordon’s best friend. Chick organized things but never said much. He was tall and rough but a peacemaker, and when they stopped for a car to come by, Chick nodded to the driver. The public school in the Heights was P.S. 8 and it was a joke in those days.

Gordon got onto Chick’s side; Straussie, who was small but murder on defense, went home; the game went from manhole to manhole, and once Dickie slammed Gordon like a hammer in the ribs when it was two-hand touch supposedly, and, a moment later, Gordon threw a bullet right at Dickie, who shied, and the football bounced off Dickie’s back and somebody else grabbed it and Chick, who was tall for his age, called for it before Dickie could do anything. A play or two later Dickie said he had to go, he was going to get killed when he got home.

When it was dark and Dickie had gone in and so had Jim and Chick’s sister Jennifer and Frankie, who could walk on his hands on the sidewalk, and two more cars had parked along this old street of brownstones where houses on one side backed onto the harbor, Gordon threw a pass too high that grazed the globe of the streetlamp—they were lower in those days—but Chick, who was gangly but could stop and go the other way in a second, managed to hold up and catch the ball, sensing where the parked car was.

Chick asked if Gordon would be home after school the next day and Gordon said yes, knowing if he wanted to he could stop over at Bill Bussing’s to look at two model planes that were suspended from the ceiling and actually were no longer of interest to Bill.

Chick started to pass and stopped. ‘‘Dickie said you skipped a grade."

Mayn said, "You mean you hadn’t told him?"

Chick never asked about Gordon’s school.

"Yeah. I’m in sixth now."

Chick aimed his left shoulder toward Gordon and threw a low bullet which Gordon caught at his knees, a perfect spiral.

"Is it hard?"

"Medium."

"Oh yeah?"

"I got to catch up on fractions."

"We’re starting on fractions."

Chick was adopted, and his father, who made a lot of money at the Squibb Company plant right down the hill next to the Brooklyn Bridge, believed in public schools.

"I think it’s just more of the same old stuff," Gordon told Chick.

Chick never had as much homework as Gordon. They did not discuss school. Chick got strapped by his mother once in a while and his mother gave him orange juice for supper instead of milk. (The Squibb Company made tooth powder, said Mayn. That’s right, said Gordon.) Chick was faster and stronger, but Gordon liked to think he could catch a fly ball better and pass a football more accurately, neither of which might be true he also realized. They hung around Chick’s basement, where there was a basketball basket just under the low ceiling. Chick was nice to his sister Jennifer and the three of them often went to the movies on Saturday at the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street where the matron in a white, nurse-like uniform didn’t give them any trouble if they sneaked into the center section and didn’t sit in the children’s section on the right. (Ah yes, said Mayn.) Chick and his sister were allowed to go on Sunday.

Gordon’s mother took him to buy a new pair of corduroy trousers because she said he needed them but really, Gordon thought, because he’d just gone into sixth grade. The Fox movie theater beyond their Heights neighborhood up near the Manhattan Bridge was around the corner from the department store, so they went to the movies and when they got home Gordon’s father who was sick wasn’t home in bed. But he could not have gone to the office because it was Saturday. When he did come home, it was just as the cream of spinach soup his mother made was beginning to smell sweet. His father had been to see Judge Hume, who was also sick, and he arrived home saying with a smile and a pat on the shoulder that they had decided that Gordon ought to study law. Gordon had never seen his father like this, alone and in a sport jacket, a gray-and-blue-checked soft cashmere he had bought when he and Gordon’s mother were in Bermuda.

Ah yes, said Mayn quietly, remembering something—or nothing.

Gordon’s father had had enough of lying in bed and he was going to church tomorrow and the office on Monday which was only one stop on the subway under the river and he had so much to catch up on he couldn’t waste time waiting to feel better. Gordon’s mother didn’t approve. His father kissed her. He asked Gordon how it was going. Gordon had a map to make for Monday. Sixth grade was O.K., he said.

There was a little kid named Arthur who had sat behind Gordon in fifth grade always doing something on his desk, scratching, tapping, and, when Gordon put up his hand, Arthur would start humming some song, and Gordon wanted to just shut him up. It was that sometimes he got terrifically mad at the red-headed kid Arthur—or at Dickie—but then in a moment he wouldn’t be mad. And in between nothing happened, but nothing.

Well, he had an answer to Dickie the first day in sixth grade when they’d walked home but it had gone right out of his head and they’d gone on home and Gordon had gotten busy on his new homework. That night at dinner the answer had come back to him when his father had said, "So you’re a sixth grader."

Gordon could only say, "Well ..." and smirk.

At dinner a week later, his father said, "How’s sixth grade, pal? Shaking down O.K.?"

Like the maiden cruise of a naval ship, Mayn said (of "shaking down").

Gordon was simultaneously on the bridge of a brand-new heavy cruiser model he had just finished painting, and in the wardroom where the officers took their meals, and he could not decide if he had a dress hat on or a khaki battle cap, an overseas cap he thought it was called—and back into his head came the words that had come to him powerfully to say to Dickie the first day as they passed the paper store, but now to his father he really said them: "I’m the same person." They didn’t feel like his own words but they were words that had come to him all right. His father frowned and grinned at the same time.

"Just got to work harder," his father said. His father always took off his suit jacket for dinner unless there were guests. "That’s right," said Gordon’s mother to Gordon the way she would tell him he was tired.

As for the Christmas pageant, he forgot the matter. Or enough to be uninterested by the time the fifth-grade Joseph got sick and was replaced. The boy, Howard McClone—

Mayn laughed and Gordon insisted that that was the boy’s name.

—Howard McClone who was not a particular friend of Gordon’s had been sent home for two weeks having been exposed to measles at school and mumps and chicken pox at Sunday school; Dickie informed Gordon, complaining that he himself hadn’t been quarantined. On the fourteenth day McClone came down with such a case of measles the doctor said it was all three diseases. Gordon’s mother remembered diphtheria. McClone’s triple-header was like a record. McClone was confined to a darkened room. The new guy who had been given the part of Joseph did not especially attract Gordon’s attention. He had arrived right after Gordon had left fifth grade.

Gordon had mastered fractions; they were like writing his name in all different handwritings, like the daydreaming labyrinths he drew layer by layer outward, which seemed to make themselves up until the paper was filled and he swapped with Patti Oxford who could draw horses or Patti Galdston, who always needed a Band-Aid for a sore thumb. Gordon was made happy by anything printed on the page of a book; it was new, it was clear and opening up, it was problems you could begin fresh in order to get to the next assignment.

Mrs. Hollander came to school early and Gordon saw her water all those plants.

Gordon looked at James Mayn. "Do you ever go blank?"

"Story of my life," said Mayn. "Now, when did Mrs. Hollander’s daughter get killed?"

"Maurice Metz," said Gordon abruptly. "Maurice Metz."

"Maurice Metz," said Mayn.

When Gordon and his fellow sixth graders would pass the fifth-grade room, Gordon saw the new boy sitting up straight staring toward the front of the classroom as if, somewhere out of sight, Miss Gore was calling on him.

His name was Maurice Metz. He had arrived from Europe soon after Gordon had been skipped, and he was the most imposing of fifth graders with thick eyebrows and a long, narrow head. His pants were too short; he wore high shoes; his pants were of a dark, flecked cloth that looked part of a grownup suit, though not like the smooth, dark cloth that Gordon’s father had his suits made of, one or two every year probably quite cheaply at a tailor’s in the Wall Street area. Someone must have wondered how Metz got to be Joseph, but he was tall and was being made to feel at home, and even if he’d had to speak lines, which he did not have to, his foreign accent sounded strangely good. Joseph was foreign too, though you’d never know from how Gordon’s father’s cousin Rose who worked at the National City Bank talked about not the holy family really but Jesus, who was always "Him," as if everybody knew who she was talking about, which they did.

Metz was a grind, and when they all filed into assembly twice a week to the grand and final-sounding music Gordon didn’t know then was "Pomp and Circumstance," Maurice Metz would march. He didn’t so much lift his knees as lean into the cadence and shorten his step. But the thing about Metz was that he could really speak German and French, and at recess he would swear in German.

Gordon’s first report card in sixth grade said Gordon had a good accent in French. His father got him to say a few words at the dinner table and criticized Gordon’s r—he didn’t swallow it quite enough—and, inevitably, his u. His mother said he was only in sixth grade after all; Gordon knew what his father was about to say—"It doesn’t make any difference" (which was somehow right, Gordon thought)—but then his father didn’t say it after all and had a little discussion with Gordon’s mother as to whether he should have a cup of coffee, and it stuck in Gordon’s memory later that evening when his mother joined his father in their bedroom and shut the door and Gordon heard the sound of their talking. His father was a good father and had taken him to a Brooklyn Dodger baseball game in September when Gordon got home from camp.

"I lived fifty miles away, and I never saw a real Major League game in New York until I was probably twenty," said Mayn.

Gordon heard himself describing Ebbets Field and the folk on the apartment rooftops beyond the right-centerfield wall, his mother knitting half of one sleeve of a dark red sleeveless sweater for him during a Ladies Day game when her ticket was half-price and the visitors couldn’t touch the soft floaters of Freddie Fitzsimmons who was so round and plump-looking, fat in fact, that Gordon couldn’t see how he could be such a good pitcher and argued it with his mother, who seldom looked down at her knitting and thought Fitzsimmons was good the way some fat people swim well—she was a beautiful swimmer—and anyway it was his arm that counted—but he did not speak to Mayn of how he had felt funny, or was it helpless, that night when his parents’ door opened and shut—my father was a good talker, said Gordon, a good father, he added, and he felt his eyes water and wondered if Mayn noticed; and in the morning, dawdling at the window staring at the harbor, hearing his mother call to him, Gordon went on daydreaming and distinctly remembered thinking (he went on as if it was hard to explain) that he would always remember this moment staring through the window at a tugboat ploughing out of the East River around the Battery—maybe a liner was going out that morning—and he had remembered that moment of daydreaming—funny thing to remember.

"Well, that was the year you skipped," said Mayn. "So you went to college a year early," said Mayn, "or did you mess up somewhere along the line?" Talk slid apart from thought.

Gordon had been so busy. And the newspaper became important to him. The Herald Tribune with its easier print, bigger type, on weekdays; the Times and Trib on Sundays. He brought a sheaf of war clippings to school and he and Mrs. Hollander picked from them. Bill Bussing visited the bulletin board as soon as the latest clippings were up.

Bill never left his house except to go to school, but in his room at the top of his parents’ house he didn’t seem peculiar, he pursued his interests seemingly without interference. He gave things to Gordon, a World War One biplane just like one that Gordon and Chick had seen in a newsreel steeply circling the sky. Bill displayed a plane-spotter chart and an abbreviated version on a handy card above his workbench with silhouettes of bombers and fighters, British, German, and now American, and he knew what engines they had and the range of the bombers. Bill drank chocolate milk by the quart; out came the can of Hershey’s or the jar of Bosco and a bottle of milk, two Seven Dwarfs glasses, and then back to Bill’s room, and Gordon never saw Bill’s mother or father or a maid or anyone else. Bill would let himself and Gordon in the basement door that had the grating and climb to the top of the house.

The roof? Mayn murmured.

You can’t safely go out on the roof of most brownstones like the Bussings’—maybe they used it to sunbathe, who knows?, no the top floor was mainly Bill’s room, with all his equipment, like a photo and chemistry lab and a workshop and the bed was a Murphy bed, it closed up into the wall so Bill had more space to walk, he did a lot of walking.

Inside, said Mayn. That’s right, Gordon said.

When Gordon would leave he would let himself out the first-floor not the basement door, and went down the steps of the high stoop; and one day when Bill had given him an old scout knife, Gordon stopped at the paper store and bought a copy of the Daily Mirror for the war pictures. His father saw the paper spread out on the piano and called it a scandal sheet. Gordon’s mother laughed, she said Gordon didn’t care a rap about scandal—

You remember that? said Mayn.

—and his father said Look at all Gordon had cut out of the paper, there was nothing left of the sports section even. Gordon’s mother said as she was wont, How good can a good boy be?

Gordon kept the sports statistics in his school loose-leaf notebook with the big light-blue cloth-covered binder. The current-events clippings he covered Mrs. Hollander’s bulletin board with until she said he should pick only the most interesting pictures and reports as if he were the editor of a newspaper and wanted to catch people’s attention. Then Gordon began to clip headlines, scissoring them slowly and keeping them flat in his notebook till he got to school and tacked them up above pictures and maps (white land, black sea), so whether his classmates read the articles or the maps or looked at an Associated Press photo, they couldn’t miss the headlines.

His mother, who had lots of plants like Mrs. Hollander, bought him a printing press with rubber letters of dark pink, and he and Chick did EXTRAS with headlines of the football games they played on their street and the roller-skate hockey they all ruined themselves playing over on Grace Court, which was a dead-end street overlooking the harbor. Straussie lived there and further up the block so did Bussing. Gordon rang Bussing’s bell, and suddenly wondered why he was doing it but when Bussing leaned out the top-floor window and Gordon clambered up out of the areaway and rolled off the curb into the street and turned around, he thought what the hell he might as well ask, and asked Bill if he wanted to play. But Bill was busy. He was leaning way out of his top-floor window and Gordon pushed down on his stick and slowly rolled backward. (As if you were in a boat, Mayn said. Exactly, said Gordon.) Bussing tossed something out the window which shook out into a parachute drifting in the direction that Gordon had started to roll. But Gordon had stopped and the chute went over his head past him. And the weight when it hit the street was a small red-and-silver horseshoe magnet and the material of the chute no ordinary handkerchief but a silky sail with eyeholes studded around the rim for the shrouds—a nice piece of work.

It looked real and Gordon bent way over and picked it up, and bunching it, caught Bussing’s eye and drew his arm back to throw it.

"Keep it," said Bill and withdrew his head and closed the window.

At the dinner table that night he shifted the magnet, which was uncomfortable, and his father, who was telling about a man in the office who was going to resign because he’d gotten into officers’ training school after all, asked Gordon what he was doing and Gordon pulled the whole parachute out of his pocket and held it up by the center and laid it beside his butter plate.

The magnet hit the shiny wood of the dinner table, and Gordon’s mother snapped her fingers and said, "Off the table"—why did Gordon remember that?—and in the same breath she looked at Gordon’s father and said, "But ..." and in her pause, Gordon’s father said, "You mean they wouldn’t take me."

His mother said she hadn’t meant that; Gordon’s father said "on the contrary" he thought she had. There was a moment of silence. Gordon told his parents about the new boy who could speak German and French—Maurice Metz.

"Sixth grade?" Gordon’s father said.

He raised his eyebrows when Gordon said, "Fifth."

"They’re from Europe," said Gordon’s mother. "They’re refugees."

Gordon’s father said it was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, and Gordon now recalled that his father told a story of the former college classmate known as Baron who in the late 1920s on his first and distinctly shady flight in South America—had a pilot’s license at twenty-one—nephew of a big shot in Anaconda Copper—had to make an emergency landing. It was right about the time the Guggenheims sold Anaconda, that mine of theirs, so they could increase their investment in nitrates. It was an emergency landing because Baron’s companion on the flight, a former Minister of the Interior in the country they were over, had gone into convulsions. And the former minister had been acting as radioman, and this young American adventurer, Gordon’s father’s classmate Baron who had been quite a good friend at college, thought he didn’t know a word of Spanish. Until he realized he was getting some of what was coming over the radio, getting most of it— which was that.—beginning with, repeatedly, the name—at first notably the middle name Marmaduke—the former Minister of the Interior who had opposed a graduated income tax and inaugurated a new sewer system and made many enemies and was wanted, was thought to be in Baron’s plane. Gordon’s father pointed out that if, as Baron must have recalled, he had not been exposed to the Spanish lessons his aunt and uncle always had at mealtime the preceding summer when Baron was living with them for three weeks while combining pleasure with his dubious labors as a trainee with Anaconda, he would not have understood that he and the former Minister of the Interior who had once been next in line for the presidency were in danger—so he was in the plane, said Mayn—nor understood as well where the transmissions were originating from. As a result, Baron changed course at just the right moment to spot an upland meadow like a small, green cove—or, said Gordon now to Mayn, like one of those small countries with no coastline. The plane landed there and the former minister recovered himself though not his speech under the curious eye of an Indian sheepherder.

Mayn said he thought he had known how to drive a car—actually, a pick-up truck—without having ever learned.

Gordon waited a moment.

It was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, said Gordon’s father. Gordon’s father’s sister was a WAAC attached to the Eighth Air Force in England and she had picked up the language in no time (Gordon’s father’s joke) and would probably never have wanted to come home.

"Your father wasn’t in the War, then?" said Mayn.

"He had angina, he developed it in his thirties; he survived the War, but not by much," said Gordon.

"Some things take a while," said Mayn, mystifyingly.

Gordon said he hadn’t meant to go on like this.

Mayn laughed and thrust his open hand outward to raise his cuff and glanced at his wrist watch; Gordon laughed and added that there was a message to himself here someplace.

If they could get to the end, said Mayn; and by the way, the Crash in ‘29 and what happened afterward hit Chilean copper very hard—was it Chile the Baron had been aiming for?

Gordon said he supposed it must have been, and, he said, this is what you do if you give up your job; you go and talk to strangers.

Well, the need to change your life gets you through many a routine day, said Mayn.

Gordon said that his wife had a new job and she’d already changed. Actually her old volunteer job, but they were now paying her a salary. Amazing, eh?

It does seem to reverse the usual process, said Mayn as if he said it as an afterthought after paying such close attention to so much of what Gordon said, that Gordon felt Mayn wasn’t entirely there. But this was more of Gordon’s unemployed nonsense, probably. Newspaper people remembered everything and nothing. Everyone was eerie in Gordon’s present state of leisure, or about to ask him some question.

Mrs. Hollander and her daughter? said Mayn, rising with his glass. Such tremendous things happen when you’re a kid, and later on there they are, along with skipping a grade, said Gordon.

Well, you remember them, said Mayn.

Of his undeclared race with Maurice Metz there had been nothing to tell—not to his parents at the dinner table, and not to anyone else, probably. But there was. So was this why he remembered not telling? And it was funny, and he’d never told it even to Norma, his own wife.

Gordon crossed Livingston Street in mid-block by Brooklyn Polytechnic and crossed at an angle so that when he noticed the tall guy Metz with his lunch box and his briefcase with the strap around it, over on the side that Gordon was crossing to, he experienced a sensation of convergence, as he put it now, that was pleasing. He’d spoken to Metz at recess; Metz lived in a house several blocks from the river, on Clinton Street, which crossed one end of Livingston and where traffic from Atlantic Avenue made it next to impossible to play in the street, and Gordon’s mother had told his father that the Metzes were refugees. Metz played soccer at recess, and you could only get the ball away from him if you shoved him, and even then the ball would stick magnetized to his foot. Metz was smart and had shown how the German soldiers goose-stepped and had told how an entire division wrenched their necks when they turned their heads toward Hitler’s reviewing stand in a parade and for a month had to advance sideways in order to see what lay in front of them, and Gordon had said he was going to be a pilot and fly into Africa.

Mayn, standing in the kitchen doorway, said, Where did I hear about . . . Brahmins was it? . . . who look at heaven over their shoulder till they get fixed in that position and on account of their neck being twisted, nothing but liquids can get into their stomach.

Metz did not look at Gordon crossing the trolley tracks and converging on him, and Gordon reached that far side and turned onto the sidewalk a few steps ahead of Maurice Metz and Gordon heard Metz’s steps and quickened his, only to hear himself in step with Metz, who wore those high shoes. Gordon wanted to stop and say "Hi," but they turned into Boerum Place and speeded up.

Once inside the school building, they went up the stairs two at a time to the second floor: where they separated, Metz into fifth grade, Gordon into sixth. Gordon liked to be early, and sit in his desk with a library book. Or he would read a Street and Smith sports magazine, and Mrs. Hollander would come in and smile across the room at him and whoever else was early and say good morning quietly as if somebody was asleep.

And Gordon thought of this when he walked to school, whether he took the Clinton-Livingston route or Montague-Court Street-Livingston or sometimes went through the block-long corridor of the Courthouse to Livingston which felt like a shortcut because of the change to marble floors and revolving doors. As the days went on, he felt Maurice closer. They were out of step. At Schermerhorn they took their separate ways across the intersection, and Gordon had Metz in the corner of his eye when they got into the last half-block on the school side of Schermerhorn. In front of the school’s wrought-iron gateway was a seventh-grade girl named Elizabeth who recited poetry in assembly and had an extraordinarily narrow nose with a beautiful, knife-like keel. "Hi, Maurice," she called, and behind Gordon and Metz came a siege of running, panting steps, and as two little kids in corduroy long trousers sprinted between Gordon and Metz, Gordon heard a voice, Bill Bussing’s, call, "Hey, Gord, wait up," and Metz passed Gordon.

Bill Bussing was near-sighted. His glasses didn’t fall off when he ran relay races in the playground, but they didn’t fit the ridge of his nose right and in study period he was observed with glee by a few of his fellow sixth graders regularly contorting his face when his glasses slipped. He squinched up his nose, lifting his upper lip, curling out his lower. He would do it twice in succession, jamming his eyebrows high all in one violent motion as if he had a stuffed-up nose, and this unconscious, agony-like habit was quite fascinating for minutes at a stretch, partly because his powers of concentration were so great.

Gordon’s mother told Gordon he would end up wearing glasses if he read in a bad light. Gordon’s father said that he had developed longer and longer arms to read the Lunch Club menu in his office building and, reaching the limit of his development, he had had to acquire reading glasses or go hungry. Bill Bussing bought a container of chocolate milk in the cafeteria but brought his lunch, which he made himself. The breadless sandwich was what he said he’d invented which was stuck-together layers of liverwurst, salami, and baloney, but he would produce also a breaded pork chop in wax paper with a rubber band around it, a withered slab of fried fish, a typewriter-ribbon container of salted nuts, some stuffed olives, shrimps with toothpicks in them, some slick marinated raw carrot sticks—all of which he ate very fast in order to get out to the playground yard but would always offer to trade. Gordon brought some kind of meat sandwich on Thomas’s protein bread with lettuce and butter on it and a blue Thermos of milk, and his mother gave him money for a bowl of soup, but if it was vegetable, which was salty and peppery but basically tasteless, or if it was not tomato or corn, Gordon spent the money on Hershey bars after school. Bill Bussing always got out to the playground ahead of Gordon.

Maurice Metz was a different person in the playground. He held court against a brick wall and the little red-headed kid Arthur stood with him as if Dickie and others who engaged Metz in conversation to hear him curse in German and translate it and to consult him on whether for instance Hitler had a tank that could go over water were consulting Arthur as well. Arthur nodded as Metz made his predictions; Hitler, for example, Hitler would invent a new and totally secret weapon. Arthur spoke for Metz when he knew the answer, for instance that Metz’s aunt had committed suicide thinking that the Allied invasion of Europe would fail in the end. But Bill Bussing challenged Metz on this and other matters of fact and even went home with Metz after school.

So when Metz came into the sixth-grade room one dark November afternoon when Mrs. Hollander seemed to have given her desk lamp and the two ceiling lights a narrower, more glowing brightness, and Gordon had finished his homework and was reading a library book that he must have wanted to finish before the bell rang, he was aware of Metz and looked around at the clock above the blackboard and looked at Bill Bussing, who squinched up his face and was greeted by an outbreak of snickers.

It came back to Gordon. It was three of them. Dick Phillips, who made incredible maps and had a handshake buzzer attached to his middle finger and hidden in his palm so you got a tickly shock that bored right into your hand. And Phoebe McGinnis, who played the violin, was blonde even to her thick eyelashes and seemed not all there but would kiss and had also given Dickie a bloody nose. And Jim Gurley, who played quarterback on the Lower School football team with a tendency to hog the ball, and lived with his mother who was divorced.

Gordon stared at Dick Phillips. "He can’t help it if his glasses slip; you shouldn’t laugh at him, you shouldn’t do that, he can’t help it if he does that stuff with his face."

"What stuff?" Bill Bussing asked.

"You were laughing yourself," said Dick Phillips.

"Hell I was," said Gordon, looking away into Bill Bussing’s eyes. But Gordon was already hearing Mrs. Hollander call out that if they had something to say they should tell it to the rest of us—and study hall had fifteen minutes to go, and it could go on longer if "you people" couldn’t tell time—and if we couldn’t tell time maybe some of us shouldn’t be in sixth grade.

Mayn said, "This is the lady whose daughter ..."

"Yes," said Gordon; "Mrs. Hollander." Who, hearing Gordon’s last words, said, "Gordon, what did I hear you say?" but so that Gordon knew that he wouldn’t have to repeat it. Furthermore, she was talking to Maurice Metz, who stood at gangly parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, and when she got up he was taller than she; she took Maurice Metz to the bulletin board and together they looked at the clippings tacked there—white land, black sea, cross-hatched no-man’s lands. Metz’s hands were still clasped behind his back. Bussing was still looking at Gordon and now went back to his book but looked up at Gordon once more and did a squinch with nose, mouth, cheeks, and forehead to end all squinches, simultaneously turning the page.

It’s the war movies I remember, Mayn said.

Gordon and Metz might speak in the playground, but they did not speak during their tacit race to school in the morning. Some mornings, that is. If Gordon happened to be with Patti Galdston or Dickie, it was no race; same if Gordon and Metz came in sight of each other beyond a point three-quarters of the way down the block of Livingston Street which Gordon entered from the Courthouse he used as a shortcut from Court Street rain or shine.

And like the rule of walking, they seemed to agree not to communicate, not to acknowledge what was going on. Which made the race more urgent but less official as if, being separate, they could not estimate each other’s position but raced nonetheless, increasing the pace, leaning forward, so Gordon might feel his feet quick and fast as hands, as though his feet were connected to his shoulders.

"Who won?" asked Mayn, interested.

Sometimes—well, Gordon and Maurice Metz wouldn’t have a dead heat, so what happened was that at some point in the home stretch one or the other would withdraw. That is, by doing the last thirty yards at a run—say, to greet a friend coming from the other direction. Or being hailed from behind or looking back to see a friend who had not hailed him—once, in Gordon’s case, Dickie; once, Straussie; and so on. But these endings were still victory or defeat, and there came a day when both boys went right to the gate of the school which was parallel to the sidewalk, and, being on the outer curbside, Gordon had to find an extra couple of steps turning right in order to tie Metz; but knew at that instant that he wanted to hit Metz with a right-arm sweeper, sweep him away with the longest arms ever seen. And, abreast at the gate, the two looked at each other and, once inside the gate and going up the stone steps, Metz said breathlessly to Gordon, "I have played chess with Bussing yesterday. He is pretty good."

"You remember that?" said Mayn.

Yes, Gordon thought he did. He’d played chess only a few times with his father, who spotted him a queen, and yet he at once without thinking offered to beat Metz.

"Spotted you a queen?" said Mayn.

"I’m afraid so," said Gordon.

By now it was December. Gordon and Chick still played touch in the street and blew on their fingers when they were going to pass. Gordon spent a lot of time in Chick’s basement practicing passing the basketball behind their backs. Gordon saw Dickie in the cafeteria and said he would meet him after school. It was one of the days they didn’t take the blue-and-gray bus out to the school athletic field in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday. Dickie said he had pageant rehearsal. Gordon forgot after school and gave Patti Galdston the slip and waited for Dickie.

Then Metz came out with little Margie who was eating something, a juicy pear, some cookies, and was not hunching up her shoulders and giggling; and when Gordon said, "They had pageant practice, didn’t they?" Margie said, "Who said?" and Metz remarked that there was no pageant practice today.

"All this—" said Gordon—"I want to think that the last event here was my father suddenly, or fairly suddenly, dying, you know?, but that’s not true."

Maurice Metz had been invited by Mrs. Hollander to visit the sixth grade and give a talk on his home in Alsace-Lorraine. Dickie appeared with Metz one day at Chick’s house when Chick and Gordon were shooting baskets under the low ceiling of the basement playroom. Chick said, Let’s go outside, and Metz, who seemed to have met Chick already though Gordon didn’t ask, and who laughed at his own inability to throw a football without it wobbling all over the place, kicked it halfway down the block where it bounced with a sonorous, metal-bending blat off the top of a parked car. They played soccer in Europe. Metz had to go home to take care of his baby sister. Dickie said Maurice had told Miss Gore he was ready to bow out of the pageant if the first Joseph recovered. Chick and Gordon shot baskets and played Monopoly upstairs on the living-room rug with Chick’s sister until Gordon’s mother called up to say dinner was on the table and where was Gordon?

Gordon—could he have some more water?—did avoid his friends in order to intersect with Metz en route to school. (Was there any water in there the first time? said Mayn.)

But Gordon spent the night at Dickie’s and walked to school with Dickie the morning Metz was due to speak to the sixth grade on Europe where he had recently come from with his baby sister and his father who according to Gordon’s mother had been a lawyer and was starting all over, and his mother, who made Metz eat lots of apples and oranges which he put into his lunch box which was the heaviest in school.

That night Gordon’s mother called home from Manhattan and called Chick’s and reached Gordon at Dickie’s. She and Gordon’s father had been to the doctor and would be having dinner in Manhattan and might be a little late. Gordon said he’d stay overnight at Dickie’s. This was before the wholesale domestic use of sleeping bags, but Gordon distinctly recalled telling his mother before asking Dickie if it was O.K.—having at once decided he would stay —then putting it to Dickie’s mother.

So Gordon stayed there. So he didn’t hear the news until he got to school the next morning, when he and Dickie parted company in the hall outside the fifth- and sixth-grade rooms.

"What news?" said Mayn.

That Mrs. Hollander wouldn’t be in school that day because her daughter had been killed.

"What was her name?" Mayn asked abruptly.

"Helena."

"Did Metz come in and give his talk?" Mayn asked.

No, and no one at Dickie’s house complained that Gordon at the crack of dawn had scissored out of Dickie’s parents’ morning paper a Jap-prison-camp-atrocity story.

"Was Maurice Metz Jewish?" asked Mayn.

"Oh sure," said Gordon; "but . . ." none of that got talked about; was it even in the newspapers? It wasn’t the type of thing that went up on the bulletin board; and when Metz in January did get to give his talk to the sixth grade, there was probably nothing about Jews.

"We didn’t see how it could have happened, the Hollander kid falling over like that like there was nothing holding her on that roof. I mean, you might get hit by a car . . ."; and Gordon’s father when the subway train came in always looked behind him and stepped back; and you might drown, as Gordon’s grandmother nearly did of indigestion when she was swimming in the middle of a Cape Cod pond at eighty; or be in an air crash or be burned to a cinder in your sleep or breathe escaping gas in your sleep ("escaping," as they automatically always said, but it was going into you); or come down with spinal meningitis and die over the weekend. But tumbling over the barrier-wall of an apartment-house roof?

"Awful," said Mayn. "Almost embarrassing."

"Well I was embarrassed in my dreams," said Gordon.

The end of Mayn’s leather valise was visible through the doorway to his foyer.

"You remember a dream from 1944?" said Mayn.

Gordon guessed it was 1944. Remember? Why, by having it many times.

Mayn said he was as bad about dreams as he was about jokes.

A newspaperman?

‘Fraid so.

Newspapermen had endless stories, Gordon said.

Oh all right he had a million, Mayn said, but it was a nine-to-five job.

Gordon said Mayn was kidding him—newsmen were like private eyes.

Yeah, and like sailors, right?

Gordon had had about Mayn a "good feeling"—Gordon heard Norma say she had a "good feeling" about herself, or about Clara the wife of the Chilean economist who took books to inmates in a New York State prison, or Lucille—she picked it up from her group. But also Gordon had to get out of here. Away from Mayn’s waiting, his patient humor.

"But my brother was the one who dreamed," said Mayn, for a moment talking; "walked in his sleep. Came wandering into my room in the middle of the night just before I almost ran away from home."

"This is . . . ?" asked Gordon.

"—Jersey," said Mayn, "Monmouth County? and soon’s I went to bed, well there he was in my room. What—ten, eleven. He’s telling me this stuff and I thought he was awake standing there sound asleep. I thought he was cracking up. But you know, he was asleep; said he had this feeling I was going away."

"Your brother still visits you in his sleep?"

"I’m not home then," said Mayn.

"O.K., who else visits you?" said Gordon, laughing, but he had pulled himself forward to the edge of his armchair.

Mayn was looking at Gordon with sharp puzzlement, and Gordon through his own impatient uncertainty heard Mayn saying that that was spoken like a lawyer.

Unemployed lawyer, Gordon thought, and thought he hadn’t mentioned what he was, had he?

Mayn said that while he still felt he didn’t have regular dreams sleeping at night, that sort of thing, he was starting to think somewhere in his head he did have a recurrent think-dream if you want to call it that—full of surplus equipment (can you beat that?), but he traded in some of the details for others, he said; it was anybody’s guess what it all meant, but one thing he knew, the memory that kept showing now and then if you could catch it, split-screen, obscure movie tricks, was paying a visit to one’s one-time torturer: there was your title for this dream, a daydream, O.K.?, and Mayn had it sometimes, he was pretty certain he didn’t dr^m-dream but he had those waking daydreams. It ought to be about vengeance, right?, and he knew this during the dream; but he didn’t avenge himself on the torturer: either his tongue had been removed during that previous bout of torture so he couldn’t speak, or his arms were nowhere to be found having also disappeared during torture, which meant he fitted cleanly into the doorway of the now-unemployed torturer’s furnished room. The fellow lay on a cot smoking his last cigarette, and Mayn knew, armless, that the torturer, or former torturer, would try to bum one when this cigarette was finished, for Mayn was about to be shot out of a surplus cannon to where he would be different.

"There’s the circus," said Gordon.

"That’s Barnum and Bailey in New York City," said Mayn, "the space man in the white aviator’s helmet. I got taken to see it; but our own local circus had the one tent set up on ten acres that the town electrician rented to the town on special occasions down behind the water tower between the Catholic cemetery and an applejack distillery; my grandmother took me there to see an Indian bareback rider."

"But have you ever been tortured?" asked Gordon.

Mayn seemed to look off into some corner of the large, sparsely furnished room. "No," he said. "Of course not."

"But you’ve known those who have been?"

"I knew a man who did it for a living."

"Went through it, or administered it?"

"I’ve known both," said Mayn humorously.

"Where?" said Gordon.

"What about the sixth-grade bulletin board?" said Mayn.

"The bulletin board?" asked Gordon.

"You had turned away from the European theater," said Mayn, "and were concentrating on the Pacific, am I right?"

Indeed.

And at that time—in the days of Caesar Augustus, Gordon wanted to say—for he heard that name uttered again and again in memory by a fifth grader with a watery cold, whose face was secretly lighted by the lectern, for the boy whoever he was was reading his allotment of the Bible story that narrated the Christmas pageant the morning of the last school day before vacation. The whole school was present, parents in the back benches and side benches of the old meeting house—Quaker meeting house, pews really, and aisles dark with small electric candles moving beneath faces—lines from one of the Gospels—"There went out a decree," that was it, "from Caesar Augustus."

"I went to a public high school," said Mayn.

"Well, this was Quaker," said Gordon, "and I went there up through eighth grade, although they had a high school too. My father went to a public high school but he did six hours of homework a night."

"I was lucky if I did six a week," said Mayn.

"I worked about a sixteen-hour-a-week night shift," said Gordon.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus," said Mayn.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus."

"Well, you had to keep some time to yourself. You were having those dreams."

"It was a lulu," said Gordon. "I don’t know if it was the next night after Metz was supposed to speak to the sixth grade. Sometime in there."

Mayn put his drink down on the floor, sat back and looked very straight at Gordon.

"I keep feeling I’ve missed something," said Gordon, and then had to laugh and shake his head.

"I can’t think what it would be," said Mayn.

If Gordon could finish this dream he could get out of here; the emptiness of Mayn’s living room had begun to weigh on him. When he’d had the dream didn’t matter.

It had a lot to do with newsprint. Mayn raised his dark eyebrows. Gordon was coming out of the Courthouse and being chased by a familiar janitor in galoshes yelling to him that he could not use the courthouse ground-floor corridor as a shortcut from Court to Livingston; the familiar face was pressing him at the same time that the galoshes should have held this person back, and in the dream Gordon emerged into Livingston Street with the old brick of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute up to his right and Boerum Place crossing Livingston down to his left—

"I don’t know this geography," said Mayn, "but I got chased by a patrol car in high school without a license and drove across a wood bridge and it fell to pieces behind me—"

—but it was dark, the streetlamps were still bright, and Gordon had gotten up much too early.

At the school gate there was Metz waiting. At the last second Metz stepped inside ahead of Gordon and leapt up the steps into a glare coming off the glass doors; it was the sun, and the time was the normal time. In no time, Gordon reached his classroom and Metz had already begun addressing the class in German, harsh and speechifying, and two girls were giggling like children. Gordon was at the bulletin board untacking clippings as they were needed to illustrate Metz’s talk and the board flashed. But in the dream Metz didn’t know that with each new piece of newsprint untacked the accompanying explosion on the bulletin board was in the Pacific Ocean, not western Europe.

He was telling his daily life that he’d had in Alsace; they used wooden plates there—

"Was that what he actually did talk about?" Mayn asked.

"Yes," said Gordon, but in the dream his French and German were so easy to understand (like a story you don’t listen to the actual words of) that Gordon recognized his own mother’s slick-haired Italian cobbler in his basement shop on the south side of Montague Street and red decorated Flexible Flyers almost out of control on the ice and snow racing down the harbor end of Montague Street that led to Furman Street and the docks, down Montague’s cobblestone hill covered and quieted with the wintry white gravity of the air itself—or elsewhere, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta accompanied by an alternately loud and nearly inaudible piano coming out of a brick house on Garden Place with a brass knocker helping the piano keep time to "What a very very nice young man"—

"Dreams," said Mayn.

—and red clay tennis courts at Henry Street between Remsen and Jor-alemon and Gordon’s dad out of breath going for a drop shot and Gordon’s parents standing elbow to elbow sharing a hymnal by the light of Presbyterian stained glass while for some reason the shallow, carved-wood offering plate was reaching into their pew to get their attention, and Metz’s French and German were so easy to understand and Metz told how many planes while Gordon was trying to tell them none of this was true.

"All I want to know," said Mayn, "is who took your place as the fifth-grade angel?"

Gordon had been only one of the fifth-grade angels. It was lost in history. But the kid who had been Joseph and got sick, got well and came back and ended up an angel, whether substituting or not Gordon didn’t recall.

"You’ve taken a leave of absence," said Mayn, "you said you were unemployed?"

"I thought I was not living as I ought to," said Gordon.

"Oh is that all," said Mayn.

Gordon hadn’t said leave of absence. So how did Mayn know? "What have I missed?" Gordon said, standing up and looking around the room, looking for mementoes of Mayn’s adventures. "It’s a rambling memory."

"The Metzes didn’t get out of Europe till ‘44?" asked Mayn.

Gordon actually didn’t know. Perhaps if the Metzes had made a dramatic escape the kids at school would have heard the story.

"Had they been in hiding?"

Gordon didn’t know. He and Metz were friends for a few months. The Metzes moved to Manhattan the next year, he thought. Yes, Metz took violin lessons in Greenwich Village, someone had said.

Gordon said he had to go. "One other thing," he said. "The Christmas pageant, right?"

"Right," said Mayn, "but did Metz take lessons when you knew him?"

"Not in Greenwich Village. That was after he moved away. He visited school the next year and stood in the corridor, he had his violin case with him. He was quite a tough fellow."

"But the pageant," said Mayn.

"Metz’s parents came. So did my mother. She knew Mrs. Metz from Civitas it comes back to me—a women’s club that had speakers. It was Metz’s father who created the scene."

"What happened?" said Mayn.

Gordon and Mayn both laughed. "Maurice hadn’t told his parents he was playing Joseph. His father was offended. I’m sure they weren’t especially observant Jews; maybe that was the reason. Anyway, carrying a candle was one thing; playing Joseph was something else. Miss Gore kept saying, ‘He was really very good,’ meaning how Maurice had looked in the tableau. I remember him after the pageant standing there with everybody and his father talking to him and then to the principal who was a tall, handsome man with a black mustache. Maurice was standing there at attention. His father was upset. Mrs. Hollander was there, too, and I remember she and my mother talked like friends, like two women; and when Mrs. Hollander came up, taking it all in, I remember my mother turned away from the Metzes and the principal and Miss Gore to pay her respects to Mrs. Hollander; and Mrs. Hollander had a smile on her round face with all the rouge; she had a sense of humor, you know; she was little; and instead of answering what I imagine my mother must have said, Mrs. Hollander said into the group, ‘I think you’re expecting quite a lot of your son.’ And something in how she said it shut Mr. Metz up and next thing the principal was introducing Mrs. Hollander to Mr. and Mrs. Metz, and my mother and I were so conscious of what had happened to Mrs. Hollander ..."

Gordon had finished. He had been standing, addressing Mayn who looked up at him from the couch but now swung his head around to look toward the front hall where the tentative sound of a key in a lock could be heard.

The door creaked, and Gordon heard the voice of his own wife Norma say, "Oh you’re home."

"So is someone else," said Mayn, hauling himself up, as Norma in the hall was heard to say, "Oh?"

"I got home earlier than I expected," said Mayn. Gordon wondered if Norma was to have been a welcoming committee.

She was in the doorway now, looking at Gordon, and she was wearing a pale brown cashmere sweater with a monogram, and she had that plain-boned prettiness and that strength of demeanor that Gordon knew he took for granted, and she was hanging on to the red rubber bulb of the plant sprayer.

Gordon remembered the trailing ivy-like plant he’d noticed. "Got yourself a job?" he said.

"What are you doing here?" said Norma, taking a few steps into the room and stopping.

"We’ve been talking," said Mayn.

"What about?" said Norma.

"Oh, what’s become of us," said Mayn.

"I’ll bet," said Norma, but with an irony of relief risen in her voice, yet Gordon still did not look from her to Mayn.

"Yeah, just reminiscing," said Mayn. "It’s that time of day . . ."

"—when," Gordon added, "the Chacma baboons of southern Rhodesia get melancholy supposedly."

‘They have each other," said Norma.

Mayn said, "He was going to tell me about the day they exploded the cloud cover that makes Venus into a greenhouse."

"Extemporaneously," said Gordon, sitting down again, and understanding now what Mayn had said to the new doorman, the remark that had mas temprano in it—he’d said he had come home a day early. "No," Gordon said, "I don’t think I can manage any more history right now."

"I’ve been watering Jim’s plants while he’s away," said Norma.

Gordon wanted to make a bad joke, but couldn’t think of one.

She went out of the room. Gordon heard water running. Mayn did not say, "Hey wait a minute, didn’t you know?"

"So that was the year I skipped a grade," said Gordon.

"That year you skipped was pretty packed," said Mayn kindly.

"That was only three months of it," said Gordon.

The water stopped. For a few moments there wasn’t a sound from the kitchen.

"Thanks for the drink," said Gordon.

BETWEEN HISTORIES: BREATHERS THICK AND FAST

Who was it heard her words? They come down to us to lodge in many small-scale filaments and are heard in turn from such fars and forgots, easts and wests, as are not yet vacant enough for the absent mind. So that the many have got too serious for the interrogator and he is going to press (el) button releasing his ‘lectrically- (from concentrate) squeezed juice and give a body a hit of it in self-defense. (Our body, his self.)

Her words slant down to us along an angle of the desert twilight from her century which soon could turn a century ago. Owl Woman’s words we mean come down to us we already remember from our friend the multiple child who is getting along and was in the next room doing homework when last we looked or better still research—

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling.

Songs sung who by? the correspondent Lincoln, sage in saffron, asks (as we hear the research child call, Not your friend; your daughter/son he-or-she).

Sung who by? Oh, by grownups—or similar folk left behind to act in place of grownups—who heard the prevailing easterlies and told their kids, "Hear the song in the wind." Grownups to hear themselves sing the praises of these songs of the wind so the children, who heard within the music honest noise, while hearing also the real song between the volts of their resident adults’ deafened lipservice to those songs (if you call that music real noise), privately willed that whereas grownups were to be heard, they might be not seen. Which lipservice, like global debt, turns ever toward big-talk/small-talk, that stuff of history, which got our parents through the long nighty-night of marriage ever after, like the weather that that talk precipitates and reports and clouds with light.

Where? When? (Who? What?)—and why did you say things more than once? asked the high-school journalism teacher (No: why did anyone?) she long borne in the future memory of the boy and man Jim Mayn, him whom in 1976-7 our saffron-(dis)robed gal correspondent Lincoln (cross-legged in Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop) daydreams out of thin air though she hasn’t met Jim—daydreams on her back burner while breathing-in an evening of women histories, one by one going round the joyful, awful circle healed with humor of tears of women on Grace’s carpet all bare and unedited: except for the foreign entrant, Clara, Chilean but with quick English accent, less naked than the others, it is her secret along her fine, tender arms and not quite flat stomach, and softly changing breasts, higher, lower, as if sometimes having just breathed along with her and sometimes not, and that like a motion of sway hint inclination faintly outward, flowers of one being—who has such a fund of international lore, and such contained eyes, such remote ordeals in her centered awareness—well, in her manners—that when she tells about life it enriches you in all its variety as the next-to-last word in narrative small talk that describes her life, even relations with husband (Men ought always use condoms, always, she says she sometimes thinks) so you think you know more of her than you know about anyone else on Grace’s carpet, but then you don’t: and yet you haven’t been tricked; for Clara—subtly husbanded, faintly shadowed Clara—makes you feel (Shit, said Grace at least more than once, nobody can make you feel unless you want to) that she’s here in Grace’s Body-Self Workshop not only for some other reason but, possibly to her surprise, the right ones too. Yet maybe the doubt is due to our gal Lincoln’s bein’ in love with a man she imagines she’s never seen except in a letter he wrote her young acquaintance slender, intense daughter Flick, where his "When’s the funding for your Washington job run out?" and "Where’s your brother Andrew spending the summer because he don’t never write his dad" decay quickly into the landscape water table of the continental Southwest as if it, and not the person himself, were the issue—not what cut to the quick his high-school journalism teacher thirty years ago.

Statuesque Miss Myles—Pearl W. Myles—was angry at his absence, and, though strong, she saw unfriendly hierarchy out-towering her and mysterious upheaval threatening underfoot; and she imagined three camps of students, those who were with her all the way in her historic fight to set up a school newspaper independent of the principal, a columnar young figure named Thompson Fulkerand; those who hardly cared; and those who in the great race took the baton from their parents if it was not the other way around and felt there’s neither a need for such a news organ on administratively so small a scale nor much of an excuse for making so much noise, and said so again and again of the woman who herself preached, "Why did you say things more than once? No: why did anyone?"

But if Miss Myles grant he had had a tragedy—Jim—she noticed he had expressed enthusiastic interest in the atom bomb, unique explosives leading up to V-J Day, and seemed unaffected by his mother’s mysterious drowning (read one-way swim, one fellow student called it); more interest in the Indian Ira Lee’s practically white sister (as Miss Myles had gathered from her prospective news editor of the putative school paper), who came around when Ira with the utmost slowness genuflecting, rising, gardened for Jim’s grandmother, than Jim showed in the midst of the rotten, blankly bright, future-catapulting thing his mother had done to as if not even really herself (and yet—and yet) and to him and little Brad his brother and to that poor man his father whose acquaintance Pearl had somehow not made and who could be seen walking home late at night, yet did she not detect —for she was Jim’s teacher, who encouraged what she termed "debate and discussion" but did not appreciate differences if they were petty as when she informed the class that you never underlined for emphasis except when in quoting a source to catch a voice emphasis, whereupon Jim put up his horny young hand to report that his great-grandfather—whom he did not need to identify for Miss Myles as once upon a time editor of the family paper—had issued instructions to his staff of three never under any circumstances to emphasize by underlining— so that Miss Myles sensed in Jim a truculence, maybe just sad tension, and in Jimmy’s unusual cool brown eyes a space falling—falling forward, she felt, but not halfway to meet her his teacher, damn it, and so, on the aforementioned unfateful day when the assigned imaginary news story came due and the tall stone of an unprecedentedly young principal had undercut her again, Miss Myles took it that Jim Mayn was bending his power as fifteen-or-going-on-fifteen-year young scion of the once only newspaper in town for a hundred years (narrow-column weekly) until another had commenced printing at the outset of FDR’s third ("There is no indispensable man") term to undercut her—her, Pearl W. Myles—when in reality Jim’s been glad to hear the answer to those ancient lead questions of the journalist’s song Where and When: but on one of those days, however beautiful and still more beautiful a woman of thirty she was, he had been detained (as we later learned to say at the prompting of our multiple state) by the Indian halfback Ira Lee, who was telling some of the guys about this map that was like the back of some strange thing under glass, this green relief of South America donated to the high school for future study immemorial, a reptile map crawling under one’s eyes as under glass, museum glass. But ignorant of this, she guessed when she stood up and felt across her broad brow and along the backs of her untired thighs that on a day when an imaginary news story following her models was due and that six-foot-six-inch principal Fulkerand, at twenty-nine the youngest male ever to have an eye in the back of his head and hold such a post in New Jersey who happened by a miracle to be exactly half bald from mid-head forward to the brink and down his high if narrow brow, had announced semi-privately that Miss Myles’s initiative was more nourishing than its fulfillment—on this sensitive day of all days, Jim Mayn had chosen to miss class.

Where? when? who? Turn it one iota, that small talk of passing amity or enmity that Jim’s future colleague-friend said history turned on—turn it one iota, said Ted, hunched at the bar centered above where his drink had been last week before he temporarily gave it up, and you’re looking head-on over someone’s shoulder at some further sight. The grandmother Margaret with her narrow, strong, squared shoulders, tartly directed her fifteen-year-old Jimmy to get out of his True Comics and stir his stumps and wash the mixing bowl (the pale-brown mixing bowl), and while you’re at it the pan and the lunch plates, and anything else he might find in the deep white sink. Small talk less narrative than her stories secretly meant years before to make up for his mother’s not telling him any and even not being there in spirit— when now she is evidently gone for good (read suicide; read, if you can find any, poetry, as Margaret told Jim his mother read as a girl—it’s better than reading nothing, we already remember hoping and half recall books that showed us something we’d been unconscious of); and Margaret’s tales could make him feel that while she might have foreknown mystery afflictions of her daughter, Jim’s mom, who definitely never had had the big hole in her head (like the Navajo Prince’s mother) but had been married as distantly as that demon-infected matron of Margaret’s stories and who Jim realized years later he’d felt must have married his father for some pretty good reason even if not out of deep wish or realistic considerations but—but if, later, other matter in his grandma’s stories seemed fact, some parallels with his own mother might make the Navajo Prince’s mother worth reflecting on—yet the tales existed in this kitchen in New Jersey. Into which now came grandfather Alexander —"Not going to rain after all"—bald as a tall old Danish farmer in a Life magazine, and ever arriving from a distance always, such as the next room, which came a little with him no matter how near he approached (that is, the doughnuts—and crullers in this instance—and his wife), and friendly upon the new soles and heels of his cordovans reflecting fine messages of dust, of history itself precipitated between himself and his shop downtown of shelves and tables (that seldom caught anyone in the act of purchase, yet was a business, year upon year), shoes buffed every day, polished every week, nicked and scraped and rained on, so as then to be rubbed to the patina repeated through these periods of time as the single kiss he now gave Margaret was then given on the far cheek she with brief absent-mindedness turned to him. So that—as Alexander added, "We might get an earthquake instead" (a joke, it seemed)—Margaret turned her gray-blue eyes on Jim while hearing his less-loved, though little, brother Brad call from the front porch and shove open the front door that stuck in the upper corner, for she wondered (though wouldn’t say so to Jim, though did before her death, in a letter) if he guessed Brad’s half-brotherhood as little as Brad did, the love-child of Jim’s mother Sarah and sort of fatally the wall-eyed electrician Bob Yard, who had two good cars but went around in a rusted-out pickup truck with one claw missing on the tailgate, who for once in his rampant, epically give-and-take, and childless married life, wept before Margaret’s very eyes, tears all down his five-hour stubble, and told her that just between the two of them he could after all believe in Sarah’s drowning, but God was this because he had loved her too much to run off with her? (through wind and rain, ‘cross land and sea)— poppycock, said Margaret, a word Jim used years later once so his children laughed and laughed. Poppycock, though, in Margaret’s mind, that her own retiring, original daughter Sarah could ever have run away with Bob, who loved his wife over a much longer haul; but then less nice than poppycock that Bob stood there and told Margaret like a gentleman friend that her eyes got bluer, did she know that?

But she retorted, The eyes went bluer, the hair whiter, Bob—as if to dismiss him when she knew that he really had loved that Sarah of hers (who had never been hers though she had known that Sarah would have to do some original thing), absent now invisibly absent now under the wedge of (when you stared at it) sparkling gray granite in the graveyard where Margaret would stand with Jim and recall that Sarah had asked if Owl Woman had been married and came to Margaret once (a unique meeting as far as intimacy went) with Owl Woman’s words from a book Margaret had never heard of (just as Sarah had never, as a girl, been told most of the tales of Margaret’s West—though told something in return for something she one day told Margaret):

In the dark I enter.

I cannot make out what I say—

Not the most trenchant verse Sarah would quote, Margaret told Jim— Jimmy—too smart a boy to let catastrophe show, though who could say what daydreams washed his mother inshore until, when he was all set to see her, the coast was of a different place or held an unmapped gap, unmanned so any foreign matter at all might drift in, and he turned to check where he was and never did see the body: "let catastrophe show"? for what was catastrophe, after all, but (let alone catastrophe theory that journeyman journalist Mayn heard tell of from those who cared more than he to know the going theories and so forth) a dramatic chance to be elsewhere, launched into that supposedly strong detour by the awful pain one nonetheless got credit for bearing the weight of, when maybe one just was somewhere else instead and not in two places at once?

Catastrophe here so unnatural and remote you almost didn’t have to run away from it, whether you can measure a mother, and her grandson’s run was an absorbed sprint down the sidewalk of upper West Main Street from her house to his and further, sometimes clear to the Fire House by the railroad tracks with a football pumping in his arm zig-zagging away across the grass-lawn of the private home of the owner of the American Hotel downtown, zigzagging right behind the gardener-mower one-hundred-year-old Mr. Lester Brown, who ate one bomb of a Bermuda onion and that was his lunch under a tree, and who knew that this dangerous athlete in a time when the Olympics had been suspended was detouring to criss-cross behind him and his hand mower and grass bag—then to zig-zag off the sidewalk into the street between the cars, so that once Mr. Brown saw him do it and feared that if hit he wouldn’t (momentarily) skid and roll like Lilac the pale hairless bull bitch that when the car braked to a stop (partly because of dog) ambled away, first up the street’s very white line (like she was a conquistador in shock), then off onto the sidewalk, and never looked back until she began to run; but Jim never got hit though he caused more than one car to brake, and gave his grandmother pause and gave her inspiration to tell her stories right down to the truth though never at the cemetery, where he and she would go, and she would guess that Jim was too willful to let the catastrophe of his mother’s death draw him into a center where, like little Brad, he would fall apart with a passion that Brad at nine or ten never had betrayed before (had he?) and never would again, in her opinion.

Meanwhile our Wide Load bore eastward—a home, or house on a trailer, winding through the Colorado night, bending the Kansas dawn to make telegraph wires yowl and every seven or eight miles make the monumental grain elevator from its oasis of trees, brief white-frame dwellings ("homes," as is said in America but literally true here), church, and mega-barn complex flow upward the Chilean economist assured his waking but still dreaming wife Clara as if its gusher-shaft guiding the feed of electrons from the unseen sphere of Earth toward the positive ionosphere a short forty miles away were the gusher itself, silent as space-minus-solar sirocco, while our Wide Load (a transport tradition with us here on this map-worn continent) sweeps on toward its various coast. The Wide Load with us stretched on top of it passes through several weathers, a muffled catalyst to be unchanged by them (oh the weather of the heart! exclaims one adult to another ‘gainst a tree, unaware of today’s kid upstairs in the same tree destined soon to feature an open-plan house who closing a good book contemplates loosing a compact goober Bombs ahoy! or stares up through live branches at the actual air of the sky).

Yet so what if these words of Owl Woman come down to us, so what if the multiple child in the next room is researching the eco-system of its neighbors, did it wreak aught that we heard distinctly

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling

and does it wreak aught that the Chilean woman zoologist with lips turned white by months of following the chalk-mouthed javelina ran into botanist Marcus Jones in southwest country in roughly ‘83 and was more interested in just how Owl Woman’s words got conveyed than in what they were. She had a right to wonder, for how else would she explain being distracted from her trail by a curious man-botanist (historical, Jim one day years later found out) who told her he was bicycling the territory in search of all the kinds of locoweed, and she believed him, as he her, when she wondered aloud in his presence there in the solitary but quietly thoughtful desert how Owl Woman’s words which were obviously Owl Woman’s—"I am afraid it will be daylight before I reach the place to see"—came to her, a passing South American zoologist, only after Owl Woman had seemed to disappear: and all this Chilean traveler could see (though not hear) in the twilight was the biggest elf owl not in captivity staring snug from the porthole of a random cactus suddenly handy. The elf is the tiniest owl, just as small as the pigmy owl, and this one was keeping an eye out—like the eye of the cactus itself—though this elf owl saw distant hawk moths, beetles, and insect larvae plus also the occasional mini-vertebrate. All of which convinced Mena the woman-zoologist that the elf owl must have incorporated Owl Woman or been done-that-to by her. Remember the fine depth of her poems and the elusiveness of her person small as a fine horn spoon and as at one with others as the singing corn grinder who passes her fine meal to her neighbor until it is like pollen; a person even comparatively small for those who might want to go up to someone in order to say and mean something instead of grasping that meaning something is not the same as going up to someone, it’s only like it:

an insight in all of us simulcast also in the form of its denial: as Jim about half-knows in his unwillingness to tell the information peddler Spence (as sleazy-acting as if he knew he was your relation) a thing or two, for example that this gramma went on hearing these words of Owl Woman across the half-light, yet in the precipitating dark there’s less and less sign of the Papago seer herself: yet now witness other verses later known to be hers coming across the air to the Chilean zoologist as on some line of communication from the eye of the columnar cactus to the seeming forehead of the woman telling this to Marcus Jones later at rest upon his bike taking a breather. So, as she said, she began to think about the water-bearing interior structure of cacti, so close (for comfort) to animal life (though nowhere near the animal she had been tracking). Surprised at what the margins of the inner desert had brought forth in her, when she’d been shadowing javelinas (read peccaries) up from eastern Argentina, she found the meaning of the name Owl Woman not only in all the lines of that known Indian woman-poet’s making, but between those lines (as sinewy-calved, lonely Marcus Jones in all his botany remembered till his dying day, although those who were with him at the end could say for certain only that he recalled at that final moment how the Chilean zoologist the woman Mena had found her own left life, her own original musical household plus the why of her setting out in search of wild pigs yet of search itself "research"), in all the other words which were also apt but especially in

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling,

which meant, if only to her, that back home the art of war refined and strengthened its texture around her angry, fantastic mother, whose native Chilean operas on serious Anglo-European themes had met with repeated rebuffs from the musical establishment—from even her own London-based (secretly anti-Argentine) dear father governing from a book-ridden house in Chelsea one of the major Chilean liberation lodges, on down to her cheerful, scar-faced husband (the javelina-zoologue’s father) who made (while ever seeking the secret of Stradivarian permanence) violins, and made agreements and claimed friendship with that gifted Bavarian emigre Aquinas Reid, composer of the first opera written in Chile, dead just fourteen years ago in 1869; and to Guillermo Frick, still active—"ser o no ser!" he was fond of saying—at seventy, one more German who had relocated in Chile with much Spanish on his tongue, who found Mena’s mother’s restless masterpiece unfortunately political when it was nothing of the kind—though hardly ahistorical as its leading tenor-pessimist falsely imagined he was—and no more secret(l) (much less Masonic) in architecture than any notoriously unperformed opera loosely drawn from Hamlet if not directly via Shakespeare but from a half-abandoned anti-miso-gynistic Italian score surfacing in manuscript in Civil War America.

Marcus Jones liked the naturalist Mena on sight, perceiving her gradually across the plateau floor as if she were daring the blinding colors of the darkness to reach Marcus before she did, and he thought her unflinchingly an Indian god at a distance, fixing Marcus in some attitude of intense feeling, awe, friendly awe; hence, he confessed having moved hardly a muscle when, upon seeing her in her many-colored cotton summer poncho down even to her hair pants from a distance despite the half-light lowering from the sky and wanting to go to her, he had waited where he was, his hand on his bike, until she should reach him; for do we go to the gods or do they come to us? and are there angels much less angel invaders in us?—and to the six-hundred-year-old Anasazi healer (who predicted not only telephones but the social power principle in the telephone expressed in the words unspoken and on certain occasions spoken, "Who called who?") she at another time recounted that Marcus had come toward her. And he would not get over those lunar lips, for he had never seen a javelina, muzzle to muzzle (which was to become, with its hind-mounted scent glands, sacred to the memory of Mena for years afterward in his mind). Marcus didn’t want to explain Mena’s white lips, only feel the divine wind. Marcus’s Spanish complemented Mena’s English, and before she had reached him where he waited on the plateau, they were conversing, and never saying things more than once. She said she had been coming from the south; but she had in fact already visited the multi-laddered eyrie of an Anasazi medicine man who, by Marcus Jones’s sense of direction, should have been slightly north of this present point of his locoweed-naming spree. Well, her interior map proved as resilient and infectiously blessed as his own navigand was firm and customary; and before she would leave him dumbfoun-dered (his own nautical word) with enough delight to do what he did not actually do—pursue for years more locoweed as yet unnamed—she had told Marcus Owl Woman’s words and the reaction they produced in the ancient Anasazi when she passed them on to that leaf-crisp memory of a man who had reached a phase so exactly fragile that one touch upon his presence and he would detonate into a cloud.

But while she spoke to Marcus of that old luminary-healer to the north who Marcus believed might be south since she could not yet have met him (if she was coming from the lower Arizone where Owl Woman flourished in and out of form), Marcus could believe in her both as a god and as a teller-bearer of likely truth, in particular the effect of the double moon on him. For this had yielded in him through its two shadows doubt as to what Marcus was later told by the Hermit-Inventor of the East in return for informations he gave to the Hermit. Who, to continue, surprised Marcus with the news that the double moon doubly shadowing the Anasazi medicine man, as Mena the javelina zoologist reached the top of her last apparently original Apache scaling ladder en route to the old healer’s eyrie, had come to her and become hers to convey (she said) on the evening when Marcus Jones, one of the most vivid men she had met, had pedaled up to her upon the desert floor and upon dismounting from his great bike cast (perhaps with its wheels) the double moon’s shadow and its light on her, which was then hers to convey until her next human.

Whatever the sequence, Marcus could believe the Anasazi’s reported quandary as if he were himself the pistol that had been suddenly struck by the double moon’s effects—the double moon, we already recall for it was ours to explain—to wit, a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties (as the multiple cum melancholy child-in-residence in next room will corroborate). So that before Mena the zoologist had reared her head and shoulders upon him-and-his, he was telling her, whoe’er she was, that the pistol in question had gathered into itself its alternative sources. It might have come to him some years after "the Mexican business" from a mestizo information peddler with a rare thirteen fingers and one in every wind so that he no longer sported quite the fingers he’d been born with. And this man the night before the battle of Chapultepec had promised a nearly albino Englishman {el Nord) that he would recover his speech if he would risk his interesting Colt revolver in a blind game (both players hooded) known among condemned mestizo prisoners as Magnet but played here with a loaded deck. The information peddler in question had wound up with the young Nord’s pistol, the Nord with his voice back; and the winner (who learned he was taking a chance on condition his voiceless but not uninformed companion took a chance himself) wound up with the information that he must never "unload" the pistol (i.e., divest himself of it) on anyone except a dark-skinned healer at least two centuries old. However, the other possible source for the pistol double-shadowed by the zoologist-assisted presence of the double moon, slanted with a virtual momentum and doubly east and west down the minds whose idea it touched, was, as the Navajo Prince learned when the pistol became his in the early nineties, that a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer, one of that clown elite who used to act out (like static messengers agitating in a storefront window) their lousiest nightmares and their most threatening daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out, had been given the pistol as a deathbed donation to this Thunder Dreamer’s dream art but, too, as an Anglo charm to stall that tragic Indian religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Which in turn seemed to us (as one of our prisoners-of-the-month was heard to tap— upon, in fact, the INside of an endless rusty pipe) information we might tell the interrogator that would be true but would not hurt any of our living-or-dead fellow prisoners about whom the interrogator wished damaging revela- tions. At all events, the aforementioned settler, dying among the wind grasses of a southern Dakota plain, at length offered the pistol to the Thunder Dreamer dancing all the while, as if he felt that if it was not better to give than to get, it was better to quit than be fired, and he was about to die. Mysteriously, however: or so the Indians said who stripped him of his curiously made oaten trousers and leaf-quilt planting jacket: for like his angry warning that the Indians did not know how God meant the land to be used coupled with his soft-cheeked sadness, as he lay looking upward out of the wind grasses as down from a firmament of gray-green rain, that a race he seemed to think himself kin with (and, as his undertakers felt, doubtless in some root way the white race) had had to wage war in order to find victims to sacrifice yet must likewise sacrifice in order to wage war—he seemed as crusty across his strangely divided genitals as an old hand, yet he had the beardless cheek and clear thigh of the youngest, tenderest brave of all and could not say what he had farmed and had no land he could speak of and, passing the pistol to the dream-news-dancing Thunder Dreamer, reputedly spoke of his conception the night before the Battle of Chapultepec as if it explained something, though hardly his willed and causeless death:

oh he wanted to die and passed on to the dancing Thunder Dreamer perhaps a prayer coded in that Hartford-hewn shape of a Colt pistol, but the dying words of the strange old-young settler who gave the pistol (the same pistol? a double of the other?) to the Thunder Dreamer who gave it one day to the Anasazi healer in his cliff far away were more interesting than prophetic, for he was said to have murmured at the end (though already as dead as the grasses sang and breathed) that his father had taken his mother for a boy and never forgot the moment he came upon her in Chapultepec dressed like a young correspondent on a bench in the zocalo surrounded by flowers and the old-fashioned disaster of "the Mexican business" like our backfirings of a later age, and by the less-clear hubbub of an unjust war writing out of a bottle of brown ink memoirs of President Jackson in New York and Washington; and knew that they spoke the same language, though not that this boy-creature was a woman, much less that at the age of whatever she was at the time of the Battle of Chapultepec she had miraculously never menstruated—and was never to.

And so, later, when the six-hundred-year-old medicine man, his personal insight beams divided by the truly double moon conveyed along the rising presence of the Chilean zoologist Mena on her antique Apache scaling ladder, heard her recite Owl Woman’s remedy for an unpregnant woman who had stopped menstruating, he recalled the Thunder Dreamer with the large eye sockets and small, receding eyes leaving the pistol with him to remove from it a curse that made it hold heat as if constantly being fired when in reality it was the tongue of the sun that cut through clouds and clothes to the very breechclout and through time itself, to "fire" that Colt near to melting point. But it did so by a wind of the sun known only to one person beyond the Anasazi healer living in his receding cliff which was the high stage for his audiences while he himself was audience for stages of a longer, greater event. On this he and his counter-seer the Hermit-Inventor of the East didn’t quite agree—that is, beyond knowing that the direction the wind came-from and went-toward proved at some hours of the day to hold the very same force, as if the breathtaking leverage in the swing of the bird’s wings powering the East Far Eastern Princess away from her father the King’s long white-lit mountain ten years later were not only bone-and-ball-joint dynamics but even the very urge behind that mechanics of flying, and to find food that that bird had never known, if dreamed of, and devour it right down to the still-cantering hoof, with gracious abandon savoring that first close whiff of terrified muscle under fleetest Navajo horsehide though not the sight itself—the sight of itself, the descending bird, some fine-nesting hugeness at the moment that it reached the frantic stallion.

That sight belonged to the Hermit-Inventor who, unknown to the crag-high Navajo Prince mounted upon his blue Mexican mare observing only an alien wing (and not its Princess passenger) impinge in the plane of men and animals, had from his own cliff-horizon above the running bulge of that world witnessed proof-possible of his colleague Anasazi’s claim that the wind took an elastic body or that time found sudden chances out here in continental space to spirit itself forth from its own further reaches. Yet the visiting bird, even with a flash of human hand and long, dark hair near the root of its vast wing, resembled a giant king eider, that heavy, short-necked sea duck seen along northern coasts (though here on a scale of its own) if not bred in Other space so it hardly evoked a prior evolutionary stage, though still some "unevolved past," yet thought the Hermit-Inventor, and was pleased with the scientific prospect of a past of cloud coasts that had not met the erosion of winds, or a past of winds that, whether or not velocity mattered, had found no work to do at the times slotted for them and had run on indefinitely loosed like beautiful child-villains without a home: but, like the window of his finest theory, he had seen the flash of other flesh over the huge bird-steed’s bright limb—drake or past-gender, less pied than our diving eider spreading its wings like an underwater plane—and the Hermit wondered if these periodic westward vacations in time that he took from his often meteorological work and meditations in the East were not catching up with him dividing him through some rough-hewn shape beyond power or its prospect—like advice he remembered giving a young girl, say, in the presence of a huge, dismembered statue in, what was it?, 1885 or so.

But where, when, who—and also what statue? wakes the interrogator after an unsound nap, his finger never having left his juice button.

The answer comes, but he will have to settle for pure information because the person liable is absent, and the words "Bedloe’s Island, 1885" mean plenty—the late Margaret Mayne hearing at the daughterly age of twelve or thirteen a voice behind her mutter that they would never put this thing—this Statue—together, plus it was facing the wrong way, and "Go west, young girl"—and "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will"—where by "what" we meant the more uncrated parts of the Statue of Liberty standing (Seeing is Believing and/or Belief) (shipped B.O.D.) lying in raw grass between the winds of New York harbor.

Yet purest of all information is your future fact, predicted yet unconfirmed: for instance, soon after the U-2 cover story the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction (and this is a later manifestation of the Hermit whom Grace Kimball and James Mayn separately and half-knowingly encountered one bright day in Manhattan in 1977) that a weatherman on Formosa would at some time in the near future guarantee that a storm with a feminine, often religious, name and eye, would not hit Formosa; moreover, that this Formosan meteorologue would be so wrong that the very next day (so went the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction) upwards of two hundred and fifty people not exclusively Formosans would die by the hand of that hurricano, and between seventy and ninety would (by the Hermit-Inventor’s calculations) end up missing; and that this unwary weatherman with his feet on the ground would stand trial for negligence with years of his life at stake.

But who are we getting at? or to? Was it our parents? (But) we are our parents by now, and in a miracle of memory now see they were angels of ordinariness helping us toward helping ourselves, we trust.

Well, not the child next door, maybe. That child next door multiplies slowly with a fresher, less-obsessed sexuality. And will never become the beautiful diva, who once in the embrace of her Chilean naval intelligencer felt virtually contained by the thought of the weight-loss tapeworm inside her. Opera singers are said to survive revolutions, we have reminded the interrogator more than once. But she was not there when the revolution came off, no? And it isn’t revolution much less fast food that brings her infamous South American amor to New York, but counter-revolution—if not music itself.

We come there from all over, always (as once Grace Kimball) ready to start out. We come there from the perimeters like we were Owl Woman’s words instead of people, words that come by the zoologist-woman Mena and her curiously historical gentlefriend Marcus Jones and the Anasazi healer and the Navajo Prince’s mother with a hole in her head who was said to have tried this very healer. Upon which the Anasazi told the Hermit-Inventor that he on the contrary had consulted her as if she were a healer in need of being healed. This was power and modesty, as Owl Woman, when she was visible and when she was not, exemplified to the Anasazi. Witness her reminder that her songs had been taught her by spirits of the departed in the form of "spirit-tufts of downy white feathers" . . . "owl feathers." The Princess of the East, parking her great eider-shaped bird—and she at once understood as a bolt from the blue that in this day and age whatever songs intermingled back home, she’s gon’ see the land. The Navajo Prince’s mother whose visiting demons only others (all others) could see junketing in and out, in and out of the capital cavity, took time out to welcome her. The Princess felt this as a fresh start. Yet this thought brought back the face of Harflex, a youngish noble back among her father’s loyal mountains who’s waiting for her hand. Yet on the way there, she had encountered premonition outside herself from high up like a break-in through the atmosphere as if the well-known breaks one in each of every layer of different breath sphering our world had for an instant sync’d together into one deep cleft letting in whatever was to be let in, oh cost and benefit both. But meanwhile it was the light of welcome brimming all over the face of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the East Far Eastern Princess noted, when she came to sense that out here in the West was for her a fresh start. Yet this brought to mind part of the face of Harflex, the bookish, great-footed noble back home to whom she was tacitly ‘trothed. So she didn’t quite see the known demons going in and out of the roof- or smoke-hole of that Navajo lady’s head observed by one and all, by all except the lady herself and the visiting Princess. Fresh start? Yet on the way to the ceremonial sing that honored the demons as much as tried to drive ‘em out, she had encountered from high up like a break in the atmosphere the Hermit-Inventor’s eye. Which conveyed, in addition to "Nice to see you again, we hardly had time to talk when you passed through New York" and "I may have told you I was going to be out here where I often vacation"—also, "You must decide one way or the other."

Or so she imagined he said, and she was right. Men meant what they said, and he meant she couldn’t have it both ways, maybe she was the Princess, but she was also Margaret on leave from home and from the mission her father had sent her on, to wit Chicago’s famed World’s Fair. Not, of course, only the New Jersey exhibition, which Jim generations later told a date was a pretty modest house (how gotten there? wide-loaded by wagon?), New Jersey’s temporary home away from home in 1893—and Margaret had drawn into the orbit of her open-ended trip the pampas of Dakota, the loco weed rocks of Col and a territory of Indians (as one used to measure them, supplying directional axes by vectoring God’s winds to get our aim), while He was essentially Elsewhere, it being a trait of Him to like being away yet always know His people were there back home keeping a place for His manifestations.

It is the late rediscovered ideal of putting something or someone on hold, that is, in order to know they’re there, a form of love if you think too deeply about it. As possibly the interstate computers knew on the night of a "held" Moon launch at least that the system was still there, which included the People, who in their turn, each at his post, knew that others waited there like latter-day angels for their wait to be dissolved and the curtain to go up on a new age in the form of a Saturn rocket until some among these journalists, economists, and seekers could find their own detour around time lost and say hello to the minutes of their being.

Easy to say, hard to manage, said the naked woman on Grace K’s workshop carpet in ‘76-’77 because I have had so many reasons to move fast, to fill a day with a dozen other days to come—

Right on, baby!

Say that again, Clara?

—until you can lose that presence that is yourself helping yourself first to what there is, reaching a place at which you hear each moment pass through you in order then to forget the time and these desperate demands on you— (As if you were being followed, said Grace—) (. . . Exactly.)

(and Lincoln the saffron (dis-)robed correspondent added, "Just what I was going to say"—while she registered that Clara’s "Exactly" in response to Grace was held back a second: a curiously long and short second full of apprehension, yet Clara’s "Exactly" seemed full of simple acknowledgment and Lincoln knew that Clara was being followed.)

Which is, for the followee and follower, a similar though not "same-as" form to putting on hold, going on ahead whilst knowing They are situated behind and won’t go away.

So Jim Mayn fell ahead, not exactly not thinking of his imaginary news assignment for Pearl W. Myles who had healthy, chesty breasts like those of the great all-style swimmer at the World’s Fair in New York long before synchronized swimming approached Olympic status while at the moment there was no Olympics at all except what his non-combatant editor-father called target practice going on over there. Yet Jim wasn’t really thinking ‘bout the imaginary news assignment either; and he looked at some ripped-out notebook pages that still had sand in one crease, having made a very quiet research trip to where (clue) there were gulls above and sandpipers below—the beach where his mother had left her departing note—and no one but the driver who had picked him up going and returning knew he had gone—much less to investigate—or so he thought, and all he knew when he came home was that he could not resort to this mystery material for Miss Myles’s assignment— because, he then saw, he had gone only to see—and later it came upon him again when he was putting behind him his little brother Brad and Brad’s own inimitable (as it was called) "falling-apart." "It" confined itself seemingly to one day—a long day yet a day of days as they might say who follow us with further measures meant to yield true weight, as in a territory of Indians, a hold of absences, a smile of tarantulas or javelinas, and a smell of troubles, necessary because of interruptions (as on Brad’s Day) which we really need to see as part of the whole parcel rather than breaks between breathing in and breathing out—I mean . . . you know? . . .

Because there were minutes end to end when Brad who must have been ten did not breathe and in those wartime days, pre-Now, they didn’t tell you to breathe. Except in the form of an iron lung visible to Jim and his friends in Life magazine—and to Gordon and engineering-minded Bill Bussing after school on the top floor where experimental rubbers were tried on if not out —and so the open-ended Windrow, New Jersey, group that came and went in the music room of the Throckmorton Street house might but obscure the scrawny boy’s sobbing, pat him sometimes, bring him a sandwich that seemed to madden him with its alien and scented caring. Brad’s Day began in the morning exactly a month after the tragedy and a week or two—strangely hard for Jim to recall—after Margaret, impatient at the carver’s delay, had imposed a brief stone upon that otherwise untrammeled point of the family burial place, a grave "empty of all but earth," Alexander had suggested for the inscription but Margaret would not have it.

On this morning of Brad’s first and last "statement" of this endless loss and grief, Margaret did not come down the street to make breakfast for the three widowers Mel, Jim, and Brad because she was in that rare condition of being sorry for herself having fought with her husband Alexander about his venturing downtown on a wet day when he had a bad cold, and then the rain had stopped after he left. She had gone out into the field-like wet of the grass of the backyard, staring at her dark flower beds, no doubt thinking about her daughter (hearing the notes of a strong violin chord or a piano run repeated as Sarah when speaking never did, for she always heard what she had just said), should Margaret phone the boy Ira Lee to tell him not to come this afternoon? She was confused, perhaps. Her son-in-law went early to the newspaper office today, and she pictured two bright cartons of cereal left on the kitchen table for the boys, and the milk left out.

Jim wondered if she would come, and felt it was a beginning, if she did not. And then Brad was first heard fisting the piano in the music room. The same clutch of bombed keys again and again until Jim yelled to his brother to shut up and went downstairs to the music-room door, which held just as many memories as the room, hearing then the moment when it was obviously not going to go on—and Jim stopped in mid-air, he felt, as if he were, well not the music, but like it. Jim knew it all so well it was beyond fact, maybe like those dreams he did not have (but his own mother had said he just did not recall), and surely (no, no, not surely) it was like someone else knowing it—the start of Brad’s awful performance—(so, heck, forget it, someone else will remember it), some elder who didn’t have anything better to do; still it stayed with him, and when he was older he told it three, maybe four times, years later in his life: to his wife, who, so uncannily, had never been told the Indian stories and was kept out of (or free of?) the mere tangle of ideas he guessed he had about his mother (tangled by truly not knowing, by not tracking her down living or dead because you didn’t do that, if she wasn’t there)— throw in his father, too; to Mayga and colleague Ted at a Washington bar; yet also at once to his grandmother who was part of Brad’s Day itself, though coming in late.

No easy thing to tell her, as she became a part.

No small thing Brad. Alone in the house, Jim stood above his brother and did not remember the distance from threshold to piano. Brad was nuts, sick or something. Brad’s back was straight with the most arching-in curve as if he’s being good. What’re you doing? he said to Brad. Little Brad was crying, gasping; he shook his head kind of slowly, half-fake, or helpless. Jim looked down into the scalp of the unknown kid, the flecks of live skin in his very short crew cut entirely different from the boy underneath, who was—

—going to pieces, Mayn told his wife one day . . .

—who was a brother in Jim’s mind always, but never before what he was now: a relative who would not move from where he was. Braddie farted silently and Jim didn’t breathe, he had gone up to this brother and had nothing much to say and couldn’t name what it was and would just as soon not live through what was going to happen, which threw everything out the window including himself carrying all the traces—a billion, but only traces—of the ancient fate sprawled in the room’s dumb things.

"What the hell, Brad," he said, and reached behind the bony little insect of a kid and shut the cover over the keys in case Brad was thinking about hitting them some more. The brother instead kept on in a language, a language was what it was, and Brad’s ghost-sort-of was crawling through something, without his body much moving. Jim kept saying words. Such as, "Gramma’s probably comin’ over. You got to go to school. She’s going to tell you you got to." Saying over again, like he hadn’t heard himself say.

They both heard someone coming downstairs, but no one was up there. Then they remembered, without either of them needing to say it. The stairs creaked because that’s what they did. And years later Jim found what he wanted to connect the habit to—the movements or motions you felt overall, in an apartment house, that were less from people doing things than from what was left of them after they went out to work or away on business or vacation, although it might be the elevator or the edifice responding to the wake of a truck passing in the street.

Jim knew at this moment with his brother that his brother was doing something with their mother that Jim wasn’t. Jim thinking of a girl. He’d been on his way, but now he had to stay with this person who left him still no place to stand. But it was Jim’s house. But it wasn’t, and hadn’t been for a while, because his grandmother’s place was up the street and his mother had let him come and go, though he didn’t have to. But maybe he did. He wanted to have Brad look him in the face.

Brad stood up from the piano bench and Jim actually touched his shoulder. Brad went to the dark, inlaid drop-leaf table that a great-grandrelative had made and grasped the violin case and slid it into his arms like he was carrying wood. Pretty morbid, Jim told his wife some twenty years later, and she did not agree, but did not look away from him as his brother had done. It wasn’t as if Brad was Sarah’s only son, except Jim knew at this long, long moment that he had been thinking of himself as her only son. Later he figured it was because he felt really like the only grandson, Margaret’s favorite, although Alexander would have politely objected. "Whatcha doin’ with that violin?" Jim said. "That’s Mom’s violin." Brad went down on his knees and put the violin case out in front of him. He lay down with his face on the floor and put his arms up above his head so his hands were touching the violin case and at that instant the case moved, as Jim told his grandmother seriously when she came in and she said, He must have pushed it with his hand. Yet Jim hadn’t had that impression. Had Brad’s hands been on the case? And Jim thought of every talk he had had with his dead mother. His sense that she thought he was "all right" and thriving. Not especially musical, yet enjoyed singing.

And who would remind Jim, too late, yet not too late, that he had never definitely agreed not to harm or not to protect his brother? Brad had been alive in another room from Jim’s in a house in Windrow, New Jersey; and Jim had joined him; no agreement had been come to on what either boy would do, and nothing could ever be just or unjust. These are words Jim did not say then, though, like your certain type of senile person whose problem is pointing via language when the tongue may have been cast off by its brain hinge (which means, we relations add, in mild pain, directing our explanation to the interrogator, who with his button has been feeling left out, that the linguistic blockage is due to calcium deficiency, upon which the interrogator writes something down, never failing to believe that if history-in-the-making is not made-up, it must be, to those who are alert, not dull).

Jim knew everything, that morning and day, except one thing. That he had stopped caring about that room where his mother had strung her violin and where she had given lessons to kids who came and went and where she had stood above a friendly devoted cellist nodding her viol now to him, now to the pianist who sometimes in the midst of a month-long sonata changed to another person.

The sounds rose again, Brad seemed to be kind of laughing and groaning, his body starting to rock and buck a little there on the floor. It was embarrassing. Did Jim’s mother remember that sometimes her sons hadn’t loved her?, though Jim could only speak and think for himself. Excuse him for living, one afternoon when as he entered she held her black-and-red-flowered china cup at her lips as if it was magical and he was still outside.

But now Brad looked for all the world like a fucking tantrum, there on the floor, on the worn Oriental carpet. The skinny arms, weak arms, came around and down to the sides and suddenly the front door came unstuck out in the hall and Jim felt that he and his brother owned this house for the first time—which made little sense, because they didn’t and their mother didn’t either, yet had occupied it.

Footsteps hardly audible there, though granted the music-room door had been shut by Jim when he came in to inspect his weeping brother, his grieving embarrassing brother. Brad’s hand worked itself into a pocket and as the music-room door slowly—Jim knew it was slow—opened behind them, Brad in a terrible condemned way slowly flung his hand out of his pocket and a thing or two from his hand. One was a wild stone—why wild?—which struck the glass front of a bookcase, the moans turned into several screams, Jim could not believe it; the person in the doorway behind, whom neither boy had looked at, spoke, as Brad threw stuff outward blindly out of his other pocket and some of it was shredded paper, pink paper, that’s what Jim told the South American woman Mayga in a Washington bar, who credited so much of what he said. The person behind the boys in the doorway who had not spoken said, He’s coming apart—which didn’t sound right or like it was addressed to Jim. Jim looked at Brad’s body then and he thought it might actually, if only slightly, go to pieces, the way it was shaking. Not imagined it doing it, though. Jim had once daydreamed the Earth slid to a stop in its own slow axial rotation, while Pearl Myles explained what to put in a lead. But here the arms grew longer reaching up for the violin case which stayed silent; a leg kicked up as if to throw off a sneaker; the strange screams rhythmically told something that Jim now turned away from: to see, of all people, his grandfather Alexander, tall and polite, it was he who had opened the front door—not about to clean up vomit or kiss someone but gentle and more understanding than Jim ever saw him again, although ever after this strange morning and day Jim would see Alexander with this distinguished look on his face telling his grandson, That’s all right, fella, and telling the other brother, Jim, as if—as if it didn’t apply to him (which it didn’t), that "it" was "pent up."

Some sound in Brad was getting out. It was like being sick. Yet it was Jim who felt that this all meant that he was the one who would go. Which meant maybe his mother was here. Yes.

Maybe that is what little brother Brad was (suffering and) carrying on about: that she was really here, but you couldn’t reach for her. A dream Brad couldn’t tell any other way.

Jim knew that here in the room were three males. He included his little brother and didn’t probably think the word "males" but it was there. He thought that his mother’s father hadn’t expected her to do what she had done and was at a loss to understand anything about it. Yet Jim didn’t really think that. He thought Alexander knew why it had happened but didn’t think it was worth discussing.

"Did you boys get some breakfast?" Alexander asked. Later Jim heard Granddad Alexander tell Margaret he had phoned her to argue some more with her and had hung up but thought, She’s there, she’s home, so he’d come here to check on the boys himself.

And she was still not here, even after the length of time it had taken him to first stand and think and then look for a thing he could not find as if it were stuck to his forehead, then walk up from his shop downtown, not once stopping to pass the time of day at the firehouse.

Jim looks at his grandfather, and waits, beyond distrust. Alexander steps into the music room of his vanished daughter. He picks a book up, another, another. "Here’s my Densmore book I couldn’t find years ago . . ." Dens-more collected Indian poetry. Time marches on. "Now you can have it back," said Brad, without the bitterness of the words and in a break between the heaves of energy that brought them all to this room on this day. "Well, you’re right," said the grandfather to the grandson, and he read some words out of the book, as Brad began again softly to groan, which Jim must have kept in his memory without trying because in the mid-1960s Jim’s wife read him some lines from the end of a book one night and those that Alexander read that day cropped up, you might say, "... my heart will go out . . ." something, something ... "In the great night my heart will go out." Was Sarah interested in the Indians? You’d never know it.

Jim tried to recall when; but his wife said it wasn’t the "when" that mattered, it was the "What"; and he didn’t mention it to her but even years before in 1945 at the moment when four principal people who mattered to Brad plus a couple three more who were less worried about his interests, hearing there was something going on, visited in sequence this house to witness the boy’s grief that had waited a whole month to put on this show, this noise, Jim had even then been able to wonder when those words had been said in his presence that were now being read by his grandfather Alexander in the music room, this shrine without a body except Braddie’s spread-eagled and groaning and noising his loss or grief on the way to take all who came there past embarrassment. But then the "when" came to Jim, and it had been his grandmother Margaret, the very one who told Jim a scary tale one night when she caught him out in the backyard "sleepwalking" (she almost believed) and he’s over by the asparagus stalks—and as soon as Margaret’s said, What’re you doing out here this time of night?, she can’t get him indoors without remembering (like an outdoor bedtime tale with wet toes in the chill grass of the leaf-sweetened dark yard) how the Navajo Prince told the East Far Eastern Princess that when she would leave mattered less than what she’s doing here now and what she would do when she got back to where she was going— which he did not call her home. Because he held, against the elders and his mother—though not the Anasazi or the visiting Hermit-Inventor—that he did not have a home, his home came to him; came constantly where he was, and his mother when she once had wandered upon a dangerous mountain before he was born, and might have been killed by a scared hunter or that tiny snake that could suck you (dry) right into the mountain of flesh or of metals that were like flesh if they could ever be mined, had told those who criticized her for walking in the wilds far from home when she was with child that she had her home with her if they would only keep quiet. The Navajo Prince believed her and said so. Which stamped the Prince, in that bare, sometimes dusty realm as either wrong-headed or a leader, and he was plainly a leader, but in what direction they did not yet know—and even when the Princess appeared in that land didn’t know and everyone but the Princess herself guessed that he would follow her, and even follow her if she did not go home to her country; but she did. Margaret’s midnight story included how the Prince’s mother seemed to die, that is during the Princess’s stay. The girl would kindly talk to the Prince’s mother while the demons circulated like streams of song bees in and out of her head; and she told the lady how in the days before the Princess’s own great transport bird evolved (that ate Navajo ponies upon arrival in this territory) her father, the King of the National Mountains of Choor, had been through a taxing experience. He had personally seen to the dry stacking of no less than five of his children in the family gravehouse and, hearing a cousin priest pray that light like dew must come from the dark cloud of sorrow, had said he was in fact "entertained" by the renewed sight of his family dead, their coffins that is, bunked four to a stack and had felt like a builder there ordering his most recent daughter laid so her head was to her great-grandmother’s (one) foot; and the humor and sadness of the Princess’s kind guest-tale suddenly vacated the demons from the Prince’s mother’s head-font whereby they circulated, and she actually died, demonless, but that was not the end of it.

Yet on that clement midnight when he was staying with her and Alexander, and out walking in his pyjama bottoms—in the garden—and she told him he was sleepwalking and should get back to bed, he answered How ‘bout you? ‘s if she’d asked him what he was doing there and—the Princess found that for the Prince’s people—the People, as they were self-called—there’s a season for every event that comes from God’s hand like a touch from one counter-whorled finger of the five, in its own time; but the history of the People was much more like the steadfast land than it was like a Started and a Finished. The land, that is, at any one time—the red cuts of the great cliffs holding the afternoon sun and turning it toward the eyes of Zuni faces as they came back to the village from a field, a trail, a structure containing work; walking (we say) through the fences hungry.

The Navajo land spread out from the original volcano that contained the ship ever bound spaceward out of time, until one day the magma receded like the wakefulness of a continental tilt until they crowded up against that cooling mountain and would not wash around this obstacle until at last they grudged their way onward scraping it clean of all its stone save that core that had then always been bound toward that place, always a Ship in the mind of the People, as the night that must have spelled to the grandson and his grandmother a snake or two, coiled sleepy-headed in the grass of the backyard, was also itself a snake.

A snake-like beauty was what the night had, Margaret thought—and remembered to write her favorite grandson this in her terminal letter some years later after his mother’s departure. He liked Margaret more even than the information always up her sleeve. The "what" was what the People centered attention on, not the sequence of "whens": witness the difference between whenever the exact moment was versus the fact of the event, that is, when, according to both Hermit-Inventor and Anasazi medicine man, cosms of the Sun ran suddenly down through that rare cleft in the atmosphere occurring when all its layers line up for an instant the single slit or crevi-chink in each of said layers (when God cannot delay his one-shot deal, he must act): for the mountain of grandfather space leans down down upon all the volcan’ mounts of our not-after-all-so-visible topograph, each answering each upon time frames so diff’rent that the People knew that the "when" mattered less.

And so the People did not stress the exact time when the Princess’s fond histories de-demon’d her prospective mother-in-law’s head leaving that lady at last by herself—but dead! They stressed instead the disappearance of life from her coupled with her relations’ inability to touch her to make her ready for the groove of Earth-Sky, there to rest; and stressed as well what so struck the pyjama-bottomed grandson the night the Allies crossed the Channel and, landed upon the French littoral, invaded Europe, namely that the Princess’s huge bird, as neglected at the far edge of the ceremonial community as it had been successful at burying in its own body its urge to eat Navajo ponies, had produced from its own bright, pale feathers a diamond-shaped nest high atop what the Hermit-Inventor identified as a volcanic plug though so perfectly wooded up to a secret tonsure at the top as to seem a true mountain; and had produced a brace of eggs while being in our terms predominantly male, nor had it received species-specific connubial visits; and from far off on a night of the double Moon it had been seen by the Prince’s people to stretch its neck and lift its chin as an old exile Indian who had lived once upon the far north coast identified as the way of some brilliant sea hen when ip the company of her husband and approached by an alter male.

But this time we find an ordinary mountain lion whose scent of its natural prey the western deer, still plentiful then, had been deeply turned and turned upward toward the rough summit of this volcanic plug above the plateau to the odor of the future, as it was later explained.

An odor from the eggs, and so telling that ... we already remember the fawn-colored cat five-foot-lean, its small-scale head over its big cub-like paws . . . never snarled or spoke as it came out of the last scrub pinon pine, the last starved spruce . . . branches wind-grown round harsh little trunks . . . root systems grappling down upon the grain of volcanic memory . . . and the lion moved so low along the ground that the bird as great as the summit itself and almost without personality, but beyond it, rose upon the downy muscles of its legs and at the last instant rose upon the night air to dive at the lion which by then had found the essence of the eggs’ light already within itself and with one lunge buckled and sucked one egg of its matter and vanished, before the bird—watched by a dozen sentinels miles off in the settlement— could either lurch back to the other egg, stained by the luminous rain of albumen from its counterpart, or swoop elsewhere at the lion that had so literally vanished it might have embarked itself like any other four-legged plant life into the large, still being of a timber wolf paused nearby smelling the lion’s hide with a twinge of turned stomach.

And the bird’s alien fire which to the wolf smelled like a mass of raunchy eyes and gums and oil grasses in the stomach of a fresh-killed pony mixed with winds bearing from the heights of Choor the pigs and rock chucks and lichens that can see with eyes but do not remember they were once lover-snakes and fruit-colored bears. Until, abandoning the trees and scrub for the upper clearing at the instant the Princess’s bird abandoned the diamond nest with its remaining egg splashed with entrails, the enormous wolf found himself whooshed by talon and bill and raised higher and higher, torn part by part, borne then tossed, then tossed again while, with each drop into mid-air, the bird’s bill like a sky made by a giant planet encroaching ate off a rib, a leg, a foot, a glinting gland, a face: till less and less of the still-living wolf fell back down the gravity of the bird’s personal sky, and watchers saw only a demon-stomach, the wolf’s, lying its strings and anchors all in the dark sky —blood-lit warm nerve and goot gut (to cite a German infiltrator’s aside to his fellow Cheyenne Contrary)—swallowed like swan song by the bird as if it promised to become that timber wolf as we would become others by making them us, when instead the bird was leaving the land that night.

As did the Princess in another direction, only to be followed by the Navajo Prince bearing a Colt revolver to protect the beloved who had left him so he forgot how much else she had really left. So that—so that ... the Prince’s mother, until now lifeless for a week and a day yet fresh as a sprig of wild bean, found that new-grown eye in the fountain-top of her head uninjured receiving her same demons in new eye-sized forms of incandescent picture: and she came to life calling out that she had been abandoned by the Princess from the East even more than by her son the Prince, yet was very much alive (three little words Margaret wrote to her anxious editor-familias from the Great Salt Lake in the summer of ‘93, for she knew he was deeply concerned about the failure of the National Cordage Company in May and the most extensive troop movements since the Civil War and the drop in the gold reserves that he professed not to understand except it threatened ‘‘paper" and had come on Shakespeare’s birthday or nearabouts)—

still very much alive in sun the like of which, dear father, I had never seen—heading south tomorrow while from the mountains twinkling with dog-tooth violets this City seems embowered in shade.—I tell you it is laid out in squares called blocks, forty rods square, the sidewalks sixteen foot wide, the streets lighted by two hundred gas lamps. Industry here includes slat-fences, mattresses, scroll-sawing, turning, type, and bone-ash, not to mention a vinegar works. The glass works employ seventy-five men—make fruit jars, demijohns, vials, soda water and appolinaris bottles—can turn out 550 dozen bottles a day. Of newspapers, we have (I catch myself speaking like a Salt Laker when I will be long gone by the time you receive this) 3 dailies, 2 semi-weeklies, 5 weeklies, 3 semi-monthlies, and 9 monthlies, and if the Territorial Library boasts 4000 volumes, many scientific, you will like to know that the Masonic claims near twice that number. And so you see, dearest father, I am very much alive, unlike the whales a California party planted here in the Great Salt Lake—never suspecting (because Californians prefer quick magic to slow)—

Margaret hastened to inform her father, whose anxiety conveyed itself to her not only by telegraph but in the caress of her own quill’s brown-welling point across the watermark-graced page ruled only by her oblong green and ink-stained blotter lowered line by line faster and faster down until we lost track and must remember what we didn’t know we knew—never suspecting that, as an English financier and furniture maker whose house up in Brigham Street had a sublime view down upon the city and steeply up behind along the slope of the mountains told Margaret, a man here has found in the desert through an Indian woman named Manuel—who shampoos with it regularly and with it fixed a sore of his that’s virtually inside his body—an oil, or wax, contained by the pods of a hardy bush, such that said oil if one could grow sufficient of said plant will light a lamp as brightly as any whale, while what has happened to th’ willing though transplanted whales is unknown. Yet no man here, where clarity belies distance in the mountains of the land and hence anon on water too, has seen leviathan blow, who may by now be all fish if not thoroughly salted (if not to taste, to travel well—a trip more total not to say saltier than any old ocean can imagine rivers to bleed our rocks salt-free): so, as we already remember, those whales, those rather tragic power-pusses, took a wrong turn and got totaled, if one still says that of whales at this late date.

And so you see, Margaret said, on her way further west, I am very much alive—which was what in the dark of early June half a century later Jim’s grandma called to his granddad, who had called into the night yard through the bedroom screen he’d installed the afternoon before, "Margie?" (as if it might be only her voice) "... you all right?"—not, "Margaret, who’s out there?" when a pickup truck its trademark audible in a tailgate’s loose hinge passed, headed downtown.

But very much alive was what the Navajo Prince’s mother had become, and Jim felt this more curiously and sadly on Brad’s Day (which came more than a year after the June night-yard pyjama-bottom scene, for school had started anew by the time of Brad’s Day and the atomic bombs had got themselves dropped, no connection)—Brad lay on the floor of the music room learning to sink or swim.

"Very much alive" (Margaret called back at the distant second-floor bedroom screen behind which was her concerned husband Alexander, who now began to lightly sneeze as if it were animal dawn, and the boy in pyjama botts and his grandmother with her hair way down le back of her nightgown snickered out there in the night yard; snickered at the sound, until she like a girl took his hand (but he gently escaped) and told him, "Come on," then stopped short and Jim could swear he heard Alexander’s bedsprings depressed—and she informed him that, having perhaps come to life because the two young lovers had flown (first one, then the other), the Navajo Prince’s mother said she heard the bird as the thick cloth of Darkness itself, and knew the foreign princess was not aboard the bird on its way back to the national mountains of Choor. And it was not known there except to the Anasazi healer and two or three others that somehow the lady now alive but with her demons back used the song-like voice of Owl Woman, "In the great night my heart will go out, / Toward me the darkness comes rattling ..."

But on Brad’s Day, with Alexander reading out of a book and bending to pat poor Brad on his heaving shoulder blade, but now seating himself at the piano and playing lightly and sketchily "Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet"! when the boys had never seen him even try to play a piano or any other instrument so that Brad rolled onto his side and stared at Alexander’s back with wretched face—Jim tasted that damned egg essence! And he would have sprung upon his shitty little bastard of a brother who was taking up everybody’s time, for crying out loud, except Jim knew that in the dark yard a year and a month and more ago he had slipped his hand out of his grandmother’s as they both heard one more screened sneeze—a last little irritation—Jim had been moved—and went toward the palely glimmering white trim of the back porch quicker than Margaret who suddenly lagged, elderly or measuredly female; and Jim was moved to feel a big something so he nearly ran down the street to his own house—father, brother Brad, mother: moved by the Navajo lady coming back to life alone with her buzzing bonnetful of shifting demons and others.

So that on Brad’s Day while the grandfather played well enough for Brad to tell him to please not touch that piano—then Brad went back face down on the floor sobbing but not moving—Jim would have asked his grandfather if all that Navajo story-stuff predicted the future: for they were now without the mother Sarah, who had told Jim to go away and not be afraid: which was not a fact like what Alexander Big-Shoe Granddad asked Brad, for he got along with little Brad, What was Dizzy Dean’s middle name? and a few years later, What was the name of Bernhardt’s dog? when Brad was in high school.

Jim was no walking encyclopedia but he could ask his grandfather what was Harry Truman’s middle name and have his elder wait for a whole minute with his lips drawn back above his teeth before giving up. Only, a moment later, to ask what general (clue: he’s Mexican) had part of his body buried with full military honors while he was still alive and kicking?

They now heard Margaret taking off her brown raincoat in the hall— brown? intones the interrogator (but in the interest of further information suspends punishment)—America may be second to none in acoustics and/or sound, but what is the sound of brown?

—taking her time before they saw her at the threshold of the music loom surveying her husband become musician (who had introduced Jim once to the words "She’s always been a giver, not a taker"). Alexander turned round toward her on the piano stool as if he had been practicing; and Brad was on the floor snuffling and groaning, making noise in his sleep almost(!) or might have been about to receive a kick from Jimmy. Who was ready to kick him when he was down where he belonged, wriggling and heaving there on the shallow lake of his mother’s music-room floor, shades of a Sarasate tune they used in the movies to make you pity a sad scene (though no one can make you feel anything, it’s what you want to feel . . .). "The sun’s getting ready to come out," she said; "how’re you feeling?" she asked Alexander and she knelt beside Brad who did not stop sobbing or moaning. She laid her hand on his moving shoulder blade. She listened not for his pulse but, Jim was clear, for what she herself thought.

"Water’s still warm over t’ Lake Rompanemus," said Alexander.

"Welcome to it," said Margaret; "the wind is not warm."

Brad was set apart; he had done it himself, it didn’t matter why, and he maybe didn’t know; and Jim wanted no more to do with his grandmother’s histories because they now made him question what had become of his mother.

(This had gone far enough, asserts the interrogator, we know next to nothing of the suicide’s intentions: we suspect she was about to be found out as having yielded birth some years before to a natural child, but we know that she was not for long if ever moved by the father of Brad Mayn and we detected in her a purpose at the beach looking out past Jim so that he could not look both at her and at what attracted her attention if anything, that is, beyond the perhaps lonely horizon, a purpose that turned in her some calculated aim beyond death, no more a rendezvous with a Jersey Coast blower whale than with an enemy sub canvassing postwar coves from America to America, Liberty Island to Penguin Paradise—and at that very seaside point we have thrust upon our attention the fact that that current manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York appears with Bob Yard and walks down the beach and back with his old friend Margaret who in the person of a Princess once found sanctuary through him upon wending her way back to the East: yet you betrayed the fact that to give her in the form of the Princess sanctuary he turned her (you can’t turn anybody without their consent) into a thing (You said it, chimes a voice with a bare body in the Body-Self Workshop circle, a thing), but wait, says the smiling interrogator (who discovers he too can have charm), a "thing" (says he) accessible only to meteorologists: from which she could be returned to her original form only by the same knowledge, and come to think of it we have on our staff government meteorologists who—but no, forget I said that—and our interrogator seems some piece of us, or his relations, albeit tortured in the next room in order to be not all wrong any more than he has been all bad, a’torturing though he sometime be.)

Yet had Margaret’s histories (otherwise free of any news of whales, which she admitted she had never read a word about) foretold the future? For wasn’t that what you learned from reading the history books? His own father said so, and when he got time (which he officially never did, because of his editorial devotions to the family that he had married into without his bride having to "change her name"), he read Ulysses S. Grant: on the subject of winners and losers, however firmly the South, like Mexico after Chapultepec, claimed there was other loss in battle besides the battle itself.

Jim’s father said this to a visitor on the front porch one day, many months before Brad’s Day. Jim lay hidden in the cool earthen space under the porch, latticed by the light that came through the diamond openings of the diagonally cross-hatched lattice slats, himself and the damp-scented cavern. The visitor’s reply stuck for years in Jim’s memory but he did not summon it later, and so perhaps could not, from the shades cast by the light of freedom and loss, while the visitor, whose heavy shoes creaked and tapped their toe tips directly above Jim’s eyes, listened to Jim’s father observe some dull thing about bias and the reading of history and the newspaper business, and replied that his host had always worked hard at toleration: which precipitated a rare guffaw from Jim’s father and thence from the helpless son supine below the battlements a cough really due to the visitor’s convergent (porch-high) fart during his host’s laugh plus the farter’s murmured "Did you hear something?" Which words coincided with Jim’s cough yet accidentally foretold it, though it was less cough than laugh, less laugh than a body’s custody of some surprise held though not quite grasped.

And before the host could think to answer the guest’s casual suspicion, he was adding what, as he said, the guest knew little if anything about, to illustrate the business carried on between bias and impartiality, for whereas the family paper—the Democrat—had come into being well over a century before to put the county if not New Jersey squarely behind Jackson and against the Central Bank and its sovereign favors to the big guns, to property as Hamilton stitched it into our founding chapters (honorable and succinct as a Swiss ledger) and it multiplied into paper you couldn’t pay my taxes with, we have to give to Lincoln in the early 1840s if not total agreement at least space to duel in his own way with James Shields, the Illinois state auditor, who told the tax collectors to take the notes of the tottering Illinois State Bank at only their real value (you know this story?), which was forty-four cents on the dollar, which Lincoln—

—dueled in his own way? came the unexpectedly knowing retort—(and the sub-rosal or sub-cathetral auditor stirred upon the dark earth, smelling through porch boards the noble gas against natural law descending from the afore-related wind, as from treated seaweed, or from a fresh, soundless second, only to hear, then:) you sure you didn’t hear something? as if the tapping of the boot tip on the porch above the boy answered the frequency of his own sound yielded by who can tell what motive beyond accident or, to travel on ahead to a Washington bar in ‘62 and a friend Ted, that key to history known as small talk and so small it might be the space past or yet to come of the tapeworm’s expansible tunnel—

—second wind? says the interrogator turning our trial to his own personal uses—isn’t that what you people call the reserve breath that runners reach only at un certain deeper hollow of fatigue? better be sure it’s not the oxygen-depletion stage of running on fat cells which we know are not the greatest back-up.

—Lincoln’s own way was to choose cavalry swords against James Shields, went on Jim’s father—who was so nearly right above Jim that pomposity closed in on love that was surprised alone, not grasped—the jumbo size, a plank on edge between, and an eight-foot limit behind for each. For Lincoln had much longer arms than Shields (and, we add, arms which were to be one day the longest arms of any American President in history though not matter of profound wonder to their beleaguered owner).

—But—and the visitor rose, transferring his weight—but that was a sure thing, Mel; are you sure you got the facts right? I mean I know you always do, but I thought Lincoln was a fearless—

—That’s why he wanted to avoid the duel though he’d brought it on in

the first place: he wrote these letters to a paper showing Shields at a fair using

state paper to pay off the town’s women who came to his window let down

‘cause he couldn’t marry them all" "so handsome and so interesting"—

Shields was Irish and Lincoln wrote the letter as a certain Aunt Rebecca—

"Well," said the visitor’s creaking porch and shoes, "I’m sure I heard something."

"Shields you know caught a bullet in the lung in the Mexican War but he lived to be outmaneuvered by Stonewall Jackson fifteen years later in the Shenandoah rain while the bossman General McClellan was building bridges like a politician, soon after Grant beat Johnston at Shiloh—and when the Governor of Pennsylvania said Grant had been drunk and lost thirteen thousand men, Lincoln said, ‘He fights.’ "

"Once got drunk and mislaid my toolbox," said the other.

"Lincoln was a fighter if there ever was one. Hardest kind of fighting."

"He didn’t eat good I seem to recall," said the voice, "but wasn’t he married to an impossible lady?"

Jim moved his foot and rang a trowel against the upended teeth of a dark rake, whose earthy rust he now knew was what he had been smelling.

After a second, "I wouldn’t want to say for the record," said his father, and for a moment the men might have looked at each other so that nothing could keep up appearances: but the diversion of the boy’s presence was not the only fact between the two men who were not willing to hate each other, nor (deep down) willing to spend time at the beach with their wives and children though the visitor and his wife—loudly difficult to a point of throwing a muffin tin at him fresh full from the oven—had no children for all that went on between them.

And on Brad’s Day, scarcely a month after a woman whose whereabouts in her New Jersey town had been unknown for several hours was discovered or inferred in certain of her effects (including a large black towel) well above high water at Mantoloking, with incidental vague apologies written to a neighbor, whose gray dory, with those sweeping proud lines that, of all months, in August needed a coat of paint on its bottom, was reported found on a spit in Barnegat Sound with one oar gone and a damply darkened paper bag rolled tight as a toothpaste tube yet with one lengthwise half of a dill pickle inside it wrapped in white store paper not waxed, the discussant men above on that porch were two of the four principal folk to "look in" on young Brad’s bereavement, though at least two others also came during the day.

Brad turned his head up away from the piano, and, his profile toward where his grandmother Margaret knelt with her hand no longer touching him, he knew his brother Jim was still there. Jim respected the little bastard, who still was telling Jim nothing more than the day at the beach when Jim got suddenly stuck above him in the sand towering murderous but hearkening to the threatening call of their mother from her black towel blinded by the sun. And meanwhile Brad on the floor of the music room wasn’t going to school. It’s embarrassing having your mother kill herself. And no more point in Jim telling him than forcing dry cornflakes scratch by scratch down his throat. Yet Jim didn’t go to school all that day himself. There were other people in this life of theirs who could come to the house. And on this day probably for the first time Jim thought about the look of the house. The dark-brown shingles of the porch roof led you up to the roof angles and facing of the second and third stories. The dormers and the other sections of roof spread in what seemed a lot of directions when you weren’t actually looking at the house. He couldn’t draw, he thought, but he drew the house, doodled its thick white pillars from the low, thigh-high wall that ran around the porch to the porch ceiling, the day after Brad’s Day, when he was sitting in History and couldn’t think, and out it came onto his notebook, but the angles of dark shingled roof section varied less than the mountainous watercourses he found he had with some instinct drawn, but he’d never thought of what the house looked like till Brad’s Day.

But here was the music room which he absorbed for the first time, as if it had been a shifting article of furniture turning up here, there, like good and bad sounds, wet or dry sounds, night sounds heard in day—and he’s here with just this person, all ‘long, Dad gone to the office of the newspaper, Dad gone to work with his worried look which he might not have had on the wedding day of that friend of his when he mounted a roadster’s running board to sail to the reception expressly to meet Jim’s mother Sarah, but had worried ever since—whatever you could say he was worrying about; and here’s the little brat brother who, Jim realized, knew that Jim was here with him in the music room, so that together they grasped the meaning of Brad’s gaspingly interrupted "You going to . . . school?" and Jim looked into the eyes of his grandparent and as a prime resident of this house, not the one so often visited down the street, said to his brother he guessed he wasn’t going to school, and told him it was O.K. while bracing himself for a more tedious display to come. For . . . {for?) their mother had said to Jim (whatever she had said to his more protected brother), had said to Jim on the occasion of his taking a summer farm job and not "going to work" at the paper (which was more for his father than for the family which his father, though with the same name, had married into), "You will go away where you belong, and live ..."

—that’s what he remembered—

—yet she had been the one to go away if we’re getting technical, even if she was merely dead, which wasn’t much of a going away.

Jim thought, You have to go to school. But he wouldn’t make Brad; didn’t want to shake his leg or talk to him, make him do anything; didn’t want to talk to him (like Saturday night finding Brad turning Jim’s papers in his room and when he got caught by Jim he said, This place needs sweeping, there’s dust or sand or somethin’ on the rug and the floor). Nor groan, cry, sob like him, much less hit those same keys out of which, minutes later, the grandfather had made some surprising music.

Yet Jim just didn’t want to be apart from Brad. God! That little shit? Just be with him, the brother so different and, not so secretly, despised: for not being a fast runner; and for recounting to others things Jim did, though not to tell on him.

Just be here in order to know what had happened. In order to leave, one day; to fall forward.

What had happened. Regardless of what the future would tell about the mother who sent them away though they had the idea—yes, they—Jim knew, and some future we—it was the two of them knew, that they had the sinking feeling that she was the one who had gone away.

Implausible, this, said the interrogator, forgetting to give us the business; a rather artistic mother, one has forgotten in the decay of the middle-class liberal family with its aspirations toward Eurodollars, may be not the head of the home on account of she is the home.

Of Sarah’s grandmother it might have been said she had the vapors many multiplied mornings chilled by her night’s rest.

But Sarah was not her grandmother, and not her mother Margaret—not one to stroll the raw sidewalks of Salt Lake City when her father had edited her trip to the Chicago World’s Fair in advance, he thought; and not one to make up stories to tell her sons when—

—Did you tell the Princess-and-the-Navajo stories to Mom? he asked in the near-stillness of the room measured by the sounds of the boy Brad on the floor—surprised to hear himself.

—What stories? sighed or gasped the central griever on the floor near the kneeling grandmother’s hand.

I hardly knew those stories till after you were born, Jim, she said.

Where’d you get them? Did the Princess’s bird have Paiute blood to eat horses?

Oh most of them are true enough, said Alexander, Jim’s one-time Paiute "source," who rose from the piano, stood looking at his grandson Brad’s faintly rising and falling form before ushering himself from the room saying a word or two under his breath that included "wheelbarrow" and "leaves," and after he shut the music-room door, a word or two in the hall.

How could you not know these stories till then?

Your mother was in the hospital with you for two weeks and they were talking about an operation, and one day I went to the cemetery to see if Eukie Yard had died because he hadn’t bought a pint of applejack in ten days according to your father who had heard it at the store when he bought a bottle of rum and a bottle of sherry to celebrate your arrival with us—and when I got to the graveyard looking for our notorious caretaker and heard the pounding of the trotters down at the track like game birds, I forgot about Eukie Yard and maybe I was thinking I might tell my grandson a thing or two more than

Jonathan Jo

Has a mouth like an "O"

And a wheelbarrow full of surprises.

And while I was looking at the green grass between my dark father’s long life and my poor blond brother’s short one, I remembered the Navajo Prince’s mother’s hole in the head that wasn’t big enough for the giant bird of Choor to do more than fly over, leaving the landing to the spirits who buzzed in and out without asking.

Demons was what they were.

Demons, you’re right.

The front door was heard to open during the ensuing silence. Brad breathed normally. His carrying-on only seemed to be ending. But as the glinting brass door handle spun loud and hard against itself and the door swung in, Jim knew his grandfather was out carting leaves, and, as if to ignore the unfortunate man who stood half-noticed in the doorway of his wife’s music room and sanctum, Jim said, "Gramma, was that before or after the Navajo Prince left to follow that stupid Princess of the East? because—"

"Both," came the word.

"—because if it was after ..."

But the man, more like an uninvited guest than a father, asked what was going on here. But not as if the boy on the Persian rug was in the wrong: Mel Mayn’s readiness was in his arms and hands; and his square, absent face had been waiting fourteen years and more for his giftedly ironic wife to ask something possible of it. Now she was dead—"his late espoused saint," Byron Kennett her music friend had put it, though who was "his"?—and the open palm of Mel’s extended hand, moving across the room and down to the boy on the floor, seemed to leave the sphere of his face to give it room to be alone and find all its dumbness of feelings.

(What’s that? asks the interrogator, whose machine didn’t pick up such vagueness except as danger.)

But Mel reached halfway across this mildly contemptuous space where his wife had succeeded in being alone when she wished and he had felt about the room all the cruel force of hoping mistakenly to love what one does not understand.

Or care to understand, muses the interrogator, who hardly knows what he does, when caressing the fresh-juice button momentarily liquefying our ever-serviceable bone system, ‘cause he’s got his living to hack and his cash flow to keep massaged—but he’s lately so alive to the fineries of feeling that these rooms discriminate that he doesn’t know what to do except receive the ensuing information that held its warmth—yet the wind (as this woman Margaret testily answered her husband as if prophesying) was cold, and the third adult to enter, coming as he did from a nerve center of the town, reported that a sudden cooling of the air in motion off the Jersey shore had created a dangerous pressure belt and there was a chance of that rare phenomenon a hurricane that originates along the mid-Atlantic coast—air, he said, touching Brad on the back of the head and speaking softly, travels like that—from high to low pressure areas and when it does that, it—

"Mel, for heaven sake!" said Margaret.

But Jim recalled his father’s very face noting once that a giant thunderhead had funneled a waterspout down the day of Sarah’s departure; so "it" came to Jim that not only had things happened to Margaret like the stories he’d about outgrown; the stories had; and if the giant bird’s fly-over was "after," then the Indian son’s leaving (albeit in pursuit of his white girlfriend) could have brought his Indian mother back to life.

Oh crap, and more crap, then oh memory, then mere memory, his voice changed, though to itself for years and later years when he came to make his living arriving at facts. Yet at that moment of Brad’s Day, the task of refiguring some of those pieces of stories was too great; that is, at the moment when the father who had been at the newspaper office in which Jim had declined a summer job in favor of the Quirks’ farm, which was mostly horse corn and where he stayed the night when he could go riding after supper, or when two skinny, sassy girls he knew came to dances at the Grange (which Margaret would ask about) when, that is, the father knelt near Margaret with the boy between them and Jim immobile after an hour or more near the door, and when the father sort of ducked his head round toward his son Jim and shook his head and began to speak to Brad even before turning back to him to contemplate the boy’s head and neck, and his dark blue T-shirt, and his arm in the sleeping position (so Jim thought, painfully, Has that little shit-ass gone to sleep?).

But no—for, in answer to Mel’s reassuring words "She’s not coming back, boy, she’s gone," "Yes," said the boy; and the man said, "But we’re not, we’re not gone, you and me and Jimmy." And Brad, with a veteran huskiness from tears and a hysteria of breathing that had become its own measure, answered the man who’d been a father to him, "/ know that."

Mel put his hand on the small of Brad’s back, one of the few if any opportunities we who are relations have taken to say Mel touched other humans—and all Jim saw was that hand, till Margaret stood up and went out of the room to the kitchen. "I know it too," said the man.

"So do . . . ," said Brad, sobbing again, . . . "so do . . . I," heaving his lung half through his shoulders, but not with the soft screams or noises Jim had heard half an hour ago, noises Jim had never heard before from his little brat brother.

And so it went. Margaret brought thick sandwiches in. This time they didn’t move to the sandwiches as on the day a month ago of the memorial, from living room to dining room, and she surprised even Jim by putting the plate of cake-rich home-baked crusty white-bread sandwiches beside Brad and Mel on the floor—

—who were related only by marriage, breaks in the daydreaming interrogator, if we have got the facts right—

Some are liverwurst, some are egg salad, and some are American cheese, Margaret said and—

—was there time to hardboil the eggs?—

—and stood up and looked at the boy on the floor, and was gone again to the kitchen.

Mel actually stroked Brad’s back—and said (but really to Jim, as if Brad were elsewhere, staring into the Earth, say), "It was something missing in the equation—/ knew it—she had her music and she had Jeanette Many who was fine as long as she was playing the viola, and she had Byron and Byron had Sarah when his mother didn’t have her dancing shoes on, and she had the others she talked to who appreciated her. Sometimes she had her way of narrowing her eyes at you as if she couldn’t see right, and running her hand down the side of her face like she was looking for a bite. And besides the friends, she had this town which she might have left at the time she and I met, and she had nothing much from me except she knew I’d always be here, be here longer than the Democrat—which wasn’t enough for her but what did she ever do about it?"

The results are before us, murmurs the interrogator idiomatically.

"It’s all right, Dad," said Jim.

"Is it?" said the father.

Margaret sang briefly in the kitchen as a drawer opened and slid shut and the refrigerator door made a noise. The front door came open, with voices, and here were Alexander, having transferred a pile of leaves from one place to another, and Bob Yard, who didn’t know what to do except say, "Havin’ a rest, Braddie?" And Brad raised up as if for air, or thinking about Bob’s voice. And the violin case lay shrined at the head of this ceremonial length, which had gotten longer, yes Brad had gotten almost longer, imperceptibly stretched by a motion contained in him. "Yeah, guess so," the boy whispered.

Mel said, "Any more news about the storm? It’s the pressure belt." "Yes, that’s so," said Alexander memorably; "air travels out of your high pressure area into a low pressure area, they say"—or words to that effect, and years later Jim told his colleague Ted so it came out funnier. Brad was groaning again, he rolled abruptly onto his back—God, first time in all these two hours—and cried in a creepy, embarrassing, slow cadence as if he were seeing something, and Jim heard the old stairs—which could have been Margaret, but she sang again in the kitchen and Jim knew she would be bringing in a black-and-gold wooden tray of chocolate milk in the tall tumblers of cloudy-blue, rough-rippled glass his poetry-quoting mother would make iced tea in. (What poetry? He didn’t really know; he had never asked. She would not ever tell stories about when she was young; she flipped it all away with her hand.) Jim listened to his grandmother bring in the chocolate milk—he loved her thoughts but did not understand her storytelling any more, for now he thought the stories had been true, though certainly some weren’t. But some were.

the finger tips of the Navajo Prince made a sound that the Princess taught to the Prince, but the sound flashed waves of danger through the hills and brought the gigantic bird-thing to hover hopefully above the moving bodies of the tribe until the cries of the Prince’s mother had their effect. His grandmother read him The Last of the Mohicans, which was this side of the continent north of here with woods and rivers for canoes, not the dry land of the Navajo Prince and his mother and brother and family and People that the East Far Eastern Princess visited by chance, until the piteous cries of the mother roused the lazing demons who got out of her cavity and molded themselves round the elder seers who claimed that the music of the interracial fingerprints fitting so subtly during dawn song and noon song were the real reason for the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head, the two sets went together into audible whorls, never mind that the Prince’s mother had had the hole in her head for years before the Anglo girl arrived, and these elders spoke of the famous long afternoon when the sun did not go down past the mountains of the sky but held firm at ten paces above the horizon and the specks of spirit awash around the famous matron’s head were briefly her ancestors telling us that the white Princess was related to the Prince so long as she did not return to her father’s nation of Choor but stayed here where three old Spanish ewes who had long forgotten the lambs birthed in the silent blizzards prospered in the Princess’s presence as she learned to weave but so slowly (with three spindles of lightning and one of rain) regaling the women with tales of swimming—so that they were reminded of the slower ways of weaving and the hard-won desert dyes they had once used and in the East Far Eastern Princess’s slow, clumsy learning relearned their own old slower ways before trading with strangers had pushed them to work faster:

until the Hermit-Inventor of the East, returning from further south, gave her not even the time of day but let her know, in the long-range glint cut by his eye, that he would meet her where her bird nested, she had better be there:

and the Prince’s mother with the demons still sucked terribly upward and downward complained that the alien girl had so befriended the ewes that they had not been butchered in their natural time, and the alien girl must stop writing her language-messages upon paper every morning and evening and must not wear her quillwork-decorated antelope shirt from the Cheyenne Germans if she expected the demons to vacate "her mother’s" head—for so the Navajo Prince’s mother related herself to the young girl for the first time— mother—so that the Princess, seeing the teeth and tongue of her adoptive Indian mother, recalled with a shock her own mother sitting up straight in a black-and-gold sulky-bare carriage breezing to church with her cousin the highly pleased banker-tenor who possessed a trotter as glossy and eager in its motion as any the race track would see—and sang in the Methodist choir—

—but this wasn’t the queen mother of the rational mountains of Choor, broke in the interrogator, sounding ye faint self-echo as if he hadn’t been tuned for a while. In New Jersey eider dey allow horses into the Methodist choir or dey breed singing horses!—

—until, having completed her day’s apprentice weaving too fast with her whorl-ended spindles three of zigzag, flash, and sheet lightning, one of rain streamer whirled with white shell and hearing the maidens whisking stone-ground corn flour, singing to their unborn children, she walked away like the visiting Princess she was, to her pony, and rode away to meet the Hermit-Inventor, who told her she was in danger, a hollow statue could hide her if she could reach it in time and let herself be changed to another form but it was a long journey but today was a once-in-six-hundred-years Window, open like a reverse volcana (as the hermit always pronounced it) from the sky if she might only be conscious of it: and though he, not the first nor the last of the Hermit-Inventors to be dismissed for unwarranted observations, gave credit to the Anasazi healer for supplementing his information with Owl Woman’s remembered songs and serving to confirm the Hermit-Inventor’s pilot construct of several layers of atmosphere—exactly two-sevenths as many years ahead of Teisserene de Bort, the discoverer of the stratosphere, as the man who claimed to have discovered jojoba was ahead of his time prior to being killed in early Salt Lake City.

And on this day under the enormous breathing of the bird, he told the Princess in the Anasazi’s language rather than his own more technoloon that she must act upon the future that afternoon:

Meanwhile, Jim felt on Brad’s Day that it was only like yesterday that his grandmother had told him how the Navajo Prince’s mother had died brimming with demons who had become more numerous and flowed together like crowds in future until those knowing elders staring down into the hole in her head saw less hole and more surface of teeming flume and a surface they would incredulously check by darting their heads around to see her face, for the fluid surface where had been the reverse fountain of her head top and where Owl Woman’s namesake the woman Manuel had applied oil of the jojoba bean to encourage reseeding of hair came to resemble the kindly storms that were her eyes’ insight and the large, nicely shameless cheeks like muscles to welcome you and reflect all you knew you could do. Which encompassed even marriage to a girl as alien to the Navajo mother as Harflex, that young noble of faraway eastern Choor, seemed far and familiar to the still not homesick Princess; until, while the demons talked louder and louder and the lady herself said nothing but wept, the impending union of the foreign, much-traveled girl and the Navajo son seemed to herald her thoroughly convincing death at the hands of demons who carried out their impulses suing for her energy more than her. Which they grasped no more than the medicine women who would not touch her or share out the clothes she wasn’t wearing during her curious period of death. And then her dying ended like a season when the noisy winds go away and the birds, if any, wing back reincarnating these same winds:

But the night the Princess left, thinking herself the cause of the Prince’s mother’s death, and the Prince left in pursuit, the demons returned to the wonderfully preserved head of the lady, and once more she suffered, lived, and, upon ceremonial occasions, including one remembering her son, whose much-sung trek around the core of Earth never came full circle, she made long noises unmistakably music to Indians and authentic to a Mexican spy openly out of work and a dark-spectacled German gun-and-honey importer from Chile who smiled as if it were his show and who, though tone-deaf, knew by heart her country’s eminence in music and by sight a Chilean lady whose daughter had become a zoologist and run away.

Why did Margaret’s account of this feel like it had been given only yesterday, when this was months ago in a dark night’s backyard? Doubtless because Jim put it in its place with the long afternoon when the sun did not go down because the rough lip of the Earth didn’t let it, as because, too, rifts in all these once speculative layers lined up by convergent pang of all or most of the gods flexing, for a second, one universe, to remind themselves of time.

—Did you have a mother-in-law like that?

—The Princess almost did.

—What about you?

—Not quite.

—What about your mother? (whose uncle in earlier New Jersey made. her a table every other year and her friend the banker designed a slick racing sulky double-size well a sort of little open carriage to show her off in).

—I was my own mother then, Jimmy.

Out West? The favored grandson, remembering on Brad’s Day, the day when the sun did not go down on time, and thinking what he’s missing today at school because this is only the second week and he hates to ask for even some beautiful girl’s history notes, finds in himself a thought as deep as two parallel thoughts—one, that he never did more than hear and appreciate Margaret’s "fish stories" yet knew they demanded questions, and from him, that he never asked; and two, that Brad, without knowing, has taught him they are brothers—no matter that here they all come, Alexander Granddad (eyes alive and taking aim on what needs to be done) and Margaret rubbing her damp hands on her apron, and Pearl W. Myles of all people, the high school teacher, a stranger, who, when she phoned the Democrat for advice and support, heard from Mrs. Many that the younger boy was having a fit on the rug and who had come at once, though a stranger.

What were the parallel thoughts? The interrogator, who has more than enough to do with his button, is thinking no less cheerfully, "Enough of this, it is of course deeply affecting."

He meant (for everyone has perhaps had a brother), do you mean "breather" asks the interrogator—Jim feeling brother to Brad for once: he could look right at him, anyway, without vomiting or wanting to liven up his pallid bony puss (mayhap seen snoring, of a night, when Jim, scorning the stairwell where no one was likely to be found to catch him, took to the roof, toeing the balsa-light slant of each personally known shingle as slow as but fast as one jump from window to grass).

(. . . to Earthward, murmurs incorrectly the interrogator, moved, his hand dreaming of that putative U-boat conning postwar haven from the Jersey shore 252-foot-length by 252-foot-length clear around to the long nation-coast of Chile, dreaming the more because he’s convinced it was created not to wait for the woman who owned a black towel who vanished into the sea, its surface, its clefts, its cells, its temperature, so that the interrogator’s hand slides relaxed over a button (don’t you know) momentarily juicing the grime off a suspect in the next room . . .)

(we infiltrate like angels trying to change and are broken in on by a young voice down the hall from a 1977 apartment in some articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and the voice is talking to the basso profundo but not about the //amto-opera warehouse gig thrust upon him, who gives off a delighted rumble now at the words "This weekend we’re going to play leapfrog in the asparagus bed, Popsy" accomplished by a clink which as Larry does not guess is a large jar of the basso’s down the hall in his apartment, his latest discovery, Clamato Juice!)—

Until there is nowhere to go except understanding: however, the division of sadness which was Brad’s way of shouldering brotherhood—"and crawls on his belly like a reptile," sounds the barker’s cry in the voice of more than one fourteen-year-old including Jim—left a less-known job of grief or action to the superior brother Jim, the study of which he found one day in his still teenage grandma’s Democrat "piece" on Mars, done when interest was at a height (August 18, 1892—"apogee," darts in the interrogator), but Jim’s interest betrayed itself in a quite foreign detail, it improved Jim’s study of his side of the grief responsibility (awkward words, but) also of how the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the Anasazi healer’s theory of the cleft by which the layers enveloping our neat fragment of the brother Sun, brother to others yet not to us who are a mere breakage become anxiously clear (through convergence of semi-explosive clays) and bent on becoming more, came periodically into line; and on that day, the Sun would not go down until those drawn by convergence of the many gods’ periodic effort to think one thought in common had had the chance to be found by cosms of this tearing or breakage of the Sun which, like ceremony, recalled that signal tearing one of many tearings or great breathings of this brother Sun when at the peak of breath or inhaled explosions of possibility that drop of fire blood split off, in love with, or expelled by, its own hunger for the void or to find what rein of force waited like a relative string arcing some bond unknown even to the cactus with its nesting eye and the birds that the winter wind becomes when it leaves: and the person who is struck by such reminiscent cosms of the Sun’s inhaled breath would find such purpose, at last, that she would start her life over as if either she had aimed inward to the center where the hells and rock-skinned saurs and river-rhines and the rock-skinned rhinogog and also the rich kettles of change tipped gimbaling this way and that upon the magma of a magnet that was not there, or her starts had been launched as secretly outward as her inexplicit "hello" to other worldlings in her 1892 Democrat piece when Mars, in opposition to Earth every twenty-six months, reached its regular fifteen-year extreme of opposed closeness—"hello":

amidst speculation engendering in the mind a wild longing to know whether people like ourselves live there and enjoy the hills and valleys and rocks and all the waterways of the universe, the rivers, waterfalls, even yes canals, and the eternal sunsets—they surely have enough moonlight! we would want to know if they were anything like ourselves and slept, eat and drank to live; and whether they knew anything of electricity and gunpowder or would like to know; and if they were going to have a World’s Fair

(the giveaway)—she would make a start "out of" no less than her future, or, in awesome fact, marriage to Harflex, the suitor, who awaited her presence,’ her go-ahead back along the shores of Choor: while the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the effect of these cosms of the Sun winging all instantly through this long window comprising in one long "point" all the single clefts in layers of breath embracing our own known world, the bodily senses of one’s given future: but Jim found later he had on Brad’s Day begun extending this material, having gotten mad at his grandmother—and maybe from the moment when Pearl W. Myles, his statuesque journalism teacher, appeared in the bereaved Throckmorton Street house, dark red paisley draped across the Chickering grand, a dust of English biscuits hovering round their sweet tin in a curtained dining room where a fortnight’s supply of Newark and Asbury Park and New York papers stared neatly stacked on a pulled-out chair, soap (Pear’s mild), upstairs flowers (fresh from Margaret’s garden which Sarah always accepted, while calling them "dead"), a nutmeg left to roll around the kitchen table (it might have been a brown Mexican jumping bean Bob Yard’s wife gave Jim after a trip to New York where she said it was the Italians who imported Mexican jumping beans) as cold as a dead turtle: the East Far Eastern Princess listened, and as she did so, the Sun began to tip into the horizon line of irregular mountains warped up toward the Sun as if (to allow the Hermit-Inventor his way of accounting for this strange afternoon) the axis had tilted so that this southwestern corner of the Earth became a pole. This explanation was no better than the Princess’s twin dreams the night of the long afternoon, nor the large turtle mouth painted upon the face of dancers in the snowy dawn of the year according to an outcast cousin from another people who carried water to the Anasazi twice a week though he was by now barely more than an occasional if intelligent fume given off by time’s inching root, which the Anasazi’s own thin mouth fresher than all the rest of him put together could be heard to tell, though with a softness audible only to those at a certain distance from him, not those as close as the Chilean javelina specialist Mena emerging before him upon the last in a series of ladders, her mouth painted white only by some love in her mind’s quest for the white-lipped javelina, not by ceremonial pigment, nor to the Navajo Prince when, long before Princess came along or giant bird, he knelt next to the Anasazi healer and took from him a Colt pistol, having at a distance of half a mile heard, moments before, the breath of the ancient healer telling how he had let his medicines take him for decades at a time away from his faithful and humorous wife and doting children only to find that one day they were gone across the space of one unending sunset which begot a double moon inside the Princess’s mind that night whereby she saw the Moon singly with each eye and dreamt that she was agreeing with a council led by the Prince’s brother that she would cost that young horseman "her" Prince his life.

And the trails he left, when she departed three nights later toward Zuni country (with its afternoon-long ramparts and nests of red cliffs), were not of cornmeal nor of crusts from her wooded memories of Choor but were only in her lover’s mind grown there by the thought of her womb hair and the embrace of her pale breasts, all such parts lost along the cells of his hand’s brain, bold as decision, humble as seeming-fact that’s beyond what idiots call sacrifice; and so he followed her.

We are such mingled growths, which the interrogator incorrectly remembers as Owl Woman’s words "I am running far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling," who has yielded his button (though to no one) for the moment and says "We" to us and sees our no doubt human matter here as a far cry from some center of information and political identification.

Well he may, for the Anasazi medicine man claimed that not he but his many hundred years younger colleague Owl Woman had sent the Princess the dream she came to him with on the morning after the Hermit’s interview with her near the eyrie of the giant bird: to wit, that having run hard all night to get to where she was to see what was vital to her precisely at dawn, the Princess was stricken by the dawn rays too soon, as if life won’t wait for you to find it.

When the Hermit, asked by her to prove the news about cosms bolting briefly through a vastly thin window in all our spheres, ran away to check again with the Anasazi, she knew she was being left alone. Above her, through the spruce and juniper pinon sat the giant Choor bird lessening in scale as if the great eggs, previously hidden, grew and the song or noise out of this still, animal peak atop what the Hermit named a volcanic neck came from the eggs as much as from the bird’s hunger.

"It’s all right," come the words from our own next room personalized by the presence of a multiple child fuguing some rock-folk against the polyfunk of old reliable homework—"It’s all right—It’s all right—It’s awwlll right" becomes a bright-eyed, quick quiet "All right!" so the interrogator who had almost forgotten himself asks if our multiple child has any Negro blood in it. We have at once answered, "If you have to ask, you can’t afford one," but the interrogator won’t smile this one off as an adroit addition to his command of our idioms . . . not even interrogative smiles ... we have put off his return to business for a time that is coming to an end.

So Jim, turning to nod to the major physical presence of Pearl W. Myles, who said, "I am so sorry, Jim; is there anything I can do?", did not ask her what she thought she was doing here—nor who was "we" which he’d half-heard instead of "I"—he wanted to ask her some good question since she was there. But Margaret reappeared and for a second looked like she would give the unknown Pearl Myles a social kiss.

So it happened (and he knew his grandmother knew) that the Hermit-Inventor of New York (who as we now say "lost a day or at any rate a sunset in there somewhere"), when he was still a mile horizontally away and, of course, sixty to seventy feet vertically down from the cliff apartment, heard the breath of the old Anasazi healer from further away than was logistically credible, and he knew he had heard before the thought expressed in words he hesitated to believe he was now hearing, particularly in the Irish accent—or Eiro-German—that he was in fact never able to prove came from him or from the late Anasazi healer.

Toward me the darkness comes rattling,

In the great night my heart will go out.

For the old man, on this afternoon that was a day later than the Hermit-Inventor reckoned it should have been, seemed dead on the Hermit’s arrival; and upon examination of all that was left by the Hermit-Inventor’s improvised standard of the state of tissues softly in the windless air waving where the old healer’s fine-worn neck had been, he had been dead a while, no question: the point was not what had happened to the body from the neck down (it had powdered at last and risen to a low cloud which Mena, the javelina authority, insisted took the form of the lowest noctilucent cloud ever seen, when those bright-banded phenomena had been observed at heights well above the stratosphere for centuries, indeed above the stratopause, mesophere, and mesopause—fifty miles—all of these officially undiscovered in Indian summer J893)—but the real question was how the last words of the Anasazi, born the year before one of the earliest described occurrences of his own pet cosmic window, had reached the Hermit-Inventor come to meet him in the absence of their utterer; indeed after the soft, successful exhalation of death.

But in their friendly way those last words had come bearing a memory the Hermit didn’t know was in him: the actual moment when a later incarnation of the Hermit suspected a magnetic break in the thin, precious, dangerous ozonosphere, the effects of which doubtless normally mutational yet the results not (for Margaret) death or sudden aging but an absorption of future: and at the margins of this swift vein of gold, blue, purple, violet, gray, and green seeming to incinerate the profile of ridge and crevasse, each peak and hollow reflected sometimes by a sunny sea of levitation, came a brainstorm—yes, providing with light financially unprofitable farms or whole hamlets at night by injecting some chemical, that in 1893 he could not name nitrogen oxide, into the appropriate layer (if you can find it in our junked atmo) round Earth’s sphere, a colossal halo to be sure, but a help to poor and insomniac peasants who might keep busy when they couldn’t sleep.

Yet Margaret, as she told Jim who never forgot but also seldom quite remembered how he reenacted her habit, stayed busy when asleep: witness the long afternoon, for the Princess dreamed a second simultaneous dream to go with the dream of the council led by her lover’s brother, and in this companion dream she saw into a grave but had no words, no mouth! for the valuable thing that waited for her and in the dream she went on to wake up and go through green trees and wooded water to find that same grave on a richly tilled hill and there was the grave which opened itself to her thought and she reached down to find a gun and an egg but not a bone or hair of that grave’s undoubted tenant and she was surrounded by the dustiest of desert Indians in this rich place who edged her closer to the grave telling her in unison (but she was the dusty one, not the Indians) what was no threat at all—that clearly she had lived the life of this dead person and now was this person reincarnate; but all she could feel, apart from relief that they meant no harm to her, was that these people from the southwestern desert were speaking beliefs other than their own, for they had no more belief in reincarnation than they had acquaintance with the cool, damp air of this hill with its eastern leaf forest, and when she gained courage to tell them this, they answered that she was the one who had told them about reincarnation; and when she felt awful and said, "You’re right, of course; what was I thinking of?" they swayed as one and, before she could reach for the egg or the gun, these people had resolved themselves into a fluid as thick as the blood of a worm and as sweet as the bean of a new world and had coursed into the grave which was then no more than the hillside—

—Revegetated? asks an environmentalist, setting up obstacles where none exist to a reasonable settlement.

That’s a promise, politicks the trained interrogator "brought in from Outside" who likes it so much he thinks he gon’ come back ever’ year with his growing family so long as there are at least the traditional mirages of water to support the summer swimming rites so common to his people.

A promise? That’s what you say to all your people prior to torturing them with doubts.

—re vegetated for sure over the long haul, avers the interrogator speaking English with a vengeance: but first we need to know what the journalist Mayn thought he was doing that February day in northern New Mexico, first trying to get a helicopter to fly him o’er Ship Rock and the Four Corners Power Plant, later rendezvou’ing at the Roc’ with one Raymond Vigil, an Indian known to regard Mayn as a useful publicist, even powerful, and a radical environmentalist-woman Dina with whom Mayn abruptly departed leaving his rented car to be returned to the agency in Farmington by the portly young energy-conscious Vigil while Mayn himself vanished south in the direction of Albuquerque, the voice of Vigil pursuing him like a back-seat driver.

The question is hard to believe; it asks so much and gives so little . . .

... but it is not done with: for the daughter of Mayn not many months later arrived at Utah International’s doorstep asking similar questions about strip mining the Indians, re vegetating the injured sky, and ascending the treacherously softish rock of the thirty-mile-adjacent ship to find out if, from there, one could see the ground-level lovers’ plate marking the intersection of four states, or so the unexpected postcard to the dusty correspondent-woman Lincoln, enrolled in one of Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops, revealed —though to someone who herself was of more interest to the multiple interrogator than Mayn’s daughter’s friendly acquaintance with the poignant woman Lincoln could ever be.

Like Mayn, whom he resembles at some angles though possessed of a killer talent which Mayn never acquired perhaps because he has had a will to no power during the formative years, unlike Grace Kimball, who had the will to power ("originally from," and envisioning Manhattan from, much further away than New Jersey), but never any interest in killing her fellow man, the interrogator has lately had to rely on the dreams of others, which if he can’t get them to vouchsafe to the next room’s acoustics, he has obtained a scan of, through surprisingly old surplus equipment captured from authentic media geniuses of earlier basal-research ilk whose mind-and-heart sensors got shunted off into projects for handicapped (which viewers of the century in question became anyway), shelved just like those secretly launched odd-lot orbital platforms, for the duration.

And it doesn’t check out.

Yet while we, the interrogator’s momentarily stoned trusties, have checked it out, the whole Wide Load kept moving, accompanied by its monster night; it won’t pull over just while we take time to reflect upon the obstacle it is until too soon it’s gone, damn damn damn. Yet we already remember, in whatever order, the things animate and admineral and postvegetal in that Wide Load passing in-and-with its own privately operated night, that is there’s a real unit being hauled and at least someone in it going through the motions.

The interrogator has his uses. He notes lies extracted by, well, pain. Like that the Princess had two dreams consequent upon the afternoon of the sunset-on-hold (the dream in which the council said she was to cause the Prince’s death yet migration soul-wise and the dream about the grave) when a third also was betrayed, the one she told the Anasazi healer and he ascribed to his radically younger colleague Owl Woman just before his death with its aural aftermath, in which she’s hastening to get to the place where she is to see something at dawn but dawn comes too soon, and her wad is shot. The interrogator also comes up with insights in the field of the comparatively social: such that we have found in countries with coasts an extreme reluctance on the part of the populace to accept the death of family members, much less their disappearance.

Yet Jim did not cry and carry on. And Brad had his "Day." Yet that is not what we mean. Brad did cry and carry on, and inconsolably, but, as the interrogator missed, Brad and Mel Mayn both accepted the death of Sarah: she wasn’t coming back; she had followed the strains of her violin conceivably, if you call that music waves.

Whereas the Anasazi medicine man left his thing behind him (if you call those words ‘bout "darkness rattling" thing) when he went on in largely powder form, or, more precisely, honest particle form, having, as the interrogator quickly and emptily notes, been for the longest time beyond life or death.

But on a day when Jim was just standing at the edge of the goddamn music room watching Brad cry and groan and swim and wound the air having saved up all this shit for a month during which Jim would wake early in his own room and stand up still asleep and look out the window then go at once to Brad’s room (which had the dormer let into it and, by the bed, a part of the ceiling came slanted down low) and wake him by touching his shoulder at the same moment as he spoke his name (he wore red-and-white pyjamas, Jim a T-shirt and jockeys), Jim was as able as the interrogator to pick up inconsistencies. But he had reached a time in his friendship with his grandmother when he wasn’t sure any more; and what happened to the Navajo mother when the Prince and Princess separately left, he after her, looked like some weird balancing-out that was like See what the future brings.

But his mother had been the one to say Go away where you belong, etcetera—hadn’t she said that? (yes, in the extreme quiet of her bedroom he had heard it)—yet she was the one who wasn’t here. He was falling, he knew, but he could not hit the floor like Brad. He fell forward, and maybe as much for both of them as Brad did this tragic bit for both of them when Jim couldn’t cry—why would he?—but this wasn’t all he couldn’t do.

He couldn’t ask Margaret any more stuff like what about that other egg, the shell splashed with the rainbow albumen of the first egg the lion ate before turning into the wolf whose entrails flared upon the sky. Anyway, Margaret was mad, because when Alexander said Lake Rompanemus was probably still warm and she said the wind was not, and Alexander agreed with her to keep her happy, she replied, And it’ll be hailing by sunset.

One thing: the Princess had felt the future that day: takes a while to digest, like Ira Lee the Indian halfback said in the huddle, she swallowed a pin when she was only nine but didn’t feel the prick till she was nineteen—

the day the Sun wouldn’t set and she knew she would leave: that was fact, to be believed; and so was the Prince’s mother coming back to life three days later and scaring the other, more administrative son half to death, on top of his brother having left pursuant of the foreign Princess who was traveling on her gift horse, not the at times unreal giant bird that ate horses and had left for Choor in the middle of the night.

But there’s an egg unaccounted for, except in that dream’s grave where the People, against the everlasting cannon, in the trench, in the trees, in the sky that is itself orbiting, express their sympathetic solidarity by resolving into a fluid neither cold nor warm pouring in, pouring in—sing it—which they wouldn’t do for Andrew Jackson in their Seminole forms in the Florida caper, getting shot, getting shot like the "red sticks" Andrew Jackson called them (and they were) and as ignorant of civilized football as were the skulls which Jim and Brad’s cereal box during summer, ‘45, said Indians kicked around inventing soccer. Until Jim, one day long after he had gone into facts with a vengeance delicate enough to be kept by him from himself though it’s just a job as the fact-oriented interrogator once slyly, ruefully said, dividing his chaired, nay tabled interrogatee-like data extracted from it into dead ends or rock bottom and further possibility, found the egg one day, did Jim, and didn’t know who’d made it up, him or Margaret. Except he did know that, before the afternoon of Brad’s Day ended upon the continuing cadence of Brad’s grieving breath, Bob Yard sounded off at last, after being subdued for an hour and a half, his shifty eyes moving soberly under the dark-chalked blazons of his eyebrows (but Hold it, offers the interrogator: Sarah, the mother in absentia, was possibly about to be found out, nicht wahr?, and so—)

No! No! howls a voice in the next room, there were those who knew about Brad and where he came from, and didn’t talk, and most others didn’t know including the brothers themselves, though Jim guessed. Not, however, that day at the beach when he wanted to throttle his brother but didn’t know why (read how).

Yes, cool and subdued for a long time as if the presence of death they were in was Brad’s, who nonetheless moved—Bob Yard at last angrily entered a dispute. Alexander had returned to report that the hurricane was not developing after all, although the window in one of the upstairs bedrooms rattled as if the whole house were being moved; and Pearl W. Myles, who had sat long-legged on a straight chair looking from person to person until Margaret, having cleared away and washed up, returned to inquire what was happening to Pearl’s classes at the high school today, said factually that she had felt the low pressure in this vicinity since early morning when she was having orange juice. Alexander said there were whole belts of pressure and Margaret, who was still peeved with him, said she didn’t believe a word of it, and Bob Yard in that abruptly deep, grating voice said, "That’s why air travels horizontal."

In the silence that followed this sound, Brad turned over and sat up and stared at Bob, who was his father but didn’t act it and the boy didn’t know. "You know what she said to me?" said Bob, with that brief power of news from beyond the grave: "She said the wind would just go straight ahead, straight out in a line, except the world is always turning, that’s what she said to me, and that’s why," said Bob—

—but Jim as suddenly (hearing Mel ask "Where’d she ever say a thing like that?") left the room and shut the door hearing Bob’s reaction to him and knowing that his own face was full and he wanted to stand alone in the hall, though Pearl W. Myles, with unimaginable presumption, at once followed him into the front hall and, in what order he didn’t know, put her hand on his arm or spoke or picked up the huge paperweight of heavy glass with newsprint embedded in it that wasn’t ever doing anything on the mahogany hall table with the mirror above it which she looked in because Jim caught her eyes widening at herself, then him—and at once he told her he didn’t know what she’s doing here and he went back in the music room in time to hear Bob say to Mel, Margaret, Brad, and posterity: "But I said to her ‘What a lot of stuff—they ain’t curved.’ "

And ever afterward Jim recalled, like the recovery of the Navajo matron with the demon-hole in her head, the blank breathless look of hate in Brad’s eyes that could not quite turn away, that is from the man he didn’t know was his father. And worth remembering, because Margaret left as suddenly as Jim had, and the front door blew closed behind her so one expected to hear her black shoes pounding the lawn, the walk, and a while later when Mel Mayn who seemed to care for Brad was sitting alone with him at the kitchen table having a drink, having let the paper take care of itself all day—most of the day—jim rode his bicycle up into West Main Street past the tall brown Presbyterian Church and out to the intersection with the highway leading in one direction to the shore and in the other past the race track to the gray capital city of Trenton and when he had continued pedaling freely south a mile, he turned in on the gravel of the cemetery where it was a challenge to ride and he would not cross the grass. And it wasn’t long before he saw his grandmother, as if the sound of his balloon tires on the loose stones had found her out, but if she looked sad, here in the place where she had put in place almost with her own hands a granite marker for the lost body of her strange daughter, she was engaged in such conversation with Eukie Yard, who had inherited the caretaker’s position from his cousin all too long ago, that Jim pretended to ignore them and passed among the neighborhoods of this place to the Mayn plot and his mother’s stone whose gray brightness said she was not quite there and whose newness needed the weather to fade it back into the realness of the other stones.

He was not sure what he smelled. It wasn’t cooking but it seemed like some simple food. He did not know what kept him from behaving like Brad. He could not believe what his mother had done. And also she had left her violin. Not to mention (he smiled to himself, literally smiled out loud) the kid insect all wiry and like a pampered kid when he never had been, lying on his stomach today with the violin on the rug beyond his head. God! There wasn’t any good reason Jim could see for her to have done this silent thing.

The marker showed she was either forty or thirty-nine; he was giving her for her birthday a necklace made of pale blue beads and little hollow silver bells, that Ira Lee’s large-eyed, tall, round-shouldered, lip-licking, single-minded, and unconsciously beautiful sister had made, because she had a book that showed different crafts and she was Indian and had visited a reservation in New York, and one in Pennsylvania where Margaret was interested in the women; Jim hadn’t paid for the necklace but he was going to get it anyhow. The breeze had blown away the rain which was on his wet knees, because he was kneeling with nothing to say.

He knew his mother shouldn’t have done what she did, but he couldn’t do any more than put his head on the wet grass and have nothing to say— not even Shit. It was hers, not his, the deed. He was going to miss varsity practice; he was J.V. age but heavy enough and he had run right through Feingold the senior guard whose father was a lawyer who commuted to Newark and who was (that is the son) supposed to make All-State this year if he kept his grades up. Feingold had a flat, splayed nose, not a Jewish nose (according to George the old man soda jerk), and liked bad weather; he really dug in and Jim had almost without thinking what he was doing run right through Feingold yesterday and a moment afterward didn’t know what he had been doing, except going for some point beyond the opposing backfield; and he was missing scrimmage today, wet helmets and somebody’s elbow numbing your lip—but thinking, always thinking; blowing on his fingers before a play to let Feingold think this was a surprise pass when Ira Lee was the regular passer.

Jim didn’t know how sick his mother’d been, and he knew other husbands and wives like the Bob Yards who yelled at each other. She had written a poem to President Truman about the atomic bombs but she showed it to Alexander who gave it to Mel without telling Sarah, and Mel was going to run it in the paper, print it as a surprise. But Brad told Sarah and she went downtown. Jim heard she ran all the way—and took it off Mrs. Many’s desk and left without a word to Mel who was at the far end of the shop keeping calm beside a press probably, and maybe nothing was said about it.

"Would you like a cup of—" tea, you’d think it was, but he had a blank, and in the blank rose and spread a substance beyond words— "and some cinnamon toast?" she asked him one afternoon when he had come into the shady house, heard nothing, and passed to the kitchen, sat down at the kitchen table. He heard his mother moving slowly like an old person or a naturally quiet person, woman maybe, slightly methodical, knowing though that Jim was where he was: and when she stood there in the kitchen doorway, selfish but not bad; dark, her eyebrows beautiful, soft warm curves—and sharp about the mouth as if she was keeping words inside, he realized that those words she did say weren’t words she got much chance to because he was out on his bike or at his grandmother’s.—"Eating grass or washing your face?" Margaret’s voice came out of the sky practically and he didn’t care if he was getting his khakis damp and rubbing his nose in the cemetery sod, he wasn’t crying (she knew that) and he wasn’t carrying on like his Brad today, and his grandmother, who had evidently finished her animated, probably administrative, conversation with the little fat man with the crew cut, Eukie Yard the caretaker, wasn’t talking to Jim like Mel did to Brad: and Jim stood up with rain from the grass on his face knowing she had been crude and sadly harsh, and he said: "I keep thinking maybe she’s here, but she’s not."

"You can be sure of that."

He wanted to say something awful, like "If they find her, this is where they’ll put her," or dumb, like "Least there’s a stone waiting for her." He said. "But it’s like there’s somebody here. You know?"

She seemed to. She knew he wasn’t one of the Sunday types.

Who could tell what he was feeling—that is, how far—which is—O.K. (he thought, and knew she thought)—just what’s the matter with all this pedestrian provincial background. But, observes the interrogator, who cares to guess at feelings? they are like dreams of surplus equipment. No, we answer, they’re thoughts that pretend to be stronger than the words we try them in.

"We"? we ask.

Who cares, the interrogator unquestioningly goes on, when we have proof of certain facts: "certain" not in the dubious American sense of an unspecified "some" but in the sense of particular certainties (he flicks his whole head toward the next room, but not as if there’s only one, and when we look back he looks like he would like to pick that nose of his but that’s our prejudice against political terrorism and its quiet linguistic routines)—facts (he goes on) such as that the Indian mother came back to life after her son the Navajo Prince departed armed for self-defense and magic but to give away when the time came with the very gun that the late Anasazi medicine man came into possession of through a spy who the night before the key battle of Chapultepec had won it by dubious play in a game of chance off a young Englishman who thereby regained his speech that had been lost when he had been questioned shortly before about an elusive German traveler’s map or abstract by Marion Hugo Mayne whose western diaries years later came into a distant nephew Alexander’s careful hands; not to mention, continues the interrogator exactly half obsessed by a new role he’s had thrust upon him (yet from him as certain as a shadow), a second fact that this Alexander is the still extant though now for many years widower grandfather of a man who, if it is the same James Mayn, on a bright day near the harbor when he lunched (where he often lunched) with two red-bearded, hungry, and distinguished economists, introduced a friend he happened to meet, a Wall Street oil analyst, to another accidentally encountered friend, a physician who was "in town" to discuss his accidentally deceased wife’s affairs with their lawyer, an intro which led like a suddenly slowed or detoured ray of light to a therapeutic contract between the oil analyst and the Westchester medicine man, who one day told a tale, guilty in its brevity, of a gambler who wagered in her absence his widowed, red-haired sister-in-law as if she were his wife and not his brother’s, and in the event won a powerboat in that card game which he then unloaded in a hurry in order to give up the tables and marry the lady; not to mention, continues the interrogator (being very slightly charming pacing simultaneously this and the next room which has ne’er been done before—with the rolling gait of a sailor), fact number three: it was only after her father had departed the Four Corners area that his daughter Flick entered it to extend her energy inquiries beyond that perfect Asia poison (Vietnam-related) dioxin in Michigan on a river that connects with Minnesota’s Mille Lacs where at an elevation of i ,249 feet above sea level another New York doctor’s Ojibway guide practices his tradition of apprehending tapeworms in order to fly them in the bodies of walleyed pike to opera singers who desire a dramatic weight loss, to the New Mexico power plant and Navajo Mine (so-called) featuring low-sulfur coal stripped from the nonetheless now not appreciably paler landscape to be turned into natural gas; and it was only after he had visited that Four Corners region—complete with as-yet-unexplained rendezvous with two very-differ-ent-as-to-sex-and-color /n-staters—that the correspondent-woman Lincoln grew interested in Mayn, and only after she grew interested in him that she joined an energy workshop also called Body-Self where by chance or design she encountered in the nude a woman who flatly asserted all men should always wear condoms yet herself gave only the illusion of being open with the other women about her husband—a husband whose sanctuarial foundation is set up to fund future finds in geothermal research, weather control without prejudice as to purpose, and many other areas such as Navajo and other Indian water-and territory-conservation legal strategy that doesn’t exclude inter-American (read even Castroist) advisory assistance.

How far need we bother going? asks the interrogator (meaning not "I" but "we," yet not only because he speaks in a higher voice having been replaced by his relief)—how far with feelings such as the boy’s or the grandmother’s or the bibulous grave tender Eukie Yard’s, when we have these other assembled facts already.

But Jim didn’t accept—i.e., live with—his mother’s suicide, while knowing that, on his knees or on his feet looking past Margaret at the glint of Eukie’s pint of applejack, he didn’t think her absenting herself right or wrong. She’d been sick with something, infections and fatigue, and she had never much talked to his father. Which Jim had sort of always accepted.

"I think there’s something here, you know," he said to his grandmother, resisting tears primed not by rain on his face from the grass but by traces of panic and relief in him that responded to the ground. And resisted "ending it all" by hugging her: her brown silk blouse, the black skirt, the medium-low-heeled black shoes (he can specify years later through memory that did not need to function then)—

—hugging her shoes, murmurs the interrogator in a now deeper voice whose sotto murmur is as from some partitioned distance which, by the ancient and modern modulus for translating terms of one problem into terms of another, accidentally rediscovered by Larry Shearson in (from his view) his hotel-like apartment house, sounds pretty intense because you don’t ask even the wonderful Amy to walk all over you (assumin’ she’ll even come near) nor even if you’re biking among a flood of pedestri- (read pederastri-, no paparasby-) terian traders horse-sucking you bike ‘n all like your own built-in vacuum, that feels (but only feels) irresistible, like the Mayn-to-Lar’-over-’n-out-por-trayed moonless Lake Rompanemus at night, off a familiar, rough-planked dock your feet alone see, or the next room’s door that wasn’t suppose to be open tonight)—

"There is something here," she said, her feet then so truly on the ground that Jim knew she didn’t go in for God while to be sure singling gods out of her memories and humor but never the whole ballgame as if youse gon’ make one sense of it all including—

—Let us say, adds our soft-soprano- (no, sobrani-) voiced interrogator, that a mother drowning herself on a windy day because she lacks the socialized sinew to remain useful to those who need her, who commits self-destruction through over-emphasis on happiness or sexual frustration or guilt, through a willingness to entertain rather than encounter the void of human—

"What do you mean, Gramma?" demanded Jim, "spooks?"—just as we, we, slow on the intake, say the same to the interrogator minus "spooks" and plus "Cuba infiltrating certain American Indian reservations through Anglo sympathizers intellectually bent upon not just understanding the Indian but keeping their culture pure (pronounced in the endemic Spanish, pooro), for do not Castroist advisers in desert powerboats have to be preceded by advance persons who are at least native American and know the "terrain"?

He looked at her across the specific blank, wet grass where his mother’s small ledge of headstone was. Margaret’s eyes grayer and grayer, and the light behind her like the sound of the announcer bringing the trotters up to the starting mark took her away from him but he couldn’t follow, and, to boot, she turned to look somewhere as if she heard the approach of what would finish here and everywhere a privacy she and he had always had. Though this was nonsense, for they could always laugh—for years afterward they could laugh—the Prince and Princess junk was behind ‘em; or they could laugh for a few years anyhow. And she said, Funny how Brad and your father accept it.

And then, so Jim dented the earth with the side of his hand, the sides of his hammer fists, he didn’t know what to call out or how; he hammered on the Earth hammering himself or someone else who might as well have been inside him back in or into shape and never said a word, while stupidly feeling that some drumming came up out of the earth at his summons and traced its smoke through him, employing him, ignoring him, maybe proving through this material experiment to have been so insubstantial that there’s nothing holding his mind back, falling forward then over the grave only to find that like a sprinter or a lineman he was leaning too far forward but the ball wasn’t snapped, the gun didn’t go off—but he didn’t fall forward except in mind.

"Yes there’s something here," said Margaret in that intelligent mellow voice after a moment; "it’s not your mother—"

"—/ know," said Jim rather quickly without feeling.

"—and it’s real, my dear, it’s real—"

"Yeah, yeah—" tired after Brad’s Day.

"My heart lies buried there," he thought she said, and it was hard to credit, so he did—tired after Brad’s Day—which in some bumping or winding in his ears he knew wasn’t yet over, like the spaces of silent, silent fact between him and what his mother had wryly specified, which he knew then and later he would have gone on to anyway "Go away where you belong" —yet instead of just doing it, departing Windrow like others leaving home and state, he’d been told to and by a mother who had then given him and his halfway brother the impression that she was the one who’d—and for that moment as his (yes!) apologetic (!) grandma spoke again, Jim the slicing halfback who had run through muscle-bound (actually nice-guy) Feingold like mere matter was in his mother’s shoes, no, well, his mother’s body or her soul at any rate, and he would just believe that she had done this even if he did not accept her—her death (because if he had, he would have felt her last breath clouding his way with or without words which were too easy to say and write down, which was what he wished to say to Miss Myles, fine wide mouth and geometric tits, for he would stick to facts, not make up news). And he got up off his knees and didn’t know what came out of his mouth until there it was: "Gramma, I’m glad Braddie cried and all. He had to. I didn’t feel like the door was closed on that room. He was a kid, I mean any kid; you know what I mean, Gramma? And I thought, he’s my brother and I don’t have to be crazy about him, he’s Brad."

And then, ‘75 he my brother, Gramma?" and Jim grinned at what had come out because of some story-like relief that got onto her whole face.

"Brad?" she said. "Brad is your half-brother. You guessed it, I’m sure. But your mother never actually told me till that day at the beach—the morning after that day. You probably didn’t need as much as Brad did, you know." Her face got the way it had been before, so what she’d said seemed to leave her with something else or the same old thing, though the fact itself of this blockbuster that had just come out (coupled with Jim not asking, Who was the father?) was easy to take; it was just there—surprising, ^surprising (y’know).

Said she was her own mother. Funny thing ever after for better, for worse, for still better: Jim hit Feingold too hard next day but did not pass through him, the attitude was wrong. He didn’t ask his grandmother (who had said, "Look who’s here"—though they were only approaching this part of the cemetery in their vehicles), Was Sarah then her own mother? His mom would laugh at that but you often didn’t know why, and in the cemetery with the rinsed grass all around and by the same token stuck to his hands so he would rub it together in his palms, he missed his mother, he loved her, she was off by herself but he was the one who didn’t go hunt her up—well, he did sometimes, but anyway, she was there and he came and went and knew her humor ‘thout paying much attention to it (life go on quat slowly—he had treated his grandparents’ house like home at eight, ten, twelve . . . Why? Oh, because it took you back to your childhood, was his mother’s joke, it reminded you of your little aproned mother hanging up underwear in the backyard breeze. At eight, to be reminded of your childhood?). She joked as no one else.

He certainly had been a kid—had played, disappeared all day; ran away once overnight ‘n applied for a job in Englishtown at a dairy; and his grandma wasn’t exactly a little aproned person. His mother, though, was not quite so tall, which was surprising because of Alexander too, and she was a little fuller, squarer, though not strong-feeling, that is, to look at, and, if you could catch her, see her, she conveyed this in the curve of her slow sweep through the rooms of the house, where, like Margaret, to do a day’s work in two days she paid the shiny-black little indestructible girl from "collard-ville" literally on the far side of the Jersey Central tracks whose name was also Margaret; but Sarah never worked along with her and never checked up on her, though Margaret did—and in Sarah’s house. Why I thought you’d gone home, Margaret, said Sarah, which made little Margaret laugh and laugh, sucking without many teeth on a cherry pit from the backyard.

Leona Stormer who had married an older man who had made her pregnant, a doctor who had known how to—and she’d gone away to Illinois where he practiced—came back and Sarah came face to face with her after years and years, in the cool-tile-floored drugstore on a day as hot as uptown downtown. Sarah had burst into tears, Leona had smiled. Just then Jim appeared, whom Leona had never set eyes on even when he was a baby. Sarah started laughing and crying. Jim found two things out. One was that his mother as he’d suspected really did say odd things: she said to Leona, It isn’t that I feel much for you, you take me back that’s all you do but— Thanks! said Leona, pretending to be a bit irritated, which she was— But, said Sarah, that’s a lot to make me do. Thanks, said Leona, and didn’t cry, though Jim’s impression was that she wouldn’t have, or as he thought back on it years later. But the other thing Jim found—was it accident that he had run into his mother downtown? and he imagined that at eleven or twelve he had been married and working to support his family and had happened to run into his mother (Oh hi, Mom, how are you doing?)—but yes, the other thing Jim found was that he wasn’t embarrassed by her, by what she said to Leona that time in the drugstore. He had observed this woman Sarah who happened to be his mother, a surprising woman, interesting, warm to the touch and would even hug him though he never saw her really touch his father, or was it the other way around?

But Jim and Sarah left each other kind of alone, that is in the good sense, but then the day came and he thought of all the times he had missed, that is, you know, the chances: to do what, to ask her things, like Dick, who used to ask his father, Why get married? or, Did fish suffer? and whose father died in the middle of the night when Dick was out camping with the Boy Scouts (smoking his first cigarette). But not to just ask her things—no, to be in the same understanding room together.

(What crap!) And what was he doing there that day in the drugstore when she ran into her old school acquaintance Leona? Well, while we’re all here, might’s well ask what was he doing under the porch that other day? "What doing, Jim?" tiny tot Brad would ask arriving softly in Jim’s room and Jim didn’t speak to him but didn’t tell him to go away: oilin’ my mitt; readin’ a comic; seein’ which cards I’m gonna swap (baseball cards—the stars in the flesh, square-jawed, at ease). Oh, said tiny tot Brad clearly, softly.

He would be allowed to stay if he didn’t mess around with the cards. Jim gave him one to look at, a duplicate, and Brad put it down on the floor carefully, but he watched Jim instead. Well, don’t look at me, Jim didn’t say.

Till one day, Brad’s Day, Jim looked at Brad, and looked and looked at him on the floor in his short pants, his legs lengthening, till he’s glad not to look any more; where do you go from there? your bike, your bike with balloon tires mashing the gravel so Margaret across the cemetery saw him before he saw her and Eukie looking (Jim had been told) like Winston Churchill. And where’d you go from your grandma’s fact called forth by your crazy question Is he my brother, Gramma?

"Well, look who’s here," she said matter-of-factly.

The vehicles parted wildly as they entered the gravel patterns of the cemetery drives. The Mayn Pontiac contained Mel, who embraced the wheel, his head close to the windshield as if to see better, and Brad, who sat back with his tough insect’s elbow out the open passenger window. The noisy-bodied Ford pickup truck had followed until they all got past the stone posts of the gateway, then it veered along another gravel way so Jim, who was at once on the move himself across the grass, could just about hear Bob Yard talking and Pearl Myles laughing and exclaiming, but the two vehicles got to the golf course side of the cemetery almost simultaneously, and Jim, who was walking away toward the caretaker, Eukie Yard, and later remembered a dog barking out on the road, heard Miss Myles, on removing herself from Bob’s truck, tell Mel she was shocked to hear (which Jim knew meant the projected termination of the newspaper but he didn’t hear the end of her suddenly respectful sentence). Eukie stood off against the lintel post of the Vandevere mausoleum wearing one of his—maybe his only—large and voluminous garment like what Churchill always wore. Jim went over there and right up to Eukie with his dirty old crew cut, red cheeks, gray chin, and asked quiet like if Eukie would give him a slug of that applejack (CT never had ‘ny apple, is it strong?").

Eukie bobbed his bald, crusty head in assent or turning his eyes somehow down into the places of his great olive-green garment and the bottle was in Jim’s hand before Jim could ask what Margaret and Eukie had been in conversation about. He could just punch Bob Yard for upsetting Brad, back home, but why did he think this?—for Bob hadn’t upset Brad. In a moment Jim was both more with his "host" and way beyond him, the effect of the fluid was a burn at first, then a worm coiling gently over his bodily structure outlining his skull-mask which there in the cemetery he saw he had looked forward to.

"We’ll piddle along with the job printing, but we’ll get a good price for the Democrat," he heard his father saying far away. So the paper was being sold to someone, Jim thought idly; yet it was not going to come out every week any more. "Your wife," a respectful voice was heard muffled by the length of the day, by the grass, by the cushioned distance of this stinking pleasant place, where an impromptu thing was going on, secret each from each of the persons there "your wife was sick ..."

No connection: it’s been in the works for a year and more; her death had nothing to do . . .

"Damn," said Bob Yard; "damn it to hell." But Bob himself, he had been affected by Jim’s mother’s death. You might not know it, because he just went on with business, and him and his wife went to the Harness for dinner out on the Matawan road twice a week and drank a snootful and laughed all through the movies, no matter what, or went to sleep in the back row. Margaret didn’t move, as if she’s waiting for a word to set her going, or a funeral that might come from the four persons clustered near the headstone. Jim, off by the Vandevere mausoleum, took another drink. Eukie breathing heavily said nothing, while Brad, whose Day it had turned out to be, stood at the undug grave and his mother’s stone. He said, "What do you mean ‘Damn’?," and Bob, who was not nice but was good company, said threateningly, "Listen, Brad—" who retorted, "Well, my mother was probably right for all you’d know. I bet the wind does curve—"

"Listen, kiddo—"

"Bob" said the unknown foster father.

"Listen, little Brad, you’ve been the center of attention," said Bob, "but you ain’t the only one."

"Bob, you simmer down, the boy’s got a point—"

"How’s it sitting?" came the murmur in Jim’s ear as if nobody was next to him where he stood at a distance from the cluster by his mother’s memorial. "You better step in ‘n defend your dad." It was, of course, Eukie the caretaker speaking, but he didn’t ask for his pint back, and Jim just knew there was another in that giant suit.

"Of course the wind curves," said Pearl Myles like a speech or song, and if the latter then ‘twas no bird ever seen in that landscaped acreage; "you’re all of you right: the wind bends round the curve of the Earth, the Earth’s gravity draws the wind—isn’t that it?"

But who is remembering all this? stabs the interrogator, himself again; or, better said, what use are the family facts to the abiding subject of the grown journalist James Mayn’s activities? both in the seventies and in relation to folk drawn into the interior or the meaningful margins of Grace Kimball’s workshop carried on naked, with visual aids, "glass, rubber, plastic" (a modern variant of an old game played with hands), and in a living unit rented as residential within the articulate structure we have gradually seen built up by partial pictures, accommodating (on faith, perhaps) a multiplicity of small-scale units, when in reality Kimball takes money from her workshoppers and is even now planning not only Eros, a nationwide system of women’s health "houses" which will serve fresh foods subject to selective boycott and which will aim at further rearranging man and woman in terms of checks and balances by supposedly establishing healthier and more permanent separation between the sexes, but Kimball is also contemplating workshops for men—which will require a compulsory minimum nudity about the genitals hopefully spreading to other areas of the body including the feet, which contain wonderful tangled and stalled powers, and the teeth, the cleansing of which she proposes to instruct by means of an imported servo-oscillator, if the assembled members will ever stop betraying themselves with talk called input taped raw into Kimball’s abundance bank where it is always retrievable though you might have to skim off the crust to get to the cream which in turn includes the lengthy conviction lubricated by repetition as by any good commercial shortening (yet far far from her home, her adolescence, some solace she is coming from that no one will find in her famous fuck-your-audience auditorium a purgatory to tell how she saw through guilt, manipulation, universal addiction) that the asshole, sensitive zone that it is, should be upgraded as not only the easy out that it has traditionally been but as a joyful entry as well, which can be neat to a degree that the person is a really neat person without respect to age or shape or size or color (of genitals, that is, at this early stage when they are all that are exposed of the person who is brave enough to commit himself to the achievement of "personoia").

"That wasn’t it," said Jim’s newly discovered half-brother Brad to Miss Myles, whose handsome scale fitted that of the stonework in the Windrow cemetery, though it might have been lost on Brad, who pondered the mere stone marking his mother’s undug grave; "she said—"

"—well I was the one that heard it," said Bob, staring across the gravestones and spruce bushes at Cousin Eukie and at Jim, who could seemingly hear what he could see an actual face and mouth say, no matter how far, maybe, except when a vehicle came along the highway which was about a football field away from where he stood.

"But you didn’t believe her," said little Brad, "and even if I hear what she said from you, I believe her, and—" he raised his finger profoundly and shook it at Pearl Myles, who taught high school—"Mom meant—I know what she meant—the Earth turns and it pulls the wind sideways."

"Well, I don’t see it," said Margaret; "the wind winds up at a different latitude because the Earth turned while the wind was moving; I heard of a person who could actually see latitudes but couldn’t quite see the wind. What happened to Alexander? Did he go back downtown?" (Not that the gathering here was a regular month-and-a-day observance, it had just happened; and she turned to see Jim take some steps toward them. A hand touched him and dropped off; he was drunk.)

Miss Myles said, "You’re convinced—?" and there was an authority in the in that rose and fell in half an instant that sounded like she wasn’t thinking about wind any more.

The hand dropped off? inquires the Interrogator with a humor of new pride in his sense of the idiom of our history.

Jim called to Bob Yard, who hulked with subtly gentle animus with his hands in his overalls, that he should leave his brother Brad alone—what was everybody on a day like today doing getting mad over nothing?

Brad said (the little shit), "What day?"

Henceforth, though never again observed, "Brad’s Day" was what Jim plainly meant. Bob asked who needed a lift, Jim turned from the beseeching eyes of his grandmother who was for once in their lives at a loss; and Jim saw what he had declined to ask Margaret: who was the father of Brad? And like a visit to the future he saw that the feeling the drink gave him was just sustaining in order later (when it wore off) to enable him to belie the feeling that had moved him to ask Eukie for a drink, yet now turn to him and ask, "What was my grandmother out here for? what was she telling you here all alone?" Only to hear Eukie, whom he couldn’t hit any more ‘n he could slam—though, mind you, not scared to slam—Bob’s face, say, "You got something on her?"

Facts come in their time, reminds the interrogator in a minor mood; if not now, then in time to come (he smiles at his English and as if caused by this lieutenant smile a shriek appears in the next room, of discovery or of pain yet maybe out of both sides of the mouth), and most curiously facts are the future of their absence where that precise absence is in questions here and now. You hear that call—

—read shriek, we urge, not call, as if he were not one of us, this Interrogator—

—O.K., shriek, he concedes—but there was and will be again a sage in southeast Asia, in the southwest of the United Conditions of America (or States, literally) or among the current urban Boston Unitarians, who say (a la Tao), "E’en though one’s held as a slave, one need not let the external imprisonment bond the free mind within; O.K.? Therefore, feign insanity— but hold to one’s true sentiments."

The shriek came again, like fact. The shriek was not a person. It was in lieu of a person, in lieu of a silence faultily designed to extend the putative person’s inability to answer the question put to her, if it is a she, by the interrogation process: Did songs by her carry coded advice to kill their recipients upon receipt? did the code tell which Cuban refugees were to be contacted as having been in fact sent by Fidel, the Cuban king? The singer-composer, having answered with silence, has next tried to sing her answer, which is her own song but out comes that horrendous shriek (more to come). But that was a woman, what do you expect?, they are more strong than men, hence make mas noise (read news) like Jews disagreeing yet we have in support of the regime agreeable Jews too, whole families we are glad to report.

Whereas to answer Eukie’s question, we had a boy, fifteen years old about, and strong-legged if a manly young drunk thickened by the real turf of his home cemetery; and we already remember that where do you go when hit by death? a hard act to follow, where do you go from that fact, if it is a fact? and where do ye go from the fact thrust like a bodily part to play, to wit the fact that Brad is your half-brother, which isn’t so bad, not so bad at all, because it isn’t as if you were adopted, which Dick discovered on the day of his father’s funeral from one of his fellow scouts (who had come to the church in step as a unit, as the patrol they in fact were) and a moment later in a stupor of what felt like embarrassment asked a fellow scout what he thought it felt like to be just ash though still living—

—No; Brad’s half-brotherhood, I could handle that, the newsman was heard to say—and I guess Brad didn’t completely fall apart that day, it was an amazing piece of behavior, that’s all, and then it was over . . .

Funny, said senior journalist-colleague Ted in the sixth decade of the century in question, a blockbuster like that, it’s almost easier to handle than . . .

—than what? asked the Chilean woman Mayga, stepping down from her stool and putting a hand on her red pocketbook, and smiling at Jim and Ted with such affection and neutrality Jim wanted to give her a present as if that would complete the event, like the last fact.

—than being told by your grandmother, said Jim (feeling some palpable unlosable sleaze spread slowly in their direction down the long bar from that character Spence who was listening as openly as he was not looking), that you didn’t need the kind of attention that your brother did—

—or a fight that you’re not sure you want, said Ted, who knew Jim but had never heard the future that Jim had confided to Mayga who in turn had told Ted, but hadn’t told, or had chance to tell, Jim, her special friend (though they met in all only half a dozen times in ‘62-’63), that she had a sinking sense returning home to help her husband as if giving up her job here in Washington were the start of some long fall.

And Jim wasn’t sure what he wanted, with applejack of which he suspected there was yet another pint in Eukie’s voluminous suit heating Jim’s thighs and chest and wildly thickening the hair in his eyebrows, and a wish to get clear of that place and even, for the moment, of his grandmother’s look that went through him to be met behind by Eukie’s words which were an inflated shadow of what world there was.

"So what if I have?" said Jim, not knowing what he meant except if he "had" something on Margaret it was the age and experience he had reached that could turn away from her stories and still want to know what she was doing with them beyond for years holding the attention of her favored grandson whose mother apparently didn’t tell stories. But Eukie’s question—well, it sort of smelled: because you don’t have something on your grandmother; you don’t. And he didn’t say, My mother’s another story—for Eukie wasn’t entitled to hear that from Jim, ‘cause who the hell’s Eukie?, as Jim walked slowly toward the group composed of his father, who had his hands in his old seersucker trouser pockets and stared at the plot of grass as undisturbed as his wife’s permanent absence, and of his brother Brad, who said to Bob Yard he was sorry, it was just that (and Bob raised a hand gently and smugly and said, Sure), and Pearl Myles, who took a tiny pad from her pocketbook and made a note, bent slightly from her statuesque height—Jim, as he moved, not knowing what he’d do but standing toward the dumb future as he walked, until he reached Margaret; and to her he said, "You said there’s something here. I believe you, but it’s not my mother and it isn’t any spook." He wished he could turn some answers into questions—answers off there in what the cosms of the hanging sun did to the Princess, but he settled for Bob Yard having a crappy attitude, and he went to Bob then, his father Mel shaking his large, square head again and again the way one might cry, but Jim couldn’t walk through his mother’s—for Jim just knew—one-time secret amour (as which this after all not unduly hairy or unwarrantably swarthy person was, horribly incredibly but had they kissed?). So afterward Jim thought he had gone around him. But no; Bob had given way. Jim had told him, "You don’t insult my family." Bob had stepped back (he didn’t do that ever)—and to the side; and, dividing the unknown with young Jim, Bob grinned and then cut off the grin, though not because he knew what Jim was about to do. Which surprised everyone and with, for Jim, a surprise within the surprise which covered the larger asininity of what he did.

Which still was fact, and people saw it happen, saw him seated "running" away when he had not known how to drive, he had only seen others do it.

He loved his grandmother more than his mother. But no he didn’t. And shit, if it was true in these stories that delayed and delayed, that the fingertips of the East Far Eastern Princess when they were met almost exactly by those of her beloved, inquiring Navajo Prince printed a sound so beautiful to her she had to show it to him but it spun slicingly upon the membranes of his sick mother’s mind so she yelled and hurt so badly the elders declared the music of the original source of the painfully uncomfortable hole in her head was a punishment for wandering into the mountain when she was with child —why then Jim would one day find out for a fact that the Princess, whose father, like an early gubernor of New Neitherland personally known to an earlier manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York, claimed that his people had taken scalps (because smaller and easier to handle than skulls) for ages before the Indians got the idea: which they must have borrowed, shall we say, from Choor—the Princess, to continue, had whorls on her fingertips while the Prince had a high percentage of arches which when joined to hers created cascades of sweetest friction—so the breathing Hermit-Inventor would have written down the tones had he not been most agreeably disputing with the fast-fading old Anasazi healer the relation of breath to wind and flesh to cloud, taken so much further on his own by the otherwise skeptical newsman James Mayn, who could not trust but could not abandon Margaret’s "histories," that once upon a time reporting these histories in a future world which encompassed his own timely children, boy and girl, at one warp and, at another, a libration-point space town free of weather and conveniently reached from Earth by Matter-Frequency Modulus doubling up two persons into one, Mayn could not tell if the tribal medical society specializing in removing bullets were Zuni, in the Zuni region where the Princess, with the Prince pursuing her, passed to the south soon after they left the Navajo outcrops and dry sheep grasses and bands of horses. Later the pursuit placed its hopes in some known river such as the Susquehanna or Juniata, above which (unprecedentedly low in the sky) one night early in 1894 the Navajo Prince, the Colt revolver he would give away when the time came loaded but no protection against his having lost again the trail of the woman he followed and whose dreams he had shared up to but not including her last three before leaving the site of the Long Afternoon, saw, smelt, and even, like his brother’s grandson Michael whom he never knew who in 1943 carried coded on his person in the words of his own curiously exact Navajo tongue an American radio message which saved a thousand lives, heard the sough and song and veritable humor of a low night-cloud the Prince identified at once as having been the Anasazi medicine man or a goodly part of him, knowing then, too, if only for a riddling instant, that, whether he was a giver or taker, if he did not turn and pass back across the land to his own people he would be childless like a woman.

But it was Brad who proved childless, though only in the Interrogator’s genetic sense, for Brad and his wife his high school beloved who was possessed of the faintest dark down in a curve of the small of her back, adopted three children before they were through, and were at once adopted by them. Brad, who on the day he was revealed to Jim as only his half-brother and grieved from nine in the morning to nearly three that afternoon for the mother whose death he accepted, jumped through this strangely overdone act of grief in Jim’s mind from subhuman occupant of same-home space to full-brothered divider of such commemorative labor between the two as had never been spelled out and never was again, except in James’s very life.

As not even he much knew except in flashes of past connection meaningless as that between the Navajo Prince’s sudden departure and his mother’s miraculously coming back to life, unless it was the young Princess’s clandestine prior flight that did the trick.

Did Jim grudge his newfound brother Brad nothing after that? He would surprisingly pitch in unasked and help Brad build a backdrop for a school Shakespeare play when Brad fell behind and his friends Bernard and Mark forgot and didn’t show up; Jim—while Brad frowned like a bloodhound puppy—would help him with math before Brad had a chance to speak to 4 ‘their father," who was going to invest sixty-some thousand dollars in General Electric after the sale of the paper whenever that came true, and lived, indeed day to day, to see value enhanced; and Jim, transcending fact, would tell Brad how on Brad’s Day he had taught himself almost without thinking to drive along the weedy shoulder of the blacktop playing it by ear and only once funnybone-jamming the indestructible transmission of Bob Yard’s surprised pickup truck which felt like a very wide bed behind you as you swung and rambled rattling down the road that passed the garden of the dead where he sometimes imagined his mother’s ashes, in lieu of her moldering body—ashes in a cylinder he had heard, and in his daydream inserted at night so the grass sod hardly blinked—till one day he saw the standard container, and it was a regular oblong box not any golf-hole-type cylinder or whatever the time capsule was that they buried at the World’s Fair with a picture or was it a lock of hair of Ann Sheridan, the Oomph Girl with a beautiful smile and a fast answer.

It was a fact that, the year after Mayn’s friend Mayga, back home in Chile, lost her life (whether or not taken by one of her two male companions along a cliff path above Valparaiso harbor, but almost certainly not given by Mayga), a minor State Department functionary named Karl wore an automatic pistol under his jacket during the emergency "Hot Line" discussions in Geneva; and a fact that an annex to the agreement called for two duplex circuits, one a tele-wire telegraph, the other a radio telegraph, plus two terminal points with telegraph teleprinter—though Mayn’s daughter Flick who heard about Karl many times but never met him doubted that he would have gotten into that room in Geneva armed.

Mayn was not brilliant and was perhaps barely average in math (which had less than nothing to do with his encouraging his wife to do the income tax with AP pencils he brought home); but he found himself nonetheless or all the more fascinated by such mysteries of ballistic deflection as the path of a shell fired nine thousand yards by a capital ship in World War Two that missed by a hundred yards to the right, even after all the obvious allowances had been made. He did (over a drink) plot the curved course of a projectile to be fired out of a totally collapsible and degradably exportable little ‘‘ system" from a roof in a tree-lined residential street of northwest Washington, D.C., where he shared an apartment for a time on Kalorama Road, to a target area on the White House lawn, and wondered why it had not been tried.

He was less fascinated than fond of that nuclear incident in which one weapon, through blast or radiation or heat or what have you, is "totaled" (we were later to say) or neutralized by another weapon belonging to the same country. (Ted and Jim were having a good laugh at the Defense Department name "Fratricide" for this type of incident one night at dinner when they received almost simultaneously long-distance calls, Mayn from his wife five hundred and more miles north who was moved by a luminous sunset across a lake and had brought the phone out to the screen porch to prolong what she saw and share it with Jim—Ted, a call from his former wife to tell him his two daughters had driven the car into an urban ravine the night before—the night before!, might as well say "last month"—and one of them had lost her little finger—"Fratricide" was the official name they were laughing about and playing variations upon when first the waiter came to inform Jim, then the owner of the restaurant came and said Ted had a call.

I need to be alone, abruptly retorts the interrogator (read aborts) glad his "interlocutor" (electrical jargon) is wired to the chair in the next room, not this; you can (his retort continues) lose touch with your feelings, engorged with fact like a mosquito or a penis con came (that is, with blood, in Spanish, he adds, instinctively testing us to see if we’ll admit we know that came means not blood but flesh as in "fleshed out."

. . . boring, as boring as family life yet not so moving, not so rich; for the current events of fam-life are richer than a lump of uranium; interesting because boring, which is not a paradox to wake the Interrogator, such as, that the reasonings which are our history’s twin valve for keeping abreast of itself concluded at the pointed end of the ABM decade that anti-ballistic missile systems for defense of city and family would step up the arms race, whereas ABM for defense of military strategic bases wouldn’t at all escalate us.

Wake? did we say—as if a part of us woke up, or didn’t. A part of us that if it were not there would have to be encountered. Gibberish, softly calls the Interrogator from sleep, but dreams two pistols with one source not one with two. He is being watched by many in his and their sleep. A singer, for one, who has to think off of both sides of her tongue and knows she has been seduced yet maybe to be a new Judith to this mufti warrior finely furnishing her king-sized bed; he is half-covered, up just to his knee, and she passes her mind’s hand over that knee and becomes that knee so that unknown to this sometime interrogating lover of hers who is a fellow national (though strictly she carries a Swiss passport), she looks back at herself from that knee and can’t believe what her ribs and fingers and mouth and blood have done, she sees her life all summed up in one damned minute (but which one?) and, back in herself again, leaving the knee where it is, she sees through the skin of this Chilean naval intelligence, and though she hears us of whom she is a part whisper Holofemes, hollow furnishing, hollow furnace, she knows he is quite real and is possessed of myriad tissues too fine each in itself to allow space for hollowness.

And while he sleeps on, her father is surely awake under house arrest thousands of miles from here controlled by the system this lover represents here in New York where he has asked her more questions than she wants to answer yet has given her more attention than would her potential executioner, and she believes he loves her and does not think her a traitor (but is he right?), and she wonders if she could interrupt this life of his as he apparently might interrupt the life of a friend of hers though exactly why may remain unclear except that the friend, an economist who was in the previous government and was living very quietly here with his wife who is still more a friend of hers, never stopped analyzing the fascist regime, or being the man he is has not stopped thinking. Has she stopped thinking, a famous singer highly visible?

Singing can seem an alternative to everything else, to thinking and to consuming life; and an alternative to (in the guise of) love. And yet to have been your lover’s knee for a brief breath of time recalls what we, even we, can’t quite bring ourselves to think upon while inertly we too move among self-righting, self-wronging systems, themselves often non-inertial.

"Interrupt? Interrupt?" murmurs the Interrogator, from his inertial sleep system. "Do not think our old-fashioned electricity couldn’t, if we told it to, attack both sides of our mouth that you speak out of: your words interrupt a life might mean break into—into a house or other sealed container or broadcast—or mean stop, as in thief or time, or heart-beat breath-flow (as we say in strategic forces training). So what is it going to be?"

It looked like the dumbest joyride there in the cemetery to take Bob Yard’s pickup truck and interrupt Brad’s Falling-Apart, or interrupt its conclusion (which was Brad-Together-Again, at graveside); but Jim turned right at the stone gate to his surprise, and heard the motor whine upward to be shifted and at that instant he nearly ran down someone’s collie itself spinning round and round at the edge of the road ready to race him, and by the time he was past the dog he found he had stepped on the worn-through metal of the clutch pedal and shifted gears.

And a mile down past the golf course and a brown field of strewn corn stalks and a two-horse trailer all by itself and a couple of narrow frame houses, he decided without warning and without checking behind him to turn around, and he needed to shift down after he stepped on the brake but, upon swinging grandly round from shoulder to shoulder so he felt in his buttocks just that first shadow of tipping, he found in his mirror if not in some new weight that a boy about his age had jumped out of nowhere into the back, a stocky boy without a shirt or (Jim later thought) shoes who’d been working in the sun all summer and had a prickle of stubble around his chin and on his upper lip, maybe the son of some indigent piners back in the woods around the lake (that the Democrat ran a piece on "the problem of" about once a year); and as Jim skidded his rear wheels completing the U-turn so he’s headed back toward the cemetery, he found he had shifted down without thinking.

And when the stocky kid, his hands braced upon the side of the truckbed where he sat, looked comfortably back down the road at their dust like he didn’t care where they were going, Jim without thinking leaned the wheel to turn again, reaching the brink of the ditch this time so he scraped gravel and dirt into it from the shoulder and this time thought about shifting down but didn’t kick the clutch pedal quick enough and the transmission screamed; but by then he was turning again and by the time he was ready to shift up, he looked in the mirror and the kid wasn’t in back any more, Jim had shifted O.K., but a little too soon. The kid wasn’t in the road or anywhere to be seen.

Jim braked. He looked back through the cab’s rear window while opening his door with the stuck handle. He stood on the running board surveying the ditches and fields and the woods a half mile beyond: but the kid was gone as if Jim’s violent maneuvers had thrown him away into the air.

But he slowly turned the truck again to head it back the way he had come, toward the cemetery, toward town, his first driving ever and never taught, and then he did see his fugitive passenger. He was striking across a field behind a little yellow frame house and Jim waited to watch him go through the fence at the far end and enter the woods without once looking back. He wore dungarees with side pockets down the leg, and his shoulders surged as he went along. Sure he would have taken a ride to town but, swung off the truck’s turning circle, he found himself aimed toward the woods, which was O.K. also. Jim tasted applejack in his throat. An old school bus passed him, shading the white line, four or five kids inside, farm kids. Jim wondered how his grandmother had gotten out to the cemetery. They were all waiting when he carefully shifted down like he’d been driving for years and turned left, in through the gate, and rode the clutch to the exact spot where Bob had parked parallel to a low curb half-obscured by grass. They were crazy, standing there as if they would always be there.

And when his beloved grandmother said from her distance, "Jim! What’s the meaning of this? What did you think you were doing? You could have—" he found words come out of him that he enjoyed more later than now because he could not believe he had said them . . . "Sorry, I forgot the body."

You can hardly, says the now-ruminant Interrogator, expect belief in a tale like that about Jim driving not so much licenseless as without any practice—unless we had here a heroic episode?—have you an epic in New Jersey, all worthwhile states yield at least one, and Jersey is no exception.

But later, when Bob Yard came round to Throckmorton Street to see about another matter, Bob told him he had understood just how he felt and for a moment laughed when Jim went looking for the kid the following Sunday; he wanted to find out if he really had taken the two screwdrivers Bob had left in the pickup truck, and settle the matter with him. "You just went down the road and came back, eh?" said Bob, but listening as he must have been he might have heard Jim stop the truck even without turning off the ignition.

He went around the lake one spring afternoon with his friend Sam, and a woman was screaming and groaning in a shack. This was before they had much in the way of trailers for settled living. She was crying out at intervals and a tiny child opened the door above the two steps and peeked around. Screams got as fast as breathing. Jim said they should get a doctor. Sam said she didn’t need one, she was probably having a baby and they better get out of there.

Jim went to Bob about it, not his own father. Did they have rooms in those shacks?

Bob said, Just one, but they didn’t have to pay anything, but sooner or later the town would clear them out.

Margaret got in touch with Pearl Myles and got angry when Miss Myles said she shared Margaret’s sorrow for her daughter Sarah. Jim felt drunk again when he got out of the pickup truck at the cemetery. He never, to his knowledge, asked Margaret how the cosms of the sun gave the East Far Eastern Princess her future, during that afternoon the sun didn’t go down and didn’t, and didn’t, but if that wasn’t prophecy, what was? And somewhere along the line he figured, yes, Margaret did have powers, though maybe it was to keep stuff to herself, though he was pretty much past all that: certainly she didn’t volunteer more story stuff though she knew many facts and often told him about the actual places and how the Navajos, with originally twenty-four thousand acres of land (which multiplied astronomically) were lucky they had no gold or silver near the surface and smart enough to turn their timber into board and not sell it just as logs, but this was long after Margaret was there. Young Margaret lived with them, did some weaving and rode a horse, learned some Spanish and was never taught Navajo. For years Jim hardly read a line of those old dispatches she sent on ahead of her (or, at first, behind her) to the Democrat and the pieces she wrote when she got home—some at breakneck speed, she hardly knew how; some, she said, slowly and painfully, one about a time when, in the dead of winter, she had swapped a lesson in herb healing and a public talk at the Browning Club on the Navajo ceremonial "Blessing Way" which helped to keep wind and lightning and so forth in harmony with other forces, in return for train fare from Cincinnati, but she wound up in Massillon interviewing over tea a self-made populist businessman who had literally dreamt up a solution to the Municipal Improvement Problem, to wit non-interest-bearing bonds to the extent of half the assessed value of the property within the municipal limits—bonds (all of this in a dream!) then to be deposited with the Department of the Treasury (significantly including since i860 the Secret Service) as security for a loan of legal-tender notes—the man none other than Jacob Coxey, whose sandstone quarry supplied steel and glass works, who bred blooded racehorses in Kentucky, whose daughter was christened Legal Tender, and who, a few weeks later, set off with an army of unemployed to march on Washington.

The Democrat was hardly a well-known newspaper. In the 1870s but-tonmakers plundered Indian burial grounds. Margaret saw a locomotive literally stalled by the squashed corpses of locusts. You could feel it. Hundreds of jackrabbits like giant unwinged bugs racing each other out of town ahead of a dust storm. Mayn had to ask a lot of questions in his line of work if you could call it that. Maybe a third at least of our known reserves of uranium are in Indian lands in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico. Navajos emphasize what happened more than when, but do not kid yourself, they know the sequence where it counts. Which came first, the well or the sewer? The day the world ends will be the day the Navajo lose their land, or is it the other way around? It’s the other way around. There are plants in the desert, in New Mexico and Africa, that get nibbled all year long; so they grow spines and brew poison juice. "The new policy is self-determination without termination." "Say that again?" requests the girl on the beach. "President Nixon to Congress. The policy was to terminate tribal control over resources and phase out federal protection of Indian control of Indian resources." "Say that again?"

"Nixon said it the other day. The new policy that’s supposed to reverse termination. I wonder what it’s like to belong to a terminated tribe." "Nixon wants to de-terminate, is that it?"

Actually Nixon was probably trying. But with one part of his mind-body. The other parts could smile upon the fact that "we" were lucky "we" don’t get much rain out in Navajo country ‘cause the radioactive waste tailings left at nine mouths and hillslopes by the big uranium companies when they went on to higher-grade ore deeper underground in Utah and in Africa didn’t get washed down the ravines into the rivers, or not right away—it’s one of those unexpected dividends that you can’t calculate with the fifteen- to twenty-percent normal return on equity.

He changed the subject. Information was all that there was. The meaning of it was either sickening or inscrutable. The young woman on the beach didn’t agree. He mentioned the Mirage bomber, and she might have been reluctant to change the subject, but went along with him. "How did you hear six years ago?" Mayn had been contemplating having a drink in the hotel bar if not upstairs in the room, and had mentioned the Mirage bomber that disappeared in the Bay of Biscay only to go unreported in the news. Oh, he had been with a UPI friend at a meeting of editors in San Francisco when Secretary McNamara "unveiled," as we say, "the Chinese-oriented nationwide Sentinel ABM system." "Aimed toward China," she said, staring at the gentle sea. "That summer the People’s Republic had set off a big one." "Why was a little Mirage kept quiet?"

Mayn knew only what he was told. "We had our New Jersey summit at last. Glassboro, New Jersey. The Soviet Prime Minister was unimpressed by the need to start arms-limitation talks. We had more ABMs, and the Russian Galosh had encountered some bugs and was not yet operational." She said to Mayn that he was funny; how had he gotten this way. They laughed and got up and made their way off the beach. Much later—as a passage in a warm, though sexist, novel on a multiple bed table in one of a multiplicity of small-scale units which a certain articulated structure which we are and which we have not yet made operational from the inside out, picks up gently, if breathlessly—Mayn answered the woman: he had once entered a kitchen and seen a father weeping and holding the hand of a son who was not his son but real enough to be and Jim standing in the doorway had been able at that moment of reentry to think only of the feel of the gear-shift knob with nothing out the windshield ahead of him, and the fact that he had driven, even if under the heat of four mouthfuls of mausoleum-blessed local applejack and without a license and with a passenger he didn’t mention but later recognized Bob might ha’ been liable for injury to; and in that late-afternoon kitchen doorway that’s now altered by Brad’s Day, which in turn alters whatever it was happened a month and a day ago, Jim (that Mayn of many turns) looked away from his bike lying on the grass to his father in order to know forever the touch of that now-seated father’s hand jarring his face bone when his father slapped him as he stood beside Bob Yard’s pickup truck that he felt was partly his now (and that didn’t require a kickstand), but that kid—

Did you ever see that boy again?

Who knows?

But the screwdrivers however casually left near a tool box and near probably some rags and usually a gasoline can with a neck on it not where Bob had left them were really gone: so the kid—

You expect us to believe you never told your wife?

Scout’s honor.

Did you belong to the Boy Scouts?

Well . . .

You brought it up.

Officially, yes.

So your word is worth only the paper it is written on.

He could live with that; sure.

Jim looked at his father’s bowed head and his half-brother eating a sandwich and as if through the munching of Brad, the mouth work and prospect of digesting, Jim smelled peanut butter, so it wasn’t one of Margaret’s sandwiches. He saw why people got drunk. He had looked out Bob’s windshield and his breath was taken away and when he looked back into the truck bed the kid was gone. As he had been to begin with.

Well, why hadn’t he told about it? Not even Sam, his friend, whose long face would look like a bloodhound’s in twenty years, Jim saw it exactly. Sam, with his leather boots on a hot September Sunday, who was always ready to go someplace but you had to give him the idea first, and then he would take over and see the sky through the trees, a beaver dam along a junky old stream, faint depressions across pine needles, tracks of an unknown creature coming out of nowhere, and suddenly remember hearing beavers smacking their tails on the flat water at night.

And then Jim thought he had seen that same piner kid of the truck ride a month before at the movies. You really knew it when you got near a piner kid in an enclosed space, not that they had the money for a ticket to the movie, even though they probably watered their bodies in the lake from time to time. Didn’t that kid go to school? Jim had seen a woman with hair flat on her narrow head washing clothes, and there was a little shoreline of foam like Mantoloking seafoam—but with mud and roots. But it probably wasn’t the screwdriver kid, that day in the movies so soon after Sarah’s death. After Brad’s Day Jim saw the kid’s face and the back of his head several times, but it wasn’t him. It was in Sam’s long backyard where they played touch football that was practically tackle and Jim left the game and ran up past the beautiful old red brick house to the picket fence but it wasn’t the kid slowly hiking a bit surly along the sidewalk; or it was coming out of the soda fountain and looking across the street at the window full of overalls and there was the kid with a dirty sailor cap but after getting practically hit in the middle of the street by two cars passing each other, Jim saw it wasn’t the same kid, this one was taller, without the rangy shoulders; or it was the jungle in Guadalcanal, hand to hand, get him before he even has a chance to pick his weapon up, his father and Alexander had been reading a book about Guadalcanal, man to man, you didn’t have time to ask questions, you’d heaved your last grenade back on the other island, Iwo Jima, Guam, one of them, launched it with all you had, which was your discus arm if it didn’t get sucked away by the same grenade it was propelling by the slinging mode—so that that hand without time to ask questions felt like the future but the War was just over, and Bob Yard didn’t talk much about it any more, his brother-in-law came home intact, his niece elected to stay in the WAVES for three more years having become an expert typist with a better chance to travel now than during the War, and Jim’s father who seemed to be developing a bulbous chin dragged out the deal to unload the paper until one night in Jim’s senior year Mel asked Jim if he himself would have considered hanging on to the paper, all other things being equal, and Jim said he wanted no part of it (which alas was only part of what he had had or had meant to say) and his father shrugged and said what he maybe hadn’t meant to say but might well have felt, since he had already been left once, to wit that that’s a big reason he decided to sell out. To which Jim quickly said, "Oh thanks, Mel, thanks, that puts me in my place, I had that coming, sure I did." (The first time he had called his dad Mel.)

No newspapers for him, not that the Democrat (whatever they said about Jackson and the bank) was a real newspaper; it had social notes on relatives who came to spend a week or a friend from New York or Reading, Pennsylvania, though not Margaret’s funny-looking old tramp of a man whom Jim first saw on the beach at Mantoloking the day Bob Yard had come and had that unsuccessful conversation with Jim’s mother more or less one-way where, on that black towel of hers, she lay irritated and still, but the old guy would talk and talk in the car and stayed with Margaret and Alexander a couple of days at least but Alexander kicked him out because he upset Margaret after Mel wanted to run a note in the paper but Margaret preferred not to and the man was known to Jim as that Inventor from New York though Jim never asked him his real name, and he wasn’t quite the same as the Hermit-Inventor from 1893-4, but was his decrepit nephew carrying on the good work, Margaret said, because you had to, and Jim asked him what he did: It remained to be seen, he said; it was partly just living, but it was unpredictable—he had invented a smallish machine that randomly invented new shapes there was motion for, but no formula yet, and he had carried on his forebears’ work which was beginning to look like learning not just to control the weather but in a new way to live with it, partly through seeing its relation to the interior activity of the land, even mountains far away, and so he was moving toward maybe a new weather, which made him practically unemployable but he had a small "competence" descended to him from an "ancestor’s" patent royalty which enabled him to maintain the "family railroad flat" in a city that—but Jim sometimes, when he bothered to think about it, wasn’t sure what he recalled and what inferred—so that the piner kid was maybe one-quarter made-up, and had forced him to share the pickup truck he had, briefly stolen the afternoon of Brad’s Day; and he was pretty sure he recalled the Hermit-Inventor of New York saying he had been given what equipment and training—mostly self-education—he needed so if he lost the struggle he could only blame himself—the very words, almost, that Mel said, the day of the final and crucial football game when Windrow was definitely the underdog as Jim pointed out to Brad, whereupon Mel said all that about having enough training and equipment so if they lost the game it was their own fault ("equipment" a crazy word), the already semi-retired father saying the sentence like words he had been given and was bound to say, so that at the time of another war in which Jim did not participate he knew he would hear those words if only because automatic packaged phrases are future phrases, a thought that Mayn passed on to his unlucky and largely unknown though loved friend Mayga, the Chilean woman—passed it on and passed it off as no thought at all but she asked him please not to dismiss it as a thought, but he could count on her to take seriously a lot of what he found to tell that he would only very occasionally get soused about—that is, drunk and loud, though not fighting mad, for if you tear someone limb from limb you might hurt that someone, he said, and although once during his married years he did in fact go for the jugular (‘‘after the jug?" said Ted, who was readier to believe Jim than some layer of his brain gook could accept). Well, to the late Mayga, and perhaps once to his journalist-colleague Ted, who was with UPI for years and knew everything (which was what he said about Jim), he explained that this type of evening’s undertaking (that is, to get thoroughly drunk) marked an effort to prove that some of these other thoughts which would persist actually then more strongly though less coherently were dependent on an inebriated state of mind and were dumb and a delusion.

But he couldn’t have told Ted as he did Mayga about his position in the future, because he liked Ted, knew Ted knew he wasn’t the type to go on like that; wouldn’t believe him, or worse would think something permanently (not odd but) wrong with him. Which future are you going to worry about anyhow?—the upcoming election or the state of the dollar four or five years from now? You control the immediate future by reducing unemployment by not slapping controls on.

The recently bereaved boy Jim Mayn took to dropping in on two old (in fact late middle-aged) ladies who stopped being surprised when this boy who had mowed their lawn until he lost the job when he went to work on a farm the preceding summer came in and sat with them. They had hardly known his mother. Their piano was out of tune; he tried a chord and was asked to play and couldn’t; they talked horses, they would argue whether a gigantic trotter named Native Hanover who’s with all the other champions on the wall outside the bar of the hotel downtown had done in fact all the things they each thought they recalled, or were they remembering two or three horses; they knew times fantastically, and once Jim asked how long they had been living together, he’d forgotten for a second they were sisters, but he might have asked that dumb question because he had felt that they wanted him to go—their bathroom had a crocheted-or-something thick pink cover over the toilet seat and smelled perfumed. He visited—always unannounced—a doctor who lived over by the military school, who played the organ at the Baptist Church accompanying himself in a heady tenor when he didn’t, he said, even believe in God most Sundays; a couple of times when Jim showed up he had a feeling that he had interrupted the doctor and his wife and their daughter who was a year younger than Jim—the son was away at boarding school in Pennsylvania: "Let the Quakers see if they can do anything with Hank"—in the midst of discussing perhaps some rotten thing they had all done or the doctor had (because his family seemed so nice, though Jim liked him)—and he got up and went out of the room saying he needed a drink. He was the first grownup to ever offer Jim a beer, when he was still fifteen. And Jim took to dropping in also on the Bob Yards, and she would ask little questions about his grandmother going in to New York to look at material at Schumacher’s and had they gotten tired of Brad’s cooking yet? She was better arguing with Bob and laughing at his exaggerated stories from downtown: there was a dimmer switch on the market like the lights in the movie house and someday you would go away for a wild weekend in the city and your house would light up in the evening and turn all but one of its lights out at, say, midnight, and look like it was being lived in, even project two moving figures up next to the window ("Doin’ what?"), while you were dancing the night away or attending the horse show. Bob was practically the first to have a television set in Windrow and Jim thought the Notre Dame-Army football players looked like squat dolls or soldiers but you knew it was real, and it was a fascinating trick that had been put over on that whole scene that you felt could—or should—only be told about by the announcer. Nobody asked Jim something he couldn’t spell out himself.

Now that, wakes the interrogator, is so empty a statement it is downright bracing; what is the humidity outside our chambers?

Jim fell forward, sent away. But by whom? For it was his (only somewhat sickly) mother who had "passed away" (as Pearl Myles put it of her own mother’s death, discussing what, where, and when matter-of-factly for the class; her mother having passed away less than four years previous or, as Jim with a sour smile hidden in his heart swiftly calculated, not long after Pearl Harbor!); fell forward, as not even he could quite know, borrowing Bob Yard’s pickup truck (this time legitimately) one afternoon of his senior year, but we, who were always potentially part of him, knew and would claim credit for saving his life that afternoon if it were not some section of our own, not to mention that of a farm kid in a baseball cap driving a bare bodiless chassis the wrong way out of the street behind the Courthouse as Jim, with the right of way and Ann-Marie Vandevere braced beside him in the same seat that Anna Maria Pietrangeli had occupied with proud arms crossed over her breast the week before, floored the pedal only afterward to be in a position (thanks to Bob Yard’s brakes in the days before inspection) to know that at that instant his errand had been less to kill that vehicle in front of him and its exposed operator than to pass through it with an angry (not "irate") vision that if he’d been given what his force for a moment demanded would have propelled him and the severe and passionate blonde girl with him through that thing—that "thing" he’s driving, that dink, that fuckhead—by way of a mere rearrangement of the matter making up said unwary obstacle without altering it in any way but the experience of these molecules that made secret space for him and the girl and Bob’s vehicle to pass through yet paralleled by a memory felt in Jim’s shoulders and knuckles and calves that this was no way to get out of town. The kid’s life was spared. The so-called Hokey-Pokey Man, who peddled his homemade vanilla ice cream by a little horsedrawn wagon at dusk, told him his mother had been one of the nicest persons he had ever known; a lot to live up to, he said—an Armenian, but not quite the only one in town, said grandfather Alexander—some Armenians are gypsies (some gypsies are Hungarians), but the Hokey-Pokey Man has that fine head of white hair and a square head like Mel’s, only smaller—he’s no gypsy—

—We knew that anyway, said Margaret.

Jim reported to his father what the Hokey-Pokey Man had said, who incidentally must have recalled how much Sarah loved vanilla ice cream as deep a vanilla taste as heart of nutmeg; and Jim’s father said how most Armenians were Catholics. Jim didn’t get it, but wasn’t in the habit of asking his father things; but when he reported his father’s odd remark, Margaret, whom he never talked with any more about her old hole-in-the-sky stories, told him Catholics considered suicide a sin. Jim just said, "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," and Margaret retorted, "No second chance there." And Jim added, "Maybe there’s no heaven." "Maybe there isn’t," said Margaret. Margaret laughed and went to give him a hug, which he more or less went along with. But it made him hopeless—how could that be?—and he said what seemed to come between them: "Well, they never found her." Not that anyone was really looking now, or raking the briny floor for a person he felt like he knew somewhat less now, though Brad for God’s sake recalled stuff about her from before he was born—maybe the little bastard really was more her son—such as that she didn’t want any more kids but after Brad came along she was glad; and that she had been a great surf swimmer in the old days, fearless and stubborn, until later she hardly ever went in. And she laid out her writing pens and ye olde music-copying implements on the drop-leaf desk in the musick womb—the next room, a room full of possible and future music, and Jim fell forward (it felt like forward) through furniture, people, walls, power lines, hilly roads—and, and—

Is she clear to you? asks the interrogator, faked into a second career as listener—and who, he adds, are you?—it’s suddenly not qua-t clear; in the modern city they have just adopted one of our own venerable methods of causing pain in order to elicit information; yes, a youth approached a park bench containing a couple who were either of different sex or same, and shot them through the leg with one shot, and (which was his original "touch") only then inquired what money they had.

—and Sarah wrote little letters to Alexander her father though he was just downtown and if he replied it may have been by word of mouth. "This is a great-grandfather desk," Jim heard her say to little Brad and she smiled at Jim who appeared at her doorway and she went on speaking to the baby of the family: "that’s a grandfather clock because it’s tall and old and it’s been telling time for a long time" (she reached to release the arm of her metronome and let it swing back and forth, then stopped it—Jim in recollection couldn’t quite see her principal audience, which was Brad—where was he? he was standing by her desk); "but this is a great-grandfather desk because that’s who made it, and over at Margaret and Alexander’s house there’s a grandfather pistol" while she smiled at Jimmy now and then and would say, "Oh Mel, you are so goddamn polite," like she was against him; or she would kid with her "baby," Brad: "Now what was your name? I forget, was it Benjamin?" (‘Wo," cried the child)—"Was it Jackie? was it Sammy?" ("No," cried the child and developed hiccups from giggling and couldn’t say his name)—"Oh /know: it was Emily, that’s your name"—("No," but he’s too young to say, That’s a girl’s name)—"Oh I remember, you’re Brad" was said at last, like sheer invention at the last burnt-out moment when we’d run out of potentially erroneous facts.

There were ladies in silk blouses with dark chiffon scarves inside their instrument cases and such; but, never forgetting her sister in Mass. who didn’t get along with Margaret and Alexander and rarely (though with some considerable annualized ceremony) visited, Sarah came more to life with the male musical contingent whether or not they actually made the music or sustained it. Here were Barcalow Brandy wine, a would-be singer with a natural performer’s name whose family owned extensive orchards and other properties in the county and who wore sport coats you’d never see in any store and a scarf around his neck like an actor, Jim thought; and Byron Kennett, who wore silkier sport clothes and, one secret shocking week, went to state prison for a while, where his mother’s dancing shoes could not penetrate, and who could play the cello and did so out of it seemed love for Jim’s mother, not for the cello which in a way didn’t even belong to him though against his will it had been left to him by a maiden great-uncle who had desired to exert some strong influence upon this only child whose father had left his wife and son otherwise fairly well fixed. The truth was that Jim didn’t much want to go near that room with its sudden empty or shouting or laughing halts in the music when someone had missed a note ("Probably turned to the wrong page," said Mel one evening when Brad reported that the music group had had a bad argument over a few missing notes, etcetera, "pages stuck"); yet Jim would not have wished those late afternoons or Saturday mornings to end; because —he didn’t just know why—because his mother didn’t turn toward or away from him but was in that room sealed by an agreement arrived at—aha!—between Jim and the intermittent music itself: but not an agreement not to enter; for he could, though didn’t because the music (chamber music cat’s-cradling and/or sawing up and down and around) gave the house a comfortable good sense, whatever that might mean. And when a fellow named James Mayn came, years later, to tell his wife Joy (to try to tell her, though then with oddly little strain) what he hadn’t known he knew, that his tone-deaf father Mel had to keep replacing a thermostat with a mind of its own (though Joy didn’t want to hear the make of thermostat it was and a detail or two Jim couldn’t have helped recalling), all part of a conflict between Mel and Sarah, who claimed that her catgut tightened up unpredictably so that during the cooler months she couldn’t keep her violin or her big viola tuned (at which the Interrogator’s knee jerks picking up a poignant sexual slant as when a condemned, in, after all, industrial process of being electric-chaired, sends back upstream through the cables his own unequal but distinct charge that changes the warden’s hand if not his being for some rest of his life e’en though he knows it not): meanwhile the brink-like brevity of Mel’s news item that Sarah had "passed away," together with such elements of her life as time and names might sum up, capped the event so Jim later felt he had not known where the event was and while respecting his father’s not unloving conciseness, he looked for news to fill the gap and found it in the future inside him, even to some nothing fantasy that he was in the future with everything Go and under control, looking back—throw in a space settlement and balanced atmosphere brick by factual brick, etcetera—but . . .

But in the weeks and months ("mouths," in possible misprint) succeeding Brad’s Day, Jim held to his friendship with Margaret. Was she "all he had"? Maybe not. He had his new angle on his father Mel, and this now heavy-laden, really fat-jawed Mel a special father to Brad, and a person who forgot to touch others on the hands and arms and shoulders and back and body (but stood around with his fingers locked behind his back and his shoulders forward), a person who once suffered enough to slug Jim in the cemetery when he brought Bob’s pickup truck back after an untraced joy ride, these were real things that years later he was thankful for, as if they were themselves the thanks.

Yet Margaret was Margaret and Jim was Jim. Newly confused about her tales, their exact date of inspiration, their pretty weird anatomy, their topography that changed like the weather, their hinted nature of foretelling, yes, foretelling for the Navajo mother with the hole in her head had come back to life when local Prince departed in pursuit of visiting East Far Eastern Princess, otherwise unknown as the Alien Beloved, AND, as if part of the same crap, the mother of Jim and Brad had said that they must go away, or anyway Jim should, while for his part he was pretty sure that she had been the one to go away—well, she warn’t here, so where was that lady?—among the Navajo? on Second Mesa among the Hopi? the long-gone Anasazi? was she sweating in an underground chamber? working "with" the poor?—give me a poor person any day!—swimming toward water, toward China, toward Choor? (to the strains of a liner’s band playing "Let’s Take the Long Way Home" what Jim had swayed in the dark to the music of, with Anna Maria, her proud, very powerful arms around him instead of crossed over her tits).

A joke: "He was pretty sure she had been the one to go away"—well with a fact you don’t always know: and facts in combination, next thing you know you’re explaining the last World War or some President’s raid on the icebox.

But still pals with his grandmother Margaret. When she went to New York to (annually) buy material at Schumacher’s and stay at the Hotel Seymour near Times Square which excited or intrigued Jim in absentia, for he had never stayed in a hotel and refrained from asking Margaret if they had dance music under the chandeliers and gambling kings and movie stars and rich, kind criminals all visiting each other in their white satin suites—Margaret would see a few people, a cousin who did something important in a museum. Jim did not like her being away (well, of course—what with no Sarah any more, etcetera). ‘Specially when the secretly joint owner of the Brad’s Day pickup truck, namely Bob Yard, added, Boy she really had to get away—(what did he mean?)—as if he knew more and less than that—more and less yes, come to think, as when some years later Bob recalled Jim’s mom Sarah talking funny to him, making a decimal point (she said) in the dust with (she said) her parasol, when she didn’t have a parasol: yet Jim felt Bob knowing something more than his stated ignorance—"said we met in passing, that’s what she said more than once but we were somewhat better friends than that," said Bob, who a bit overwarmly recalled the day he first saw Mel upon a running board sweeping to his destiny downtown from church to hotel-reception the day he best-manned a local friend’s nuptials, leg out like a skater (who on earth had the camera to catch him? maybe his inner immobility conquered his outer)—grim gay smile exactly as fixed as that of a man (to wit, him) who squeezed as much a record amount of concisely edited news into the paper of the family he later realized he had known he was about to start marrying into five minutes later, while smiling not so fixedly that he could not be a shade long-winded and w/tsmiling upon meeting an unexpected feminine obstacle en route to the hotel punch bowl who was so taken aback by his fixed best man’s grin that Mel momentarily introduced himself—they had the same last name. Maybe remote cousins? she asked; from Jackson’s time? she tilted a head. He thought it through and doubted it: a branch of the Mayns’ from right around Harrisburg-Carlisle way (Pennsylvania’s beautiful, she said)—until his post-introductory at-a-loss-for-words near-solemnity in her presence now made her laugh and tell him he should always wear those trousers and a cutaway and the gray top hat, while he abruptly explained that he was second in command of a small-town weekly over there to the west, that was getting more into wire service and statewide news which was what he had been working for, these many long months; and meanwhile he said he liked Caruso, and she could only reply, You don’t say, not knowing what she felt, nor recognizing by speaking voice a tone-deaf man—though she laughed (never knowing he would be tone-deaf nor that if he could not conquer tone-deafness he could still rise to one side of it); and so they walked away into the room together and he dropped his topper, which landed right side up, and he picked it up and left it on the punch table, falling in love but not with love, as the music had it at that very moment, she had told Bob Yard, never guessing (she told her father one day indirectly in a letter downtown) that Mel Mayn (without the e) would never again drop a flustered gray top hat and snatch it up and drop it and pick it up as if it were soaking and leave it on a punch-bowl table; never again, because he managed it just that once—having power, but not for Sarah, who married him on a whim because he wasn’t afraid to tell her as he stood up with his hat that he’s tone-deaf, yet because Margaret had kept her on the strictest rein yet had bent her ear for years about women in the home and at the polls. Which Jim and we—changing track less and less angelically to its summary moment the night of the day that Margaret died, a few years later, so swiftly that we hear Alexander (implicitly paralleling deaths of daughter and wife), in the midst of more grief (which he’d call "trouble") than he will ever have time to grasp, apply the word "Ow" but to his daughter’s marriage, that old trothful plight Sarah would write him little "humor-me" "gists" about—’ ‘What more could you say but Ow later Ouch to sum up fifteen years or so of marriage to Mel with a point like that one, Jim: Ou . . . ch."

—which Jim and we unconsciously fast-track (O.K.) inward, past a not quite totally unloving remark by Sarah that Mel was the only man she could conceive waterproofing his carpet slippers; inward to Dr. Range’s ex post acto word that Sarah at the time of her vanishing into our coastal waters hadn’t had anything incapacitating or incurable, just anemia plus periodic blues which he for one (with a gentle shrug) could not track down but did associate somewhat with the fluctuation of her musical activity, for things might take a downturn right after a chamber recital at the church, for instance, but there was—or had been—little organically the matter (in those days when antibiotics had not yet priced house calls out of the market)

—inward to little Brad’s dream—no nightmare—of Sarah standing in his room making her own dark moonlight waving her pale fingers through the air like the conductor of the Philharmonic in New York and told him she would wait for him till he came back but where she was he could not remember, though she had less burn than tan for once and the black towel draped over her until she swung it off her to reveal grandly, like terribly peeled areas, skin that did not have the beautiful tan, and he wanted to give her some clothes —woke up (for a dream of Sarah would never be long-winded) and went back to sleep but told the dream at breakfast, and started crying, and when Mel said she was in heaven, Jim reached and touched his half-brother’s shoulder: "You thought she was cold and needed her clothes; she’s O.K., Brad, no kidding, she’s O.K."

—so swiftly inward to that time "done" under the porch, inward through the dull clank of a trowel against the upended iron teeth of a dark rake under a front porch (the dark side of the porch), and Mel’s unwillingness to say, "for the record," whether his visitor was right that Lincoln was married to an impossible woman; upon which the other voice, which was Bob Yard’s, swiftly and softly observed, "Lost the battle, but won the war," only to hear Mel react with a violently amplified scraping on the porch boards above: " What war?" and moments afterward he came after the boy who, just happening to be there in the course of a day, seemed to be eavesdropping upward from underneath

—so swiftly inward through cloud and clear, through moons that stretched from a dismembered Statue of Liberty past reflections in Pennsylvania’s Juniata River where the Navajo Prince camped on his way east, to great plains and basins not even an Eiffel could cantilever out to view beyond, and through dawning hailstorms to the wake of a very large bird, too large to have gotten clean away inward so swiftly through such fact as that when Margaret was in New York a couple months after Sarah embarked upon her ultimately boatless voyage Eukie Yard told Jim a phone call had come to the cemetery inquiring if interment had taken place, and when Eukie, with the receiver up against his ear on that day, four or five days at least after "your mom was drowned," wanted to know who he was talking to, the fellow in New York instead said he knew the mother and had seen the daughter Sarah but once, and when Eukie said the lady had drowned off the Jersey shore and they had not recovered her so of course there hadn’t been no interment, the loud voice at the far end of the phone line said, Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, and hung up "‘z if he’d told me something I didn’t know"

—inward swiftly and (like orbits th’t git smaller but faster) with a speed capable of accommodating inversely a multiplicity of small-scale units kept in mind by the wind whose convenient passive/cheap fuel though we don’t actually see it we’re glad to use as a means to an end though bypassing the question that—as he lived his own life in years to come—Jim couldn’t have cared less about namely our need of him, his largely unacknowledged use of us to whom he has certainly been a good and loyal part, like Grace Kimball but also countless others who’ll always be less here than she, whether in that multiple dwelling in New York or moved-out—

—inward in short so fast Jim conks out cum schlafing off the d’effects of a (neither war nor battle) heartfelt marriage that he abandoned (since institutions can take rejection easier than folk—or federal agencies) to leave us, actually in his vicinity, within the controlled weather of the tapeworm track which sans loop takes We to pauses where we have always been before: to hear a woman help a man hear what he heard before but didn’t know; to have a woman being helped recall love by hearing but despite hearing her lover joke about having shared freely her labor, her agony, her joy (almost for free); to hear a wife with the education of a specialist guess or mind-read what happened at a distance to her husband for whatever it was worth; to listen while two women, one still very young though, paired, of convergent ages, review men as if it’s all for one and talk so intimately in a large window as to transcend the chances of female friendship as if some male Fate sets us back three decades to early post-War rent control before vacancy became by law the lode the landlord waited patiently to strike, while the tapeworm track literally lets us hear a fashionable physician originally from Boston now secretly in therapy remind his famous childless patient (who varies her delightful English foreignly and with elan) that "using" a tapeworm to effect dramatic weight loss might shift the . . . onus, and be a form of avoidance—through which no doubt she would learn, but . . . but learn what? she asks in sync exactly with her medic’s same thought sensing the tapeworm track still there a semi-permanent trail or scar through the very thought of American peanut butter, while she half-knows she doesn’t need to lose weight no matter what a friend of an acquaintance has done to herself through some old or new regime, there’s so many ways by 1977 that if you don’t feel you’re in the worming tape tunnel ‘stead of it in you, you got to feel that it opens outward like a lip growing and rolling from every moist glim of its circum, and you are it and might’s well look back down the narrowing wind-tunnel as when you could—we all could—indulge in the uncontrolled controllability of nostalgia’s splicing and slimming of events to recombine or reconstitute them, as in "constitution" at some later libration point which Jim, addressing gentle Mayga in a Washington bar early in the 1960s describes as a balance point of pulls, hence a good spot to settle down or out ‘tween Earth and her-or-its primary Moon, that is for an in-space settlement, so they contemplate each other with affection giving diplomatic recognition to that great area of gap between their socially stooled thighs, which is a gap of experience, if we will but let it in: and the diva Luisa years later finds in her a track left by some grace of the divine, like experience to be traveled, again if she will, and again she can’t tell her loving physician of hands upon her thigh (two hands belonging to the same person) or of how she let herself learn to love him even in the dark of night in her duplex balconied kitchen for hearing her lover’s bare foot near the threshold, she had resumed her phone recital in the English in case he may not know that the poetry’s Neruda but at least prior to her covering explanation when she hangs up (which his surveillance has decided her against lest it seem guilty), he can kiss her skin, on his knees on the linoleum, one of those thigh listeners but listening with his lips for any clue from the subtle anatomy of her experience—a clue to whoo shee’s talkin’ to—at a moment when, for very love as well as ultimate hygiene, she considers flushing him out of her "life" and off the planet as simply as some gently acting bacteria suggested by your family G.P. much less our intrahemispheric tapeworm and teach the ecstasy of middle-class hunger excruciatingly prolonged for a future of weight loss and healing—until Luisa, hearing from Clara how surprising and warm(yes)-hearted are the Kimball workshops, Luisa now beyond danger which is fear abruptly concludes "Momo, it’s late" into the phone to her friend Clara, who, knowing whose nickname "Momo" is, intuits by the magic of near-disaster who Luisa’s with ("Momo" being Ford North, basso profundo and gourmand silly genius with stammer in his wings), "Momo, for the last time please I would love to oblige you but—" (she has to pause to hear Clara’s own real conclusion as if Clara on her own imagines Luisa’s lover padding back to the bedroom extension phone to hear no basso but the voice of the well-known Allende economist’s wife)—"Momo, that warehouse isn’t the—" (she breaks off as if Momo at the other end has interrupted her)—"isn’t the place for either of us, and I am no Bernhardt and anyway she wouldn’t have doubled as Horatio, and there has never been a good Hamlet opera or we would have heard of it (I don’t care if there have been two dozen), the only chance was Verdi and he abandoned—"

—but Clara is talking some more and telling her she could use a Kimball workshop but where are her loyalties and who is she planning to get herself killed by or risking her neck for

(how’s the weather down there? we hear ourselves ask, having long since given up the idea we’re single)—

—and Clara’s not so friendly now and hangs up on that name again, that man’s name again with Luisa speaking it stupidly into the receiver (why? why?—so her lover can hear the name?)—

—oh we said it close to her neck, her thigh, her volcanic eyes, though to our erstwhile Interrogator, who knew it at once—the name Mayn . . .

—while the diva, alone with her great self and her undeniable lover kneeling on maroon and white diamonds of linoleum that are black and white in the dark (ready naked for any type of attention) knows she never thought seriously of killing this man: how was it done? (Yet, easily, she sees!) She’s hurt by how Clara rang off. But it’s her own fault for phoning like this with this one lover, but a man who may have done nothing but pass through naval school. To murder him now—that asks too much of him! The soul goes elsewhere, the body stays. She would like him here with what she cannot swallow left out. But that is asking so much of him that he will have to die, but how has she gone this far, to fuck with a man who whatever he is in that regime knows too well what’s happened with her father—responsible as she for her career—

"I came in here, I couldn’t sleep, and—" she’s explaining too much . . .

"I was thinking of Momo and this Hamlet musical, opera, whatever it is and like mind reading the phone goes and I caught it in mid-ring so you wouldn’t wake up—"

And as she moves reluctantly her thigh from his lips thinking she better get to the John—but wondering then what she would destroy him with—pour bleach down his ear, his nose—all one—the thought whets her for a simple kiss in bed. She hears him rise from the linoleum, asking if Momo sings any Spanish roles: to which she answers swiftly, too swiftly, that the city is bilingual: everyone knows some Spanish even if Ford North never rides the subway in his double-breasted camel’s-hair and his basso’s bowler—it’s more than she can handle—yet she will handle it and whether she kills him curtained behind a shower bath of blood or swallows him with a brand-new tapeworm, she cannot but be ready when, behind her, he wonders why that basso is getting Neruda from her in the middle of the night in English and Spanish when she said he only called to persuade her to participate in his degenerate send-up of a great though decadent work of Shakespeare: to which she rises in angry acceleration, turns upon the naked person who she can’t help knowing is about to love her even more: "Neruda was why—why I cannot get mixed up in that claptrap Hamlet, whatever it is—Neruda, ‘the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines’ "—" ‘petrels,’ " her bilingual companion continues, " ‘petrels and eagles,’ " comes back his voice equally in English, while—" ‘meadows and foam,’ " she says, and ". . . Tu me pre-guntas donde estoy?’ " (remembering the lines Clara has given her) and her naval officer with relentless complexity or culture replies, " ‘Te contare’— ‘I will tell you,’ ‘ but stops short of the next line he has heard Luisa quote to the friend she phoned—which is: "giving only (solo detalles) information useful to the authorities"—stops short, and she wouldn’t know why except maybe he’d rather not give away any threats; so many people she never met and never had to since she’s who she is, a dutiful daughter only in anxiety, in mind—while, fixed as he is, her dead or alive father (no longer with the telephone he so used, the many rooms of people he sat and talked with through the everlasting political moment, les urgences an ambulance entry sign reads upon a dark building near the Seine) would still have paper to type with, though type what?, a man in history no less arrested in a house she has never seen—

—but she can’t control her thought which goes to the man who was sitting right there in one of Clara’s orchestra seats—

—and left her (though he stayed at "home") before she left him, which matters only if she turns toward it, which she will do if she turns back to her lover; yet doing so now means only the male bone and blood he turns into, over her shoulder, and more important is get to the John, save a friendship, find out why Clara feels her husband is in curious peril apart from his allegiance or his voice (though in his businesslike scholarly way he never was a speaker, a sound, like her father), as if his antagonists were making up their collective mind whether he knew about a certain thing or not, besides all the other things he knows; and she hears her now treasured friend Clara with her unfailing large dark blue eyes, wide pale mouth, deep heart waiting out all the trouble of grown children in danger beyond precise reach, husband in danger, nation beyond reach, a West Side apartment where she won’t let herself miss her interhemispherically abandoned belongings (while he with silent humor jogs thrice around the neighborhood)—an apartment where she and he still move each other—hears, Luisa hears, her treasured friend laugh and tell what these women in the workshop, these American women say to each other such as that wars and houses are made by men and understood by women. The women expecting Luisa’s life story. Free with the cost of the workshop. Complete with revelations as if the women there were from the newspapers. Turning the corner into her bedroom she wants a boy, a little son against her, and on the current of her own feet on the carpet can hear him in pyjamas someplace and can hear him, hear the fridge—watchfully watch him take his chances, just her and him, and the name on which Clara rang off abruptly comes back, with nothing now in front of Luisa and with a man behind: to whom she turns but not to him, he isn’t there, or she’s lookin’ through him in the dark; and by the way she looks good, too, and when the check came at her Mexican restaurant her fascist escort stared down at the total and murmured, "Una jovena al izquierda de mi y on your starboard quarter has been contemplating you for the last half hour"—aficionada doubtless; alone and small, with a box of foreign cigarettes beside her glass, big thin gold circles hanging down out of her hair on either side, no rings on her hands—who seemed to have eaten alone often.

—till, as cramped as her own personal tapeworm that flew in from the Minnesota territory and descended toward her gravitational center, and was flushed out of its own coils and crannies by a loving physician’s recommended dose of atabrine, she lets herself forget murder, forget the threatened bond with Clara, in order to know—as she knows when in her morning tub (so still) she lets a dream forget itself—that she hit upon that woman-in-the-restaurant’s profession for one second—but now what was it; what was it? (her very certainty had lost it): and with that, she sings a phrase with intervals so slight they are primitive, a cry, a thought—that still gets an echo far off in her apartment, for he is not behind her phrase. It takes her, while her twin sense that some half-conscious community rhymed this proposition to her lets her rest both with her abrupt decision (to sing two roles, the second Horatio, the ultimate friend) and her wish (which even Judith might have entertained could they have run a power line to Holofernes’ tent) to watch bedroom TV with her lover whose hand (yes) palms her belly pregnant (yes) and with shared peperoni pizza sent out for, and meanwhile she is reading in his mind places elsewhere where he thinks of her—yes, he thinks of her—even to the point of telling someone, a stranger to her, how much he likes her (it’s a man friend he’s having lunch with) yet she can’t get off the—the unavoidable phone call from her compatriot Clara that tells her in the guise of possible friendship that (whatever you call it, the chilly bowel below the Swiss bank vault or the prisons of acoustical foul-up suddenly offstage) this is it: she wants Clara’s friendship despite what her loneliness also hears in the long words of her father (thou shalt love, well, thy father)—she could hear the breakers like dreams of mountains stagger distantly down her father’s known words until, hearing her lover en route somewhere between here and the kitchen, she hears as if for the first time her father defending Karl Marx, a man real as her own father—lest we forget that the shortcomings in his thought are the shortcomings in our own—his history ours (she recalls)—and she, who gives pleasure and pleasure that begets pleasure to those who pay to come to Lincoln Center and to those who do not pay because she has given them free tickets whether they use them or not, would say this about "Marx" who comes back to her like her father as "The Moor," the dark-faced, the naked shape now rejoining her in (after all) her dark bedroom, she listens while her lover lubricates with the essence of her refrigerated Deaf Smith peanut butter du pays the softest of predictions—that’s "unknown," he grants, but "forced" upon him by what he cannot but infer—that in the near future she may forget what stage she is at home on and find herself before a small but far more risky audience: upon which she does not bridle (after all, she warms to him, if, granted, now with some cute irritant of fear, some additive that does not yet subtract though it could strike in the midst of anything, of love, like a woken tapeworm track), and handling the back of his neck, "Do you know Shakespeare?" she asks, "do you know Hamlet, do you know his loyal friend Horatio who is around at the end, isn’t he?, to pick up the pieces? What’s it matter what small closet stage downtown, what auspices?—Momo is my friend and—" drawing her lover to her so that, of their four hands, only the fingers of her left upon the back of his neck come into play, breast to breast, leg to leg, she hears his breath intervene, "It was not Momo—"

"—you were thinking of?" she finishes, knowing, though, that he meant calling (phoning) not thinking, so who but his mouth inquires finely of the skin of hers, smiling she is certain, neither asking nor telling her, "Oh Ford North is not your friend in that sense, I think": so that both of them are in control, shared (less than two but for the moment more than one); and she’s for a second French, then for a second a grain of history, as Sayao’s emerging equal in Boheme (she won’t do Boheme, she prefers to avoid lingering coughs) or a gifted girl from a legendary hemisphere who heard the great American Iago in Buenos Aires and upon speaking to him later in Europe got invited to visit him and his wife in Greenwich, Connecticut, at his "South American house," paid for by tours through Rio and B. A. up until Evita banned American singers, from Iago on up or down: no, Luisa is Clara’s and yes definitely Clara’s husband’s friend, what would she give up for this?, but she is being thought of at this instant, nor would she believe in living through others’ thoughts of her, yet has done it, she has been that priestess mother murderer, she could not otherwise have raised her acting hands so rarely through three hours of onstage carrying-on (she’ll look at hands always, she knows the hands of four heads of state, always looks); uses her own onstage so sparingly it has been noted in the press—could not have stood before her audience and on occasion turned her back to them all, stood so still in the flesh of that living "house," the mass, the masses who (of customers, that is) alone matter if they take her away with them so there can be still more value of her and more, multiplied, spread everywhere—so there, Father, and yet she will be to Clara, woman to woman, in this way more resonant, a friend even should she become so active a compatriot she’ll risk her skin, even her still clean Swiss passport, a risk worth being not less than a friend with Clara and her aloof husband who once recently had rather hear the opera at home, and Luisa here in her home, a vastish unused apartment with a duplex kitchen where you can get a balcony’d view of an egg frying, knows, too, that all this sea of rapture, this air winding out from her passion, her art, also gets shut off the minute the show stops and the curtain call smiles its (one) way into the eyes of a thousand people now standing to go elsewhere with or without her.

"You exist," comes the soft voice touched off by her fingers on the back of his neck, "in the hearts of so many people; have you ever thought about that?" and she laughs loud a simple laugh from her sex, from which then comes "Where are they now?" so she in her words can just think what it might be to be him, not so much with a slight (pretty unimaginable) erection in the dark—puce? prepuce? she must see!—as with his wide, taut chest about to meet hers, yes—and no notion amid the small sweep of his male but threatening propaganda that she has, through some new dependency (that’s banana-peeled between present and future), left him in this scented and odored bedroom (made larger not smaller by the bed) if not escaped him into an event, discovered her same old self in an event she didn’t order curtains for, for where would they hang?, hence an event she couldn’t escape—

—oh she’s more real? ‘z that it? oh she’s reckoning a political or national conscience into the cost of her tax-relieved Alpine passport? (while hearing her father once call nationalism just another brand of competition which is death next to cooperation)—

—oh let no one call her more real now than when vicariously singing, singing all these years, but—

—is she then recklessly involving herself in the for-the-moment gratuitously naval intelligence officer’s pursuit of happiness, being authentic, plus some knowledge or intelligence of her apparent friend Clara’s exile-economist husband whom Luisa might in some womanly (or theatrical) way unveil to her lover: because there isn’t enough drama in her life—or in lieu of having a child? (her medicine man speaks within her like the trace of the expelled worm)—

—let no one call her less than friend to Clara now after how many months of the New York sojourn of Clara and her husband (who is or is not imperiled, for a lot of people seem not to know, yet): yet suddenly it’s would-bt friend, for Clara may hate her if she knows who she’s been sleeping weeth, or Clara might not want to understand what’s between Luisa and this man whose national employers’ planned violence has over it like a blinking sign the alternating hence moving words both of save Chilean business and Chile’s old families, yet words, too, of her own father’s house-arrested position which now she feels but also because she ought to feel it and in varying words which may be not how many thousand persons the conjurers in power like population controllers cause to disappear behind the very wall those about to vanish stood against a moment past, but how many millions the persons in power represent; and all the time there (for is she growing by necessity more intelligent?) alternately appears like a sign the mere fleshly face of a father who brought her and a brother and others, always others, sometimes quite silently along solemn (damn serious) mountain paths, casual precipices in her little hook-and-thong boots so she wondered if at the height of the hike they would find again a coterie of serious men smoking in a room talking hushed or angry (though the amount of smoke held constant) led, inspired, moderated by the man her father who expected possibly nothing of her, a mystery, she couldn’t tell, she’d seen him close those eyes of his listening to her sing at the age of seventeen, seen him close his eyes and frown as at some idea, while also he sent her a telegram here and there, or once upon a time and then again, like a bouquet of local flowers, Milan, Los Angeles (where she really ate), London, Vienna, "take it back to the birds and the bees and the Viennese" Momo’s pouf sang upon Momo’s piano one night in Momo’s apartment building which God help us is just where Clara goes to the women’s workshop, which couldn’t be any less helpful (at least, if one were thinking of taking it) than a very, very tall young American woman poet who did not know that she was pretty—from cheekbone to upper knee and all, she was secretly pretty (and her adored daddy had called her "giraffe" until the day he died! animals first, then habitat, for she’s) secretly pretty instructing Luisa that Luisa’s country equaled some (no doubt American-made) shadow: O.K., Chile is a long shadow, O.K., good (and why is she listening moist-eyed to this girl in a noisy, aromatic room? she knows all the ways to get away politely, and all the other ways), yet (And do you come from a line of poets?) she with a Swiss passport gotta wait for this long shadow spoken more from the secretly bruised eyelids, melancholy and self-swelled, than from the wonderfully wide (not wide open but wide-long) eyes of the young woman—a shadow (she’ll swear) "cast" (maybe out of one of her own poems) "by the lapping sea which is the overlapping silence of the world breaking upon the hemisphere, a ghost coast like a mapmaker’s lost lore"—Luisa’s homeland, Luisa’s country down there a million miles under New York, "a planet," the girl goes on, "a planet in essence long" (and does this description of Chile make the American poeta political?—heavens no! only nostalgic for a nation she has not yet visited for Christ’s sake): let that poeta help herself, O.K.? . . . "what is in others ..." (but these words ... do they ask, do they interrogate? or do they tell you? or are they part of words to come?) . . . You asked if I came from a line of poets, senora? oh God no!—did you ever hear of a financier named Jay Gould and did you ever hear of the blizzard of 1881 ?—(she had heard of the blizzard, actually)—O.K. you heard of the blizzard, well it blew down the telegraph lines and Jay Gould had to keep sending his rapid-fire orders to his broker in the stock market—(was the poet descended, then, from Jay Gould?)—and his broker was doing O.K., too, you can be sure—(was the poet descended from Mr. Gould’s broker?)—No, senora, so Gould sent a messenger through the snow with his buy and sell orders, the fastest he could find and, well, the boy was kidnapped—(ah, you are descended from the messenger boy)—let me finish, senora, and Gould’s rivals put another boy who looked just like the kidnapped boy in his place who would tell them day to day what Gould was selling and what he was buying—(ah, you are descended from the lookalike)—No, from the boy who was kidnapped: he survived . . .

Are these words that ask, that interrogate, are they part of words to come? ... as in this same noisy room one man, two men, three men, all (though she’ll guess their occupations) unknown to Luisa who is so gloriously known to them at this reception on a Sunday before the new production, a different magic lantern in each set of season-subscribing eyes, all with attentive mouths (and noses!) each with raw carrot stick and glass of urine-tinted wine, approaching made the literary girl in the midst of further utterance perhaps fade proudly away into the rest of the room with a chandelier, two chandeliers more heavy with glass than light, and a large bell on a leather-and-mahogany bar that the Australian consul will pick up and ring in a moment—fade proudly away and toward no one special when she could have been talking to Luisa the diva, the opera singeuse (joke, we get gladly from her and she throws back to us half knowin’ we’z there only as {qua) need for change as we’z individuals being we’z race and we didn’t get wise to this overnight and haven’t even yet, which is why we’z currently angel-human alternant, you mayba gon’ not like this—halva takah chances—truth be maybe not so true as ye made up) so that to adapt to Manon’s or Piaf ‘s language (not Bidu’s or Luisa’s) Luisa’s own adoptable New York accent (turnoffable, turnonable depending you pay the bill) in order to double or treble or make her ever-various self even more many in the also still singular (if pidgin) French of singeuse, which does not in French exist, gave her a kick, hence some precious sense of entertaining herself, a solitary pay for those who are incorporated and much in demand, and, not wanting these three men whose lives might be waiting to become hers, nor anyone she can think of except Clara maybe, nor quite wanting the twenty-two (odd)-year-old poeta (who’d understand Luisa probably much better than Chile) to come back to confirm from just what collaboration there has come to Luisa’s brain through her ears—or (!) vice versa! —the words What is in others yet has others in it? and she is having help, she knows it, to hear those words and to know that it doesn’t matter if these people, the "others," are part of a statement or of an interrogative, she’s having help from somewhere, inspiration from the foothills (thank you), or from a dreaming person possibly whom she has never listened to, a mother in her (say) that she wished to be to her own father—the poeta would understand this of all things—when in 1950 or so he opened the great door to look at her standing fifty feet away beside a grand piano that was an intelligence in itself, with a tall window bright with a sky like sea beyond her singing voice upon which he shut that door again as if to say, You are here and I am elsewhere—he was then himself moving someplace: while she, with whatever back-straightening and shoulder-yearning, stayed where she was unless interrupted by herself or her teacher or the thought that her father had poked his nose through that door to look beyond her to the sea view out that nineteenth-century window: while the heavens knew we’z content to be foothills or her own mother herself, since we in never staying still might, since the sea becomes us, shrug seaward albeit thus yielding Easter or other half-known isles, or fault our half-known funking ways upward to Andes we may have felt we had to try being for ourselves however many (granted, temporarily) missing per-sonae would tell us convincingly what it was (you know) like to be ye Andes when not even her former resident tapeworm could tell (apart from living the—take it day by day—reality of) what it was like to be her or at least a parceled part of her team: but relation as we but are of her we found it not easy to swing away from her of late, since her vicarious habits kinda worked both directions, so, in process of getting suddenly real, she was living us, and only the sternest kind of asshole talk was going to keep her from going kind of crazy upon the creation of the distance necessary to move on, which us had to do constantly anyhow, being ourself as essentially relations as the coast of that ghost country is that country so long as its length is long: yet even then, our semi-amorphous, multicellular shrug-forth that draws along from behind our lengthening, contracting proposition, which will seem at times a century in question, at other places a curve of something like land, and at others a conclusion we drew that then drew us: and so, to get that distance from her, we were all (be quiet, be quiet) hearing us say, quote, "She is, but now we see always was, in a dependency structured to cope better than it knew with a multiplicity of small-scale" yow-knows, say ongoing kinship not to be either totaled (qua dependency) or—

But Luisa holds on to those words What is in others yet has others in it: which later she’s not sure belonged only to the bend of the tall poet-girl’s retreat, but stayed in Luisa’s mind (in her, she-sees-now, doomed, though naked, lover’s presence coming to her which might surprise her or pass her by, acoustically adorned with his "You exist in the hearts of so many people"—that is, Don’t get mixed up in the troubles of exile-economists; think of the life you make for yourself though no one’s saying singers are dumb, "we" know how well you’ve personally managed your household finances long distance to Zurich where the portfolio info if not the buck stops; but also the way this gifted scholar-compatriot of yours, the husband of your friend, trots in the park, he is drawing some attention to himself and did you happen to know—which comes through as his quietly interrogating Do you happen to know—)

"What is in others," she breaks her lover’s silence (hearing again Clara’s last insinuating word "Mayn," a name, Luisa is sure, interrupting barely her lover’s silence), his approach, his amazing gravity flavored with her refrigerated peanut butter and as male as it is more hooded than blind, more blind than false—so her breath becomes "What is in others" (her breasts softened each upon his chest then gently filling at the rub of fur—as she continues "yet has others in it?"—

—for we, with her in us, stand ready if always on the move like her father even when he’s (as now, if not defunct by someone else’s game plan) under house arrest, stand ready, being but relations in the vale we genuinely rent though it gets smaller contrarily the closer we get to it—constipado we try out with the o ending, for the universe is now allowed to be too-badly male, and the female principle is considering having nothing to do with this pustulated uniwurst before it disappears into its own core-needs—

—meanwhile, Luisa’s real; she’s no longer the vehicle for tapeworm tracks to get us from there to here in or out of the persons of a diamond-squint Ojibway medicine man operating just a stone’s throw from the Great Lakes system, or his New York contact in this inter-worm arrangement the sometime fisher-friend guidee the Park Avenue doctor who swears by wood fires and reads by them to drive off winter spirits while thinking often of beloved Luisa, now still more real: her that does not—in her lover’s mind, say—quite add up . . . this just plain naked lover adds to all else he is half half-feeling, for he thinks pretty well without clothes on, though never has been obliged to as it were kill naked, and wonders if we had here (in others, others in it) some mere fresh citation from Hamlet—could be Horatio herself speaking—until it crosses his mind bound elsewhere unto the unknown that naked he might be obliged to undergo death, and cannot tell where that thought came from or comes to, for he is not given to whim—

—or totally to any one (the fur upon his buttocks might tell that to someone too late for it to matter), while not so knowingly for he is not by himself a poet he ships daily on the ship of state without questioning you know the Chicago-school anti-inflation economics his captains import to run the ship which lately has expanded its range though no less tightly compart-mented against local breach from ghost coasts it cruises multilaterally by theoretically lethal instruments only occasionally looking out a porthole into a life where this mufti officer himself will see here and there a wood fire, or its tiny glint from cabin embedded in a childhood mountain so that if we have, though not knowing him well, told him, we did not need to tell him, he’d suddenly like a wood fire right here in Luisa’s bedroom with its marble hearth (and could almost go looking for wood, send out for anything in this city) and at a moment when he finds he loves her, he does, and so won’t say (for now) the name he heard her (intelligently) say into a stage phone in her kitchen with its cold linoleum some minutes ago, he can puzzle that conundrum, puzzle and puzzle it with a lover’s fanaticism while not hearing in his arms Luisa’s mind say again the name from the phone—but now her lips themselves breathe the name, and he won’t seize whatever lead it gives, the name from the phone—and she runs her middle fingers hard down his spine, and he is quite taken if unprepared for the bumpy impress that is one track, one touch, and answers breath with breath, "There is a future in those fingertips—" "In America it is known as foreplay," she breathes back with an extra exhalation of smile—"Preparation," he breathes, and she, ‘7 feel it too," and part-withdraws part-draws him with her by the small of his back when he murmurs like a sleepwalker, "The motive of our preparations," as they move together, where are they exactly?, the bed gives off light through her hair, and he knows for certain that she knows Mayn only as a name, a word, no doubt through her friend on the phone, yet knows that she has decided something about this unknown "Mayn": Absent, intimate, sitting on the edge of her bed, "I know," she says, "that that little woman you said watched me is a journalist; don’t ask me how; I know," but where her absentness is now he doesn’t know, but feels her friendly hand on his buttock, and his toe, firmly in the carpet, feels waited on; and "Good," he firmly answers, "good," while, being almost in the ship of kind, he is not enough there to know what would happen were he to find his sea to be land and if so if he would crash and crumble and kindle, or would pass simply into another life.

For we exact but what we are: we are relations. And if not always so perfectly where, yet we will loyally to ourself ever exact what. Between kin and kind, between blunder and art, between the first words of the saying the diva distinctly heard from the ponderous, shy, likable young American poeta and the second half of them, which seemed to come to us from other distances if not from no distance at all. And turning from the poeta (who was in turn turning from her) Luisa found in the three hyper-dressed men less matter for speculating what, say, they did than lumps taking up room unless one were to remove them by coup, by blender, by dribbling one’s salt on them so they dissolve on the rock threshold of one’s private house imagined beside the strong leg and ribs and shoulder of one’s father giving a nature lesson on a mountain rock that for small Luisa became a doorstep of a crazy cottage in the trees, far from all else save father and brother, and where question fades into question along with their interlinks: oh such as the one hundred percent inflation through the first nine months of ‘72 and how much of Chile vanished into Bethlehem’s pocket through iron from 1913 to the fifties, and what sign hangs over the sale in ‘23 of Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine, to Anaconda by the multinationally musical Guggenheims and who had told her lover she’s bought and sold and bought some shares of Voest Alpine for he so so so carelessly mentioned it as they stood together operatically approaching the monumental dirty green of the Statue in the harbor only the other day (who got herself together, walked out across the waters of New York, and took up her stand in the last century Luisa supposes it was and hasn’t moved since)—while her father’s prominent nose so large and beautiful and, in those childhood days, straight (not the nose of a frequently interrogated subject nor ever the nose of a drinker) and, in the days of her adolescent music training, without those hard-to-appreciate (you know) dark hairs creeping out at the nostril, is recalled withdrawing, almost funny like a Walt Disney cartoon she saw where creatures come and go and those Marxists aren’t yet explaining that in Disney the only workers are lumpen thugs or noblesses sauvages and you will no ever see them makin’ steel to make trusses to make a bridge to carry coal over and/or be in slow motion blown sky into wind high: no, you might see that culminating reality but never the industrial process.

Did you mean (?), asks our (now old) friend the shifting interrogator not wishing to be indelicate on the score of sexual version, that, well, the lady in the harbor otherwise known as a one-hundred-fifty-odd-foot copper envelope without portfolio had in the course of this American greening we used to hear about acquired a warped relation to the one-time Guggenheim gig deep in Chuquicamata (a vintage Chilean wine) on which we have run a time-and-motion CAT-type scan turning up no link with Voest Alpine or Bethlehem (iron, that is), which does however sell on the Zurich exchange—

—for the interrogator, part of us as we him, can use wind as we while not quite ‘‘getting" as we do the concept of passive energy to process us inward while more and more as if with interpurse generosity accommodating the multiplicity of small-scale relations, as that ironmolder whose father had been inspired two generations earlier by editor Heighton of the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia and who met Alexander in Pennsylvania in early March and met a thousand striking/striking ironmolders of Coxey’s Army with

The seed ye sow, another reaps

The wealth ye find, another keeps

: not that Jim young or older would know or care for Luisa’s doctor’s haunts—such sayings haunting him as "When me they fly, I am the wings," though that devoted one-shot-and-only-one-shot tapeworm importer, who got from Boston to New York years before the flying shuttle or even pre-shuttle flight scene yet stays young, has those words in common with Jim’s mother Sarah, as few would know nowadays besides Brad, back in Windrow, N.J., who might not know he knows, nor if it is a "quote" or a bone-deep gene of his long-gone mother: but in the midst of such outlandish matter at graveside as what Sarah who ridiculed weather conversation said once about wind curving, Jim easily retained a mystery he had already worked out for himself— that according to Sarah, speaking to him when he told her he’s going to work on the farm this coming summer not in the office of the newspaper, he would go away: "passed" away, Miss Myles even in a model obit could say—which, O.K., also retained mystery, if you want, and as with Jim and his mystery, or was it his mother’s, the mystery didn’t get solved and shelved or even lost, but got said: yet really just remembered:

: we already remember what had been going on, the whirlwind ride in Bob’s first pickup, the unknown piner boy who got on and off but appeared only to be first there and then not there, in the bed of the pickup, though visible at a distance that didn’t add up and apparently not carrying the later missing evidence of thievery that was all Jim would report to Bob, who at first had said if Jim had wanted the gasoline can he would have given it to him, then shook his head and agreed that the piner kid had taken it, what’d you expect of them? (—but what did that mean? Jim abruptly asked—Mean? why that those kids are survivors; that’s what Bob meant):

: we already remember, despite the red herring interrupting us as to confuse what’s the margin, what’s the leverage, what’s the center, what’s the fulcrum (to compound the possible confusion if not the possibilities, for the interrogator had tried to cut in, perhaps just to show he knew what’s gon’ on to ask, Do you mean that the diva’s giving her lover head while contemplating murdering him on one of the unwholesome nights during the degenerate run of the gay Hamlet opera-ette?, and who, by the way, is doing the script?).

Already remember what’s so soon not here any more; remember at last what’s been here with us so long we had more’n enough time to see but now would seem to have been waiting to remember.

Oh that’s crap, all that regret crap, say James Mayn and Grace Kimball in unison at a distance so that curiously they hear each other but don’t know it, a distance that could be stereo if Jim chose to say it as loud and long as Grace; but less noise betokens often superior conviction, where here, Jim, in a Washington hotel bar, having described the mourning of Mel for Sarah, heard dry colleague Ted "agree" you don’t know what you had till it’s over, and described the love of a woman he had experienced only to find out upon her departure for Hawaii on a bird-study vacation that he had felt stifled by her attention, though granted it wasn’t yet quite over but her absence was like it being over, and only then did Ted see what he had been living inside of; and Mayga, quietly or, rather, patiently and strategically there with them at the bar waiting till she knew what she would say and had the right moment, seemed then to say we have the time to see but we rather let it go, you know?, and then remember it, remember with rue, let the marriage go, then lament that, let the life go—

—but crap, the fact of the matter, broke in Jim, his hand belyingly gentle upon Mayga’s sleeve, and as near to the White House fence as a trip to a window would evince, and he’s albeit freshly shaved and facing the crystal cone of a martini that particular very late afternoon or earliest evening (recalling a daiquiri his mother sipped all by herself in the music room before Sunday lunch once) the fact of the matter (having been, he feels, succinct all day, he repeats the words but hears himself gabbing, hears himself from an interior angle, which maybe is just the bullshit-radar often birdlike or snakelike sweeping the area, so he starts to say) "Wind does curve," but only gets out the first two words and will improvise, "Wind does know which way it’s blowing," and while Ted does his theatrically hilarious coughing at this, Mayga holds on to the spirit of the word "crap" and Jim suddenly sees she meant slantingly what she said and doesn’t believe you have to look forward only to figuring things out after all the damage is done, and he wants to embrace her there and then, and then somewhat untogether he does embrace her, but it isn’t just because he sees what she meant, and later that night, oh yes it’s about time (quips the interrogator) that this relation was owned up to, Mayga persuades Jim that the real indirection was his own, oh I know you you see, I know you, I am proud to, you understand, but I do know you, it’s you on the contrary trying to tell yourself what you don’t much credit—

—and here I am letting my marriage go? he asked—which made her unhappy but not unintelligent because she will be at peace with him lying down or sitting at a bar or in a restaurant booth—with her going home to South America and "going home" with him tonight each has said to the other that this is the first time unfaithful to spouse:

: which Mel never could have been, and that’s all there is to it: and while his fidelity to Sarah, who hadn’t loved him, survived her presence in his everyday life, though he became capable of passion expressed (in volubility) to Margaret ("I could have made her like me—" "She did like you, Mel, she certainly did—" "At least I could have made her love me, there was something about the shape of my feet, the front end of them, she couldn’t take, it wasn’t my lack of music and she didn’t mind John Charles Thomas, at least I said what I liked, no, it was me, it was that I was on the ground trying to take off but knowing my limits, and she was in the air, trying to find the ground—" "She was not," said Jim to his grandmother, when told, "she was not up in the air," and Margaret to each of these males, the husband, the son, said the same thing, "It didn’t gel, so I guess it couldn’t"), Mel fell in love with Brad for a while, they comforted each other, Mel told him please not to feel he ought to work at the newspaper office, and got into the longest talks at the kitchen table with Brad so they took the consequent years of Brad’s growing-up, it seemed, and when Jim got back from a date, or, once, from the most terrible scare involving Bob’s pickup truck, and once got back from the whole summer away bartending at the shore, there they still were at the table and the only thing Mel wouldn’t discuss was Brad’s (to Jim, dumb) nightmare of her, of Sarah, coming close to him, drawing bow across string, marking time with a conductress’s finger, reaching for Brad in the most loving way whereupon, his fault, his fault, he awoke, fighting himself free of the sheets to find her not reaching for him any more, or the reach was there but not his mom—but still Brad had his Day (as Margaret said to Jim one day at the cemetery), and Mel insisted Brad take more piano, with Barcalow Bran-dywine’s sister-in-law who jabbed the keys as if to position them, smiling, and, when she served as accompanist, could keep up the pounding and still look away from the keys and up at Barcalow in his orange-and-maroon horse-blanket sport coat that excited him almost like college colors on felt pennants or football jerseys, he got taken to the Princeton-Harvard game by the bibulous doctor who was Dr. Range’s main competitor in town and whose house Jim had taken to visiting unannounced not hesitating to go on in and sit down even when often the doctor and wife and sometimes daughter looked interrupted in the middle of something not too good, and the wife and daughter shivered on their stone seats in Palmer Stadium and glanced but didn’t want to look at the program, while the doctor hollered somewhat embarrassingly to particular guys on the Harvard team, because he had gone to Harvard, to get cracking, which was a little like Barcalow Brandywine arriving at a gathering and beginning a little too soon to lead some singing and standing up with a glass in his hand to announce that he was still enamored of his wife after seventeen, eighteen years, nineteen wasn’t it?, years of married love (which was the title of a book Jim got hold of from one of his friends who actually had gotten it off a girl in the eleventh grade)—and once, to Jim’s amusement and Mel’s discomfiture, the doctor got unwound enough in the midst of the singing (for he—and his wife at least—did attend more than once, though why was not clear in memory), so the doctor told Barcalow Brandywine he had never liked him, and now he was thinking that he still didn’t like him (he burst out laughing) and never could understand that family of his either. But then there was Brad, right there, saying hotly—aged eleven or more—"Then you’re not welcome here because my mother was Barcalow’s friend and played for him," upon which all laughed except Jim who could have brained or throttled Brad whichever was surer (forget "faster"), and Barcalow genially told Brad it wasn’t his house but his grandma’s.

But Sarah could do strange things all right, like in the drugstore insult her old long-unseen acquaintance Leona Stormer revisiting town who lived in Chicago (which she said was nothing like New Jersey), and Jim at the insult his mother spoke didn’t get embarrassed, did he?, and she did things posthumously for if Brad’s Day a month or so after Sarah’s very own drowning —a Sarah special—had been Brad’s coming out into the open and grieving like an African, like an Italian, like a Jew, like a non-crazy old Indian speaking to the winds that cornered the world maybe, there still Sarah was, talking through Bob her one-time quite secret lover’s mouth and creating the swift, breathless hate of Brad when Bob put into his own mouth his own recollected remark re: winds, "What a lot of stuff—" he had told Sarah—"they ain’t curved."

Unless you were talking about a hurricane spiral, Jim observed out of the blue to Bob, who didn’t know Jim had been sitting here in Bob’s basement thinking, but now said, "We had a false alarm that day your brother carried on," as so they had, for no less a member of Brad’s Day than Mel had arrived in that strangely focused living room like a "living" wake with the info on his lips.

And so Jim found and soon afterward must have left it there unsummoned where it belonged in what rapidly developed into—hell!—the past (shrug), that he could collect if he concentrated (sun heat, uneven Earth shape, airflow cells, pressure belts, horizontal current)—all there was to it, you had to concentrate—not be confounded with "Get centered," from Grace Kimball which three whole decades later nonetheless comes out as unison to our ears, relations though we only are, the skeleton of that Brad’s Day talk about the weather. (You’d make a good newsman, joked Ted in their Washington bar not twenty years later and got a wrinkled forehead from his hunched, heavy set friend and a snicker from none other than Spence, whom they often had at the end of the bar pigeonholed but too sleazed-out and too silly for Jim to ever contemplate picking on him—under layers of slightly ugly comings and goings.)—and the skeleton was attached to people: for it was grandfather Alexander who had claimed that air travels from your high-pressure areas to your low, because to begin with, as Mel had pointed out, you get your pressure belts because air heats and cools and when it expands and contracts to put it ass-backwards (though isn’t that where the ass was, the last time we didn’t look?) and your pressure belts move because, to begin with, like stays with like, so you get cells of wind despite the warm always moving if not spending itself toward cold—which it becomes—for to begin with, whatever is true of the water which Alexander predicted would be on the warm side should anyone sample it this afternoon, the air moving at speed over an erratic Earth’s land of mountains and valleys, beauties or pockmarks, is not warm, as Margaret said with something like faraway anger, but not because water is slow to lose the sun’s heat, land fast (which is why the far, far more than cozy warmth of the sun’s radiation journeys so many million miles earthward while Earth in its ball of damp vapor is always moving but cannot ‘scape this given life, though by what or whom given the shouting tenor of the doctor-organist Sundays when Jim for a time, then, at (what?) fifteen attended service, could not say).

But Bob, why did Bob, eyebrows and all, dispute what Sarah supposedly had said? Well, Bob himself was the source: ‘course wind curved, Jim thought, yet when Jim did think about it one Sunday in church beside Anne-Marie Vandevere, who set no more store in church than Jim and did not find the doctor-organist much to applaud as a person perhaps because his daughter Cornelia wasn’t in her group, Cornelia could hear the horses whinnying for their corn in the stalls at the military school down their street (Do they feed them corn? Jim asked), Jim had to wonder if Bob all in all wasn’t right because what could nudge a wind off course except another wind and yet his father said there was no question about it, winds do curve: until one day that like other days in that year of his mother’s suicide might have been easy to forget he kept Anne-Marie waiting in Bob’s pickup discreetly (because illegally) down the street a couple of blocks clear of school because he had been thinking analytically and nonetheless passionately about dropkicking in a wind and whether his father would come to see him play since his father really didn’t have the time (But yes he did, intervened Mayga, swapping her stronger old-fashioned for Jim’s while Ted looked on)— As it happened, he did, said Jim, for Jim had been discussing basketball with Ted, the enclosed court, the trick of taking up position so it was (you hoped) clearly, stably yours then by law, and preferred not to find his father in the discussion, though then Mayga’s kind interruption had turned the talk to that afternoon of the pickup truck parked two blocks or three from school, Anne-Marie still sitting upright in the cab (as it happened, the driver’s seat) of Bob’s vehicle while Jim was somewhere (he had to admit it) thinking—if "thinking" didn’t make it more than it really was—why yes, leaning on the glass above that great old green-gray-brown relief map of South America somebody’d donated to the high school: thinking that if the fucking wind (which might curve around buildings like New York City or mountains) was in cells like individuals, well, how about a football? it got going its way up above the ground, but the land wasn’t promising to be there where it was when the ball came down. Ted and Mayga and Mayn all laughed at that expurgated evocation of what he did not for a minute know was a well-known effect that got named eventually after a Frenchman far more recent than it and that at some time had inspired Mayn to go get stuck in some difference between inertial and non-inertial systems, which explained why science had no satisfactory way to acknowledge this Coriolis effect; but there was Jim leaning on the glass above South America, as a familiar commanding voice called at him, "Get off the glass," and he removed his arms, transferring the support of his extended weight to his stomach and back muscles (no doubt), exactly at the instant he had seen that distant continent move beneath him and understood with a shiver, hearing scary words from his otherwise friendly coach, not just that it depended whether you were here on Earth or beyond it; and if you were out beyond it the wind down here crossing at right angles to the kick that he’d aimed downfield goal-postward, was straight as a die, even if Earth wasn’t; but if you were on Earth the wind with indubitable deflection warped—wait, I thought the football was yer wind, said Ted (and Yeah, echoed the wise little bastard free-lance photographer and news "dealer"—if the deal wheeled to his sleazy satisfaction—at bar’s end)—but coach John Rocker was asking if Jim had heard what them two girls in tenth grade had done, and at that moment like another discovery even more confounded unless you just stated it and let the fucking flickering mystery be—like the would-be dream that kept Jim "busy" (as Margaret said dreams kept her when asleep), the would-be dream Jim had-and-lost the very next dark, dark morning when he saw he wouldn’t have the chance to understand it except he did hear singing in the next room and it wasn’t his brother’s (room, that is)—which was in one sense the only next room next to Jim’s— but the music room downstairs and his mother was singing interrupted bits of a song teaching it to apparently Brad who was there with her and the word "world" and the word "morning" that came through the emptied, dark air were all Jim knew or was let know and what was between—well, yes, what was between, except the usual nothing—and yet hearing John Rocker’s hairy, husky voice discovering what it was saying just as its own words croaked out happily, "Why they damn near killed themselves in that pickup truck of Bob Yard’s I heard—hey, don’t you go with the Vandevere girl? what’s she doing driving a pickup truck when she can’t drive, the Pietrangeli girl was with her and I heard the right door was open when Anne-Marie swung the truck around in the middle of Manalapan Avenue so it almost tipped and the other one fell or jumped out and a car hit the right front headlight but they’re O.K.": so it wasn’t clear whether this was something two girls or one had done: but, leaving the glass counter covering the crocodilean relief map of South America and angry and reluctant but expressing only surprise and concern to John Rocker to whom he told the factual truth at once and John certainly did help out in the next couple of hours, he found pockets of relief in the middle of his anger and chaos—because his mother was dead and he was expected to, he was expected to, he didn’t know at all what? but pockets in the anger that were independent minds self-protected where the understanding had come along with South America moving beneath the glass (maybe you needed glasses, said Ted)—which marked the limit of what Jim could confess to this good friend whom he would go on joking with and detailing packages of fresh information to year by year over a drink or at a ballgame, baseball that became football that became basketball Washington, New York, Washington, home ‘n home, two decades upwards of—while to Mayga—

—Did he not broach these remembrances with his wife, asks the interrogator whose empty face has grown tender eyebrows and sprouts smallest tufts from shadow-erased nostrils, maybe he don’t got a nose—

—no mo’ (sang Barcalow Brandywine, upstaging the doctor in a warm, boisterous room at grandmother’s house)—

—I mean, adds interrogator, you have such friendships really in American Marriage or so our informants report—

—to Mayga, while she was available, Jim brought out the subtle blanks between the lines, explaining that the insight of South America moving beneath the glass above which he had been watching (thinking about, perhaps, wind and Earth) had been not utterly blown away by Coach Rocker calling the disgusting news of that girl apparently making a botch of the afternoon, the two of them too—but the insight had held to Jim, that is, without his havin’ to do anything, and it was that Bob, who had heard actually Sarah say that owlish junk ‘bout wind and all at the beach (—at the beach? asked Mel at the kitchen table and both Brad and Mel looked in wonder at this intruder Jim Mayn standing in the doorway, come home—When were they at the beach? —but Brad said, The day that old man came to see Gramma at the beach)—

—it was that Bob had needed to be part of Brad’s Day, well he’s a nelectrician ‘n has a pickup truck ‘n a dark red Ford sedan simonized like grandfather Alexander’s shoes, and a load of friends who say, Good old Bob, you have to watch him because only he knows where all them wires and cables are going—and he hardly belonged with the Mayns in Throckmorton Street or even in Sarah’s awful story but was in it no less and knew he would provoke by introducing that staggering fact of Sarah’s expressed opinion re: wind curves and re-provoke by citing his dismissal of her late view but it was where he was—where, Flick Mayn years later able to bring herself to say, where he was coming from, he wanted to be part of it and so—

—and yet as Jim raced through the uncaring halls of the high school, damn it, to the no doubt real location of that bashed-up pickup truck that was his responsibility when he had only a picture of it in his head, a blonde girl with lipstick (judge’s granddaughter) embracing the wheel of an endlessly rocking vehicle, a dark-haired girl without lipstick spilled, Catholic thigh by Catholic thigh, out of Bob’s stupid truck with her history notes bound in a notebook but adrift, Jim knew more, knew more than he knew, so he was minutes and minutes getting clear of that high school and a picture of a blackboard full of fond chalky shapes abandoned by human hand, but the very obstacles—

—read ob. (we recollect already)—

—very obstacles that kept him forever from getting out of this high school and down the street to stupidly hunt for the girls and the truck without asking directions though it was his hometown, wasn’t it?, the very obstacles that seemed to make his run down those halls endless wonderfully let him see, let him see—

—not a principal and a journalism teacher in passionate dispute or a male math teacher with some solid on the board and his head on a desk evidently too tired to even think "n’est-ce pas" at the end of one of those loud challenging non-questions of his—but that something in Bob Yard had loved Jim’s mother, and Jim, who didn’t care for either man too much, might be a hair closer to Bob than to his own father Mel, but that was crap like everything else, and beside the point and one more obstacle while the world seemed to be rattling yer cage, you had two systems no matter what the truth and so on about Sarah turned out to be, and it was more than that, oh shit, she was right ‘bout wind and Earth, and Bob (yer uncle!)’s right too even if he didn’t honestly and truly say it to her, except Bob’s the one on Earth, where winds what with Earth’s easterly rotation do look like they curve, whereas he’s takin’ the view from out beyond the Earth that ought to be Sarah’s. They had their problems all right, that clung to them like this sight that came to Jim and stayed after Coach Rocker launched Jim outward with his scary words, and he felt denied by those goddamn girls the chance to hang on to the two systems but they held on to him and went on knowin’ him even when he left them, seemed like, to rush away to handle one of those well-isolated—

—incidents, the interrogator fills in, proud of idiom—

—incidents to be handled, dealt with, coped with, covered, etcetera, as if this up-to-now continuous world, one by one—

—taking it a day at a time, adds the interrogator—

—oh, were you divorced too we chime in? did you have your limb cut off and then regret it? did you lose a loved one by unforeseen overdrift and have a really hard row to hoe because of it coming out of left field where there was no warning track to tell you the guys off there on the firing line rattling the fences wasn’t just taking batting praptice (as Sammy pronounced 4’practice")?

—we do not have divorce any more, the interrogator intones, we sent all potential (joke) divorcers via matter-energy dome-trans (a mere pleasant buzzing in the temples is all they feel) so that—

—they arrive in Locus Libration translated, each couple, into one?—

—into one? but surely you have not the technology yet to do dat, have you? asks the interrogator in a new voice coming through him from elsewhere—

—never mind, we have enough trouble launching our new cars, we reply, feeling more American which may feel like an isolated incident—

—sensibly handled as such (of the two-girl accident in Bob Yard’s pickup borrowed semi-illegally by an underaged borrower of the first part who was absent mulling over South America under glass), concurred Ted, one’s fellow newspaperman (you couldn’t say "fellow colleague," ‘twould sound redundant ‘stead of the succinct that Mel espoused ad nauseam, favorite theme, witness Sarah’s obit written by the proud widower himself—

—and if it was a mystery why Brad went to pieces that day, Brad’s Day as it came to be called, never mind all its wrinkles, its whys and whys and various crap you can’t know, maybe he discovered jerking off the night or afternoon before but was too young surely; and who in the hell cares, comes a foghorn-strong voice both far and close, hard to tell, we almost miss the later James Mayn expressing good-(more-or-less)humored disdain for something or other, maybe family history:

and you come up to the present with a lot of interesting enough memories, no doubt about it, hearing your mother’s fugitive brief lover (who loved her but would never have called her "nice") tell of an argument they had about a piano being out of tune and he heard it, a foreign vibration, a separate if not isolated sound, and she didn’t: sharp-edged memories often become surrounded by a nothingness of what lay around them I mean the idea of all these never-to-be-known people who knew your folks and arrived with horse-drawn (in Windrow, horses could draw, you see) vanilla ice cream at twilight saying but once, You have a lot to live up to—she was the nicest woman . . . and you hear them in the woodwork, then never more, such as the vanished voice that called the cemetery four, five days after Sarah disappeared and got Eukie Yard mad in his voluminous one-piecer to ask if interment had taken place and when Eukie retorted that the drowned lady hadn’t been recovered, the voice from New York re-retorted Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, which Eukie said he knew already, he thought; and somewhere before a trowel clanked under a porch but not before Lincoln’s wife was identified as an impossible woman, a voice with shoes on said to another heavily shod voice that Alexander had said the second voice ("you") had told him it ("you") had gotten opera tickets for a special road opera performance in Trenton, because it ("you") was afraid Sarah’s going crazy or something, and the other voice said, Yes it was Vurdee’s Ba[w]llo in Mascara (like a brilliant woman designer of revolutionary new men’s shoes with whom Mayn discussed South America all too briefly who insisted on pronouncing as Bore-guess a known Argentine storyteller and poet whom Mayn had never read and possibly never heard of) and what had been said to Alexander (who once observed that some Armenians are gypsies) who thought for Pete’s sake he’s going to start bawling on me, was that the lady in question might go crazy living with him, Mel—

—close down some of these systems, a voice says firmly at a semicircular meeting of Grace Kimball’s workshop, close ‘em down, don’t go back for more, ol’ Freud’ll have you sniffing around day and night till you got a snootful and it’s like booze, one snootful paralyzes you as good as another, close down some of those systems, you’ve seen ‘em, they work, he do act like that some of the time? you know it’s most of the time, which might as well be all the time, so don’t go back for more—so that we might have substituted the verbal sound "voice" for "workshop" and dispatched to the heart of what’s just been said—

—hear those voices with their boots on comin’ down through the woodwork and you’re under the porch but outside if you want to be—and the memory is worth not maintaining major space for, so store it dehydrated it’ll keep next to Brad’s brief vision he recalled and recalled and recalled of Sarah with skin peeled raw when the draped black towel came off which meant the waters tore her clothing, she left no garment in the boat, and she had gone away on her trip—

—oh please don’t, said Mel—without enough clothes, y’know—but after Dad Mel said she was in heaven, big brother Jim said, touching his half-brother’s shoulder (though Mel could touch Brad, too), No, Braddie, she’s O.K.

—no need for her to go on floating downward in your ill head, she had the water to float on, in, under, within, through, out through, so long as you got the basic info into your who where when lead—

—What? asks a now-long-unheard-from voice, a childlike interrogator who have overheard stuff not comprehensible or not especially desired— "What?" asks a kid watching TV—multiple kid dune homework with the sound off for a new wrinkle—

—No, she’s O.K., Braddie, she’s O.K.

Well’s far’s I’m concerned, said Dr. Herman, when Jim told him of Mel’s asseveration that most Armenians were Catholics, all Cartiolics are Armenians—have you ever had a real drink, Jimmy? and he bent to deftly lift from back of some other bottles ein quart applejack before Jim could start to describe Brad’s Day finishing off at the cemetery with a couple of snorts from Eukie’s small but somewhat inexhaustible bottle emerging from his voluminous coverall—"sirensuit" as it was called by Margaret (a great Chur-chillian sometimes though then she would see he was only history) and when Jim asked why "siren," Alexander said Churchill attracted all the ladies with that suit and looked like a baby in point of fact, and Margaret said Nonsense, the fact was that the siren was the air-raid warning and Churchill was always out among the people at those times and always wore that one-piece semi-military-fatigue coverall outfit—and Jim said, "Thanks, Gramma," and she said, "You’re welcome," he still visualized the Prince leaving in quest of the Princess, and the giant bird still adrift in that formidable western sky that at some margin, or set, of the light, became East, and the curious recovery of the Navajo Queen—curiouser and curiouser if you thought about it but he could stop thinking and he did stop asking:

And seldom asking his father, Mel, who didn’t relinquish the weekly newspaper for quite a time, questions he really wanted answers to and often thinking up questions about Windrow goings-on that Mel would have incorporated succinctly into the Democrat: a piner woman and her infant were found dead at the edge of the swamp west of Lake Rompanemus: in fact, the woman’s foot was in the water. Back in the woods the apparently sleeping body of a piner man, in fact dead, was found braced in the limbs of a tree near a burned cabin. (His clothes, Mel observed upon being asked by Jim what about him, were still damp, but there was no sign of foul play or water in the lung though no autopsies were held on three unknown piners.) Jim asked Sam, who for some reason had not told Jim that Sam’s uncle at the firehouse had heard about it at the Elks’ from Dr. Herman, who had been called by the police and had taken Cornelia with him and Cornelia who was in Miss Myles’s journalism class had turned in the brief article to Mel at the Democrat, which became briefer in the Democrat, though Miss Myles, who got this information out of Jim, could never persuade Cornelia to expand it into a feature piece. Jim saw waterflies playing on the murk near the dead woman and child, saw one waterfly carry some sultry irritation to the baby so it revived and opened its mouth but was capable only of silence. (The woman had shown signs of malnutrition and her hair was bedraggled. There were no plans to drag the swamp.) When confronted with such interesting news items strangely brief, Jim tended not to ask his father. If he got into talk with him it was maybe to tell him things like what would happen if the Earth slowed down rotating and stopped rotating when inertial momentum had been enough reduced so no one had been hurled off Earth’s surface—’cepting that this event occurred in a dream (though a daydream) Jim had which therefore he would never have told Mel and possibly would not have broached to his mother were she there still, or were she to appear on the roof in the middle of the night or in his framed picture of Sequoya, brave Cherokee linguist, gift from Alexander like the picture next to it of Andrew Jackson in a black coat looking pretty mad—the pictures done in the same year of 1821, according to Alexander; or Jim would tell his father there was "some crap" showing through the ceiling, a discoloration on the slanting, low, roof-squeezed ceiling above Brad’s bed—some rotten shingles out on the roof at that point and it would get worse—and Mel asked Jim (a rare asking, a rarely personal species of asking though father and son and densely aware, more than that, of each other) if Jim recalled how upset Sarah’d been when they came home from her group’s chamber recital at the Presbyterian church and the snow firm underfoot and the winter stars out and even with his tone deafness he’d told Sarah it was one of the memorable evenings of his life and she said Byron Kennett’s mother had come up after the quintet and told Sarah Sarah was making By fall in love with her, did Sarah know that? and she could see it in his eyes during the Mozart, she could see it in his eyes, and all Sarah could say was wasn’t Betty glad Byron was falling in love with someone safe— with a laugh!—but Betty got mad and said some fairly surprisingly final words and went away, and though Sarah, though bitchy, was enough in the right all right, she couldn’t get over it and got cold late in the evening and her fingers got blue, did Jimmy remember? not really except Mel had wanted to call the doctor—"my musical anemia," Sarah said, "my incurable blues" and she looked so young then, said Mel, like a little girl, younger than when I first knew her, but deathly pale though we knew what a toughie she was, climbing out on the roof to look at the shingles one spring and when Mel, whose slippers were always dark red leather, the best, and made of leather only (not the carpet-material-type slippers Alexander wore out onto the porch to go half-sideways like a sea captain or a sailor down the steps to retrieve the newspaper in the morning with the dew still icing the front lawn the deepest damp green), said if they didn’t reroof the house he’d have to waterproof his slippers, Sarah picked it up as lightly as one of her letters downtown to her father came up off the floor into his hand, and when Dr. Range in his yellow slicker came by when Brad had influenza and they were all there, Sarah said (and Mel said that’s the second time you got that wrong) that they were probably a leak-proof and dry house but Mel was the only man she could imagine waterproofing his carpet slippers, which got a laugh but not from Mel, who essentially clapped his hands and offered a sherry to the doctor who said he would love to but it was against his religion this early in the day whereupon Mel plucked the doctor’s yellow oil-slicker rainhat from the hall table where it hatched a massive paperweight with newsprint from the first, heavily Jacksonian issue of the Democrat sunk into it, and handed the slicker hat deftly to Dr. Range, whose services were not for very much longer sought by the Mayn family though Margaret and Alexander Mayne (with the e) went on with him nominally their physician for years, though Margaret, who was congenitally well and believed that there’s an awful lot of things in this world that’s your business and nobody else’s, couldn’t stand doctors doctoring—much less hospitals mined with bedpans, buzzing with thermometers that got shoved hither and yon, granted, by nurses that for all their hellish officiousness knew more than the doctors up to but not including slicing you open, which Margaret would never permit done on her, though she had had Sarah’s and Sarah’s sister’s tonsils out (well how many actual tonsils does that make?)—and it comes to us as if it were moving outward to our fingertips or had been on the tip of the tongue, a notorious nearness better located at the susceptibility threshold of the tastebuds—when ‘twas through Jim unbeknownst to him that we relations extracted clean clear and isolate Sarah’s "Well done," when Mel hadn’t flown the hat to Dr. Range’s head or done anything special, only wished it a bit fast perhaps from the mahogany table to the doctor’s living fingers, which is no sin.

No sin for Range to say Sarah might get out among people more than she did, for if anemia was anemia, blues didn’t help anemia, and though no longer called in after Sarah’s death, Range did offer to grandfather Alexander the morning after charges had not been preferred against Jim, against Bob, or against Anne-Marie Vandevere (the remarkably impassive one of the lot) the confidential opinion that Jim would land on his feet, the doctor had liked him ever since Jim had in his opinion quite possibly saved the young German girl who had been out of sight down in the meadow between the cemetery and the race track when she had been struck in the temple by the good doctor’s unseen golf ball that had sliced and sailed—took off and seemed to travel further than would a good shot, although there’s an illusion—through trees and into downhill sky, and all Jim saw was one girl in one meadow fall, drop, drop sideways, almost as if cleverly pouncing on something unknown there in the grasses: Jim had run to her, found her gagging, sensed her whole struggle, gone into her mouth with his fingers; had gotten her tongue forward, had started raising her hips, pressed some life into her (she seemed in a concussive shock) so that when the doctor, in search of his ball, came in view looking down to the right of the golf course and beyond this far end of the cemetery, the intent motion of the boy straddling the girl and the swift, sturdy approach through the field of that Ira Lee, the Indian kid (part-Indian? full-blooded halfbreed!) lacked any visible response from the girl lying in the field who was then, as if in death, the cause of Ira striking Jim across the side of the head for Jim went on trying, that is to revive the girl, and in fact never stopped although the doctor’s shout and Ira’s second thought saved Jim from a second blow; but judging from the examination at the hospital, she could have been in trouble if not found soon—she was a refugee, but not a German Jew—and Ira’s presence there never got explained any more than Jim’s, who came out the rescuer, but he never said how he came there, a fairly boring place to be, and this was long before his mother died—all in all, an impressive performance, the doctor emphasized to Alexander; that boy’s all right—

—an isolated incident of irresponsibility giving Anne-Marie the key to Bob’s pickup so she could get inside and wait, where presently Italo-American emotion found Dutch-settler property enclosed beautifully in the cab but not locked in, which inevitably if not fatally caused that scene to beget and to overflow into and to slide sideways curving into (out of nowhere) a next:

while Jim, from obstacle through obstacle rushing through his high school building at twin speeds too fast, too slow outward, unsure what’s wayside and what’s way, how much to love his mother gone, how deeply to give his father thought, how much weight the motion he had experienced above the smudged Windrow, New Jersey, lens guarding the earth-colored corrugations of a continent of South America donated by—he forgot—how much to blame his grandmother Margaret for being the East Far Eastern Princess who in her turn couldn’t tell him quite where she was Margaret or how she was her own mother or what was so and what wasn’t and so he had thought, hell, he didn’t want any more of that story stuff, he’d close that out and about time: and there in one place was coach telling him to get off the glass, then finding stuff coming out of his mouth about it being Jim’s girl (but only the one he knew about) that he hadn’t first thought about, re: Jim; and there in another was an absolutely pooped Mr. Quirk (Jim’s summer employer’s brother) who had only three in his Solid class and had been ordered to remove the otherwise much-laughed-at sign over his door "let no one ignorant of geometry enter here"; and there in another place whizzing by was the tall young legislative principal Thompson Fulkerand, columnar, firm as stone, exactly half-bald, and the equally tall, majestically material Pearl W. Myles, and they ain’t talking about the weather but it’s bad whatever it is, there’s the eye in the back of Fulkerand’s head for half an instant jolting Jim as he bounds by so fast only the word "criminal" in no doubt "Well I’m not a criminal, Miss Myles" or "It’s criminal what’s done to gain favor with the student body" gets into the strong, fast, angry boy’s head; there’s the occasional, laughable seventh sense in Jim that at least for the time being he, or the world-altering episode he’s in, is insane; there’s Mel’s all-too-brief obit for his wife, black-edged oblong on the second page a stone’s throw from the masthead, that Jim was not asked about but, after the fact, when asked by Alexander (in Mel’s presence, for Alexander did that) if Mel’s piece seemed O.K. with him, Jim called it "short and sweet" and never spoke of it again—locked it in; and there’s the order in which people came to Brad’s Day: there’s Alexander, his shined shoe-toes sticking out while he peruses a book about Indian music and smells very faintly of peanut butter he keeps in his shop; there’s Brad, so set apart by his own hand, his own act, of legs, neck, head, stomach, voice, playing hookey some might say; elsewhere, though same room, there’s Mel reporting a chance today of a hurricane originating astoundingly along the mid-Atlantic coast, and Margaret, shocked she said at Mel, then ovaling her mouth, though she didn’t ring true, while that weather reporter’s hand made a rare trip to the small of Brad’s or anyone’s back; and then, blink, there’s the sound heard at a distance but not a close-up, an illustration of which Pearl Myles from on gentle high asked for as part of her tall kindness to Jim and the family; and always there, central and invisible, is Brad sometimes swimming, the way any swimmer will use the floor for training and support, though not much on breathing, though ‘twas heavy:

For as we breathe, so shall we move, but upon moving, we go on of force breathing—

—on the move? the interrogator tries out idiomatically echoing in warped unison Mel’s "on the move?" at the bedroom doorway and Jim had abruptly quarter-turned to catch his father in the corner of his eye, then continued laying out every bit of his clothing on the bed beside a suitcase and a largest-size old khaki scout knapsack, he had three pairs of narrow khakis, he had five white T-shirts, he had four pairs of colored boxer shorts and two white jockey, he had three pairs of washed denim jeans, one of them Army-Navy store bell-bottoms, he had a maroon V-neck sweater raveled at one wrist, a yellow cashmere sweater (you said sweater) his aunt sent him from Boston that he never wore, and a tight-fitting scratchy, very warm blue-black turtleneck Navy sweater that Margaret had just last week brought him from the City; he had a washable seersucker jacket that he could wear certain evenings this coming summer if he had to, and for shirts he had a fine-red-white-and-blue-checked button-down, a blue Oxford button-down, a white tab-collar shirt with a light-brown stripe, and a regular white button-down; he looked at the closet and around at his open bureau drawers and answered his father: "Yeah, seeing what I got." His father had had a (his "warm weather") haircut, which enlarged his square head and broad-chinned face. Behind Mel, or around him, the sound of frying was audible, for Brad was a capable cook and, flicking the pan butter with a (with "his") spatula up over the yolk and unsettled white, would fry himself an egg in the afternoon and sandwich it between two slices of Tip Top bread, the egg of which Jim now smelt, and saying Brad made him hungry and was there any peanut butter left which he knew there was, he stepped around his father who sort of got out of the doorway. In the morning there’s Brad looking at Jim when Jim comes in for a fast glass of milk, Brad slowly chewing a mouthful of cereal in the quiet of the sunny kitchen so sounds like Braddie’s got nuts in his cereal or bones—whole animals, for God’s sake—while looking, looking, looking, munch, munch at his big brother (How ya doin’, Brad, you glutton!) and less fugitive and meaningless and exactly not to be turned away from, the dark red wool skirt (her mom did weaving as a hobby) of Anne-Marie Vandevere sitting on his right in the pickup truck (how did he drive it so many times right in town?), the cloth tight across her thighs and knees and lap you could tap like a drum but there must be a tunnel underneath right up because of the cloth not hanging down the way it sometimes did, he’s not sure how much he’s going to get this afternoon? why no practice that afternoon?—either it’s very late or it’s Sunday—and he’s eating an apple or something sweeter, he can’t quite recall, not what Anne-Marie thought or said about his mother’s drowning though he didn’t go out with her till just after, and not worth recalling, obstacle upon obstacle, but it’s his life, he feels years later, and there it was in all its minor trivia as vivid as fact in suspension ("Suspense," said Ted, "but did Anne-Marie ever say anything?"—and both men, aware of the Chilean journalista between them who smiled at her drink, knew the difference between saying that about an adult and, here, of Anne-Marie—"Oh she often spoke, and she’d have thought it out and she’d begin by saying, ‘You know . . .’ and you listened.").

It was later like he’d turned to these facts, all scattered and all the more exact and kind of meaningless, yet horrendous, funny—he’d imagine the entire life of the Stormer woman (going far away from her home and feeling occasionally guilty, and bearing a child and then another child conceived in marriage while perhaps her doctor-husband watched, watched her being a good doctor’s wife or falling out of love with him without knowing if it was him as a man or as a medicine man), the woman who married the hairy, intensely hard-working doctor ("workaholic" we always say now in the mid-eighth decade of a century that threatens to see life itself as a drug), in Chicago they lived, and Leona who on a visit to Windrow parents ran into Sarah and seemed not to be insulted by her one day in the old, still drugstore that was also a soda fountain and afterward Jim asked his mom if he could have a Clark bar and she paid for it with the tears in her eyes and then needed a bite of it, raising her lipsticked lip a shade above the upper teeth looking along her nose at it. Jim aimed the balled wrapper at the trash can and it missed and landed on the white tiles that weren’t as much like bathroom tiles as was the facing in the barbershop from linoleum floor up to the counter.

Yet Flick Mayn, the daughter of Jim, once wrote for herself to give to her dad ridding she hoped some need from not just her system, why was it insulting to say to Leona Stormer, "It isn’t that I feel much for you; you take me back, that’s all you do—" but it’s honest—and your mother cried—

—which she never did, said Mayn, and granted she did say "that’s a hell of a lot to make me do," I think she said that—

—damn right she said that, said the daughter never flinching from (well) someone else’s life, but she meant "taking her back": that was the "hell of a lot" she meant, and I think you knew that, Dad.

No . . . no—which was how Mel habitually responded to someone’s opinion, even on special occasions a cluster of facts reported to him, such as that Sarah when she played the piano, which wasn’t her first instrument, was able to see places she had never been to, markets full of red beets in a Polish village, the Chicago wind from the north raking the lake into white flesh, grouped skeletons down a mine, and when Brad looked at Mel saying gently, No ... no ... his brother Jim fighting mad, said back at Mel, Yes. Yes. Yes, to which Mel answered Jim, What do you mean? How do you know? Whereupon Jim seemed to surprise Mel by saying, I was there when she said it, she said it to me and Brad—upon which Mel was just able to smile, Well if she thought so . . .

You can just about take an insult from an adult who will at least not decorroborate what you have testified when he, or his relief, inquired who’s doing the script for the opera-ette we’d cited entitled Hamlet?

But Alexander, whom Flick came to know in his ninety-second and ninety-third years (concluding postscript years, not twilit so much as noisier, que brujo, what din, as he lost his sight and turned the radio up and up and discovered music all over again—Alexander no more meant to insult Brad by removing the Densmore book he had loaned to Sarah a decade before than to dishonor Brad’s Day (quite the reverse) by bearing upon his person a simple smell of peanut butter from his supply downtown, which was neither here nor there:

The Indians of course lacked peanut butter, or the demand for it, to begin with, though the jojoba bean, a very buffalo among vegetables, not in that they used all of it which wasn’t the feat that totaling a buffalo was, but in that the jojoba got them through many a weekly problem, from shampoo to the generally unknown desert fish fry, when these deep-underground travelers found their way or it found them up into the warmed waters of the high cacti, raised the level and brinked the pressure of these standing reserves and ceremonially leapt from cactus "eyes" we name them, openings sometime occupied by owlbirds, one at a time unless we include the biggest-ever elf owl that Mena the itinerant zoologist had seen, plugging that particular hole clearly, yet, in the dusk, darkly when contrasted to the visible but illusory wash of moon-stark dawn-lumen literally coating the cactus trunk as the real light otherwise diminished: for that elf owl would not have budged for a pressure of fish risen inside that cactus except to fly at the eye of some night camper Anglo or Indian glinting in the flash of jojoba oil awaiting that desert fish fry so unknown even Mena had not witnessed it (hence the importance of judging comparative descriptions), and the Hermit-Inventor of the East said he had not witnessed it but Marcus Jones was more to be believed, a plainer, less potent figure so that when little Flick ran off outside to see what her younger brother was doing around or under that house where Alexander still lived though now with supervision, the name of that west-renowned botanist who found, and found names for, even unknown growths of locoweed so that his feats of broken-ground bicycling south of Salt Lake City and, monumentally, still south, are overlooked, brought from old Alexander, who was just turning the radio volume dial up again a generous exclamation, Oh Marcus Jones! (as if to say with distant softness, My old friend!) he was real, you know, that was him, with his field work in Colorado, you only see that book in French, (slowly) last day of April, the air perfumed you know, the sunny white flowers and the silver stems of the poisonous loco, and the Spanish bayonets, reaching an eminence, lights across a mesa—

—he remembered that? the thirty-odd-year-old grandson inquired.

But only that, came the reply, all else is gone, like your daughter just now, and the volume dial turned delicately while the man in carpet slippers who had been bald through four decades "quoted" a mass of dark rocks . . . gigantic walls half ruined, some ancient cathedral . . . good stuff, lifting sadly in the wind its proud debris notched and made jagged or something by the puissant hand of time—Ute Pass by horse, and so forth, and I have no reason to suppose your grandmother didn’t really know him, he was out there in the late seventies and the eighties and he’s up at the Sperry Glacier in Montana twenty, thirty years later—but in the late seventies he changed to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at Kansas City ... is it possible that Colorado is more beautiful than Iowa? he asks, and you don’t have to go there to say with him you bet your life.

Upon the sinking of Sarah’s teeth into the outer-skinned chocolate of the Clark bar on into the honey-colored brown-sugar-crumble inside you would not build a broken marriage, or a self-destroy scenario either. Yet you won’t go so far as to say you’d have ruled out Sarah’s leaving her husband one way or another. Taking the boys with her? Hard to imagine her taking Jim; in the end he would not go. Why is another question. Not loyalty to Mel. Nor to the town, for what is loyalty to a town? get out your hose and have a speed contest outside the fire station once a year against fire companies in English-town, Toms River, Holmdel. Grease a pole and set the duck or flag at the top. Loyalty to a place and time: Jim would have been able amidst the madness to say I’m not goin’. And in his heart would be, Not yet. But then she had gone, she had gone. He couldn’t have foreseen it, could he? Not in the drugstore the Leona Stormer day of the enforced sharing of the Clark bar. He just saw Willy and Wally pass by the bright drugstore doorway in the downtown direction running in step and he knew where they were running and he didn’t recall what it was all about: years later, fallen forth into other lives, he lighted Mayga’s cigarette, an American cigarette for a change, and he said to Mayga that he could see his mother’s mouth, teeth, infinitesimally nose-crossed eyes watery still, but no fingers. Mayga told him he’s so precise on what’s not there, while she waves away her smoke and not into but away from his face. Oh, you see, I was feeding her, that’s how I recall it. Nonsense, said Mayga.

Oh Christ, you’re right, he said. Let’s, she said, get back to the libration-space future you’ve already had. Let’s get, he asked, back?

But if these sole things were there to turn to instead of the something identified as real that Margaret a trifle throatily (especially for her) said existed there in the cemetery where they had stood on Brad’s Day before the others moved Brad’s Day to the cemetery, there surely were people to turn to if he wanted; but he couldn’t. He couldn’t want. And not just Byron Kennett, who put his sensitive arm like water around Jim’s broad, strong shoulders and said, If Jimmy ever needed to talk . . . well By was comfortable like a fly winging softly in a calm room.

Do you mean, demands the duty interrogator, that the effeminate Byron man was like a fly, was comfortable, was a room in himself?

We can’t answer—for we changing from angel into Jim sometimes find or hear only the moment and the words of its impulse, we’re not explaining.

But there were others. He made a one-quarter turn and it was Brad staring at him from a nest of garden hose a-coil beside the house: "You goin’ somewhere, Jimmy?"

(Why naturally.) "We’re havin’ pork chops tonight."

(Kid brother; no mean chef; acting like a mom, but nothing like theirs, who knew freedom and wouldn’t ask where you goin’ and Jim would never catch her sweeping his bedroom floor.)

And there’s Margaret: he made a half-turn in the leaf-windowed silence of chewing down a kitchen doughnut, and she broke her mood and whanged a n’innocent fly off the white icebox (real icebox on porch, pale-brown unfinished wood with inset panels and two big sections, upper and lower, what timeless comfort that icebox with butter and apples and he didn’t know what in the lower, and a great cake of ice mysteriously and ceremonially alive, a treasure that never needed to blink its eye)—well, this was a summer later and he had a job down ‘t the shore swizzling Tom Collinses at a hotel with a long, long sanctuary porch of rockers where the older ladies sat in their white unbuttoned sweaters, he liked the people on that porch and he came out with his tray and walked to them and they enjoyed especially receiving their drinks watching the wind ruffle the American flag on the pole, he knew that was partly it, while the sun settled lower off to the extreme right, around the bay.

And there was Bob Yard, with whom he did talk, and a lot, and some about Sarah. But then how can you? You just do. Except in Bob his mother came out quirky, and not even ... he did not have the word in those days, and sexy wasn’t the word . . . "sensual," he said to Mayga later, realizing as he did so that Mayga was "sensual" less mysteriously than his maddeningly gentle wife, Mayga was "there"—he let her be—and he would go to bed with her if he suddenly asked and she wanted to but he never stressed it, and then they did go once, and then it was valedictory, which is very very risky, like looking for special large last words on your deathbed and not settling for what you already know, but no, it turned out to be friendly and miraculous, no doubt the Grace Kimball that Mayn later heard about and came closer and closer to would have said Exciting one-night stand for crying out loud: but it wasn’t anything like that: it was love: and he loved his wife, too: and it was another form of . . . well Sarah came out exciting, behind Bob’s memories told frankly sometimes to Jim, the son of Bob’s illicit paramour, my God!, are they talking?—well, why not?—quirky and exciting and, yes, magical: and Bob did not know about when she went to France for a few months in 1925 in a carefully supervised program for music studies at Fontainebleau checked out by Margaret so that little but the music was left to chance, and that time evidently meant a lot to Sarah though Boulanger and other mysterious teachers were what Jim recalled her talking about when he didn’t know much about music or care, at least about the violin—he came, eventually, to care about cabaret piano, the super-involved departures and the root simplicities of it all such as the first, perfectly scale-like six-syllable progression of "She dances overhead" (followed by "on the ceiling near my bed"), "Dancing on the Ceiling," a very sexy song half-clothed in the airs and imminences of romantic touch: and one day in Paris Jim woke up knowing that Sarah’s feeling, hardly communicated to him, about Fontainebleau in 1925 or so, was unchecked in him at that moment in a large bed under a comforter in the vicinity of those very few articles of rather heavy dark hotel-room furniture and the sound of cars revving that could not touch him because he was looking at the curtain veiling the ironwork of the narrow balcony you could hardly step out on, and he was due at the airport in the late afternoon and thought today, yes, he would go further out and take a look at Fontainebleau—it was on the way to places that he picked up, according to Joy, his wife, what he really had to report—or left it (he retorted, because wasn’t she putting down his profession such as it was?), and the French journalist he was supposed to be meeting at the airport who wanted to ask him what would happen to top-priority French plans for ballistic-missile submarines if the Russians were to wangle out of Washington an agreement to reduce general western strategic strength changed his schedule and went with Jim to Fontainebleau and during that visit asked many things, had Mayn ever opened Henry Adams? ever been down to the Maginot Line to have a look? try Brittany in January, see Mont Saint Michel and eat very well—but never mentioned a submarine till they were on their way to Orly after a fish lunch that left Jim liking France and still wondering exactly where his mother had lived, he could have checked, it was a school: Jim had never, he realized, thought about his mother fondled by a man or sinking her teeth into a (Clark bar) neck or shoulder, Jim had only his own experience to go on at fifteen, but it was pretty good, he thought about it in a lot of pictures that didn’t easily go away but also didn’t think about it at all, was in casual shock, it was pretty good, better than he grinningly let on to Sammy, who chose himself a girl nobody thereafter would have dared call a pig (which she wasn’t), but she certainly was plain (as the older generation would say it) a very plain girl who also said kissing his way was unsanitary but Sam loved dancing with her slowly with his right hand firm at the downward limit of the small of her back just where the flesh flared beneath clothing, though, as Sammy reported, nothing much was happening—he liked Margaret, that was her name and she had thick, raspy red hair and got brown not burnt-pink at the beach like her brother, who played tennis and got razzed by the guys behind the fence of the town court for playing a fruity game, spring being bad enough but fall too. Jim had never seen his mother undressed and whatever he pictured out of Braddie’s dream he himself didn’t see his mother bloated, salted, or wafted deeply and coldly by the Atlantic Ocean out and back, out and back, though he half-saw her in her panties a few times, hips a little larger than he had expected, shoulders defenseless (—It is true of women, says the interrogator; Crap, we say to him, in your country all people are defenseless).

(On the contrary, the currency is at last defended, thanks to your remarkably durable republic—with panties on, but turned away): only in his mind if he was honest, her back to him and he didn’t see Bob Yard in the daydream and knew him to be somewhere where he would never see Bob’s face, Didn’t remember the first days at school after Sarah’s suicide; felt he could—but didn’t want to, possibly. He did miss his mother’s . . . privacy: what a thing to miss! he had his own, and plenty of it; and one day twenty years later he wondered what his daughter’s ever sharp view would be of her father’s mother doing that.

So he didn’t turn to others, the ones that seemed logical to. But Sammy was the only one he remembered like a daydream in retrospect coming up to him and saying, I’m sorry. And he shook Jim’s hand and there were tears right under his old eyes but none in ‘em. Jim and his mother never cried. Well, obviously Jim—that is, didn’t. And this was something the grandmother stated, one time, and it was true enough. Three girls wrote notes to Jim that went out of his head though he recalled the notepaper, one with rabbits on it in the margins, the others with little pink and (/or?) yellow flowers. Anne-Marie didn’t write him a condolence (he learned the word) message, but came to the house the second day when there was still some awful expectancy, and she walked into the living room where Alexander sat and Margaret was in the kitchen and Mel and Brad were there (long before Brad’s Day—a month to be approximate) and Jeanette Many was teary and Byron Kennett and his mother were alternating on the theme of who could have predicted it, and Anne-Marie coming forward reached and hugged Jim and then she kissed him three kisses on the mouth, each one longer, which could not create anything but silence, hence acceptance—jokes would have been out of place; then Anne-Marie took Jim’s hands with a happy smile that brought courage for the unknown, not sadness—dole—for tragedy, and she said softly, "I don’t want to stay here, but I did want to give you a big kiss. If you want to take a walk, come over. You know what I mean," which was all she meant. He was part of her life, she part of his, but no real sweat at all: maybe it meant she wasn’t going to get tied up with any fellow for a long time; Jim never did find out if there was an answer like that with Anne-Marie, they just weren’t together later on: but now they were, yet with a happy knowledge he took so for granted it forgot itself, like the inequality of his not giving a damn when he found Brad going through some papers and stuff he’d brought back from the shore —until later (in Anne-Marie’s case, twenty years later, and then he tried to understand how they had been so warm and cool at the same time; it was sex (going all the way), respect, a slight subtlety on each side; but in Brad’s, the unequal, case, maybe a couple of days later) he found some joint of his mind wham! remembering for him:

In the daydream of retrospect—to continue, to continue, to continue, to get anyway to this end at the risk of being less and less (than) succinct—his mother’s bare back was to him as we have known him to say to Mayga and to his much-loved wife, and he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find his mother’s—oh yeah he couldn’t find Bob Yard in this, the daydream, who was so vivid, so living, as opposed to the bare back and elsewhere directed shoulders and hips that were full of oh full of—

—you cannot easily say, said Mayga, for who could?

—something, said Mayn quickly, that’s it, thanks, kid, expectancy, full of some expectancy that—

—this is your mother? did I say "expectancy"?

—sure, sure, and I’ve got the words now, but—

—You had the experience then, said Mayga, never rushing him but giving him or taking from him a lessening of time, as if she would look at her watch, ah her watch, her watch—

Oh he wasn’t remembering stuff he hadn’t remembered, for he had always had his mind inside this time of his life; that "true" daydream had come, there wasn’t much to know about it.

They all laughed at a thing he said, bartender, Mayga, Spence at the end of the bar that always seemed underground or optically curious; a bearded man with a newspaper; and another bearded man just entering from the hotel lobby, who laughed for no more reason than to join in or lest the joke be on him if he didn’t, or out of good spirits, though when he sat up beside the other bearded man and they at once began conversing in tight order it wouldn’t have been good spirits, no, upon which Ted appeared from the lobby with, for a change, a real grown woman at his side, not one of his gals who always made such a rotten impression at first and eased into their natural grain later in the evening when it might be too late—but what did Jim say to make them laugh?

—full of expectancy, the room the day Anne-Marie Vandevere kissed him "in public," for Sarah might still be found, and full of expectancy, that strange bare back, in the daydream somehow, missing Bob Yard, a daydream as still as if the dreamer were she and in motion, opening the front door with the upper reaches of the house as empty-feeling as the front hall, familiar with its mahogany table, mirror, carpet with Persian prayer rug on top of it, his new raincoat hanging outside beside the mirror where he’d left it forty-eight hours ago after returning discreetly from the shore, and the paperweight as blunt and uninstrumental and as ugly and second-hand-looking and never really old as ever—a hall (nothing underlined) the same as it had been a month ago when Sarah had departed in her own direction, he looked at the pictures on the hall walls seeing them more than when her mother Margaret was there; and, electing to go (to bound but not to bound) upstairs, instead of to the kitchen, he took two stairs, then one, then paused like a back-diver adjusting his balance, and knew that the absence of Bob Yard from the daydream detail of the lady in panties only and with her back to him, his mother’s shoulders he was quite sure, and dark hair, was hard to get out of his head and he had been entertaining alternative explanations as the source of the daydream forty-eight or so hours ago—what the hell might as well play detective to the hilt: (entering house, starting to throw off coat off both shoulders at once is hit in face and midsection arms pinned)—sheer story!

He felt he had been preceded, and often thereafter. Someone had been there ahead of him. Well, he had been delayed getting there. Pearl Myles ("Pearl," as the class called her offstage) had asked for an imaginary news story (evidently nothing happening in town), what a contradictory assignment, said Mel (his father), to whom Jim could not say that with all his own practical physical confidence he left that classroom and stopped, bumped by a couple of guys, and stood nauseatingly alone for a moment losing everything to something, but what?, and then he knew it was embarrassment, mortifying, over his mother: and not that it was suicide (recalling Alexander crying in the kitchen very, very briefly, with the words "How can those boys stand it?— why, I can’t accept it, I can’t accept it ever, Margaret, not ever")—but no, it was embarrassment at her being not present any more—

Letting the family down, responds some former interrogator, and rubs his chin and glances "out" into a closed-circuit screen where those "presently" contained in the local stadium that can "seat" a hundred thousand (and stand more) are playing soccer, but he gets no confirmation nor does he himself need any that he is correct in his judgment of this woman whose name temporarily escapes him.

A woman also in a raincoat who when Jim thanked her for stopping asked if he was wet and when he said he wasn’t sure if it was raining, she stopped her wipers and together in the front seat as they accelerated they watched a mist grow on the windshield which was "rain all right," Jim said. She sat pressed back against the seat, keeping the wheel at arm’s length well almost. She asked where he lived, whether he’d had a good summer, wasn’t it good we’d had the atom bomb, that is, to use—and what was his favorite subject, or was it too soon to tell, or was it always the same subject. Something had to happen, which was why Jim had decided to revisit Sarah’s point of departure. Something. Anything. For nothing was happening at home, except Brad came into his room and asked about this, that, and the other like touching things.

Jim got a hard-on but his new raincoat covered it. She never asked what he was doing hitching down to the shore on a rainy September day, or what his name was, but they laughed at a billboard and five Burma Shave signs that made up a sentence, and his hard-on had gone down all by itself as warm, though, now as before, and a boy and girl happily huddled in the jouncy back of a pickup truck they passed; the woman drove Jim an extra eleven and four-tenths miles and though she wasn’t old her nose looked tired, like some stuff or material or other, while her cheek was soft and tan; and when she shook hands with him when he got out he liked her tits filling her yellow silk blouse and after she made her U-turn they waved. No one need ever know he’d come to Mantoloking, and then he got mad, being alone, and wondered if he could get in a few good jabs at least at Bob if they had it out. You could call it hate, and he cut off around and through to the small road, and up through to the beach that was bright without the light of brightness. Jim wanted to swing at somebody (maybe just play catch). Then he saw that it was the future, this decision to investigate the place where he suspected there was nothing, nothing to be found. A man was fishing. He knew the man. The woman would not have waved had she thought Jim was a detective. The cottages back on the bay side were many of them still not boarded up. The man turned about, with his eye on the end of his rod like it’s alive, and came suddenly through but slowly and methodically hurling his line far out, beyond the second swell back of the first breaker—"comber," Mel his father had called it, and somehow Jim always remembered remembering his father who did not swim calling it that (though he could, undoubtedly, swim).

You might have an accident if you lived alone and you’d rot in your room and you became luminous. The man was a brother-in-law of the man who owned the gray dory that needed a bottom coat in August and probably still did. Jim knew this so well. Jim didn’t know the man to speak to and figured the man didn’t know him and had no reason to change his judgment in this regard. The man was built like Jim, or like Jim was going to be—that is, broad, stocky though not less than more or less medium height. Jim had not wished to listen to the subject of their eventually finding Sarah much less go and ask Lester Coombes, the jowly, long-legged chief of police down at the Courthouse. His mother was here in the sand.

She was on a towel in the sun and he saw her fingers, her hand thrashing as she threatened him with his name as if she would actually do anything if he fell upon Brad, and, moving toward the man who now cast again as rain again fell, but the man passed the least additional second aware of the other person approaching, though from the direction a mile from here of the bend and the breakwater and the pier down came two, three walkers slowly as if they might never get here—Jim passed over the exact place where he had stuck like a pole at an angle in the sand though he would never have hurt or anyway murdered his little brother, who would have his day beyond all this feeling after Sarah’s going, a feeling that could well be the crap about eternity the minister "put into words" (as Barcalow Brandy wine in a black suit with this time a tie like one of his horse- or Indian-blanket sport jackets, done in a Windsor knot—"He surely put it into words")—so it must have been there and might be "Still out there?" he said to the man in boots and olive-green slicker reeling his line. "All winter if you got the circulation for it," the man said and at his voice some dumb gulls yelled against the breeze, and an image of his mother went away, but he’d been getting this foreign one with panties and bare back and Bob Yard went away with her—where? over to get clams or ice cream at Mantoloking pier? clear down the coast hugging it as far’s you could go?, but he thought they had never done that kind of thing together, at least she played badminton a few times with Mel who moved well and had a wicked wrist. Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, look out, you’d get in there and go so deep you’d never stop falling, long’s your rate of descent was controlled. A swarthy man walked near them out of nowhere, dark, "darkened by some centuries-old desert," Jim one day recalled the scene for Mayga, who was made uncomfortable by this particular (circa-VJ-Day) slice of the small-town Mayns, and he knew it and later felt that he had guessed why fifteen (sixteen, seventeen) years before knowing Mayga whose conversation, occasional as these drinks together actually were, might get him feeling unfaithful, and her discomfort made him secretly mad this time quite a while after the U-2 but Spence was at the end of the bar, one of the few actual times Spence was there, when Mayn said what the boy (a smaller shape of him, or was he, the grownup, the smaller?, they were in each other for good and sure and goddamn sure) said to the man fishing, who each time Jim looked at his face seemed to look back at Jim though he didn’t, "Did you ever know anyone who drowned out at sea?"—"And never washed ashore?" said the man, and bobbed his rod and kept reeling. Yes, had the man ever known anyone that that happened to?, but he said, No, not known, though he thought it wasn’t as bad as many deaths, and, as if changing the subject, the man said, "Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that." And Jim, abandoning private detection though glad of his raincoat because of the wind even rainless, asked if a body would sink and later rise, or what, and if the man had seen bodies come ashore, and the man half turned to speak, then turned to look at Jim (or like a silent version of when Mel was saying to Jeanette Many, "It was a mistake"—"A terrible one," added Jeanette so quiet you had only faith that you’d heard her—"She didn’t die, she didn’t die, Jeanette, she didn’t do that" (Jeanette’s long and amazingly narrow hand on his wrist) when Margaret entered and said gently, "You mean maybe she didn’t know what she was doing; but remember, she did it, not you," so that Mel looked up in surprise, the editor of the Democrat, crying again, and said, "Do what?"—that is, the brother-in-law of "the boat" Sarah had in some fashion used was saying, by not saying, You’ll live with whatever it is; and you can.

So that after passing back down the bay-bungalow road up to the pier and breakwater and asking nonchalantly if the police had ever questionedpeople about the woman who committed suicide and the man had laughed, a commercial fisherman, and said there was things that matter more and wasn’t the boat found a ways down Barnegat from here?, owner was lucky it wound up on that spit—police found a note in an airmail envelope (man laughed but)—people are people, the boy flared back and the man in sudden defense of what he probably did not know stepped forward, and Jim thought of stepping back, but the man said, "What’s the matter kid, eh?" and although Jim did not know a good answer he knew what to do, without knowing.

"You bastard," Jim shoved the man in the chest so he moved, and Jim ran, he didn’t recall even turning to run. I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people it seems. The man had boots on. In motion, it was no contest, except much depended on the man’s unwillingness to go beyond a boundary that was in Jim’s mind, and it was a measure of the man’s rock-bottom interest in the event. But Jim felt the same even when the man gave up and Jim wasn’t hearing the great whishing silences between when one boot hit the ground stride for stride and when the next. But Jim ran like the halfback he was, because detectives didn’t run, they stepped behind something. (Ted: He ran like a Seminole through the woods with Andy Jackson whooping after him. Mayga: He ran because he wanted to get somewhere else! Spence, end of bar: Ran like your little brother trying to keep from getting beat up. What’s it to you, Spence? Oh, man tells me his story. Other people’s families, you know. Stick to your own. Wish I knew where they were. Breaking my heart, Spence. You ain’t got a heart, Mayn.)

Someone says (and it’s a multiple child that is growing up staggered): The boy meant not only that his mother mattered but so did the man in front of him. He shoved him, which is like pointing except the thing you mean is too close up but it’s better than having to wait till you know his name.

Well, what’d he do? asked Sam the next afternoon. Stopped running: he musta got a hernia in those boots, he was just standin’ around fartin’ enjoyin’ life, but he was a bastard.

Yeah, he musta been.

So you went down t’ the shore.

Yeah.

I’d agone with you.

That airmail envelope, Jesus, said Jim.

The guy laughing, you mean.

Yeah.

He’s a bastard, yeah, said Sam, who knew about Jim all Jim had to tell and that was a lot, though not Margaret’s Indian crap.

Jim came off the pier running easy, and passed up along the bay cottages. After a minute he walked and cut through to the beach again. He always recalled the horizon the hot day his mother stared at it irritated and alone upon her familiar black towel and he had to look away from her to see what she was looking at. But now the gray receding sight threw at his eyes a wake of sharp wind, and he knew that the man on the pier wouldn’t have talked like that if he’d known who he’s talking to. But is that the way it is? But here on the beach with the wind asking nothing but hitting the eye like a chemical not quite healthy given off at great speed by the horizon, Jim knew there’s two systems, and the man on the pier would have been O.K. if he’d been switched onto the other, which his grandmother surely knew ‘bout ‘cause she blinkety-blinked around between the East Far Eastern Princess and the Margaret who got more freedom running off from Chicago in ‘93, and then onward largely alone to the meat packers of Omaha and the loco weeds of the stony West, than Sarah ever got when she came of age because Margaret was a suffragette but not notably at home; but if his grandma knew the two systems she must have known she must have known, she must have known—have to get to the point, said Mel, when Brad to whom Jim had spoken of the odd brevity of the little "box" about the dead piners asked Mel what Jim could not ask— have to be concise, succinct, compact, terse, pared-down, compressed, succinct, short, concise—

—she must have known (as Jim found the other man, the fisherman brother-in-law, gone, and felt that this trip to the pier and back was coming around in cold, dumb circle ‘cept more a doubled half-circle round to the pier and back again that could have been a full and single circle only by sea, by having a sea half), she must have recognized the other possibility (and Jim looked quickly around him, we already remember, for he in us and we in him have needed help who are relations but relations that sometimes we have yet to have or that loom away in the offing, which must be a sea term we almost remember—help seeing in the absence of the other man a sign that this might not be just where the fisherman had stood) that, as the Navajo Prince learned upon acquiring that pistol shadowed by the double moon, a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer had been given it on the deathbed of a white man who gave it as an evil charm while lying that it was donation to the T.D.’s clown art of acting out awfully their worst nightmares and daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out all except the fingertips whose whorl prints showed the path of the winds at the time of creation—and if she didn’t recognize that secret possibility, well Jim was all by himself anyway, in his raincoat that he liked the deep pockets and crisp fabric of, and was turning away from the scene not of the crime because there had been only the starting here, though a leaving of the note in the unstamped airmail envelope for someone she hardly knew who hadn’t kept an eye on her taking the boat out through the low surf, or how had she done it?, well she did it—

She had help, came a voice from bar’s end—

—She left the suicide note to the owner of the boat, for crying out loud?

—But you didn’t stay angry at your grandmother Margaret . . . (for Mayga didn’t ask why he’d been angry)

Oh no, said Jim, shaking his head humorously, we were pals, and I was going far to see the land, as Owl Woman, remember her?, said, while back in my house (what was it?—no takers even from bar’s end) the songs are intermingling (he laughed open-heartedly), and Margaret pointed out how I was doing some of the intermingling, I remember because later before she died we had a similar reckoning up—I can hear her on Brad’s Day walking all the way back with me from the cemetery saying I never told you anything about a second origin of that pistol, the first one was perfectly satisfactory, or you found it so when you were a little boy—for Jim had asked if it was true that the Princess’s prospective mother-in-law got better when the Prince and Princess cleared out, and the resurrection led back to the Prince’s pistol which really belonged to a lot of people for even Harflex of Choor had had it in his hand and after saying cruelly and angrily, Why did she have to go telling him all that stuff?, he added the Thunder Dreamer’s connection with the pistol and Margaret said with equal irritation, I never told you that—

And it would have gone further but, shaking his fifteen-year-old fists out to sea, and roaring and screaming, hurting his throat, he never remembered what into the wind or winds that blew some damp self into his dry eyes, his mother gone, leaving not a crumb of ice-cream cone, that nice woman, and taking nothing with her not even that half a humid pickle in its paper on the thwart of an everlastingly damned dory which should have arched its gunwales and told her No, don’t do this, don’t do this, lady—a man’s voice from behind Jim called and he turned to see the brother-in-law fisherman beckoning and he went sheepishly but when he got to the red-slatted sand-drift fence in front of that beach house, the man said, Aren’t you the Mayn boy? asking a fact that Jim wrote down in his notebook verbatim that night. Aren’t you the Mayn boy? (as we ghosted him prolixly, to be in the very difficulty of what it is to be) but giving what Jim ever after knew was almost love, from a stranger, a stranger with no hole in his head and no double moon in his brown eye and cheek stubble, inquiring if Jim would join him in a cup of canned Manhattan clam chowder, but who asked Jim what he knew he’d been asking to be asked—so that it wasn’t until he got into the front hall at home in Windrow two days later, and stared at his new raincoat that had been hanging there since he got home from the beach almost two days before, that his daydream of a near-naked mother (never turning around yet turning and turning and turning in the sea like just a body) returned together with, again, the absence of Bob Yard and the emptiness of this house especially where he went, seeing the panties, the spinal line, the shoulder not now bent to the ear as when she played the violin, the fiddle, but straight and lost, waiting, waiting, while Jim took the stairs and slowed waiting to hear something was waiting up there so it’s too little to think about coupled with too much, like twenty lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snowbound he had to memorize by next week (not only memorize but remember!) when he didn’t like poetry period: So that when he heard a rustling upstairs so that he might tell the fine drift of its air, a window open, an opening when all the layers of the atmosphere lined up each its slit, crevice, or chink which explained that cleft Margaret had told him of, when cosms of the sun (and apparently the Hermit-Inventor of New York and the Anasazi ancient agreed on this) ran instantly down but what they did had not been clear, or not as clear as in retrospect the next day the news of the Normandy landings had been clear in words and on the map in the Newark paper and then the New York Times with headlines and paper and ink all as authoritative and packed and soft as a Christmas present, the map Jim had (on the page it was printed on) snatched from under the nose of Brad who wasn’t touching it with any part of his body (You ain’t readin’ that): yet was the rare atmospheric cleft (now successfully explained as Jim went softly up the stairs of his home some two days after his detective round-trip to Man-toloking) an opening for the cosms to draw up the life of the Navajo matron with the hole-in-her-head? or to prepare for that night of the day when the sun itself would not and would not go down until at last in darkness the double moon came to reveal the Princess’s sometime bird rising and hovering, as only the Hermit-Inventor of the East witnessed and told later to Margaret, to attack the lion drawn by the future’s odor in the eggs of the bird’s strictly diamond-shaped nest but lost both its quarry the mountain lion and the lion’s prey the egg or the matter inside it sucked by that speechless cat at the long instant when it knew its own inner essence to be that of the egg—

—What’s "essence," Gramma?

—only, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York, to vanish with a speed given it by the egg or more plausibly taken from a process of relation or transformation the Hermit-Inventor’s friend the Anasazi could explain if he would, that turned that mountain lion looking for deer but introduced to more curious food into the very wolf, the giant wolf with immense, slick, independently breathing internal organs that the bird then taloned, dismembered, and/or gorged as a one-for-the-road farewell since evidently the Princess and the Prince after her were bound elsewhere if not together—

—and the remaining egg, the remaining egg, atop that volcanic plug? asks the interrogator—

—I never said anything about a volcanic plug, said Margaret some years later upon what would have been her deathbed if she hadn’t "gotten up to die" on her own terms—

You’re trying to make us ask how she died, but we will not fall for it, the born-again interrogator recently christened Gatorix nags.

—Jim in one silent swoop was at his bedroom doorway witnessing what here he was not too late for: his brother Brad reading note pages of Jim’s held off the desk and now returning Jim’s look of blank hate with fear and the sudden inspiration "Your floor needs sweeping, what’s all this grit?"—until moving toward Brad with a hand like a paperweight downstairs, he hit him on the side of the head and Brad said, "She was crying, I remember, she said Gramma had told her a sad story about the Indians." Jim went away downstairs getting the point of that picture that was missing Bob Yard at last, that he and Bob Yard were occupying the same body in that scene and that’s where the missing Bob was. But Jim couldn’t think of anything probably then but what sad story about Indians?—nor did he hear Brad make a sound upstairs, who now knew where Jim had gone two days ago and had a nerve going into Jim’s stuff and had a jaw or cheek or whatever Jim had swatted that was hardly a living thing for Jim he didn’t give a shit and didn’t even feel like calling up Anne-Marie but here today had come home forgetting forgetting forgetting—

—Hey Jimmy, didn’t you have varsity practice today? came the voice of the chin, the cheek, and he wheeled at Brad, who said he was sorry, he was sorry, he didn’t really see anything, a few words underlined, nothing honestly, and he would of liked to go to Mantoloking with Jim Saturday—

—Well now you know, so it’s just as if you did go, you fucking little snoop, and if (or words to this effect) you don’t like beach sand in the house why don’t you sweep it out—

Tough little insect with a life of his own all right.

People just taking up space. Taking up matter.

Was it cold? asks a firm voice that wants to know.

How’d you get down there, Jim? asks the same voice.

Did you see Missy?

You didn’t go in the water.

Did you go barefoot?

Hey Jim . . . ? asks the same voice, dwindling. Nothing much more to ask.

The insect might turn into a person one of these days.

I don’t know why I wrote all that down, but I left it there because it’s my room.

It was an assignment, didn’t you say? Vm sorry, Jim.

Just don’t do it. Don’t be sorry.

Is that what you’re handing in?

No.

Good.

What do you mean, good? I couldn’t hand that crap in.

That was good about ramming that guy, Jim.

And, Brad, what story about Indians? Gramma never told those stories to anyone but me.

Mom said it was a swap. She told Gramma some things, and then Gramma told her some story about an Indian who died.

Jim was looking long in the refrigerator and when he turned Brad was not there. There’s things probably can’t be said about relations with your family. Margaret told him "the man with the pencil" was an Indian word for "white man."

Well, had he wished to be at the shore alone or had he wished to find people there? Can’t have it both ways. Isolated incident.

What’s a . . . volcanic plug? asks Ted (who supposedly knew everything) with some readiness in his voice so Jim heard the joke coming a mile away, or the elements of it, and laughed at once but didn’t stop his friend, nor go on to tell the places where the additions had been his own to his grandmother’s souvenirs, and earlier instructive additions by Jim very young, such as the crevi-chink and the Thunder Dreamer alternative provenance of the Colt pistol, and—source of somewhere both inside and outside him like us because it is us becoming human, a piece of him, or a piece if they came even in pieces (like those Brad "went to" on the following day) of these relations that go from him as he from them—the gigantic timber wolf’s swan song out of lion into the departing bird’s bright-eyed ferocity below the double moon and above the elf owls in their cacti and the People watching both the sky and a clear radiance off the body of the Prince’s apparently dead mother, a working glow—so that when, weeks later, recalling its curious positioning in the detective document that Pearl Myles never saw (but never needed to see), Brad the little insect asked, Hey Jim, what’s the lion’s egg mean?, and Jim considered clouting him again but pointed out that it was the lion that ate the egg and there were two eggs—which then reminded Jim—and Brad said, Gramma says she never said anything about a lion turning into a wolf and being torn up by the bird, Jim felt less betrayed by an unfaithful beloved than in possession of some other adder than his own dumb calculus of daydream that he discounted as being not him, begun then, long before he found himself living and half-returned from the future that in the early sixties the interesting Chilean journalist-woman Mayga accepted (as she perhaps in sympathy could not accept the painful thing Jim’s mother had done for reasons easily invented). So it was "See I didn’t make that stuff up, Braddie" (he heard the voice, his own, and recalled Pearl Myles preaching Synonyms, Synonyms, Synonyms for an increased vocabulary and Success): whereas he would "claim credit" (in the code of later political violence) for additions, hell, to tell his children if not himself—many arising some time after Margaret’s characteristic death: to wit, the vast visitor-bird’s sneaking kinship to our heavy, short-necked sea duck the king eider of northern coasts (now thought, by a curious "lifer" ornithologist doing time within thinking if not striking distance of the Hudson River, to possess a tracking-resolution grid in the predatory wing of its brain enabling it to process both incoming weather and the crabbed configuration of the coastline it patrolled); to wit, too, the fact of the pistol’s having been given the Thunder Dreamer as a dying white Anglo attempt (by, likely, one of that brother-band of dueling Germans in the mid-century American West) to put the whammy on our Plains Indian protest religion of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Yet additions occurred also prior to Margaret’s death: unpro-duced operas by a Chilean woman of the mid- to late-nineteenth century that were part folk, part Italianate—but virtually Verdi!—and part (in the strange case of the Valparaiso Hamletin, according to Mayga, the journalist) late Beethoven chamber music (i.e., in the "This was your husband," cum picture, aria echoed in Ophelia’s Valentine morrow song): addenda also including matter on German settlers in Chile who might design a railway system then retire to keep bees; plus matter such as the desert jackrabbit, his eyes a-watch low and for’ard in their moist head-holes, and other data the authenticity of which James and Margaret very occasionally bickered over and might have even on her deathbed if she had had one. But the Hermit-Sojourner, who to the Anasazi healer’s mind had about invented New York, with its plans for wind-saving mid-air canals above the projected skyscrapers of the city along which would run pneumatic shuttles like the communication capsules future department stores hoped would rattle and whistle their efficiency music up pillar and across ceiling, proved to be a person (Oh stop it, Jim, the ill old lady laughed suddenly, not so old was she yet plummeting into her real age unreally ‘z if she’d been radiated in some fascinating zone), a figure anyhow, whom the grandson was not specially pleased to reinvent: for the Hermit was among other things multiple, appearing first on Bedloe’s Island in 1885 as the nephew (though this wasn’t known to the twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Margaret) of yet another Hermit-Inventor who had known the Anasazi before Margaret knew the West, and who a generation before had detoured lengthily en route to Anasazi country via that Alabama farm later named (and truly) Whalesville where slaves had turned up the amazing skeleton architecture of that fallen angel (so they thought) which their betters at once christened the reptile Basilosaurus—while at least one new manifestation of this character-scientist seemed to come up in later allusions, all used, both to build to a fine phantom of a continent spanning Margaret’s girlhood and her grandson Jim’s latterly irritable imagination, for the Hermit-Inventor came to visit the Statue of Liberty in pieces the same day Margaret and her father, her daddy, came to cover the event for the Windrow Democrat (a dubious organ—oh stop it, Jim—founded once upon a decade to get behind a President who was haunted not only by the sinister lunacy of a central bank of the United States that might foster adventurers like the American Wheelwright whom Alexander’s grand-cousin shipped to Chile with to build a railway that had been accidentally designed on a restaurant tablecloth, but even more by the possibility that he Andy J. himself, dyspepsia, desire and all, might be inhabited by one or even two of those Red Sticks he had striven to extirpate and scalp from the woods and marshes or send west in one of Our early solutions to the mass transport problem and to that of economizing on Mass itself)—yet a similar figure rises to crags and other lookouts in the western appearances of our Princess of the East Far East who is sometimes Margaret eager, intractable, palpable learner and sometimes an earnest tale told by a place about the Navajo Prince’s mother’s dream songs: until as the references pile ahead powered by the latest cow-catcher-engine fueled by a locoweed even Marcus Jones could not name before we let it die out through inattention as a viable energy source when if used it would have gone on living even after being picked and while being burned (wait, though, wait, wait a ramute! remember the northern bison’s tongue, delicacy amid wasted carcasses, yet) as versatile as the jojoba pod, as thoughtful as the nature gas in Casco Bay Indian seaweed, versatile as winter steam in northern Maine or as that visible relation in certain of the territories between air and earth, and altogether as active as particles of melted, smelted, Indian and Anglo flesh which in rituals in northwestern New York (where the printer Morgan threatened Masonic secrets) and in central Oklahoma (where a curious sect of non-evangelical lay Christians, the "Protestant Franciscans," loved and knew the exile Cherokee without ever laying their religion on them) sometimes mingled in purely symbolic communion whorl upon whorl—and as by definition so much of this current knowledge (read knowhow) keeps clear of James Mayn’s eyes and the working heart he turns upon his work and hours and his humoring pessimism re: the senses history does not much make, and runs only in memories he rides pestered by a past that for cripe’s sake is over and done with until he charmingly lets slip to a friend or two at most that he’s in and is "coming from" the future, the libration-point space settlements, and can describe them and will oblige when that spirit comes upon him maybe get drunk, sozzled, mildly mackereled, pickelooned in (please add also) good company to a point of preferring to believe his future existence is an inebriation best succincted or, failing that paternal tradition of economy, shunted into a nutty past that kids him ‘s much ‘s he it, until occasionally he meets a man or woman he’ll tell things to, a wife, a colleague, maybe a person he knows is primarily overhearing him, but to be so believed as he was by the lady Mayga bugs him so he’ll drop right into someone else’s life which is neither the future relation of strip mining to the deep-steam taps, nor the truncated lunacies of his own (he thinks substantially banal) fambley where you go so far and then shrug your way forward into adult life and he never needed a somewhat wonderful and historically elusive mother (who, well, had the good taste not to get found, having gone too far, too deep) to say to him You will go away where you belong, because cripes he was goin’ anyway—door’s open: yet these private lives that greet him between, on one hand, the relation of chemical warfare (agreements) and the ease of keeping C.W. development secret, to the genuinely civil uses of controlled poisons to seed the atmosphere at many levels with efficiency that’s odorless but almost painterly if you can catch it just before or as dawn arrives, and, on the other hand, the relation between the Prince’s mother getting better when he left (which Margaret claimed she had never told Jim!) or Harflex of Choor waiting patiently but far from passively in the old familiar coastal plain while the Princess eluded the pursuant Prince by being spirited in the shape of a swaying mist into a Statue braced like a tree against the high winds of the harbor it’s a-guarding to the question why Sarah, a mother, for whom people mattered quite a little and who was a good and practicing musician should have turned away into one day’s horizon like some meaningless wind that’s as equal to the matter a descending body becomes as one obstacle yields to another and story to story—yes, the aforesaid private lives that greet him and themselves between all these above relations became nicely complete, modestly revealing—he told someone named Norma about teaching his son to ride a bicycle so he was the one taught, not Andrew, because Norma had told him about a separated woman she knew who was living with another woman and they took the first woman’s twelve-year-old son to an experimental video showing at a small loft theater downtown and in the middle of it a man got up out of his seat with a pistol naming a woman nobody knew who he’s going to kill and people began to get the point and were scared, and Norma’s friend’s son suddenly said out loud to the man with the pistol, "She’s not here and it’s lucky for you she isn’t," and the man collapsed weeping on his folding chair—"She’s not here, she’s not here, she’s not here!"—and the gun dropped to the floor and that was more or less that (someone kicked it away from him, he was as they say overpowered or something similar to that happened): and many of these shared lives are chambered where Jim wouldn’t even get at them, knowing that in their disconnected self-containment they make sense like a day’s work let it go at that, like a past that you could get pestered by to the point of having pursued Margaret right to her deathbed—not over a thing like 4 7 never mentioned any eight-thousand-volume Masonic library in Salt Lake City," but over some embarrassing little gap in her life as if it would tell why her daughter Sarah (think of her with white hair, garrulous) permanently absented herself from the town whose name we have been given to use and understand was made up by our grandmother and our grandson between them like founders.

He even told his Chilean journalist-lobbyist friend Mayga once what he never had told his wife, which is the uncrowned infidelity if you want to explore the continent-size tilt of the well-known guilt-ride where you ride it and it rides you, told Mayga, told Mayga, told Mayga (before she herself disappeared at a point when she might have told him something—disappearing like the apparent converse of an obstacle heaving up again and again) that the day he saw South America move beneath the glass he was leaning on (ah yes, no practice that afternoon because they were excavating the south half of the field laying a pipe, looking for a pipe, it’s no longer clear. Fascinating, Jaime, fascinating. Sure, sure. Don’t lose any sleep over it, as you say—if you could dream, you could economize).

—he had seen above the glass above that map that if he didn’t move, life would—but no, that wasn’t quite it (another bourbon, Leo . . . Mayga? no? Early flight to Boston tomorrow, New Hampshire)—

—no, it was that the brother-in-law man sharing with Jimmy a can of tomato clam chowder which Jim discovered at that moment was not his favorite kind, he liked the white New England milk kind, you tasted the clams, tomato roons everything oh it’s the oxalic acid no it’s the red shit, the brother-in-law man on a dull September day at the Jersey shore had said point-blank, "Your mother hasn’t been found"—those words alone—and leaning over his soup Jim said nothing, one of many times he said nothing—nothing until the silence and the soup-spooning changed the subject:

But that wasn’t it: Mel, who’d written with one of his many soft-lead pencils this stony-brief obituary for his wife, had said, apropos of the "hokey-pokey" ice-cream man who’d praised Sarah, and after (no matter "when") Alexander said some Armenians were gypsies but that most Armenians were Catholics, and Margaret said later that for Catholics suicide was the worst mortal sin, so Jim said (thinking suicide certainly makes you mortal), "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," without knowing how near a joke his remarkable inference was—but surely he meant, Because the hokey-pokey man had said she was a lot to live up to—

It’s certainly mortal, said Mayga.

No second chance, Margaret had said.

The day after Brad’s Day, Brad asked what happened to the other lion’s egg. Brad wanted Margaret to buy him a new raincoat too, and Mel said he would buy him one, and Jim said it had been for the funeral, but Brad knew just what he wanted and it didn’t have the epaulettes—

—but, said Mayga, who had to go—and the following week left for good—you were thinking all the while that—

—that (it’s wrong, it’s in absolute error) that when I was away at the Quirk farm working that summer or until shortly before V-J Day and all of this—my mother was home, she was there—and I came home for two days, I forget why, and that was when—

—You mean you had something to do with it? (You might have left your imaginary news notes out, but—)

—Of course not but you know you remember the Prince going away and his mother reviving—

—Almost entertaining, all that scattering of half-tales.

—It was thought up to be almost entertaining.

—But you came up with this detail.

—But the Prince ... did his mother die when he eventually . . . what did happen to him? (did the Navajo have princes?) did he come home? or become assimilated and become a guide or a mass weaver or a sporting-goods tycoon?—surely not the first American Indian tycoonic or a doctor, a doctor (but Mayga wasn’t flippant, wasn’t good at it, but wasn’t being it here)

—The Prince? Oh he was tragically wounded by Harflex of Choor, as I recall.

—A wound need not be tragic.

—Even a mortal one need not be tragic.

—I don’t agree, but his was mortal.

—Of course.

His heart was opening and closing to Mayga, as she got off the bar stool and looked at her watch because she didn’t want to go, though she already knew what time it was. She had something else to say to him. But instead, "And Pearl Myles?" They both laughed.

Funny you mention her. She wound up on a paper in Minneapolis.

She didn’t.

It’s the truth.

Trouble-shooter? said Mayga.

They don’t got no trouble in Minnesota—only in New Jersey.

So they have to shoot a long distance.

How far is Chee-lay from Peru?

Chile’s distance, said Mayga, is from the U.S.

Anyhow you’ve had your share of stability there.

Give us time, said Mayga.

Time is money.

I have it!—give us money!

What did McNamara say before the Lima coup last year?

Ted now came back from a pay phone somewhere, a bit holy in his walk. Jim could not believe some of the stuff Mayga had listened to from him, though she talked, too.

This was almost the last that Mayn saw of Mayga, though they met later that night, the first and last and only such meeting decided on by sudden phone call from Jim though it seemed mutual, like strange friends who have only corresponded or have not seen each other in twenty years—and after that (though it might have been after the 6 P.M. cocktail earlier) he really never saw the lady again. At close on seven, she had gotten off the bar stool, not a drinker, not a lady-drinker, a lady with a way of looking down her shoulder at you or at something vaguely poignant at the far end of the room maybe; wore dark, warm-styled clothes with a dash always of ancient brightness, a yellow sash Mayn remembered, or a bright blue hat the color of a French workingman’s jacket, or one time orange shoes that showed off her legs which in the manner of European and perhaps South American women she knew without knowing. She said, after kissing him on the cheek (then, after an instant’s thought, on the other cheek), "Dinner with three difficult and powerful people—my husband’s newspaper business—which becomes regrettably mine though I never as you know need to take notes which makes me much more attractive company yet there’ll hardly be room at the table for me if General Clay comes, but he will not wish to interrupt these large gentlemen talking about his commission although they knew that even when John Kennedy came back from Vienna high on foreign aid after sitting on a couch with Khrushchev, the investment money would come through Washington, not from it. And Jim, as for your Defense Secretary the Computer McNamara, urging a beeg welcome for Latin American military trainees here, his words to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on this ‘the greatest return on our military assistance investment’ were, T need not dwell upon the value of having in positions of leadership men who have first-hand knowledge of how Americans do things and how they think.’ "

Ted asked, a year and a day later, if Jim recalled those words verbatim, but he had to admit, he said that the lady on occasion would talk like that and it was a pity she had not lived to be President of Chile.

They were, of course, briefly joined by the little laugh like the shadow of a nod or like a loud breath or two from bar’s end of the free-lance photographer and information dealer Spence, always an isolated incident on the move, and with the mist that settled or rose in Mayn’s eyes came some blind gap of crap or fight that would blot that presence whatever it was at the end of the bar—the business they were in? minus some nice woman they used to have a drink with once in a while? or some business that was in Mayn, protected by him like a host for all the world the way those clothes kept Spence just the way he was for well over a decade, the often fringed buckskin jacket and string tie or some other decor up there around the neck, the beat-up shined always expensive (Mayn thought) boots and the whipcord jeans (or denim or slept-in colorless velvet jeans) and the lank hair just as light as that little set-shot artist back-court guard on the Toms River basketball team who you could never stop from eddying away from you, Polish, whereas Spence (whom Ted hardly noted except to ask why Jim disliked him—Jim shrugged as if to say he pretty much ignored the "Spence factor"—Oh, said Ted, Spence would have had to be invented if he didn’t exist already—"Concockted," laughed Jim—"What’s he got on you?—have another?"—"Probably enough to know I wouldn’t care if he found I’d over-expensed a business trip or was seen examining a Colt revolver in a Manhattan gunshop"—"You’re clean," said Ted)—Spence, yes, might have borrowed origins temporarily the way he could rent or loan news—now how the devil did you loan news? what happened to it when the information was paid back? was it a swap for other items? but you couldn’t loan news, it stopped being news: while Spence seemed unchanged for over a decade during which you would seldom catch him at a press conference yet typically he knew of the plane crash of a rich executive relation of Mayn’s two-time boss the Argentine who owned a string of papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania seemingly before it happened while to Mayn’s friend Ted who saw and was curiously stopped by Spence at an Easter conference of Third World economists who were largely complaining (as Ted reported back to Jim) that America wasn’t drinking more tin or doing more bananas, Spence professed astonishment at the story (news to Ted) that was going around, that the presumed-incinerated rich Argentine cousin was not dead but playing clean-shaven golf under an assumed name beside a green-bean plantation in the Cameroons. The "loan," Jim tried to explain to Ted, was in a slight lack of indelibility to be found in the item, but Ted said no matter how good your memory was, the news often had this quality of, well, history—he sounded like he was joking and Mayn only said that Ted told with special verve those stories he felt little more than amusement about: whereas (Jim did not audibly add) years before—and a year and a day after Mayga’s last drink at the hotel bar—Ted felt much more about their first woman "President of Chile" (Jim knew) while saying almost nothing more than "What a waste," which meant nothing very specific about what Mayga, "that newspaper publisher’s wife" (Spence once with sidelong or was it smiling confidentiality inquired of Mayn about), might have wanted out of life but Ted seemed to express a sadness at the circumstances in which Mayga (as no newspaper would so wordily, if truly, put it) "met her death" plunging from a cliff during (or to be precise, at the conclusion of) a walk near Valparaiso harbor only a few days after Jim had seen her, though Ted had run into her the morning she had left for home and she had given him a book (She gave you a book?—Sure, she’d finished it. It’s Henry Adams, you know, the Adams family—you want it? I’m not sure Adams ever finished it either.—Who?—Henry Adams). And who was it that in some isolated incident had told Mayn to read that same author? The Mayga death would not leave him; or anyway it did not. No doubt because they had wanted to make love that last night in Washington suddenly after months of friendship curtailed just shy of comradeship (yes, that was it); and there was a friendly completeness about the night and that was that, but a month later it began to feel as if it had been some completion foreknown.

Well, if so, then in her mind; for not in his.

Perfectly understandable, then, that hearing Ted with his firm view of history as commerce cloaked in the small talk of sporting drama and moral health and divided mostly between the Ordinary, who gave the power, and the Worst, who took the power by being also dumb but so colossally so that their complements and client audience the Ordinary just watched them bestride the Earth like statuary bridges of fine, fixed networks of public utility when actually such busy, blood-like action coursed through these structures that the Earth risked explosion and worse still leakages that would permanently stain—oh hearing Ted go on about the Third World wishing we’d sprinkle more bauxite on our breakfast in the morning ‘stead of home-spawned plastic snowies, and more natural zinc, wood, and diamonds in our brain resectioning ‘stead of the new orluminums and solid-state love-informations, Jim was put in mind albeit contemplatively of that isolated incident "Spence" looking for and finding somewheres to happen, since it had been right here (not only in the Easter conference in question but) in this hotel bar snickering like a breath of impedance at the tribute to Mayga as Woman President of Chile, and then with an impudence so incredible Mayn could just about disbelieve its content, "She said you left your notebook out on purpose"—when it was such a distance from the warmth between Jim and Mayga one day he told her about Brad’s Day and environs down to the end of the bar that he never thought Spence was listening.

Today, this very late afternoon, perhaps in honor of the dead lady Mayga, they were in many places in that conversation and Jim Mayn said it was a mistake to go to people for what they couldn’t possibly provide, produce, or give you. Ted’s father, for example, had an excellent sense of humor but little kindness in him. Jim’s had little humor, from what one could divine after upwards of a hundred years, though how many Mels there were was no doubt someone’s guess—probably one Mel. Right you are, responded Ted, right you are; except any person has one thing to give and you’ve been given it if you don’t know it.

It was time to call a halt to these festivities, such as they were, and Jim observed that the one thing Ted came up with agayn and agayn was interesting news items re: Third World.

And who was it who in some isolated incident had told Jim to read Adams, Henry Adams? The rear of his brain just above and independent from the balance part has a sluice let into it out of which and in pour and are dumped things (definitely things) and maybe nothing is lost, as Alexander used to think with a book in his hand, oft recalling some fact from Margaret’s own early "travails"—so that she, rehashing that old time, would sweep it away with her hand and an exhaling, whispering sound of dismissal—who cares now?—about a homeless quite presentable Mohave woman who with her Ojibway "wife" (that’s right) had almost got them both killed by the Utes they stopped briefly with and had wound up among these Navajo, and this Mohave woman wore men’s pants and wasn’t allowed to sing ceremonials but had amazing veterinary skills with sore horses and anemic sheep and understood the wild pigs, she said, and was accepted as "the husband" though not permitted to do what hunting that community of Navajo went in for though did spend time among the men yet never, as in another Indian people, discussed her "wife" intimately with the men. (The weaving, said Margaret, was extremely well done, tight and flat, though for my money the Navajo patterns weren’t a patch on the drawings, horse and haunted landscape drawings, done by a part-Sioux part-Cheyenne holy fellow with these pale gray eyes almost white eyes over and over from one single sight seen in a dream when he was twelve, pretty sad chap in the early nineties of course.) (But, said Alexander, the weaving and the pictures were two quite different products—yet for Jim’s grandfather history was not only a catalogue but, maybe somewhere in his snoring sleep just before he woke up hearing Jimmy being taught by his grandmother off in her room in her bed to whistle or in relations never to be flushed from their coils and crannies coins and flex of feeling, a romance, and Alexander had in the winter of ‘93-’94 met at a campfire by a Pennsylvania river a band of itinerant unemployed who told him of Coxey’s Army of the poor that would set out on Easter Day to march on Washington though Alexander was back home by then—where was the romance?)

Jim thought you never knew how much got left out of Mel his father’s obituary for Sarah and how much in the very niggardly nucleus of that black-framed box on page 2 actually crept in. Like time of death, when no one after all could tell: so "knowledge" in the absence of evidence, what was that? You never knew what Jim himself felt because he told Anne-Marie he wasn’t all there when he had the copy of the New York Times in his hands, for three lines of information appeared there, three mornings after—after what? the drowning?—and he wasn’t all there when, the next afternoon, without touching it he leaned on his grandparents’ dining-room table, one hand on either side of the weekly issue Margaret had folded to page 2—("Well I could have told you that," said Anne-Marie, with married humor while stirring chocolate into two tall, cold glasses of milk)—

Jim told Marie that his mother had no middle name. Marie said that girls didn’t. Jim said without thinking that his mother hadn’t been exactly a girl. Anne-Marie did have a middle name but she said she didn’t want it, it was "Maureen"—from a famous sharp-tongued horticulturist great-aunt on her mother’s side—her father liked "Marie Maureen." Jim had a middle name which was Charles, but boys always did.

But his mother didn’t. She had been strolling past the monumental brown-stone Presbyterian church one afternoon, one of the few times Jim recalled taking a walk with her. (One of the few? said "Marie" (he tried out the name), Well, maybe one of the two or three, said Jim.) In fact, he had only happened to meet her and he was on his bike, so he swooped up a little steep driveway ramp, cut along the sidewalk, and slowed down to "a walk" beside her where she was whistling softly some music. She looked at him in a darkly friendly way without saying anything and asked him if he liked his middle name Charles (which she said as if he might have forgotten it) and before he could answer she said that his father’s middle name was Honesty (which the way she said it he almost believed) and she told him she had been scheduled, before birth, to have a middle name but "your grandmother" dropped it, and she had tried using it as her given name the spring and early summer she was studying in France and in French it sounded really like her—Marthe, Marthe, Marthe. But she ran into a violin student from the Middle West whom she really liked in the middle of the night in the pitch dark in this dormitory she lived in outside of Paris and when she heard his voice asking who it was (and she knew this was Robaire, Robaire, Robaire) she said her real name, "Sarah," without thinking. And she particularly recalled this because he had been at a recital of Saint-Saens and had met an American violinist named Spalding who was going to be famous, and when "Robaire" had said to him that he himself thought you made your own luck, Mr. Spalding had said to look him up in New York, though he wouldn’t be there for a few months.

Where did you and your mother go? asked Anne-Marie (Maureen).

Jim and his mother had gone on a little further, and she had asked how fast he could ride back to the church and return to where she was, but when he raced back to the church he got yelled at by three of the guys who were walking along the sidewalk with their baseball mitts, and he stopped for what he later thought was only a moment but when he recollected his projected round-trip and wheeled away back up Winderhoff Avenue seeing only—he didn’t know what, porches, tree trunks, a man far up the street fixing a flat —he pedaled on and on but no mother. He had lost track of time.

—Jim thought you never would know what got left out because I’m not about to ask Dad how responsible he felt, and what he thought about the fact that she left only the note to the boat owner saying she was "kind of sorry." He couldn’t ask Anne-Marie about Mel’s responsibility, and then, a month later when he knew more, he couldn’t ask her or Mel how many people knew about us, that is, the number of boys Mel was in fact the father of; or why Mel never got into a fight with Bob, although the shoes on the porch above Jim’s head (upon his head) got amplified in our view to a threatening weight, and he couldn’t at the long, days-long moment of his mother’s death, if there was one, believe in a time ahead when these things could be talked of apart from the Sunday wonder and stunned fluency of euphemism in a room where the absence of the dead parent gave Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl and the clothes and hands of others the same independent molecular substance as the whole-wheat sandwiches on the silver plates that Mel told Margaret he hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but the thing was, as Jim confidentially pointed out to her, his hand on her shoulder, that she had sliced off the crusts which she never did because she used to say, Eat ‘em and they’ll give you gold teeth!—

—so at least he asked someone something during those days, and took that Windrow Democrat obituary standing up, that weather-report brevity edited into being by fifteen or so years of wedlock: so that if Jim (whom his grandmother called on her last day "good people"—"you’re good people, Jim") had ever been a scientist instead of a journeyman, he might have found a formula for that extremity of briefness that so much reduces it releases its very soul which had become already the void about it; and so for years, whatever Brad felt after scissoring out the black frame and the words of the kind man who had been and was becoming his father, and whatever Brad felt a month later after reading in his brother’s scrupulous quotation from the brother-in-law man "Aren’t you the Mayn boy?" adjacent to the words "How did he know me? I didn’t ask," Jim had to ask himself how much of that obit so easily memorable it wouldn’t stop repeating in his head was ignorance, and how much as unspeakable as the solitude on a breezy September beach when, having run one fisherman into the ground, he no more knew that the other was watching him than knew what he meant in his terrible words spoken against the wind but never ever written down for a brother-half-brother to spy among all those horizons of a lined notebook page, "I don’t want them to find her."

Margaret had let herself be appointed, because of her Democratic party connections, to the state prison commission during the War and had revived her New Deal interest in unemployment, what it costs to make jobs in peacetime or not to. But, though she set foot in church only on special occasions, whichever the church need be, she said the Devil found work for idle minds. She meant Mel, when he got rid of the paper at last; and she did not mean he played the market (with some success) and the local harness races (with some happiness and just barely in the black), though she regarded the first as living vicariously through numbers, not real making of usable products: what she did mean was that Mel suffered even more over Sarah’s "tragedy" because he stopped working and had less to do; and into one gap came another, if that is possible, and we, who are relations meteorolong, whorled, human ward, and possible as well as relations that people have actually had, believe it is, and were there, like an equal and opposite reaction, to receive through Mayn’s at the time only incipient voiding-sluice (incidentally creating us at need) his moving picture clandestinely witnessed through glimmering back-porch screens in order to be put soon out of mind, of Margaret turning on the porch light, opening the kitchen door to come out and open the wide old icebox while Alexander came and stood on the kitchen threshold continuing a conversation and asking her now not why she was crying (which she clearly was)—for of course their younger daughter was gone and there were problems of life itself—but, rather, what on earth she meant that Mel was dying vicariously (Alexander really didn’t understand that)—was it that we didn’t know exactly where Sarah "was"? But Alexander, who was subtler than anyone else told him, got out of the way when Margaret went back into the kitchen and the sticky yellow door slammed and the back-porch light went out upon the odd sobbing noises of the loved voice and upon the possibly inaudible stress in the devoted husband’s words didn’t and Sarah (as if, well, he and Margie did know the final whereabouts of someone else), and upon the curious boy who sometimes roamed the early evening and mastered into middle life a healthy shrug because he knew how to shut the door too.

So what if the double Moon expected as its due two explanations if not more?—ranging those twi-set nights those twi-set times between the story of the day and the story of the night to the shadow Marcus Jones the man-botanist cast on the woman-zoologue Mena as he got off his bike in that narrowing desert, for Mena claimed that before Marcus went away that night he had cast upon her the double shadow "hers to convey" until she met her next human—

—the ancient Anasazi?

—right you are, who because of her appearance at the top of the last ladder upward to his cell had caused that lifted pistol in his feather-light hand to throw two shadows according to the precise Mena, which was the only way he had seen the double Moon.

But so what, so what, shrugs the humor of the boy-man with such casual cogence his very shrug grows him up a year, two years, five years, who could now have spoken a bit of Spanish with Mena had she existed still, six years, seven, eight ("You will go away where you belong, my darling"—but we did not pick up "my darling," with all our audio resources did we?—sho did!—did not—)

Until the "so what" ‘s subtly prevail, even when to a child and, in fact, the children of Joy Mayn and Jim Mayn are voiced the weathers which the Hermit-Inventor of New York divided with his mortal colleague the Anasazi medicine man, the weather of presence and the weather of absence, which do not quite parallel the division between the weather from earth and the weather from beyond, the weather from the body, the weather from almost nowhere, weather of going and weather of arriving, and so on perhaps into a future where Mayn found himself returned to the city and to an apartment he had inhabited with a family, and the family had been his own, and the family had rented the apartment at that particular time, and now, taking possession of the apartment with misgivings not because he now owned it, but because of love he found he really had given, and naturally the love he had not given, he compiled for professional use a history of rent control and related matters in the city of New York which struck him as the classification of the constituents of a chaos, or so it was suggested to him in similar or congruent words by a new acquaintance, a fellow tenant of the building where, within the inertial system he partly tried to take a view of, he did much of the compiling, oft interrupted by "so what?" from voices known and unknown, sometimes his own, breathing in and out such weather as was ludicrously true and profanely painful, recalling the "so what?" shrugged silently from the boy’s own early telex looking on at a grandparental scene complete with lights on and lights out. Meanwhile—

It could be established exactly where the intent botanist and geo(il)logical bicyclist Marcus Jones was employed when one morning in 1892, a year before Margaret entered that world, Marcus listened with curiosity to a young visitor from the South tell of having seen in company with Navajo friends along the dusty bank of a "wash" near Ship Rock, New Mexico, the brightest and tallest showy loco imaginable in height twelve to sixteen inches with up to fifteen whorls along each main stalk all tufted with nearly luminous white hairs among the spikes of deep pink and live lavender so well known among the Oxytropis. Marcus could hear the locoweed report with one ear, while with the other pick up an unabashed chat between two silver-mine operators who were contemplating backing Bryan over in Nebraska for reelection to Congress this time from the boondocks.

Likewise, Jones’s learned whereabouts could be established in 1896 when Alexander Mayne attended the presidential convention with his young wife Margaret who at twenty-two going on twenty-three shared with Bryan only his liking for Charles Dickens and his more public sympathy for farmers, and who had had a soothing, in fact down-right medicinal cup of tea with Jacob Coxey in ‘94 a short time before he led his march of the unemployed on Washington, D.C., and in her fine, though paternally edited piece for the Democrat had something to say about the silver-lined inflation whose formulae Bryan ignored in favor of the truism that a dollar "approaches honesty as its purchasing power approaches stability": this was as "far from the authentic Jacksonian support for the forgotten working man everywhere" (never an appeal, as Nicholas Biddle fumed, to mobs like those martialed to anarchy by Marat or Robespierre in the Faubourg St. Antoine) as were the locofoco "workies" striking the new friction matches of the 1830s to footlight with candles the "platform" of their protest against financial privilege and solidarity with such maverick journeymen as John Windt and George Evans and the Hudson (N. Y.) cordwainers plus the renegade printer William Morgan of upper New York State and Philadelphia, "more unlike the western interests of that day which were as indifferent to anti-bankism as a well-to-do Mexican lady fandangoing all night in Santa Fe was to the low class of a barefoot peon partner showing his smalls." Alexander had his doubts: Jackson was very middle-class and would never have gone along with striking ironmolders sixty years later reciting, "The robes ye weave, another wears."

Why anything might turn into anything or itself, war into weather into war and back again in i960, given the right imagination, the right overflight, the right reception of light, the rightly modulated night, the right day for a nothing of a brother to play hookey and turn into a noise of grief, then into a half-brother as separate from the real Mayn son as Brad was for Jim and real enough to help Jim go away—not from a snake’s nest of garden hv whence Brad promised pork chops for dinner, but from acting for Jim in a way better not worked out, given that "I don’t want them to find her" really meant, "I don’t want her to come back." For any words might turn into the right gap of passion in which to model some genius of Sarah the way Mel did for years, or, more exactly, into the Alexandrian mellowing of Margaret as a giver not a taker (who took the West for herself but monitored Sarah’s minute sojourn in France years later).

Jim never let himself quite know this in the atmosphere at Windrow, which bent his efforts elsewhere until years later he felt himself filtered as through Windrow itself one late morning near Fontainebleau within striking distance of Paris, in the information that with his rambling left hand Thomas Jefferson wrote the meteorologist Le Roy regarding Le Roy’s reports on how dew point varies with wind direction, the northwest mistrao and the northeast grec being not so dry as the north wind (nor, of course, said Mayn, so sane as the north wind, at least if we are talking about your mistrao and similar winds)—

ah, his journalist companion for his part added, of ill repute—

of ill ions, went briefly on Jim Mayn, such positively charged particles as put people into a funk in Egypt when the south wind comes in off the desert, the khamsin wind "of fifty days" or the German Fohn whose relation to the history of the thirties and the forties could never excuse the Third Reich: so that (continued his French companion), as Le Roy had provoked Jefferson to ponder, dry and moist are relative in air, so dry summer air at the seaside or not may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But Mayn could not tell his correspondent confrere what a filter of Windrow and its everlasting though twenty-odd-miles-distant shore these quite charmed informations veered through, no more than that on the road to Fontainebleau he was listening for transitions to submarines, which presumably were much on the Gallic newshawk’s specialist mind; but when Jim said he thought for a second that he had seen the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the man laughed and said even if it was possible at fifty kilometers, Jim was looking the wrong way (Easier that way, rechuckled the American pragmatist)—and when the man very thoughtfully expounded the stress moments in Eiffel’s adaptation from his bridges to this tower, Jim thought they were getting into U-boat waters at last, pressure, distribution, range, cost-benefit breakdowns, formulae rendering congruent a stable peace and an authoritative news supplement if not scoop (in French, un scoop) that happened actually to be beyond Mayn’s knowledge: but it all came then to the delightful and hardly alarming "when and how" fact that behind the Tour Eiffel in principle of wind-bracing practice stood an earlier work of Eiffel’s—

—the moving hospital-submarine!

No, the moving hospital, not to be confused with the Wide Load which at times gets as big as (not just) home or house but apartment house capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and only thus an articulated structure—the moving hospital was a spin-off of the Civil War as the moving missile emplacement was a spin-off of the Cold like breathtakingly advanced weather observation—

—which was a spin-off of the balloon-observation surveillances that were a spin-off of the Civil War, like concentrated food—

—but no, we do not think so—

—because the balloon observation was of military movements but not of the inertial wind—and other systems to which it was subject, mais no, the earlier work of Eiffel’s was the internal steel frame of the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi’s visible outer sculpture like permanent news—solid and fundamental as lives of unknown people Mayn sometimes briefly knew—or saw, without knowing, and was seen as by a larger knowledge he joined and sensed his power in, until one day he heard a story of a detective whose client knew more about him than he of the client, a story also of love and freedom told by a fellow elevator passenger so briefly from the floor where he got on to the ground floor, where he and she and her friend, the two leaving Grace Kimball’s workshop, vanished that he knew that very story, had lived it, even if only in advance like sentiments of reincarnality—

—which proved nothing except that Sarah, whose mother told a story of a Princess spirited or sublimated we now say in the guise of a mist into the Statue to foil an Indian transcontinental^ pursuing her, must doubtless that day at Mantoloking within the visible woman sitting like a statue on a black towel or lying down have been secretly standing within that seated or prone person, before, during, and after the moments when Jim saw her looking out to sea and when Jim found himself founded like a gnomon sundial in the sand above his vulnerably irritating brother; for was she not in fact watching for a German submarine to break the horizon and bear her off to South America or, failing that, Manhattan!

: a possibility we, of their relations, would not rule out, since, as the angry savant had it, "some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first":

: which takes character beyond courage to be sure, though Mayn would leave the formulae and what power went with them to someone else (for he was only taking up a sort of residency in a New York apartment where he had once lived happily and not happily but also happily (lived and not lived) with his wife and children who had moved on:

which Mayn too did, in circles no doubt, until a day came, or he to it waiting, soon after the aforementioned renewed trial residency, when a nice, sometimes worried woman in the apartment house in question, whom he let befriend him without insisting on her husband materializing, told him of a person named Grace Kimball he thought he’d heard of, who said she had withdrawn from this world only to return with new powers, her own, her own extraordinary powers nonetheless very simple, you know, Mayn smiled sharply like a laugh.

Norma added that the withdrawal at least of Grace had been in marriage (in marriage, said Mayn, checking) (yes: in) while the powers found partly in stories told in Norma’s group of women seemed real—the people, the women and men that had become "family" to nonetheless send on their way at some point—forget the night gapped like Pentothal with all the interchangeable braceros translated into and out of the planetary labor force wide-loaded in convoys of super-semis cross-continent: two women technologists sit sipping mixed fresh-crushed juice, getting acquainted, that kind of thing, discussing they imagine two men when, by some small-world economy scrambling whatever used to be the matter, it’s in fact one guy they’re talking ‘bout for the longest time, the unknown medium through which they get acquainted: not to mention (for to Norma Mayn didn’t) the couple in Phalanx, New Jersey, a marriage that did and still may play (with revised dialogue) who ritually hitch him up like old Dobbin complete with the old vegetable man’s fedora with earholes (that is, for the horse) to a real imported rickshaw (brought it back themselves never thinking what they would do with it, just part of tax-write-off basic research) so he can pull her down the garden path with the blue ribbon on it and we’ll hitch old, yes, Dobbin to the shay: not to mention, but he does, to Norma and then independently to Norma’s husband, a couple of heavy-handed economists Gordon proves also to know even better, one from Metz in Alsace-Lorraine which is in France at the moment, the other an Irishman from Los Angeles, "old L.A. people," one (actually employed) cousin marched with Coxey’s Army of unemployed protesters in ‘94—well, took the train as far as Chicago, then walked to Washington—and both economists have red hair and beard (if you looked back and forth they could do with only one set of looks), and once when Mayn and they had a lunch that was a bit awkward at first, then too full of talk, Mayn had said he had thought of getting to know some more economics as a substitute for economists but economics seemed too hard (which made the red-haired economists laugh and say in unison, You and Max Planck), then later when the waiter got into an argument over the arithmetic of the tab with a man about Mayn’s build whom he’d been introduced to at the bar because the man, who was missing one little finger (though Mayn didn’t recall feeling it) and wore a well-cut blue pinstripe and a red pointed handkerchief and a dark-blue, tiny-red-emblemed club tie, was lunching with a doctor-friend of Mayn’s whose boat he’d been on, now just sold to the Xerox people in Stamford, Mayn had said to his tablemates that on the other hand economics was really too easy, which made the russet ecologues blush in concert and in concert choke on final swallows of their first Manhattans and say in hilarious unison, You and Bertrand Russell!, upon which Mayn, who had the impression that he mumbled a lot but realized that this was internal and that his speech was normal, caused further hilarity by adding that he would stick to what he could see, like whether people listened when we talked, and seemed to say only what they knew, and whether they used their hands and what they looked like (—Their hands? the economists asked, but this time kept the joke private, as if it would be one too many):

they were way ahead of him, he told them, like Rogers and Rockefeller when they bought Anaconda Copper with a rubber check they covered by loan collateraled with fresh-printed stock in a non-company that existed to buy Anaconda, leaving them with, after they sold the fresh stock, a real copper company and thirty-six million dollars profit: the economists were eating their lunch through this transaction, they did not know those facts—maybe they weren’t the facts, said Mayn—seemed impossible, yet so easy; and, as usual, a bunch of people got stung—the economists nodded with mouths too full for what formulae formed higher in each head—the argument nearby with the waiter was over—and the man in the blue pinstripe was grinning at what the elder gent the doctor had said, who was (Mayn knew) "drinking a little" since his wife’s death but who was an easy chap, Mayn had played squash with him a few years back, a man who didn’t believe in making difficulties for himself, so that while, true, he had become a shrink, which is, hour after hour (facts supplanting facts), dealing with folk who make difficulties for themselves, and are made by them—and mostly, though you had matriculated and paid your dues, done training, etcetera, you might just tell them, Take some time for yourself, you know (—A breather?—) That’s the ticket; and for him himself it was after thirty years of medicine and in order to retire into (at his wife’s suggestion) seraZ-retirement:

But breathers aren’t what they—or we—used to be: once marginal, the breather came to take up major space like a friend in need whom you have to listen to for weeks of personal crisis: once space, a breather has become a person like turning into yourself; witness even those doubtless workshop-trained adepts who hold their (if it is really only their) breath and have it too, and, within that body-hold, keep so deep self’s other intake/out-go that coming upon the phenomenon of breathless breathing less like the old tab-less tab men’s collar than the cordless unisexual (little) shaver, we children of the phenomenon may grasp only its idea yet feel its matrix quite absent, while we would drown in our own fresh-squeezed still pulpable information with built-in gaps as if it were the breath of life—not Jim, contemplating reported reincarnation of the noted Grace Kimball from one change stage to the next, from the Great Mother-Sun of forbidden Splinter-Inca lore along the Peru-Chile frontier, and from the Goddess who was Greek yet then a sister renegade who occupied the oracle Tree-Lith on a Mediterranean crag perilous yet organic in the lower Peloponnesian wilds of Mani, until she (still Grace) became the lorn Prince—what just would not blow Jim’s mind because "almost nothing surprises me" (he remarked to Norma and Gordon)—the reported lorn Prince (that Norma reported was of Nava-Choor in Kimball’s version) derived like revelation from a detailed account given Grace by a newsperson friend of a Prince or high-born brave who (news though ‘twas to Mayn on his own doorstep and beneath the lintel of his long past or at least as presently adjacent as Little Wind teaches the Hero Twins to throw their breath—for immortality purposes), (this Prince) on being destroyed by some "Princess" type he thought he adored surprised himself by self-resurrecting secretly as two people in the visible form of one, was it man and woman now?—according to all that’s recently been voiced—and not half one, half the other, but both—and since the evening when the news of him had passed from Lincoln (significantly, Grace thought, robed in saffron) to Grace, Grace had, she told Norma, who took some of this with a grain of salt, joked but with some secret rest-reserve of truth that she was this Prince reincarnate but that the extreme light like a tiny planet far back in each of the newsperson’s eyes which she did not know were one light told what she also did not know, that the reincarnation Grace had obviously been "ready for" was a new brand and—

—three interruptions converge on poor Norma—first, as is only proper, from her husband Gordon ("Well Grace would like to think that every man wants to get himself up in black lace pants and a garter belt"); second, from Jim, politely entering only as if in part to divide the husband’s roughshod wedge (Puts me in mind of the Krakatoa easterlies above and the Berson westerlies below: they were supposed to be parts of a single zonal current— How do you show a thing like that? asked Gordon—with an unusually mean cycle of twenty-six months—hey Norma, who was that newshen-person-lady-woman, and who was her source?) (Gordon, like a lost voice, "They don’t know that man as in chairman comes from German Man, i.e., "one, nonsexual"—"Unisex," retorts Norma, surprising Gordon into softness: "Not unisex at all," he says too quietly); third, we, whom proposition for proposition Grace knows less well than she ever will how she uses us, for we—as she and such trammeled husbands as Gordon say as if it will all go away if said or, humid lights of breath thrown outward or away, compound with quick noises of sense the atmosphere they mean like walking newspapers when they say, "It’s in the air,"—we are each a change in life too personal not to be grouped, too shared to be all shared; while Grace, who for Woman would become a man as mortal as that general He who called the "true security problem . . . man against war," on behalf of one woman that she is has found, in her one-sixteenth Pawnee root (and touched with her fingers whose prints are arches becoming whorls and back again?) a faith that man the hunter brought back with him not just the fiber and juice of meat but guilt for killing time away from home as real as the opiate receptor molecules (Grace heard of from a delegate to a rolfing conference who had become an inch longer yet now said next to nothing) that are one part our history and future waiting only to be activated for romance, dependence, twilight aperitif, any key habit deepening into those that like the key melted into the short-circuited ignition Mayn knows of as facts isolated by the million kept by us addicts as close as out of sight within the tumblers they’ll always make fall into place: which Mayn half-hearing interrupts—what also will not be interrupted like the ongoing time of his computer-wristwatch timing turnovers at a basketball game with Larry and Amy, the same Amy with whom he occupied opera seats in which the Chilean diva expected to see an endangered economist and his wife Clara, who was herself present when the correspondent-woman told the Na-vachoor Prince’s fate and the first and last name of her source, a daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter named Flick, though Clara was unable to connect this with a journalist named Mayn she feared.

"Prince? Prince? would that be the Nava/0 (not -choor) Prince who one night along a river dolloped into his lungs a festoon of glowing cloud above him?, that rarest of radiances a pseudonoctilucent which looks like your true noctilucent cloud fifty and more miles above Earth that in summer twilights in the better latitudes may become visible with the stars—"

—"You’re—what are you?" interjected Gordon. "You never—"

"Oh sure," said Mayn, "and that pseudonoctilucent in question was really a late-departed medicine man, old story, got it from my grandmother, passed it on to my daughter Flick who’s an honest half-breed like the rest of us and wouldn’t swallow it and as I recall embroidered upon it—and my estranged son Andrew, who seemed to believe the stuff but always went to sleep."

"—but when you all interrupted me," said Norma, "I wanted to finish that Grace perceived what she says this woman Lincoln didn’t understand: that this is a new type of reincarnation, sort of parallel—"

"What egocentric garbage," said Gordon.

"She heard it from someone who heard it from someone else," said Norma looking into Mayn’s face intensely curious.

"It’s more likely than the usual kind of reincarnation," he hears himself saying, thinking he likes these people because they have children; knowing as if he were in Norma’s mind that she’s thinking, "You speak of these others, your daughter and son, but what about your wife?—What is her name? is she a former wife?"

—and he gets away with answering Norma in the same way—in his head and here, "I love her more now than ever" (picking her out among the corps of undivorced but separated wives or is she, illegally speaking, divorced yet wttseparated?)—

—wondering if Flick can believe such returning history (Well why didn’t you do something about it?) who cares for both her father and current history, whichever is obstacle for the other (as Mayn wonders if this kid Larry with his split family and his Obstacle Geometry system he claim him got from Jim of all people knows, who goes in for fact not formulas, that’s Jim, and, when not on the job, scenes of fact, which make a hell of a family history not to be told easily—the scientist whose baby died while she was at work in her lab {the lab); the black model studying to be an actress taking her son to the park and telling him go on and ride that bike if he’s going to learn; these people he instantly knows as other people are known to their locksmiths, supers, former and future girlfriends and boyfriends, and he wonders now, against the presence of Norma’s loving voice still in his head after she and her husband exit at last, who the long-despised man Spence is—who he is— aside from a deal about transcontinental trucking here, a deal for information regarding the future of obscure federal-agency handling of the trucking of transcontinental waste, a sequence of surely expensive, unauthorized, and uncredited stills of a multilingually intelligent young chief-of-state who’s cleaned up most of the foreign-run casinos where he lives dealing Russian roulette click by click to a political opponent—how come you got it in for Spence? he never got caught, did he?—a presence, Spence, attentive and sleazy in a bar as far back as Mayga, and as recently and malleably close as some history in his grandfather Alexander’s inner ear or fiction this new friend-son Larry makes into an irritating geometry—who Spence is, to have phoned a new friend of Flick’s to ask out of nowhere if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter, her friend, had lived in the very apartment house where Flick’s friend (who’s calling her, having been called by this Spence) had been attending a woman’s workshop attended also by (oh gee) a (whew) woman momentarily involved in springing from a New York State prison a supposed anti-Castro nationalist who, it is planned, will find sanctuary in a narrow but lengthy nation run on an economy imported from the shores of a Great Lake of which school of economics much actual knowledge in that Hispanic nationalist inspires not love but its tactical facsimile to cloak his real mission to kill a high officer and abduct a charismatic old Masonic socialist now under house arrest.

It is already too late, a terminally optimistic sometime-interrogee offers, to speak of women and men; for aren’t they at the barricades working out together, watching together (between amplified aerobics) the old organic plume mushroom? So from weekly formula to current form one’s last name turns to ash in the heat of some race to inflate currency by finding the unsplittable seam to make it from?—while Larry’s Modulus will get one from here to there if one wants it to, and the new marriage contracts just out and not to be confused with the earlier, mutual dowers of the very beginning of the decade seem already a thing of the quantum, though some casualties of that Open Marriage cruelly less easy than its Masonic abbreviation O.M. in wanton rooms of rising rent and energy levels devise new home weddings and new faiths painfully reviewed.

Yet no power from the next century’s L5 libration settlements to imagine into life the mid-twentieth (hardly the first to see itself the last) can deny to Jim

who knows at times himself to be in that awful two-to-one population-limited civilization where nothing too much has changed to be honest except the swimming pools where you dive upward into water as well as outward into margins of sufficient wetness, and the wide loads and looseness of structure that from the outset failed to be designed and accommodated into the secure torus whose doughnut shape no more shows itself to our everyday attention than the whole porch of the weatherless sky with its spectrum of sound now only visible in the deep screens we have internalized two to each hopefully stereoid customer-soul, do not bobsled their way through, and marriages account for new peace as being paired of pairs, since each partner came out to L5 transmuted from an original two half-suspecting the emigration wasn’t only on the up and up but locused of willingness contained by, yet containing too, some thrust of inner wilderness

a lost dream such as Jim’s one rainy night when he woke and exited from bed sweating to open his door and saw his mother in her nightgown of course heading downstairs so slowly she seemed sleepwalking until she turned to look back up at him, her hair across one side of her face and he saw she was "readwalking"—a book in her hand, no common word of "It’s late" in her eyes that seemed protective for a change but he didn’t know of what—and he asked her what it was, and didn’t mean to though the act produced an effect, which was that as she told him he forgot his lost nightmare: "The Marble Faun," she said, "and I’ve almost put my eyes out staying up reading—and what have you been up to, my darling?"

He didn’t know, and could only say, "What are you doing?" to which she softly replied as if her heart were in it, turning away and proceeding downstairs, "Just reading." But he remembered going back to bed and later starting up awake convinced he was plunged into a future where people had been at once combined and sent away to settle another world.

Larry didn’t ask Jim to elaborate on that combining of people. Did he know it without asking? He said that a succession of obstacles had been reciprocally substituted for the vision and he advanced his system which Jim passed on to Gordon once in a moment when he could think of nothing to say yet was disagreeably surprised to be able to report Larry’s recently hatched system which Larry we know ascribed to Mayn’s inspiring.

What need had Mayn of formulae? Larry was passing through a difficult time. How could Mayn live in his old, now quietly owned apartment. (Owned secretly.) Weren’t old scenes moving in and out—oh, the children of his former wife! Each time he felt it coming, he had substitutes? Why was he in this apartment? Wasn’t he really someplace else? He was no speculator waiting to jump when they discovered which way gravity was really moving, that is, in general. Mayga took away to her death that alarming willingness not to doubt his delusion that he was in the future specifically traveling to and from a libration settlement between here and the Moon imagining what was else the only apparently actual present time—

—if you’ll buy that—

(—she didn’t have to, she’d been given it: and had she, then, taken it away with her to or from that ledge near Valparaiso bay from which she had vanished into death which was a kind of ignorance?)

—he wouldn’t try it on Larry, lest Larry believe it, too, and now Mayn had to admit delusion in 1977, he had the firm scenes of the many people he had met in crisis, their own minor dangers and opportunities, their awful "we" voice on occasion exploding about him like the one that is the sum of two; and he didn’t need Larry’s Obstacle Geometry formulae to get from one chamber of tensions and human warmth to another, though he would grant Larry’s Modulus a humoring power to get you from one isolated incident to another without undue connection—

What was the point we missed about the Moon?—

until the coincidences between what he had witnessed of women and men at home and in the park and in their mutual media coming with such self-containing accuracy from Norma who reported to Jim what Gordon could not listen to of the women’s stories many told to Norma not in Grace’s workshop but in pretty private midnight raps with Grace alone, caused Jim regularly in the world who would always hold the door for a woman but a bit too semi-retired from combat to seem (he thought) male supremacist (having been, it seemed to him, caught carrying the membership card of every targeted power minority of the past twenty years—white, male, middle-aged, lapsed agnostic, middle-class routinely-married-then-sleazily-single newsman-oid) to want so much (on a gray day when Red Smith’s column had failed to appear in the sport pages) to tell Mayga his fresh suspicions that he nearly phoned (as he sometimes did at times of sentimental panic, or even horror at his life, or love for her) his quondam wife, but instead found his young friend Larry, Larry in a sad mood, his mother largely unmentioned gone to live "temporarily" with a "chum" (not a word of Larry’s generation but he was able to do that) but not launching a stratosphere of theory as he often did with Jim but complaining about his neighbor that Jim had dimly known of, having seen him, yet understood that the fairly famous singer-man was moving house—yet more notable than Larry’s news of strife in the hallway

between the singer North who was wringing his hands like he was singing a scene and the two in truth costumed creatures (male or female, who knew?) whom the older man tried madly to separate (oh shit, they were guys I guess) whom he was fantastically upset about just at the instant when the elevator flung open and this woman Larry didn’t know in a large white fur coat burst out and started bitching Ford North the opera singer (I know who he is, said Mayn) who was wringing his hands like he was on stage and she sweeps him angrily into his apartment leaving the flower boys to work each other over in the hall at which point they disappeared . . .

was his unsurprised acceptance of Jim’s theory so mildly slipped into talk that Jim thought maybe Larry hadn’t understood, except Larry did say with equal gentleness almost inaudibly a thing remarkable enough to show he had heard—that these little life stories Jim was hearing through Norma from the Paying World of Grace Kimball, mainly Grace herself, were quite congruent with only the slightest blurring at the borders with scenes Mayn knew of, that Mayn joked that he’d decided while playing squash no less, in that white theater-in-the-round of the boxed-in ultimate barrage-escape or court, that this Grace Kimball person and he were some same person perhaps in life right now as an ant community he’d heard was one organism in effect but he and she probably not larger than the sum of themselves and since both right now alive to tenant some same articulate structure that accommodates a multiplicity of small-scale units (Larry nodding rapidly recalling the lingo of "your" red-haired economist whom Mayn had listened to in an auditorium press conference) why Mayn conceives (perhaps through Larry) of reincarnation that’s somehow all here and now, with no past (recalling also someone asking him in the midst of a four-way rap what was the point we had missed about the Moon).

‘The haunting of America," said casually the younger sage though troubled in a yellow sweater purchased for him by his father, "reincarnation that is simultaneous, the haunting of the world maybe since there is where America came from, all the uglypipedreams tradewinded over here from Europe at the founding that later they pretended they didn’t want back.

Having said the syllables—Simultaneous Reincarnation—Mayn found them generally applicable like a lot of fairly equal units in an articulate structure and—on his way to dinner with his old friend Ted who, full circle, though not looking well, was with AP again though glad not to be packing one of their computerettes to file his stories into, whence at twelve hundred words a minute one of the new high-speeds prints "out" far and wide your likely less than twelve hundred words, hence less than minute waltz—Mayn had no one but his same old self (if entertained) to tell that at the thought plus the thought that Larry’s Modulus was maybe bigger than the both of them and getting Jim now if not to the Century, where Ted kept his dues up because he admired the famed Drew (but-twice-perhaps-a-year-encountered) Middleton even beyond his gifts as a raconteur—getting Jim at least from this alarming Simultaneous Reincarnation with Grace to those more innocent heartfelt ancient times with Mayga barside, when Brad became Jim’s brother by losing half his brotherhood to a scandalous secret, and the wind his poor mother carved, damn her, damn damn damn her, curved by whim of some swerved splinter in the groove of her unwed brain, took him no less straight away from home as she had either ordered or predicted—a home so real it got nicknamed secretly by Jim and his grandmother—yes, and Margaret at that moving moment of Brad’s Day became, if temporarily, only his grandmother by losing her credibility as a historian "reporting in" with odds and ends coming terribly maybe true within the old tales, for what about that Navajo Prince’s mother coming out of death to life when the son left her?—and had he ever returned home? (for we did not absolutely leave him camped by a river ‘neath the threatening protection of that unprecedented cloud), the stories didn’t get finished by Margaret (Jimmy, if not Margaret, cut them off in ‘45), nor by him, Mayn, in later days with his drab and other modern amendments such as trying to figure what the "plant growth" was that Margaret once said Marcus Jones thought he had to use (we mean, botanical process) to explain the development of (pistol-related) Mena’s unprecedented moon-white mouth—but losing something of her credibility at the cemetery and on the porch, for she’d said, "My heart"—my heart—when she would never speak of her daughter like that, would she?—she wasn’t tender with her, though with Jim’s aunt in Boston she wasn’t either, yet was she tender with Alexander?—for she had him, and she had, to confess the truth, Jim (did Indians really say "How"?)—but the porch, the porch, a muddled not quite nice riddle came across those kid stories for a time, for what was Margaret crying about on the porch that night?—’cause she didn’t ever cry, and hadn’t there often been "a mumbling of the eyes" (as Mena that other night on the desert floor with Marcus translated a fugitive insight of Sequoya’s), a looking unclearly each at each between Jim’s grandmother Margaret and her daughter Sarah?, but you might have thought that that night when Jim secretly observed Margaret and Alexander on the back porch Sarah was still dying, strangling in waters so deep and cold they preserved you (also you, from ever putting her out of mind, though by the direct route from Windrow or the circuitous, no doubt, inertially sideways-slipping flight route round the world that you must have pretty well taken a few times on business you never stood again on that beach, that sand, from where those older green deeps of water were harder to believe in than a black, icy plummet from the brink of a mountain quarry in the Berkshires)—and not only the night porch but the cemetery: what had that meant? He had sometimes made conversation with his father whom he had to admit he felt sheltered by, and while We many of us seldom in later years felt moved to visit Mel, once when with the children Flick and Andrew Jim let his father take them down to the shore while he Jim looked up his Indian classmate backfield rival Ira Lee, who no doubt like other Indians worked at the Fire Department; and once upon a time asked the author of that obituary so brief it flirted with the unspeakable, all that amazing grief was Brad’s own, so Jim could better fall forward into the obstacle of all space round Windrow leaving that full-blood behind him in that house mingling with time while Jim the other brother who’d been told to go away where he belonged presently did so—well, that is, upon graduation and after helping his half-brother carpenter a high-school Shakespeare set of different levels and a couple of trapdoors, and other formalities such as announcing he would stay clear of the newspaper racket (Wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole? added Alexander and wondered where the expression had come from)—as far as—as far as— oh think of something—as far as your old Navajo Prince from (he joked) . . . but didn’t finish, for his grandmother didn’t appreciate his distaste for what had been a family concern even though her daughter, Jim’s mother, Sarah, would never have scribbled for the paper had Heifetz played in Windrow or Einstein at the ‘39-’40 World’s Fair or had she had a mother who in 1920 would have let her go gallivanting off—

—yet because in later years he would rather report business, industry, new Coast Guard meteorology functions, the specifics of a Sprint missile’s hard core even if, like an Edsel car, such facts shortly "obsolesced," or such human data as how an apartment house set up its own energy mill on its city roof, nuts and bolts reality, no more, he was peculiarly angry at the Spences of his business surviving on exorbitant "tips," inflated little payments for putting one source in connection with another source in the covert interest of gaining information that was to be sure news for coverage but for money-like leverage, too; but he was above starting something with Spence when Spence with stubble like sooty earth on his cheek, and chin like sand, chimed in with a question from bar’s end sparked by information he surely had never heard firsthand here, and one year or the next was heard to say, "You mean you had a cemetery with a race track on one side and a golf links on the other?" (Chuckling derision it was not, but allusive, invasive, pervasively collusive, so Thassright, Spence, thassright, thass what I said. Or, Spence was heard to say, "You mean your grandmother was honest-to-God pursued by that Indian eastward? How far, then? how far?" (Doubt it, Spence, doubt it.) Or, "You mean your mother left a note only for the owner of the boat?— and she said she was sorry this was all a terrible accident, that his boat was there and he was away?" (Forget it, Spence, you didn’t hear a thing; forget it.)

And so when he saw this very Spence—as trashy after fifteen years of off and on being within Mayn’s sights, as sleazily unaltered as some crum who was probably loved by someone, but who?, a love child!, there, that was it!, a love child, as Margaret had once called Mayn’s counter-brother (half-) Brad—Spence in close convjersation at the Press Site we hardly remember with the South American gentleman Mayn was interested in, so he felt his very body inclining to blot Spence from that night view of the white poised vehicle NASA’s vertically movable bridge three Florida miles off, but it came to him, the subject having been fatally on his mind (and he checked it out with his colleague Ted), that Spence was Lincoln reincarnate doing all the damned things that Lincoln could not let himself try doing, until Mayn laughed and asked what had ever happened to the President-elect’s dog, left with a neighbor in Springfield to be walked in the invigorating February chill, smelling near and far— Why that’s who Lincoln became, said Ted.

Mayn, we already remember, took his time and was not an interrupter, and Larry liked this when he told Mayn about the "Pseudosphere" and drew it like a personal horn for him—

like a little old-fashioned solid picture of other possible space but here a la high-school geometry but then Larry fell silent stunned that he’d confined himself to studying the pseudosphere as a graph showing the extent to which a surface bends, a graph of bending moments (!), when this garden-variety old Euclid-type image of other, far out geometries of space linked up (like capsules) in his mind with a backward-photographed relation between the growth of the nuclear mushroom and the wild gravity of that somehow highly personal obstacle the black hole. Well, Larry seemed slightly freaked. So Mayn mentioned the Russian laser whizzes who figured out a way to fire a ruby laser beam through a smearing lens and into methane gas or it could be one of the other so-called non-linear mediums that are optically affected by light, like crystals and aerosols, and with this "phase"-something-or-other mirroring process get the light beam to come back like a time-reversed image with the distortions gone—which, fired and retrieved through atmospheric turbulence, could help us plot storms, and had uses in satellite weapon systems Mayn preferred not to think about. Mentioning these things, Mayn did not ask Larry why he accepted tacitly the Simultaneous Reincarnation label for maybe being in Two Places, voiced off the top of his head by Mayn himself, while for weeks he had never alluded to the future he might well have come from to judge from his onetime friend Mayga’s willingness to go along with it. But Mayn did ask, What do you mean "they disappeared," the two faggots in the hallway? to which Larry replied that he meant that they disappeared. Meaning? Mayn asked. Well, that Lar’s been accepting these urban phenomena lately. Maybe the space of the elevator reached out and took them (Larry grinned with one side of his face). Mayn was quite fond of him. He missed his own son. Larry let go some tears out of his eyes, his face was screwed up. Mayn had a vision and Larry put one hand across his eyes and got out some words of what he was feeling: "I wouldn’t rather live with her; I wouldn’t. I thought they got along pretty good, you know? I mean it’s O.K. with my father. Oh I don’t want her to come back. Oh ... ! No, I don’t mean that, I’m too old to say that; forget I said that. Maybe it’s who she’s with, another woman, like a mother—is that it? I want her to come back. But I don’t. That’s all. But I think she will." Larry is slowly, softly almost laughing, like not quite trying to throw up, and Mayn finds history right here.

Time to call a halt to falling forward, we know the voices have not stopped, back home in that place that, like founders, his grandma and he called Windrow, their name for the growing town; nor stopped in the Hermit-Inventor’s New York, nor the Harrisburg near where the Navajo Prince, increasingly real as he came eastward, encamped canopied by a cloud imbued with the lumens of a Moon barely there that night but implicit in the dawnlike fineness of ash comprising in fact the Anasazi healer’s humorous airborne remains, long before our current software’s hardware but not before our perennial software itself.

Mayn should not take Larry into his confidence. It might be dangerous. Larry did not need, moreover, to hear a middle-aged man confirming his own words from a past that could seem a future to the boy, though boy was not enough to call him. Nor should Mayn be father to the boy. He already had one, who could help him simplify his economics homework and take him to see Shakespeare Off Broadway and they’d discuss it on the way home— "Let’s walk; O.K., Dad?"

I didn’t want her to come back, was what Mayn the boy said to the spooky porch that absorbed two, three Margaret tears; and, once asked by his wife what his (apparently not very narrative) mother Sarah thought of all the grandmother stories, reported Sarah saying, Good God! I never knew any Indians.

But if he said, I don’t want her to come back, he also said: I don’t want them to find her.

He conceived of her standing right there on the beach that September day (when she was in fact long gone), awaiting a fugitive sub but herself turned invisible, yes by one magic that the Germans had at the last second salvaged from the lost War (for they did things, and proved that things had causes and then switched around and began with a cause and made a thing), salvaged through a woman leading a cadre of men and finalized a device for becoming invisible, say by an internalized meteorological focus of concentration kin to the destructive yearning of the continent to contain all the anger and hope of its tribes even if from New Mexico to Maine this yielded a mount of waste here and there that would need moving by a new geology.

Naturally it passed through Mayn’s mind—alternating current, direct, forget which is which—that his mother might have passed into another life and by some established route not died at all. Oh he never went back to that beach. Christ save us from the sentimental beachware of nostalgia, thank you. Yet wait a moment, fuck you, yes He will if we want save us. She wasn’t there, for why should she be? But neither had she been there on Jim’s secret September day in ‘45 when no one knew he was down at the shore; Jim’s no kook, no private eye, no mystic, none of the above or below; and no mother was there in spirit or intent, any more than on the day of her disappearance a few weeks previous when her family had not been there to say goodbye she had embarked by acknowledging only the owner of the boat she would always need in Jim’s mind, a boat exactly as present as the owner was not. But Jim knew it didn’t make the best sense, the sense which breathes from the soundest family histories. He knew. And knew, as well as he would ever know the statistics of what the corporations in question vowed they would only do to that giant foreign southwestern landscape of the Four Corners through flaying its cloak of (if you call that) vegetation—and knew as well as he would know that the dark-blonde woman Dina West, who "needed" him, she said, to help add to the evidence exposing the power companies’ surgery of the land (so exposed already under the vast, flat New Mexico sky we don’t just right off the bat think of their operational Enterprise as Private), did not need in the same way her husband and his radio station in Albuquerque for an instant of history coinciding with the appearance above it hanging still together of the plume from the Four Corners plant, a sign that the waste of parts may yield coherence of the whole; yet she was not coming on to Mayn when she let him take her (in her car, driven by her) past the turnoff for her Paseo and along the Sandia Mountain highway to a bedroom suburb you might call it if the land were not always taking over and surrounding us with distance and those distances of the sky’s horizon that you stop thinking about and without much ado join but a permanent change of mind if you could only lay your hand on it circling back to find it not quite there now (so you look up, you look down), and, within that pretty elegant trading post the bedroom suburb, an artists’ joint that Mayn had eaten green chili and soft, mellow chalupas in once and never forgotten when there was nothing to remember there where he thought you could drink a meal every other night if you were that caliber of artist until, in this conversation that was supposed to be about wasting environment, he just couldn’t see what the blonde was adding to the specifics he was already in possession of except, of course, within their vivid margins of number and compound one more brief life (hers) implicit in the reality and threatening to be like other stories, long before he heard from a new friend named Norma some of the same stories, more or less, fed back if not shunted via that central agency of information-sharing power Grace Kimball, which collected him more than he them, until, sipping her second straight-up margarita in sync with "your" waitress in a pearly shirt approaching from yet another corner of the woody place to try and take their order, his blonde environmentalist dinner partner with the husband with his radio station asked if Mayn was married—a question whose sense was the words he had said already to himself yet with the meaning What’re you doing here, guy?—until he heard the bottom line in her say with quiet exactness that Ray Vigil’s idea Indians’11 get into commercial geothermal (given the right rock somewhere—and not meaning the Indians working on the hot rock experiment at Los Alamos) was nuts because water was what they wanted, not money or innovations; and Mayn heard her say that she and her husband after twelve years had a good, good friendship and he had said any time she wants to go to Washington as lobbyist or, indeed, work on Interior Department people, he has connections for example with the cement industry, though probably she has plenty through the Bureau (of Indian Affairs) and the Council (Indian Youth)—

—and in some rush of faith so that she tapped her candlelit fingers on his wrist (the waitress tilted her head cheerfully at them and they decided on flan for the lady), he told her about a red convertible automobile equipped to negotiate a New Hampshire lake, and a tiny sailboat with Mayn’s two children sliding around this in fact man-made body of water slashing in close to the piny shore, sliding out toward a point where a whole lot of Indians got trapped by some other Indians and incinerated like a fortress guarded by a meaningless moat—

—and you and your wife?

—they had loved and admired each other—

—ah; well people don’t get divorced only because of that—

—but he had left her.

Often? she asked.

Yes, he smiled.

For what?

He didn’t say, Business . . . or To prove we’re like other people (though the blonde lady said, Ouch, in the pause).

But we’ll probably . . .

Get back together again?

Now that you mention it, no; she is there year round now. We used to rent.

Mayn and the woman laughed with warmth and tension, in the knowledge neither was content to agree the reasons for separation were "usual" reasons, we all knew what they were (if you call separation without catastrophe real separation!), but in the evening of a day a year and more later, after he had elected not to take Larry into his confidence even in the quite other matter of a displaced, semi-incognito Chilean economist formerly of Dr. Allende’s full-employment, long-rooted, short-lived regime, he heard the woman’s voice in his phone receiver in the middle of the night and struggled off the peak edge of Ship Rock where he would have dreamt then (if he ever dreamt, but he did not) that he was, if her cheerful voice that brought him to that edge had not also woken him in the sharp, rainy light of a New York apartment he had once lived in and rented (and now clandestinely owned), she was in New York and in trouble, she thought, because of a man named Spence who had phoned to call himself an acquaintance of Mayn’s and to ask if she had spoken yet to Mayn’s daughter because their mutual involvement in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something called national technical means capability for verifying placements of missiles, could conceivably put them in jeopardy, and it was likely that Spence would ring her again.

But what was doing in New York?

Whether or not, with the insulting barside queries of that nosy Spence in memory mushrooming like an inspiration to recall everything else until Mayn became that southerner who near the moment of Lincoln’s election observed that if a Yankee pointed a pistol at him he would ask him how much he would take for it—"You mean your grandmother was pursued eastward to her very doorstep by that Indian what was his name?"—"You mean your mother left a note only for the owner of the boat?"—he Mayn still felt that that history of his mother’s getaway—"I am going far to see the land," she had recited, plus other lines—or more anciently his grandmother-to-be staring up at flowers growing down out of a haunted ceiling above her bed in an 1893 Omaha boarding house and her father’s contradictory instructions to "Go west as the man said" (the man who ran that paper in the city?—Greeley?! No the crackpot who stood behind her in 1885 at the historic pre-ruin of the uncrated Statue arrived prepaid on Bedloe’s Island), yet her father (who hoped she would carry on the paper someday because as he said to her beau, Alexander, she was a reformer even more than a writer) said at the same time, "You’re to be with your Cousin Florence the entire time you are in Chicago and that includes when you are back in your hotel writing copy"—all that stuff, although he kept circling back to it only to find it wasn’t quite there any more, made no less sense than the twenty-five-year span promised (like interest) for regrowing the vegetation shield stripped by the geniuses who’d rented the mine from the Indians (and called it on their signs the "Indian" mine for Interest does not lie) to feed the coal-into-"natural"-gas-"if "ication project by the Lurgi method which Mayn learned in five minutes and consigned to one plain young sentence declining to contemplate the perfectly good principle that what’s true of (yea, good for) the part may not be true of the whole— until with a start that was not all him, Mayn felt the ache of wings in his back (a shade more credibly than any conclusions he and his distant loved son had reached at breakfast time as to why dreamers thought their dreams conveyed the future), Mayn we say felt a long, halyard-vector (call it) slung from far off bugging him with its maybe hundreds of thousands of miles of calm meaninglessness so that he understood again not only that his position in the future could be real but that he had been assuming without evidence but not with faith that nothing dreadful would happen to Larry, this troubled young (be O.K., though) fellow Larry: but then as if he were responsible yet could not be responsible for the boy, there came to Jim a fresh free dose of void— though without any of those gross little margins of witticism history’s humor—a prevision that Larry was doomed, and soon.

Naturally, it passed through Mayn’s mind that his mother might have passed into another life, not died at all—a second, a third, or yet another life. He did not discuss this with Margaret, who, in so many words, had said that she just could not accept it, the fact, the fact of Sarah’s doing this. Meanwhile the boy lay awake with the shape or symptom of the repeated fantasy lost within him saying to himself, "She said to go away, but she went. So her advice now means, ‘Go away from home like me’—more than it means ‘Go away from me.’ "

Jim was not deranged and so he was able to be amused even at fifteen at the thought that he had made her go away. It wasn’t a true thought, and he would have it from time to time. That is, he was aware enough of life to know he would have it from time to time.

the message for what it was worth

Meanwhile you have to come up with something, said the older gentleman with whom I exchanged views from time to time. Economical of words, he would have gone far giving business advice. Maybe come up with something now, I said; but the last thing you decide is what to put first. True enough, said this older acquaintance of mine, but who knows what condition you’ll be in on your deathbed?

He would listen, and then he would speak. I had an odd way of seeing things, he said.

Well, what did that mean?

Oh, he said, smart, but a bit turned around. Cart before the horse? I said. That’s the idea, he said; first things first. But the last thing you decide, I said, is what to put first; that’s what the French mathematician said.

Are you a French mathematician? my elderly acquaintance asked. And one day I asked myself that question verbatim. But I have heard that one should stop talking to oneself; or so advises one of the religions, I think. Does that mean talk to others instead? Well, I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go. Have you told her, my elderly acquaintance would say. Have you told him? my wife would say, of whomever. I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go.

A hand gripped my arm and I turned to the young man detaining me. The train terminal all around me seemed freed of its morning rush hour, but the terminal wasn’t going anywhere, while I was. An old girlfriend of five or six years ago had come to mind with such perilous decency and sweetness that, if I kept moving across the marble floor uninterrupted, I might reach her voice; I was thinking of her, she was wearing bluejeans, then a plaid woolen skirt I had paid for. The hand gripping my arm was like the foreground sound I heard against a deep mass murmur in the station.

"Sir, do you live here in New York?" the young man asked. He held a book to his chest, a holy book with a title I recognized. I wished him a merry Christmas. "Do you live in New York?" he asked, and I heard in his speech great spaces of our country that are not New York. His hand grew upon my arm, and I reminded him that I had wished him merry Christmas.

"O.K., but I don’t think we’re getting through to each other," the young man said. I looked down at his pale hand on my arm and said that at least we were still talking. "That’s right," he grinned, and I said indeed I did live here in New York and at this moment was leaving it.

He asked me where I was going. "It is the journey that counts, not the destination," I said, and withdrew my arm.

"That’s right," said the young man and touched my arm again.

But then I fell into a habit I have been ordered to break—a shorthand that somewhat privately brings together past and present: "I can’t come to your wedding," I said, "I’m busy every night this week."

Whatever he thought of this—a private joke, sarcasm, madness—he smiled with an understanding I am all too familiar with. Another young fellow had accosted me Saturday on a cold, festive street as my wife and I peered at a menu through the fogged window of a restaurant. He had had three girls in tow and it was he who had asked me to his wedding. He was marrying— and of course I knew how to believe him—Jesus Christ at midnight. We smiled and nodded, my wife and I; all six of us, I think, smiled.

But this morning I was alone. The young man with the holy book gripped my arm like a blood-pressure test. The Bhagavad-Gita was what he was holding. "Can I talk to you?" he said, as a son at a certain time of life might think of saying to a distant father.

I threw up my elbow in his face and he let go.

I approached my gate that had "11:40" in large white numerals below the name of the train. At the gate I turned and looked back. The young man was showing a blonde lady a passage in his book.

I was early for my local, but I had an unbelievable number of other things to do, and today, whatever I had in common with the man I was visiting, I had little if anything to say to him. "And yet—and yet . . ."I already heard his words, this elder acquaintance of mine who in his slow humor betrayed only a very mild interest in his own affairs.

If he could see me now. Here I was, moving away from the very gate I had approached, and moving toward where the young man and the middle-aged blonde stood discussing the Bhagavad-Gita. It is, I am sure, a religious book. But I have my own notion of gods. I am no god; I won’t go for that. Nor to my knowledge are any of those close to me gods. And yet, as the older man I have mentioned would say—and yet. My notion is that there are many gods. No problem.

I passed near the young man and the blonde woman, and the woman looked up and smiled at me. I heard a child crying, and I heard another child, on being prompted, say, "Hi." I heard a man say, "So sue her—sue her ass." I swept the great echoing station, picking up more than I knew, noticing at the end of one row of marble ticket windows that were now devoted to Off-Track Betting a notice that did not apply to me, for an organization that helps gamblers. The man I was going to see had known a gambler who came to him with strange pains in his fingers. My host did not tell jokes, but he told very particular stories. It seemed that this gambler had been strolling down a street in Anchorage, Alaska, with his recently widowed sister-in-law and had run into another card player, a recent settler there. He had introduced the lady he was with, but only by name, as she afterward pointed out to him. What she was not to know, however, was that behind her back a few evenings later at a crisis he risked her—bet her as his own wife—against the settler’s powerboat no less. An old story, no doubt. But she had never learned of her stake in the boat or in the proceeds of its sale, and the gambler came to love her and they married and were happy. This despite his habits (though he had a regular job now) and perhaps at the price of a ritual anguish in the nerves of his fingertips four or five times a year, one of those times the anniversary of that game in Anchorage.

"Lucky at cards, lucky in love?" I had suggested.

"If that’s how you see it," said my host.

How then, did my host see it? He shrugged, but then he said, "Oh, smart at cards, smart in love."

What had that gamble to do with love? I thought then and later. My host added that he and the gambler had concluded that telling the wife the truth about that game in Anchorage wasn’t what was called for and wasn’t even a good idea. The truth was that the gambler and his wife were having a little trouble at the moment and she was a bit bored with life.

Once more at my gate, I thought of my wife in bed, answering, not answering. I was almost certain my elder daughter had read the Bhagavad-Gita. She talked of getting her own apartment. Our second daughter, much younger, had been my idea; her birth had proved unexpectedly easy. I wasn’t thinking straight, and yet to come out and think this thought could mean I was. I was going to get on my train.

The dispassionate man I was going to see had a habit of prefacing a remark with "You’re not going to like what I’m about to say." But while he had his idiosyncrasies, this was not one of them. My wife was also in the habit of telling me I was not going to like what she was about to say. But unlike the man I was going to see today, she was almost always correct in her warning, her prediction. I say "almost" because, having warned me that I would not like what she was about to say, she would sometimes stop and not say whatever it was, on the ground that I stopped her from speaking her mind.

Not half so much, though, as I stopped myself. For who has the time? I must speak for myself. Not a renouncing individual, I had renounced fighting with her. It was necessary to my renunciation that I had not told her.

I sat in the NO SMOKING car of my train among newspapers left by commuters. I had a good empty feeling. I was hungry, but didn’t want whatever they were peddling in the cafe car. Christmas was going to be bearable. The somewhat elderly man I was visiting was not exactly a close friend; I was paying him this visit because I thought I ought to. I had nothing special to say to him today. As I’ve said, if he had taken himself seriously he could have gone far as a business consultant. I’m repeating myself.

I had met him at the bar of a business-lunch restaurant downtown through a journalist friend whom I hadn’t seen for months and haven’t since. A bright, windy day a couple of blocks from the harbor—and the brass rail I put my foot on and the polished wood under my elbow and the golden rust flecking the great mirror behind the bar might have inspired even me to take the day off. I recall that they were discussing their grown children when I appeared, and the journalist said he didn’t see his as often as he’d like but he guessed it was partly up to him; his friend here was retired so he had less excuse. Semi-retired, my new acquaintance said. Well, you’re not packing a stethoscope any more, said my journalist friend. When he left the bar to sit down with, as I recall, two well-known economists, each with a full, reddish beard, who instantly began studying their menus, he shook hands and for a moment held in both of his the hand of my new acquaintance, this somewhat elderly doctor who had come into Manhattan to see his lawyer that morning.

What happened was that the doctor and I had lunch, and the fish was watery. I told the waiter he had ignored us, he’d been taking something out on us, what was it?, and I told my companion that I had been using my squash racket on court lately like a shillelagh and I had no idea how many blood types were represented on its raw head, and what did he do by way of being semi-retired!

The long and the short of it is that he was at present a therapist on an informal basis, with a few patients. That was the first and last meal we had together, a thought that came to me as I imagined what they were serving in the cafe car of my regular train. I had not asked what his qualifications were, though I had seen in his study a framed certificate from an institute of pastoral (I think it was) psychotherapy. My time was limited but we met quite often. What did I know of him? He had his share of sorrow. What more could one say? Well, that he was droll and, if not magical, self-contained. Mostly—for he declined to be an oracle—he said humdrum things like, You want to take some time for yourself. I sometimes thought I didn’t know what to say to him; but he was there, and I paid for the hour, though it was usually less. Well, it was supposed to be fifty minutes and it was usually at least that. I will say that I felt it was my time. There, that’s what I meant to say, banal as it comes out.

I had had the time to talk with the young man in the terminal who would not go away, but I was here in my car instead. I knew that the Bhagavad-Gita was a Hindu poem, a sacred text I was almost certain. Come to think of it, I knew it was conversations between two persons, a god and, I believe, a warrior. I had not felt called upon to read the book. I knew pretty much what I would find. My personal view is that there are many gods, and when we organize and rank them we go too far, we ask too much of them.

I saw my fellow passengers with such clarity that I might have suspected I could enter their bodies if I had not felt the opposite. A black woman in a red coat unwrapped a candy bar and watched a girl with a scout-green knapsack on a metal frame enter the car. Two mustachioed youths sat down, lighted cigarettes, and got up and left the car. An older couple—two older couples —sat in the far half of the car facing my way. A flaxen-haired woman who looked like my wife and had a slightly broken nose glanced across the aisle at me, held my glance, and gave me a smile. A man in a white helmet had wheeled his bicycle along the platform and was arguing with a conductor. Two men wearing glasses settled down with heavy-looking loose-leaf notebooks and, exchanging names of men they knew, talked for all our benefit as if the train were already rumbling along. A black woman entered the car, found the first black woman, and sat down with her. One had an old Macy’s shopping bag, the other a brown canvas bag like a blue one of mine in which I carry athletic gear.

The doors closed, the train moved, and I felt I could see anything I wanted to see. The man in the helmet stood on the platform like a trooper, his bicycle pointed in the direction our train was moving. I heard what sounded like a cat’s angry squall at a distance and knew it was someone’s zipper close by. The train’s movement was like the tunnel we were moving through, and the loud voices of the two men with the notebooks talking guidelines receded.

I hummed a chorus of an old tune, "It’s Just the Nearness of You"; those were very likely the only words of it I recalled. The flaxen-haired woman across the aisle smiled, and I asked her if it was going to be a good day, and we seemed to find that funny.

I reported to her that a young man with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita had tried to convert me in the station, and the woman asked why I assumed he was trying to convert me. But then she raised a hand gently and said, "No, no, of course he was."

"Wait a second," I said. "You didn’t mean that."

"Oh I guess I didn’t know why you were telling me," the woman said, and looked down at the cover of a magazine in her lap.

"What are all these people doing traveling out to Westchester at half past eleven on a weekday morning?" I said.

The woman opened the magazine as if we were old friends, in fact as casually as my wife would turn the page of a magazine if we were traveling together—indeed just as she had done on the one occasion when she had come with me to visit the man I was going to see today. I swung my shopping bag from the seat beside me to the floor. Well, I was not quite empty-handed journeying out to see this after all wise and interesting man, but perhaps he would have a laugh or two in store for me.

The flaxen-haired woman looked at a page and barely glanced at me so that she seemed to be turning against the resistance of that small, abrupt angle where her nose had been broken.

I had bought my wife a Christmas present on the way to the train, a last-minute inspiration. Standing in the crowded subway I had felt time warming me, exciting me to a point of common happiness—holiday time. On the subway platform as I had gotten off, a man was singing. But he might have been screaming, to judge from the pain in a woman’s face as she climbed the stairs. He had been singing well and singing for us all. I had wanted to speak to him, give him something; but that wasn’t his idea.

I had my wife’s gift in a shopping bag. I had my doubts, which I don’t have when I buy things for my children. My doubts are that nothing I buy my wife can express my feelings for her. I love her looks and her humor. I fear my reactions to her moods and her commands. She is a hard person to shop for, and the nightgown or brooch I buy her can’t match, let’s say, the hand-carved, bass wood canoe paddle my wife produces for me on Christmas Eve.

That was worth telling the man I was on my way to see, for maybe once upon a time he had had the same experience. I would not wish to pry. Certainly not into the tragedy that had come to him apparently around the time I had first made his acquaintance.

Often I had bent his ear so that we didn’t know where the time had gone. I had told him all my stories. Once I had killed a burglar with a half-full bottle of apple juice in accidental self-defense and had had to go to court and could not believe that I had done what I had done. Another year I had hit a school crossing-guard, an unmarried woman in a yellow slicker and a pert, novel type of cap, who had stepped like an actress or an apparition out from behind a rental van as I approached an intersection and when I hit her I seemed to knock her back into the slot she had emerged from. My father had had a long, hopeless illness but had then shocked us all by suddenly dying. It seemed to have been a hard life all around, but I couldn’t believe this, and I was at least glad to hear myself say so to the man I was traveling out to see.

He knew me, I guess, and it was a pleasure to talk to him on these visits I paid him from time to time. I asked him if he would retire completely. He didn’t know. I suggested he come into town for a play I would get tickets for, but he felt he would rather not—as if it weren’t a good idea.

In the train window, the tops of the trees made a movie of the low winter sun. They divided endlessly the distance between me and where I was going.

The flaxen-haired woman smiled at what she was reading. The conductor told us the next stop over the loudspeaker. I thought that from time to time you have to come up with something. My host had said this.

My wife had asked to come with me in April soon after I had met him. She had sat in one comfortable corner of the room, the study it was—and she was both between me and my host and beyond us. A memorable visit. In amicable fashion, we had gotten onto my nature and my wife’s periodic spells (to put, no doubt, too explicit a label to it). We could not decide if she had been frozen out by me from time to time, or what. What the devil do I mean we could not decide? A bell had rung and our host excused himself and was heard at the other end of the house saying, "Put them there," loudly as if the person was coming in from outdoors; then there were scuffing noises and a faint concussion. Our host didn’t come back and I pulled out an old medical text and asked my wife if she’d like something to read, which for some reason is a joke between us. Our host came back into the room and stood at the door rolling his head at us with mysterious humor, secretly powerful, even if not for us. We resumed, and presently a clock struck somewhere. The clock had made us aware of the house.

My wife sat straight up on the edge of the couch. In the end, as we were leaving and after I had phoned for a cab, she asked in her own abrupt way a personal question.

"Are you married?" she said.

Our host smiled his crooked, courteous smile.

"I was," he said. "I was until a few weeks ago."

My wife looked from him to me. He told us what had happened. His wife had fallen from a ladder in the garage, had hurt her leg and died of a blood clot. A freak accident.

‘Thirty-five years," he said. "Just like that. It’s a lifetime," he said, still with the smile in the manner of the quiet host who says he’s glad you were able to make it.

"Damn," he said; "damn, damn, damn."

He raised his hand, and, unsteady on his feet for a moment, he snapped his hand to one side—an idiosyncrasy of his that brushed away irritation or that said, Well, that’s over with.

A door shut heavily, the impact came through the air as if that room, wherever it was, was sealed with carpets and drapes. But passing out through what might have been a waiting room in this wing of the house, we found an extraordinarily fat woman sitting on the couch smoking, staring straight ahead. And I remember a new car was parked in the driveway. Then our cab came.

I had wanted to see him again, I mean at once. I wanted to know what he had thought of us.

My wife said, "He didn’t like me, I could see that."

I had smelled the spring and, as we passed a green golf course that rose like a meadow away from the road, my wife leaned on me and kissed me on the cheek.

She wondered if he had children. Of course, he must, she said. I said, Oh yes. She thought he’d had a quick drink, probably a stiff one, while we were waiting for him to come back. She made an observation or two on the constant threat of immaturity and on the need to keep the parts of one’s life distinct. "But I didn’t think he liked me; I came between you," she said, and she clasped her hands in her lap. "He’s really quite a charming man," she said. "I’m terribly hungry, how about you?" I remember her words.

I didn’t ask him about himself. We kept it at a different level. I was in the middle of my life, if I could stay in. I mentioned a friend I had had who had let me know I held back too much; I should open with him more about my life. That is, our friendship depended on it. Naturally I came to find this view precious, not to say a pain. He wanted to know what my relationship was with a woman whom we both knew. As if what my revered friend did not know about my life waited secretly between us—call it misdemeanors accumulating interest unspeakable into my life whose integrity needed him. I have said too much too fast, as if I were short of time. My host once observed that I had a somewhat formal style of speaking.

Other friends I spoke of not so much as of my wife and of my two children, now at their different levels nearly grown. My wife, I said. The words are said less easily nowadays. I think my wife has found a spark in me. I had come to know my family better through my conversations with this semi-retired doctor. Not that he said much. But my family became so comforting to me in his presence that I would see my daughters with a distinctness that hurt, at the same time that I saw them stand up strong, truthful, unharmed, and independent, while I saw the finest brushmarks in my wife’s hair after she had drawn it back so tightly it shone like a reflection.

Which is the journey, which the destination? The train I had so often taken recalled such things. The woman across the aisle did not look up when I put on my overcoat.

I left the train, crossed the platform, and passed down an icy ramp. Like a resident I carried the shopping bag with my wife’s Christmas present. I gave the strange cab driver the address, and he named the person I was going to see.

The driver was big and fat and, below his thick, gray hair, his skin had a powdery softness infinitesimally wrinkled. We passed the golf-course sign and we passed a white lawn with colored figures on it. Again I saw what I wanted to see. I had been irritated with the driver because in speaking the name of the person I was going to see he seemed to pry. I made conversation. I asked if he had his snows on. He said that on bad days he used chains too; you could waste two hours spinning your wheels in driveways, and he said something else which went right out of my head because we had approached the house and I wondered why the hell I had come, and I believe that instead of responding to whatever the man had said I said perfunctorily that I didn’t know.

Behind me were the subway train and the railroad train, throw in some angry bicyclist with his bicycle, and now a taxi. I could not check my thoughts. I wondered if my wife was seeing someone and was reluctant to tell me. And would she if I asked? Or would she only if I didn’t ask? Because my host understood often without asking. I would tell him a joke, I would tell him he was not going to like what I was about to say, I would tell him the truth that I had almost not come and I would ask if he thought Christmas upset your biorhythms and if there were such things, and I would throw in the Jesus kids Saturday night; I would tell why I’d be damned if I’d answer the kid with the Bhagavad-Gita in Grand Central, and I would reiterate my notion that there are many gods who preside in the things that touch us and move us, gods we look up and down to, gods we enlist the support of, and I recalled the gambler in Anchorage who staked what he didn’t possess, lucky as a god and driven like a god. And I would add that—to quote one of the old polymaths—Pascal, Emerson, my daughter would know what I was recalling—when we most fly those gods, then they are most our fuel, or something to that effect—it had gods in it.

One of them drove too close to me on a three-lane northbound artery looking for trouble and when I yelled at him he shook his head deafly and grinned, and another came up behind him and they two took off around the next curve and must have vanished at the next exit in pursuit of each other or some such nonsense. I would tell my host all this and more and would tell how in the train I’d suddenly known I would see what I wanted to see; and I would talk about my wife as if she were there with us.

All right, I was bringing him some pretty good stuff today; I saw him smile inwardly at this. I felt better, and, as if experiencing difficulty in getting out of the cab, I could not for a moment get my hands on the right money to give the driver. I left him and he left me at the entrance to the driveway. Two cars were parked in the driveway; one had a Maryland plate and one, I half-noted from its color, was from further away.

The glass panes in the double doors of the garage were frosted over as if with Halloween soap. The sound of the cab receding rose and fell. I felt in my pockets and found a glove in each. I didn’t put them on but bunched one in each hand inside each pocket. My wife was home. I saw her in bed. I didn’t see her face but I heard her voice. She reached one fine hand toward her bed table.

I went across the snowy flagstones to the square flagstone porch, which was like a large doorstep. Two front doors faced at right angles to each other and were adjacent. The left one was locked, so I rang. I rubbed my hands together and heard myself way inside my heavy coat and muffler go, "Ho ho ho," and I dug my hands down into my pockets. Fir trees set the lawn off from the road. A car passed and then another in the same direction. I waited and rang again and wasn’t sure how many times I’d rung. He was on the phone or someone was with him and the door had gotten locked. The winter silence was of Christmas morning or of Sunday. What was missing was in me. I wondered if someday I might heal someone. I rang again.

I turned to see on the other side of the trees a car pass in each direction like curtains closing and opening at the same time. I looked at the other front door, with little oblong windows on either side of it. It led to the main part of the house, a one-story suburban dwelling. I pressed the one bell again and didn’t hear it and realized I had never heard it and then remembered I had heard it once from inside. My feet were cold. My wife was lying on her elbow, thinking less hopefully than I about the past, her hair down, shaking her head and smiling. I could very nearly see my host, and he was looking at his watch and saying to whoever was with him, "Wonder where he is."

What was happening had never happened. I stared at the bell, which was in the corner between the two front doors, and in the corner of my eye I felt appear and disappear in one of the narrow panes running vertically beside the right-hand door a face, and I could have sworn it was a woman. I rang once more and peered through the glass beside the right-hand front door to see what I could see. A carpeted foyer. The end of a living room maybe. Part of a window looking onto trees at the north side of the house. I stepped back.

Everything had passed out of my head and I had no idea what was going on, until then the right front door unlatched and swung open, and there was my host in broad daylight—hair not too thin, freckles at the temples, faintly wall-eyed. He was shaking his head, or he was rolling it, I don’t know what he was doing but he had been amused before he saw me and he was feeling just as good now. His eyes were misted and attentive. He was a different man. He had on a red-and-black lumberjack shirt. Along his jaw and cheeks was a silvery sheen of stubble.

He’d had something to drink, and his leisurely, slow speech hit me like a code: "Do you know I phoned you?" He’d had a few drinks. He chuckled as slowly as he talked. "I tried to put you off, but I didn’t remember in time."

I said, like a person of lower rank, that no one had gotten the message; and at once I saw this was an odd thing to say.

"My family arrived last night. From California . . . from Washington." He flipped his hand out to the side. "I didn’t expect them until Christmas Eve, and they got away earlier and phoned me and—" he threw out both hands, happy with fate.

I said something like What the hell, sorry I didn’t get the message.

"Didn’t get the message?" he wheedled, and he chuckled as if I had come up with an idea he hadn’t thought of, and he frowned unsteadily. "Well, come in and meet my family." He stepped backward, and I stepped into the foyer with my cold snowy feet and felt huge.

This was the other part of the house, not where the study was, and I had lost something, which, it came to me, had been my opportunity to go on waiting.

I followed my host out of the dark foyer into a living room that opened to my right. And although what I had lost was my purpose, I found in the accident, in the awkward foul-up, a polite power.

My host was introducing me by my surname to two young men in their twenties, his sons. The introduction didn’t take long. Behind him, from somewhere at the far end of the room a tall, dark-haired young woman appeared as if drawn out of hiding. There was a door there. She must have been in the room talking with them. She was the woman here. All that curly hair of hers seemed playful in its abundance.

The son on my right did not get up but raised his hand to shake mine. The hand was hardly waiting to be gripped; it was where I was not. A scar like a seam cut down across his forehead and finished at the bridge of his thick nose. The second son, whose equally pale face was bearded and who wore a gold ring on his ring finger, took a swift stride or two toward me, gripped my hand, and stepped back. Beyond him the father came to introduce me to his daughter, who came forward and shook my hand as if she were shrugging. She wore bluejeans and a large, luxurious ski sweater, dark green, with a high neck that came up under her chin. Her hand was cold. Her face was very tan. I started to say the dumb thing that had just come to mind but didn’t say it; she blushed; I realized her hand was cold because she had been outside.

I had left my wife’s present in the taxi.

The three young people were being given what I had envisioned as my time, and they didn’t want it, I mean they didn’t want mine. Their father was feeling no pain. They had been talking about who I could possibly be, before their father had hauled himself up to go confirm his suspicion. But before that they had been talking of a whole life. But he must have known exactly who it was ringing the bell.

I said, "You all haven’t been together in quite a while."

I was a little angry, partly about leaving my wife’s present if not the thought that went with it in the cab. Well, they weren’t saying what was on their minds, and I was in this as if I and the father between us had brought them out. These serious young people. He knew me very well. The girl looked at me as if out of a tableau. She and her brothers were three serious, invaded faces. They seemed young for a thirty-five-year marriage. Nothing could be said until I left. Yet I could say what I wanted, for I always did here.

I knew what they had been talking about, knew it as certainly as I found a freedom in my embarrassment. But then no, I did not know what they had been talking about. I thought of the woman who was absent from this room. She came to me as if I had seen her.

"I’ll call a cab," I said.

"Oh no," my host said slowly, "I’ll drive you, I’ll drive you."

I decided that the door at the far end of the room must lead to the kitchen and beyond it the garage, a car, a lawn mower, a ladder.

"It’s better if I call a cab," I said and felt in my eyes looking at the fire on the hearth a warmth of excitement beyond my politeness.

"Oh no, I’ll drive you," my host said. "It’s not far to the station."

His children looked to me. Their father knew me. They wanted me to disappear, by cab.

I had a grievance. The clock struck a quarter of, and there it stood on the mantel; I’d heard it many times from a distance.

I knew where a phone was, and I nodded and left the room, and my host came shuffling along the carpet behind me. I found the way from the foyer into the other wing of the house. I went into his study and he said, "Where you going?" But just as I reached for the phone on the desk I heard a car horn close by, distinctly stationary, and instead of the phone in my hand I found I had made a fist. I turned to my host, and the car honked again.

"I had some pretty good stuff for you," I said.

"Good stuff?" he said, and smiled and rolled his head. My words had come back to me.

"I’m glad your family’s here," I said, feeling sincere.

"They’re delightful people," he said, as if that’s what they were— people. "I can’t tell you what delightful people they are."

"You’re not going to like what I’m about to say," I said, "but you should have tried harder to get in touch with me."

"Damn it all, you’re right," he said, and smiled with good-humored understanding of what I had said.

"Well, you don’t need visitors today," I said. I meant extra visitors, but then I didn’t mean that either. I saw us in a car, and he was playing games with the white line.

"Your time isn’t your own," I said. "No," I said, "I mean if you’re going to give time to someone, you don’t want to give it away. I mean, it ought to be still yours. How about that?"

"That’s pretty good," said my host.

"It wasn’t what I was going to say," I said.

"I know," he said, and he seemed more my equal than a widower or a man with a few drinks in him or a man made happy by his grown children returning to his household the first Christmas after his wife’s death.

The doorbell rang and I went through the unlighted next room in this wing of the house that I was more or less familiar with. My host followed me.

I put my hand on the knob of the front door I usually used. We’d been in another room today with an audience. Except that that wasn’t it at all. I was the audience, but that wasn’t it either. My time was theirs. As simple as that. This was his family even more than last year, when his wife was alive.

"I had some good stuff for you," I said.

"Will it keep?" came the voice behind me—"because I don’t know about next week."

The three invaded faces had vanished into my head. They had never been there before.

I pulled open the front door.

The strange cabdriver with the powdery, wrinkled skin held out my shopping bag to me and nodded when I told him I was coming with him but . hadn’t phoned.

I shook hands with my host. The last step had been mine and so was the next.

"I’ll phone you," I said.

"Do that," he said.

This is the end of the story, except that I now see I should add that when I returned home much later my wife, whose sense of humor is unpredictable, asked me among many other things how it had gone with my man in Mamaroneck. I replied that we had had a good exchange, though somewhat abbreviated, and we had wished one another Merry Christmas, etcetera. But, thinking of her question, I kept an uneasy one to myself when I said, "I came up with a couple of things."

"Like what?" my wife asked.

"Like the gods," I said.

"Oh, them," said my wife.

"Have I ever told you about the gods?" I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if—"

"You never said that to him," said my wife.

"Wait," I said, but she went on, "You sit around and tell him stories on an informal basis as you say."

"I had competition today," I said.

"Well, that makes it more interesting for all concerned," said my wife. "Whatever happened to the gambler who bet his brother’s wife against a boat?"

"Hold on and let me say what I’m saying," I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if we will; but they have their lives—I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say."

My wife took a long look at me as if I were a way of seeing something. "That’s what you came up with today? That’s what you came up with in your abbreviated session during which you had competition?" She paused and tentatively continued: "You found out that he had his life—is that it?"

"But I’ve never entered into his life as much as I did today," I said.

My wife thought a moment. Then she said, "He wasn’t alone." She paused. "He had guests. He had people with him." She tilted her head, eyeing me. "It’s Christmas; there were people there."

My uneasy question burst out, "Well if you got the phone message, why the hell did you ask me how it went with him?"

But this was the funniest thing my wife had heard all day, and I was amused at myself to see her laugh. She said, "Believe it or not, I got myself together right after you left this morning, and I’ve been out until half an hour ago. Did he say someone answered the phone here?"

I didn’t remember.

"Maybe it was a burglar," my wife said.

What I recalled was that I had said that I would phone and he had said, "Do that."

I wondered when I would phone him again. It might be a long time. I said to my wife that the gods leave some things for you to figure out, and my wife nodded sagely, eyeing me, and observed that that was true, very true.

Very, very true, I told myself.

"He should have let me know," I said. "It would have saved me a trip out there and back."

"Did you tell him that?" my wife inquired.

"As a matter of fact, I did," I said. "What I didn’t tell him was that I felt your presence there with us."

"I always feel that, but thank you for telling me," said my wife. "By the way, who was with him?"

"His family," I said.

OPENING IN THE VOID (smile)

... so much for the Foley Plan to make of this or any prison a home some know exists already of all men’s skills, the closet priest, the born brewer; shirtmaker, teacher, lawyer, Indian; singer, woodworker, Houdini, machinist, interior decorator (the guard beat up for hanging a "hanging" across his cell’s pillared front), the printer and the plumber, postman, nurse, angel, mason, and their comrade green thumb and let’s not leave out the economic mind who got us here (smile) bartering equalities for a family so open-ended, Jim, that Maximum Security withers away like memory of a den of guards, while ploughing its way outward to market surplus fertilizer, knives-forks-spoons-plates, vibes, vintage, fabric, and ideas from such soil of Inside Energy that where we have builders we will have architecture, where lawyers arise judges will be needed, and where green thumbs, another land. And what is your story? someone interrupts. What did you do to end up in this endless community of minds? I sometimes hear angels talking talking talking nearby and all they want is to be like us and live only inside our limits, change their lives.

But so much for the Foley Economic Plan to best use this Maximum Security Facility: the walled garden unfortunately for the time being notwithstanding is outside the walls: while inside them, Jim, growing pain goes down with any beans, canned corn, rice pudding, any milk you had in mind to be thrown up if desired in reverse menu a la the raw diet guru woman one day visited from New York City with outlandish sex shit so that I have to forget I first heard of her from your fellow prison-visitor the generous South American gentleman whose wife knows her from women’s workshops I could see my Miriam attending once upon a time in order to help herself get over me. Tell me a story, George, she said, hey Foley tell me something, anything.

Or pain is messages (believe a well-known dentist, who should be exposed for practicing without Novocaine so as to prove pain is) "nothing but messages": or was it Novocaine he was drilling for?, but the message I never got answered from the light of my life?—if she can’t get back to me it’s her choice though I am always with her (tough luck, dear Miriam; tough luck, Mir’): though not all inmates here know Getting Through is what this place is all about, getting not out but through to me and you (for James you too, give or take certain Cubans resident here, could be in danger) getting through at that special speed of Earth I learned and from no book—just the speed our light is slowed suddenly, bent by oil slick, blown glass, intriguing haze, eyeball, juice, gray matter, blood, sweat, or sea that that light falls into yet is not lost; or air: remember the grasshopper that landed on the biologist’s deck three hundred seventy miles from land? what air did it travel through?

Which isn’t your facts of prison life immortalized by girl sports writer that made research visit here to check out a black basketball joust in the yard and wound up giving us (surprise, surprise) the complete treatment: smells of clean steel and surplus soap, the hawk-song pigeon-voices, nutritional strategy, educational programs (if not the amazing chemistry that brought you here), license plates she had to touch like Braille, painting by the numbers on glass that some here learn, under-the-bunk postcard sales depicting our seldom-used sacrifice chapel, the individualized mail privileges too complicated for words, the resident writers, the guards’ blue blazers, the physical jeopardy step by step, the Rican family picnics (‘‘festivals"), the death-row chaplain’s safety-valve seminars but not the guru woman’s one-shot sex and diet rap, the Box Efrain did his farewell solo in for redecorating his cell—all data, from the dimensions of cells and inmates to rising cost per unit-con; all specifics from Anatomies of Anger in her top-dollar title, clear into dreams slept through by inmates then gladly given up to be published under this girl sports writer’s byline though her younger, chess-master house-husband did a downside rewrite and typed it for her—yet this latest exhaustive chapter on prison life is missing what /, Foley, had to tell:

and this not just your George Foley Economic Plan (documented for the eyes of our generous Chilean gentleman by private mail drop so private Efrain the bearer didn’t even feel it happen on a city street corner granted swirling with hookers, tourists, beggars, basketball hoopoe-wackoes blocking all lanes continuing out into the night of a thousand whistles the game they paid ten bucks a stub to see refereed in the Garden—and other messages Jim some worth it some not), but a greater thing even than the Economic Plan her prison piece missed was no less than the Way, the Way which swirls colloid in all of us, her too, by which Way and Chemistry we Get Through, though those who have it may not know they do:

as I told our gentleman from South America when he headed south to launch the Moon (smile), who thinks constantly of that southern continent some here abscond to on their nightmares—while he heart-targets with dignified rage and noble economy of word "that former country" he called his Chile to a certain anti-Castro Cuban inmate who we hear though (what with their political differences) doubt he has something going with—i.e., beyond that generous gentleman’s human interest, which you said wasn’t news (to you) yet not no news which no matter what my father says is not good news, but what mail does my father ever get?

Meanwhile, in lieu of news, Jim, we have on tap all economic learning the generous gentleman got out of Chile with, exiled from that stranded, coast-

WOMEN AND MEN

like nation that the anti-Castro (if he really is anti-Castro) Cuban in question recently spoke in my hearing about (in peril of his life inside, yet anxious for his wife and son he thinks of moving from a doubled-up apartment two blocks from the American Indian Museum in Manhattan to a new Hispanic quarter of Poughkeepsie)—and, in the same breath, spoke of you, Jim, as if you worried him (that nation concealing mountains and estuaries within its single-minded length, dense mines below rivers running with the cold blood of glaciers, a south pole of anti-land and a northern border hot in temper as in mercury)—oh all our Chilean gentleman knows more about than you and I of surplus value, skewed capacity, which brought him and I together by eavesdrop, mail, interview, colloid way, for I had felt he would need me, just as I am with you, Jim, in this, whatever it is.

Which leaves me often where I was, opening in the void, and if a mere vessel (like my mother said, meaning her Lord’s), my kind’s a vessel moving through a solid so long as in mid-trip you don’t come to and find yourself a chunk of fruit in the Jello Museum, and the light of my life if Miriam can’t get back to me might be having her own experience elsewhere that loving is more than being loved or "George, tell me a story, tell me anything."

So we have tabled for now the Foley Plan for this correctional facility, Jim; and so on into a new vein where a messenger came but didn’t know he was one.

And so on through all blocks of this multiple dwelling, this seventeen-hundred-toilet redoubt (for where there’s children you need plenty of toilets), walled by hills and woods (the trees in a book I have, and in the trees birds I think), walled by barns, brains, and moving figures I have heard—their limited-use autos, their working animals, all injecting tax dollars into the bird-pie to keep us and our ungodly potential at rest between the lines and from escaping this (strainer-with-built-in) jug where fourteen grand (you said, Jim, updating to ‘76 or so, my figures) pumped into each man’s annum inflates day and night as the Inside gets more inescapable (where the sale money’s spent—from the Inside), gets more cloudy, and so on. But in an adjacent vein—

(you with me? for believe that more than one of us are in touch with you, if only through your unused power—

(to get me outa here! (smile))

after our trip into the nuts, bolts, and budget lines of a scheme to make this jail more than a bird preserve so we who’re inside (not just I) grow into Insiders living to keep the Outside in its place—let’s say a messenger arrived not knowing he was one.

New vein after all Foley’s Wide Load to you of unused capacity (almost all we got here), trade-off bartering one-to-one hand-sewn shirts for another man’s talent to entertain a thousand people all by himself, one man’s instinct for engines for another man’s legal mind, a born chef coming out of the closet to inspire that tired genius with the green thumb; surplus value ploughing the collective heart back into the labor value of the use value, which is true value in the Foley prison economy still merely ho-hum to scanners of outgoing transmissions—hence all this has covered the coming of the messenger like all our talkers inside who never heard the rest is silence, who’ll tell you why they’re here if they ever find out. And, Jim, a different vein now—and we’ll trust that the correctional scanners of mail who never knew ol’ sex-box Premier K’s adage "A long wind that is too long forgets the mountain it has come down from," got gross-dipped with foregone lode of Foleynomics (constructive as jailhouse lawyers’ nit-picking here where cleanliness long since killed all nits but not the body oils) so that the above-mentioned correctional scanners didn’t comprehend Foleynomics (with its self-contained prison cooperatives of craft-skill, revenue management, marketing, and retreat) as part of the long-term continuum I’m really sending you, the shadow thrown by the words— and by now the scanner powers in this Multiple Dwelling that is Nowhere but walled inside Somewhere may have passed this particle transmission by, as it them; whereas my Dago friend Dante’s Life Inside got intercepted by our scanners on its way to a humor contest and Dante took them to federal court where you also have to talk fast only to have the judge tell him insanity was no defense of such writing and he should be ashamed to submit such a critique of authority when guys like him drove authority crazy not the other way around, and better go back and try again—which is why I contact you not mainly by word-unit or real-page but as I do, including voice-over and memory-merge and the twin-scopes to come. So in the case of this communique which can be as long as you want to be equal to, Jim, let’s hope them frogs have let us bugs limp past their slimy, froggy nose holes on one wing looking for air; so let’s assume the coast is clear. Look there, and there—if possible both at once. Stay with me; this was all you needed. Prison is not just full of murder or of bodies.

So what’s the issue, Jim, you visitor, me captive host? Me making sure you shtick around to the end, and no judge is going to send you off to jail because you took your eyes off the road, looked in the mirror, checked the nervous alternator or the fuel, looked at the passenger on your right to see she was still there, fellow-pro you said got you into this once-a-week experiment but how come you didn’t bring her, Jim?, I can see her so clear I know you love her.

So in a different vein, say the messenger arrived but didn’t know himself to be, and didn’t know the room. Yet this room was it, all right. Hadn’t he aimed for it, driving his rented car through the hills up tree-lined parkways we remember and down rock-bound hairpins so fine they are timeless, across trout pool, by a stream’s sheer rock with writing on it along tree-guarded parkways above New York taking our poisons and breathing back green oxygen—so giving back better than you get is the sign of a vegetable!

While because of the mail scanners I had to get here my way, by our full account of the Foley Plan for 5-to-20-year development of this retirement compound, prison, or, some bad days, all I know.

This here then is not just what you the pro with life experience asked us for, as once a statuesque woman asked of you when you didn’t, you said, pick up on what was really on her mind until you had blundered ahead and put yourself to test. But you know I couldn’t fit it all onto one screen. And I didn’t come yet to my girlfriend Miriam’s father’s four-star garbage cans, or the space under the float at the Y camp one July, or a substitute teacher at my gorilla-training school; nor have I come yet to the guy with your name Jim but less hair, who slept through his own eleven-o’clock execution ‘cause nobody bothered to tell him his attorney got a routine stay from the afternoon judge! So maybe my communication to you here and now, this penetration of your head, Jim, by chain (clunk) reflection, given as well as written you from way back before I knew who you were, and half-unwritten now like primal scripts among many unsnarled (smile) thoughts, is what’s transmitted here by need, to put it in a nut’s hell (smile again), not some expose of prison life, its secret suicides posed as murders, its historic farts and mutterings in the night.

So maybe it’s not what I should have sent you, what you asked us for, you driving alone arriving from many times I felt; but the messenger I said has meanwhile passed his road signs and such signs of the Outside as the low guard-rail dividers we remember so close to the road that your fender bypasses the air between, unless you go faster, yes there’s a thing I miss. The guardrail divider that moves because you and the road move, always in the left lane ready to pass, and so close your left fender’s tracked on a point of the divider rail that’s always a few feet ahead though the fender looks like it’s touching, am I right?—and the optical flicker stream is enough to make you epileptic. Hear the pain of your steel-belted rubber (as on TV, which we get on Honor Block) rubbing out the road, turning gas into gas, eating it up. Messenger driving the highway to get to prison on time, through hills, valleys, forests, sheer rock, you name it, get there on time before his time is up, am I right? And I know that some of you out there dream of getting us out of here at last and us killing you for your time, but a guy in here can’t know for sure if silence means friends haven’t written because my mail’s been held up and that is why I’m connecting between the lines.

No Andes here, Jim, no lone Indian shepherds along the parkways and no work here for wild llamas watering head up head down, along the Chilean shore drinking straight brine (turning salt water to blood—now there’s economy for you). You’ve flown to far-flung climes, to seas, cities, mountains, seen only by astral projection which reached unprecedented range in New York State prison system if this bunk tourist hadn’t learned a better; doubtless you’ve woken up, Jim, in Southern Hemisphere with a girl on your arm, the two of you flying high, am I right?, rented car, the works—while I have been to Peru with Karl Marx in a footnote, the fine print’s how Foley snuck in.

No Andes here above New York, but make no mistake, our supposed messenger driving an old Indian trail had to pay attention to his driving at that sly twilight the Motor Vehicle authorities threaten us with, between night and day, each margin your last along the tree-lined roads and into the steep, rock-bound curves Slippery When Wet (you see I remember). I remember the road signs, Jim, the shapes alone, as the authorities like you to know them. Signs of the Outside. Signs that, when they’re put to you, are just shapes you could enter right into, never hear from you again ‘less you’re a messenger getting to prison on time.

Your time, Jim. So taken for granted that it’s unknown to you who have it. Think of the problem it is spending yours, whereas our solution is to spend by doing. Good time, they call it. Time done. But take time to come, Jim.

Time well known by seventeen hundred wall calendars here and known so to the day and hour of future rain and shine that it decays into what I call a suspension where anything could fall out, looking for an opening, even past time, well how you gon’ teach Chemistry without a lab?

So let’s say the messenger’s got a purpose if he didn’t always see it. He had something his host wanted. But some of the criminal types waiting for him wanted not a message but to be him.

They waited up against the walls at first in the long, one-hundred-odd-yard-long green concrete corridor with your white-line two-layer corridor long as the city block between the jugular training school I attended in my extreme youth and the brown-brick fire-escape tenement where I practically lived because my girl Miriam lived there with her family and she was my girl and practically my sister from seventh grade until I left school, and later so did she, if I’m going to tell about her.

You came into Room Four of what we call the South Forty in this our temporary home-retirement institute where you won’t need your rented, purchased, stolen on time, or second car, looked from face to face, you formerly of (let me introduce you) the Associated Press (was all I knew) and now on a once-a-week basis voluntarily deputized to a posse of criminal types unless you’re CIA—you walking into the room and the guys getting off jokes and kidding (like the kids that this place condemns them to stay) while they acted like they’re not paying attention to you—this pro in a suit, red tie, cordovan shoes, who’d come once before—how I got wind, who might best profit from the experience, the only new man at this second meeting of the group in this pocket of human waste imploded into a toxic mountain—and while the guys are kidding around and not (you might think) paying too much attention or when you stopped by the desk and took out your cigarettes and put them down on the desk I know I heard you say, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here," so quiet you maybe hadn’t decided to be heard. Right?

Which we did hear. Even the guys laughing it up heard you through their own shit. And what you said pulled us together, Jim. It’s not the thing you hear from the lifers’ legal liaison, who’s dedicated in a way you’re not; and it’s not what the death padre (temporarily out of work!) says in the cadre therapy sessions religiously attended in order to put off lock-up for a couple of hours, when he tells us though he means well how we must not abuse ourselves; and not what you hear from the two Bible-class oldtimers who come in in boots and Stetsons sporting Bible Belt accents and huge guts—well, only the one with the white Stetson—but they mean well, but all these others are at least a little different from you; but you, you’re saying, "Suddenly I don’t know what I’m doing here." So Efrain (of whom much more later; right, Jim?) said, "Then you come to the right place because we don’t know either. You going to fit right in." Which got a laugh, but Smitty with the eyes closed said to Efrain, "You’re here because you’re a bunch of murderers and rapists, right?" which got another laugh, and from you, too, Jim, you wouldn’t keep it in.

"So you got something in common with us," says Efrain, who then was getting out very soon, and you answered so quick ("Oh yes") you can’t hear you almost, so nobody picks up on it.

The news comes in about the Outside, and we are not there.

So then I said, if you recall (and maybe only if) that some of the guys were really into journalism, which quieted things down, and I said once upon a time (though I don’t mean the clippings on my case) I was into it too— until they locked me up, and then I diversified inward. Newspaper work, you opined, has many facets.

But Jim while I have sweated out the politics of why I’m here, I know what you meant when you said (be brief, you said, be brief) that you wondered what you were doing here (though you were kind enough not to wonder if there was any future in it—for what is there to journalize about inside?). So the circumstances under which I was implicated in the decease of a person known to me would have come to mind even if you had not pinpointed said circumstances by telling us that as of fiscal ‘76 fourteen thousand dollars (and counting) was what each of us more or less cost the state per year, subject to inflationary update, when we all know the inmate doesn’t get that fourteen grand unless he is very special. It goes into a waste flume except that those whose overweight ill health and expanding families this fund floats cannot get off on the insanity of this fund or, come to think of it, the beauty of (in many domestic establishments) a wife who does work worth $250 a week by 1970 par, roughly $13 grand per annum, my mother for example a crimeless victim, or Miriam, such a girl, Jim, that around her I could never say enough. Meanwhile you do not ask, What’s your story?

Now you said you were used to getting a substitute instead of what you were looking for, and that that was the story of your life as a newsman. Carlos takes the New York Times and asked if you had information you refused to reveal and if you knew any journalists who blackmailed their sources to get more info and if you often knew the answers before you went after the facts. But I am communicating now to ask you this: a government contractor, say, gave you what they wanted you to get, like their own press release, ‘stead of you always finding out what was truly going on, so for instance you said they say countermeasures equipment that keeps the peace protecting B-52 bombers by denying threat radars information as to our bombers’ range and azimuth position, but I am asking you this because it was hard to get your attention with a dozen criminal types monopolizing you . . . now when you go down to, say, Venezuela or the Argentine (you said)—or, cell-bunk itinerant I, let’s say Vermont (you said), doing an in-depth on the ‘‘insurance cover" corporation you did not name, well what else are you going to go looking for except the truth? I mean, did you surprise yourself and get into insurance and forget what it’s covering?

You answered as I asked and so I understood: but wave-length, forget it, though alternating current comes closer: what it is, Jim, which I put together that I never could have Outside is the Colloidal Unconscious where contact works through the Schism. And I am not guilty of discovering this unconscious, much less that it found me through a lab-less chemistry unseen as deepest bonds. Not that we’re of one mind in here with seventeen hundred guys longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic and black, Irish and black Irish, but only one slot-machine massage Chair in the chapel confronting four rows of pews for player-piano historians with clout and the need to study a captive example, if not to throw up the menu in reverse, but you said you were acquainted with at least one man in your business who was capable of the blackmail Carlos brought up—and you sometimes thought the truth about the Mysterycorp in the points of its operation you had checked into might have been all the time in you. Or did I only guess that?

If the guys didn’t know what you were talking about, I did. Arizona where sacred mesas are not above shedding refuse; northwest New Mexico, where a rocky ship shrugs off a moving desert; oh Jim, hit Houston racing-dog farms, El Paso boot supermart where every pair fits someone who will die, Vermont cemetery-sculpture quarries, New York music; you went into the history of that ghost state Uruguay as sanctuary in the McCarthy period which is like before my time. You traveled some in South America, which half these guys are mapping runs to in their waking dreams. And you sent word back or flew back to your desk with the information you had developed—how does that work?—and had the stuff in the old attache case bringing it back thousands of miles to your office, well maybe (you said) dry run or wet, going and coming you carried the real facts on you at all times, do you recall saying that?

Why do I ask? Conspicuous leisure and lifetime bent.

Remember when you asked, Got any animals here?—which got a laugh because you meant real cats, real dogs, tiger in this think tank, camel with loose hump in the yard walking between the basketball game and the iron pumpers.

But on the heels of that laugh you asked what I read. Someone said, George never learned; someone else, He got his own rules.

Right then, Jim, I hear Miriam on the phone and see the clear, large color of her eyes. What’s your act, Foley? you asked with wordless eyes. And once gently asked on the way out, Don’t you want to kill or get killed in here? but I had felt the shadow of such words cast long since, and the answer was colloid not pacif-ass. And we’re onto something new but then it seems not much good to have you aboard.

Yet some of us who share interface reach other in a mind compounded chemically but far truer than the sums of its particles—call it Colloidal Unconscious for lack of more up-to-date name: and some whose interfaces lie a billion millimeters off do reach each other and know they are amid particles suspended and dispersed but—I said "colloid"—so much smaller than fat droplets in homogenized and pasteurized (carcinoma-emulsified) juice not from concentrate and so much smaller than the clay in what you call at a glance muddy waters that you (because as I came to see when I had to make up my own lab, we are colloid solutions) experience and maybe use them (only you don’t see them) and if the Colloidal Unconscious is unconscious of itself this is the same as ants in their towers in Africa, they’re all working together, Jim, cooperation life, competition death—and already I can’t help hearing Miriam on the phone at the tax-return office—and you talking to me, the noise, you’re blunt and brief, you leave stuff out. And when you asked me what I was interested in, well you can write back and tell me what you think of that Norwegian immigrant non-farmer who grew ideas you know his name—wore a fur cap that hid his long-headed predictions—didn’t do much more farming than I would give my labor away for twenty-five cents an hour the going rate here, the staying rate!—to be your own peasant outside the walls on the correctional farm correcting potatoes to be someday mashed in milk. And I have read all the philosophers—read them in the programs, Jim—and have found many as blind and slippery as the economists on my way to test myself at Toxic Mountain (rumored by a lone foul or fair-weather genius correspondent of mine) via the Colloidal Unconscious which goes down through monetary theory like laxative or in your planet like dry ice through cloud potential.

You said, Don’t call collect (like the hip social worker whose phone got cut off), but Write, and you’d write too but you didn’t save letters. I don’t want you should get a substitute for the real thing you wanted, you’re a man who met the great Goulart in Brazil on his way out so there’s a chance for me, and you’re after something more than helping a clutch of cons be journalists (my mother went to school twice a week on the sly at age fifty-one) (my substitute teacher aforementioned Ruth M. Heard always made me feel I was in for something special in my life and must watch patiently)—by the way please fill out the correspondence form, Jim—you see as I told my mother who comes up here all alone sometimes real independent with a pack of cards and who is brave but has her own way of understanding what I mean, what I’m in for has proved to be something else, Jim, a purpose: thus I found myself, and here not there, like you in New Mexico, if I got your meaning.

What I’m in for—the appeal hangs fire. So when you said you don’t save letters, were you letting us down gently? A package deal of friendly help but when you get it open—well ... the letters you said all get boiled down in your mind, you probably had them all, so that, never fear, while you would remember us—our stupid fish faces boiled down to veined pulp—you had to save on head space (there being not the unused capacity some claimed, and I was grinning because you knew I knew what you were talking about and not to think our letters were lost when they got thrown away, but you don’t have to be so honest all the time, did you know that, Jim?).

You saw I knew you meant who had written the letter didn’t matter, the name could detach from the words though the person was still there and the letter’s message turned into you and you had it in a new vein so I was glad to grin and also at the two former missionaries I get mixed up, you never see them together, they wear sweaters. I was sweeping, and one quick-steps by and with a shake of his head he says to my uncomprehending automatic pushbroom, Such a waste, such a waste; and I to my broom which suddenly goes off Automatic and weighs like a live thing on my hands, In my keeper’s multiple dwelling there are many Mansons.

This I thought, thinking of you, Jim: He’s been all over. I been here. Years going on lots more. But what’s he know? Said he skimmed stuff more than before; needed the information, distrusted eyewitness.

Then I thought, He wouldn’t be here for the hell of it.

Neither would I.

The guys wanted to ask you about yourself. I can speak for them, because I know they did. Your family, if any; your history: brother in haberdashery in Jersey, the brown-and-orange tie (the next time you came) came from his place. Much of it better forgotten, you said, if you recall.

You were shown the prison newspaper. Front-page shots, Puerto Ri-quenos, Indian hair and headbands, don’t know what you thought. You don’t see our whole picture. What is intrinsic here?

What the messenger’s hosts wanted, waiting for him in a mile-long corridor, then a weather-proof room (look, no windows!), was not a message at all (unless an emergency greeting from the state parole board); what they wanted was to be not the messenger himself but the message. Or so they think. But while some did, not I.

What could they know of you?

The lines you gave them straight—the news article simple and clear at the outset, separate from everything else under the sun except its subject. Subject in hand, get in get out, that’s your rule, and "How is the Rican mafia taking over the prison newspaper?" "They like to get their boys into all the photos looking like Indians," Charley said; and Efrain, "Hey man, I got to get out of here," like an inmate here who escaped a month before his release date.

But between the lines a message the guys would not find: I saw Juan write it down and put a box around it. "Don’t get too curious around here," Efrain said, didn’t he? He knows because he had a long elevator ride one morning, and the building he’s in only got two floors.

Curious about the law—you got a laugh; we got a law library here where some guys go to dream. You said dreams passed you by.

Curious about people: what questions do you ask an interview? You got a laugh, some questions you don’t ask, man! What makes people tick, what sets them off, look at a man, an ordinary man at a run-of-the-mill international conference, and you report what he said, not what’s going round in his mind, but I think you know that also, Jim, and pile it up as you encounter this prominent character again months later: "it’s like chemistry," you said—you looked my way—you never knew much chem ("Makes two of us," Juan said)—’ ‘Like between a man and a woman," said Efrain, and the guys laughed ("Oh darling," called Jackie, and I hear Miriam saying on the phone, "To whom am I speaking?")—but molecules, you said, if they are in the body, who says they are not in the mind? The guys sensed we were loose in inner space and they were ready for some personal history all around, but I knew where we had gotten to, and was glad I had broached the molecule problem.

Miriam I heard between us.

And most of them did not wait first in the room that our strange messenger had aimed at as he drove billowing parkways into twilight headlights coming on and oncoming. They waited in the mile-like corridor.

They waited in order to see the evening’s arrivals lest these be in part female. To whom am I speaking? For whom am I waiting. They’re good guys; there is some beautiful understanding going down here, don’t doubt it. Here comes the lifers’ legal liaison (young mother of three), keeps them up on the law (popular in her own right).

And the car dealer’s son the car dealer whom you Jim might not expect to find teaches algebra and the calculus part time here in prison and brings with him his Austro-German wife, a woman of musical talent. So math and music, like chemistry together, do you agree, Jim, do you agree?

Wait also to see the sociology substitute who has settled nearby, a good woman, Jim, a blond, sweet-bosomed lady named Dinah Shore Petuniak, who will seize in marriage the Born-Again Willie Calhoun Jackson when he gets out on work release after Christmas. So bring your wife, your girlfriend—a wife’s value must be intrinsic or forget it—and any other females, the more the merrier, why not?, the evening programs are the only exceptions to daylight visiting hours unless you can make a brief getaway from the tedium, and three, four minutes later the evening’s visitors turn the corner at the distant end of the corridor and are watched as they approach conversing like Albanian (joke) dignitaries on guided inspection tour—the program people—and you among them but not of them, Jim.

Then that’s it. And everyone coagulates into the appointed rooms, counterclockwise (smile) and the evening’s programs—no martial arts (which offer a way to not get locked up for the night right after supper)—start. And so as you approached you saw them, my fellow crooks on or off my personal random zigzag their substitute for an evening boulevard, Jim, waiting up ahead against the walls of the long corridor with the white line down the middle. Two-way traffic no cars but plenty of internal combustion. And no lack of lawmen, which one hundred fifty yards or less is of a length half again what I took to walk the city block between the respectable brown-brick tenement where Miriam lived and the gray jugular-school teaching with one exception the art of red-blooded waste where I scarcely learned not to read—and later forgot. Though in those days when I had not yet rendered unto Caesar I gave a speech now and then, quickies at street corners and through the fence at playgrounds. And in the booths of two or three hangouts, and at home between my long silences under interrogation from uncle, sister, mother, and during the long minutes when my father in his extra-large T-shirt in front of his own single-screen TV had given up yelling as if we all knew what was my problem and once back-handed a beer can at me, not his only way of caring (for a cousin bartender’s cop-nephew knew somebody downtown who’s going to get me into fire-fighters school without the two-year wait, on which subject our substitute teacher Ruth Heard on one of her rare appearances in high school as well as junior high so I imagined she was important in my life, said, "If you want to," with a shrug and a look away at another kid waiting but so I felt it very personally), that is, my father in one motion snatched and flung a beer can so he felt its weight only after it was in the air about to strike my shoulder, and like a perpetrator looking the other way he knew it was the wrong can, not the empty, and he had just enough of whatever it took to reach down and yank another free of the six-pack plastic never understanding that it was his fatherly tirades taught me how to talk—but Talk, like him, about Ya got freedom here, free enterprise—about getting married, about the unemployment of ("See here") his son—taught me to talk? (I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re saying, I said, and then didn’t say, but all he said was in my head already and if he could only see how great that was I mean how could I understand what he was saying if it wasn’t in my head already?

I mean I don’t mean how to put a new clutch in a beat-up old city bus, which he can do but I don’t want to talk about it—and about the crazed Hispanic off-islanders now attending big-league baseball games in our shared city (the Jews are better at picking up Spanish, he says, and he’s right, than the Irish—all of which explains how well I know the distance between that school and my second home, my girl’s).

And she was my beautiful, wise girl who took individualized driver training from me and was my girl from junior high until I left and later so did she, my future, though didn’t leave the tenement itself with a row of galvanized cans her intensely white-haired father the super—Jewish—get all info into lead!—kept always in their place so random Venusian descending via sun-fueled greenhouse-ship saw, through the deteriorating cement of the building’s brick, a sometime vacant "railroad" we might make better use of for an hour and a half, he saw his cans there on the sidewalk as field batteries, standing reserve, ammo. Accessories in my head long after the fact. I can feel for him, Jim, right down to the red nick on his jaw twice a week, and I am thirty and counting, and—as my esteemed substitute teacher once pointed out it would be painfully different for a childless female long-term con—wonder if I will have a daughter to protect, or just have one. You knew something because you said after me She is your future, getting it straight (your only child?).

So you can see where I am coming from. Neither of us dark to the other as I guess you’ve thought, driving up here or then with that one hard kernel of corn between your fingers looking at it and then Juan and back to that tooth of corn—do you have it, still, do you know where you can lay your hand on it?

And where is this here intrinsic continuum of message being (smile) devoured, by the way? In your hand? Your head? growing in your ear? Does it raise a blister in your fingerprint? Does it make you mad? Or, more like, make real the billions of millimeters between mind particles each with one interface exactly met by the other, and if you cheat the world’s jailed jailer of its substitutes, maybe you see further than you’ve a right to. If you go in for rights, I don’t, I go beyond.

But if the future is bent on some path, the latest in communications out of an electronic suitcase you mentioned that might go off or speak in words of two syllables, linking Vermont, New Mexico, Chile, and this prison-redoubt where I send out myself honeycombed with light, where I have transcended the passerby who carelessly strikes off the head of the sunflower, this sev-enteen-hundred-toilet redoubt ringed by hills full of white farmhouse roofs and fenceposts topped by talking crows and the glint of earless mobile homes like truck-stop diners in the trees—Oh I know they’re there—hills groaning full of firearms and tax deductions and howling with loose-skinned hounds— no, a hookup you don’t hang up on, a new path communicating between here and there, man and man—O.K., then, so what’s the economics if with all this new communication system there is nothing to communicate?

This was the point that our sometime substitute in the old days, Ruth Heard, have I described her?, fresh from England, would make; and if she wasn’t looking at you with the blue eyes and the brown curls sticking way out all around, you knew she would be in a second. So much for economics, Jim, the vein of my opening cover for scanners of outgoing transmissions but secretly in its very openness for you too, Jim, and for others outside, if, and I give you leave, you have shown this mish-mash of news. Isn’t there more important things than being brief, Jim?, if you’re still there. So brief there is only everything to remember.

You’ve been in South America, but didn’t see anything, you claim: like, I have been here! But remember the grasshopper? I bet you do. Alighted upon the biologist’s ship three hundred seventy miles from land, what had that grasshopper in mind? Through what air did it make that jump? what vein? I am without a lab here except the darkroom. Photography’s the program here, since C.U. can’t be taught or learned but only known, and there are some guys here who take unique pictures, Jim. No sunsets maybe, for orange dust smidgens don’t glow on the man-made horizon of our walls. But these men will photograph a shadow; a halo, in my opinion; a face; perspective looking down a cell block; or bars from inside or out on the gallery half over-, half under-exposed so the series locks into your head remember those flickering parkway guard-rail posts controlling thought? And my old sciencer sees weather control one day altering times of twilight, angles of seasons, rains albeit through radiation-parametering focus spoutwise down to flush up lung-blood from the avenues, leftover power toxins to be rethought. I knew my mother would not see the future in the photo I developed and arrested the development of soon after I was transferred here from Auburn; she shook her head—the future? she said, but look at the valid driver’s license she now carries due to me, hidden in her plastic cigarette case, good for years while Jackie who got me in the photography program will never agree with me what he can do: these men can photograph our finest particles, Jim, if they only knew what is there to be seen in the enlargements of faces, and yet is this a point?—that the taker always sees? Your face last night showed in the seams under the eyes the search and what-not of a life—like the noted substitute teacher Ruth Heard, even to the stories told. But while you are a man whose eyelids have doubted many a dawn, don’t be so sure you’ve lived all the way between your time out there and ours in here. Oh I could have been a doctor; I knew too late. I know another lab, though; and it’s here. You’re getting away from me, Foley, you said.

Well, that kernel was handed to you between thumb and forefinger by a (says-him) Marxist name of strong-man Juan, who was the other person present before the guys trooped into the room ahead of you; and then there you were.

On the threshold, you looked at Juan, the muscle-man with eyestrain pink across the furious, friendly eyes, who studies the abridged Kapital half the night as if his all-night light is the always switched-on bulb of Death Row, and you seemed to see nothing else but the old corn kernel he had picked up in the yard that only I and he and you—the three of us—were aware of, though more than three now occupied the room, and you asked what it was, and Juan held it up—a tooth? you asked—and give it to you and you had it in your right hand for a long time and forgot about it.

And I see that what I have been trying to say, Jim, if I can call you Jim once more, is that at 6:20 P.M. you came into Room Number Four of what we call the South Forty in this Stressed Concrete Castle our contemporary home (smile), you formerly of the Associated Press (was almost all I knew of the messenger), now associated with a gallery of criminal types.

You said you didn’t know why you were here. How come your act’s together, then?

But Jim, you did know.

Don’t know why he’s here; going to fit right in, Efrain said. Which brought a laugh and it was yours; but Smitty, who shuts his eyes tight, talks till he’s ready to open them, then shuts up, said that you were here with a bunch of . . . you heard me before. And I as a friend of Smitty’s had heard of you and knew what you brought for me.

I the new man in this pocket of potential waste (new-type potential energy) here long enough to be relocated again, where they might tell you the night before or an hour before, and suddenly you’re not here, you’re up on the Canadian border (polluted beef, don’t you worry they won’t let you in), but you’re thinking up a new life, new territory, redcoat horsemen at outposts, great fish full of history diving out of rivers into lakes, wriggling airborne clear from the great long-head Norseman’s Wisconsin and Minnesota, land to be had, Sino-Russian reconnaissance reflector-planes slipping between dew point and early-warning layer, lunatic wing orbiting the top of the country: point, though, is you got through, Jim; and I spoke and said some of the guys were really into journalism, and you asked if there was some good copy around, and they wanted to know about yours. Oh, you said, it made you think of newsprint like wrapping paper and you said you could wrap the state of Vermont or New Hampshire in a year’s newsprint.

Charlie says: "This is Foley I told you about: I told him what you said."

Charlie with amazed animal eyebrows, open cell on Honor Block, the will to get people together, but what animal?—I’m thinking and will come up with it.

Why then it was my turn, and I said once upon a time I had been into it, too—(I feel we are now at a later time; been meeting here the guys and I with you, Jim, for a month maybe). But I said I’d been into it because one day long ago I made the papers without writing a word. Got locked up, and then diversified. You could wrap the whole Northed in a year’s American newsprint coast to coast, that’s what my substitute teacher Ruth M. Heard passed on to us in high school one day thank God I was present, she from England which is how she had all this information about the U.S. and you cocked an eye my way and said if we’re making a present of the whole Northeast, we’ll miss the individual states less, but who gets them? First come first serve?

Now, I have sweated out why I’m in here, for I had the chance. But I get you too, Jim, when you wondered what you were doing here; and were aware that the previous time you had just told stories—and had we brought in our leads this time? And then you discovered the kernel of corn in your right hand and put it down on the desk beside your cigarettes, and pointed at it and asked Smitty how he would record this. (You still there, Jim?)

Now you said—and I’m reporting, if not briefly—that you were used to getting substitutes instead of what you might be looking for—oh this hit me so hard—and was the story of your obstacle-course life as a newsman. But I want to know this: say a government contractor gave you what he wanted you to get, like a press release saying that they were a Future Firm operating in a frame of no less than Energy itself and had subsidized mental hospitals in their state and dropout training programs—this, though, instead of you knowing what was going on; and I wanted to ask you amid the noise of those criminal types what you go down to Venezuela or up to Chicago for besides the truth.

Last week when you came the first time and Smitty said he would drum up some more guys, you had said pass the word but I confess I listened to Smitty’s one and a half tapes with the break at seven-fifteen and then eight and then to conclusion at eight-thirty-five and his unit picked up even your footsteps coming closer.

Which seemed right, for then you said you sometimes thought you were out of it, all these years, filing stories; but you had talked to a tall, bald, intelligent (nor did I like how those words went together) South American economist, and this unconsciousness trick was your chemistry, you did say, and nothing to get upset about, but if nothing happened to him this South American economist would be worth talking to—did I get it right? Smitty wouldn’t let me run the tape through again. You were predicting the future. You were. I think you had been there.

Prosecutor said I the perpetrator could not be two places at once, so how could I plead not guilty? Where he was coming from, he was right.

I am getting scrambled in your head. With more variety out there, you get less cluttered than us in here. Or are we your visiting nightmare? Half-known people flowing through here, glimpsed like beginnings of stories and as after-images. Your daughter saw a father get ripped off in a D.C. park while teaching his twin sons to bike-ride.

Fill out—thank you in advance for filling out—the enclosed form the office sends, so you can get permission to write me even though you did it already, and vice versa. I mean a personal visit even more than a personal letter (not dictated to your secretary if you had one—smile) would facilitate communication on a variety of fronts. Which you guessed the second meeting I came to, for you looked at me at eight-twenty and asked when visiting hours were.

Yes, I am here not there. And Miriam—I used to reach to touch Miriam in traffic, who wanted to get a good job as a secretary and go to community college—listens to me in a booth against the jukebox telling where ostriches can be seen in their native habitat but even a South American ostrich will run out of darkness if the multinats find they got a market for sand. Someday there could be a landbridge from there to Australia where there’ll be so much sand those swans of the desert will never think of sticking their heads in it which I doubt they ever did anyhow, while I’m telling Miriam we will find a way to Australia and she says, You’re crazy, George, and I to her, Crazy? Crazy? if I’m crazy I got no place to go!—you needed to be quick to keep her in line, even on a hot day when her kind Aunt Iris (have I described her?) said you could grill an American cheese sandwich on the lid of "our" garbage cans.

Yes I am here not there. Yet I have put together eight plus years inside here when maybe I never could out. Am I getting briefer or longer? I look both ways. You still there? I hear you requesting clarification on how you sleep through your own execution, and on that long-brained Norwegian non-farmer whose name you must know who wore a fur cap to cover his predictions one unstated, to wit that Women, heretofore conspicuously consumed by men who might either want to show off their wives’ seeming leisure or be proud of the job the wife had landed superior to their own, would one day give away their husbands as some conspicuous munificence an unsuspecting fellow woman might think insane generosity. I hear you, I don’t deny it, nor confess either.

I am getting through to you sometimes direct by multiple word-bypass. Eases workload, dissolves congestion. Seventeen hundred criminal types longheaded, round-headed, Hispanic, black, Irish, Italian, and out-of-state; one Jew transferred to a minimum security and shortly after took a walk, reportedly to a Tasmanian key. All this we have got here—plus but one Chair available on in-house postcard for a dime, black-and-white Early American furniture model, a museum piece guaranteeing us maximum security, built as we are right into these hypothetical hills, we got our old Chair we don’t let anyone sit in long, whereas you got an electronic teletype component suitcase you’re telling us news-gathering is all about now, but I didn’t quite believe you, Jim, though I can believe your jokes—because there’s no reason you should open with us.

Good to have news of multinational world and of exec sent to wrong city and nobody notices. But I don’t believe that’s what happens from my reading of history. I have one for you. From Chilean. The difference between the multinational executive’s dream and his nightmare: his dream is to live in London on an American salary with a Chinese cook and a French wife. But instead he’s living in Paris on a Chinese salary with an English cook—and an American wife. Our Chilean economist told me that one just a week before he flew to Cape Kennedy and he got it from his wife.

And since I didn’t hear you say you were not to be quoted, you said you sometimes thought the truth about the corporation you’d followed across state and national borders for a "puzzling" length of time might have been in fact close to you all that time, might have been at arm’s length—you laughed— closer still.

I am only reporting, as you said to while you also said, Make it up first.

(Thanks for bringing the filled-out form with you. I didn’t expect you so quick. I’m veteran of too many potential visits; I see a motorist at 60 MPH on a country road waving to a walker who waves back. My mother saved up for driving lessons, she took them at age fifty-one on West Fourteenth Street, and just as well there was no family car to fight over.)

Well the night I met you, I was in the room ready for the messenger. The room he aimed for, though he was not entirely into his message. It was not just a room your course was set for.

Because Charlie, rounding us all up—because here you don’t sit down and put in a call to some guy in his cell that you want to meet with him later in the week, but you find the guy maybe in the mess hall, if he is not doing his own food trip or fasting; or you pass a message to somebody in his block—Charlie didn’t know I had heard Smitty’s tape of the prior meeting, and Charlie told me you said you sometimes felt you’d been unconscious a lot of your life, between bedrooms, pressrooms, twenty-some years of assignments, many small-scale units but no one overall shtik. Charlie said he could relate to it, because he says he is also very aware of his unconscious.

But Charlie did not say what I found on Smitty’s tape—that you were obviously into the unconscious and it was chemical.

So then I knew, you see; but, the first three, four sessions, I held off broaching this with you. You see I knew maybe more than you.

The South American in question; yes?

I had known he might contact me. I knew he might need me. Even me. But I could not say this in short when the workshop broke up at eight-twenty and the guys crowded round the desk.

Now why did I think that you were unaware of the message you were being used to convey from the South American to me? Your interest in the kernel of corn Juan had picked up in the yard seemed more than your interest in me, a bearer of other things.

But no, you were no go-between, Jim. And would not use someone, though I feel that first letter is getting scrambled with my longer second— and shortened, especially after your hoped-for visits.

But I know when I’m being treated like a person!

The guys felt this in you. Efrain came out with things I didn’t know he knew. Like the guys thought of you as a friend. Hang loose; no sweat; the guy’s in the business, he wants to share some of his shit, give something back. I could have told you they’d be saying before you knew it, Hey Jim you ever need someone taken care of on the outside, you let me know—hey did you ever cover a contract? how about armed robbery? Ever cover a war? (But you knew the Cuban contact of our Chilean gentleman had asked where you in particular were coming from.) One guy who never said a word before tells of sticking up a drugstore with a piece of wood and a Volkswagen waiting outside. I had never seen you before. I said, "Were you ever in Brazil?"

You turned at me and said hard factual stuff, but I felt that the messenger might be hearing double signals; and I know the message was meant for me while the response here must, in kind, include the cover: so do you recall you said quick-like, "I met Goulart before the coup. Some revolutionary he was!" All dollars and cents was what you said it was, the middle class losing their wages advantage over the working class, Goulart refusing to stabilize at the expense of the workers, so U.S. development money went to provincial anti-Goulart groups, the CIA went ahead via AFL-CIO to infiltrate Brazilian labor (listen, we ought to have a union, let the Teamsters take us on)—but it was all dollars and cents, you said, and liberals in Washington you said thought it was beautiful, undermining Goulart. ("A liberal," said Ahmed Williams who came one time in four, "is someone who wants for others what he doesn’t want for himself"—the talk gets abstract in here but penetrating.) All bucks, forget the change, you said.

Something’s wrong with that view, Jim. I sound like my mother, who always had high hopes for Miriam, whose own young mother had shared at least the Catholic faith.

Tell the South American he can get in touch with me direct.

(Thanks for filling out the correspondence form.)

He will understand, and I’ll get back to you whether or not you make it up here for that afternoon visit, be assured. Readers of outgoing mail say now and then they read these letters but when they get past first few lines like mine so little smut or legally inflammatory—and you ask does that teacher Ruth M. Heard ever write?

Well, she could run, I’ll say that; small, not too thin, thick around the shoulders, lithe arms, prominent head of curls and when she faced you, her azure eyes came at you and at you, which there’s more of to come, though you understand that my account of the Norseman economist’s view of woman and my fascination with the Scot financier of kings, projector of Mississippi schemes, demand-and-supply monetarist who was first a man and far beyond the moneys he dreamed in, all this, Jim, is no mere opening screen played upon those outgoing-mail scanners who when they’re at the end of their rope have been seen actually holding a page upside down like they’re looking for something. Perhaps, like us, to do.

And so let us say they never got to the mythical messenger. No more than they the spendthrifts of this state’s at last account fourteen grand per inmate-annum (who can’t imagine the lights of that messenger’s car seen intermittently round curves, through trees, like a series of signals, signal fires, smoke signals) will find each the key to his own nature, that "invisible government," Jim, but not to be confused with your liberal nightmare, that CIA they call the "invisible government" right down to the "evenings" they sponsor. Which isn’t—if you can stand one prison inmate’s non-violent reality—the invisible government I mean (though you as a stranger even to yourself whose motion’s a way of waiting, know what I mean?) the skeleton key to what Jim Mayn can do: and this home wherever you go or are, the two the same. You would not go to a siege zone and expect immunity from snipers (or Cubans!) because you’re Press. Alcatraz is where it was, but now nobody home, not the Spaniards or the British, and the Indians who "landed" there were not the first ones there, and during their protest wrote their high slogans on its walls so to the passing ferry the walls might speak. The Feds, in essence they gave it back to the Indians, but the Indians didn’t want it, I said to you; you laughed at me seeing me anew and deja vu and I would be willing to be your reincarnation, if you let me. If I was to plan—thanks for sending back the correspondence form—to be elsewhere, like Outside, I would get my wish one day but arriving there victorious I might find nothing to occupy, it’s like that communication system world round we discussed, Jim, when maybe you got nothing to communicate, that’s what Ruth Heard once said.

And so I am here. Consumer of unseen leisure. A pat on the back for you that you don’t save letters much (you said—and I report—I the maker of carbons near-sighted reader of fine print practically on the end of my nose, in a book-lined study with grid-exposure on the west whence comes the mountain of my inspiration rumored in the stacks of force that one correspondent thinks is widely if slowly approaching, an old man sciencing radioactive weather, yes wrote me—and you boil all letters down in your mind, saving on head space since you doubted there could be as much unused brain capacity as the authorities are trying to make us believe. You saw me grin, man, I knew what you were saying. I who have diversified and know letters need to get lost if thrown away, just as I know what is small is better, idle need not be unused. But you don’t have to be so honest all the time with your new pen pals—Efrain, who’s writing a lot to his Iroquois girl sending her dreams; Smitty, who I wonder if he can smile with his eyes closed—please fill out the correspondence form—and if you write them you will find them very idealistic, Jim, souls, so with an exception here and there I wouldn’t expect these men to tell you their lives, if that is what you came for. Do we want your life?—there’s Shin, a Cambodian social worker (not assigned to prison), who seldom comes and come to think of it seldom writes except to apologize for not writing and to hint at problems in his personal life; so his marriage is on the rocks, maybe he’s got something going.

Never mind: we are into ideas here. Some are. A few. Where is this violence of prison life? the girl reporter jai-alai expert asked. Well, I guess it is here. We all, and so much in the abstract!, in blind talk like the African termites who in their forty-foot-high termitaries work like secrets all together—soldiers, workers, the Queen entombed engorged in secret touch with them all—which is their secret from themselves.

My specialization will not be labor much less farm. More important things than to get outside the walls at twenty-five-cents-an-hour prison wages in return for fresh air under the gun, though once I, like red-rimmed Juan, saw labor the basic unit denominating all, but now I do not, and will not give my labor for life at jailhouse rates any more than that Norwegian-Wisconsin brave, the farmer’s son with two-syllable name you’ll know, bent head to furrow hand to harrow back to bushel heart to father or president or God, dissolving the Rockefellers and the military-industrial compound (smile) before anyone had a name for it and said—I have it here in my security-conscious library which is perhaps my head—"what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or kary-okinetic process to which we may turn and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality . . . ? What are we going to do about it?"—yet when taxed with the looseness of his personal life if not his sentences, said, "What are you to do if the woman moves in on you?" So he could be brief as an angel, like Miriam and me in a sometime vacant apartment with windows looking down on five high-powered garbage cans. Tough luck, Mir, I’m with you still!

So that sometimes in this quest for things-to-get-in-the-way, I have felt the rock-bottom unit was Woman, so here, so there, so ever hard to pin down.

You evinced experience of this unit, this constant; I did not ask your marital history; thought Efrain followed up on you saying you had something in common with us but all you said was "Crisis."

And in the middle of the midnight of my pursuit which the South American economist about your age but bald traveling I feel sure you know under an alias seemed to understand in the brief time we spoke across the Visiting Room table so many months ago it’s years by calendar and even not by calendar (though the warp of this communication yields sometimes Efrain and sometimes only his absence, paroled)—followed by a second (but only by my count) stranger visit in the Visiting Room after our economist got back from a space launch—that visit the last time I heard from him till recently—I sometimes have felt that after all I have not found that unit and it’s as close as air and wherever I go it is with me, so I will not get shook when some former missionary in a sweater murmurs What a waste, as I’m standing by mop and pail, and I say that in my father’s house there are many mansions, but then see this missionary isn’t the same as the other, his brother, his twin, ever have a brother, Jim?, but then am reminded that, no, I indeed did find the fundamental unit microscopic as beings we’re made of, grand as thought, abstract as the age.

And where is this letter by the way? In your hand? someone else younger? Here? Gone? Boiled down? To what?

To be made like my earlier letter and our subsequent afternoon visit? You said you would check out colloids (like to see if there’s any left!). You didn’t read much "to speak of." Thank you for bringing the correspondence form with you. To answer your question, No, Ruth Heard doesn’t write. Of Cubans and our Chilean I cannot say, though one of former was visited by a tall, scarred man sent by a fortuneteller’s friend and it’s general knowledge he’s on the way out of here sooner than legal.

I hear the black chant, the Muslim feet jogging down the concrete tunnel, study session’s over; I hear, I see, the men, two by two, the knitted caps, among them Willie Calhoun Jackson soon to be out on work release. And seeing this limited yet group consciousness bind these men, I think we are all . . . but you know what is coming, I felt it a century ago in the frequency emanating from natural sources, cloud, hail, mountain, human plasm making me, as I then was, a hole in somebody else’s head no doubt (smile)—but what is coming you know.

The Colloidal Unconscious passed like a watchword so brief as to be unspoken from the South American through you was it by chance but really by itself. And so I know that he needs my help, though you might not know this, though you may know the gravity of his plight which I have not helped.

All this goes too far too fast, and whatever is true in your racket, Jim, brevity’s wit may turn out gravity’s vacant nutshell (read "-house," as in "nut-" or read "multiple dwelling")

Yet I slow down to be complete—holding no brief for speed, what do you really like doing fast?, in and of itself you get plenty of time to fix all that—then if you follow not for the purpose of honoring a super’s garbage cans which he would speak of and as often keep watch over in case a neighbor, a kid, even own daughter’s boyfriend at school should leave a lid unsecured having stashed an old out-of-state plate where any animal or other might get into the building’s garbage, which is neither here nor there I’ve learned later in three places which are all prison which in turn I may not have said, but it’s a very good experience being transferred, as I have been twice, no middle-of-the-night police-state nonsense, right after breakfast, and you can get well-known for being well-known.

And when you get there you are as ageless as before though for once time done is space crossed, but might as well be the river in Australia longer than our Mississippi, endless as the abundant dairy products Miriam and I are farming in New Zealand calling to mind dairy-product cancer but also life as it was at first, where land is for the having.

To own land, Jim: not theft, as Juan thinks, practicing on my typewriter till the last minute—eleven o’clock when the juice surges elsewhere leaving us in technical darkness. For even if such property comes down to your claim through heirs upon the future, it is a transient holding minor as an accident, kernel of corn falling from a bird, a wind; one corn falling like theory, evenly from heaven, not to mention the paper manufacturer’s daughter who in her race for the State Senate and in preparation for that long-winded body added to her pilot skills learned at our airfield just outside these walls with a course in bailing out, but overshot the acreage her father owns, and someday, always in skirts, she will own for miles all around airport and prison, and on the Sunday of a Puerto Rican festival she drifted down too low, and, clearing one rampart but not two, she found her fantasy skewed, she yanked her lines expecting an answer that wouldn’t come, accepted with total-body wit the double-chute bare bloom, nearly twisted her leg descending onto the volleyball net with its angry holes stretched in lost memory—practically landed in the caldron of beans and sausage which would not have ruined underwear she was anyhow bare of but dispersed a long line of PR inmates and families and could have corned the ice cream but missed the rice, the coffee urn, the bandstand wired for poetry at that point, and missed a man and a small boy playing catch in the sun—catching up on lost life with a third, a known visitor in a western fringe outfit and hit a picnic table by the far wall where Efrain was getting it on with his full-blood Iroquois girlfriend fingerprint masseuse though while kissing turning both their heads so he could watch the Unidentified Woman’s flight approach out of the corner of his eye.

To touch down and be besieged by admiring strangers who, all but the Chilean’s associate the journalist Spence who had been talking to the Cuban’s little boy, could not be blamed for not knowing the industrialist’s daughter was the new owner of this land, if you see; for, sometime during my fourth or fifth year inside, the truth came to me (which I could never discuss with Shin the Cambodian would-be correspondent who when he used to come wanted to discuss the extra lift a guard gives you on your way up to the Box or how many assault problems per new inmate, plus profile which guys lose their wives in here within six months, ‘stead of basic problems like what I’m telling you came to me): that property is theft only of yourself: where are you if you have land? Why, you are there. It’s got you like the tax man leans on next year, which you have let’s say borrowed from him, but where is he if you want to blow him away or drive him nuts? You learn there’s a new man.

They go away, and approaching what I hoped would not go away, I’ve known the great obstacle, which is to be not remembered, to be almost on the tip of someone’s tongue, no more, though that’s a beginning for you.

The evening’s visitors, the program people, came up the long corridor, and there’s my Mayn in the rear chatting with the Austrian wife of the car dealer who turns and waits a beat as if to say to her, You O.K., dear?, and in the forefront comes a former missionary in a sweater, he knows me and I say, "Putting in your time?" and he, "Aren’t we all?," eyes rolling upward, but when I say, "But mine’s being paid for by taxpayers," he steps on, as if he’s thinking for the first time today, turns back toward me and I don’t know which of the sweatered former missionaries he is and so don’t know what of me he remembers, and say before he can say anything which is doubtful anyway, "In my father’s retirement compound no rooms are rent-free," and he turns to greet you, and you stop to shake a hand, grip an arm, say a name.

And that obstacle, that being forgotten, I got to go down after it till you pass through the last nothing between you and the ground and find a footing. Everything you find here, Jim, I have seen with both eyes for myself. So I remember the Y camp that let me in for two weeks one summer because I knew a lifeguard at a beach in the Bronx I’d never swum at; they let me into the Y camp even after I had trouble in school thanks to Ruth Heard, I mean really thanks, and it was the first time she was fired; and when I left camp to go home I wondered where she was and remembered the pine needles on the ground beyond the screen of the cabin where dew and early sun whispered to me, Jim—yet, more, I had in my head a watery place way under a float out in the lake supported on all sides by fuel drums so you had to dive down through the anchorage lines and come up into the cool tomb of air, empty drums smelling of mineral echo and containing inside them someone’s private motor faraway outboard, bike, chainsaw; and while the drums and slimy ropes were good obstacles to your being discovered, you heard the guys shouting far away. One day a black kid with reddish hair came up in there gasping like whispering his mistake, and we just breathed at each other and I didn’t tell him the air pocket was getting smaller and smaller and the drums was timed to go off at seventeen hundred hours, but then I did, and he said, "Shee-it, man." But then he got to believing the way I believed it, and we would swim in there from different directions under water like as much as twenty-five yards thinking seriously for the first time of saving energy even creating your own, and two kids who went to parochial school and I would dive off the float and get up on it again, one of them must have had an idea because one afternoon just before seventeen hundred hours he came back up under there in the center in our air space and couldn’t believe it when he saw us and looked from one to the other, back and forth, but I whispered that the air pocket was getting less and less and we had to get out of there, and he got scared of us, I saw his teeth, his white eyelashes, the water and shadow gave us speckled skin —I never thought of that—he was treading water like he had a cop running after him and he was grinning at me and over his shoulder at the red-headed black kid and I said there was only air for two minutes for two guys and what would that be for three guys and the kid said so quick it was like breathing in, Forty seconds for three, thirty for four, and the red-headed black kid and I reached for him and he started screaming and we pushed him down, down under and toward the ropes—why did we?—but we didn’t hear anything after that and on the train home when the two weeks were up I kept thinking the place would forget me. Just some crazy place? Because I knew I wasn’t coming back and anyway the float would be gone.

What happened to that kid? Tried to get the two of us in his sights. He got homesick that very night, because when he got pretty well drowned he passed through a vacancy of the lake and saw only the connection of it with home and never slept again.

The float, though, gone for good? The place able to forget? I met my red-headed black associate once long afterward—my clock says almost eleven and I can’t lay my hand on a fresh carbon—met him at a city pool more full of kids than water, a pool with a good and unexpected shape and high and low diving boards and a Chinese kid (said to be thirty faking his age) who was thrown out for pounding the high board while the rest of us yelled at him to go off, then leaning sideways suddenly at board’s bend to pitch himself a good ten feet over to land on the low board which was free for that moment and landing in such a way that, though he practically snapped the low, he vectored all the curves of this force into a floating straight-out swan that held but did not let go all the joined curves of his act: until then he hit the water, and as he entered with a slice the growth he had been compounding of force for a million split-seconds that held us fascinated and sent the sound of the elevated train passing into an ear of sound so we were deafened by the sight of the diver, took hold of him: and, while he went in straight, once in he was swerved so hard left forward right left, that his body was swung under the surface by that unspent tangle of poles—it was another mind’s hook that sent him then with energy you would have sworn he did not have smashing silently suddenly six feet to his left with a gravity of force into the pool wall—cong! I could hear it. Ruth Heard who I met on the street the one and only time and she was not alone said I would have if I’d been under water.

When he was pulled out, looking like an old man who had been far away while time had stood still here—and ejected—I met my former camp associate who said, "Hey man, what about that kid we—" but he looked over his shoulder and our thoughts collided. He looked me in the face, and just as three kids yelled in my ear so not even my girlfriend’s father could have thought he heard what I said, I said, "It was a good spot and they’ll never find it," and he said, "What?" then nodded once slowly, up and down; "Right, I got it." For we had that place right with us, between us, we knew the camp wasn’t there no more.

You get out of me more, you see. You said again that you would check out colloids. My dad sees only one thing when he looks at me now—the cage in front. He will never get to see my cell, but . . . and he doesn’t see what I was sent up for but if he maybe accepts it he never liked me writing the Fire Department to remove my name from consideration. I had been put forward without my consent by friends of the family and I could not go that route, a letter to which there was no answer. My sister I will say sees more than one thing looking at me—now married to a ticket taker on the New Haven in a black hat who I think of as a cop, basically, who has put her in a pre-dyed pink ranch unit by the Thruway where she can see his place of work pass twice a day and he hers even to knowing if the garage door is down or up, though if down, not whether she has made her every-other-monthly secret trip beyond the Connecticut line (no doubt mined) to see a once-loved relation in his storied seventeen-hundred-bathroomed redoubt, first arranging for the kids to go home with friends after school, mum’s the word, shopping for Dad’s birthday—oh, in New Haven, Hartford, Boston . . . Montreal! Newfoundland!—while in this way she hides her true trip some miles westward and hides that once-favored relation of hers more than his exile hides him.

Now give her credit, though she can’t slip past the metal-detector threshold an old license plate of hers specially requested by the brother sentenced among other things to drive no more, she when she sees him unlike their father (who is also, granted, embarrassed, which is maybe good for my father to feel, you know) sees two things—not one, like the old man in his bleached T-shirt and his mouth. But she can’t see her two at once, and I can only forgive her; and the two are: me her brother the foregone once-loved relation; and second (but not in order) her man in black she sees—in my eyes sees him reflected, Jim, behind her on his suburban local moving past power poles like picket fences flickering disapproval but much worse than disapproval at her through me, my eyes—or try this for size, he’s standing just behind her mad brother (me) just before Brother seats himself on his side of the Visitors Room table, and seeing through me as thank my stars she alone has always done with the light of love, she instead, like the Visitors Room is a museum, finds her husband there, he in real black not my correctional green, in a silver-buttoned uniform coat over my prison-issue green short sleeves, and in his silver-number-plated conductor’s hat above my long-lobed brainy ears and short, fair hair, and his clean lip under my utility infielder’s mustache, but is he in black or in blue? it’s been so long I wouldn’t know, and you got to ask yourself as you said, Jim, speaking of trusting your memory, Did I ever know this thing I claim to have forgotten, rest my soul?

Ruth Heard thought like that. And that’s how I almost got thrown out of Junior High: attacked the principal and other teachers for pushing her out, this beautiful subversive person. This is about i960 and she took us on unauthorized trips and we would disappear for the afternoon, and a skinny Irish kid who was funny so we all thought we liked him didn’t like her assignments and got his folks after her and she had no teaching certificate and told his parents she was glad to teach only when she was worked up and wanted to make trouble for herself; and in the different ways parents have, no one fought her dismissal and the principal fought me by letting me graduate. First things first, my mother would say, the sweat on her brow; and make dinner that my father would look at the meatloaf and ask very quietly, Where’s the ketchup, and she said, Already in—yet he brought home an electric frying pan for her once not threateningly and you could tell if you looked close he was pleased with himself.

My mother did not imagine she would go to a driving school on the sly and get her license at age fifty-one, but she did. Meanwhile made what trips she could to see me by bus, but has never to this day told me the explosion when the old man found out she had gone out and got her license.

First things second. It’s not a pat on the back I want now much less that brown-and-gray-striped shirt—did you get that in your brother’s store? It was hot in our workshop room that first night. Thank you for filling out the correspondence form. I took your word Friday that you do not know the activities of the South American economist (while we do not discuss him or the American photo-journalist who has pursued that distinguished gentleman’s life for profit that has led him from Florida to this very institution. Which the Foleynomic Plan was to cover, too).

You were part of the life of that good and heroic gentleman South American with an Irish or was it Scottish name but with the foreign and the English accent: hence our constant messenger tooling up through hills which was only one thing I meant when, before I said, "So much for economics," I found an opening in the void.

It was a face I could have pushed in, or inward. You know the type, Jim. One with oddly the same eyes as my girl, sharp behind the mist—a little not there. Reflecting not you exactly. Just secrets seducing you to know them when shit who cares.

But those eyes not my girl’s drew you in by likeness and then you were betrayed and where her eyes were all readiness which you expect of a good person, a fine girl, these similar orbs of her father the super were motion I swear like he’s not all here, and he did marry a Puerto Rican even if she died. Which left him free to go to Israel, which Miriam said her mother never would.

He never missed a thing; looked after the building like it’s owned by someone he looked up to. And he would forsake his bed in the middle of the night to monitor his garbage cans.

Once, the garbage started rising. So he needed a fifth can, and he got it out of the owner, but then found that under the beef gristle and chicken joints, the toothless cobs, lolling eggshells, glistening slicks of tuna cans and here’s a gefilte fish jar and spent tapeworms of spaghetti and tomato sauce and grounds and cucumber curls everything breaded in cat litter, light bulbs like new and angles of toast, was stacks of his old newsmagazines and papers he almost didn’t know he had because he reads them only years late for perspective, but now he wanted them and freaked out that the ones not already mashed by the sanitation-truck paddle-chopper were stinking wet, and what he could sometimes be saying in shock to his cronies who’d stop by the cans to smoke a cigarette, "I don’t get into shouting matches," and Miriam was up in the apartment right there when he came so close to smashing her little Aunt Iris who’d thrown the magazines out you might have thought those old pages and supplements were life savings—papers prematurely leaking cancer cures and showing old infants half-cooked half-eaten in the furnace of your local place of worship. He paid for them with his labor, and he had spent his time preparing to read them, it carried him through the very twilight hours of "local dusk" at which you said the Russians are fond of recovering payload weapons test-fired by retro from orbit in case there should be a future to ply with, which will mean more of the old educated guesses as to actual cash flow in global arms trade because credit arrangements not to mention the grant basis make, as you admitted, major weapons transactions as hard to put money value on as the give-and-take of modern wedlock (laugh). Twin mysteries. But why did you then say we shouldn’t take you seriously? I, at least, saw the connection. And I know the papers make up whatever they find they are missing so the future can be told; but if statistics like last year’s jump in military spending in a certain South American nation will likely be followed in ‘77 by a corresponding drop because the lid is on there now—and even because statistics don’t find it easy to lie, so action after action must be made up—did you sleep in berths in the old Pullman trains?—the father of a kid I know worked there until one day they put him behind a bar selling pressed units of turkey-gobbler in bread wrap—actions as live as that dioxin spread over four misty years of Asian woods and farms maintained its integrity so well that it proved itself as a future area-denial weapon—which you know already, Jim, so well that my being in your head is the important thing, not the information I rehearse there—as interesting, all this, as people, Jim, and as, sometimes, the boredom they make you live with—more events to read about, to carry Miriam’s father, his gray-white wiry hair standing up on end, through local dusk from work to supper even in my thinking and I feel yours concurring, beyond the sanitation tumbril chopper-scrambler (his head borne under it, and disappearing, or segregated and rejected for transplant tumbling back into the street where it is exasperated) while Miriam’s Aunt Iris watches with her soulmate Eddie the printer with friendly ink-eyes and an anvil forehead still unmarried driving a late-model compact.

And Miriam’s father keeps himself going with other consumables besides these magazines and papers which he kept because he wanted the chance to devour them all over again someday, while leaning against his building talking to friends who had retired and didn’t work part-time but are included, free, in his leisure watch over a six-story tenement not far from the East River Drive, from the subway, from my own former home, and from a drop Miriam and I some days detoured to so as to go not right home from school to her house which was a way I couldn’t begin to measure near-sighted though I don’t forget a bit of it, down to the point of a pizza wedge Miriam once fed me across the booth table to shut me up when all I was going to say was, Let’s get outa this dump, let’s go to Jersey, the beach, maybe further out, no one’s there this time of year—whatever time of year it was.

And I am not forgotten by her father, which is the story of my one-time life before I learned to think. But a man who his beloved daughter Miriam said spoke often of settling in Tel Aviv with a friend he had once sat on an East River pier bench with and disputed for hours. But if I am in your mind now and by design, you are in mine and no getting around it and you see I do not hide my light under a bushel.

You said, as if in question, There are no animals here. Got a guilty laugh, running up out of the convicted gut on a string that was then leashed in. I see you moving and me here. Ever-moving. But sometimes moving in one place without ever leaving, yet knowing you could leave. You asked who visits. Well, I have always been pretty selective. My mother borrows Eddie’s car— you don’t know Eddie—and always leaves a little present in it—a bear to hang on the sun visor; a pack of mints. My mother comes. The Visitors Room—what more than an expansion of the seminar horseshoe table where we rap with Death Row chaplain ‘bout everything except that inevitable penalty itself, and the Muslims come and listen and burst out now and then I mean really very intelligently. The meeting’s called "cadre," it’s called "therapy," it’s a rap supposedly though padre does all the talking, urges us not to jerk off—but the cadre’s a way not to get locked up after supper which is earlier than the army but later than the hospital. Not this dentist-equipped hospital, which I don’t go near.

Though Miriam sent me once to the dental clinic uptown, and I recall contemplating borrowing a car off the street to save time and now I see that as an early experiment in a public transportation system with open cars anyone may use within a given borough. The car theft I mentioned awhile ago was an old VW that petered out slowly block to block while the cops gave chase until at last vehicle came to a halt, and perpetrator left piece of wood used as pistol on seat, and the cops never identified it as the weapon.

Things go on somewhere here and are heard of. Guys for example might get burned upstairs. I don’t mean they been doing it, but it looks like they are going to activate the refrigerator and other major appliances (smile), stove, blender. But we would never see it. Not even the dimming of the light because they got a separate generator. What do you expect in a maximum multiple dwelling? Let’s say the head pop off and the exhaust smoke just squeeze out from armpit one, armpit two, and the curled hands darken with the body’s irritation at this half-ass cremation, this summary drying out of the teeming colloids. On those midnights when you are waiting for a dream in which there’ll be an unexpected dimming of the seventeen-hundred-toilet candle-power, you think then of an H-bomb settling whole and bright upon this place and reaching down instantly along so many fuse radii the incandescent inmates here are at the center of the flower if not attention; bodies with auras for a moment and auras inside too, where the skeleton flares orange under the analysis of the moment and the brightness that is in truth the ultimate shadow gives you gall remembering what you’re in for to say as you die (instead of "I think we’re in for a shower," because as our Chilean contact said, When people talk about the weather they often mean it). At least Outside the others are getting the same, and you see one of them jacking up a fast car to change a tire which ain’t reboring a cylinder because what’s he know?, but doing something anyway, and on the parkway rolling nowhere; another person jumping at the kitchen timer and plunging to the basement to take clothes out of the dryer; another window-shopping, finding a trace of a faraway idea in an article of clothing; another in a backyard digging not realizing a person that knows him well is watching him from the back-porch steps, you could go on, Jim, but when you’ve had this final thought at the moment of the capital H —that your own human kinsmen outside are also being totaled by the bomb —your brain’s too full to let this be the last thought so while you think, ‘ There it was, they’re getting this, too," and ‘That was my last word and thought, that was it," your brain as it shimmies adds a whisper to the shuffle of your coil (smile): Anh-anh; nope; quite the reverse, everything on the Outside, unchanged, unbombed, is O.K. and as it was—like this new generation of clean devices come off the drawing board not just to eliminate undesirable elements but to model a holocaust at minimum expense and with maximum media exposure to show each man in the family of man.

Or so I used to let my mind go—a sloppy body (you said you’d check out colloids, no need to get too technical, Jim)—until my life changed when I woke up to the Colloidal Unconscious. It had always been with us. You touched on it when you first arrived on tape. You are different, Jim, from our old born-again prospectors with the fine-tooled boots pointing out under their cuffs, who pull their big-buckled belt off at the metal-detector checkpoint, yessuh, small change, pen knife, and some credit cards show up too, glad to be asked, suh, well you know they have got it all down to Jesus; or that good bearded father who cornered history by just splitting the Earth between those thirty-two hundred mines full to the brim with miners and on the other hand and always elsewhere the twelve inspectors who by some arithmetic fronting as geometry could ensure each mine one visit every ten years.

Or that bad father—for there’s always a good father and a bad father, Jim, and the bad father didn’t want to get into a shouting match and found the world in a necklace of garbage cans that magnetized his mind, and were his work and perpetuation and care like overflow from father function until his beautiful daughter the one I always love grew older and then those cans got mysteriously linked by a medium-voltage line especially dangerous in a drizzle to jolt and stagger Dobermans, frowning shepherds, bassets minding own business, cold-cock your Afghan, explode your spaniel, straighten out a white chow’s tail, recharge your Saint Bernard, when these had until then lifted, oftentimes propped, a leg to leave a sign of themselves upon galvanized common surface that could now be turned on or off; or another who’s got it all down to one thing, Willie Calhoun Jackson, fellow inmate, soon to get out on work release, soon to be wed, soon to join the army of the employed, who does not say what he does not know and does what he says he will do and is one member of the population here who does not walk the tier or walk the yard but—like him or not—got it down to one thing, and he sees it all as black and white, until you better just not talk to him any more, he is so clear:

as you, Jim, can see when he comes into a workshop when he comes, and in that ledger of his he has place for that famous President’s black Jupiter behind him on horseback or muleback (secret overseer-without-whip)—comes up in that famous American’s account books who knows when?, when the master was meditating the source of petrified shells in the great layers of schist in North Mountain—not the ray-root mountain of the West-coming-East alluded to in the new weather of my old science-man when he writes, that will change our chromosomes and coastal precipitation not necessarily for the worse—and Jefferson recalled if not the Universal Flood those shells fifteen thousand feet high in the Andes that were said to testify to it—and this Jupiter was in unconscious connection with his famous master in ways not imagined by Willie Calhoun Jackson’s universe of black chance

: whereas you Jim boiling down my letters in your head now and the visits in between, keep us all in our places: you’ve got Juan, I bet, out in the yard pumping iron to build up strength to study chapter and verse long after lockup, after the last steel door clangs to, made by a Cleveland ironworks but not by unskilled cons but Juan isn’t hearing the clanging any more if I may speak for him, he’s memorizing contradictions between the freedom to sell that one basic valuable your labor, and the freedom not to buy it of those who made the steaks and winter coats you need, for these are nothing but materialized labor: but I say (wishing Ruth M. Heard was here), Listen, man, the cheap-labor market for Puerto Ricans in the early fifties, that’s past, it’s education that’s the difference (but I don’t like what my words tell me like a head I have contacted into existence outside of me)— So what happened to you, Foley (Juan demands), blond, white Irish-Polack (asks the red-eyed leader): Juan bides his time, regrets he was not at Attica getting strafed by a Rockefeller for what a difference a transfer makes: while hearing his own voices only sometimes because he’s studying every paragraph three times of a sacred book that found its proofs from across the ocean in England, but: Attica (I tell my friend Juan) was inevitable, then so was his not being there to get winged and anyway the day is over when Puerto Ricans were neither Americans to Americans nor Latin-Americans to Latin-Americans:

No, they’re not over, he looks up now from his book and I feel old twilights I used to enjoy outside—but (I add) Puerto Rican is internal immigrant. Migrant, you mean, he answers and don’t look up from his book: So what are you, man? Con, I answer—and he goes up in a laugh or not a laugh, and snaps the Bible shut:

You see, I come back at him, quantity of opposition between us has increased to a qualitative change.

But he reaches for the good book that’s dropped to the floor by his file crate: "Con" is right, he says: (Not "Pro," I quick-quip) Convert, I say.

He says, Look here (but I can’t see the long footnote he’s holding up): I should have kept up with my fuckin’ chemistry, he’s saying in somebody else’s voice. What I know about paraffins and fatty acids?

Baby, you don’t need to know that shit (I reply); Marx didn’t know much more chemistry than Lenin knew about rocks; it’s what you make of it (I act like I’m kidding, lift the open book out of his hands and see the chem footnote adapted from Hegel’s breakthrough vision and I recall you don’t need Marx to tell you a quantitative change builds up and bursts into qualitative (water heated to steam, I’ll take water any day and so would Mir’s dad’s tenants though steam is welcome in season) and mine came the morning I woke and knew my billion colloid cells were truly under suspension not solution

but I’m thinking of Ruth M. Heard, Jim—why?—I tell Juan, Look it’s all in Hegel, the evolution and obstacle quest of the spirit, that’s what you’re doing in here.

He grabs the book away, I’m still talking: Your brothers and sisters have got all they need except luxuries and freedom from worry.

But (he replies, because Jim whatever you hear ‘bout prison violence, we have a lot of time to rap in the abstract), they got (he says) freedom not to think why the boss knows more of what I need to know than I do, but I need to only because he knows, when neither of us really needs this business.

The light falls, Jim, through thick and thin, I hear it, actually sloshing around my vocal cords, and each sees the other in pieces. We both know who said that, Jim; I feel we both know. Though he, the gentleman from Chile, told his contact here, who passed it on to Efrain, who got to me, that he thought he had heard it said at Cape Kennedy near the coffee machine by a passing journalist or, sensitive as it was (though who knows what it means— except me and you, that is), by an otherwise menacingly ambitious photo-journalist with whom the Chilean has found himself involved.

Do we all live alike in here? I ask Juan; and Ruth M. Heard, who I saw maybe ten, twelve times during my formative years, is with me and against me (I’m excited)— Man, did you ever have raps like this Outside?

You’re getting silly again, Foley, says strong-man friend Juan, What are you putting off? go away and leave me alone (and well it isn’t as if I don’t have letters to spirit out of here!). And Jim, I remember how Ruth Heard said how her father believed in speaking out and would pack a Thermos of Indian tea (how she learned to drink it without sugar) for the two of them on London Sunday morning and a cheese sandwich each, and her sister going up and downstairs every minute while her mother sat by the radio; So Ruth and her dad went off on a double-decker for hours with two changes to get to Hyde Park where royalty’s galloping around—you have been there, Jim, I am sure. And here her father would get on a box at Hyde Park Speakers Corner and talk, and talked even when they turned away because he believed in a new all-purpose tax, and in changing the time standard for England, and in experimenting with having every area in the world on the same time. He wore a dark brown suit, red tie, gray felt hat like a labor leader, and he could interrupt his address to catch the attention of someone, tourist or resident— speaker-shopping—but he kept talking even against ultimate noise interference, like if the machine you’re driving is working O.K. you forget what a jerk you are, but if you bust a fan belt in the boondocks (and the car is "borrowed" at that) it all comes down on you, what you are.

Juan says he wants to get to the bottom of why things happen. I say you can’t blame it all on Monopoly or Race. He’s thinking I know about his little baby brother, no baby now. There’s a lot of water under the wall between him and me and I’m going to leave him now and go around the corner, it’s time to eat, he bides his time, his food and roof, his heat and light are free but he must work overtime for that one corn as the Good Father says that’s only Juan’s subsistence before he begins to even think of his family’s, which he does not.

And Jim, take Charlie with his animal eyebrows, who’ll always listen and bring you together with someone you don’t know and even he is coming to think the Education Programs maybe sedate you, and knows the Colloidal Unconscious is neither powerful nor a drug. And Smitty will never tell you but he knows he’ll never be a journalist but comes to the workshop to stay out of his cell till eight-thirty and to add to his tape collection while trying to go on closing his eyes to his little woman (with the highest heels that make her taller than he is broad); and you, Jim, see Efrain, soon to be released, going up and down in that elevator because he put up a curtain across his cell bars and wouldn’t take it down, only the beating he took on the way to the Box is in his head now and his dreams shared with his Iroquois lady who can massage even his fingertips-fingerprints and nobody laid a finger on him for a long time I think (though sometimes I think every guy in here knows news I don’t); and nobody kids around with Smitty lately, but he’s got his tapes with guys sharing their thoughts and feelings (you don’t get that on the Outside so much), so you know that these guys are not just (as the foreign gentleman was heard to say to his contact here) vacuum-packed for burial in space, that even if in the cemetery here where you don’t want to wind up alone, on the headstone they got a number (that’s all) so let’s face it, they’re not dealing with death’s sting even at the end when, whether felt or not, it comes, these guys rapping on tape are just as alive, Jim, as you saying (also on tape, where I first heard you), that it was maybe just due to your chemistry that you were unconscious all these years which I don’t quite believe you, these guys they are not vacuum-packed for burial in space, that’s what our mutual acquaintance the South American said who we both know though how well is like why you’re here—he said the astronauts look alike, and a man he met there in Florida called them all sealed up in their suits unknown soldiers which made an impression on the South American and on me because the astronauts aren’t typical at all. Yet in your head it’s mainly me I hear talking (smile) and the time we had a Visitors Hours visit as private as such can be with the waste product at the high desk on the platform catapulting butts every twenty minutes depth-charging over the desk to be swept up (no waste/make work) by some half-visible con, not to mention in the corners above the junk dispensers the two closed-circuit videos scanning the room as if you would steal me and my annual value of fourteen thousand five hundred dollars when at best you rent my heart, friend, and all you can get at except to reach across the steel counter to press the flesh is the dispenser’s white-flour sandwiches (crisped by time) in their lighted windows and the no-cal leukemi-aid and the potato curls which they hold down inflation by filling the bag less up but then they rethink the price two months later, which I owe you thirty cents for: we spoke so little of the Chilean economist that I wondered was he our connection after all, though I figured you had come to your own discovery of the Colloidal Unconscious as well as through our economist-exile who had mentioned it to you.

I wondered how much he was our connection because—let’s be frank at least in heart-to-heart—when I asked if you had an address for him better than mine which is a "Care-of " that just isn’t where a man with a dignified manner and a head like that hangs his hat (not even an apartment over the deli in question), you paused to let, I know, those sub-microscopic half-knowing mirror-particles face me a message: which was, Can’t you give me an address?

Hey, when you going to bring Larry, I faced back an answer. College and from Outside.

Someone inside me knows more than I, and that’s the one you needed to ask. Unless it’s yourself, these later weeks, Efrain getting out, Smitty missing workshop one week, then not taping us the next, and saying little but keeping his eyes open now, telling me he did not believe in suicide.

Yourself, I said, for you said that sometimes going out on assignment you’d have this dumb idea you already had the facts. Was this to warn me of what I knew already from the tape, oh and from the capability of those colloid surface faces we share more than you may know, Jim—that you brought a message in units only I might put together from that fated man—his name you know; and he, as I told you on your last visit (not the most recent when you were not admitted) I have been in correspondence with—and he hinted Danger he is in from a journalist.

But these letters of his had begun again only after our workshop had gotten off the ground so there was something there between the two, a connection though not through the Colloidal unConscious with him—only with you, if you are not yet much of a chemist, so that in the evenings in this multiple dwelling while Charlie and others on Honor Block are watching the seven-o’clock news, I am catching the two of you—I’ll explain—there’s three Honor Blocks here—it’s not so easy to concentrate on Honor Block—but what I am explaining (since you and I accept no substitutes) is that you and the South American aren’t all I see, but it’s on not one but two screens, sounds like the latest thing, Jim, two separate screens you don’t tell the guard about, but he wouldn’t hear anyway up at the head of the tier reading the paper.

Two screens—separate but overlapping. It’s always that way—neither one complete, and I’m about to catch on one screen you and him both.

There’s his face listening at me like a window, but I know it is you he is facing even if you don’t know, and on the other screen there you are but not face-on (like a window) or back-to, instead in profile and you just finished talking, say to our mutual acquaintance who’s on Screen One, and there’s other stuff on each screen, women and children (I didn’t say "innocent" but you heard the after-image), an orchestra (I’m looking back and forth) and a stage with singers and some people I feel I know in the audience near me offscreen, a barmaid grinning straight up (with her kids yelling in the apartment upstairs, off-screen), an apartment furnished only with one unbaited mousetrap vacant for one and a half socially necessary love-hours, an arm in a sleeve I’ve seen on two men before and a hand swinging close-up back and forth, on-screen off-screen like it’s making the background of walls and stairs move, and then on the other screen as if I’m the owner two forearms and hands fitting a galvanized aluminum lid snug down over a garbage can so I know who it was in the other screen going downstairs, but whipping back I see the sleeve that’s going downstairs pull up above the wrist and there is undoubtedly the blue toe of my old man’s tattoo; then here’s a window full of shirts and jackets and when a bus passes I see me and Miriam in the glass and an out-of-state Dodge parked in a towaway zone and want to look some more—she takes my picture at the beach with her mother’s old box camera—but I’m seeing the other screen and a table with a million winged particles of steam above three bowls of real chicken soup I wish I could smell and we’re sitting watering at the mouth until her father’s hand comes up and grabs his spoon but before I can do likewise I’m back to the other screen but I’m in prison, not my head, and what else needs to be proved, you jerk you—and I don’t get to see me and Miriam but a familiar hand half in the dark reaching for a switch which is dark enough so it could be my father turning on the light on a Friday afternoon in spring when he’s home from the garage—but I know it isn’t, it’s someone else and the switch is for the garbage cans.

Meanwhile, hey Mir’, so what happened at school? She says Miss Heard substituted. It’s high school, Jim. I’m mad. I ask what happened. Miriam shrugs, smiles, throws me a curve, and screen becomes Heard’s first day substituting in junior high:

My name is Ruth M. Heard. / What’s the M for? / Mean Mother. / That’s two Ms, someone else adds. / M squared, would you be up to squares and square roots, love? / And in the snickering silence she gave a ten-minute account of square roots and squaring and cubing and no one gave her shit, then she reminded herself what class this was, but she shut us all up warning us this was a two-class-in-a-row substitution and she’s going to take us on an unscheduled trip soon. For tomorrow we had to walk one city block and write on two sheets of paper (one side only) everything "amazing" we saw. Plus, bring in, ready to tell class, the most plausible lie we could find—and when she said, What do you want to be when you grow up? some kid said, A good burglar, and we all laughed, and she said, Why not an anarchist?—that’s a burglar with self-respect, luv—What’s that? the same kid said who now had his particles glowing and would try to make it his show. / Oh, you set fire to your neighborhood munitions factory, you blow up the government printing office. / Oh yeah, that’s me, a lot of us said. What does it pay? I asked. / Liars, she said; you don’t want to be anarchists.

But the screen cuts me back, Jim, to its counterpart. So off in Honor Block Charlie and the others catching the seven-o’clock news are receiving the first commercial, the price your eyes pay for the disasters shown so far and to come; while I, if not otherwise engaged, find on one screen (—am I the real prison guard?—) a glass telephone booth all by itself under a night street light with the receiver off the hook lying on the ledge, shredded directory dangling by a chain like a higher power not yet recognized, and on the other I’ve got a woman’s arm and hand absolutely still, that’s all except for the address of the free dental clinic uptown, but on the first screen you see the woman all of her except that hand—and it’s my mother shaking her head slow, her eyes not coming to mine: and all I want is to get her on one screen, and is she watching the road? Look, let alone the once-a-week screamer that the Chiefs ignore (and it’s the Indians who’re always having a talk with him who screams once a week on Saturday morning, "The White Dog must go! The White Dog must go!") the real wilderness Jim is what’s not said by mouth which if they could hear it they would be making out transfers for one-eighth of the population conservatively and shuffling them off to Box A to have their rotten cells pulled at Clinton on the Canadian border where you say a Russian bomber has the capability of finding an unscreened layer to slip through over the prairies to detach us from our installations, and is that where the unscheduled mountain I hear about here at Ground Zero is coming from when it comes? a super-compact nugget that when you let the pressure out, swells to an overnight mountain?, that’s right, what do you do if you don’t pick up on either screen? I’m beyond those speeches at the playground fence, discussions they were, while the German lady Mrs. Erhard (who says Yes under her breath after every fourth of your words) kept a watch down the block across the street; and sometimes I stopped in to buy a magazine, and I asked her when she would be ripped off again, Mrs. Erhard, for she had a little pistol, but I wonder if she’s alive in Florida.

And so on, Jim, week to week, and even direct-mind delivery can convey the weariness that passed understanding going the wrong way. Same old shit, observes Carlos delivering to me his Times with the one piece always cut out. I have begun to follow rent control and rent stabilization after what you said and Juan could tell you about housing and its issues because his sister is smart and they pay the City just a few bucks a month but how long can it last and you know of his little brother’s disappearance who went into this gutted pile close to home to play and did not come out. Rent control. You got something going, I imagine, Jim. And you should bring friend Larry, he sounds like a find, and bring your lady, Jim, she would be treated with honor here, which is not what I tried a few colloidal words ago to say: which is this, that there you are, Jim, investigating rent control and rent stabilization, but then there you also are, I mean into Earth resources though your deep cares are not there at all, and between these two is a different vein and does our economist acquaintance slip through there, and if so which way, for he is in danger from a journalist unknown to me who in return for not indicating present involvement with inmate, or so I hear, yields to journalist further information regarding his role in scrambling of an American company down that long beachhead of a country.

Slipped through and left you where? Why do I mean it comes flickering at me that if you needed to speak face to face with the Chilean, you’d know v/here to do it? A lady con with whom I correspond at Bedford now wishes she had grandchildren. She’s been in so long she remembers when she wished for a child.

Oh this old solid familiar place! The sociology substitute, blonde, sizable, sweet, comes five times a week but the legal liaison is on vacation, and the old Bible hawkers have pointed their hand-tooled uppers and tuned their string-tie transistor medallions toward the fat hills of Oklahoma if they still got hills there, and are off, and the Chevy dealer’s foreign wife the musician who plays him to sleep no longer approaches down the mile-like green two-way white-line-divided no-passing corridor, and Shin the Cambodian morale-booster writes Smitty that he got a deal to end all deals in a Minnesota social-work program and will be working with Indians no doubt teaching them to fish and hunt, but a woman who recently became a carpenter having been a foreign correspondent is going to start writing us and visiting. But you, Jim, who came here first who knows exactly why unless to compare colloids, are still with us, food for thought, and the Chilean does not come up in talk, not that you and I have time at the end of the workshop with Jackie and Juan telling you how to place two photos on the front page without unbalancing the makeup, asking you to read thirty inches in two minutes while standing in the doorway there’s the little black guard in his blue blazer who lifts his Sears Roebuck barbells in his home garage in Poughkeepsie, but then you paid me another visit after the time they didn’t let you in and there we are talking about everything in (between us) the (continuum of the) Colloidal Unconscious except the Chilean.

Including Miriam and her father who knew (I say "knew" though he was wrong) that Miriam’s Aunt Iris had tried to toast him on his own garbage cans; and my mother, who once told my father his son being a good Catholic mattered more than a job with the City; yes, including the quest for basic unit of value right back into that overload of Foleynomics giving something for us to live our sentences for besides the Outside—and softened-up enemy scanners to screen from them all that came hereinafter: so without I been taken in, Jim, but since you’re out there and can find out what you want, I must ask in another vein if you’ve gotten what you came here for or a substitute. I don’t mean I played sick the time they turned you away, for I had received a letter from the South American gentleman addressing himself to not only the institutional matter of employed and unemployed women as (shapely) forms of conspicuous consumption, but to his fear that the journalist with speckled wrists named (his contact here told Efrain) Spence who had confronted him with demands directly at the foundation where he carried on research could imperil him and his wife, who herself (and here he said it right out) had initiated a counter-move imperiling her even more. I can name no names, and the excitement of this threatens to thicken inward from the mere margins which is all such international vagueness is worth, next to the colloidal energies we keep sacred. I communicate better or worse. They won’t give me an appointment with the eye doctor—there isn’t one—and my mother needs a prescription if she is going to get me new glasses. Someone out on the gallery comes by my cell, comes in, invited. "Life is in short cycles, or periods," I have read, "rapid rallies, as by a good night’s sleep," you know the mind that said those words, or his knows you; for him the world of this correctional facility breathes close, fades off, fluctuates, and very often (as you said of your past) does not exist. And there are those who write of its ground plan, its power structure, unknown creativity where you find it sticking in your ears or bram-bling your ribs, correction officer approaches Carlos, You better shave; and like the officer has hair to his jawbone and a beard a year old—I have noted the plain, striped shirts you wear, Jim, with the imported-style cuffs; I wager not your brother’s stock in New Jersey store.

San Juan Bautista Day for Puerto Rican families (the guys invite me) and there’s talk to the kids about stay away from drugs; I hear Charlie, who is not in this block, reading his poem he calls an ode in Smitty’s cell on the tape recorder: and it says, "The human spirit is a collective phenomenon," and I don’t know if I add or subtract, Jim; you know what I’m saying? Yet "the poisoned mountain that controls our mind overnight" was vague till Efrain said Smitty got that from him, and didn’t get the facts right: Efrain before he left prison said in workshop his spelling is bad but it’s a part of his history he means to keep so people will be in a better position to identify his writing. Does this add to the collective human spirit? An ode Charles says is a poem that answers the question How should a man live his life? Who would (dare) tell me? Better we communicate this way, Jim, that’s why I didn’t come to the workshop: Private cell, granted not open-ended yet open whether at one end curtained illegally or not. So you see why I sometimes see this barred front end as one side. But it’s the top, too—and the lidless lid—because one night soon after I materialized from Auburn Correctional Facility I dreamt my cell was carried along the beach like it was the promised land like where Miriam and I went Sundays in a borrowed vehicle saving the scofflaw owner from being towed mayhap, which we would leave parked out there and take the bus home; and in this dream cell being lugged along with me in it the bars were handles and all alone in my carrier I was being swung step by step and I would see the bright sand and then the white and blue sky, the sand and the sky; but then I and the one lugging me turned, and the swing of my container showed me the dark wet of the sand and then the gray sea; but wasn’t it raining?—and I was sitting on my toilet, my back to what was now the floor in this tilted cell, raced like one of your astronauts to seed the universe with a grain of surprise—but no countdown—beyond it; but then the rain came down and rained, heavier on the downswing than the up, and hanging on to my seat seeing for the first time that we only think we’re asleep but one’s always awake especially dreaming, I kept hitting the flusher with my elbow to spring the rainwater but gravity kept shifting and the toilet was plugged up and we turned away from the breakers and down the beach and I saw on one back-swing sand all running away and trash barrels and kids charging around, towels tied round their necks in the rain and losing themselves at the edges of my view, and women and men running, and on the down-and-up-swing I saw gray sky and a plane hauling a banner but I had to read it in three, four swings, and someday I’ll know what that banner said but by now I was off the toilet floating higher on the flood of rain, and for all I know calling into the future when through the Chilean economist who had it from his left-handed contact Spence I learn of a weather-freak loner whose hermit-uncle like his before him was an inventor of New York (what’s that mean?) and who, himself an out-of-favor meteorologist, had made good the promise of his more-than-a-century-long line of nephews-uncles by describing a new weather: for before the Chilean gentleman knew it, he passed on to me name and location of this long-shared weather thinker who was beyond rain-making and hail-suppression but has come up with a coastal dynamic that really gets to me because I’m less learning than remembering its tale of—

—of cloud-fragments at the sea-land interface refusing to condense and precipitate yet falling fast as a feather in a void as if their load of uncondensed moisture canceled temperature gradient in favor of a gravity which isn’t the pull they thought but just an economical route for—

—for what? translates the dream out of some distant lingo, andpir quanha quoia-san comes to me as far from por que as why is from because—

—route for strange cloud-contents drawn coastward by what (?) that waited there?

But at the time of this dream—dreams settle nothing, you guessed—I did not know these people. And Spence, who, come to think of it, did later mention to Efrain, when Efrain got out, a meteorologist who had meditated ocean coasts in South America and inland coasts in North, was sure new winds were schemed with contingency underplan to quick-pollute selected areas of the U.S. possibly by Wide Load in motion eastward, and Spence, prob’ly un lunatic himself, told a touring foreign agent that a Known Daughter knew more about this because she and her father had made separate trips southwest recently especially in area from which Wide Load or Toxic Mountain (code name bearing built-in correctional facility) was thought to be commencing, and Spence wondered if our South American friend had written me—and I in my dream interpreted by Juan economically called to the knuckles that were white from the drag of the cargo namely cell plus me, and they didn’t have any hair on them so they were Miriam’s or my father’s, and the swings got less until the weight of fallen rain held my container from swinging much, so the open end was up to the heavens but the plane went away and then the weight got so much the cell was set down on the beach with a terrible bump I’m sure but, being partly weightless and in my sleep, I didn’t feel it, and I called to Miriam and she didn’t hear.

So there I was, afloat in my own rainwater higher toward the bars at the top of my traveling cage that wasn’t traveling now, and I thought, Miriam don’t know how to drive, they’ll pick her up. But at least she would be inside out of the rain but I couldn’t see her, and I wasn’t getting into a shouting match, I thought, all I could see was those fingers on the bars and below me underwater the toilet, sink, and bed were fixtures but table and chair, papers and books floated loose down there and the bed was changing but I had to look upward to breathe, and then bars with no fingers so I was alone and the water got higher until I had just my nose and half a nostril up above the surface and to do that, I had to position both eyes against bars so I couldn’t see to breathe, and so after a breath I looked down into the depths of my cell again and saw a shadow and a glint of silver or blond about the eyes, if it was a person, and the bed was sprouting not another bed but branches at the front corners, it was made of wood like my bed at home, I saw it growing but had to breathe again, but I heard everything from dolphins’ opera inside musical garbage cans to lobsters crawling my way over the land that lay all about the square bucket I was drowning in. I took mouthfuls of water, squirted it but it came back in, until I heard a pounding like thunder and then, Jim, I couldn’t hold on no longer, and I knew this was no dream, the thunder got like a weight in my drums and my chest, it was awful, I was ready for the chaplain and the whole cell received a jolt which was like a decision and tipped slowly and it went over and almost halfway but not quite, just so the bars instead of being turned down against the sand were facing onto the beach so anyway all the water ran out and kids were yelling and I wondered if they would kick it again but by then I was conscious in old way again.

It’s good of you to care, I guess—’bout Miriam, my mother, the garbage cans, more than when you first came—and will Larry come sometime? I think I’m on the same curve as him, from what you said about the obstacles he faces; but at that instant awake in my new cell, having come the day before from Auburn’s melancholy vale, I felt I saw Miriam. I tell you I saw her, whereas in the pir-quasi-quoiq dream it was only the knuckles (where was the hand?).

Me seeing Miriam meant I would see her more by being away from her.

But see what?

The white shell of scar since you ask along one fold of nostril. Raven bangs with the slight part like the narrow gap between two front teeth, the hair fell that way. The warm shoulders turned perhaps toward me—toward her father; anyone. The high cheekbones—you’ve heard that before—were they from eastern Europe?, it was where her father’s mother had hailed from, cheeks that looked like they had soft cream makeup on but, to touch, they didn’t. The eyes, one gentle, open degree wall-eyed, so you believed what was true also, that she saw you with both but saw beyond you, to for instance the broad-shouldered old father who acted like me being in the kitchen when she wiped and her little Aunt Iris washed meant I did not give him respect, but she’s afraid of him, Miriam, she don’t want him to even know I asked her to the movies, and she tells me privately she got a cramp while Iris is telling him the stove is still leaking gas and the smell isn’t that mentholated oven cleaner.

Yet waking from that prison dream with no one to take it to except myself, I saw that being away from Miriam was my going, not hers, my weight downward and she couldn’t hold me, O.K.

But all the good that ensued—this was Lady Luck in the grip of that dream hand. In tune with the opening leader-group response of the Death Row (therefore currently unemployed) chaplain’s cadre meetings that they soon threw me out of. Leader: "Out of the struggle of the now we will create the human world of the future." Group: "Our life is in the human struggle. The past is approved. The present is received, the future is open." But not luck, Jim, not luck at that bereft point of waking but, near known sounds, in a different cell and prison, guys passing my bars going to breakfast, desolation like an anvil I’m forged inside, with no hammer to hit it—having not known how to run my dream into the ground by tilting that box one more side over, and suffocate in the dark.

That is, after the water ran out through my new floor of steel bars into the sand.

Not luck that I made a single thing of day and night then and there through seeing not just her fingers if they were hers but Miriam. For I’d found how to receive what had always been mine to, in the Visitors Room from people I hadn’t even met, or in the photography lab which I was now destined to use only so far (no further), or in my manifold cell where I was keep-locked most of that first day in this particular multiple dwelling (call it orientation) though I did not need my colloidal swarms to light me down through this particular multiple dwelling—trade shops, dining salon, law library where there was a spontaneous fight, the Muslim study group (which has changed so many guys not just their names so they have two names with the authorities now); the programs and the plumbing and then deep inside our multiple dwelling the camel in the yard slouching back and forth between the five-on-five basketball game and the barbell clonkers and the very old lifers who, when you tell them a little about the Economic Plan to corral all skills for a better home and envision a society with no more prisons, shake their clean-shaven heads—oh man, f all the criminals was let out, this con for one would rather be inside—though every one of these joints is different, Jim, hence an idea for the future, of correctional confederacy.

You still with me?

Don’t ask, you say.

But as sure as from Smitty’s tape I knew you move and relate by the Colloidal Unconscious, not in so many words—even without words. And whether through the South American gentleman who is in the jeopardy you knew in advance predicted on Smitty’s tape, or through your inborn chemistry that received your future and brought you through it to this jailhouse where your resident economist (smile) seeks as he can the intrinsic unit of value, you now find yourself where you may need to know your own power or what it is, even if you don’t tell others such as the beautiful young social scientist Amy who came with you to the last Puerto Rican festival and you will let me know if she is coming I predict to the workshop soon so I can be there, I hope she did not think I was prying when we were at the table on the grass having ice cream with Charlie’s kid and I asked and she replied in the affirmative that she had been associated with a foundation, only that, no more. She looked around at the other picnic tables and said the guys looked in great shape—very clean, she said, as if she wasn’t sure what to say.

How you going to get dirty here?

Well, it came to me—the message—three days beyond the dream. The message of myself. But the dolphins still sang and the lobsters swayed below the billows and swam a little and in another vein crawled past the old bare tuning-fork fir tree high behind the lake at camp, and in the corners of my eyes swung the father’s garbage cans a loose unit glowing and sparking and clanking like competing anchors with nothing to hold but themselves, one lurching upward to haul the rest, another dropping to drag down those around it, the lids loose and floating off then back on but always loosely so I saw the father, also in each outside corner of my eyes coming but slowly, knowing it would wait, while his physician who I smelled but didn’t see waited to look him over and the Y camp physician was talking like a parent to the kid with white eyelashes who couldn’t go to sleep any more and the prison doctor waiting somewhere in this multiple dwelling to jam me while I coughed, or maybe more a traveling vet who inspected once a month, once a year, everyone will have info re: who when where, but you’ve got only yourself to trust these physicians I knew were there on one point to one side of my nose where I was blind but could smell them round the corner and Miriam she must come walking toward you very clear in what I tell you very tall she was (in junior high, I mean, taller than Ruth Heard), because you have not gotten into asking for all this information about her, like does she drive up here?

So was Miriam why you came? (smile)—father Jewish but mother P.R. (is Miriam Catholic then?), did the father go to Israel? what did Miriam think of your speeches, Foley, through the playground fence? what does she want out of life? (that question you asked didn’t ring true, Jim, yes? but you’ll never master the deeply dumb question Shin the Cambodian asks, like (one on one) Write down the three (or four) heaviest influences that made you what you were at eighteen—) such overly specific "things" prove obstacles to real sharing but for a person in your line of work, you don’t interrogate, you wait—is that what you do?

Miriam, Miriam, you can call her my other half if I had an extra one— Miriam came toward me as if she didn’t see me, she’s walking across my view, her arms swinging at her sides so slowly I would have watched the century out except she was also coming toward me and I had to watch out for her in that quarter also in the other screen where she was walking across and on bended knee I aimed a kiss at her she was going to walk out of sight if I didn’t switch my eyes to another view just as she was disappearing.

Because there was my own voice answering the substitute teacher (What do you want to be?) I still want to be a rich burglar, and somewhere, not on either screen but in between clearer because of my speed back and forth between the screen where I didn’t find her telling how I should come to England where they had the best burglaries like treasure hunts like a team broke into the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Association only to find in the safe not only all the jewels and watches but the keys to another G&S branch practically around the corner only to find, when they got there and broke in, the keys to a third branch, same shit, keys to an associate firm, number four. The class was laughing and the sound was like very great speed, I lost track and the calendar said it was the next day and the substitute teacher wasn’t there n’more and I was thinking I needed help getting over to England and back before they found I was gone.

The obstacles had not been in me, Jim, I had put them out there in front and this continuum that seeing Miriam had left me had nowhere to lead until three days were past and Jackie who smiles a lot and makes you feel you were the guy he was waiting to meet had made my acquaintance observing that a lot of the guys were totally materialistic and I was admitted to the photography program. Admitted so unusually soon that I thought they were out to trip me up but I reached out to claim if not yet unseal the message of myself that had been waiting for me, knowing also that what Jackie would teach I already knew. And they did trip me up. And it might have turned a bad corner for me at that opening of my stay in this multiple dwelling which is far more than the state correctional system.

Jackie—with Juan—in a tunnel new to me—said You want to take the last two on this roll, we’ll run it through now, learn by doing, O.K., George? And we did more than Jackie bargained for. And Juan especially. We passed a guy sweeping and we passed a plumber they knew who was going in the opposite direction, who raised his eyebrows, that was all, it was a long walk, like the prison is really the bigness of this space and you never get to see it. I let them tell me how to turn the shutter speed and roll the barrel. Then I did it my way.

I focused and took the long corridor plus half of Juan’s head up close while Jackie said, You can’t get both, you got to find the optimum, I saw what he meant, and a guard called out down the tunnel behind me, "Where ya going?" and "Better get there," and without taking my eye from the viewer (an expensive camera) I drew back the lever advancing the roll, turned blindly and took a picture of the guard who didn’t like it any better than Jackie who said, "You belong to the shotgun school," but the point of my instruction was to come, Jim.

In the darkroom, an eye on the second hand, an eye on the long strip in the tray-bath filled with what came from a bottle in a box called "Darkroom Graduate." For Juan the one-and-a-half-dozen frames time if not trouble obtained from taxpayers’ surplus income on which we here subsist though monks in their establishment have got it over us they can make a little wine downstairs and move it on the open market, yet if we grew the grapes our correctional wine might command as good a price as the inmate-therapists I have projected in Foleynomics who would work with outside patients by mail like the chess instructors also projected. One-and-a-half-dozen frames taken to be displayed to loved ones and all who care to look and those who read the paper where two or three shots will appear as a record of work made possible by conspicuous leisure, though not equal to the red-rimmed eyes that have viewed those tables of minimum subsistence wage equaling rate of exploitative surplus at one in the morning yet understood more than these, that in the last century a government could decree in the interests of employers that childhood ends at age ten or at the outside eleven—red-rimmed studies which prepare Juan he says for the struggle (though What about the parole board? I don’t say)—studies possessing a fair visibility here Inside while Outside the fourteen, fifteen grand earned and laid away to keep each profile here low if not void is funny money, Jim, I was able years later to explain it to Juan and in return—because effort is returned in this place, guys give and share, you’d be surprised, don’t underestimate us, guys who don’t belong here and guys who maybe do—Juan in return pictured for me his son, and his son’s cousin, Juan’s nephew, helping Juan’s little brother-in-law Manny get a new TV in a shopping cart up a hill from Broadway to Amsterdam at seven o’clock of a cold Saturday evening, I could see how Juan felt, he didn’t explain it, Juan’s kid holding the TV and pushing from behind, windbreaker, wool-lined leather gloves, baseball cap, sneakers with the laces tied).

Which is just filling you in with a little future because Juan and me and Jackie didn’t seem to have a great deal of future on that afternoon three days after the rain vision and here we are in a place they promise you if you fuck up and Jackie is giving an hour of socially necessary labor to the collective phenomenon as the poem says whose author you know, a phenomenon which is, as he says, the human spirit, and but a few minutes of darkroom time had elapsed under the red bulb when—too warm in there—to the amazement of Juan, whose pictures all but two they were, and of Jackie with that broad, pale, about-to-smile face whose pupil I was and who with Juan’s permission let me agitate the film in its bath, agitating the film along the many-tracked continuum of day-night raised the dripping strip, skipped the rinse, and slid it into a waiting pan of hypo and before Jackie and Juan could stop the act which stopped the developing process—or express their surprise at what the haunted fingers had done—the growth of Juan’s negatives had been suspended and that was that.

Dumb, you say? Not the coolest?

You didn’t say (but you communicated these words in our way though you’re just beginning to be in touch with your own C.U. and told me in the friendliest tone that "Dreams don’t settle anything"). And—dumb? uncool?—I’d have felt your point like misery in the lower back or an itching far inside the ear or wanting to go on a long sleep-walk in the middle of the night or our old question What do I do with my life?—had not the Way come to me where it and I always were waiting for each other, the Way of using what I had always had, using those grownups scattering on the rainy beach, using the knuckles that had dropped me in the dream, using the rainwater that was to spread and leave the photo on my table dry and the metal bed in which I came to, using the basis of the electricity more than it itself that Miriam’s father accused the good witch her diminutive aunt one foul spring day of switching on when he could be seen approaching his string of garbage cans with an offering of trash—using the blood that ran upward into my eye and congealed on my mustache though none touched Juan’s darkroom fist as the reminder from a dream those two guys had no way of knowing about, that it wasn’t the knuckles’ fault no more than mine and while I thought what was in my eye was the red light of the darkroom when really it was blood that flowed upwards from my crooked nose I knew in a flash—clear as by instinct I knew the heels and soles approaching our lab door to be a guard who’d heard angry sounds—that I would tell Jackie and Juan what they would comprehend and I would turn their measure of me (which at that moment would have been no truer than the guard’s measure of all three of us) to a finer bond intrinsic to what I’d just seen on those two negatives at the end and rescued.

"I’m sorry I had to do that," I said to Juan, his back to me, shaking his head.

They listened to me. I was way behind them in the mechanics of the camera, the tricks of film, not even a beginner, not started; yet I was way ahead, too.

They could not see at first.

"Wait, man, don’t let the light in!" Jackie called to the hand that gripped the door knob and that (far outside us as if beyond the very walls) said, O.K., what’s going on in there?

But the hypo did its stuff, while the record was in my mind; and when the guard opened the door, I could use that light to show what I meant.

They looked at what I meant. The guard, as I talked, I kept my face away from him; he’s in the doorway.

"‘you say so, George," said Jackie, not smiling, after I had pointed out to their more normal eyes what had been seen by the camera.

Was it a bright half-head (say, of a Puerto Rican iron-pumping Marxist) against a lighter corridor sharply sleep-patrolled darker in the three spots where there were lights? Not at all—only for those whose future is past.

No, Jim, what was it? I almost don’t have the words.

What was it? A moment of Juan’s true power a blur only to negative eyes that have to look ahead to that computerized correct flesh and bone and liquid—you know, Jim?—of our species’ face.

But not blurred if we’ll only see.

Juan’s power, then, caught at that moment that’s always waiting: between scattering we come from and dispersion we flow toward. Rain-dream material. But vision. No dream. So you don’t have to say, Dreams don’t settle nothing.

So the blur, the beginning, of half Juan’s head was no blur, no beginning; it carried on what was there, the core of his force if he find it to live with it to use it (and even if he could not). I said to them that it was Juan’s power mingling with his total environment which was rough if you were not into it because with photography you were going to get your nice perspective and some old corridor. Here you had more.

("You see the stairs," said Juan, low. "Yeah, the hypo got developer on it," said Jackie. "Oh shit," said Juan, the guard was in the doorway at our backs.)

I started to go on about him without designating him, that guard; but all but one of Juan’s immediate family had been on the film, and I had said enough, told what I had seen for all our sakes, leaving out just private stuff (they would think was just me not them). Here, I mean the shadow in my rain cage far below me wafting, budging, whatever it was doing with a blond silver shine about its eyes down there around the bed whose wood was growing from several points, I was fascinated to find that kid suspended in the particles of Juan’s power opened in the mass of light-sensitive stuff I had arrested the development of (smile) (you smile, you think I darken counsel by words without knowledge? true enough, Jim, as we will see a few days past this turning point)—the kid? you’ve guessed—the kid who swam out of the sun in under our raft. And now with the guard behind me and Juan’s power before me under the red bulb, I recalled ducking my head to keep an eye on that kid only to see him wriggling in the wrong direction back under the raft among the loose extra rope fat and slimy suspended here and there doubled and half-tangled near one of the anchor ropes that was taut through the murk.

Then I knew what Juan was going to say, Jim, don’t ask how I remembered—it comes later. I had seen a mind, Jim, a suspension within that film paper, the very small pieces it was in at that time of my life— swamped but too dry: I knew Juan would say, "Where do you get this stuff, Foley? Was you up at Clinton?"

Jackie laughed. He had not been smiling. I knew that through doing whatever it was with the great surface area of all the faceted particles increasing their area with each division that split the work and spread it far and wide, I had given those words to Juan who to this day doesn’t quite know the power of the Colloidal Unconscious to find him where he is, but is used by it, and not badly, Jim, for for all our waste of this power, it is always there, and always more.

So much of this was the work of a moment.

4’Auburn," I answered Juan.

But the guard had spoken, he was the one I had taken a picture of, I didn’t see how he’d gotten all the way down here to where we were. "You on D Block," he said, question but no question.

I turned halfway round and agreed; he asked me my number and I knew it.

"You look at me," the guard said, and the murk of power when I turned to see it, knew I saw it in all its tangled shorts and sparkings.

"You are not ready for this program yet," he said, "you don’t get into this program till you been around awhile."

"Around?" I said—it hit me, but funny; was it the prison system or this particular facility where I was now hanging out?

"It was cleared," said Juan quickly.

Jackie had done the clearing, with the help of Charlie, who asked me my second day how he could help me settle in.

"I said," the guard repeated, "you’re not ready for this program. What you got on your nose?"

"O.K.," I said, "I’m not ready."

"I said," the guard repeated, "what you got on your nose?"

"Blood," I said, wondering where the blood in my eye had gone.

"You hit him?" the guard said to Juan. "I heard you."

"You see that developer," I said, nodding at a thing that looked like a giant microscope. "You’ll find a piece of my nose on it, I ran into it."

"You keep your nose out of here till you get clearance," said the guard, who wanted to know how long we would be.

Jackie said the film was still in the hypo. The guard said he wasn’t having us hanging around there and didn’t I have anything to wipe my nose with. He left.

Juan told me the big thing was an enlarger.

The guard opening the darkroom door had let Juan and Jackie see what I showed them. So after all you don’t know who you’re working for. The guard, who I get along with now because to the ear I am quiet and I read and sit looking at my pictures, was working for me that day and didn’t know it, or the part of that day that had such consequences for me. And I was working for Juan and Jackie though Jackie thought he was working for me and for Juan separately. And six months later the guard asked me if I got cleared for photography because that’s a good program to be in—they all know it is— but I said I decided against it. And that first and only day in the darkroom my work for Juan went almost to waste because he wasn’t ready; but there was the enlarger I hit my face on (smile), plus a with-the-grain something in what I tried to show Juan and Jackie, so that soon afterward Juan worked for me.

‘Cause you build up credit with guys in here, nobody tells you that you were loyal, you didn’t give a guard more data than he could handle (smile), you didn’t pay a little bit too much attention to a guy who knew you knew what was going on with him, nobody tells you your credit rating is good, but you know. Yet Juan did not know he was working for me, in what happened soon afterward; look, he was working for himself too but not as if he knew the work he had done for me, and was destined to help still more, months later, the night before a test he never took but would in my opinion not have failed.

But you, Jim, who were you working for?

I think yourself. Do we all? No, we do not, said Ruth Heard, who told us to figure what we were getting out of every hour we worked, which was confusing to kids, but I found it’s confusing to others, too.

But doubts remain. Why don’t I know even now if the contact we made through the South American gentleman was by chance, or you meant it? He wrote to me, then he didn’t, then he did, then after Efrain got out the letters stopped again. I have told you how the South American gentleman, the Chilean economist, and I met diagonally across the counter in the Visiting Room one day late in ‘72 when my mother went over to the sandwich machine and my father didn’t know what to say to me—can’t blame him—and was looking over at Smitty who had his eyes closed talking and his wife was leaning on her elbows and nodding her head, but on my other side this guy who was getting out the next month was talking to this well-dressed bald gentleman with a mustache who spoke with an accent and he had come with this guy who looked like some street dealer but outdoors-looking not in the city way in a brown leather coat, heavy slick hair, more like long black high Hawaiian, but it wasn’t black, it was like blondish brown toxic-tinted with your "dirty" look, and this guy, our mutual contact the South American economist, listened by looking off into space but at that moment toward me. Then he said, "We are of one mind there, but this company agent you know so much about was my friend whatever his political aim may be," and the slick guy in leather and with hands that might have belonged to someone else, they fitted him, they seemed discolored or speckled—when he interrupted, the bald, well-dressed man seemed to not hear and he nodded in a friendly way at me because I was looking his way, and he said that whatever it was was more than a matter of scrambling funds, it was how the parent company filtered rewards among subsidiaries and the way this changed local taxes, and he mentioned the word "Marxian" but suddenly he and I were talking and I, to say something, asked if he was a Marxian and he smiled; but before he and the other guy with the hands and the high, sort-of-throaty voice got up to go, the South American gentleman asked what Marx I had read, and we exchanged names and addresses, it was great, the guard standing below the dais where the desk is came over and told me not to mix up my visitors, though my dad was still there so I had an excuse to be there, and my mother came back with two sandwiches and asked what it was about and my dad told her, or thought he did, they all love rules, you know.

I have told you this, and you have told me you ran into this guy at Cape K.—coincidence, his zig your zag!—and later learned he was an economist in the Allende government which I knew. But since then he didn’t ever refer to you when I mentioned you in my letters, and once I detected a colloidal settling to the effect that you wanted the address for him that I was in possession of.

But it was always me who brought him up and I don’t know which of us was getting the information, Jim.

Except you’re still here. I mean coming. Like a once in a while letter from the old weather sciencer who takes care of an old lady friend who thinks she’s in New Jersey half the time.

And the information you’re getting—think of it! About inconspicuous photography, hidden work, Foley Plan for 5-20-yr development of this retirement compound, garbage bail-out into a Puerto Rican festival inside these walls leaving the Cessna to level an abandoned barn that had been recklessly commandeered by two lovers; the blue of the sky witnessed above the Yard, if I could only put it down, the stars and comet tracks that are always there, seen or not; the slow, sandy rasp of a super’s shoes (of Life Experience for college credit), Miriam’s father’s soles heard making the swollen-footed ascent to the For Rent apartment he prided himself on not permitting her to clean out after the last tenants in case of rats; and you’ve been getting multinational jokes, and the unknown soldiers cited at Cape Kennedy that impressed our mutual acquaintance from the Southern Hemisphere so he said "vacuum-packed for burial in space" as if he quoted from some store of learning; and speeches through the fence; and why the color of Miriam’s eyes looked like it did when she turned away from everyone else on Earth to me, the late winter sun in her teeth, our feet in the salt soft sand beside a driveway back of a beach house, for we’d kept going all the way out to Westhampton and we were going to enter this beach house and it’s a week before St. Patrick’s Day and counting, and we were too far out from the City to rely on public transit to get us home, but what to do with this visiting Volkswagen, green but at the edges muddy whose New Hampshire plates I had turned to a single New Mexico plate, and I desired to return this VW to a legal spot near where I’d just managed to ease it out of an illegal space from where it could have been towed at owner’s expense plus fine, and I even took good care of the finish out there swept by the Atlantic salt of Long Island’s South Shore, for when we got up the side stairs to the door and Miriam kept saying, Are you sure it’s all right and I said the friend who usually had the use of the place had told me just how to get in, I went down through the house to the garage, slid up the door from the inside, and pushed the VW in as easy as starting it, but all the time suspended in all my mind’s eyes was the color of Miriam’s itself due to the more narrowly physical side of this colloid mystery we have spoken of).

This a cover? you asked.

But speeches through the fence? You didn’t understand about them? On-the-job training for leadership. The little store with the newsstand outside is within earshot, and Mrs. Erhard moves from behind her counter to come outside and watch.

Hear the basketball smack. The one-on-ones have occupied the playground playing half a court going six-on-six making all the moves; and me, I’ve got a crowd on the sidewalk side of the high fence maybe five, six, seven kids taken up position (got there first) watching the game and listening to me, so then the speaker himself, me, talking as always Issues, turns to the fence and addresses those deaf geniuses making all the moves—did I say jungle training school?—charging, double-dribbling, traveling, hooking up toward the hoop but hitting the hard rim like a stoop so the ball kicks twenty feet out beyond them, it’s as if without the cord of the net the rim has that extra power and they’re all chasing the ball but each other, so the elbow’s connected to the neckbone, kneebone to pelvic area, and our famous High Kool with his great semi-albino hands, six-five at age fifteen, stops short transfixed, Jim, for he hears me say, "What is the southernmost state of the Union?" Big man is in a trance, he’s outside the game now transfixed, while two lesser talents colliding with him where he stands (occupying position having gotten there first) fall away from him stunned, bruised, maimed; for in the middle of my critiquing of the Los Angeles police not letting the Russian strongman Premier Khrushchev visit Disneyland and of K. himself who said to us and our system, "Only the grave can correct a hunchback," I had asked out of the blue which was the southernmost state in the Union.

This had to be more message than I knew, for often words as clear as this current-event trick question to keep them on their toes and supplement their jungle education came out of me, out of me mind into me throat, out of the struggle of my life, to reach another with a charge from me that settled some particles over there in him or her like there’s nothing to choose between there and me. You said that all this was just my feelers, Jim, which I souped up—it’s more, you ought to see. A power no less, Jim. A swing-arm anti-weapon you’d not detect by most known scopes. Unique capability, I call it, waiting there all dispersed to be willing to work for you. Work? Oh feel what’s given in the particles and deposit it wordwise coded to the message in you all the time.

I mean me. You. The others, and Juan.

He has achieved all this inside. To me, Juan has at least lived the rock-bottom unit of value in here if he has not in so many words known it. For so many words keep him from it: the Decade of the People; the time of the Real Great Society; la lucha (the struggle) for a better life (a better way of doing things, the Chilean said).

Juan had further muscles to flex, he went to prison ninety days before the great Garbage Barricade of ‘69 in East Harlem when the famed Sanitation Department declined to release city brooms to the people of El Barrio’s 110th Street to clean it up themselves and the people achieved overnight a consolidation of area garbage like one long, quiet upper that was a statement but still, as garbage, had to have alerted if it did not blow the mind of Miriam’s container-oriented father downtown, while as rampart and beachhead it was its own defense/offense without benefit of ventilating tradewinds that recycle out into the Caribbean Sea from that other, southern island, the isla verde of Puerto Rico proper, the smell of garbage strewn on a city beach for a population of free-range pigs raised there to harvest. But Juan inside got firsthand reports of the 110th Street Barricade from his visitors, so you see, Jim, this multiple dwelling sixty miles up the parkways past the guard-rail’s low barrier posts whose flicker-frequency could lock your normal speeder’s eyeball into gagged epilepsy, proved a contact between that neighborhood in upper Manhattan and my own to the south. I mean like you and your on-site inspection of the insurance corp. that quietly works into the earth and up into the troposphere, so you look at a quiet executive I can see him standing on his inner-office carpet in Vermont fantasizing a whole home quarried out of local granite, appliances too, an extension ladder, granite notepads for the wife, even granite you-know-whats. But I mean also, Jim, you take a trip up the river to find out what’s happening back where you come from. And you here with Foley looking for some hard info re: Chilean, and you find me waiting along the wall with a new method of communicating, don’t you know.

So coming from heterogeneous points in the city, Juan uptown, I down, we met at a point in the continuum intrinsic for both of us. For Juan it became soon afterward a time of new dedication to work for a socialist-humanist state, yet of near-madness since his studies had led him to see that the time he was doing had been provided by taxpayers whose sweat’s already being fleeced of its fruits and now Juan and the rest of us yardbirds are forced to go on exploiting these workers because of our tenancy in this place.

I showed him that we were getting the rent of our cells dirt-cheap if we ignore the value put on day labor in this retirement compound. But I couldn’t cheer him up—"Cheer up," Ma said when my father shook his head and scrunched deep into the easy chair and said he couldn’t have done better than stay where he was in the transit system all these years—or better still, help Juan right over the edge toward roaring derangement, because at the Death Row chaplain’s cadre session he had just come from, so absorbed had my friend been in cramming for his Chem final that the single thing he had heard, having heard it before but not from this source, was the remark by a part-time missionary I had had words with once who on this evening was sitting in and might have wanted to get a laugh, to the effect that there were folks on the Outside laboring to make time available for us guys Inside to do. And so, coming back to the block from cadre, Juan was murderous and seething, for what would he ever have to do with discovering lattice structures to substitute for rubber (outdated textbook of course) or to experiment with sewage-disposal solvents for the benefit people? His work, I learned, through my abstract evening bars where he paused to bid me goodnight was in Revolutionary Theory.

But we had a going joke about that page of Chem.

The kid on the north side of my cell was listening to his own latest message to his wife on the Jap tape player he’d recently been allowed to import but which I didn’t envy him.

Now I swiftly saw the relevant page of this book belonging to the man Juan about to retire for the night to his cell on the south side of mine and in the mere moment before the officer called Let’s go (which is a funny thing to say when one man has just come on his shift after a thirty-mile commute and the other man has just arrived back at his cell for the night), I was able to see Juan’s work and place run simultaneously with my own grain.

He had not asked for help exactly when he’d exclaimed with that angry grin like some movie star, "Christ is it a suspension or is it a solution?"— what did he know, he said, except what some once-a-week visiting authority said by the book they had been required to read. Well, to this he and I in unison like we were telling the teacher chirped, "It’s a colloid system," and for the last time I gave my friend his book back through the bars like I’m putting it on the shelf, and we crossed brothers’ thumbs and palms.

In he went for the night with the mountainous clank-bang I no longer hear except in my understanding, but for a second, only a second; but of crucial import I smelled, like pollen that no longer afflicts me seasonally, the collective flumes of all Johns on the tier. Oh sweet privacy—a high percent of these guys can experience it only here, not home with their family sharing a bath, not in the armed forces I’m told, not in a mountain monastery, definitely not at Y camp. But wait, Jim, understand it was only for a minute, that smell (however timelessly recorded in that girl sports writer’s "treatment" of this facility). For—will you wait one instant more?—with an end to that minute that I suddenly saw I always made by myself (and an end that your mere outsider engineer’s got his book explanation of, such as shooting centrifugal force at all particles of said dispersed odor so that through their sedimentation potential they concentrate at the outer rim and you get rid of them like particles of smoke in a poisoned city made to coagulate, precipitating out in one dark, industrially flushable lump all the dispersed specks and films of smodge we lumpens go on breathing of our fuel and work)—I as I say grasped suddenly without trying the power I saw I’d grown to be grasped by.

Grown partly I swear through the motion of my double screens.

And if it was not help Juan wanted at that eleventh hour such as my advice to fuck memorizing and get to the heart of the Contradiction as he will say—the Matter, as I—yet what do you know—it was help Juan gave me. My thoughts gelled and then by some return were swimming limitlessly, imprisoned in the locus of their own freedom, forget the Chem.

It was nothing I needed; but it was a gift no less. More a material to see through than a pay-off formula to say the word; for what is colloid but a name for the unnamable, a name to say, a word and little more. But holy mother wasn’t I then in the next few minutes not only chatting to the unseen Juan round the corner from my cell but signaling unknown to him through his wall because if I could not I also did not want to keep myself from using what I’d all the time been being. No accident that without a word spoken out loud from his friend he got to the heart of the matter right then and there remembering who he was and that the time to begin is no more the next day after than the place is the next room. Which is a way of saying it that, now it’s out, might come from Outside me—from you—from the Mind that’s not mere Body-Brain. You hear me now without words said or penned. Jim I had seen between suspension and true solution. On that historic page this was what I had seen. And I saw what I had done. Oh, Jim, what relief! To see and prove what I had done. That is, besides my work in economics and in dual screens. For I had been going round and round what I had done, these particles of all life, Jim, so fine: a string of garbage cans; a watery space under a float; two medium-size apartment tenements separated depending how close you see them; a private announcement, to one who smiled but cared, of Sunday’s— tomorrow’s—current-events message; particles, particles multiplying surfaces by the light they themselves multiplied so fast it began to stand still and give back all the time I had given up to understanding what I only now saw went part and parcel with how a state of body-brain turns to mind and mine to ours. A Miriam was here so many-sided that love for her got more and more: so many particles of all life and so fine no lens in or out of the lab we do not have at this bomb of a correctional facility could make them out: unseen, they’re what Juan’s old book here on my shelf calls "homogeneous"—all one stuff—but knowing them, they are you and all so different: Miriam walking away under a blue winter sky, her left arm close in holding her books, so her shoulders curved forward slightly; a forkful of mashed potatoes catapulted at my father’s T-shirt when he told Mom for the last time that they were lumpy; the blue of the ocean in a blind kiss, and all dynamite colors in a windy sunset so we didn’t hear the beach patrol until I jumped; and I had been scattering and settling these particles for a long youth, let me tell you—particles so fine as the voice of one guy telling either side of a playground fence by a fair-to-average city school the difference between the real smog which I was to read later is the mark of business mismanagement (as our womanizing Norse economist once saw) not of technology, and on the other hand the Russian ambassador, smiling Mike Menshikov’s small betrayal of the revolution in misrepresenting to Premier K. one sunny California day two small, innocent, fleece-lined clouds in a clear, but colloidally blue, Los Angeles sky as Smog, Smog, tut(ski) tut(ski)—but I hear the voice, me, the one guy at the playground fence, but more, going round and round even then before prison came into the picture, going round like what later was by chance at Juan’s moment of individualized evening lockup to acquire as if it needed it a scientific name and description—and did Larry get his visiting rites (smile) form?—and going round and then round one night a small tenement apartment building superintended by the father of his beloved, round and round so that the island of Manhattan all around that square block dissolved; as round and round the current of this one young guy’s voice itself (with contributions from the audience) might go and the playground fence disintegrate while that voice sought what power over current events only his buried spirit knew and did not yet tell, for to him it was as unconscious then at first as what swarmed deep behind his pride the day he concluded his sometime (by Eric, by Joey, by Hector Ramirez, and by others) interrupted remarks upon the need for blacks in city government and a new Israel in New Zealand and Australia where there’d be more space which might encourage Russia to unload more of its Jews—and halting in mid-word to find, hands in pockets diagonally down the block, Miriam’s father glaring from the newspaper store which had always been within earshot as, standing right behind him, Mrs. Erhard even when she would not muscle her bulk out from behind the sugar-and-nicotine counter and step outside to see with her protruding eyes what she had heard, would testify—if you are receiving all that, Jim.

Miriam had foretold that he would appear one Sunday I was there. He had had scarcely a word for me ever, but here and now was willing I should have words that happened to apply to him.

He never spoke afterward of my plan for resettling Jews in the Pacific, but he almost never spoke to me anyhow. Miriam slept late that Sunday, later even than this dreamer. Two little girls with little white hats led my eye down the block to two double-parked cars bumper to bumper and when I caught sight of Miriam’s father who never got his Sunday News at Erhard’s, I didn’t know where Mir’ was. I was seeing screens even then but when you’re ahead of your time (smile), how you going to know it’s O.K. what you’re doing, it’s natural?

Eric was a black kid who squinted and concentrated when he talked and the only black kid I ever knew who did squint, said they had to get high up in the unions to get power in City Hall, but his father made good money rewiring people’s apartments, he just knock a hole in the wall and a hole in the ceiling, wiggle his cable up inside the wall and along inside the ceiling, never know it’s there—Joey, an Italian kid who was always saying he was giving a big party at Easter, at Christmas, you name it, and there was always a hitch (I’m going off the screen), this Joey said, "Georgie, you can start any car, so come over my house, my brother got carburetor problems, he got to go to my cousin’s wedding in Jersey," this was what I had to put up with. But when Hector Ramirez—whose brother is a super but he races his car every weekend—was watching the game, says, "What if the Jews don’t want to go to Australia? they got a desert there too," little Gonzalez, he’s the only Jew listening besides Miriam’s father (who’s ten miles or ten millimeters away and don’t want to get into a shouting match but my name is mud now), little G.’s dribbling round and round the back court, they’re all after him only he sticks his ass in High Kool’s face and dribbles right away from the basket, fakes his ICBM right back over his head then looks left and fakes a dribble right and just starts backing in toward the basket, two, three guys faked out, right and left, and all the time Gonzalez is talking, talking, "Jews willing to share City Hall, that’s the way, it ain’t who’s commissioner but whose pocket is he in," while High Kool’s bending over Gonzalez’s shoulder, those half-albino speckled hands, it’s only a matter of time, and Gonzalez can’t last and at this moment, Jim—like I know in the beginning of your trips here you said you didn’t know why you were here but at that time really you thought you did, so now when you wouldn’t say it, you maybe truly don’t know, but only because of the two-screen system, am I right?—little Gonzalez about to be wiped out calls over one shoulder, "What’s the southernmost state in the Union?" and during the second that High Kool’s body awash with colloidal fluids counts one-two and High Kool calls out, "Hawaii, man, Hawaii," Gonzalez with double-wrist snap topspin like gravity, man, like a tough pitcher’s sinker ball, two-hands the ball blind back up over his shoulder and everyone except H. K. and little G. turn and watch the mother go in.

But what, then, Jim, is it you are watching wherever you are? Miriam’s father disappear? Mrs. Erhard’s little pistol under the candy-and-cigarette counter with the lottery tickets? The whereabouts of a known Chilean economist living quietly in a great American city? But you know by now where. But you know, otherwise I couldn’t communicate it to you, that you got to follow both screens, they’ll always overlap not too much. So Jim once I was someone that knew the Chilean economist, while now I am just someone, am I right? And sometimes kidded dreamlike by these queries of yours—like, you sure the forkful of mashed wasn’t a spoonful?—you know, inertia between the tines? no matter how gluey the missile.

And you are a guy who comes here to do when you get down to it what we want: talk about our travels (smile) and the effect on our magic armchairs of the energy crisis, we being ahead of our times; talk about our trials and travels (smile), swap news; and where you position a photo, and while the colloidal particles with billions of unseeable faces and more all the time if we could only economize and move at random unless you commence the centrifugal, which is only in emergency unless you can make yourself either do it unconscious or find the neighborhood of messages that’s meant for you and for you to grain in on ‘cause it’s impossible not to give when you receive, you might lend your ears but there’s no lending there’s only giving, and you better live with your particles so you know how to work with them and their feeling for all other particles and so send what you want to send and only to whom it may concern and wherever my ma is in all this, her mashed potatoes ain’t gluey, Jim, but wherever the Chilean economist and wife live, she, he tells me, in her independent tailing of the journalist who has been after her husband, met a feminist leader named Grace Kimball and through her a woman named Sue, who left her son and husband and talks about nothing but sex and the mirrored candlelighting ceremonies of the sisterhood, which makes the Chilean economist think himself in a new world with customs strange as some early language—but makes me, Jim, think, Isn’t Larry’s mother named Sue?

Sometimes the gap between screens is so great, Jim, it’s hard I have to say from personal experience (which may not be news, pal, but—) like between that Sunday (remember?) and three going on four years later like nothing in between, although the apartment that came vacant in Mir’s building can’t have been the first in all that time but was only the second that she and I had ever used.

And you go back and forth between that Sunday when Miriam’s dad got my unconscious message as I did, just before he disappeared either up the block or into Mrs. Erhard’s, and all those months that there’s no calendar for later when I got Mir’s message unknown to herself as one, which by then I was advanced enough to know she only thought she was holding back from me, covered as it was by the irrelevant, immaterial News—conveyed to me when I visited her at her part-time full-time office that shall be nameless and probably hires out its own huge return like a dentist his own teeth ("To whom am I speaking?" she says when she before I hardly said Hello excuses herself and picks up the phone and names her employer whom I will not give free advertising to and listens to some doubtless lunatic for a moment—oh, "to whom am I speaking?" was message of herself enough but not the aforementioned News when she gets back to me to the effect that (if Jim you are really there) she thought her father didn’t like her seeing me, my family Catholic, this after how many years, oh what a memorized speech, yet then plus an unrehearsed He thinks you’re anti-Semitic. Well, did I let her have it, oh yes. But I was reacting to her unsaid message my particles had taken on their collective kissers and gotten together (without telling me so I knew what’s happening to me).

Later I have more words for it. Oh coarse as a suspension of undrinkable water, unpalatable air, slippery as emulsion of milk, pure as a solution of salt water do with it what you will, ladies have been known to douche with it, lovely Chilean llamas lap it up, great men not realizing others of their era have come upon the same discovery independently gargle on it while once in a century a grasshopper will sail three hundred seventy nautical miles over it without wetting a knee like psychopaths who get from one place to the next without concern for route or their shadow cast along it—no wonder the message hit the colloid stuff and population of my brain and body as it did carrying its sender with it though she would never be advanced enough to tell why she then felt so clutched and intruded on in all her little folds and joints, oh I knew her, Jim, this beloved that I had to go to since she wasn’t coming to me, right?

Not right, you tell me in secret, Jim, as quick as Miriam’s father quite long before on that Sabbath at the playground fence when I was a bit old for that scene and Miriam had overslept and not come, but her father had.

In order to receive along that diagonal between my aging (smile) scene and the newspaper store of Mrs. Erhard, who I kidded warning her I might have to take her arsenal off her if she did not manage to get held up, a message from his beloved’s beloved that he couldn’t have received, but could not, if he had not been in me already, I give him credit I had reached him as if he and I had found that we knew the language of crows or of bloodhounds and always had known and he wanted to be reached, we sought each other and a billion particles had already joined in that encounter which is peaceful energy though not slow, believe me beyond speed, why the opposite of any lower speed, and the not exactly wordless message registered between us for me as for him, gelling and de-gelling with all that power meshed across our charged, multiplying surfaces (oh thanks Juan and Juan’s ancient book and all later confirmations of what, like the dual screens, was gift if not essentially needed), yet knowing what you’re doing is often best while centrally and at bottom none, Jim, is like the message that comes unforeseen from a meeting of suspecting minds: YOU WANT TO CONTROL MIRIAM TO GROW UP TO STAY HOME WITH YOU AND IF THE LATEST YOU’LL LET HER BE OUT IS SO EARLY WE JUST HAVE TO OUT-EARLY YOU AND HAVE OUR PARTY WHERE THERE’S NO NEED TO COME HOME (where we were, the only direction was Stay Put).

But Gonzalez is into his dribbling dialectic that lasted for ages and High Kool with the half-albino hands now gone from here except for Sundays, and gone from tenth grade to unload hosiery trucks in a high, echoing workday street in the West Twenties, not gone on to some all-black college "five" your TV imagines for you reaches around Gonzalez further, further, and Miriam’s dad is gone but not from my closed-circuit screen between which and its counterpart screen I’m your correspondent at a slambang Red Communist Mainland Chinese world Ping-Pong final, snap my head back and forth carrying nose, eyes, eardrums, and that jaw of mine which sustains its own separate but relative motion until it is once and for all fixed in immobility yet even then with the strap of totalitarian homogeneity across it the immobility of a ventriloquist whose power source is limitless: I see on one screen here a Friday sundown (for I was almost there) and with fish a needlessly costly offering to the day when no one in the house cared for it and when you could have sun-yellow rice, sizzling green peppers, hottest chorizo sausage, and ice cream to wash it far away and one candle because a fuse blew just as the phone rang, and at my end of the line I heard Iris say, "Forget it, I got a candle." "Forget it?" says Mir’s father. "Forget it until after dinner." "Well tell Miriam get off the phone, it’s time to eat." "You tell her." ("So what’s for supper, kid?" "I gotta go." "Come on, make my mouth water." "You know, for God’s sake, pork chops, rice, peppers." "How do I know?" "You know what I mean." "I’ll buy you an ice cream." "I got a gallon in already." "Can I have some, Mir’?" "How much?—oh shoot, I gotta go." "So I’ll see you later, Mir’?" "How much later?") The screen runneth over with— hard softening.

Old Testament or New, Jim?—oh you wouldn’t know.

Runneth to that other screen, there is no over-screen, and on that other is a Friday-night white tablecloth, white T-shirt, white mashed potatoes, white haddock on a large, white oval platter, one still-folded white paper napkin held down by an unconfessed knife pointing (a) between a dish of (raw) onion slices and a white saucepan of peas and diced carrots, (b) through a can of beer and the diamond ring on the hand holding the can lifting it, tilting it without a hitch as a voice not of the hand, a voice picked up silently by racing, bombarding particles swirling round until there is emptiness at the heart, says, "So where’s the tartar sauce?—and where’s Georgie? Who does he think he is, he can start paying room and board, that’s what he can do."

So where’s Miriam’s Friday-night Jewish father get off calling Catholic? On the day of rest where’s young George Foley but substituting world affairs for my mother’s beloved Mass prior to having a beer later with Mir’ or once on a blue afternoon, the sun pouring through the meshed bones of my uncertain head taking (as they say) a drive to see the animals ganging up on each other in Coney Island or to walk an early spring beach when perhaps I was at my best.

Round and round I’ve gone, you’re tossing the rich, dark-red tie material across once, twice, before casually but just-right drawing the long end through the big knot, and like some history I read you’re following me, although the questions have changed, though never like Barbara-Jean and Larry’s—oh what an evening that was! Do many guys get extra food from home? Anybody play chess? Do you get to go to trade school as soon as you arrive here (haven’t put it very well, she said)? Get any airlifts?—got a landing field next door—

and now you want (if that’s the word for you) to know how Mir’s old man (not too old, I confess; fifty-eight? a lifer ready to see parole board, trying not to miss any shadow of his shaver) was there to hear my New Israel comments (you’re quick for a guy who acts slow though drives like a demon), and what had my particle message to Miriam’s father to do with her unknowing one to me three, four years later?

Well, I might not be able to keep two former missionaries (in sweaters) straight, but I keep my two screens close and I know the street-dealer type that came with the Chilean economist who you stopped asking questions about (though truthfully you got me to speak of the Chilean and never asked me a direct question about him or his sidekick who had to be the one known to have speckled wrists who threatened to blow the Chilean’s cover because he sure as hell had speckled wrists: but that’s for spies and) the Chilean isn’t spying, is he?, but wants privacy for himself and his wife (right?) who I hear did counter-intelligence of her own against this journalist who may be the same as the one with speckles I saw here in the Visitors Room who irritated this calm South American gentleman so that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see violence on the far side of the Visitors Counter no doubt related to this husband’s fears for his lovely wife whom I have not met, while her fears are for her husband, as it should be no doubt, so it’s back and forth and round but you must know all you need to know in that quarter and still you communicate with me one way or another while the journalism rap session which is really what it’s gotten to be threatens to die out so you with your correspondent’s eye for a story—for history in the making though you said you take no view of history—ask, So how did the white T-shirt of a certain father who shall be nameless needing no further free advertising in this space react to a catapulted payload of lumpy real spuds right where there should have been decal’d a raunchy friendly joke or a picture of a President or a slogan to add a little life to this retirement compound and any other multiple dwelling you have in mind as a multi-center of commercially viable meditation, and now they’re putting under surveillance what has gone on too long though what key will ever open their hatred of themselves which is all part of an orbital merry-go-round opening to a numerous few a vacant center of peaceful communication known perhaps only to those who have found the Colloidal Unconscious but know that into its center, from that all but endless round touched for energy’s sake by the back-and-forth dual-screen speed, may come at any time a wild shot in the dark and I or you or, and he knows it, by chance a bigger man than you or I may be assassinated.

Three, four years you seem to have gotten into your head, more years than that join Miriam’s pointed message to mine co-hosted with her dad. Long years in fact afterward her father I am told appeared at the new entrance wing of the prison without visiting permission form plus knowing too well that I could not receive him. His plan was stopped, whatever, and I never asked how he got up here, he never to my knowledge drove.

Through Efrain I have kept in touch. He’s out, as you know because I heard you met him the night he slipped through a pickpocket area suddenly into a warp within warp where your pocket gets a valuable put into it. In touch with the Chilean, that is. Or tried—to be honest.

And he has, the Chilean tried to keep up his pithy letters to me. On economic topics, though he has been encouraged to expand his coverage to those political margins associated with his earlier conversations overheard or not here in visitors’ "quarters" (smile) with friend of reported anti-Castro Cuban in danger of life here inside though reported to be being processed toward some unknown escape and is the Chilean mixed up in that?—it is immaterial, next to that bond between us. Better his letters on full employment, substitutions in the marketplace, the as my friend puts it undoubted motion of corporate inertia against the sinister resilience of this country’s technological inventiveness in the matter of alternative energy though never once at the national level consulting the Colloidal Unconscious as it emerged from body-brain fluid states finding the jump to mind. He names no names, not that of his old friend, the late Dr. Allende, whose fate he I believe sees as his own but I can’t find anything out, I didn’t know the inmate or anyone who did know well the inmate our Chilean gentleman visited that day we met diagonally across the Visitors Counter, there’s a pattern here, no doubt the ever-dividing particles dispersed non-visibly in the colloid total of my self—my whole body is my self, I see; you who may have come among us for political information re: an exile economist and a supposedly pro-Castro Cuban inmate rumored to be set to spring—you have helped me to see it—have plotted in my unconscious this pattern and some message which is to me or from me or both and which will be me is in the works. This is more than consolation, as everything worthwhile must be, Jim, and I felt myself, for a sub-micro-instant that’s as small as one of the colloid particles, say it in a Spanish language that I never have studied or learned—you speak it a little, you said, and regret your daughter does not—but the impulse went back into the cloud it came from. Better the instructive letters I now and then receive from the Chilean than those visits Carlos gets from an elder liberal lady with a secret pocket for mints and non-sugar chewing gums in her shiny bag, a lady with scarce a grain of dialectic in her who gives him his subscription to the Times and after smiling bravely at him for an hour shows strong, true feeling only when his sister or uncle comes and she plays second fiddle but lately has proven her devotion to truth by a special letter to the Governor reluctantly urging, we hear, that for Carlos’s own well-being he delay Carlos’s clemency despite the seventeen hundred or twenty-seven hundred letters supporting his clemency petition on file in the State House we like to imagine and in a crate of files (the carbons) which Carlos rereads and shares with me by hand since our cells are too far from each other on the gallery for him to read aloud around the corner.

If I do not leave here, I have no need to. The hunt for the unit of value goes on in person and is no respecter of place. Neither is the ever-increasing speed of dual-but-separate-screen grasp, a speed so constant it could be maddening to its host but for the Colloidal Unconscious, its many-faceted spread, calm, content, its endless particles of difference charging the host to make contact from time to time through this medium that adapts itself to centrifugal coagulation-sedimentation to clear things up and to the huge good power mirroring itself in endless division of particles it’s a gift that says we all have it and (let me confess) must misuse it so, Jim—

—so that we penetrate the D-fences, send or receive (i GOT A NEW BOYFRIEND, Mir’s message came to me, ONLY IT’S BEEN GOING A LONG TIME, HE’S AN ACCOUNTANT) yes, when instead we should be going round and round; and then when we should be sending, receiving, we instead go round and round precipitating a void where the center was. Am I right?

So you came here—well, once a week—started your own brand of social work, more entertaining therefore more valuable than most, at this retirement complex, and it’s how I now have all to myself that family window though you’re almost missing from it, where I see your grandfather with a pistol on the mantel unbending two or three times a year to sing, ‘Tut on your old gray bonnet / With the blue ribbons on it / And we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," almost missing but not quite missing because here you were, singing briefly for a lively audience of cons, a song I’d never heard, and if I hadn’t they hadn’t, though blue ribbon even I a city guy (even now in a multiple dwelling in the country occupied by mainly city guys) know is first prize they pin on a horse at a horse show. Sixty, eighty thousand miles traveled, two or three times round the earth, and still a town boy with a family, though we have pianos in the City too, though none in Miriam’s or my home though I hear the conductor bought my sister a blond-wood upright which no one ever touches, she told me, and you don’t get a man like your grandpa to sing unless he’s accompanied, think who might pass by and look in the window: Foley a generation later, if I broke out—and more interested in how you fit into that window your old white Caddy you bought to give to your daughter in Wash-inton, a grand gesture to be sure at nine miles to the gallon but any guy here could dig it—blue-ribbon horsepower and I’m glad she took your gift in good humor (I sense you’d been unsure): you say the Chilean has a brother in Washington—now that I didn’t know but Efrain (who would never come back to visit) wrote asking if that dealer-duck’s-ass-into-a-ponytail type guy had been back to visit, he’d run into Efrain near Penn Station and asked what he knew about the murder of the wife of a South American newspaper publisher ten, fifteen years ago and had he been in Philadelphia the other day, the economist’s brother was there for some opera singer’s recital—and Efrain is scared—mainly by the guy, not his information, though he would not admit it—but what do they stick your daughter for insurance, she’s under twenty-five, maybe my information is old. But why be so damn ready for the future, it’s here, to recall a peculiar point about future you dropped which nobody but me picked up on, so that everybody but me nodded thoughtfully, you know? But a touch of old-fashioned class, give or take a tender valve or two, Jim-Daddy, might even get her an interesting friend or two in the nation’s capital. I wrote letters to the editor once upon a time on the subject of Australia, etcetera, but also of having some good old-fashioned taste in the design and beauty of the automobiles you choose to get into, and I dreamed of seeing an article in the paper with my name on it and of taking Miriam up and down the Hudson River in a hired helicopter, so I must have been looking forward to that corner of your aforementioned window where you can be seen rising off a Manhattan pier in the middle of the day in transit to JFK jet but for the moment watching out the window some cops on the pier, a TV crew, a tugboat, and a diver just coming up the ladder onto the pier in his black rubber suit, TV news possibly but no network sign in evidence and something else wrong with that, you looked back down there as long as you could but—and I, too, sense something in that scene familiar (to you, I mean). Or was it, Jim, that you said sometimes you leave people where they are. ("Very funny," said Efrain, the only one of us then soon to be paroled.) To which I’d add leave some of your stories where they are and don’t look back too close, like at the man and woman upside down in seat-belt harness the blood dry on their alert faces but the car wheels still spinning, I don’t pretend to know where you were, it must have been up in the high magnetic mountains where the air friction’s less (smile), although I grant it occurred to me more than once because Mir’ liked to drive fast, an accident, a fatal accident—well, close the window, if you like—a dual fatality they would have said, leaving us where we were. In time. Oh say her name, Jim, I say her. They can’t hang me for that. Not in the state I’m in (smile) for which the future for all I know may already have developed colloid-boosters to phase out imbalances such as what inclined us two. I mean you and me, since there was little hope for my Miriam to take control of her life. Her father had boxed her in, while only I called her "Mir’."

Dual fatality leaving us where we were, I said.

That way I hold between screens of her which is just my speed back and forth between screens. While life goes on somewhere else, in Chile, in Manhattan, and here, and names do double duty in, say, a room I would aspire to be in in person one day so real you made it for me, the apartment Larry and his father’s, and there was a man whose wife had just had her baby and she was contemplating a chair where she stood by the stereo when a short man with a beard came over and poured her another drink, looking you were sure right through her dress as her husband across the room was too pointedly asking you what you’d do if you learned later that someone else was the father, and you know this guy talking was letting go a little and you looked at his wife who caught your eye so that though she smiled at the guy with the beard she let you know she was uncomfortable and looked from the bearded guy to the chair through you as if a glance at you was the real reason (remember you told me this?) though later she sat down tired but at this moment Larry’s mother walked in the front door which must have been open and Larry’s father said, having forgotten the new father’s dumb question to you, called out, "Sue!"—because he hadn’t expected her, and the guy whose wife had the baby took it as the answer to his question and clapped you on the shoulder, you don’t like him—freeze—cut—frost on the family window but there’s the music, grandpa singing "Your old blue bonnet," Ruth M. Heard disliked singing because she said she couldn’t sing and she thought it was always an excuse not to talk and think, which was why she preferred Scots to Irelanders as drinking companions, but someone is thinking in that New Jersey living room far from current events because a bigger and bigger hole’s being breathed in the frost and there’s your granddad finishing up to applause and the accompanist (it’s your mother, oh yes she played piano too) rising and stepping out of the picture so I feel guilty for hardly seeing she was there, but listen, Jim, I like her, but who cares what I think, I mean in an odd way she’s not there but very much alive, you never got into your family much and I didn’t ask, but it’s definitely a blue-ribbon window, man, I’ll leave them where they are unless they got any objections, like you did a kindness to the woman you know who you spotted crying in the street and stopping by the liquor store and then she went in the phone booth like it was an emergency, it was cool not to offer assistance though you know her though you said so much happening in New York your attention got distracted by three guys on strike in front of the restaurant, I’d like to step into a phone booth, make a call like I used to, though now only to a guy in another block, can’t stay put, know what you mean two places at once, maybe that time you’re in the shower you thought you were in New Mexico because they haven’t got the water out there (no joke if you got arthritis like Aunt Iris have to take three hot baths a day), who’s laughing? someone’s laughing in the shower, you tell me your dream I’ll tell you mine, my uncle’s bar song, oh it’s Miriam, the two of us shivering in our boots a week before St. Pat’s standing like in a phone booth together while she calls home but in a shower stall in a beach house waiting for the water to come on—no, it’s not raining outside, I’m telling a true story—and both of us knowing at the same instant why of course the fuckin’ water’s been turned off for the winter but a shower wasn’t what we needed as much as a good laugh.

Which was what you had more with Ruth M. Heard (for I’m reminded by one of your queries, Jim, Did little Gonzalez make that back-over-the-head shot before High Kool left the tenth grade or after?).

R. M. Heard had friends, at least the day she walked in and not quite all of us cheered and she said we were going on an educational trip, which substitutes never did, and she had to laugh at that—get out of the classroom situation fast as we can. The friends, three guys, were parked by the playground fence in three Volkswagen vans, no one in authority impeded our descent to the first floor, though at first three girls got together and said they needed permission, they didn’t like this trip obviously, and Ruth Heard said they’d got it the wrong way round, they’d need permission not to go, and then she laughed and said they had permission to go to the lavatory . . . no, the water fountain—but urged them to make use of the time (and we’d all realized this wasn’t the last class of the day and we’d be on the trip) and Ruth told them, the three girls who kept staring at one another and no one else, that if anyone came they were to say we were studying City history firsthand and meanwhile sit at their desks and write an account of all they did in the P.M. after school was out, even Miriam laughed there, the secretary in the hall office by the front door scowled with her usual confidence, and we had paired off I remember without being told as if we were going to give the New Amsterdam exhibit at the City Museum a repeat visit, which as I remember is a hell of a way, but it was the unknown, that’s why little Gonzalez didn’t slap some kid ahead of him going downstairs in the neck and get poked back, that’s why the black girls didn’t act up as a group, that’s why High Kool paused half bent over the water fountain watching us pass like a thought he had never had before, an unplanned surprise—so we were introduced to our drivers, each of them, our teacher claimed, a rich American—"Light Moving" was the sign on one van, and I predicted to Miriam (who I recall had grabbed my hand after I’d dropped hers and then she’d dropped mine) that the transmission was going to go; and before we knew it our caravan had run a couple of lights and kids were shoving the windows open and we had stopped along one side of Union Square so we could get out and be asked what socialism was and be told who had given speeches here, and someone got Eric mad saying, Hey Eric there’s your father, Eric, of a blond-Afro’d black junky, then back into the vans like a battalion on the move, same seats except Ruth Heard was in our van now pointing out a tree where a bomb went off in eighteen-something, though the very quiet but roughest girl said clearly so we all picked it up, They didn’t have bombs like ours then, but R. M. Heard was asking such things we were too stupid or young for as what was revolutionary about the American Revolution and nobody knew, and someone said, They bombed the tea boat, and when Premier Khrushchev comes for a visit next year what would you show him that would tell him what this country is like? (Fire hydrant in summertime—Yeah, hit oil, man—Gusher City) but soon the fine stone of City Hall was being pointed out in its park by the Brooklyn Bridge which most of us (City Hall) had never seen, and in the middle of telling us that this was where the Flour Riot began with a whole lot of high speeches because flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel which meant that a loaf of bread cost the bakers more to bake and they had less profit, right or wrong?—silence, and a passing patrolman called Wrong!, same profit, higher price, Ruth Heard stopped our van and she transferred to the third van without stopping her talk for a minute though I heard through the window that the rioters were marching downtown to offer one of the big flour merchants eight dollars a barrel, and presently we were way downtown near a church so Ruth could show us where an iron door was ripped off and used to batter down the other doors, whereas there was a revolving door now where she pointed. Which when I mentioned this to the old weather-sciencer in a letter he recalled as a building where his (great?) uncle the first New York thinker to weigh wind as an architectural element had hidden a fugitive girl when she was fleeing her "very other self." Jim, I feel you refusing to question me?

Meanwhile dozens of barrels of flour were rolled into the street and the heads broken open and a kid named James was throwing barrels of flour out into the street from an upper story calling, "Here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel," which was what it should have been selling at perhaps, and the constabulary could do nothing with the anger of the mob which was organized from its inception north of City Hall at the present site and it was the first riot in "your history," the lady told us, where the poor ripped off the property of the rich and a New York paper called it the beginning of the French Revolution, did anyone know what the French Revolution was—no one in this junior high class did, and one of the drivers asked who the George Washington Bridge had been named after and a black kid said, Martha’s man. Anyway here was the Flour Riot of 1837, never forgot it, Jim, so what if the building had changed, and it was inflation panic, Ruth said, did we know what inflation was? the voice held us, not the words which is often the case with colloid communication, prices going up, what do you do when the landlord hits you for twice what your pad is worth like me, said Ruth M. Heard, because you see, rent went right up with flour in 1836-37, right? (Right!) and why was that (why the bakers, a man’s voice called, owned all the real estate) and as Ruth called out these questions, three older ladies with small hats came out at the door of a restaurant to smile, and I said, We got rent control now. Ruth called, Well what about the poor landlord, you watch, the City ups his property taxes and you and your family go on paying peanuts for your apartment; I said You’re taking both sides—her voice came at you deepened, like harsh pellets whipping through the sunlight. I reached for Miriam’s hand, she was over by a vendor with Gonzales buying a hot dog, the cost of flour had gone to twelve dollars a barrel. Ruth asked what was a monopoly, one of our drivers as stocky as a snatch-and-press fanatic here on the farm cut in and gave a teacher-type answer that sounded English to me until she told him compassion was death and he could shut up now and the point was the flour people had made flour and wheat scarce by hiding them in the warehouse till the price went up: see the flour in the streets, our substitute called, and our twofold divided group on the sidewalk had been joined by slow-moving late-lunchtime people and messengers one with an enlarged head, one not, and anybody you want to think of was looking up at James’s windows. And as the flour and sacks of wheat came down, rent went up, now how do you figure that, think of what the street looked like! Think of life outside.

But we were back in the vans now—Jim, I’ve been over every square foot of that trip in here, I have the map, I have the pictures of old New York—and we were headed to the fish market to see historic Coenties Slip with the little houses that looked like they might fall down, which was where the rioters wound up smashing windows and doors and ten more barrels emptied. But at this point, Jim, our substitute reintroduced one of her wealthy Americans, the strong one, as the man who was going to buy us hamburgers with the works at three o’clock and I don’t know how many hamburgers and sodas went down, this is 1958, 1959, but I was the only one who could tell without counting hamburgers and sodas that little Gonzales and Miriam had been missing since the last stop and I figured Gonzalez knew what he was doing if Miriam didn’t, for this was only junior high and Gonzalez went everywhere with his father and often alone to do with his father’s lamp business. It was irresponsible of me and of Ruth Heard not to, respectively, do something and know about the two absentees, but when we arrived back at the school in our vans there was High Kool making his moves and dunking a few, and the roughest girl in the class, Louise, laughed at something Ruth said and looked over her shoulder and caught me looking at her and I gave her the grin, and a thought came in one eye and out the other—and no Gonzalez though there was an explanation, little G. had had a business appointment several blocks uptown and Miriam accompanied him, an errand for his father. Ruth M. Heard kept me or I her talking by the playground fence and she was telling how she had heard about the brain drain from Britain and had decided to come over in case any rubbed off on her, and how she was Jewish and so was New York which I was ready to believe though not that this small blue-eyed rambunctious woman with her accent could be Jewish. She said, You’re ahead of the others, I suspect way ahead—but how old are you? What’s going to happen to you? Two teachers, two men, had come down the steps with a cop, it was late, they seemed to be approaching but this was the time of day and really they were waiting, and Ruth M. Heard said, Here comes trouble, I could walk her home another time, but I had said nothing about walking her home, Jim.

"You were thinking it," you reply, picking up what I would have said had I not known you would pick it up.

Yes, and there I stood at the playground fence, it had begun to rain and High Kool stopped short with the ball hanging from one hand and looked upward. I felt the city, this block and the few other blocks I knew well, south going down to Fourteenth and east to the river, you know the area I know, and while my parents’ building and others like it still stand, now being occupied by, as my father used to say, "off-islanders" (Hispanics) but I happen to know also by gypsies from New Jersey via Rumania, and rocked by bongo drops (suddenly a drum is ther^, two drums, and guys have cut out to play them) and opened here and there by dust-choking construction sites like everywhere else in the city where kids play and imagine shortcuts through to other Arab- and Australian-financed construction sites leading mayhap to a brand-new disaster area where their own building was this morning, which may be what happened to Juan’s little brother like Efrafn who passed into the very heart of pickpocket land where you get the opposite, ungraphable, unpredictable, and anti-pickpocket warp where instead of your pocket being picked, valuable stuff comes into your pocket.

And suddenly, retreating from me to face the music for the first of many times and she could care less, Ruth M. Heard left me at the fence dreaming of speaking, starting somewhere between ahead of myself and retarded— speaking of what then I did not know, thinking nonetheless of, well mostly bullshit, Jim, but also of Ruth M. Heard’s father, who I thought might have died, yes hit by a bullet while speaking his mind on some great current event, and there beside me was Miriam looking over her shoulder telling me our substitute was in a shouting match down there (her eyes slightly wall-eyed like some thought came back to me seeing me but . . . you know).

But I had not noticed what she reported; no at that moment I was speaking my mind with an eye on the fence, the mesh steel the action viewed through the diamond holes which went away when you looked at the guys through them stopped, gathered around High Kool, all looking into the sky, and like taking up position in advance SQ you’re the one who is fouled, not the guy who couldn’t check himself when you stopped and he ran into you, I can imagine basketball is the key to everything but these guys didn’t play with fouls, and I didn’t want to go home but looked at Miriam wondering when I’d get angry about her disappearing with little Gonzalez and saw that she hadn’t registered a word I’d said, because I was speaking in my mind, and I looked at Ruth tossing her head of thick heavy curls twice our age and shaking her finger at the men, and I thought I would like to speak on how the poor women gathered into their own bags the wastes of flour and wheat from the barrels and wheat sacks spewed by the rioters into the street and how maybe the rain—what month was it? I (didn’t know—came down and mixed in with the flour near the fishmarket until you had a block-long of dough and immigrant demonstrators heated in the oven of the City freely sprinkled with if not sugar as Mir’s Aunt Iris did, then by a free hydrant. But I knew that current events were of more use: a human newspaper I found myself, but talking mainly to Ruth Heard who believe me knew too much and was too much for the authorities to permit her to exist. And then I got angry at Mir’ and walked her home, and she said I was crazier than Miss Heard when I said, Here’s all this news coming in from Russia, from Algeria to see if General De Gaulle can end the war, from uptown and from Wall Street, and I’m not there, I’m here stuck in a neighborhood, know what I mean? "Vacuum-packed for burial in space" I wouldn’t have said then because it had not been said yet, though I don’t mind taking it from the journalist the Chilean met at the launch named Spence I think for he’ll take a thing or two from me like all the rest before we all get sick of ripping each other off.

Neighborhood? There you’re getting close to home, and I confess the school was not a jungle school, not like Juan’s uptown where if they’d had the personnel they’d checked the kids coming into class like passengers emplaning for Florida or Israel. No, my neighborhood, Jim, I go round and round some blocks of it and I don’t understand.

Where’s the mountain in Smitty’s poem? It’s settling down, a new mountain that bends my mind, while that old neighborhood comes in from the top down looking for the street sniping at me with eyes but more like something heavy and rusty that got thrown at me out a window or off the top rung of a construction site. Who did it? I’ll never know, I got to make a move, I’ve got custody of a very, very small pistol in the pocket of a leather jacket that I hardly know how it operates, I never did know one piece from another, I know carburetors, Jim, not like a mechanic but by ear, by touch, and I know pickup and timing. Shall we speak of the weather? Who said that? Ruth M. Heard when I was seventeen or sixteen and unexpectedly finally collected my rain check and walked her home to a different apartment. Speak of the weather—what was it the Chilean economist said to me? That neighborhood comes in, and I’m not here, is what I said except it was the news. Mrs. Erhard (and her tiny firearm)—whose customers come and go. The clip-joint garage around the corner where I take cars up in the elevator, motor running, car rising, run them around the roof, two three four, shift them in twenty seconds, get them in the right spot, or unpark them, bring them down idling and on a cold day missing, missing, no time to warm them up, bring them in for a landing like blinkered ships from Mars that have aged on the trip here.

The Precinct with ten twelve white-and-green squad cars double-parked filling up the street with emptiness and here and there a radio voice, and across the street down two steps the gun and equipment store, and the training cops coming out of Precinct Headquarters with their black bags and was it gray uniforms? not full-fledged, I don’t know how it works, it’s a career with early retirement.

Two blocks down and around the corner our dingy brick church with long, wide, slightly curving steps and the white-and-colored altar you can see if you stand across the street down from the black-and-blue awning of the undertaker and his double-doors down two—no, one step, brownstone.

Couple of pizza joints a block apart, one with the booths down one side where we sat and a wise kid who works there with big horn-rimmed glasses bigger than his face who’s giving us a lot of shit across the counter and the girls are threatening him; the other, a take-out with Sicilian and regular Guinea pizza, the Sicilian like cake. What color are the cop cars?

And it comes like particles in the wind, snowing me, pouring in and I’m the funnel, but you know that already some bull on the corner of Third Avenue is yelling to some bull two blocks away, "Hey Johnny," "Hey Eddie," "Hey Marco," "Hey Eric" "Hey Sal," when a refrigerator truck stops for the light and blocks the view and the guy goes on yelling, under the truck, around the front, over the top, through the high cab where the driver with his arm on the rolled-down window ledge looks straight ahead, gunning the motor.

Six flights up, I’m old enough now, taking a can of beer out of the icebox, shaking it a few times, get a rise out of my mother—"it’s going to go all over the floor, Georgie"; my dad standing in the kitchen door, "At it again, fuckin’ freeloader."

Telling them when I’m in high school about Ruth Heard. Why do I? I know what they’ll say, do you understand, Jim? I know what they’re going to say but I still go ahead and tell them. Very smart lady, funny, went to college in London, England, fastest tongue in the East—dismissed, reappeared, dismissed, disappeared, rehired as substitute still talking, still doing it her way, calling New York schools so bad they might not be an instrument of the class system after all, commanding us to write down the best lies we could think up: "Eric can beat up Jeannette because boys are stronger than girls" (when the truth was that Eric had hypnotic powers and everyone knew it and in those days boys had more pockets than girls and Eric had some very bad things in his pockets, no mere switchblade knife but tricky electrical devices he said his father had taught him to miniaturize). (But, no no, said Ruth Heard, that lie’s just confusing, it’s not persuasive; get to what matters, what we live with.) "My father don’t go to church on Sundays because my mother takes care of that side." (But that’s no lie, that’s true, isn’t that true?) "Someone I know, her sister she’s getting married now not waiting till June because she wants to get out of the house she can’t stand it no more." (Getting out of the house? Ah yes, a substitute for the real reason, and a good substitute, and so a persuasive lie. Right.) "If you study hard you will get a good job." (Well look at me, I’m a product of the English school system, ruined my eyes, speak two languages, don’t read any more, only speak, intelligent, brave, and beautiful, and here I am, waiting to get started.) "America is the best country." (Of course it is, that’s why I came.) "This is where the money is—I wasn’t finished, Mrs. Heard." (Not "missus," thanks but no thanks, marriage is important, it’s one of the most interesting and dangerous ways of distinguishing between two people. Otherwise, religious cant.)

No one asked her what "cant" was; and so she asked us. Quite a person. I said there was no such word, and that got a laugh out of her.

"Sounds like a Communist," my sister says, getting ready to come out of her room. "She speaks the King’s English, I’ll give her that," says my mother in her rapid way that wasn’t only her relief at finding something sensible to say but also her secret protection against being found out to be a bright woman who didn’t want to be especially noticed—bearing a tall can of grated Parmesan cheese out of the kitchen. "What do you mean she speaks the King’s English," says my father, "you never met her. They all come over here. You can’t even be sure of the English immigrants any more. This is where the money is." He has enjoyed all four of his statements, each strong and taken together better than he could have even guessed from his chair, and they earn him the right to go on being clear of the rest of us as he hauls himself out of the easy chair and stumbles yawning and stretching to the head of the table. "Who knows why she’s here," I say; "but it ain’t the money and it isn’t the job." "Make up your mind, Georgie," says my father. "Yeah," says my sister, but I’m not looking back and forth between them. "She can speak Spanish," I reveal. "Well, that’ll help her in this fuckin’ city," says my father. I’m not looking back and forth between whatever and whatever, I can tell you; I’m seeing my mother’s plump knuckles mix up the shells and the meatball sauce in the big bowl she mixes her cake mixes in, and I say, before I know I knew it, "She talks about factory workers never being alone."

"Sounds like a Communist," retorts a voice yet why do I not recall whose? high or low, light or glum.

I know I go round and round, Jim, but not so fast. You see I could get through to her father, I decided. Miriam didn’t know what to say to me any more, for sure not a report of that colloidal message that came sliding out of her while she looked the other way even more beautiful at twenty, twenty-two, than at sixteen when we took over secret control of a temporarily vacant "flat" as Ruth Heard put it.

These garbage cans—I mean her father had a respect for them. They were vehicles he kept hosed down and he hammered out the dents more than once. He knew that if the ironing board lever sticks and you can’t fold the thing up, you don’t throw it like Miriam so it hits the TV and scares her aunt who blames it on Miriam’s old man for putting the screws to Miriam—when he himself saw mechanical devices as life we have brought into being to be treated kindly, kept in working trim, not mechanical brains to suck all the bones out of our heads like that mountain that’s making the rounds.

Who are we then, Jim, you to come here like you had something to tell or had something you wanted to get out of me—and who am I to be there with you now or be a man you’ve told your friends about who think they will never see me? But by colloidal action they may find, out of their minds, me on their doorstep a substitute for another trip, escaped from outside to inside, like my always waiting for Ruth Heard, escaped from England to America, to tell us what?

In our very early twenties—to answer your question that, admit it, Jim (though you’re a pro) was a substitute for further query re: the Chilean’s wife’s plans to get back at the journalist who sought information concerning the Chilean’s continuing activities on behalf of interests undermining the military state-capitalist regime in Chile that had killed his friend and leader Dr. Allende—Miriam left me over a considerable period of time for an older man (smile). I guess I mean her father, too, but the part-Jewish part-Hungarian guy who had a share of a foreign bicycle shop was three years older than she and she had gone out with him once in a while, long (a) before her message to me in the tax office but long (b) after the Sunday morning she slept late in order to keep from her conscious mind that she had told her father I was going to be saying some controversial stuff about Jewish homeland Sunday at the schoolyard fence and if a good discussion ensued it would not be surprising.

And when at the end I saw him down the block across the Sunday street at the German Mrs. Erhard’s newspaper store and we knew each other in the message he received from me but which we, the boyfriend and the widowed father, together created, I follpwed his sudden absence the seven and a half blocks to the well-tended tenement and the string of bright garbage cans because I had to be on the scene in case he burst in to tell his daughter her boyfriend was planning to concentrate all Jews in the limitless Australian desert at whose edges according to Ruth M. Heard Cockney long ago became audible because the settlers were cons shipped there out of sight out of mind and low class low speech. But what could I say to Iris who opened the door all dressed up, her beloved, the printer Eddie, her size, in his blue suit, a tattoo on one hand, ready to take her out after Sunday dinner (which I smelled through Iris’s perfume and her hesitation between asking me in and wishing I’d go away, it would be so much easier) and who when I tilted or cocked my head to say to Eddie, "How’s it goin’, Ed?" was replaced by Miriam’s father as if he was all face, vdice raised not to shouting proportions only to the violence of one who didn’t know, poor bastard, that he had communications to make to me only by colloid suspension express (smile) and was in no mood to be told especially by one who did not have a name then for this power to which our lives and spirit are to be raised, not an anger voicing what was false, namely that Miriam was sleeping late and she didn’t want to spend her time with no bum who ought to be out of school and working, whereupon I shushed him if Mir’ was sleeping, and he slammed the door, and I could hear steps coming out of an apartment two, three floors up, and as I heard the old man’s stupid sound going on—"At least she’s not with him"—and seeming to calm down, I found myself admitted—half admitted—again to Mir’s home, or facing the door magically ajar again and heard the old man’s voice go on and saw that he hadn’t calmed down at all but only faded into the next room as if there was something there, too, and Iris, I see her holding her apron bunched in her hand, saying to me softly, Miriam went to the movies already, her father thought she went with you.

I know I could have killed the old man except he was Miriam’s father —I admit it, Jim. You learn to go for what is inside you like no stigma at all. You go round and round it till you see it, then you don’t need to say it except in these particle facings between you and your self, or you and me, which the Whole Turning Factor turns thank God into the Two Screen never fully known till I came here to prove it in my body, my touch, the presence of others whatever their race or social class—and thanks be to the Giant Colloid Swirl we share whose galactic disk we can see, or flat Earth, or on end a gibbous bike-wheel, or the full mass to live within by letting it find itself an infinite neighborhood, such as this, and between the Great Swirl and the Two Screen, between the back-and-forth and the endless curve that will come of it—as between the centrifugal coagulation away from a cleared Center, and the penetration from one to another heart, we find a back-and-forth trip of substitutions to collapse our history at a cost anyone must afford.

Iris made Sunday dinner in that house mainly for her sister’s husband, my Miriam’s father; he burst out the front door muttering like a super whose building’s suddenly getting bigger over his head behind his back and passed me standing there in the first-floor hallway seeing cast of thousands featuring in the three or four movies I knew she wanted to go to, and on the other side instant and constant a void for whoever she was with, a void I couldn’t fill except with the feeling of myself and couldn’t see but as the dark reflection of her friendly face, Jim, turning after several seconds of my watching her enjoying the movie in the seat next to me, turning like a wife, I guess, Jim —you have had a wife because you have a daughter, so much I know like a wife I say, so beautiful, her glasses on because she wore them at the movies starting around age fifteen; garbage lids crashing outside, I in the hallway standing back to let a rent-paying tenant-couple pass and knowing that turning the hidden, living-room switch for the garbage-can circuit the day Mir’ and I had occupied all too briefly the vacant apartment, hadn’t been much of a joke and I had hated him for being the reason why Mir’ said up there that it was too risky, and minutes later when her old man came storming in and blamed Iris for flipping the juice hoping he’d go up to one of the upper floors so I could get out of the building—

—I thought she loved me enough to have followed me the day of the rain-check walk-home with Miss Heard to her apartment which was no longer the "flat" she had when I was in junior high, for she had been in and out of New York several times since then, though that earlier "flat" I one day heard described by another English voice.

That is, one of the three similar-looking van-driver friends of R. M. Heard but not the one who said so unforgettably in 1959 that you could see flour caking blood in the street, a monopolist was the sole seller of a commodity that has no substitutes, to which definition I could apply the Whole Turning Factor to connect the van driver’s definition with that Law of Substitution I learned from the Chilean gentleman between us when I proposed burial in space as a substitute for cemeteries or our precious oceans—a Utopia dissolving interface between outside and in

—instituting an elite brother- and sisterhood working together with the inmates to make the Inside a center of self-supporting craft and industry, not license plates but clothes and furniture, and exported therapeutic services, all maintaining a balance of payments with the Outside and always a center too of communal thought directly engaged in like democracy in your inter-lunar space settlements while enriched unpredictably by individual thought alone in contemplation, call it subsistence thought whose surplus can be saved by being shared by the men and women in communion here or stored like my own lone swirls of colloid light forever and a day—from, as I say, these Foleynomic projects for a great articulated structure where an infinity of whatever you called small-scale units may find their being—all the way to changing the concrete itself they wall this retired compound round with—so that someday each new vacancy here would be an opening for a new and different freedom, it would be a resource vied for with an elan that someday in future could dissolve guard and con not into one non-individuated mass, but—

that is, Jim, if you’re there still, Miriam would not receive all this because Miriam did not reach that swirl that Juan by fits and starts leans into, then loses, working deeper into Surplus Contradiction alternating by fits with his attempt to see where in the building site his very small brother has disappeared; and Mir’ paid off (if I had let her finish the job) with her once precious self, the shadow I’d hopefully thought she’d engaged to follow me the day Ruth Heard and I met at Mrs. Erharjl’s, each waiting for another, each waiting for the other I do believe, and while Miriam did not come to meet this temporarily but structurally unemployed old friend of hers George, her bike-shop Hungarian not at that point in time identified by me as who he was pedaled past upstream and downstream several times, along Third Avenue truck’d, bus’d, taxi’d, brimming, jammed, but with one sinister space for him, while Ruth, my elder by nine years, and I walked her home, seen by not only the bike-capitalist Hungarian on his wheel and by my mother so that she walked right by the gleaming meat market, but seen also by Gonzalez who must by then have been age fifteen or sixteen easing into his father’s business, profiting by each new day—

—that is, the Hungarian bike-peddler (smile), as you have guessed, recognized not me alone but Ruth M. Heard as well, her heavy head of wild hair atilt, her eyes everywhere, her voice risen richly, telling me she was afraid they would pull her Green Card, telling me she would return to the South one day soon, telling me how her father had taken her on the rollercoaster which has another name in England—but asking me what I was doing (she cared, you see), asking if I had graduated, asking so much that was unanswerable that to my stammering interest in what she said I could not add that I had for a time made a regular thing of current-events discussions at the schoolyard fence—until I envisioned a time when bands of bicylists would break traffic laws so commonly they would go to jail for five years—

—that is, her hair was not heavy but light, her head not heavy but aglow, her recent history so full how did I pause and wait for what would come to me to change my life?—having tendered my resignation to the management of a garage where my part-time job had left me more than part-time free, until at Mrs. Erhard’s, both Ruth and I watching diagonally up the block toward the schoolyard fence, we turned to know each other, and she: We never had that walk, and I (feeling ahead of myself but a retard working on being a retread): I said I’d take a raincheck, and she: A raincheck? (coughing through her laughter at the American word, coughing with bronchitis, TB, cancer, trying to get free of whatever it was as if it was what made her laugh); and before we knew it we were in a narrow elevator and getting out of it and finding ourselves in a one-room pad with no curtains with to my surprise not one-tenth the books I have in my cell today, a canvas chair beside the couch-bed, a photograph on the wall of a very intellectual-looking elderly man with a bushy beard and eyes staring at you half-impatiently, half as if you needed to be treated (you know?) so that, half-tongued as I was, I couldn’t tell if time crawled or ran wild and this was the first thing I thought when I phoned Miriam to say, "Hey what’s happening?" when I meant how come she stood me up yesterday at Erhard’s—and Mir’ said would I like to explain how come I spent so long inside Ruth Heard’s apartment house yesterday, what was going on, and as I say I thought about how slow and fast time went, up there, listening to her describe like a witness Medgar Evers’s children on the fatal night pleading with him to get up where he lay face down just beyond the doorway, arm outstretched—I couldn’t help thinking, "Like a drunk"—and beyond him a bunch of new sweatshirts and in his hand the key to the open door and on the sweatshirts "Jim Crow Must Go" and, I recall remembering irrelevantly my mother the year before crying for days over our wonderful young Catholic President Jack—so I know Kennedy came before Evers—while Ruth had no tears in her eyes telling me how Medgar’s wife packing his toothbrush for the hospital was distractedly asking nobody in particular how many pairs of pyjamas he would need, and I sat down where she told me on the couch-bed and she sat down in the canvas chair and put her feet up on a suitcase and asked me what I would like, she thought they hadn’t turned the gas off yet or the electricity so the beer in the icebox was cold or she could make a cup of instant—you’ve got to get out of here, she said, which I kept stupidly remembering as if I couldn’t remember anything else for years, two, three years, Jim, and that I’d said, "I know, I know," thinking at the time, "I need a dry climate for my asthma" but also New York is too big even to get through; but thinking of her wise advice, for three years up to and beyond when Miriam let slip the message in the tax office, binding those years together so they were gone, Jim, like the road of hairpin curves up the mountain and all that was ahead and is then behind—

—that is, her hair was nbt heavy to the eye, but thick with electricity to the touch of your particles, not soft and straight like Miriam’s, as gentle as Miriam’s mind, and then she too left school, I see her before and after (smile), smiling when I said I was going to get car for transport-delivery and drive across the country, I imagine you’ve done that, Jim, but in an expense-account car, am I right?, smiling (that is, Miriam) when I said, "All we did was talk—how do I know how long I was in her apartment?"—"Gonzalez saw her put her hand on your shoulder"—"What do you get for that, two free throws?"—

—that is, Gonzalez was too busy to see more than that, but Kallman the Hungarian who raced on weekends had time to do a soft-pedaling parallel-tail on me and Ruth my former substitute teacher, and it wasn’t even his lunch hour but he’s the boss, or one of the two bosses so he can be in two places at once, and more, because on the day of the raincheck walk-home to where Ruth was preparing to leave, I knew nothing of Kallman’s interest in Miriam and wasn’t inspired to guess, for she, who had stood me up or at any rate made me wait, could not self-evidently be paired with him for, for—two places or not—he was present along my route with Ruth, but I did not know she was then beginning to see Kallman, hear his accent on the phone, watch him far from the innocent women and children on Third Avenue swiftly unstrap from his Volkswagen’s bike-rack beside a New Jersey lake, one for him, one for her; and so I could only blame her for not meeting me at Mrs. Erhard’s and believe Mir’s claim that she had phoned Mrs. Erhard’s and the line was

full, which like some other history to be taken on faith was a lie I believe

that is, Jim (and thanks for getting Larry’s correspondence form in)—

—that is, when I met one of the three rich-American van chauffeurs and recognized him all of seven yeirs after the 1837-Flour-Riot-and-Union-Square-Bombing-New-York-History Tour, he told me Ruth had been ready to leave that last apartment on a moment’s notice, he liked this neighborhood, he’d almost taken that apartment, he knew the place, the address, had crashed there, the canvas chair belonged to his friend who’d also driven us that day in junior high though not the one who gave the definition of monopoly on the sidewalk when Ruth said shut up (oh she got arrested, he said, when I asked about her, right there on the street in Boston picketing a school), she was a warm-hearted gal oh Christ she was, he said, she’d give you the shirt off her back (when they carried her away in Boston something about her visa they made her leave the country—I didn’t have tipie to track down the whole story—history is being bombed, you can quote me, it collapses in the mind to what really happened).

"Her father died when she got home," the "rich-American" van chauffeur said to me—"Charles heard that she got married to someone, Charles it was his canvas chair you sat in," he said to me, and I didn’t use the only comeback I had.

That is, I sat on the couch-bed until I went to the icebox and opened the one beer and Ruth and I shared it, it was all alone in that icebox with a white jar of marmalade and a couple of puckered mushrooms.

That is, when I said to Miriam that it wasn’t all that long spent in Ruth Heard’s apartment, and I said I think she was packing, she took down a framed photograph off the wall when I was going, the glass was cracked. Miriam smiled not like she knew there was anything to know, but like it didn’t matter—

—that is, I later recalled seeing this but it not registering, and (if you’ve got a minute, Jim) the moment when I recalled seeing but not registering that she didn’t care was the moment much later of her accidentally getting to me with the message in the clean-carpeted income-tax office, with a half-bald guy in a windbreaker beside a desk, his elbow not too calmly on the desk, waiting for some accountant to come back from the key-locked John (is the City still like that?), and Miriam meanwhile with me there, picking up the phone so cool, reaching for an office ballpoint like it was a handkerchief to wipe a kid’s nose (a ballpoint I asked for, with a smile, and got with a shrug but no smile from smiling Miriam), and I took it, I mean what she had to give me then and accepted what had happened to us, I would live (right?) but the Chilean economist now, Jim, let me be frank with limited data, let’s say it is the truth you want about him, but whether or not you are this other person Spence who I hear the Chilean’s wife is after for threats against her and her husband, shouldn’t you let him lay?—I mean in decent obscurity, I mean what’s the use as I said to young Larry who writes me such letters, Jim, that I almost forget to read between the lines and said he would give anything to go back to age fifteen with what he knows now at eighteen (smile) which is like me thinking I’ll write all this down someday, though perhaps that won’t be necessary since others, few though they be, share portions of my information, for I have found that Larry too has made the acquaintance of that loner the inventor who in the eighties and nineties changed the world by making feasible his much-beloved alternating current with its fantastically higher voltages plus their long-distance transmission against the hostile opposition of Edison and his DC faction who, our loner-genius knew by intuition, had pushed AC on the New York State prison people when electrocution came in as a means of discrediting AC. But you wanted to know if Miriam came to see me, and I believe I said I am selective. My cup runneth over with your interesting questions—

—like, the Chilean gentleman between us has enough trouble, am I right?, and more trouble I couldn’t use for there’s a limit to the trouble you can use and if it comes to you in your warped life what are you going to do on the principle of Give Back More Than You Get?—

—like, I thought about Miriam but did not see her because power is in restraint; called her up on her birthday and on Sunday it’s no secret I was by then in a holding pattern and didn’t know what I’m waiting for, not the rich-American school-tour chauffeur who does one day run into me in the street and it might as well be Ruth M. Heard, until I hear what he tells me and I need to slug him, kill his face—you’ve had that feeling, tell me you have— on account of he’s pretty dartin casual about Miss Ruth, while I remember everything, the little I have to the wall, her father maybe (at remember, like her taking the framed photo off that point in the afternoon I could almost have asked), and leaning it up against the other suitcase not the one she’d put her foot on so many swirling, surprising, clear minutes ago—

—that is, I could have accepted what happened to us, and lived with what she had to give me—

—that is, in the tax accountant’s office I heard Miriam, a year before the rich Anglo-American van-chauffeur ran into me on Third Avenue—

—lived without her—and without her saying, George you ought to get married and settle down; and without you, Jim, saying, Now which one said that?—Ruth M. Heard or Miriam?—when you know damn well Ruth wouldn’t say a thing like that, she said to me the last time I saw her, Get on the road Foley get out of this spot you’re in—

—that is, since you insist on asking, the prospect of settling down with old girlfriend; laboring in a vineyard of worn-out brake pads and (irritable) valves and walking into sunsets that need to be changed every fifteen hundred miles—having some kids who at different rates walk up the widely slightly curving steps of the church on Sunday with their Aunt Iris and won’t be allowed to go near granddad’s electrified waste units, oh the whole bit—

—that is, she didn’t say so much that day but this was the kernel and it ain’t popcorn, Jim, just like the danger to your Chilean friend whoever you are, Jim, ain’t prime-time TV cops and bombers treasury agents and vice-smugglers, current events before you turn in for the night sponsored by automobile commercials and Sir Horny-Loin Plus-Burgers preserved by psycho-colloid solutions, prime-time kidnapped tycoons sending an arm and a leg back the long way to the main office of their bank attached in a revolutionary new way to prove they exist and confess to long-standing surplus, no Jim this is real as the absence of information about Juan’s little brother who disappeared into the open-ended construction site and as crass as the van chauffeur who met me the day my ramshackle history fell in and I stopped waiting—

—that is, for Ruth to add to what she’d told me, for I could add my own conclusions to what the van driver who after all had not been there told me about what happened during two hours I spent in Ruth M. Heard’s semi-vacated apartment which I would not believe

—that is, I said to him, You’ve been talking to the Hungarian at the bicycle shop—Kallman—Oh do you know Kallman? says the rich American light-mover van chauffeur, Kallman gets around for a bike grease-monkey, said the van driver, who still had his face, it was still alive, I had not killed it—

—that is, Kallman had told him about that afternoon raincheck walk-home, the van driver—and the last words of his I recall as I turned angrily, precipitately, away to get away from him, was his saying, No he knew Kallman, everyone who saw the future of bicycles from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth knew Kallman, but Kallman, don’t tell him I involved him in Ruthie, he never said a thing to me about you and her—

—that is, those two hours—

—that is, the van driver had had more to say, which he no doubt went on saying at length long after I’d split—

—that is, I did not wish to hear his personal reminiscences about my substitute teacher, her qualities, her frankness, her suspicion of brevity, her relations with the official tenant of that last apartment, and her supposed words about me—

—that is, although I had agreed to take the afternoon-evening shift of a car-rental agency (downtown branch) on trial, I cut it pretty fine by going to Kallman’s bike shop which had grown in size since I had last thought about it, to confront him with having told others about me and Ruth but he and his partner and three assistants with T-shirts with French and Italian sayings on them were spread out, confusingly dispersed, across the showroom and the repair department so that as if entering a room so full of furniture you’d spend all your time deciding where to sit, I saw that Kallman, swarthy, muscular, eyes flashing with the humor of a well-rested stud, had laid out for me an obstacle course of glistening wheel spokes and frames of all colors and nations that he might look like he owned when the fact was that the bank owned his bikes and his future of such colossal interest charges that a man like him must receive monthly rebates on his by comparison negligible automobile loan charges, because here was a man who Miriam had once told me always obtained on his personal savings commercial paper rates which is hard to believe, and I called to him across the cement floor of his showroom so sharply the wheels of a foreign racing bike near me (as near as the upside-down car in Florida you told about) would have begun to spin if it had been standing upside down on its seat and handlebars like one over in the repair area no doubt being tuned up or one up on a platform that Kallman with one eye on me not knowing my policy was never to attack first, was describing to a fantastically tall lady in loose overalls and an old-fashioned leather skull-tight aviator’s cap, with whom he suddenly then left the bike and made his way grinning, mouth partly open like he was about to speak, as if he knew from my loud, abrupt greeting across the storeful of merchandise that was more beautiful than Miriam, more finely tuned and whirringly out-of-reach (I remember then understanding for the first time)—that I didn’t have time to stop, I didn’t really have the time for him; and knowing me through all that interference, knowing what I had to say, Kallman stopped for me, maybe however not knowing of me what I knew of him, that his direction might have been mine; and his smile, his grin, was not Miriam’s smile of delicious amusement, and before he could get near enough to try and sell me something, I was telling him—

—that is, I had not killed his face, only I had had it up to here, the junior-high Revolutionary-New-York-History-Tour van chauffeur’s (who didn’t drive the light-moving van any more but had gone on to contracting, he had a team of musicians and painters who worked for him plastering and painting apartments, non-union, off the books); and so to stem violence I turned my back on that face but the wor4s of his message got to me and were admitted to the Colloidal Unconscious, which at large in its space has no front or back; yet that developing power in me needed the truth of his cruelty in order to come to know what doesn’t matter and what does, Jim—Ruth’s touch on my arm, my leg, my sleeve being helped on, and, come to think of it, my back, which recalls her father who was off the wall (smile) and who took her on the rollercoaster—

—that is, in some region of England rollercoaster goes by the name of switchback; while what doesn’t matter, Jim, is the van driver’s will to show such knowledge of Ruth as I would not match. I knew what was in his mind which meant that he could not; (at that stage of development) know what was in mine.

And so he was able to say to me that Ruth never made that bed of hers, that they had shared that apartment through some pretty bad times, that Mrs. Erhard got the air edition of the London paper for Ruth, that on the day of the raincheck walk-home (I lo^e track of seasons) and the shared beer and the advice re: my life interrupted and cut short by the arm and a leg I would have given her for that and more, and did give, I say on that day the van driver (as I divined through his words and with a new use of the centrifugal though unidentified coagulant clarification I now think I was coming then into) had himself been stood up by Rut)i Heard just as I had by Miriam whatever her busy signals said; and over his pursuant, early-afternoon words circling me as I went round and round Miriam’s and her father’s and her Aunt Iris’s block that night recalling louder and louder Mir’s father’s I-told-you-so relayed now months later by Kallman whose direction I could never have taken, never never have taken, were my words to a thirty-year-old former substitute teacher as I paused at last on her semi-vacated threshold for further words of advice and still barely tasting our one beer: we will meet again Ruth (the first time I called her that)—/ just know \ve will—and returned to me swimming in my dreams, dispersed through days and months, swung round by a cruelly other voice to leave a clear vacancy at the center which is me, my doing—

—that is, my meditations before and after divined what must happen for the high-risk development of powers I had no name for then, God curse me and curse your obsessed but (I Jiave to think) good questions, Jim Mayn, curse you, though—

—that is, when Larry’s sad, fucked-up letter (for you’ve brought people into my field who I then know have often already been there) reported hearing your ladyfriend namely Jean worried herself about you (lucky you!) because you "confessed"—not "claimed"—you’re in the future doubling back upon the past which is our present to see it and us so plausibly that it exists— claiming to her nonetheless that you’re not the type for this deranged stuff, not crazy, not off the wall (like me, or, come to think, the sleaze who hung out with our fine senor), nor did you honestly think the future yet exists—

why, it came to me, Brother Mayn—and who says you ain’t crazy as a container ship full of do-it-yourself corn kernels that pass like a shadow over a vein of heat gushing up beamed geyser-like single-minded as lasers bombarding a tornado and no one in designing the containers and the container-ship allowed for these billions of kernels growing like plant cells out of control in the next century or the next room into—call it—popcorn but is it growth or death?—it came to me and my freedom to receive the before and after so they dissolve—that whatever the giant differences in how you look but given the fact I have never seen the two of you together, you and the Chilean’s associate Spence may be one and the same and don’t say no, Jim, because in the great community where the colloid’s facets of human light do not escape us but do not settle either nor readily filter out, this identify of Spence and you might be true—

—that is, with another particle of me, not cruel like the van driver’s voice that gave me back Ruth’s words, I later learned what I knew already. I knew what I was going to do that night though above this meditation went the traffic of particles trucking helter-skelter up the river of the city until—

—that is, having had it up to here, I told Kallman—several bikes still between us—where did he get off blabbing about me and Ruth Heard when he hadn’t been up there in her apartment? What was he shooting off his face to the van driver (which van driver?) (what’s-his-name who shared the apartment with Ruth Heard, Miriam’s and my substitute teacher back in school) (—is there any other Ruth Heard? cracks the Hungarian and answers: Oh there’s only one Ruthie, we threw coffee mugs at each other over Hungary, I threw a wet cake of soap at her and it hit a picture of Karl Marx and busted the glass—you mean Fred Monk, who painted my apartment, oh Fred Monk I saw him last week, I sold him a three-speed for his little girl)—

—that is, the van-driver-turned-apartment-painting-contractor had known Ruth Heard did business with the German storekeeper Mrs. Erhard and later that afternoon, cutting it so fine you might say I had already given by default my new car-rental job a trial, finding her with her back to me on the phone, I slipped a few copies of the early Post onto the sidewalk before entering the store; I stood across the glass counter with its breath sweeteners (or is it suppressors?) and asked Mrs. Erhard, who seemed upset, if the English woman Ruth Heard who had once had a standing order here had had a friend called Fred Monk with one bad eye, a white streak right across the eye; and when she didn’t know what to say as if I had something on her, I kidded her: I said, Mrs. Erhard, that little pistol you got’s going to go off and hurt somebody someday you’re bound to get robbed as long as you got it on the premises, and her face with the big round cheeks was saying, Do you really think so, but she said, "Yes, she would come here and wait for him, and use the phone, and sometimes he didn’t come and she was very mad and talked to me like we were close friends—"

—that is, I didn’t go right to Mrs. Erhard from Kallman, I went and phoned Miriam at her office and made her talk to me. We hadn’t gone together in months. I said I’d like to take her father to court for bad-mouthing me. She kept saying, "It’s so long ago, it’s so long ago, it’s so long ago—" and had to hang up amid—

—that is, Kallman claimed that I had it wrong, as he slowly approached through his ranks of bicycles^—no, man, it wasn’t him who spoke to Monk about me and Ruth, it was Mir’s father who had spoken about me and Ruth to him Kallman, but it was so long ago, you know—

—that is, Ruth on the day of the raincheck had been reading her air edition of the London Times and opening it out to continue the article she was reading, and when she noticed me and we spoke, she looked at her watch, she had on one of these heavy sweaters with buttons down the front and a collar, the Colloid Unconscious divides and divides its particles, faceting faster than light so light pauses relieved to be no longer champion—

—that is, Kallman, definitely not smiling as he reached me, heard the very tall woman in the baggy overalls with large smoked glasses and the aviator’s leather cap skull-tight with the earflaps snap-tight under her chin call from where she’d been left staring at the racing bike up on the platform, Hey is anybody selling bicycles around here?—and called again, while I traded words with Mr. K., who, looking all around the store, waved an assistant, a girl with Italian words all over her T-shirt, away from a young boy in a baseball cap and toward the aviator woman, then turned back to me: "Miriam’s father said you were sneaking up to the apartment of that Communist teacher, he said you were always a no-good, I’m just telling you what he said"—

—that is, there’s nothing wrong with Mrs. Erhard, she remembered me from way back, her life is simple, she opens up seven-thirty, has her coffee in a container with a grain of saccharin and a bagel that she breaks in two and nibbles the second half all morning and she closes up at seven P.M. sharp when she’s had time to sell most of her late edition; and if she knew I threatened to expose Kallman to Miriam and her father for playing around in the bathroom with Ruth Heard, whose father rode an old black bike to work every day of his life, she would have better things to do than worry about threats. Still, I wondered if she paid anybody off. She was a little upset, probably because I was. For these things communicated themselves in our last (which seemed final) visit, when I told you, Jim, after you said the London Times never used to have "continueds" but would end the article on the page it began on, that I was so finely cut into the faces of your particles, their dividing swirl, their timeless beamings, riverings, and wheelings, that I knew you were in big trouble over something, maybe the Chilean, but when the Cuban Brigade leader came on TV with a bag over his head I felt Colloidal Unconscious drawing you near me. I said to Mrs. Erhard someone must have pulled a Post from the bottom of the pile because there’s copies all over the sidewalk, could I pick them up for her, but she squeezed out from behind the counter without looking at me as if she’d had it up to here, and went outside and I slipped behind the counter but not to give her job a dry run (smile) and put my hand under the counter and there it was—

—that is, we’d both had it up to here, and Miriam knew it when I told her I had to talk to her father, tell him a thing or two about what she said oh God it was so fucking long ago, and find out why he still had to bad-mouth me after all this time I’m off the scene, I’m her past, I’m not the boyfriend anymore; and she said, Please don’t get into a confrontation with Dad, a shouting match, it’s not going to help matters, is it? But I, being in the more developed state, could tell she would not hang up on me this time, and I hung up on her—’That’s it, Miriam," I said—("That’s it," one black guard at a side door of the Tombs in Lower Manhattan called to a second black guard standing beside the rear door of the correctional bus, stockpiled schoolbus, with its steel-mesh windows which from outside can seem like grime shading the interior, where some insane kid with a little beard calls sex to a couple of girls talking especially intently as they pass the bus and us in it, its rear door now closed upon the one-way all-inclusive tourists who are their own bag self-addressed to be consumed, wasted, or invested)—

—that is, with no place to turn from Miriam, from Kallman, from the van driver who meant me no harm and had inaugurated a profit-sharing plan that gave the artists he employed (to resculpture and cover with two coats of oil-base paint walls in which the customer would then drive hooks to hang other artists) marginal increments of time or other possibilities of experience into which increments of money might be translated, I needed to talk with Ruth M. Heard to ask her—

—that is, about the basic unit of value; but as I wrote Larry, I had not yet found the obstacles that would stand in its way to make me look for it—

—that is, I might have hunted the painting contractor down to finish what he had started when he’d given me Ruth’s story of what she and I had done during much of the two hours even my mother (who said I was all she had) had learned I had spent there because to tell the truth no one had told her—

—that is, beyond little Gonzalez identifying for her who the person was who had rested a hand on my shoulder in the street—

—that is, I went to see my mother, who was in the kitchen on the phone listening to my sister I could tell by her tone of the tired survivor now beyond the struggles of others, a bag of groceries on the table, another with a six-pack in it I could tell by the straight-up sides of the brown paper, and she looked at me and pointed to the clock and looked back at me but didn’t say what she meant because I know she didn’t want my sister to know that I was not at my new job at this hour of a jam-packed day, and she continued to listen with consternation in her eyes until smoothing the gray-brown hairs that had sprung late-afternoon frizzy out of the tight-pulled-hair combed back along her head flat and rolling her tensely blinking eyes around as if my sister’s long-winded stories had made my mother forget and forgive all there was to forget and forgive facing her in the freshly linoleumed kitchen I already recall (but why do I say "already," is it some prompting from a facet of you, Jim?, only a facet when you are tuijned also outward toward perhaps our Chilean said to be involved by his associate Spence in some plot to be exported with an anti-Castro cover possibly from this very multiple dwelling while you shake your professional head allowing that there might be something in it but one hears these stories) my mother pointed at the clock again and meant, I knew, my father, and wanted no fight about whatever the meaning was of my appearing at this hour—so it’s about time you started paying rent, you drink my beer and eat my food, and I left—

me to be between my mother -that is, when her voice

—that is, I was down the stairs when I heard our phone above me and knew my father was always a half-hour later than my mother said because he sat at the last stool at the end of the bar at the corner, sat in the window looking out, talking to a couple of his friends whom he hardly looked at but would sometimes interrupt wtyle watching the world go by—well, he would not be as yet climbing the stairs of our building; and so there was no one for

and—

as close to a cry as my Christian name permits came solitary down the old stairwell and I knew the phone had been ours, and I let myself out as gently as I could in the knowledge that the two phone calls my mother had found herself between had kept me from sitting down with her and saying, Look, Mom, no excuses asked but I come this close to taking the advice I wish I could have got all of from my substitute teacher, this close today, but I run into this fellow Fred Monk and I can’t wait for the rest of Ruth M. Heard’s advice, Mom, I’ve had it up to here and you have with me I know—

—that is, she found me between first my sister’s phone call and my dad’s arrival home her habitual hour or half-hour early, and second my sister’s phone call and a call I caused, though I never thought later to ask which of the possibles it had come from, conveying the information that I, Foley, was thought to have on me a small pistol—borrowed lady’s piece—and had my mother seen her son George Foley?

—that is, I loved her and she me and she had never said a word to anyone but me a year before, to wit "What do you want with that woman she was fired three times and she’s old enough to"—

—that is, I found New York very big and very small at that moment, Jim, you’ve said the same observing that in your memory the city was neighborhood enough, walking your little girl to the school bus stop though at the time as you later told her the city seemed too big and too harsh to be a neighborhood that now in memory you may think it really was all the time because your family’s there wherever you were, Jim, in your sundry travels, you have a son, too, so where’s he? I know you wonder if you should have left—

—that is, I had been looking at electrical equipment in one window and then boats in another, rubber, wood, collapsible boats, I knew I was beginning, I was on Broadway across Union Square from the bench or tree where some historic bomb went off—no legs lost that time—and I walked north magnetized by my will—is there a guitar in that street window of the Flatiron Building still?—east on Twenty-third Street fingering a pistol I wasn’t friends with, by the high gray wall of life insurance with a giant clock up there someplace (is it there still?)—post office on the left, hardware on my right side, oyster bar at Third and Twenty-third (still there?), then the public library branch on my side, School for the Deaf across on the left (am I right, Jim?), doughnut counter, and I turned down First Avenue wanting to get where I was going my own way, passing the multiple-dwelling development across First on my left named after an early New York settler-crook no doubt, on my right the liquor store, newspaper stores, meat market (not my mother’s), a jumble of steady money-makers whatever they say, all the Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican settlers on this frontier of noise more or less happy in their daily work, many gone home, me just the opposite; past the street where the precinct waits barricaded by all its squad cars double-parked: and before I know it, I’m along Fourteenth Street thinking west and I’ve stopped for a cup of tea and a blueberry blintz and the sky is darkening but not the city, and curbing my westward aim I bend north into Park Avenue South understanding in my magnetic will that all I wanted was to confront Miriam’s father with his socially unnecessary remark at this late date about me and tell him I hardly ever saw Miriam and what was I to him or her, or Iris, or their well-kept tenement in whose reaches, well above the electrified interlinked waste-disposal system, I had so transiently visited a vacant "railroad" with the daughter who my own father never spoke of now—though I didn’t always follow him from (frankly) quite cheerful coffee and fresh light cream and glazed doughnut with my mother at the kitchen table through a repeat two hours later at the garage (no fresh cream) through all that friendly talk turning up and changing the oil of big New Jersey cars until their owners, their mat of meshed hair woven all colors across their scalp, reentered the open-ended, dark garage at four as if to get in and drive away with hardly a glance at the white worksheet clamped with a wiper to the windshield, through to his curved corner of late-afternoon saloon and the shared corner of (call it) Life with two guys talking and him almost never looking at them but when I spied him from across the street staring quite happy (frankly), to his speechless reentry into the apartment to go straight to the icebox, then the bathroom, then his chair, never mentioning Miriam any more so why should Miriam’s father pile insult onto exile talking of me when his cup was running over and he had a half-Jewish Hungarian son-in-law-to-be with a late-model foreign car and a surplus of new business every week Kallman claimed he couldn’t handle, and occasional Sundays to please his bedridden widower father he might go to church with Mir’ and Iris and Eddie when he and Miriam were not otherwise engaged driving up the Hudson, down rockbound hairpin curves, along tree-guarded parkways, their bike wheels in the bike rack turning faster and faster hanging in the clean air: all these little things expanded to take up the strange gaps between one year and another, what has Foley been doing? (I heard you ask as if you had said it out loud in my presence)—as stalled as our Chilean incognito at his foundation research sinecure who wrote me that he might as well be our Thomas Jefferson riding through imaginary Andes to see for himself proof of the Universal Flood by the testimony of shells at fifteen thousand feet—there was Ruth M. Heard, a fighter, a brilliant woman, on an immigrant visa questioning our system but whooping it up, here one year, gone the next, back, gone, living her future while talking about the present, providing some action for us slower settlers like me and Gonzalez who had been delivering some plumbing supplies to Ruth’s building around the time my postgraduate school was letting out (smile) that fateful day of the raincheck walk home—"well, at least you’re a dropout, Foley, you don’t have one of those diplomas to keep in working order, you’re free," I thought in her words, fatefully walking round and round, in a narrowing circle you could call it, cutting out Broadway, then Park, cutting out Twenty-third, Twenty-second, cutting out First Avenue, cutting out Fourteenth Street, Fifteenth Street, coming toward whatever was waiting in me, not at all the geographical center of the great oblong of city streets I was narrowing, the Puerto Rican who was still dividing the high cakes of Sicilian pizza waved to me as I passed, and was it my magnetic foresight that his raised hand through the window seemed to stay raised in a long, too-long "Hello, Georgie," and was it my imagination that, when I looked from the bright TV screen and the window of the bar where my father would long since have had his final going-home beer to the curb that had been as vacant as three in the morning a moment ago, I found a squad car in the streetlamp light and two young cops seated below me so I let go the small pistol, and, presently reaching the narrowest circle of my developmental approach, I turned into the school block, the playground where no matter how luminous High Kool’s stormcloud-albino hands, I don’t see them n’more—past the wooden stand outside Mrs. Erhard’s little store taken in for the night, to the corner where stood waiting for me Louise the roughest kid in the class. No one ever saw her pull a knife on a boy but what she said was meant for you and she swung her shoulders just that little bit when she walked so you knew she didn’t care what she did; she said, "Hey Georgie, you got a mustache." I hadn’t seen her in months, not consciously, maybe years, same old dry cleaner, supermarket, very unhip haberdasher, drugstore, dress shop, palm reading, in that neighborhood you didn’t count the months or years; it wasn’t a bad neighborhood, Jim, she had her hair drawn up in a kerchief with a couple of rollers bulging, she’s Italian as plum tomatoes, Italian as a life-long widow sitting on her folding chair in a doorway in the evening, Italian as a church festival banner stretched across the street, none of these things is Louise (sorry), and she was smoking a cigarette against the railing above the basement Chinese laundry, and she had a little girl with her though it’s late and I could almost have stopped to shoot the shit with her, she’s tall and fantastic-looking. "Where you working, Louise?" And I think not that she would pull off a job someday because we often thought that, and there were rumors besides; but what I thought was Louise had liked me, I mean at the moment she looked over her shoulder when we got out of the New-York-Revolutionary-History-Tour van and I was looking at her; and now, years later, Mrs. Erhard’s pistol’s in my jacket pocket and I could dump it in the corner sewer, I could go back half a block and put it under the door— Yeah, Jim, I know the joke but this is true, there’s no way I could leave the piece at Mrs. Erhard’s so it wouldn’t be seen, but drop it down the stinking, smoking sewer to music playing someplace—sure I could have, but I was in love at that instant with the roughest girl in the class, and I say, "Hey they didn’t have bombs like ours in those days," and she gives me the biggest smile and long-drawn-out "Hey r/ght, right" and I couldn’t look at her or the three-year-old kid holding her hand and eating a pink ice cream, and I say over my shoulder, "You’re beautiful, kid, you’re beautiful," and hear behind me, "I never knew you cared," kidding or true, and I’m very clear I can’t go round n’more, there’s no room, the AC working smooth at last, the magnetic field rotating free, I’ll have it out with Miriam’s father, that’ll be it—help I give myself.

And then I’m coming up on the silver garbage cans and I can see him, his hair dangerous in the streetlamp light, he’s in the door, three or four steps above the street level, and saw me and didn’t move for a moment till he saw something in my walk or thought something, and ducked out of sight. I put my hand down on the first can and nothing. And so on, no juice. The cops had spoken, and he’d cooled it, and maybe he’s on the phone now calling Kallman that I’ve got a gun. And Jim, I know I’m going to do a dumb thing that might throw me forward into what I won’t know I need until I see I know it all along: do you develop by knowing the greedy oppressor and reciting your history like Juan my friend? Why is he in here? He does not say. But oh you have these thoughts, Jim—

—that is, deceive—

—that is, knowing that the goods and the bads on the Outside are getting their share of the bomb also—the ones with bags over their heads or haloes, with pistols in their hands or fellow feeling—you know at the last sub-second particle of our unconscious that everything on the Outside is as it was and the bomb is cleanly modeling something awful next door or at a never-fear maximum security center overlooked by all except the media who have the infrared filters and the resolution and the extrapolation capability and the cool, high Horror Threshold to give you this truth in your homes, Jim, journeyman journalist that you are, to make you understand without having to go through it save for a documentary tour, I forget d’l say one day a month we’re fasting against executions? (for colloidal communion is but one way to work with others and a self-induced rotating magnetic field must be another if you think of all that alternating current our loner-genius of the eighties and nineties could generate who later in ‘93 disproved in his head at least the curved space that new-fangled gravity graphs so potently and disproved the claim that we are walking-around bombs in the mere matter of our bodies). No, it was our young friend Larry (who was bringing his girl but they broke up) whom I told of Jim Lee State, totally bald since adolescence and they said had a pretty odd amber shine to his skull that you thought you could see through into his long-structured Indian- (apparently) type brain, who fasted except for one cup of water and half an avocado per day for three weeks prior to his execution date, this is in the Middle West, and wanted no part of last meals (sharing quadruples on ice cream with fellow condemned—"con2"—(smile)) or chaplain supplying last words; and he slit his own trousers because he wanted it to be his trip subject to the normal balance of manual/automatic in the system; and he was writing a story in his cell trying to complete it for his lawyer to have in lieu of fee, but it was nine-thirty P.M. and only ninety minutes till Time to go. But Jim Lee State fell asleep at the new manual typewriter a recent parolee had left him and slept through his own execution—that’s right—because no one told him the judge had granted his lawyer a stay that afternoon. He was tired, he found out.

I had a letter from him before I came here and he said he would be thinking of me up there on the Canadian border—the dreams of all that night’s work he singled out were two, and he does not recall at all the dream he had had off and on for months that was as close as he came to a dream of the Chair, but the two he had the night he slept through his execution were adjoining like a two-room apartment you can’t live in all of at the same time. His wife was cooking very hot and dry Mexican food, the pinto beans, the chopped meat, the chili peppers, her own corn tortillas, and singing at the top of her lungs so he could hear in the next room when actually he was right there where he’d been all day but now behind her sitting so close he could have reached out to touch her hips and she could have sat down on him had she not been busy stirring a pot and turning the tortillas and folding them but holding them a little open.

Meanwhile in the next dream she was lying in bed half-covered and drops of bathwater on her body and face so he could feel the dampness against the sheets and she didn’t see he was standing right there speechless with love but she was talking to him like he was in the next room and he couldn’t tell her he was there. She worked at a supermarket checkout, I learned. The two dreams were one after the other, repeating, but then they were at the same time too, and she was about to discover he was behind her listening to her sing and she could sit down on his lap, and at the same time she was lying in bed with drops of water on her about to discover she was looking right through him talking to him like he was in the next room one hand near the bedside light and he was about to speak but couldn’t till she saw him, and these dreams went back and forth all night it seemed, but later he had the idea that they occurred at about eleven, but how could he check with the guards? they said he talked in his sleep all the time anyhow.

I had heard of his case, his composure, his writing, his claim that his murder had been the victim’s premeditation, not his; and I had written telling him of the fateful day when I’d had it up to here but had not known till afterward the degree to which unconscious premeditation, mine and others’, had turned a divided visitor into a perpetrator of the unknown. I got his answer as I left to come here; they might have forwarded it, but the post is uncertain. I wrote Jim Lee State to report the dream that awaited me upon arrival here, but he never got back to me and so I do not know what use-value he placed upon the dreams that determined him not to complete the story he had fallen asleep writing, which you have to figure was also the work that tired him toward those dreams which if I did not know better now I’d think were as lost to us as they are now to him and he to us. The story, you ask—because I feel that you are asking.

The cons revered him for doing his own thing until the end like a leader concentrating on personal thought and meditation right up to the moment when he must leave his billet and go out to the barricades. He wrote me that they didn’t know the truth of how he felt; true, he did these things like when they came into his cell in death row to forcibly shave his beard off ("Want to see what you got under there, stud"), a rule-breaker right to the end; maybe you could hang yourself with a Father Time-type beard (smile); anyway he fought tooth and nail when they unlocked the cell door and three of them came in and stood shoulder to shoulder before they reached for him, he fought the way he believed he would the night they really came for him, having as a dividend not had to shave his head. Yet, Jim, it—the resistance, the calm typewriter, the close attention given everything even the guards’ pension plan and pay-increase schedule—this activity was mainly, he said, to keep his mind off the fear of time passing behind his back and not thirty years of future life, say, lost but mainly his inevitable vague death held in the hands of moral morons who at the moment of its passage didn’t hold it, but were held by a job which was to prevent it not happening, where its happening would be a high point of their work shift, topped only by its not happening, that is through the seated man in question (for when is it ever a woman? we wonder—while we’re saying, When is it ever a white? though are not a few white "burns" to be the cover for the true policy?)—bringing to a center all the live organic electric charge which the Colloidal Unconscious can draw to itself and because of a unique defense system which I only later in Juan’s abandoned book saw was due to the charges around each colloid particle being not a single but a double layer of opposite charges making the colloid suspension behave like an uncharged body, which when controlled by him who (not holds but) knows how to be held by his Colloidal Unconscious may theoretically receive two thousand volts of inorganic commercially generated mere alternating current and put them to peaceful communications use, but, since this effort of concentration can never succeed in suspending the heartbeat to a minimum as hard to pick up by stethoscope as colloid double charge by electroscope, what are you going to do if they think you are dead and load you onto the stretcher and do an autopsy? The backup mode is to resist as the unified sense of Colloid Unconscious is uniquely fitted to do against the AC system and theoretically repel it right back to the generator where it came from, thereby blowing out their circuits and their new equipment with perfect safety however to the perhaps masked functionary at the non-conducting lever, with at most a Mayday ring to other C.U. members who hear a sound-barrier-bust-type blow accompanied by their favorite music.

Well, I wrote Jim Lee State but in my opinion he never got back to me, which was sad but not sad like saying so long to Efrain when he got out so recently which was not sad. Jim Lee State said that after the stay of execution and the dreams he came to see the stories as work for someone else: like the last was to pay his lawyer, though he also saw that this was just making the trip his own by paying a real debt not to some abstract Society but to counsel (smile), but if he thought of the story as not money but friendly communication which was the best he could do and his best work, its money-value would be real and then how many others would profit by it?

Until, with no prodding by me to investigate the True Unit of Value because he was answering only my first exploratory letter, he saw that he was into Immortality—for a "him" he could never get hold of or know, so here again he was working for someone else, though I pointed out in that letter I never got a personal answer to that wide-spun readers of his Death Row tales would be an endless surplus distributed according to desire and need long after he had no more use for whatever value they returned.

But on the night in question the dreams had drawn him away from this story he was working on—insofar as he recalled it, for he had destroyed it. He said it was based on a true incident, but in the story which begins on a big outdoor Visitors Day like our P.R. festivals here, a guy who’s got a clean lip under his mustache and is wearing under his correctional greens khaki chinos with a razor in the pocket and two freshen-up wet-wipes, and a but-tondown like he never had on his back before, he peels off here and there piece by piece and in the crowd gets into conversation with two girls who don’t (yet) know why they’re here—that is, they’re with an old lady who visits once a month to check on the rehabilitation of a con she’s been corresponding with for asshole years in the hope that he’ll never get out; and our hero, whom the old lady doesn’t know, just walks out the gate to the bus with the two girls and the old lady later that afternoon; he’s free and making his way to Florida before his greens have even gone to the dump for reprocessing with the paper plates and cups.

But here is the point: he arrives in Florida and seeks employment in a supermarket chain as a security guard (smile). Before he knows it, he thinks up a better system which involves all the employees and a pattern of checkpoints superior to the tilted overhead mirrors or the closed-circuit videowatch, and he calls it security-sharing and Personnel is about ready to give him a change of uniform, the system is security-sharing and depends on the employees looking like average shoppers and tracking a three-cornered (three-person) line-of-sight routine which each employee is on his or her honor to share in at least once every ten minutes. But the day before he’s to be promoted, because they’re afraid his system will get more and more participatory, he’s on the scene when a hold up occurs. He gives the alarm, is wounded in the spinal column; in firing back from the meat lockers, he wings a butcher scale and hits a patrolman just arriving on the scene, who later dies of his chest wound because the hospital does not check to find out the cop was allergic to penicillin.

But now our guard is identified as a vacationing con and when a hysterical out-of-work actor a member of the gang is asked point blank if the guard was their inside man and answers yes, yes, the other members of the gang aren’t listened to when they say, No, No, No, what’s this about a guard?

The ending was in doubt, as was the trick by which in the first place the escape artist got onto the back of his hand the invisible visitors stamp which shows up purple under the machine on the way out. But that problem he left to others, if any, because the alternating dreams of his dead wife had shown him where he was coming from and the gap he had to fill, which was working together with others, and he would never write one of those stories again. He said, "I aim to be the oldest living con" (smile), and this was before his sentence was permanently commuted; and now he works steadily against the death penalty ("against death as a penalty") and for more meaningful careers for prisoners.

But shortly after this initial exchange I wrote him a longer letter concerning the Colloidal Unconscious where center and margins are outmoded ideas, and while I did get an answer back, it was on the letterhead of the committee he’d founded and was from someone else who spoke for him, relaying his message that he was gratified I too was involved in my home state working toward a more meaningful prison experience; but I don’t believe those were his words.

Which young Larry when I told him about Jim Lee State agreed marked a development that was practically a scale model of what went on Outside, and he asked if there was much vomiting Inside, he said his mother’s women friends did it all the time, I said it can’t be just morning sickness, but he was puzzled and he had to go, and we agreed that personal communication is our only hope, and he said Jim’s not hearing of the judge’s stay was hard to believe.

Miriam’s father spotted me and ducked right back inside, not even pausing to defend his cans in the bright full moon of the streetlamp. And before I knew it, he was behind both of the old glass-plated doors of the vestibule that would protect him from the explosion of a small borrowed pistol that no doubt my mother, the police, he, and others had gotten a call about, when all I wanted was to tell him how I’d had it up to here so where’s he get off doing a job on me about the two hours I once spent with a woman not his daughter? So I could figure it only that he had failed to stop the Hungarian from marrying Miriam (I feel you shaking your head steadily at me)—and had taken it out on me—

—that is, if I cared, you say Jim?

Well, yes I cared: enough to face him in all of his faces, galvanized, switched-off, widower, Jew, father, boss of a tenement inhabited by renting tenants where he paid no rent except his twenty-four-hour attention to what he found himself responsible for.

That was it: we’d once been responsible together for Miriam. I heard voices where turning shapes struggled through the dimly lighted glass. And thinking he had regained sole responsibility from me, I saw he couldn’t handle it and had turned the surplus back to me.

That was it, a male figure not in color, agitated and vague, agitating the dim light through the milky glass, and another familiar figure, female but less small than Iris, turning me into a gunman when I would have been glad to make him a present of the gun, when all I wanted was a word with Miriam’s father, who was retreating to call the authorities and maybe turn his garbage cans on but he’s scared Miriam’s going to get shot in her effort to peacemake when she and I knew she’s scared I’d tell him what she and I had sometimes done, and where, and so I called him by name, his first name, to come out like a man. Windows started going up; tenants were getting their feet on the ringing metal grates of their fire escapes. I heard the old man’s voice calling but not to me, the figures merged and wrestled, rattled the glass, and a voice came from deeper inside that multiple dwelling.

But that was it. They didn’t matter, yet they insisted on mattering: but, to a man, they were able to place me only on their well-swept sidewalk and could not imagine any more than a jury of unknowns that I had come to their doorstep as if it was only one center of many rounds, for now I was also in another place round the corner having a long overdue talk with the roughest girl in school, Louise Agniello whatever her name was now, who’d vouch for me in some way more real than words—I heard her thinking at that moment.

That was it. I was just an ordinary guy she remembered liking; that is, part of life’s untouched potential, Jim.

But these people, one now breaking through into the dingy, dim vestibule, made me matter, when all I had wanted was a few words with one of them —or did I, now? And, expecting to see in the corner of my eye the light turning round and round like a lighthouse on the roof of a squad car closing fast to double-park hopefully at a scene of perpetration, I heard a whirring close to me and knew it by a foreknowledge of what I later knew there was no getting round, and I made my move toward the outer door calling to the loved figure opening it, "All I want—" as the loved figure replied as she was joined and half dragged inside by the father, not as if I was exactly covering them (right?), "Go ahead and tell him." And I heard my name and a clank behind me, and knew it was a bike leant against a car, and, at the same time as my name, the father saying, "I’ll talk to him, I’ll talk to him." But he’d already sent me the messages: sent them with my help between playground fence and newspaper store whose proprietress had phoned him the info he’d kept from his daughter until just now; sent me the messages with the help also of his future son-in-law. For Kallman was here, his hands came down upon me like the /^meditation that I claimed later to no avail, for they narrowed the scope of my arms and hands (his too), dropping my right hand into my jacket pocket; so as we fell together I could do nothing but, first, gripping Mrs. Erhard’s pistol, hold it away from me inside my pocket; and then, hearing Miriam shout, "You’re an asshole, George," as her father ripped her dress, I saved my leather pocket by lifting the pistol up out of it and touching it off like pricking a balloon, firing wildly at her father who was tugging at her from behind the glass-paned front door, with a City inspection sticker on the upper right corner and a cardboard cup sailing down half empty from someone’s window to hit me cheek and roll away with great commotion where I lay trying to recall where I was, and what was important, my right hand alone on the sidewalk hurting like a tooth with a terrible cavity, my arms not held now but without value, Jim, like I had always been close to marginal and now was for good. But I heard a voice saying "Miriam" more than once and a voice saying, "Blow in my ear"; and I knew that whoever those warm words had been said to, the voice was mine and I must become its breath, wherever you are, Jim. And I got to stop thinking there’s what was and what will be, and start thinking there’s a story in between.

Who are we, then, Jim?—you to come here with something to tell us or more like a thing you would get out of me, when we were in connection all the time by colloidal particles. They won’t tell you. Don’t ask. Don’t ask and then maybe they will tell you. The bad raps. The lawyers who didn’t show, the lovers who were too prompt, the lawyers who overdid it in court. The say-so of some mouth in a bar at two in the morning, circumstantial hearsay that helps get you eight to twenty if you can believe in it. The guy who came back to his old apartment because he had been in love there and they hadn’t changed the locks and a new tenant was there and he scared her to death and stole some money and some grass. The guy who could hear such fine and delicate sounds that nobody believed anything he said. The woman who was in a holdup in a supermarket and didn’t remember all that she had had in her pocketbook that had been taken off her until the perpetrator came to her home, and ate an avocado before exacting one long desperate kiss from her.

I have looked for the things that endure and recur, what rules hold firm, and in Foleynomics have urged landscape gardening within the walls where you can see it.

When I engaged the Chilean economist in conversation never guessing he had an Irish name, I was pushing a broom and had heard someone say behind me, "Nobody comes to see Foley," which was because I told them not to, being in a large enough communication to do without visitors as well as the vending machines that line the walls. I know distances. Down the gallery I hear a message; it’s six snores and four dream-curses off, and one astral projection from here to New York down hairpin parkways that throw you always back. And the message is no less margin than are visitors, but it has been passed to Efrain by the man the Chilean came first to visit who was never Efrain’s friend until a week before Efrain, who had lost good time he thought in the Box where he had nursed one and a half busted ribs for curtaining his cell and expected his parole to be held up a month at least, unexpectedly was released from here as if his recent Box time counted: which wasn’t the newsbreak you were after (smile) when first you joined us, for you named, bless you, space-time’s Colloidal Unconscious, having half-sensed its power in yourself and homed on another center of it, where you know at last what no one else knows—not Miriam’s father who looks for her at twilight in garbage can after garbage can of chicken limbs and leftover wordburgers of our nation’s half-read magazines, and is not sufficiently developed to get through to me; and not even the red-headed black kid who helped me ritually drown the kid from parochial school with white eyebrows: he, not Miriam, is the one I think of, with true guilt never spoken, never stood up for in court, for after what we did to him at camp that kid never slept again, so great was his fear confronted with the dividing and dividing particles of air he had such a quick concept of, there under the float, but no inner resources to find multiplied in connections among all our minds; and so some nights, when Miriam joins Larry, and, however good and friendly you’ve been, you merge with Spence, and the Chilean economist’s wife imperils her own husband-mate by enlisting his brother who while in Philadelphia sees not only an opera star’s recital but that lady’s dangerous paramour visit some old, ill printer who answers, "Very possible," to each query and returns wisely to firmer ground, which is that a female relative by marriage once put Andrew Jackson everlastingly in her debt by ordering for him in a tavern a radical if not quite borderline-toxic colloid to allay if not suspend his dyspepsia (if not his desire) but, too, his hunt for her beloved who sat back in the shadows of that tavern having let himself be disarmed by his beloved who later herself got rid of the darkly engraved pistol not by throwing it into the river they had both seen from end to end and on spring days when a woman and a man might spear the great bodies of the sturgeon running upriver above Albany, but by slipping it to a reporter-diarist in the shadows of another corner of that tavern, friend of Jackson and of his namesake Andrew J. Downing, protege of the Austrian consul general with whom he had collected mineral samples on walks in the Hudson Highlands but, more important, ideas of landscape and gentility whence to emerge as a great American builder and planter—on such nights, I say, even some twilight payload of a mountain moving our way to be deposited somewhere in this general region of the Northeast so that only those in active possession of Colloidal Unconscious will resist the bent of that mountain to make us think that it was always there and that we have found how to make our living together—on such nights I think less of Miriam, whose fate her father dare not take responsibility for, than of all those roadblocks the kid we scared must have had to draw near and bend himself around all his life. And so, Jim, for I am with you even if you have taken your message whatever it was away with you never in body to come back, we have reached a simple truth. If prison is irrelevant to the work of the heart, lasting time inside’s mere transiency, too. Therefore, it does not exist. So as for escape, who needs it?

Yet if it does not exist, then it presents no obstacle to escaping. I shared this with the old scientist-man whose lady companion came from Cincinnati thirty years ago but came to believe she was in New Jersey half the time and he replied to my letter that he thought her delusion was her way of being part of his early life. He whose work is clouds and winds, the newer rains and the particles of power in our atmosphere that may still have the wrong names, is all for my plan to exploit the potential of this place. But I sent you the F.E.P. as an opening cover to carry the real Moon rock of C.U. but I see it all about me, the Foley Economic Plan, and find that planning to build a home you may start by seeing you already got one built.

I am someone you have told your friends about, I hope. I see someone take up a letter of mine off your mahogany table, maybe your kitchen sink; your window sill, car seat, motel carpet, beach towel, or out of the wastebasket where you have saved (smile) other exposes of life’s stacked-up words including (remember?) your little brother’s who when you told him he didn’t have to thank you for helping him frame a scenery flat for a high school play said to you his admired elder bro what you said you never forgot, "The rest is silence"; or my letter comes out of your coat pocket while someone’s standing next to you; or I’m in your mind and you are in prison while snoring away first thing in the morning next to your wife, do you have a wife?, a future one, a past? maybe seeing yourself on one or other screen of long historic time. So here is my news article, get in get out you said, the larger frame of history is nowhere, which is how there can be an opening in what is already open as hell I told the anti-Castro Cuban (who looked at me weirdly), but the opening I meant isn’t some escape he no doubt plans but the one snoring along a thruway through Old States, New States, to be totaled soundlessly when we all run together, for is not history’s frame everywhere? Charlie and Carlos I know say hello. They know we correspond. The guards in their slots send best, having heard from Juan that a Chilean prison cleared out all their beat-up inmates the day of an OAS human-rights team visit and put the guards in the cells, but in this joint there wouldn’t be enough guards to pull it off, but they have their daydreams like you who I had this sense in a dream last night do not ever recall your dreams, so you move ahead imagining there’s none to recall, or could the South American gentleman have told me this about you?—except how would he know? by the very fluid bond I have called "colloid"?—which, had I broached it to that girl-sensationalizer of life inside, I would never have shown was part and parcel of the Foley Economic Plan since it includes the fuller use of our esteemed visitors as well—and was that anti-Castro inmate right to wonder about you?, but he could not know you as I do—I asked what he thought of the man who got bombed in Washington last September, he said Letelier wasn’t far enough left to matter—like, upper-middle-class semi-guilty husband with extra-love on his mind—but it did not sound true to me, for I have read about the man since the car bomb blew his legs off under the car, and I have asked our Chilean, who knew him and I could tell respected his energy but would not speak of him—also in the Eyes of my fellow inmate the Cuban supposedly anti-Castroite I have seen Escape, for he weighs time here against the blind light out there of mere explosion. Won’t stand up in court, Jim, what I put in writing, what said in person, what you’ve received through being tuned towards me and what you’ve added, for we make our contribution I mine here and you who might here and there say it all in your own way better—so much for Foley.

rent

Rent a city, if you were rich enough.

Now use it. Take occupancy. Put things into it. Run it. Look at it. Keep it from others if you wish. Sublet it. Inflate it and paddle it. But if you sound funny here as if you don’t mean what you say, remember to be serious. Be objective.

He saw through the changing charm of his six-year-old daughter into the future, and he wondered what he had learned. He saw ahead to when they would come early to the park to get the best choice of bikes. But this time and last time he was renting just one bike. His daughter was learning. This time and last time they had come early to get ahead of the crowd in case other children were learning in the parking lot.

But as for getting the best choice, he saw that at that hour you couldn’t tell for sure which bikes were better. A hundred bikes were standing against each other in the rental shed near the boat pond, and they all looked pretty good. Collectively they looked quite new.

At that hour to reach in and pull out the bike you thought you wanted was hardly more difficult than to see one bike clearly from where you stood outside the door of the long shed. Jammed together to economize on space, the bikes fit together in a loose, extensive lock.

He had a Raleigh Grand Prix at home and he bicycled to work when he felt like it. But he wasn’t going to ride his bike thirty blocks to the park when he had Sarah with him because he wouldn’t carry her on it in traffic, not even on a Sunday. Now Sarah wanted her own bike, and he would buy her her own when she learned to ride. But that bike she didn’t yet have she wouldn’t be able to ride except when they went away for a weekend or she was out of town during the summer. She was too young to ride from the apartment to the park.

Last Sunday Sarah had told the man she wanted training wheels. He’d said training wheels wouldn’t help. Sarah went along with that. When they took the bike across to the parking lot Sarah was ready to ride. He thought she had a city child’s sense that the time was now and might not last. People might be too busy. The park might fill up with traffic. The bikes might not be for rent any more.

When she had begun, he’d given her long, running pushes, and each time she and the bike had keeled over because she stopped pedaling. She would be about to cry, then anger drove her onward, she said he stopped pushing—or pushed her so she fell. Two Puerto Rican kids passing through sat on the curb of the island that went most of the length of the parking lot. They laughed when Sarah fell, and she cried out mumbling somewhat incoherently, "You don’t even have a bike." Which embarrassed him, while the boys only shrugged to each other and sat waiting for the next development.

The next time she went down she got up and kicked her bike. He righted it for her. She flung it away from her and it clanked to the pavement.

"Damn you," he said.

The boys were laughing again.

But his anger and their laughter seemed to help her take their laughter as applause. She smiled at last. O.K., the thing was funny. Yet he knew she wouldn’t use it to clown. For she meant to ride. With his help she raised the bike and he gave her a long, bending, trotting push that left him panting and wanting a cigarette.

But there she was—up—leaving the last wobble behind her— accelerating—taking the upper turn at the end of the island, pedaling alone back along the far, slightly downgrade side, pedaling a little faster.

This time her turn was wide but no one was in the way.

She was coming toward him and the boys. She called that she couldn’t stop, and the boys started laughing again. He wanted to tell her to put on the brakes—when he realized he was thinking of hand brakes. The boys stood up and got out of the way, and Sarah went over onto the curb of the island just as he remembered the right words and said them: "Pedal backwards."

But she had not fallen; she found herself standing on one foot and supporting the bike naturally.

So now this second Sunday she wanted the same bike she’d had, a blue one with balloon tires.

The man was saying, "So aren’t you glad you didn’t take training wheels?"

"Daddy, you can take a bike if you want," Sarah said.

He thought he wouldn’t; he’d watch her—it was only her second time.

He and Sarah were practically the first here. His eyes were indirectly connected to her hand, which he held. But also between eye and hand he felt a gap, a nothing, and his gaze slid from one responsibility to another thought.

To his gaze the bikes gave a collective promise. Bright steel equipment, moving parts beveled, balanced, cogged, and slotted, polygonal, tubular, ringed, invisibly greased and able to lend power independently. So in the shadow of the shed they had that glimmer of many motions that you saw in the spokes of the racing bikes in the sun when you looked beyond the parking lot through the trees to the road that went through the park. It was a different road on weekends. The road with the cars was somewhere else. A road for bicycles and joggers went through here on weekends. It had been substituted for the other, and it went past the parking lot. It seemed temporarily unrolled through the landscaped rises and falls of a city park by the advance guard of serious bicyclists whose spokes spun in multiple superimposed illuminations and who always seemed to be racing those fine bikes of theirs, taking possession of what the city offered on the weekends, some with goggles on, and caps with the bills turned up, thick socks contained in striped shoes that looked like track shoes or bowling shoes, toeing ahead pumped by heavy piston thighs.

Sarah looked up at him when a blue bike with balloon tires was wheeled out. She said it wasn’t the one she’d had, and he remembered that in this place they had the nerve to hold your ID along with the deposit, and he asked the man to look again. He pointed out to Sarah that this bike had a bell. She rang it. The man took a quick look and said last Sunday’s bike must be way back in the shed—he didn’t have many of the small bikes. Sarah said she liked this bike, the seat wasn’t so high.

They wheeled the bike across the path that led off down to the cafeteria. Sarah said, cT’m not sure I remember." He didn’t smile, but she didn’t look at him. Distances multiplied between them and he was very far from her and very close to her. He looked at his watch and thought he’d like a container of coffee.

She remembered how to ride. Coming down the far side of the island she stepped back on her pedal and the bike slowed. She did this again. When she slowed the bike she seemed to be daydreaming, to have forgotten everything except this. It came to him that she could be more free than her mother was.

A loudspeaker blared in the distance, and a lanky black boy coasted off the road into the upper end of the parking lot where he stopped his bike and looked over his shoulder. Then he brought a walkie-talkie up to his mouth. He had a first-aid kit on the back of his bike.

Two women—one fat, one thin—had come in at the near end across the pedestrian path and were trying their bikes out. Sarah passed the fat one who shrieked at her friend as Sarah came up and passed her very close. It was like a race with Sarah lapping the others. As she came up on them again, the women rode slowly out the far end of the parking lot into the road and he saw that the boy with the first aid and the walkie-talkie had left.

Near the exit Sarah slowed almost to a stop, but then she lost control. She tried to pedal as she and the bike went down hard.

He ran toward her. Her leg was under the bike. She was still headed away from him. He’d urged her to wear jeans instead of the shorts. She was tall for six. The loudspeaker seemed now to come from the whole city. Sarah wasn’t looking back.

He got to her. She frowned. He said, "O.K.?" He pulled at the seat and handlebar; her right leg was over the bike and when he lifted, she came with it; so he lifted the bike and her.

She wanted a Band-Aid, but the tar-smudged bruise beside her knee and along her thigh hadn’t cut through the skin.

"That’s how not to stop," he said. He was going to say take a break, but she was on her seat and this time she stepped on the pedal and got going herself. She now knew how to start. She passed the road exit, turned past the end of the island, came back along the far side of the island, and then, coming round toward him, passed a small black boy and a woman entering from the rental end with a bike. Sarah went around again and then she came right up, slowed almost to a stop, put a foot on the ground.

"That’s terrific. Now you know how to stop."

"How long have I been riding?"

She wanted a hot dog and a drink. It was too early for lunch, but he asked her if she wanted to turn the bike in before they went to the cafeteria. She looked off toward the bike road and asked if she could keep the bike while they had lunch. When he said O.K., she looked back over her shoulder at the boy standing beside his bike which was like hers.

The woman with him was sitting on the outer curb of the parking lot. She was much lighter-skinned than the boy. Her olive-green raincoat was open over dark blue slacks and pale blue turtle-neck. She was speaking in a low voice. He wore gray corduroy trousers and he had a baseball cap with a monogram.

Sarah said she would practice some more.

The boy did not straddle his bike, he put the wrong foot on the down-pedal and pushed with the other foot as if he had a scooter. Then he looked the bike over, turned it around and did his one-foot-on one-foot-off scooter push again. Then he fell.

He fell on top of the bike. He kept both hands on the handlebars.

The woman said, "You going to ride that bike?"

The boy, who was smaller than Sarah but seemed older because he seemed in the tilt of his head to have thought more about how he might be able to do this, straddled the bike and walked it along.

"Go on," the woman said.

"I will," said the boy.

Sarah passed the boy and gave her father a smiling shrug.

He thought he might get her to go to the museum restaurant. The park cafeteria had hot dogs, greasy hamburgers, frozen custard, Coke. He stood up as Sarah came by again. He swung his hand through to touch her the way he did when she was going high enough on a swing and wanted a push to go higher. Next Sunday they would ride together.

The boy tried something new. He ran his bike a ways as if to jump on it when it was moving; then he stopped and turned it around and ran it back toward where his mother sat. He turned it around again and looked it over. He had it, he could see how it worked.

But he was in a tight spot.

"I’m paying for that bike," the woman said. Her perfect curls were sprung out in a high bell-shape. The boy was not afraid of her. "You ride it now," she said. He was not afraid of her so much as of not doing what she said—or of not knowing how to.

He straddled the bike again. Sarah came by and called out, "That’s the one I had last time." She seemed to be racing the boy who was standing still. She made the turn and came down the back-stretch. The woman got up off the curb as if to enforce what she’d said. The boy saw her over his shoulder and tried to move the bike, stepping on the up pedal; and when the bike moved, the other pedal came up and hit the back of his leg and he almost slipped.

"What’s the matter?" the woman said. The boy got his foot on the up pedal, which was on the other side now. "Look how she rides her bike." And suddenly the woman gave the boy one tremendous shove and stood watching.

The boy pedaled four, five, six times without faith, and Sarah instead of overtaking stopped while the boy’s bike ran across from the outer curb to the inner one of the island as if in some trial of its own; but his frowning eyes found those of the only father present and the boy stopped pedaling and the bike went over with a clank.

A two-wheeler takes confidence as long as you don’t have it; later— which is, after all, very soon—a two-wheeler uses the confidence you’re not conscious now of having. Bikes come and go, but if the sense of how to ride is constant, why should this be puzzling?

He picked the boy up. "Keep pedaling," he said. "Don’t think. Just keep pedaling."

The corners of the boy’s mouth were turning down against the equal but other force of this other adult.

"Get on, and this time never stop pedaling."

Sarah came by now, coasting, and she made the road-exit turn to come back along the other side of the island.

He started the boy. He ran him along holding the seat of the bike, feeling as if with his hands the boy’s narrow ribs and shoulders, and then the boy’s pedaling got away from him and he lost his footing and let go, but the boy was going. He hit the top turn pedaling like a cross-country racer and came down the back stretch just as a white motor scooter with a red-faced policeman upright in the seat buzzed in and stopped.

Sarah came by like merry-go-round music. "I like this bike," she said.

The woman had a paperback book in her lap. She was laughing as the boy made the bottom turn and came around toward her and Sarah’s father. "You got it, Mark." Laughing so hard that Mark started laughing himself. And as he came up with her he seemed to be thinking about an injury, an adult pain. The woman was seated on the curb; her legs were together, gracefully turned to one side as if she were picnicking in a field overlooking a valley.

The policeman had walked away toward the cafeteria.

Mark got himself out from under the bike, and the woman said, "You all right?" He sniveled. Then, seeing one adult coming and the other staying where she was, he watched to see what would happen next.

The woman put her book on the curb. "Don’t pull that crybaby number, I’ll slap your face." She got up and walked toward Mark. "You ain’t going to get your real bike till you know how to ride this one, now you get on that bike and ride it."

The other adult had stopped halfway, but he spoke to the woman: "Those rental bikes take a beating." She had looked up as the words were said, and she had to answer. She shook her head: "At least they don’t get ripped off."

"Oh they probably do."

She told Mark to get on his bike—did he expect to learn?

Then Mark said, just loud enough to be heard, "My daddy’s going to buy me my real bike," and the woman slapped him on the cheek as he was getting his leg over the saddle. She put her hands on her hips. Mark’s trousers were torn. She got her palm on the back of the bike seat and this time she gave Mark a running push and she held on for a few steps, but she didn’t want to play in front of Sarah’s father, or so he thought, and she let go and stood leaning on one hip.

Mark veered over into Sarah’s bike and fell.

"See what you did," said the woman.

"That’s O.K. Let me give him a push."

This time Mark got going. She went back to where her book was and seemed to look only when Mark came around the bottom turn and pedaled past her to the top turn. Sarah rode after him.

"Stop pedaling and coast," she heard her father call to the boy.

The woman looked up at the words—not toward him but toward Mark, who was pedaling faster to keep up with the bike.

"Stop pedaling and coast."

"Like this," called Sarah.

The boy was staying in front of her and on the turn nearly went over into the pedestrian path where people were passing with a transistor.

What book was the mother reading? She would be just as well-dressed on the subway in the morning. She wasn’t comfortable with the book, but it wasn’t the book; it was how time that she was spending was occupying her. He tried to repeat the thought. Possessing her. He looked at his watch. Two dollars, two-fifty. Next Sunday, double that for the same amount of time.

The boy wanted to stop; he’d done many circuits and other people were in the parking lot now, and he wanted to stop.

"Sarah, want a drink?" He thought she called back yes. The boy now coasting up past his mother looked toward him; the boy had an idea how to stop; he slowed way down, way down, then let the bike go over and jumped clear.

He looked down at his machine. He came and sat down on the curb.

He was close enough to be spoken to quietly so the mother didn’t hear: "Say, you better get it out of the way there."

The boy shrugged.

"I’ll show you how to stop."

The woman was watching. Sarah called.

He held the bike with the boy on it and got him to balance with his feet on the pedals, then drop one foot to the ground. The woman watched.

"But you got to be moving," said the boy.

When the time came you didn’t really think.

Sarah was watching too, but she was in motion coming round the bottom turn by the cafeteria path; she wasn’t watching where she was going, yet he saw that she’d made the turn and was approaching slowly. The boy looked back over his shoulder like a motorist.

Two other kids racing each other came up behind Sarah and it was a sideswipe squeeze, close enough to bump her knees or lock axles—well hardly—and when they got past her she seemed released as if other hands had been on her handlebars, and luckily no one else was coming up behind her for she turned across toward her father just as—he didn’t believe it—the black boy he was holding up suddenly decided to take off—the face would have been worth seeing—he staggered against the absence. But Sarah had forgotten how to stop or was thinking of something else, or maybe had been aiming for the black boy who wasn’t there.

"Daddy," she called, and he found he couldn’t get out of the way, and they would both have fallen if he hadn’t braced himself and caught her head-on by the handlebars.

She got off the bike. He was holding it.

She showed him where the wheel rubbed against the fender. She wanted something to drink.

She asked if they could go on the road next time. He said sure if she thought she was ready. She asked when she could ride one of the bikes with thin tires. He said those bikes were too big; she said no; he said they had hand brakes.

Maybe, she said (making a joke), they would just go on renting a different bike every week.

The thought consumed him. All those bikes. A chain of bikes. The city’s endless claim. But Sarah’s childhood was not endless.

But which was the thought that consumed him?

Sarah’s mother, ten blocks closer to the park, would say—he knew what she would say—Be a hero, if you want to shell out the money; but why buy her a bike now?

Well, he wanted the kid to have her own bike. But she would soon outgrow it, wherever it was at this moment. Well, what was money? No— he meant, what was it exactly? Like time, it had a claim on him to be used and not to go unused. These rental bikes had no reflectors apparently. His Raleigh had three red, two orange. He saw himself lifting the wheels out of the frame, holding the chain off the rear wheel’s gears, flagging cabs until he got one to stop—disembarking uptown, fixing his wheels back in, and renting a bike for Sarah.

Money was time—or had used to be, when there was money, before money had disappeared into an expanding cloud whose only bearable promise was that money might vanish into psychic barter. Well, if time was money, time spent thinking without success about how to avoid wasting money was money wasted. The thought was worth something. A medium of exchange. But hold on—the black woman had stood up to stretch—her head went one way, her hips the other—if wealth was a claim on someone else’s labor, what was he able to claim here but somebody’s exertion getting a bike out of the shed, and what was he paying for but someone to take his money and his identifying credit card and make an enterprising note of the time? Dumb question. Inflated thought. He felt himself—it made no sense at all—the most silent person in a radius of fifty miles. Dumb feeling, he thought. But then he remembered he was getting also the labor expended in order to buy the bikes—house them—fix them. He felt the sequence. He fitted into it. The owner couldn’t ride all those bikes—now or someday or once.

"Let’s take the bike back first," said Sarah.

How about a long-term lease at a lower rate? Or a quitrent!

Sarah was saying she wanted—Sunday dinner, he thought—a hot dog, taco chips, and an orange drink. Mark’s mother had her hands on her hips— if she was his mother—as she watched Mark pass. "What the man say to you?"

Listen, the rental people exerted a claim on your labor; for your labor such as it was was where you got the cash to pay.

But Sarah’s claim was greater and she wasn’t paying.

In fact, he paid the rental people so that he would then be able to give Sarah his labor.

O.K. But give?

Say he rented her?

When good neighbor Sally had rung the buzzer last night and had said to Sarah, "Darling, might I borrow your father for ten minutes?" Sarah had said, "Nothing doing." Her new phrase.

He remembered that the park cafeteria had beer. Sarah wheeled her bike. He looked at his watch and Sarah looked up at him and he thought he knew what she was going to say, but he was wrong. She said, "We’re both walking."

What did it cost Sarah to rent him?

"You and Mommy would never slap me on the face," she said.

They were passing Mark’s mother when Mark came up and skidded to a stop.

"That’s great, man, you’ve done it all—ride, start, stop—all the first time."

"Well it isn’t the first time I forked out a dollar and a half an hour for a bike," said the woman. "Mark, you thank the man for helping you."

The book was a book of modern plays.

"Let’s go," said Sarah.

They crossed the pedestrian path on their way to the bike rental, and he got a whiff of mustard and meat. "You never forget how to ride a bike once you’ve learned," he said.

"That’s a likely story," said Sarah.

Sarah thought she would not go on the road next time after all but have one more time in the parking lot.

Good, if that was what she wanted.

And would he ride with her in the parking lot?

Sure.

THE HERMIT-INVENTOR OF NEW YORK, THE ANASAZI HEALER, AND THE UNKNOWN ABORTER

The grandson, who had refrained from asking if a certain skinny geezer that came and went one summer day was the man or weird character in question, would recall his grandmother’s remark—history, prediction, regret, relief—that there were things about the Hermit-Inventor not even she knew; for the grandson said, and at once recalled saying, that there was maybe stuff the Hermit-Investor didn’t know about the Anasazi healefs discoveries.

Oh that must be so, the grandmother averred, with a pensiveness not humorous this time, yet embracing but never equal to a knowledge they both had that the grandson would know things about these her fabled history and lands that she herself did not. Wasn’t this because she had always been so near to him, he to her?—yes: down the street of a New Jersey town’s seasons from the late-spring morning when light shared itself with him, shored from the tiers and banks and steep slopes of foliage seen from his own third-floor room when he would stay with his grandparents, or seen from his grandmother’s own second-floor bedroom (where once he had learned to whistle), prime green-sea mass of waves of maple-bough leaves that crowded the porch as if the trees were mysteriously withheld, all but their leaves, which so surrounded the dining-room windows of his grandparents’ house that lawn and dirt-ground and driveway and the raised sidewalks of Throckmorton Street where it crossed West Main all just flickered as if through the fine wings of butterflies known by name or as if precipitating the broken motions and real flow of these sidewalks’ own brown and slate lozenges, on, on to autumn’s first intuition that winter had been in its mind all along (we mean chill) when the boy, who was like a man and felt somewhat that way, left his own house for school; left always later than his kid brother always in haste yet with the leisure of those young years no matter what the weather (while the kid brother curiously hated and could burst with rage at the lunatic winds that visited the street during just six or seven January days, unlike the tougher elder brother), who came out of their now motherless house a hundred yards down the street from their grandparents’—and, on instinct that morning as he was turning at the end of the flagstone walk toward downtown, he glanced back in the direction of his grandmother’s house to find her there—a watchman or, in the midst of everything, a live eye—there diagonally up the street on the far side as if something in his head way in advance had been seeing her there but she hadn’t gotten the message until now, a figure who waved like a mother seeing him off to school, where he was a regular person and a husky, friendly guy, etcetera, nothing odd about him, he’d leave that to others in and out of his family: yet now seeing his grandmother standing by a pillar of her porch, her hands clasped, he registered some rift in the scheme as an extension of it, economy of scale long before he knew those words (which years later like many others seemed to have been waiting for him inside him)—only that that grandmother woman, whom he had fallen out with after recently doubting for the first time her old but secretly always mounting stories, doubting because they began to flicker as more than stories and to bear queerly upon his life so that he had to think that if an event then that was so like here and now wound up like that, things here will too—ugh ugh ugh and shoot and shit but it sounds silly!—was waving him ("downstreet," as you said in that town like "downwind") off to school from that home of hers that he loved and sometimes lived in, and not this other home of his own at the other end of this flagged walk less than a regulation championship pool’s length behind him his father’s house, his departed mother’s undervalued house, and his own (an early real-estate insight belonging to him as freshly and clearly as in later years the house never seemed to), from which he had just emerged (for yes he did feel the exposure), with a gray-with-white-trim porch one step lower than the porch of his grandparents’ white house, "his grandmother’s," up the street: yet his own porch had dark, earth-damp, min-erally aromatic room under it to store two or three (in fact two and a half) rakes and some crates and a litter of forgettable junk and an occasional eavesdropping boy and a lawnmower that you made into a congenial machine between your force and the sweet sluggish-grown growth of the grass that didn’t feel very grassy green when you were pushing through it: a house with, above that porch, a ruffled tangle of dry, dark, indestructible ivy running up and around the porch posts sticking by some adhesive, some type of time, and pretty only at a distance, but a porch not with the everlasting paint smell in one specific corner of his grandparents’ porch, the corner behind the all-weather wicker-white chair (with kind of webbed legs, roostery-furred legs, if you know what we meant at the wordless time this was thought) in which his grandfather sometimes but not in this weather or at this hour of the day sat with a tome of the Century Dictopedia (as he said it, open under a pearl-handled magnifier which he fingered and looked less through than at, murmuring that this way you could see double:) while this school morning, whether because alone and watched, or from a mental wind from her, to her, a very grandmother-wind if you will, the opposite of that supposed ill wind (yay) Danny Kaye sang of in one of those nutty movie numbers as the identical-twin celebrity-extrovert—or in fact mistral (of the largely unknown boy-man’s later years when we lived to Change or talk non-judgmentally of Change late into the night show and mistral became miztral); but did this grandmother-wind, like nor’easter or sou’wester (also a rain gear in the overall weather machine’s sluice-drive continuum), come from? or did it "go to?" (as Shakespeare in high school said, while Jim and friends snickered, "Go to"—"How now, Gratiano?"— "How now, my lord, wilt hear this piece of work?"—"Come hither, sit by me"—"Go to, thou varlet")—for this wind, grandmother or ill or other—or mother—moved this morning across his broadening shoulders from left to right pushing him to turn squads-right upon achieving the main sidewalk which he was going to do anyway toward school which is beyond the other, far end of town, and he thereupon turned against this momentum, only to find, up the street, his grandmother on her own porch waving, as his mother sometimes more slowly would from her window if she was awake and in position to and had she now still been among the living if in all probability suicidal:

CUT, said the man who played the director in a picture about Hollywood that was showing one weekend in Windrow, New Jersey; but you kept watching; the movie went on, the screen didn’t go blank on you with consequent whistling and stamping as if the audience were trying to get out: Cut yourself in on what someone else is doing, a woman coming home, saying hello, waving goodbye or was it good morning, or just good, practically speaking, off there, until you can’t tell if her scale is inside or all around her, like your own according to the powerful woman Mayn visited in the Bronx years later not because he wanted his own auras read but to get information on someone else, and there the locally famous woman, who was unexpectedly pregnant, leaning back thoughtful on one arm of her armchair, told him she do him but not gonna talk about someone else, some lady he said come to see her: Cut, to the grandmother waving slowly, not at all trying to be his mother (it came to him), but being herself, which didn’t rule out being at his house when he and his little brother got home from school, Brad earlier, Jim at dusk, a tall, surprisingly soft woman, although quiet somewhere inside her, for he understood one day that they had this understanding not to pry—let some feelings, some of the past, go unknown although wasn’t it true that it would always come out? and he waved back to this grandmother of his who’s way up the street there on the opposite side—she’s got her life thank you—as if this morning salute happened always or, looking ahead to when another event that felt sort of laid out, used to happen oh twenty years later in the century, and his own wife marveled that he accepted this odd event, namely, meeting just like that on a city street a very specific person from years past and on the spur of the moment taking for granted that here came this person he hadn’t seen in several years, but—well, walking down a street in New York’s Greenwich Village past a bike shop all metal, glass, and color and with a quarter ton of maroon newness in it, perhaps because of a great cold red English bike frame that, as he had not noticed knowingly before, is a plane figure in space, a near parallelogram stronger with sides and an angle or two gone on to a kiltered inertia of vector-time elegant and ready that always waited for it, a bike frame detached from all wheels applicable in future and hanging near a soft-blue French Motobecane completely assembled so the blue warmed the shining saddle as much as did the sunlight, he reflected upon a harshly curious interview he had just smiled, factored, and chatted his way through with a maverick meteorologist, only now to get run down by two small laughing kids escaping their mother who’s at the door of a brick-faced bank just as he met a russet-bearded man (economist) not knowingly seen by him in seven years, and (here’s the point) said directly, "Hi, Cliff," as if years were days, and nodded with a smile and passed on down the street for another seven, ten, twelve years—as if (did we say?) it had been laid out—

—laid out? asks a voice threatening to get comic that instantly acquires the body of the all-purpose interrogator who has probably picked up "all-day sucker" in his crash research for potential enemies’ childhood laid out with a jawbreaker roundhouse right—but no: not laid out on the carpet with one punch, laid out like a ground plan in motion—

—so later he knew that that morning that his always beloved grandmother had been off there waving away the distance between them like thin air, he had put away into a dump of his brain some sketch or letter in the seldom-emptied wastebasket in his own room two doors down from his father’s bedroom (pyjama’d forty-five-year-old bulk dead to the world in sky-blue cotton issued him for his July birthday till that father would come awake jerking up onto one elbow and shielding himself with the other against the room’s deep shadow so Jim could quote his father’s old "He’s a good boy when he’s asleep" remembering many not apparently unhappy bedtimes when this got said in his mother’s company but when company was present so the smaller Jim would grin dumbly, he saw himself, but no one in this dark bedroom to say it to now, and so much surrounding the now bigger, older Jim inside that it’s worth putting also out of mind), a diagram (close to) a coach’s blackboard play-pattern remembered (doodled) with an exactness honoring maybe not the scale or content but the method of the October History class he was sitting in; or during Geometry; or during Journalism (which, oddly, his father with all that practicality sweating toward acumen if not quite to it, didn’t think he should waste time taking when there’s a newspaper in the family:

: so the lines of two homes got linked by a street paralleling them by means of sidewalks the length of the town, and got connected by him and corrected by his heartbeat so that, shifting through at least one inequality, they became like the lines of one T-formation halfback going in motion to the left side until the ball was snapped, and the quarterback faked a quick pass shallow to the left but he handed off instead to his stellar fullback (me) who went three steps to the right, leaned toward scrimmage—toward tackle, where a void had been cleared by "Tornado" Tim Ivins, thus attracting doubly a new flow of enemy defenders—leaned the other way to cock his right shoulder and heave a surprise pass as unexpected as it was diagonally risky to the far left sideline where the very halfback who’d been in brotherly motion and to whom the quarterback had just faked a pass was now all on his lonesome, while drawing during History your circled Xs and your broken lines and the blocking assignments, he was aware of growing a rollicking hard-on receiving beside him his girl’s faint halo (just before lunch) of gentle sweat and a seasoning he knew one night some weeks later was gardenia. He had brought her one, having never knowingly smelled one, in a shiny white carton, shoebox size, he had to carry like a coffin offering with something live or afloat inside, gingerly anyhow, and dared to greet her with a kiss upon her cheek but long enough (was it one kiss, or two or three) so he felt her smile but with precious quakes along the dimple which are now and forever tender plus amused, so that (in any event) the play pattern of the quarterback’s faked pass and the fullback’s faked run displaced the teacher’s words—which were about words—and well this was the way the diagram of the two homes acted like a play pattern and that early morning that he felt was brought to some wonderfully imperceptible point upon the raw air by his grandmother’s being there,

he displaced or slipped into a fold of some soft luggage for the journey (Great day in the morning! his granddad could say, happily astoni’ed) which fold might have been itself something slipped away—dis (we continue) placed the atmosphere of seeing his grandmother waving, in the time it took him to go from porch down own front walk to sidewalk, his own home behind him had obviously swung round (but don’t tell anyone, they’ll say you’re nuts or, worse, that you’re not serious, don’t tell even yourself, for, shit, the truth’s gon’ come out anyway)—sailing before those prevailing easterlies you heard about {prevailing westerlies, a man interjects at seaside Mantoloking cripes anybody ‘n everybody knew what west wind meant!). But was it blew from or to the west? because Jim asked and forgot—to think about it, that is—and asked again {and wasn’t told!) for they didn’t even know all about clouds and you could see clouds but couldn’t see wind (said some voice in him) and this was there in him and yet wasn’t him at all because he was on the march to school: he blew up at his girl (though laughing all the way) Whadda ya mean I’m spoiled?—just ‘cause you say you got homework so you can’t come out to the movies?—and he squirted—

—quite unexpected words at her: "What if you got pregnant?" (he would say anything to her at fifteen, he could do that and she didn’t get shocked) but he was thinking horrified a second, What if this queenly girl has already (not gotten, but) been!—and never told me!—because some girls must be like that, ‘stead of putting the screws to you in which case you followed Owl Woman’s example, "I am going far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling." But if it is not an irreverent interruption, How did owls get a reputation for knowing so much?—shit, Owl Woman, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who heard it from several people including both Margaret and the East Far Eastern Princess, was just always turning into an owl and her getting the name (they took all the good names—Red Cloud, Left Hand, Reared Underground, Tall Salt) Owl Woman might not mean a thing about wise owl shit and mean only that she disappeared into an owl when she wanted to and maybe flew around at night looking for bright eyes to aim at until—CUT—she was back again Owl Woman, singing songs she didn’t claim responsibility for since they came to her in dreams or when she was an owl but who was to say if the owl was in her or she was in the owl, or basically was owl?, she was known to have had children, so maybe she wasn’t an owl; but what happened if you turned into an owl in the middle of giving birth or in the middle of—

—squirting water he had virtually sucked (so distant was it) at the old low-pressure drinking fountain outside the noisy school cafeteria at his friend Sam’s big brother who wore glasses lensed thick as whirlpools and was fat enough to sit on you but when fighting threw these fiendish longitudinal jabs that looked fast but no more than fast until they went through you as evil as an electric shock and permanently greened a muscle in your arm y’know, and on the march to school (for, after the million shocks flesh is heir to, it’s still only the late apple-breeze of the fall of 1945 with the dust still setting on those immortal Japanese recreations one beginning Hiro t’other ending saki that through their layers of sifted, screened, pastel’d tumuli-cumuli foretell that with American aid the Japs can imitate anything, up to and including an obliterated polis) it’s his grandmother just beginning the day sweeping the porch a bit early, not this daydream of his own front walk maybe twenty or twenty-five yards behind him turning into that other and only apparently much greater distance from him of her house so when he waved back far down the street and held her gaze a second as casual as if she was there every morning, the distances to either home with him at the center were, well, equal—her large gray eyes his body swung to, as close as his mother’s eyes sometimes at the window behind him of his own house that’s turned by this arc of mind or swing of wind to his grandmother’s: This afternoon in his mind anyhow he would be fighting the halfbreed (who most of the time had no smell) for the halfback spot that in the new formations was basically left halfback when everyone knew that he should and would stay where he was, he was broader and right for fullback where the coach was playing him for sure-footed solidity and while his grandmother, who often employed that halfbreed classmate of her grandson’s for yard work, asked of the "endless hole," as grandfather put it so slowly filling up with doughnuts or crullers, how football was going, or Sam’s father’s huge greenhouse for commercial roses, or how Geometry was going, she would listen so truly to what was said that she might have been drawing out of him those shelved daydreams where the halfback’s positioning and speed went apart from his person, in fact so perfectly separated from the halfbreed’s braggart person that you acquired your own signal back at you that, on a morning porch not obscured now by the bough leaves of other months and from the center where you yourself were just equal in radius (that warmed and vanished into his hand’s question now Which was more sensitive—the upper slope of his girl’s breast or the lower plum-jut and did one breast get aroused by the other’s being aroused?)—just equal in radius to his distance from his home porch, because that porch of hers was home to him, and never forget that if he himself had lost his one mother (by sea; one if by sea), the grandmother-woman had lost a daughter (which word he could apply to his mother only with the difficulty he had of thinking she was not dead), and if he couldn’t think of his grandma generally and of his girl’s breast in the same head, nor with the real regular stuff on his mind and at the same time that dopy radius that belonged in someone else’s mind not his daydreaming its swing around behind him and in front of him plotting out some future, and then around and back between the obviously near house his father now alone owned and the grandparents’ place obviously six, eight times as far away (leave the surveying to us, to George Washington and his sister city Thomas Jefferson), why the radius from being impossibly the same to both houses to being plausibly and clearly the same now became a radius just a shade more than you needed or wanted: but for what? for some godforsaken reason that forgot itself in the doings of his day till he paused at the threshold of a class early in the darkening afternoon and got shoved with initiative by some class799

mate just as he saw rain hitting the silver panes like light, and his teacher, a statuesque woman capable of movement, turned from the board with wet around her eyes und cheeks, so that, elbowing the friend who shoved him, he could put all of it and none of it together for a second to embrace an elusive burial of fact, that it must be many mornings his grandmother had been on that porch of hers up the street watching the motherless brothers go to school in succession, and he had known it with some corner of both his eyes so not shifting their light upon her who watched over him was just this vacancy about the thing that had befallen him—not a death, though someone else’s, but a thing—fallen right through him to leave him nowhere to be found apart from the wave that had fallen through him, so there’s this feeling that’s unsure embarrassment (he told his girl Anne-Marie after they had lain on the night ground fifty yards from Bob Yard’s parked pickup truck, and she understood how you could feel embarrassed at being so) over what his mother had done or "arranged to have done," he kept hearing and hearing, though this he did not report to Anne-Marie, layin’ on her elbow once in a while noticeably blinking with the coolest and most loving concentration so that he finally cried one time there on the ground and said he didn’t know shittin’ why except he was now more than embarrassed (she said, I know), he shoved her in the shoulderbone, scented flesh, matter!—and she shoved back harder and he almost asked her to marry him by which he would have meant go away now at the age of fifteen and a half, which she would not have done and partly because she did love him, but he didn’t say the words and felt better for holding those words in, while sensing the Tightness of feeling, yes, embarrassment (it didn’t matter if anyone else in the world felt it for this type of event—he did) embarrassment at the departure of his mother, his grandmother’s daughter; at the same time he was not going to go out of his way during that autumn to tell his grandmother he couldn’t trust her old Princess and Indian stories to be stories any more because she was obviously often the East Far Eastern Princess and had done at least some of the things that some of the time some of her old kid stories said, an Indian chief’s son’s mother who was nuts or at least with a hole in her head all the time filling with demons really did die and really did come back to life when her son left in pursuit of that paleface Princess now immortally bronzed by the western sun (though bronze was an alloy of Bolivian tin and Chilean copper, though come to think of it, how did you alloy? did you melt the metals and stir ‘em up in a bowl made of earth?) and somewhere in his mind populated by football smells of cleat-rubber, fresh (green) football shirts, hide, choking earth, and the tense, constant future of play patterns and populated by his now only one girlfriend’s wonderful proof that flowers might perspire with dew that other scientists could imagine came down from above and from the outside but really came from the interior of the soul even on Sunday to the straw-creak of slightly shifting cushion stuffing in the church pew (that seemed the least Godly place of the week and in some pleasant threat one of the more exclusively sexed-up of times in the fairly steadily sacred week, feelings he years later knew that he had accepted as wordless and unlosable), he recalled and recalled that his mother had told him he should go away and would go, but then had gone herself: so he woke up into his mother’s oceangoing hallucination for which there was no word, not even the one they gave it beginning with s (for selfish, for sea, for simoom, for suing in absentia), too confused to do any but the next thing, suspecting that his grandmother’s west-easterly histories shed upon him some shadow if he let them (which he did not do) imagining through the successive fall and winter clarities of his mother’s absence that no force acted on him, oh he was freer (oi, he was freer—oi, they would say, because one of their friends was Jewish and both his parents were, too, in that New Jersey town and this kid’s father had bought out the hardware store and enlarged it just at the time another newspaper got started that commanded the outlying agricultural advertising and audience, oi), freer than free, which equaled but an illusion of manhood he even then guessed.

So he chose to be friends with his grandmother—but friends instead of relations or something else unknown to him—having never told her he wasn’t friends with her. Which maybe he never had not been. It wasn’t her fault his mother had taken herself away; and his grandma had been there all along regardless of any view of his; and he even fell thoughtfully in love with his grandmother again, but was more aware of time now, so in knowing his feeling like a man was O.K. but a little early and tough though it didn’t feel tough, he did all over again feel a man. And the day dreamt radius of one school morning faded into his life countersinking there some power he wouldn’t take, particularly because it went on thinking itself into the future unless he reined it back a little like beeg thoughts that if shortened find their true area, as closely real as it is troublesome—that is, to survey such facts without taking the speed, juice, and directed path out of such moving bodies the better to see them.

So he found his grandmother again and they were talking about the weather. They went that much back into her old yarns, when people cared to know why weather happened as it did. The two weathers of the Anasazi Medicine Man and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, who in one of his successive incarnations, just one year before meeting an editor’s daughter on an island that belonged to Bedloe among the littered limbs and deep-mined uncratings of a Statue he called a French gift for comic art, had witnessed a tornado so symmetrical it sustained itself for two hours, while the Anasazi Healer, who said if you reject the Yuma preventive of an ounce of mesquite wood ashes and purest brook water and must choose the pound of cure as my old friend the Hermit-Inventor of the East has taught me, go ahead and beat your belly with rocks (knock knock), but if the wind turns to hail or even rain you may wind up having the baby anyway—thus the alte Anasazi who would ever be six hundred and more years of age but whose death without-reincar-nation was real and important, having precipitated an eastbound cloud un-precedentedly noctilucent and low that was to be contemplated as weather and not for its long, slow trip in the lee of a young Indian man (the boy flickeringly, and the man less and less, recalled) tracking during 1894 (a hundred years or so before the end of the world) a young Anglo woman one day to be herself turned into a mist and temporarily secreted if not inhaled by a statue large as a giant rising from the waters of an aging harbor.

The two weathers of downcoming and upgoing were not quite the same as observed ("just seen") and created ("suddenly made, y’know"), or the weathers of presence ("there") and absence ("not there") in turn not the same as the two weathers of leaving and arriving; nor were these pairs to be parceled or paralleled equally between the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor. For the Indian and the Anglo agreed as well as disagreed regardless of their relative distances from each other; they were near each other sometimes even to the point of meeting, and yet they were oftener far remote, while the Hermit in his Net-Space-Traversed seemed less a hermit than the Anasazi who dwelt in a high rock cell but in order perhaps to be visited by those wishing to be away from where they were and get a glimpse of the more than old man; and he was visited by images, winds, and creatures of everlasting hues and waters including his friend the Hermit and the alleged Mena (woman-zoologist, Chilean, specialist in the javelina and its hind-mounted scent glands, also in horse-bone meal) and the troubled young Navajo Prince, who for the love of a strange girl visitor had abandoned his principal pursuits, his studies of the northern bison tongue’s energy potential, the improvement of corn crops, the messages of Earth told in the apparent motions of storm mass and dry cloud from mountain to mountain or the transparency of an aborted fetus.

The grandmother’s grandson thought a minute, as if like an avalanche of warm air the events during that awful summer, which was always the year of his father’s age, had not happened; he said he didn’t remember if the East Far Eastern Princess had ever gone to see the Anasazi Medicine Man; then he caught himself—It doesn’t matter, Gramma.

Doesn’t it? she asked, piqued, at odds with him and ruffled but not flummoxed; No, she supposed it didn’t.

For what would she have gone to the Anasazi Healer for? He wasn’t your general practitioner, nor much interested in disease (his own people having all died out hundreds of years ago), though you don’t always go to a medicine man to get rid of some old Eurasiatic disease, and the lady in question, bearing upon her person an aura as real as the turbulence a person may conveniently release from his or her heart system in order to externalize it so others may enjoy it, may have trusted the phenomenal specialist she consulted who was himself so old he was about ready to become a more or less fragrant crumble of herb fossils to be read on the concave floor of his retreat, if she knew how to read such herbs, for she knew next to nothing of the lore, only that the fern leaf of the reddish-lavender-bloomed redstem storksbill showing in early spring in open areas where the soil has been disturbed may cause upheavals in the womb that are heard as if from afar until they come closer like a dream and may be woken from but whose releasing magic may be overvalued by some women who imagine they seek swift solutions when in truth they seek knowledge—until, with his gentle wisdom, unaccompanied by what went without saying (that he would respect her privacy), her aged host the Anasazi Medicine Man said that in a few days she would know what to do and then the how would follow naturally; and she went away feeling at once that she had arrived and was all of a piece, which when she told her future husband many weeks later at the other end of the world he took to mean "all in one piece," which he echoed gratefully. But by then the intermission in her life was over, and he was a good man and it didn’t matter what he said—

—because the two weathers of leaving and arriving went on regardless, observed the grandson (and we who were his Choor relations often so far from the country he inhabited as to be beyond body though bound in many bodies saw that her smile at being told this seemed pensive and neutral, not an elder being told a bedtime fancy by a child though charmed by how he said "regardless" at the age of fifteen and even sadly dubious at the soft corners of her infinitesimally downturned mouth, though she was the one who had thought up a long time ago leaving and arriving, to express what she recalled).

Where did he recall a tornado?—I’m getting old, Gramma, losing my memory. Let’s see, she said, fifteen is only the first prime you’ve passed. But he did recall a tornado, and there’d been a division of opinion. The Hermit-Inventor of New York looking upward described it according to his lights and claimed to have seen the whole flotsam-jetsam the tornado snapped up and took away to its grand crocodile nest (the Hermit humorist), and chewed up, bag and baggage, animals, people, some possibly both, and some so ruined as to turn into each other, all in the rotational storm that toured the area like an early Geiger-sucker and that went away across a mesa and could be heard but in the uproar not seen, then suddenly came back (But but but but, didn’t he see?)—because (he said) the only thing it had done was leave, after having been in the Earth there to begin with and would never in any sense have arrived—for it had only left.

The Hermit knew with his own eyes, however, that the winter wind when it leaves New York precipitates the arrival from an equal and other area of spring air: and this must be exactly as real as those consequently materializing birds which the Anasazi on the other hand knew had in fact never left as birds or anything else, but became the winds, whose many-voiced, potentially screaming speeds were but streaming cloaks for their absolutely unchanging spirits: and he, on this other hand, from his acquaintance with the steeps of Taos’s holy Blue Lake where the ponderosas hold the upwind and keep it from getting away, and from his acquaintance with the heated, standing-still breezes of the desert to west and to south, knew that wind only appears to move in or move on, but really waits at rest in invisible skins of breath and when the sky speeds up, to come even with the Earth it hardly knew was as entranced by it—say, a slippage or molding shrug or searching readjustment by the sky frictioning the Earth possibly in memory-for-future of those rare times when all the layers of light hiding us from death but each with its cleft may shift into line leaving one great wheeling spoke-like, aisle-like cleft—those invisible skins of breath at rest in all the places of the country are stirred to make their breath blow outward from their fierce stores of force so that few of the People if any know certainly that a wind blowing from Nevada land or from northwest isn’t a wind blowing in truth to New Texas or to southeast, or "aimed," as the Anasazi understood the habit of the breath winds when let out of the skins—or cells, said the Hermit, because according to the grandmother he was always remembering the cells that hermits of other times lived in in Yay (or Yea, Ti, or Ye) which was a dry but not thirsty site that Choor never annexed. (Guess they was both of them windbags, said Mayn years later to his son asleep and his daughter awake, but his daughter didn’t say anything, while his wife from another room called "were.") And when he said he was reminded of old General now new President Harrison’s Inaugural Address in 1841 whose deathless prose when subjected to spoken time went on over an hour and a half in the March air even after Daniel Webster had spent days pruning it and old Harrison had refused adamantly to wear his overcoat, caught his death, and departed almost at once after his arrival, the listening daughter said quietly, Get back to the night-shining cloud made of the Medicine Man’s remains that followed the Navajo Prince across the continent following the Princess east. Well, the father said, kissing her and then his son, there’s a lot of gaps in the record. Fill it in, said his daughter, how about it, Dad?

Come to think of it, that young Indian must have been in Pennsylvania right about the time young Alexander was, because that was his one stint for the family newspaper the Democrat, the early preparations for Jacob Coxey’s Easter march on Washington (Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, But Death to Interest on Bonds!) and he met Chris Columbus Jones near Rockville who believed in some recompounding of the soul’s chemicals, called it reincarnation (industrial reincarnation!) and believed in Coxey’s road bill and his non-interest-bearing-bond bills for municipal improvement loans that came in a dream to this self-made sandstone-quarry tycoon who did not believe in prayer but in action but against the deep-laid plan of monopolists to plough the poor under, crush them to the Earth, whose sin was not the begetting of children whom Parson Malthus declines to economically christen but only that they have come to the dinner table after others have already fallen to. Coxey’s child was named Legal Tender, and that was Massillon, Ohio, and somewhere in there Margaret had had tea with Coxey on her trip home from the West.

How about it, Dad? Fill it in. But Mayn had finished with so much of that at age fifteen when he took up with his grandmother again, who could help him with French, that he would ask how high it snowed out there and hear his grandmother regret she had not seen excessive amounts of snow while among the Indians, but ... but .. . (but what? he thought, imagining that she didn’t want to talk about the trip back) while he himself had this sight that didn’t leave him as if it saw him of the Statue of Liberty being drifted with snow higher and higher—no kidding, with snow from the West—cripes, some kind of record, that’s for sure, or when the old stuff hit him later in life he would check out for instance that avalanche of warm air he knew she had said rushed down a mountain slope for a week before one awful night of lightning and hailstones, hailstones like trees made of luminous bole-ring timber that wrecked a horse and practically annihilated a woman, and wonder if, well, you could honestly get that type of weather after a sort of maddening Washoe Zephyr running down mountain or in the Urals the wind White Russians (or so told an interrogand) call the Ilya that jams luckless landsmen with restless ions running down Urals as down the grandmotherly eminences of the West or what she described with a good deal of invention inevitably—which all wasn’t what his daughter wanted to hear but she was young and even at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen would not, like her father before her, ask Gramma how the Indians had broken their horses, or if there had been any fighting against white people she’d told him about who were also poor—all this rather than complete any more that dubious record arising from his grandmother’s strange sources and occasionally supplemented by the boy’s young inventions such as (inspired by listening to a dog that had just survived being "snow-ploughed" by a car at a moment when a child in the car unaware of the skidding dog looked out the closed window of the back seat and silently with eyes closed sneezed and the dog had trotted away putting the experience behind him though first sounding that high metallic wheeze that’s as nearly beyond our hearing as our Kultur’s sound vibes that will pain a dog) that the Hermit-Inventor, who knew his friend had never written a word, not a colon, not a comma, not a Sequoya point, heard the Anasazi healer’s last-breathed words over an incredible distance not just of space (one mile horizontal, sixty-five feet vertical) but of the real time (estimated by the Hermit on arrival as "a while") that brother Anasazi had been dead, heard said sounds (said last words of the already-awhile-dead hence now-ageless Anasazi) by means of a slow-carrier pre-sound like what the boy many years previous had made with pursed lips to his grandmother when in bed together in the early morning, auditing the generalized soft snores of the grandfather in the adjoining room, because his grandmother had been showing him how to whistle, "learning" him because you can be taught only what you know already. And if at sixteen when this was all about over, but earlier at fifteen when his mother had vanished from life—yet in prior years as well—he went on feeling something like his very self-like body literally beyond his wish to get hold of it or drop it, something he had to be or do—a thing as real as a thing—he left it to those growing relations inside him and the world to store leaving and arriving along with hints of dawning hailstorms sifting the wake of a great bird (that had a not so great disposition) whose terminal activities might have no more navigational bearing on a story-book tornado around 1894 than the muscle of a frantic horse reflected the mind of the tense eastbound rider or some risk blowing its shadow over that rider’s shoulder. Yet if the conjunction of the Navajo Prince’s instinctive (while doomed) departure in pursuit of a person he thought he loved with the precipitate recovery of his demon-tenanted mother to actual life brought the boy to the hour when the Hermit-Sojourner (sensitive to an overall convergence flow-pattern) tore the East Far Eastern Princess from the company of the local maidens who sang of their as yet unborn children while grinding and whisking the corn flour as she their precocious visitor wove at the measurable Anglo speed of beginner’s luck upon spindles three of forked, sheet, and streak lightning according to the old saw, and one spindle the white-shelled rain-streamer, but she had just that moment finished and could go calmly, whatever the alarmed inner voice of her would-be guardian who told her when she came to where he was that she must leave at once and ride eastward, her bird was not going in her right direction, she must let it go its way back to her childhood haunts in the foothills of Choor: but, arriving at this moment, the boy, having to speak, asked questions other than what moved him to break in—hadn’t it been flash lightning before? and the Hermit-Inventor of New York had not done any tearing of the Princess, for she had left her work as if nothing was the matter and walked simply to her pony (a gift she’s going to take home with huh) and ridden someplace to rendezvous with her hermit who advised her that if she could let herself be altered to a mist and spirited into the Statue assembled that had been only semi-uncrated pieces when they’d met in ‘85 ("the year after that skinny old geezer," interjected the boy, "saw the two-hour-long tornado according to him") then the Navajo Prince’s mother would live again—

I never, you know, said that, said his grandmother, I couldn’t have— but she did ride east or southeast (fast and quite carefree, considering) to the dry orange valley of the Zuni who were learning beautiful silverwork and turquoise then (not centuries before, in case you wondered, it was an employment project—late nineteenth century) and when she came to a house a woman was piling clothes and a pipe and what looked like a naturally grown toothbrush outside her door and the East Far Eastern Princess (—come on, Gramma!)—the Princess asked a man the way who loitered outside and he said he would go with her to show her and when, alive to the niceties of reciprocation, she said, But don’t you live here, he said, Up until five minutes ago. And he picked up the pile of ejected belongings on the doorstep—but anyway, who ever wove with lightning?, it’s too hard to handle, said the boy—

What is lightning anyway? said his own daughter Flick years later, and by then he knew, or anyway could say)—couldn’t you, said the boy, carry lightning around in you and when you opened your mouth—

—No, said the man years later, you don’t hold the charge; naturally you get burned, etcetera, but you don’t hold the charge—

—so what brought the boy to that moment setting in motion the Princess’s departure, hence the Navajo Prince’s, hence, foreign to all we are supposed to know, his mother’s recovery to life and legend right there without moving an inch and where she had been dead, although the demons did come back although they found her Indian head healed of its hole, and could but canter about among the follicles of her supple scalp for the first time getting to know each other ‘stead of being all business—

—and it was not until another time that he and his grandmother went into the matter of downcoming and upgoing weather, when they seemed to reach an intolerable moment when he had to speak of his mother to her and almost did not—

because he heard his mother’s voice saying what he had, however, heard her say once already: "I am waiting for it to come to me. I know it’s going to. It’s inside me." Oh she was smart, that’s why she got herself into these spots to get out in one piece: he heard that, too, like some thought she had had when he was inside her but we don’t believe any of that crap, it’s in the same league as reincarnation. She was asked if she hoped it was a girl this time around—oh God I just hope it can walk as soon as possible!—well it’s not a horse (a foal) feeling for its stirrup out in the darkness of the unknown world!—until, knowing the awful word because Sam’s mother had known somebody who had one, he asked his father, Did she really want to have Brad? (the little spoiled bastard) and his father for once in a lifetime backhanded him across the bridge of the nose, a point hard but sensitive to pressure, only then to ask him what he thought he was saying. And the boy who felt like a man but enough to honor his father’s stupid pain and not strike back, replied, Just did she want to go through with it?—so his father stumbled out of the room and the boy knew the man didn’t know how to say I’m sorry I hit you, and the boy thought correctly that he would despise the man for many a year.

Yet forget though we may that long ago in terms of American continental space-time the Indians had horses that were midnight blue from Mexico—the hoofbeats go on along the parallel tracks that cross at will in memory as if they were underground upside down by our angle and we were in the ground not they—we already remember a beeg difference between the levity that itself can be seen visibly coming out of the collected mouths of those concerned, and the real wounds appearing on the surface of the long-mentioned and long-suffering victims’ form as he or she is bent to her task of recalling what the interrogator has or had asked, including how the Hermit was entitled to the title "Inventor." We, as his and others’ relations have spoken for Mayn, who havee power but dinna want ooze same, and in speaking for him suggested that while subject may be encouraged, nay gladly prodded, to find in recollection a future of sorts, and truly the past recollected the person in such a way as to concoct a future, a parallel to turn to or on, parallels meet, which they do on these new spherical drawing boards plus in the horse latitudes though strictly speaking it’s horses there who meet.

When the Hermit-Inventor in need of a breather and fresh from his New York exploits though unable to sell the real world of commercial architecture on his theory of wind shadows told the Anasazi ancient that the horse latitudes were so cold because horses were thrown overboard in those oceans, the Anasazi explained that this in turn was because sea and land were joined like earth and sky and once ships had been able to sail right through the land and horses galloped the waters, but horses had forgotten all this and it was cruel to just throw them into the sea. We didn’t hear them any more. But after all these tapeworm tracks and evolution of self to new limited senses of the worm, the not-hearing of those horses kept up till we had to admit in the absence of interrogation that we saw the horses we had heard, there’s a number of us, so a number of them, while admitting as well that a man James Mayn (not always to be identified with the boy who looked out of his grandmother’s house into massed leaves mysteriously withholding their trees or with the fratri-being who left the other house, his own, second every morning for school) saw them (horses) like a (dreamlike?) recollection (reported wifeward, who herself would always say, in the days when she was near enough by to be heard, Oh you always have them, you don’t remember them) the horses were racing, two dark brownies left to right, two paler incompleties below the first two but racing (or, better said, frisking, left to right) yet from the right came two others going the other way like a market or the optical illusion a wagerer has that the horses he has bet are running in the wrong direction and will reach the finish line too soon; but, Mayn finds in the (day?) dream some horse that grew long mountain horns and a one-line body no less abstract than the two mere lines of long horns (long arcs) and two that are identical but legs, directed downward in case gravity evolved in the body drawing it toward where gravity go; except that to his wife in the morning as one day in the future to another who isn’t his wife but some of the same things get said like was, horse, you, antler, laughing, water, new, though it can’t all be reincarnate-new until he said, oh of course it was that postcard—which postcard? asks the lady from beside him, and with fatal charm adds, I don’t know anything about any postcard . . . !

—Postcard a fellow sent me, French guy, we talked about Polaris subs in a cab going to the airport, or was it the other way around?, the card was the famous caves with the drawings twenty, thirty thousand years ago, better than I could do.

—Let’s go see them, she says, but what did you mean the other way around?

—Oh it may just have been Polaris cabs we were talking about in a sub going to the airport.

—Airports are on dry land.

—Anyway only five people can see the caves at a time.

—There’s just the two of us.

—But it’s the humidity, the chemistry; open the cave and the humidity erases all the drawings. You have to be a scientist, a scholar.

—Scientists don’t hold their humidity?

—That’s more or less the idea.

—Oh Christ what time is it?

—Too early. Am I being interrogated again?

—No, just haunted. Well, I wasn’t asking you. You’re not here.

—Thank goodness I’m not. I don’t have to listen to you nag.

—I take full responsibility.

—You would.

—Look, there’s a river running in the middle of the air between the halves of canyon, I mean it’s just optical, but—

—It’s not the sort of thing that happens in Europe. We ought to be in the American desert.

He heard horses’ hooves from the cemetery, which we some of us recall lay between the golf course and the race track, each of these tracts farmland more recently than this other field where bodies planted in time might yield lettered stone and eminent urns of granite flowers. Facts arose that you could arrive at in later years for a living, arose from the cemetery moment when he decided to close down his grandmother’s stories. Yet arose is not just arose —and didn’t he call a halt to those tales upon surmising that the stories were not so much like what had really happened to the East Far Eastern Princess as (uh oh) really were what had happened? At the intolerable moment between grandson and grandmother when they were discussing downcoming and up-going weather and he had to—had to—speak to her of his mother departed, what was to be asked? asks an interrogator so internalized it could be I or they across that sexually shared ocean. Was she perhaps sick and tired? Why did a woman glimpsed in one of Margaret’s tales pound her belly with stones and eat ground-up horses’ bones for a late-afternoon snack? It wasn’t the common cold she had, or the measles, or what Indians hither and yon were likewise curiously unimmune to, to wit Eurasiatic tuberculosis, which the Anasazi healer may have had for two hundred years or more since he wheezed like that three-hundred-pound old bullet-riddled General Winfield Scott so President Lincoln could hear him coming in the next room. On the other hand, the Anasazi grew widely bald down his center part-line—and baldness is more rare than gray hair among Indians. How do you remember all that? When did that happen Gramma? Who was the woman pounding her belly?—It was a woman called Tall Salt, a widow, and she did the asking of the person who had interrupted her. Jim felt very much like a man at fifteen. So what? So plenty, even allowing for silly dialect jokes he and Sam told—Jewish, Negro, foreigner, farmer’s daughter. Felt then like a man why? Was it because he looked in at his widower father pyjama’d amidst more surplus man-hours of sleep than Jim needed? Was it that in sotto voce discussion with his friend Sam at the drugstore soda fountain about to order a second chocolate Coke, he answered Sam’s "It ain’t exactly a hole" with "It’s an opening; but it’s not quite open ... it’s .. ." Was it because with less parent to go around Jim was victim to what, later in the dying century, came one inclement year to be called "parentifuckation"? Or was it that he had early experienced as vicarious future that mode of murder called by the same (Latin family) as that given and ahead-thrown generation later, to the effect on an arriving missile of the thermonuclear explosion set off by the preceding target-happy missile so that he felt he had foreseen such usage of the term in question, "fratricide." This was more like it, for if he seldom or never felt his strange presence in the future as his responsibility to himself, he did early think (ahead), "I’m getting out of this," unlike his brother, who sat around the kitchen table with Mel, who’s supposed to be their father, and planned never to leave that town and was reassured by Mel and in turn reassured him that the lady of the house was not returning from the dead or from whatever matter she was with them and their mad memories—or the matter.

But whose horse was it if not a communal or common horse that paid with its hence ground-up life for being in the ongoing plane of the exit path of the giant bird that had already gobbled its one-for-the-road wolf, that moonlit bite of Navajo horse? How the extended grandson at fifteen felt a lot like a man without seeming to have passed through normal induction or initiation processing turns to further questions, to wit his sage if fugitive or half-sane njt-picking foresight that two or more questions had better have one same answer because he’s so harried from behind by one of them while dealing with another that, hell’s bells, he plans to get him gone from this town soon’s he decently can. Paired questions such as (a) What were his grandmother’s tears made of the night not so long after his mother’s disappearance into the sea when he accidentally found his grandmother under his surveillance from the backyard?—and, on the other hand (b) By what process was the Navajo Prince’s mother returned to life, assuming this really did occur and occurred almost as soon as her son departed in pursuit of the alien beloved?; or another pair, (a) Was the rotational storm tornadoing its great business that night of the double moon in fact the wake of or the very presence of the Princess’s former bird that, when the Princess departed that Navajo settlement, itself departed in its own Choorish direction? and (b) the question on the other hand, Why had it been at the juncture of downcoming and upgoing weathers or their vouchsafing by the grandmother (who was helping him with his French) and subsequent exploration in subsequent talk about these weathers that he had reached a moment not only when he had to ask about his mother (but what? pirce-quoia?) but a moment intolerable because he couldn’t—that is, ask why his Gramma had been crying that night he’d spied on her, was it straight grief? and what she had seemed to say one day at the cemetery actually was there underground where everybody knew that his drowned mother was not—at the same time asking again if the great day when all the atmospheric clefts lined up and one light-year-long slot or slit parted for cosms of the sun to suck up the life of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head, had been made up by the Hermit-Inventor or brought on by the Anasazi healer’s sense that something should happen to get them all off the hook including the mad mother herself who that very night, upon the sliding forth of the double Moon and the departure of her son hotly abandoning his studies of the power still untouched in the northern bison’s tongue (that can be dried and reused up to twenty months later), had come back to life and limb, which left a faithful imprint ever afterward upon each downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts even though in later days the Anasazi healer had passed into high-flying noctilucent cloudhood doubtless turning to use some of those cosms that (themselves infinitesimal power parcels holding immense unused energies) would have sucked the lady’s life away on a permanent basis.

Until one day, wondering if he himself was cloud-and-rain, mist-and-snow, temperature-and-wind expert hermited within himself re fleshing that skinny old geezer who (Jim had been privately told by his grandfather Alexander) was sick but still breathing loudly somewhere in New York

Jim happened to say to his grandfather on the porch one idle hour of a subtly sad weekend this dumb-ass thing about wishing at least two or three questions that came at you all at once had one same answer, it would make life easier, ‘stead of keeping it all up—and Alexander guffawed in his own white-wicker world only to break off almost tearing a seriousness from his eruption to say, "Jimmy, that’s what the great ones understand they have to do. History is a knacker’s yard and the trick is to specialize in one use for all your ground-up bones. It’s why Grant told Sheridan to remove General Warren who foresaw every damn danger except the delay occasioned in acting to forestall every damn danger." (What’s a knacker, Granddad?) "It’s the secret of scientific genius and of any great military strategist, although it is not why Grant declined to join Lincoln at Ford’s Theater the night of April 14th but took the New York train instead, wishing to see his children in Philadelphia."

Then grandfather Alexander guffawed again with a touch of unease. Jim nodded sagely. Alexander confided in his grandson as they rocked and gazed out over Throckmorton Street at two highish, narrow white Victorian houses out of which then came Leonardo Hugo, the blond, parchment-tanned oculist, from his and his mother’s, and Miss Amyabel Larsen, the pleasant over-the-counter clerk in the post office who had surprisingly large breasts when they were looked at, from her and her mother’s house, "Why that crazy friend of your grandmother’s, interesting old bum that he is—and was!—told me about a tornado he saw in ‘84, the year before his ill-fated meeting with Margaret at Bedloe’s Island that was absolutely symmetrical, straight up and no bulges in the wrong places to speak of, a cylinder of sorts which went on in one spot like a dervish for two hours." "Oh yeah, you told me, Granddad," said Jim who thereupon recalled that when he had told Margaret that she had told him about this tornado and she had said she certainly had not and he had thought how had he known?—and at the same time remembered his late mother saying there were things he had in him now that he would know later, and he had not put two and two together because he was suspicious of that method yet recalled her telling him to go away where he belonged whereas she had gone, at least for the time being, so he had concluded that he was in the future therefore like someone shocked by a terrible event into a sleep—got it?—yet now could see that he had heard Alexander say it.

But that fine, broad, ever-bald, ever-well-shod gentleman grandfather quickly within the regular tempo of his rocking said, No no, he had never passed on to anybody that little tidbit, and went on muttering and rocking while Jim was busy knowing both that he would like to touch if possible Marie Vandevere’s longish neck with his fingertips and follow each softened point of her arching strong spine downward because she liked it, and (knowing) that he would someday be in a position to recall this important talk with his grandfather as if many streams had made their way toward each other steaming over heavy, jagged rocks but as in a hill-and-valley rural model of Washington, D.C., where he had twice been, where streets meet sometimes like spokes or these streams were a liquefied city he had daydreamt of where parallel avenues and such would melt into one another and meet while being preserved parallel by the dreamer’s will itself: and magic of a loving kind seemed then added to the importantness of this talk with his grandfather because as both rocked and watched the single pair across the street turn away from each other in opposite directions, Leonardo toward town, Amyabel the other way toward what we might today term the cemetery-golf-course-race-track complex, though as anyone could predict she would call for a girlfriend en route and they would vkit the unprecedented greenhouse on the highway to study how the vast new rose operation was run, Jim tried to frame a question for Alexander, which was about what Margaret’s tears had been made of that night and how (or by what process) the Navajo Prince’s mother had returned to life as a result of her son’s having run off after his alien girlfriend: but Alexander had arrived at a point of being audible to his grandson, who now heard him say, 44Oh she’s responsible, she’s a very responsible person and sometimes takes her responsibilities too far—some events just happen, you know—and even at this moment she thinks she might have saved . . . well you of all people, Jim . . .it’s like thinking that you might be back there a few weeks ago the way it was, but having more foresight, you know what I’m saying—I mean Margaret knew your mother was generally unhappy, and worse."

Which didn’t have a thing to do with the weather (or for that matter with the way Jim thought others saw him—sensitive and observant? a knower of things? was that him?) but one day years later while factually extending for the benefit of his own children how the Navajo Prince could be interested both in energy buzzing potentially in the soft valve-needles of the often overvalued tongue of the often largely wasted northern bison and in messages from mountain to mountain as moist air rises to cloud itself into waves and accumulating towers or a warm column stops rising at the top as if to come down spreading out in a stable deck or layer mushroom-like, Jim recalled that when he heard his grandfather Alexander speak thus of his grandmother Margaret feeling responsible for everything and then, yes, got kinda funny, he found he could answer (who knew? forever) his own question in this instance re: that odd rotational storm of (the Princess’s getaway) ‘93 or ‘84 (the symmetrical tornado)—two sides of the same whirl that, he took now for granted, was both bird and wake; and that cloud-aborted, downcoming funnel that whirled in to suck then upward like a later-model industrial vacuum all substances available, liquid, illiquid, and all objects even those that had not been objects a moment before, was Jim’s plain responsibility to take fact away from antifact, the second unaccounted-for egg in question from the former and Choor-bound bird, and distinguish the Hermit-Sojourner of New York (sometimes Inventor), who helped Margaret get away, from the lion that turned—tornado—into a wolf at his moment of dismembered truth; the ground-up horse bones, on one concretely remedial hand, from the my thy maw that, airborne, had its own air aboard; the downcoming and upgoing weathers later understood in such staircase documentation as the compression-warming-drying-evaporation descent cum the expansion-cooling-humidification-condensation-precipitation ascent, versus, on the other hand, in the midst of discussing downcoming and upgoing weathers the Anasazi healer’s view (reviewed by Margaret for her grandson Jim) that mountains drew heat upward from deep below Earth’s rock, hence the heating of air along the slopes, this literally a mountain way of thinking—a mountain capability—since thinking was "Aimed Being" versus the Hermit-Inventor’s view that if there was any of this subterranean thinking going on it was more dreaming. But the less restlessly scientific Anasazi didn’t believe mountains dreamt, while the Hermit-Inventor held to the notion (the "motion," said the intuitive Anasazi lightly at a distance of many miles nonetheless audible) that western gravity created some heaping of friction in the molecular cascades of slopes, a turbulence heat form although it might conversely feel skin-cold. This stuck zone-wise in Jim’s mind so he never thought it prevision till he arrived years later (and ludicrously) at a visual formula for wind flow, he no scientist, while traveling in a small plane that lost its "lift" during a slow descent and then the pilot lost control a moment later coming in in the wake of an airliner’s takeoff. Jim did not or could not ask his partner Grandma in the aforementioned discussion of two weathers (and a new batch of toasty crullers) what on earth she meant implying that even in the actual absence of Jim’s mother’s body something was there underground in the cemetery locus of the Mayn family area—perhaps because he felt responsible for having spied on his grandmother when she wept (but she never wept!) one night on the back porch, Jim in the dark out there, loose and free, upon the damp, dark lawn of the yard where his part-Creek rival the (behind-his-back called) /za//breed halfback, was sometimes employed by Margaret to weed or to trim hedges at fifty cents an hour, who had a mother who probably cried from time to time.

So, while it was with "I am responsible" derived from Alexander’s characterization of Margaret that Jim had solved (oh for God’s sake let’s get out onto the field) questions re: (a) wake and bird, and (b) why at a certain juncture of discussion he could not ask Margaret something about his recently departed mother, he had a lingering doubt, for after all he had answered his own question and perhaps had his own way or had in the parlance of later times no feedback, cruller’d or disturbing. Yet Margaret did disturb him when she retorted that she had said nothing about this or that—nor had she ever known anything about a symmetrical tornado, he could have made that up, although she granted that the East Far Eastern Princess had in fact been turned into a mist to facilitate her being spirited into the great Statue (that had floated dismembered into that aging harbor of the East one day to be there recomposed and to stand up strong and centered) during the last throes of the Princess’s return home—so that years later, when the man Mayn found himself desultorily absorbing a concept of convergence-flow in the theory of storms, he recognized not only that back then in the fall of ‘45 he had felt he would one day know what such inklings meant, he felt even that then (and then later) he had been in some angle or isle of the future already: this he had rather not be thinking about, for there was so much else, yet why could he not ask Margaret what he did ask Alexander, Was that skinny old geezer and the Hermit-Inventor of New York one and the same?—to which Alexander replied that there had been two or three of them, very bright, sleazy chaps, taking long vacations for generations in the western lands, apparently experimenting in the control of the atmosphere but entering at times too easily into the lives of impressionable young people though he thought Jim might not agree. But it was not satisfying the single solution for the paired questions, it was like when they all sat around after his mother’s suicide (he did not like the word, it was awful, it was as embarrassing as something he might never know), the family friend Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl had the same look, same protoplasm or something, as the sandwiches, whole-wheat, and as the hands of others there, like they were shrugging off their differences and yielding their one common substance, so their equality had to be fought against or it would be your death too, or fought for so you’d come into possession of what you had anyway. And years later he felt that unbeknownst to him he had been some scientist in those fearsomely exciting bereaved days but when he found how at fifteen he had been in future e’en to understanding those shear zones along wind boundaries where friction increases dangerously he later had not your true scientist’s interests in such, though still a law or two or three from the old days such as 4’Answer the question that has been asked, not some other question, O.K.?" from which extended a corollary (pronounced by the depressed geometry instructor at Jim’s high school with the stress on the secundo syllable), namely, when possessed of an answer (especially when it has become conscious within self) make sure not to marry it (as they say aboard ship of line and cable) to the wrong question, that is, find the question that has asked this answer. Later answers increased so crazily that their content mattered less than their spirit, if that is possible; meanwhile, he, part-distracted by that dynamic virgin his grandmother in her earlier incarnations, revealed another answer to himself which was that responsibility or "I am responsible" wasn’t the only answer to the second pair. For, still unsatisfied, he saw that past equaling present would do equally well for the tornado’s wake being the bird as for the discussion of downcoming and upgoing weathers coinciding with the question he could not ask Margaret about his mother, since in so many ways the silly old humdrum weather was his future, or what he later surprisingly turned his hand to, events in that sphere of vapor, so that in that original juncture, the present equaled the future, which was another way of saying past equaled present, though only his nerves did these equations, he didn’t shed no blood for them, from day to day.

But what if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the answer to the first pairing? He reached that point one Saturday afternoon when his brother Brad paused at bathroom’s threshold to watch a drop of blood pass from Jim’s face into the basin as the elder shaved. Then the same occurred to Jim that night in the front seat of a borrowed pickup truck when for the third time he found Marie—Anne-Marie Vandevere—her neck, her bared feet, the whirlpoolings of her ears, her way (it was a way) of not wearing a bra, carrying him beyond the quiet laughter of their happiness into a winglike breathing that was alive in what it was missing, which was a—call it a full-length naked realistic halo (read hello/)—he didn’t know then but years later found some capacity in him to maybe recall it, though its being a "visual" half-blocked, half-revealed a fact of life he succeeded in not thinking about by concentrating on Marie— anyhoo some aura that nonetheless warn’t about her for she was realer so maybe ‘twas someplace else if you had to go look fer it but if you didn’t, why then Marie was here, at least for the time being till graduation do us part (and she never mooned over him though she would have gone with him when he left Windrow, yet worth noting is that she did not get pregnant, not at first, and then not later, when they took to consciously talking about it, and he never asked her if she had used some foam or something to begin with, but many years later when a colleague from South America named Mayga (he never saw her name written) passed out of his life, he wanted to put in a phone call to Marie in whatever later life she had made for herself to check if he was right recalling that she listened with marked care and only a smile or two but with some sensuality of paying attention to what he said as if she believed its truth more than he and wanted to convey this to him, to wit about the Margaret-Princess-Hermit-Anasazi scene shifts and shelvings across the inverted floors of a still recognizable continent, a wider load than would feasibly in terms of profit margin pass all those highways that brought the Wide Load itself into being and motion unless we invented a system, you see, if it could only develop from those fingers in his fifteen-year-old head that were Marie stroking him while he murmured nice jokes to them both and she had no concern about dislodging her aura because she didn’t have any, leastways not for him and possibly not for her father either, which was due partly to her, a very clear upstanding person even supine—’cept maybe way inside her there’s an aura taken for granted, though her fingers, having proceeded right into his head, frankly said, There are other women, and among these others seeded faithfully in him were some disappearing acts (spelled ax) wind-driven as the vessel of his own damned mother’s unburiable suicide where excessive drama and words sometimes met in embarrassed agony; and if you could be embarrassed (at school, for instance—as if his mom had left his dad—and at college where he rarely spoke of it except to a woman now and then in a moment of lusty sentiment, and still later, when it had become history without ever having been understood and he could tell a colleague with a hoarse laugh named Ted and a friendly woman named Mayga also a colleague though as professionally elusive as she was personally solid and right there during some early, early evenings in the bar of a Washington hotel hearing him say that if you could be embarrassed about a terrible, paining, destroying, living thing like that . . .) maybe that meant his mother (God bless and damn her for the medium she chose, namely solitude and seawater) was not dead: for that’s what he couldn’t explain to himself very well, much less Alexander, his well-shod grandfather, who anyway was saying a thing or two that rocked Jim back (no joke—only back, not forth, only back, like our undiscovered energy window warping out of age and time, we once believed)—that if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the one unifying answer to the first of those increasingly distant pairs of questions that years later surprised him as if from behind though standing obstacle-like and sensual under his nose, his tongue, his hand, his foot, his eye which is one window of your windows that can tell us things without even being operated on—how did he use, then, at fifteen, such syllables as "substance" and "process," they were little more to him than the battlement-gray scenery he helped his little half-ass brother Brad tack up for a school play that required a trapdoor so a ghost had somewhere to come from and call from, sing from (almost, the way that spook sounded when the play was actually put on instead of being there potential and silently exciting on the shadowy daylight stage of the auditorium with sets gathering paint and nails as if the voices working were keeping the story of the play from leaping up out of nowhere which you had to put off till it could leap out from somewhere or just walk out) then Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the single answer to the plural questions, What were Margaret’s tears made of, that night on the bright-dark back porch when she thought she wept only for her own and for her husband’s eyes (and ears)? and How did the Navajo matron regain life the night her son madly departed in pursuit of the Princess who was in turn leaving because it was time to and though she loved the Navajo Prince the Hermit-Inventor had all but impelled her to go: yet then, as buriable as Jim and Brad’s seaward mother was not or at least not yet, came a next space of thought which reasoned its drugged conclusion downward into some sleep of Jim’s growing body and so as it got clearer got deeper from the acoustic air where it could have been said, and Best thing was to go on, as Jim’s friend Sam’s petite mother in a large, dark straw hat said quietly to Margaret at a gathering soon after Sarah’s suicide to which Margaret bluntly and as always with no blur of conscience or guilt replied, Oh that’s what we all say and next thing you’ll be telling me that time heals all wounds

reels all moons, congeals all ruins, steals all sounds—for divorce!) —the conclusion too thought to be true, surely, that Margaret was at once responsible in the substance of her most rare tears for her daughter’s untimely evacuation and in her storied narrative of the East Far Eastern Princess’s roughly eastward exit responsible for the also departing Navajo Prince’s mother’s recovery: because if the tales she had been telling her favorite grandson who ran like the wind and could gallop a middle-sized black pony bareback around the edges of the Quirks’ horse-corn fields at age twelve (and at age fifteen in the middle of the night in the general direction of the Grange and a house near it where two girls might have gone to bed by now) were in some godawful way true, didn’t that mean that Sarah Mayn, whole mother of Brad and Jim, half-wife (as they say precisely in one ancient scientific marriage-culture) of Mel, and sister of Marian who now distantly makes her home in a suburb of Boston, and daughter of Margaret and of Alexander, . . . "lives on," said Warren Winecoop (as if listing the coming week’s events) from the pulpit of a church not much frequented by Margaret or Alexander, "in the memories of those who loved her": so that, quite apart—apart—apart from the atomic question of whether he could or did love his singular mother after an action so unforgettable, he was confused enough to be derailed from responsibility, Margaret’s or for that matter his mother’s (for maybe she had acted responsibly), and was much taken by his grandfather’s remark, that latter-day porchside qum friendship, that the Hermit-Inventor of New York, as, strangely, Jim’s uncomplimentary grandfather went on calling the skinny old geezer’s 1945 manifestation—whatever it was he had invented—had confided in him things he had never told Margaret though adding, to Alexander, that he was another man entirely from that sensible, methodical guy who told Margaret to go west in 1885 on Bedloe’s Island amid the pre-ruin of the Statue of Liberty: yet, Alexander went on, he sure as hell had the look (though sick, now) of the man he had briefly seen when Margaret returned home from the West in ‘94, same weird bone-ridged forehead so you expected to see through it, same crappy clothes and scuffed shoes, no, he had sneakers now, same irritable and confidential manner, told Alexander of all things that the Anasazi, who knew more about the weather than he was saying, had been the only man then known—i.e., in that century or apparently in that area in earlier centuries—who for certain had never been reincarnated but been only himself, his long self, and who upon dying had been bound to be but a memory, which was fine by the Anasazi, as he always had said though never guaranteeing the truth of this fact about him gleaned first from the spiny-sinewed bicycling botanist Marcus Jones who had it from Mena the Chilean zoologist specializing in javelina-peccaries, their possibilities, their hind-mounted scent glands and luminous lips the hue of moon-drenched cactus flesh peeled by the eyes of an elf owl that on certain nights shares its being with a female seer much as the cactus shares its with the owl or at the least the owl’s eye: yet key here (though key to what was not yet sure) was what Marcus Jones on the locoweed-naming jaunt told the Hermit-Inventor (who upon meeting him under a red crag near where thermonuclear devices were even then latent and to be unearthed had expatiated and complained how New York had so changed just in the four or five months he’d been gone): to wit, that a certain aged Indian healer had told Marcus’s friend the woman-naturalist Mena upon her one visit to his eyrie that we create our weathers partly then to observe them, that is, so that there will be something in front of us: we make them by entering into the four-cornered creation which when we do so by conceiving it as four corners meeting back to back not as four corners facing one another at a distance we live through again the one son becoming two, namely Destroyer and Born of Water, thence multiplied to four sons, namely Reared Underground, or the Double, and Changing Grandchild, which, because he had been able while still in the womb to see the future, the Anasazi had singularly always been, that is Changing Grandchild, which was why he stayed young or, if not young, alive, and in his singularity never could gain or want reincarnation as another kind of man or as a woman, say, though he had strange interior memories, like a happy worm moving round inside him, of a time when men and women were first created and did not fuck but the woman masturbated with a quill or a sour cactus or a stone if you could find it, that in its fleshiness bore hard future knowledge that one day it would be a stone used by a woman to beat her belly with and induce an abortion.

Mena, at all events, was a remarkable person who had told Marcus this and more that he passed on to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who, unbeknownst to Marcus, recognized at once the Indian he was talking about, and Marcus in his happenstance encounters with Mena on the great nocturnal plateau from time to time found support for a view that came to him more than he to it as when one day near a river leaning against the bright, birchlike shadow of an aspen trunk musing upon the snow that would fall here in three months he had been accosted by a man who with his young son who presently arrived set about persuading Marcus by commercial means, later the violent means then commercially available, to divulge what was not Marcus’s to divulge, to wit some doubtless mythical mode he for one had not heard of of dry-steaming the flesh of the sometimes almost animally attentive saguaro cactus while it was still alive high above the desert floor, betimes adding a seasoning of one of the northern Navajo locoweeds Marcus was supposed to have named for the benefit of the New World, the end result a winter mash marketable for horses (that could be dried, stored, and shipped East) as well as a porridge to attract passing Indian refugees who because of their ovally-whorled tastebuds would never recognize the ingredients, perhaps also because of their kinship to the vegetable world. But the treacherous habit of the saguaro plus the mystery of which locoweed to use had led the exploiter and son to seek out Marcus Jones and, as he reported to the Hermit, thus inspired Marcus at the cost of "but one joint of the right little finger of a left-handed botanist" (he would grin) to reflect again on such mobile kinships between animal and vegetable as had tempted his contented mind upon seeing and touching Mena’s lips that had acquired a petal-patina silver-white in sympathy with the javelinas she had tracked so long observing their hind-situated scent glands—but still more from hearing Mena report Owl Woman’s retreat, like a fugitive hallucination, into a cactus in order that the cactus grow an owl or owl eye: so that Marcus blamed his renown for the violent brush with the saguaro exploiter not to mention the minor amputation (to prove a humorous if not evolutionary bereavement) but had found in the self-created obstacle of his professional reputation and his unwillingness to make up some story to get rid of the saguaro exploiter a none too costly spark of inspiration he then understood he had often dreamed in the form of ships sailing the desert stirring eddies as if the ships were wind, and humans exploiting their animal or vegetable souls at need so some pains could not reach us, like pistol shot or lonely lust, until the renewed use of our coupled natures might lead to some similar union of our male and female selves.

Now the Hermit-Inventor of the East at once recognized in the prior words about created and observed weathers and the direction in which the world’s corners were envisioned his colleague the many-hundred-year-old Anasazi plus the old healer’s strict habit of never peddling the same conversational tidbits twice, for the Hermit was hearing these "created" versus 4 ‘observed" weathers for the first time though at once remembering the Anasazi healer’s suggestion to him that he not always see opposites as being necessarily "versus" or opposed. The Hermit told Marcus what he never had told a soul—that a girl he had seen but once at that time and told to go west, had in herself shown him why he had been drawn to the West for decades.

She was a fine girl, beyond subtlety at that moment in 1885, her hands at rest at her sides, her dress full of lilac flowers and the minute fire of red loco, and upon being spoken to by the Hermit she advanced to one limb of the dismembered Statue of Liberty and ran her hand along the molded metal and tasted it: and both her fresh directing of interest, which was a humble appetite for what lay ahead, and her actual ingestion of some far-flung grain of the copper sheets recalled to the man how when he had first known the Anasazi among the high caves of those western zones touched more and more by the perilous magic of Anglo law, the old mediciner would give him a pod to chew as being for the side teeth, the pulverizing teeth (not the front ones), and this then-nameless pod or bean would dissolve ultimately in his mouth but soon reappear in spirit, a whole minute vessel passing everywhere inside him until, accepting it, he found he could use it, and, using it, found it curiously navigational like a lode that lives in what of our active selves we let rest, until, decades after, as he in fresh form (his own) saw the girl, who could not have yet seen more than thirteen or fourteen summers, turn away from a grand haunch eyeing him and smiling as if the pale flush of her neck (for she had just been bending warily over that piece of statue) betokened a wise smile the whole of her young body gave to the irritable, disheveled, impatiently alert man who had said thoughtlessly Go west, and she said Oh she planned to do all that by hook or crook before she settled down to marriage and a family and she would pay her way, what’s more, and was meanwhile happy to be here in New York where she didn’t visit often. To which the Hermit-Inventor dumbfounded could only blurt out a dumb fact that hardly began to tell how he felt, to wit that according to his geography she wasn’t in New York right now, but in New Jersey.

Which was how Jim often felt in Windrow when he needed to go away both on his own hook or because his late mother (now departed herself) had told him to and yet how he felt in New York itself whose immigrant men and women in their transparently individualized transporter capsules seemed often more understandable than such minor mysteries as the Navajo Prince’s mother’s revival and how it left an imprint upon downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts, ‘mselves so blue and constant of sky that the Navajo Prince’s envious brother in mild shock (because he was still envious now even in the absence of his envy’s cause) the morning after the Prince left couldn’t see why the Hermit-Inventor bothered to explain the blue, especially when he said it was really black but dissolved to blue by the Sky’s incompetence to use, yea wake, its full force—a most funny (Anglo) wrinkling of the Obvious (the Navajo brother who was skilled at dressing buckskin and making whips and hobbles could feel with a neutral, silent wisdom of contemplation displacing for several minutes his inveterate envy of his more gifted brother), yet, as this remaining brother did not suspect, a needed detour for the scientific New-Yorkono round possible interrogations that the Hermit-Inventor found risky since, by a rich defect of language in that world, to describe, say, the buildings of his native city of the East as being anvil-shaped like clouds was the same as having invented those buildings, likewise his city’s streets tall as the treacherous Cleft Pass between the Anasazi’s remembered border and the cliff pastures of the Indian sea isles when Ship Rock was scarcely a thought—to describe meant to have invented: which meant that the Hermit’s actual inventions such as a rooftop gauge to predict differences between light and heavy air masses (possibly inspired by his thoughts on pistol design during the Mexican War) or an underground railway (which was never to be built perhaps because it had been conceived as soundless and to be cooperatively maintained) might suffer unforeseen unimportance, but mainly that he might be credited with the Prince and Princess’s elopement were he to describe it, if only the atmospheric phenomena that attended it (doubtless recalling, said the grandfather Alexander on a spacious white-painted porch in Windrow, New Jersey, in late ‘45, that expiring French wolf who remarks at the end, "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, / Only silence is strong, —all the rest is but lies").

But he had lost the boy or the boy him, for Jim had heard his grandmother and she was on the tall-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock, and he had had to wonder, on that day-night in ‘93 or ‘94 when the sun would not and would not go down and all the slits in the onion layers of atmosphere clear up to the spheres of most and least change lined up and cosms of the sun descended more suddenly than two eyes together could have seen, to deform or translate, depending on how you saw them, if the quick-winded timber wolf into which the egg-sucking mountain lion turned just as the Princess’s giant bird stopped to snap had been there perhaps already, and did the lion vanish into the underbrush atop that volcanic neck rather than turning into an alternative choice on the bird’s farewell menu?—so that he heard and didn’t hear like classroom code words "kinetic" equals "motion," got it?, "K" equals "M," some words of his grandfather’s to do with "fool" and "wise" and one day fifteen or more years later, when his own age had doubled, recalled some weird consolation of reversal in that word "fool" and in his grandmother’s news that three small babies had been found abandoned near a piner cottage at Lake Rompanemus but strangely or like sacred aliens nestled up in two old trees as if to keep the babes safe from flood (though they woke drenched in themselves), which saved Jim from being asked how he’d done on his French test, she had been tutoring him mainly by famous sayings, famous to her, like "Keep quiet, people will think you’re smart," or words to that effect which sometimes took effect later, as when he learned the French for a thought he had already heard his grandfather casually say without laboring the fact or even acknowledging that it was a French thought. In the middle of such tutoring as Jim and Margaret indulged in the following Friday, namely some dumb verbs (about seventy or a hundred!) in a special tense of the past he never got straight, he got her into downcoming and upgoing weathers and knew definitely that she was telling the truth though, albeit amidst science, he’d let her get back into these rotten old stories or margins thereof he vowed after {post mortem!) his mother’s death he was through with: the Anasazi healer held (and apparently had demonstrated) that thunder was the upgoing burst of undreamt dream mined in a flash from mountains by downcoming knives of lightning—"But the Anasazi believed mountains didn’t dream, Gramma"—True enough, but they arose from dreams slanted out of the Earth (its quality of being layered) and because of this origin never after were able much to dream though they thought and thought and were admirable if left alone and alive which incidentally proved to the Anasazi that true feeling must follow thought, even at a slant, not the other way round, because mountains did not feel in that human way. Yet they had all this stuff and bone and drama of dreams that never came to view and like some horsepower that didn’t know what to do with itself could get blown up by the right lightning coming down the right line at the right time—’ ‘that would heat the air and make rain, right?" the boy added— Right you are! whereas the Hermit-Inventor who remembered late humid-dark afternoons in early August in New Yorkono as it had once been called differed with the medicine man in that the so-called upgoing of the thunder was really ongoing, like a flooding of the banks or later much as the Heaven of Space-Thought grew to be an owf-concept more than an up-. But Jim, this being the weekend before another French test, swept all this away like love and all but stunned his grandmother telling her that Bob Yard had told him that thunder was gas expanding within the channel made by the lightning short-circuit and Bob had added that was it, that’s absolutely all he knew: but when Margaret retorted, "What do you expect of a man like Bob?" (who was an electrician), Jim, who with Bob’s illegal permission had borrowed Bob’s pickup truck the weekend before on condition that he and Anne-Marie ("Marie") stay clear of town, could reach inside himself for words but only so far as a ball of raging love to hurt his grandmother so that, for a silence that was large enough only for him to know that the French she had just recited to him thrice very slowly of a poet named Alfred he didn’t know was the very thing her husband grandfather Alexander had said in English on the porch a few days ago and for him to recall Alexander’s words and knew he could at once give a smooth translation, he could not bring out this intolerable question until he gave up trying and then heard all the voices inside him, his mother’s included, audibly then voice the question: "Gramma, why did she do it?" (the "she" at once felt as a lapse in his possession of his mother and of sonship, for he ought to have said "my mother"), the "Gramma" at the last gram of moment thrown in to tell her all he supposed his cool interrogation in its clipped outrage did not tell her: which at once let go in his own head, like a thought which, with Margaret beside him trying to recall for him things Sarah had said, could not contain a parallel question so hard to control that it became "Who does she think she is, to commit suicide" (as they with such natural syllables say com-mit-su-i-cide) "when she’s got a husband and two sons?" (hey, and a mother and a father and a sister in Massachusetts); a thought that became a year later offensive inquiries into the full circumstances of Sarah’s sandy, watery leavetaking by Jim’s statuesque journalism-English teacher Pearl W. Myles who had by then lost her job yet she had at least imprinted the basic interrogatives upon the majority of her pupils such as Where?, Who?, When?, Why? (or was Why? not one?) for Margaret, whose one-time self (if she was the same person) bending to taste a limb of imported copper, had refreshed in the Hermit why he had gone back to the West again and again—to wit, the seed pod given him by the Anasazi to chew on for the good of his grinders—could say to Jim, "That much we will probably never know."

And the grandson snapped shut his French book and ran off the porch at a bound hearing his angry grandmother call to him, "They don’t know for sure how lightning comes!," thinking nothing but these irrelevant thoughts out of his energies that not even his girlfriend Marie (really a friend) could contain (with or without precautions): Where, When, Who, What, How— wasn’t How contained in Where, When, and Who? but go easy on the Why because maybe we don’ gong know that ever—and flung him outward past impediment after impediment he was no doubt responsible for providing himself with so’s he’s have somethink in front of us as the Anasazi’s "created-weather" watch had concluded into a larger life of fact that wouldn’t go away even when you couldn’t prove post partem gloom might, in the humid late August of a young woman’s mind, be literally feeding on the most freshly electric of charges, those mythic ions, a weather inside out and as violent as an opera in which people stand for walls, or a lonely crime whose victims (who are victims only of the life that’s left them) do not know after all what the crime of this departed’s departure was, although they feel endlessly how it works in them, a person who was one of them now gone into a gap each survivor would fill if he could with stuff of himself or even, God help us, from others.

Yet, years later, when his own wife said she had a totally real picture of his grandmother Margaret from only the little he had said and so she didn’t fit this tale stuff he only alluded to into the picture of Margaret, he knew his grandmother had of course talked also facts. Facts about the Prince’s aunt, named Tall Salt, a promising widow who made the visiting East Far Eastern Princess laugh and inquired with a discretion that was even more intimate than its opposite about her state of health, as if she were blood kin to Margaret who, one early-winter day to interest her fifteen-year-old widower-grandson, told Jim that Tall Salt had expected her to marry into the clan—"And stay forever, Gramma?"—and had rope-burn welts where her own uncle a generation before had practically lynched T.S. as she rode rudely through his cornfield—he’d run wildly after her to lasso her and her horse rebelled at her familiar heel and started going round and round in little elegant circles she had taught him but not for emergency getaways, but her uncle he gave her two sheep one day when she had herded his flock for a year. She herself taught Margaret how to coil and weave baskets in the shape of bottles and stick them all over with pitch so they held water, and she never would say her sister the Prince’s mother was crazy or possessed or even a witch when to not quite everyone’s amusement that Navajo matron slung a coyote pelt on her back and ran away on all fours for a day or two followed by her horse and then came back and got up on the hogan and blew magic pollen down the smoke hole until it rained, but Tall Salt explained to Margaret that the nail parings and the small portion of dry shit her sister kept about her were her own, not from someone else who was thus to be bewitched and made sick as when a witch shoots a shard of mica into a person; and Tall Salt, who was very fond of the Hermit-Inventor’s ways, always cited her sister’s predictions such as that basketmaking was on the way out because the proper grasses were harder and harder to find.

Tall Salt also took part—rare for a woman—in the Night Sing aimed at ridding the Prince’s mother’s head of certain all-too-familiar demons her hospitality toward whom did not interfere with her (well) actually Christian hospitality toward Margaret whom her son obviously loved and to whom she gave an amulet asking the by-now-not-so-pale-faced visiting Eastern Princess if she would come into the isolation ti-pi "and bring the bird with you"—the giant bird in fact larger than five or six hogans dovetailed securely together by the best woodworkers—though a bird with proportionally small eyes oddly diamond-within-diamond-shaped, the type of eye the Anasazi medicine man should have had, to represent wisdom and watchfulness, though while he had the first he could not bother to have the second, for he left watchfulness to others which, even without diamond eyes (squinting or not—whereas he had normal gray-gold liquid eyes), was a mark of the reincarnality their beings secretly yearned to get over with in order then to watch out during a succeeding lifetime for the next life after that—though, as the Anasazi believed with a smile from his slow-beating, all but immortally slow, heart, one did not know this was what one watched for: and when Jim, like his daughter (though not his sleeping son), told grandmother Margaret he didn’t believe any of that reincarnation stuff (and found himself momentarily off guard to hear her cheerfully concur, "No more do I"), he wanted her to add something else and he heard the long-at-large memory find her in a catch of her breath: "But do you know," she said, "he told the Navajo Prince once toward the end that a young person would someday find a new form of reincarnation like a unique green butterfly—seen luminous-night-herring-fashion from the shores of both oceans uniting them for it was the same perfectly sane butterfly in two separate places and there would come, in the future, a way to verify the fact by instant communication over that full distance—this a prophecy without question for when the Anasazi, himself close to death and (not, of course, reincarnation but) that cloudhood that proved to be his own lofty noctilucent burial, saw the aforementioned new mode of communication in future as possibly a kind of ear whorled inward to a tiny pool of air dense as the cactus juice, strong as a rattlesnake’s jaw, clever as the percussion cap of a firearm from the East (tested or not in Mexico) that might receive at will messages from so far away only oceans could express this distance, he obviously knew nothing of the telephones from the mid-seventies of his own century that already connected fort to fort, Fort Keogh to Fort Bowie, to some deep bank of Black Hill treasure plundered without interest, to the sacred lava lake where Kiowas exited to the Pacific Coast told their Modoc hosts of grandparents killed at Fort Defiance and of Anglo warmen listening with their bare ear to the rail to hear seventeen miles off, say, or exactly eleven and a quarter, the iron blackbird of fortune grinding closer and closer bearing unconscious in its mineral genes the coming concept of Wide Load cross-continental haulage, but the Anasazi’s prophecy of death for the young person who found this new species of reincarnation was not less true than it was unnecessarily harsh.

Now Jacob Coxey, who marched an army of unemployed on Washington in 1894 and who had tea with Margaret who interviewed him in Ohio on her way home from the West, believed in his cohort-populist-financial-theological windbag Carl Browne’s theory of reincarnation. At death the soul returned to a reservoir like a caldron which contained all previous souls and this reservoir was where you got your soul and its special mix when you were born (as, from the Earth, your bodily chemicals), and Christ’s soul was in that caldron too, and therefore, in the fractional reincarnation which soulhood was, you had some Christ in you, but Browne discovered he and Jacob Coxey had an exceptionally large ration of Christ’s soul (presumably not embezzled in those panic months of defalcations by the dozen) which explained why the two men had been brought together for good works and for the march on Washington commencing at Easter of ‘94 (by which time Margaret and Alexander were reunited in New Jersey and making their own plans) and Browne called Coxey the cerebrum of Christ and himself the cerebellum. But the Hermit-Inventor had nothing to do with religious or social questions.

But . . . but . . . (the boy who at fifteen felt like a man asked his grandfather Alexander, who raised his palm in the peace gesture and laughed, Don’t ask me, don’t ask me), but didn’t the Hermit-Inventor of New York say the Navajo Prince’s mother would come back to life if the East Far Eastern Princess let herself be turned into a mist and spirited into the great Statue in the aging harbor?—Don’t ask me, laughed the grandfather, I thought you were through with all that stuff, so that Jim saw Alexander with meaty hands and bloody festoons reflected in his eyeglasses, because the awesomely pale-faced butcher with his Panama hat downtown had a sign behind him saying, DON’T ASK ME. I DON’T KNOW AND I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. But did that mean the Hermit knew the Prince’s mother would recover? But how long was it before she actually did come back to life? Wasn’t it that very night that they left? Or did the Princess’s promise to let herself be turned into a mist later on make the mother well again? Did the Hermit actually make it happen or only know that it would?

Oh, said Alexander, I think most of their ceremonials are against disease (can’t blame ‘em) whereas down among the Zuhis most of the palaver and singing is aimed at making rain, I think—your musical mother wasn’t the slightest bit interested in all that—but don’t ask me, ask your grandmother: Think what stems from not asking a given question ("given"? who gave it?). Think what would have happened if Jackson had asked the Indians what they wanted. The Civil War might have been averted and U. S. Grant would never have had the chance as President to fill the Indian Agency with Quakers who often actually did find out what the Indians wanted. (How could the Civil War have been averted? the boy started to ask, but his elder was perhaps way ahead of him.) For one thing, Indians westward might not have been so bad off and Margaret might not have been so curious to see what we had done to the Indians, and how—because you know she met a nasty little chap, part-Sioux I guess, at the Chicago Fair who told her the Indians deserved the Long March and had a perfect right to their poverty with their dumb ways of farming and if the magic was so all-fired powerful why did they not make rain? A man named Wentzel or Hintz or Lenz, the name doesn’t matter—and that’s why she got mad and disobeyed her father whom she was sending news dispatches back to, and went on out to Indian territory, still sent her dispatches mind you, wore her hat clear to Colorado, courageous girl, Margaret, but . . . but . . .

What? asked the grandson, who had once asked Margaret how she had gotten back to New Jersey from the West and she said she had had enough money to get to St. Louis where a collateral, thoroughly disreputable cousin of the Eads family whom she had met months before at the New Jersey exposition at the Chicago Fair helped her out—he drank too much and had been a friend of Gustave ("Le Tour") Eiffel in the French countryside where they had studied trees and computed bridges—and this man had gotten Margaret onto a train east, he was owed a favor by a railroad man, a German immigrant who had supplemented the meager pay of two Democratic coun-cilmen but made more money faster across the river in the East St. Louis mule market just before the famed windy flood of ‘85, and both men were now obsessed with putting together a World’s Fair for St. Louis within ten years to top Chicago’s, one already writing a book about it; but Margaret fell out with the conductor of the train somewhere past Cincinnati and made the rest of the trip under her own steam.

Ran out of money in the dead of winter, wound up in Massillon, Ohio, taken into his home in nearby village of Millport for the night by Jacob Coxey who was then planning his Easter march of the unemployed on Washington and whom she liked up to but not including his adopted theory of reincarnation; and much later at home in Jersey she wrote two humorous accounts of the Great Unknown:

the day before Palm Sunday a mysterious stranger appeared near Massillon to participate in Coxey’s "Commonweal" march, one "Louis Smith," a big well-dressed man who seemed the best-informed man there. He disciplined the "Commonweal" marchers and taught them to drill and salute officers. A Secret Service man on the march was also unable to find out who the Great Unknown was.

When Coxey’s March reached East Palestine, Pennsylvania, it received a chilly welcome. But it was at East Palestine that the Unknown proposed a system of publicly owned farms on which the unemployed might work under military discipline for the benefit of the State.

At Columbiana, a boy recognized the Great Unknown (or, Unknown Smith) as the ringmaster of a circus that had visited the town three years before.

Jim asked what Margaret recalled his mother saying and she said, "Oh, some severe thing about Chopin being better than Schumann, though she loved his wife." But his grandfather, who never went anyplace, had always until now seemed a source of certain knowledge. This day on the porch, the boy thought: They’re married. And it was not the marriage of his own, now halved, parents.

Anyway, Alexander went on, it was an accident that she went out there to start with, and if she hadn’t gone out there, she wouldn’t have had to come back. (He chuckled.)

Was Gramma in love with someone out there? asked Jim, who was a man already and a romantic who could take at some moments of softened and recompounded time a year stroking Anne-Marie Vandevere’s fingers in the treed darkness of the cemetery driveway at one in the morning (in the borrowed pickup truck, of course) and never wonder that she let him—

Oh it was back here too, said Alexander abruptly. And after a minute or two he retired from the porch, half as if for the bathroom, half as if for the "radio room," and Jim wondered if it was true what he had heard Alexander once say to Jim’s mother, that all too often one knew a woman through a man, through her husband or her brother or her father; for he now heard Margaret on the long-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock at news about—as he had already heard downtown—three piner babes living or dead out by Lake Rompanemus swamps. (Oh, the Indians took all the best names before we got here, she had told him. Well, they was here first, the boy had heard himself say.)

All things being equal, it was up to him, to Jim, to decide about things, about people. So that, responsible as he mysteriously was for anything or everything—including his exit as soon as possible after high school graduation from this town which contained these stories but not him—he would find an outside sanction to go away in the command of his mother whose own example he was swollen with and yet could set apart, that is of leaving him first: which were, whatever their dark or convergent, (or non-) connection, undeniable facts that would not go away, though he would rather make his getaway without seeking information, rather take a sea voyage—yay, sea voyage!—even a Coast Guard weather patrol, the ship was not at all the mere tinder bomb that war films Saturday afternoons and Saturday nights made you think ships basically were, where explosives all this time were what he knew he should study, namely the explosives that science was coming up with along with a glassless beer bottle. Yet this glassless beer bottle might be explained several ways and absorb all the explanations—might be an electric field, or a plastic substitute, or an inventive description of a bottle served without a glass. The last inspired by the presence some very late afternoons in the early sixties of a sleazily momentum’d collaterally professional slew-handed, sometime information dealer who sat at the end of the bar of a Washington hotel like a western visitor hoping to be mistaken for something—as if to overhear what Jim Mayn and a colleague (say friend) or two might be discussing. And once there he was, taking an interest not in some fact of Mayn’s past that was small-talk till it entered this perpetual one of Nature’s eavesdroppers’ ears to glint then left-handedly in his sickeningly interested eyes, but in a curious left-handed discovery, through near-disaster, of Jim Mayn as accidental scientist —not that his formula, framed at a moment when the pilot of his light charter plane making a descent for a landing lost "lift" and stalled them into the briefest of dives, would change the history of wind, and the formula had in any event already been arrived at independently of Mayn.

Nor was it much of a formula—kinetic power of wind equals (but here he didn’t know how he had arrived at) mass (which he had seldom understood) times windspeed squared, except that the turbulence layer their small-businessman’s Cessna hit was so like a landing strip undergoing an earthquake and thick enough to immerse the plane, disintegrating the smooth flow of air the plane’s elevator surfaces were plotted to play and be played by, grasp and be grasped, that this frictional boundary with a life of its own (though made provenly real by the presence of this light aircraft) seemed to multiply wind by wind, like some airs don’t mix, to make the energy splashed in among the controls some personal spirit he had been waiting for to make of him a conclusion; but the rollercoaster leveled and the pilot called back to him, Are you still there?, laughing as they got down to fifty feet above the tarmac when the wings went—no, God they fluttered vividly, and the plane, in a scale of motion so slow they had all week to watch, flipped one "arm" half-over so that Mayn, within the body of the plane whose wing this was, bruised his rib cage, daring the vehicle to go right over upside down to prove (extra-vehic-ularly) the difference between flying and landing. But their descent to touchdown jibed exactly with the roll-back into level so that the Earth, which was after all, Mayn saw for the first time, always one prime boundary to winds, seemed to draw them toward its magnet against the double whirl-wake that had been crazily waiting two or three minutes for them in the absence of the airliner that had started them spinning and departed; and he knew he had a grinning formula for this too—what the pilot not so casually stammered was turbulence tunnels caused by wing-tip vortices that kept whirling sometimes for several minutes—"Can you believe it?" the pilot called—"Sure, now that I’ve had my frontal lobotomy!" his occasionally suicidal passenger said unwarily and so enjoyed his remark that he let himself for the hundredth time fall short of the Anasazi’s high standards of non-repetitive conversation and possibly silence (the line between which one might be moved by yet never understand): lost, however, on Spence in his leather fringes at the curving end of the monumentally lengthy bar but who upon hearing the name of airline correctly identified the time of Mayn’s landing (was Spence lookin’ out the back window?) as being that of his own departure from the same surface on that very commercial carrier whose turbulent wake spinning air off its wingtips had doubled and redoubled the hazard for Mayn’s small plane returning from a business powwow with three sewage-disposal companies in Delaware on a day marked by a band of clouds with some embedded showers and thunderstorms.

Spence then fell so silent he was actually a moment later not there, no doubt calling long-distance from all the lobby pay phones at once; but he returned with his beer to inquire if Mayn was still interested in NASA’s "overt weather operations" (joke). Mayn’s nod was not curt cordiality. How do you nod to a worm? (Now a snake ... a cobra that can carry a tune und reise to an occasion!)

"Ah was on thet plane," Spence mimicked; "ah was on mah way ta Arizone."

The men didn’t give a hoot; Mayn heard Spence murmur names of other western states—"made a fire out of mesquite roots middle of nowhere forty-eight hours ago, small business conference, might’s well a been blindfolded, in the middle of some desert, man named Santee Sioux—ever been on a forty-eight-hour pass, Mayn?"—which sounded like "Ever know a man named . . . ?"

"You know damn well I’ve been on a forty-eight-hour pass!" but Mayn had never told Spence such a thing, and Mayn’s words told both of them that Spence had an interest in Mayn but it was probably no news because some years previous—the eve of the U-2 press conference when we learned how we had sown the atmosphere known as Russia’s airspace and they in turn had seeded our seeding so that a pilot named Powers was precipitated from the issue of whose weather it was that NASA was examining—Mayn had been restrained by his friend Ted, the skinny, obnoxious Spence would defend himself with a weapon you felt sure.

Why—spor-quoia—did it stick in his head or his grandmother’s (who would get to the point at once if he demanded it but showed her care for him by making him, like his living life, wait for the upshot of a tale maybe somewhat like his brain, maybe a tale that proved always to get into tangles that emerged as having started earlier though he hadn’t seen it, so he knew she had loved having him in the palm of her hand. This wasn’t at all like teaching him to whistle while they lay in bed when he was six years old, and you do it or you don’t, you summon the exact wind and supple crevice for it and then of all things forget what you’re doing in order to do it, but—)

Why did what stick? Why, this long-lived, half-dead couple of guys: do we mean . . . ? Yes; the Anasazi (semi-retired) medicine man (who was uniquely invulnerable to reincarnation) and the Hermit-Inventor who seems to have existed in three manifestations at least (the great great uncle three decades before the meeting with the girl Margaret in ‘85 "at" the Statue of Liberty (if you call those scattered large-scale units one statue) and then much later in the mid-twentieth of centuries an unfrocked weather thinker who lived almost as remotely in his own drab Greenwich Village street as he did in the lost feelings of a man called Mayn who would inexplicably imagine not primarily what this old specialist geezer had gone through but the galaxies of people who had known him and looked at him—to which we have to add the immediate, more amused and optimistic, yet shorter feelings of a woman on the street named Grace Kimball, star-quality possessor of a bicycle, great giver of instructions and sympathy to other women—who saw the most recent manifestation of (unbeknownst to her) the Hermit across the street one day escorting an old lady both beautiful and baffled, entertained and confused (in this loosely articulated Manhattan capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale lives) but if confused, also beyond transition.

Now, the Anasazi medicine man lived high up in a honeycombed cliff because his ancient people, of whom he was the ultimate survivor by centuries, had traditionally inhabited such apartment structures or multiple dwellings; but his real reason was that, given the name of Changing Grandchild after one of the four mythic or directional sons, he had been unable himself to "change" for a good part of his life, sitting in his desert basement as a distinguished adolescent thinker, maintaining for over a century an alarming reputation as a healer of seductive tranquilizing powers (who could have foreseen but, by self-definition, not reincarnate in a Presque Isle, Maine, obstetrician long after to whom many-times-miscarried woman traveled hundreds of miles to receive his magic) and when the Anasazi had changed his life during his second century, he chose to live high-celled and inaccessible in the canyon wall. He betrayed strange likenesses: between his noctilucent teeth and gums and the specialist Mena’s javelina-like lips; also between (a) his capacity to recreate outside him, from their origins in his bodily organs and circulatory precipitations and heart-light, such weather phenomena as warm sleet (whence?) or the fan of shadow-rays across the pre-sunrise sky, and (b) the capacity in his friend the Hermit of New York to take such phenomena from outside inside—to "internalize" them, we already remember saying in a later language—and explain them in the poetry of science; also, the penetrating humor in the Anasazi’s stark, light, truth-reflecting or -inventing voice seemed a less dense otherwise identical imprint of the Navajo Prince’s, for instance on the day when the Anasazi yielded him the pistol which had belonged to the Thunder Dreamer (the very day when the Prince’s mother refused to consult the Anasazi about the aperture in her head which a voice on the winds of a storm seeming to be the voice of the healer himself had ascribed to weather of foreign origin falling into a mountain in the vicinity precipitating forces like weather then falling "out" of the mountain to target selected human receptors). The likenesses aforementioned hinted to Margaret and her grandson that the Anasazi’s future non-reincarnality had been made up for by some simultaneous dispersion of his being among his contemporaries. Jim did not think it through at fifteen, though always knew that he was not scheduled for reincarnation. Enough could happen in this life. Enough for what? for whom? But when, years later, at the end of a night on a Bermuda beach with his wife, Jim saw shadow-rays over the ocean knowing they were not really fanned out but parallel and they shot out from an irregular horizon profile of tradewind cumulus, this he remembered was pretty much what Margaret had said the vacationing colleague from the East had told the Anasazi, who had seen the phenomenon though never the ocean except the ocean of the desert, and the Anasazi had been glad for once to agree because what had emanated from him via the back of the eyeball observing the confluence of seas, mountains, irrigation ditches, and the crepuscular cactuses that while you’re not looking fly away (in exactly as threatening a manner as the prehistoric Texas pterodactyls with thirty-five-foot wingspread flew at their prey), had reappeared in the Hermit-Inventor’s science refreshed in its turn by each summer’s breather westward.

Could weather precipitate from the ground upward? The two colleagues agreed it could—"At least once in a Double Moon," chafed the gaunt New-yorkondo. But the semi-retired medicine man, whose way of seeing things the Anglo did not pretend to see as an insider, and who looked too fragile to smile, much less shake his head, blew a polite negative upon the rosy sand map on the cell floor before him. Double Moon was Double Moon. Ground-upward clouds were something else; likewise, hail growing in the great planted fields like the old black-and-white "bullet" melons, then to be sucked upward by passing "chimneys" of thunder so the Anglos could have harnessed this downside-up hail against one another. The Hermit-Inventor of New York asked if the Double Moon that had fallen upon the pistol Mena had brought to this cell had turned it into two pistols or only roused rumors of two origins for one. The Anasazi recommended he stick to the subject. The Hermit said that his great-great uncle, the only short man of all that singular line, had once in London stood upon a sunny hill Christmas morning to see hundreds of feet of ground-upward weather. He had taken a photograph upon a large oblong of card treated with a layer of fresh bodies of the tiny marine carnivore the comb jelly plus a film of glassy "shite" from the French marbled newt. It showed a sulfur-gray gulf of ground-cloud packing the city with an effluent known a century earlier to put a fur and crust upon silver plate. But the Anasazi and his eastern visitor saw weather-from-the-ground-up differently. The old one had never seen a city but could imagine it sunk two hundred feet deep in its own poisonous fog; and he knew that the sole source, the earth itself, had turned the temperature upside down so that ground-level stays cold even after sun-up and the sun cannot lure the ground-level airs upward. The Hermit felt this upcoming weather derived from circulations within the Earth that upon reaching the cool pre-dawn surface mixed with airs already too well breathed by men and women and chemically redestined by the feelings and leftover dreams their bodies impregnated those airs with. The Anasazi blew upon the sand-patterns and simultaneously laughed: he saw no real difference between these views, unless he and his guest should wish to have a wrestling bout over it.

Jim’s grandmother was avidly reading a love-story book about a whaler one day he came back from football practice. She hadn’t seen him in a week, and he asked why she had never returned to the West. "I had responsibilities here," she said. She went on reading but stopped, and she looked right at him in her way. But he left her and went over to Marie’s house where for some reason she was neither peeling carrots and turnips for her mother nor reading Sinclair Lewis upstairs, she was sitting on the porch staring ahead irritated, and some absence of halo round her up there on the porch where he joined her made him think upon a strange potential fact, and this was hard so he thought instead of her breathing body and the friendly scent of her under her sweater like a whole air even more than a smell and coming from her when she breathed in as well. He sat down next to her and was glad to think a thing or two through, which was the last time on this score, which might have seemed unsettled between him and his grandma, while he now made a discovery. But when, in the midst of it, the familiar girl in her plaid skirt and short-sleeved angora and bobby sox testily rocking said, "Looks like rain," he knew it wasn’t really him she was mad at, if him at all. Anyway he had seen that between the steamily upgoing weathers and the resolute downcoming weathers, between that observed and that created, between the weathers of presence and of absence, and of leaving and arriving and most strangely of inside and outside, and all these always divided up so you could practically see them out of that time when people really cared why a luminous night cloud came widely low to the continent in subtle motion each day as if the continent were turning westward and the cloud hung waiting for places to come under it, the grandmother had always been out to entertain him at a fairly high level but had been led into history she herself cared to keep if not create; likewise she had told some pretty fair horse and cactus tales to pass their time as if there would have been nothing otherwise, but in doing so she had covered up things that had happened so the coverings became queer to the eye approaching, say, that mother with a hole in the head or a tornado that rumbled off like the made-up pterodactyl bird it really was, that is when Margaret turned into a Princess, which was really another person in her that he didn’t ask about, but she was two persons, both the young woman who saw slaughterhouses in Nebraska and dry farming among the Indians—

—what’s dry farming?

—It’s get-right-out-there-while-you-can farming just during the brief period of the rains—

—who read the 1892 commissioner’s report and knew that medicine men were adjudged to be barbarous conjurers and got ten to thirty days in jail for a first offense; she had studied provisions for "field matrons" who would help Indian women learn hygiene, crafts, and in the "Lend a Hand" clubs proper observance of the Sabbath, and she had looked forward to visiting the Indian exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair which was confined for lack of funds to an industrial boarding school, thus demonstrating Washington’s commitment to educational progress for the Indians who were not to be called Red Men but the People, not Injuns but the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Seminoles, Creeks—we’ve got a couple of Creeks right here, your teammate Ira’s half Creek—

—he’s crazy, Gramma—

—which Indians was she referring to?—the industrial Indians, the boarding Indians—

—they would go home for the weekend testing themselves with often a round trip on foot of eight hundred miles between Friday night and Sunday night—

—the Five Civilized Tribes recognized by treaties of 1866 and later—

—and on the other hand, the Princess who sought nothing by experience and felt in her wrists and heart, amidst the smoke of the Night Chants which her host the Prince demanded she be allowed to watch, the high juggling of live objects by ritual clowns who ran so exactly out of step that they were simultaneous reincarnate priests branding the night with its own outlines shifted into question—but when she grew sick she could go on sitting on the floor of a still unbewitched hogan in a beam of light from the hole in the roof, upon a beautiful blanket whose design she knew had no more urgent meaning than the designs on other blankets (or the way the light from above siphoned her into some space of the future in which she would remain here forever) and be glad that the practicing medicine men would not come to heal her—for she did not miss doctors, the doctors of Choor, the more gentle island healers hidden among the lakes of the Long White Mountain.

Grandfather Alexander, whom the boy talked to more since his mother had died, and who must have been one of those responsibilities that had kept Margaret from returning to the West, said Margaret was going to Muskogee for the Sequoyan Convention in 1905 but she had a couple of small children by then. The boy asked what that was, and Alexander told him they had had the idea of a state of the union drawn from the Indian territories and organized by the Five Civilized Tribes. Quite a big thing at the time. Creeks, Cherokees, forget the others; became Christians, owned slaves, real civilized. Made a dictionary, started a newspaper; built regular houses—not those six-sided hogans of the Navajos or underground houses like the Salish out near the Pacific (because it don’t get very cold below ground level).

Only one state? said Jim, and his grandfather laughed, which put into the boy’s secure memory his own remark.

That was what got him into the newspaper business, a reasonable memory for and a respect for fact, y’know—plus a way of removing some facts from his head to an ink imprint on paper, and it came to cupric sulfide and pen-taerythritol, supercooled cloud-seeding agents that proved to be much less convenient than lead iodide or dry ice (though Nature wasn’t to be sniffed at even when it evaporates a cauliflower cumulus and disappoints a farmer): how to remove intact from his mind a fact so that it might never lose its authoritative meaninglessness, even (he bet) for chemists who nodded with matter-of-fact intensity at names of yet other cloud-seeding agents phloroglucinol and me-taldehyde: and throw in the more earthly meteorologist contacts Jim ran into, who had a trick of telling you how the gas law explains a good half of weather—that is, that a gas adjusts its state moving from one environment to another—and in a trim surveillance craft gliding not at all silently (because of the density of conversation) just below a growing cumulus at its flat, football-field-long base, where the cooling air turns rainy, he could be shown one afternoon how the base’s center was higher than the surrounding edges; yet confronted with a restless atmosphere—the air rising; the pressure on it hence decreasing so that the air answers by expanding, which in turn takes effort on the part of our "only human" air which as a result must spend some of its energy which is measured (we are reminded by a child or young person in the next room) in temperature (check it out) the air gets cooler ten degrees Centigrade for each kilometer upward—Mayn’s contacts (friendly as relations he phoned once a year) could also speak to him of this rate as the "dry adiabatic lapse rate" (it will never desert you and in a pinch will tell you how high or low a cloud will form). And these clouds were what you put into them too, it came to him years after he had committed to some memory morgue the sometimes furiously, yes, furiously made-up spiral winds, whose attempt to return only to their source in the breathing of certain vegetarian reptiles and the needle-shooting cactus those reptiles woke up once a month to feed on, the Hermit-Inventor would explain to the Anasazi as an effect of a shearing or squall line between the reptile’s moist breath moving to meet its nutriment and the cactus’s oppositely targeted dry—thus stirring at widespread joint-feed times spiral breaths that on rare days joined energies and went away, uniquely dustless but of a discernible green hue due, the Hermit said, not only to the cactal skin but to the fall sun’s blueness elusive to the naked eye mixed with yellow, bile-like blood which these vegetarian reptiles tried to purify each day from their prior carnal form of the minute Pressure Snake of the South that preyed on mountaineers who one moment would see a sky-blue worm accost a boot toe and the next would be sucked all but their bones into this (we almost felt "human") compacter, which, to those few who had lived to see it, then proved to have rooted itself to the mountain and while maintaining its wormful size digested what it needed of the object-human whose flesh it had separated all but instantly from the bone cage, and shot the rest into the mountain. This caused a general tremor since the mountain understood that the flesh so dazzlingly compacted into that blue snake could hold, in some riddle of energy, this reduction only for a moment, which buttressed the Hermit’s theory that mountains dreamt. But the Anasazi would not be drawn back into this issue; he explained spiral winds his way.

With his breath he drew upon the sands of his rock floor. These early weather maps coiled shape inside shape, the abiding forms present in the weather places at rest and restless and always ready to open out so that we saw a wind had been potentially a bird, a bending tree some moment clothing a wind; a flash flood rivering down the sky ocean high above it had once in the desert’s territorial memory been a reverse waterspout. The sands in which these maps were drawn were rose and green and blue sands, sands orange and nearly black, sand sand-colored (as the Anasazi’s colleague from New York put in); and more unusual was the live violet of that western chinook wind the Anasazi once had seen from far above it in this specialist eyrie of his, a wind that warms and dries and avalanches down a mountain so not even the desperate trees could detain it, speeding to eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour across the flatlands to remove, incidentally, moisture from the ground so swiftly some of it was never seen except in unexpected memories; long, shallow islands of volcanic dew; salt arms of some departed sea become rivers without issue or source that stood almost unnoticeable, dead as the dense Anglo rivers of the later East that have learned to store even the most bright-veined wastes against a time when we will know how to use them. So all the above colors dropped from the Anasazi’s ceiling as if dye-separated from the sands subtly crumbling thence down in order then to remix with them: but no, said the uniquely non-reincarnable elder to his much younger hermit-co-thinker who advanced this theory of separation and reunion; no, the colors could not have left the sand even as they filtered through the ceiling, because in that event they could never come back; so they must have created, in the precipitation from ceiling to floor, a shade in the color skins of our snake-like eyes, an obstacle or message that had the appearance of an illusion, so we saw only sand falling (and when it all caves in someday there will be no cave!).

But no, said the Hermit in his turn, when the ceiling falls in—and the Hermit had acquaintance with different ceilings where he came from and had invented some to fill a need—we will get the landlord to repair it!—and while they laughed, and the Anasazi muttered absently who is this Landlord of the East? they both admired what the four winds, or the four generally heroic brothers the name of one of whom the Anasazi bore, had created on the floor—a scheme of avenues and parallelograms and squares and anvil shapes, outer ovals and apparent cols and crags within, in turn hexagonally windowed by forthright trenches tempting a marriage of lights just as the irrigation ditch reaches out to the water if people let it. For like the weather patterns windblown into the map—that is, by breath not solely owned by the breather— the colors in the sand came from ages of high-handed flow especially at sundown or sunup when the blood of the mountains stirs about toward the thoughts of its own horizon light and this red passing to and from the Sun through that upper land of filaments and nation-sized curls and rippled sand ("Mackerel," put in the eastern Hermit, always inclined to give the precise, if eastern, term) becomes all the halo colors, all auras mapped on this floor cooled by one of the silver moons that come near, and in the night told the Anasazi again that these maps radiant as a musk thistle or serious as a city were not the four-cornered history of his early adulthood when his devotion to healings so curious they got to be ends in themselves took him away from his children whom he loved more painfully from a distance and his sometime loved wife from whom distance had too seldom been possible until one day he found that they had contrived distance between them and were lost to each other. And he would see her face looking up to him from a mountain he would pass when death had turned him into, as he predicted, an unprecedented cloud, or looking up to him from the shaken grass-grains of an earthen winnowing tray or straight into his eyes once when she told him she would not use the age-old wooden pillow for the head of their new baby in her cradle board. Until with, thus, the moon’s cool help, he saw again these weather maps for what they were, a history and prediction weatherwise as sure as that when you stand with your back to the wind stream you will feel its absence in your left shoulder and intensified presence in your right inviting you to turn, though when you do and find you have risen slightly onto your accepting toes, you find not the same pressure of hands upon you, for in the circles are always motions upward or away and thus we would feel deserted by these spirals of wind if we did not sense through the twining spirals originating inside us in our internalized four corners and always breathed outward if we only recall how from endless sources in us that it is always the same wind. It is always a different wind, groused the Hermit-Philosopher but saw in the sometimes angular neighborhoods in the map, which became another map before his hugely color-sensitive eyes, that winds did not follow only the curves of valleys and the ovals of bird flight but turned sharp enough and often enough to frame the very territories about which he and the Anasazi once quarreled.

This was not to be compared to the long-distance, sight-unseen, though ear-to-ear exchange of opinion between the Anasazi and Marcus Jones who heard upon an angle of the counter-twilight breeze, though they had never met, the (to him unmistakable) voice of the old healer identify the musk thistle as radiant, and Marcus found himself on instinct responding out of his ear, of all likely responders among his bodily parts, that the musk thistle’s flower-head system was in fact without rays, and while the Anasazi might have replied that the color over the haired and convex reddish-lavender head was radiant, he contented himself, and Marcus Jones, with praise of Jones’s love of the coyote thistle as witness his discovery that in look it obviously was some distant pineapple though he knew pineapples only in the descriptions of his visitor the Hermit-Inventor of New York.

Yet the Anasazi was stunned, as he told the Hermit upon his next visit, to hear the botanist Jones’s real point: that animal and plant were more than kin, blood and juice, animal and fruit, hide and leaf—for example, the immigrant giraffe of Choor and the wild swamp tubes of New Jersey that would stem-suck those swamps dry for one swift, illusory day each year were morph-ically one organism. To tell the truth, this thought had visited the Anasazi some centuries before upon loving his wife and sensing that they lived off each other’s breath for hours at a time and fed one another like cooperative animals and grew ripe and large and silent and close and even mutually shadow-rooted so that there was no telling which they were, plant or animal.

But the Hermit-Inventor, who was to love one woman from the time she was a thirteen-year-old girl throughout her later life’s general absence from him, shrugged sadly (perhaps because it was, that month, time for him to return to the invention of his eastern city, which equaled often the invention of ideas to explain or utilize what the city’s spirit had already brought into being), and grumbled that it or they would be all "one" a century from now, he was not sure how fast it was all flowing together, one gross anthill of coincidence, but it surely was. To which the Anasazi, who had not practiced medicine in many a generation, added: Like female and male, returning to the one they used to be. The Hermit said No, he drew the line there—though community might have much to gain from such a transformation, to judge from imminent mingling of the races and also to recall that, even with future increased vertical building, a part-time economist he had met in the forests of Massachusetts, or visited conceived of a mile as the right distance for neighbors, for they could if need be at that distance see each other. There was neighborhood in silence, concurred the Anasazi, as witness his own adept ear for what Marcus Jones had forgotten to be amazed by at the time, that in fact the Anasazi had picked up on the subject area of the coyote thistle only Marcus’s unvoiced thinking, for Marcus had said not one audible word out of his ear or any other of his functioning organs.

But the Anasazi, nearing term, was glad the power did not extend to his eyes and ofttimes painful touch. Yet when the Hermit, his annual sojourn done, said Keep in touch, the aged savant had to wonder if he had powers he didn’t know about, if so he must learn them lest before the right time they accidentally de-leave the woods of the East or dry-freeze an adjacent volcano in full cry. He used such words as "adjacent" and "Keep in touch" to show his feeling for the Hermit-Sojourner, and in their anger over the question of shared and territorial weathers he showed words and ideas that convinced the Hermit the Anasazi was so far ahead of his time as to be—not crazy but so bony of mind, so humorous about a violent future, that the Hermit all but asked if it was weather he ought to been discussing or some other—what?— obstacle?

It must have been at this point in his later skeptical discussions with his grandmother, the winter and early spring after his mother’s permanent vacation from this world, that the grandson apparently forgot or deposited at a distance from his life a pile of rather rich data. His grandfather reminded him of these at thirty-five, as if for the grandfather, who was on his last legs then, recalling territorial versus shared weather was the most natural thing. "Oh, you got mad as hops didn’t you just. Because she told me you did. And it was some dadblamed stuff about a mountain of flesh and tainted hailstones—"

—when the Hermit took the East Far Eastern Princess away from—

—For God’s sake, Gramma, it wasn’t you, was it?

Well, sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t (for Margaret had decided not to put up with his anger all the time, only some of the time)—

—when the Hermit took her away from the maiden weavers to urge her to get out of there fast, he conveyed to her such a condensed mountain of information (for he had his troubles too) that one might spend a life digesting it all, so that that afternoon of the interminable sunset resembled a year of such light, and later when she galloped not at all like the wind away from village and mountain and the hauntingly local, turning storm she had been thrown outward by the beginnings of, the Hermit’s anxiety seemed to her to have precious little to do with his talk of upcoming or rising weather, which would be territorial, and downgoing weather, which would be shared. If this debate with the Anasazi coupled with regret, anger, prophecy, and (she felt) his curious relief to be talking to her at all had taken up the space they seemed to need, why she would have been listening all night, for a year of nights, and not have escaped that night and might never have left—

—but why not?—she could have left later—

Escape is always possible even if you think you are free, according to the Anasazi, who so maddened the Hermit with impatience and inspiration that he vowed he would never again tell him anything. This after the Hermit described those purely mythical three- or four-foot-high towers of frozen froth called in the East-North-East "foam volcanoes" which of course no one including the Hermit had ever seen—only to have his fanciful instance of upgoing weather, which stayed rooted to the place it rose from, taken so seriously by the Anasazi that the Hermit was moved by his friend’s explanation of the so-called Ship Rock as being no ship at all but a piece of the very seas on which the supposed ship had come to this ancient terrain, which had been in process of turning from seawater into dry land, a process more than completed upon the arrival of this "Ship Rock" tower: moved, then, to anger was the Hermit, for the Anasazi had already taken the Hermit’s vision of a future of vertical building as a promise of destruction not only from people of the East dropping dangerous objects from such heights but employing a new, visible air to make the tallest possible bubbles which would be in the midst of their unthinkably hot creation in imitation of the Sun, frozen dry and hard with the people of the future embedded here and there like windows, doors, or sculpture or fading away or going to pieces as in Tall Salt’s pictorial rugs, while the Hermit (who had seen in Ship Rock’s bare steep lift off the desert floor an assurance that mountains thought but did not dream) would stop his ancient friend with "But those foam volcanoes I told you about, they’re not true, I never saw one of them in my life; you’re saying they rise up from bubbles in the wintertime—"

"—the late winter in the north of Choor," laughed the Anasazi, who had spoken at a distance reportedly to the Princess’s giant bird to ask if it missed the moisture of its faraway climate and had heard the bird’s retreating words curving down into distance even as the bird flew higher so that in the decoded words of the bird identifying the frequency of thawing days and frosty nights, the Anasazi had both a verbal equivalent of an unknown music and a weather report from another territory, though not then a resolution of the Hermit’s painful differences from him: for while the two agreed that some weathers actually belonged to the people living in the given territory such as the hailstorms of the western summer, and that other weathers were no one section’s right but shared—even sea-to-sea, such as the thunder-without-light-ning that came with the dampness of a late-summer gibbous moon observed by the Navajo Prince two hundred miles from here, while he was studying the compacted potentialities of the bison tongue, and verified by the Anasazi and subsequently by others as having taken place elsewhere at roughly the same time—still the Hermit maintained that the hailstones of northern New Mexico were both downcoming and upgoing weather since the stones fell and rose several times before hitting the ground, for one heard them whistle different scales, whereas the Anasazi, who doubted this, was convinced on close but necessarily swift inspection that hailstones were in reality trees, leastways their trunks, compacted violently to spheres showing those internal rings to mark the spiral layering by those always present winds which the Hermit contended were either arriving or leaving, while the Anasazi, who, on nights of Double Moon, could project onto his floor or wall photograms cross-sectioning practically anything, even the four winds (which especially interested the Hermit) though not the extraterrestrial voids charted like wide rather than long tunes inside the Prince’s mother’s head that, for the many holes that the one large seemed to explode into, might be a young singer’s wild ceiling of as yet unreached high notes, yet here in the Prince’s mother a head charted if at all by her terrestrial demons who sometimes knew when they were licked yet sometimes were themselves possessed of a versatility due to the several possible causes of their presence not least the rare wind joining substances of some far northern landscape with local mountains reputed to have human flesh (or being) in their actual circulation, yet also not least the sometimes visible breath of her husband the Prince’s father when he speculated as to these causes but never consulted the Anasazi, so old he didn’t know the difference between Anglo and Indian, white man and red man, hermits of the East and seers of the People, and was known to have hardly troubled to argue, in his longstanding discussions with the Hermit, that there was (in the matter of winds) only leaving—if that—never arriving: for that which is already present need not arrive. The Anasazi found delightfully funny the Hermit-Inventor’s generous vision that terrestrial weathers might become shared weathers but not the other way around. The Anasazi, who would express his love for the Hermit through ridicule such as "We are going to have war between us even if we don’t have to fight for it," argued that the winged water wheels of five hundred years back had passed from the world of the Indians into the concave sky, and to call these gray illusions from which came a century of real irrigation water for Indian peoples "shared" when they had passed away was like claiming that Marcus Jones’s silver-bristled pussytoes was a western July twin of those clustered tresses of hair-frost the Hermit claimed on hearsay grew in Choor from wet soil in months of gloomiest cold. Possibly more than a twin, the Anasazi observed, since at that distance there was no way to check (except by his own rare powers of hearing, which would not help) whether or not the hair-frost somehow translated itself westward to be, for a time, the pussytoes in bloom.

Which should have been the moment, roughly in 1889 or ‘90, when the Anasazi knew he was going to disperse and (through a method only he then knew, though as Margaret guessed her grandson might hit upon it himself sometime) recompound his ancient veins, vacancies, and breath in cloudform, glad not to speak any more but await some inevitable precipitation. Yet when his death and chemical promotion coincided with the poor Navajo Prince’s exit in pursuit of his beloved, the Anasazi never thought his own new (un-precedentedly low-altitude) nimbic noctilucence would last so long eastward to be consummated in a trip to the Northeast to seek those foam volcanoes despite the Hermit’s guarantees that he would not find any. The Hermit had by then named certain cumulus sky-chains "cloud streets" and was on the way to the fulfillment of his personal frustrations on two fronts, one of them the "front" itself, which in their quiet way a team of Norwegian meteorologists would claim as their contribution near the end of the First World War. The fact was that the Hermit had put two separate pictures together from the work decades earlier of his own Hermit-Uncle who possessed an unmatched sense of smell: one was the picture of vast shelves of underground rock sliding laterally to push other, weaker shelves of underground rock angularly upward—or vice versa, the upper flowing across the lower—this giant motion resulting from the ingrained shadow of the sea’s memory within those ancient solids waking them to periodic waves not unlike the circulatory dreams in the lower levels of mountains; the second was the picture of his tall, sinewy uncle-manifestation on a field trip to the extreme and odd Northeast straddling a branch of the highest oak upon a mountain covered with holly bush and sniffing from the West an odor he knew from but one place on the continent, the cell of an aged Anasazi med’ciner, the faintly acrid oxide sear splashed on the barrel of a revolver lying beside an earthenware winnowing tray brought to the Anasazi once weekly by his long-time regular maiden with his ration of legume and cereals—upon which the high-perched uncle, oblivious till later of a clan or club of Abnaki Indians encamped on the slope beneath him on their way to try vainly to volunteer on the Union side, conceived of an east-bound wind in the form of minute parcels of experience—here, a point in the West, possibly not the ultimate origin of the wind itself particularly if, as all the Hermit-Inventors of New York have concluded independently, winds may be global belts or sashes that have no actual beginning as true as their ongoing motion. All of which led the Hermit-nephew to see, through additionally observing differences both between his moods on inclement days and those of children or midgets at a lower level, and between his own intensified sense of smell in warm weather and that of the neighborhood dogs responding to many of the same odors in his native city in winter, that if temperature affects what is carried by wind, it must affect the progress of wind, and so when the seared-pistol scent came coolly through the branches of his eyrie oak, the Hermit saw a particle-tinted wall of warmth nearing his oak perch only to veer off upward above him as if it had always been a rampart of another system, then fork to either side of him while two other events occurred: one, he realized that the odor from the west southwest, mixed of metal-sear and of the nutriments maiden-conveyed to the famed medicine man had just kept coming as if the source of the odor were unending—a stream thousands of miles long from a source but a few inches in size; two, as he told his nephew deliriously on his deathbed, the land of the sky (to use the term of their friend the Anasazi) was an inverted presence of the Earth, and the animal man that lived in both but walked on but one must find the way to defact ("defract"?) and parsipate ("precipitate"?) in both. But the Hermit-nephew, putting all this together in the late eighties, very early nineties, concluded that, though he did not know the word "baroclinity" (which the Anasazi, who could not have cared less, could have predicted would not cover all cases), one mass of parcels had met another and, discovering their different temperatures, hence densities, neither obstacle had penetrated the other but made a wedge or "front" of agitated, void-jumping weather locally discontinuous, but that quite apart from the old Indian healer’s marine geology of desert Earth, the crucial, maybe confluent odor from the West (which made the perched uncle thirty-odd years ago sweat so that the Abnaki group camped on the slope below got wind of him and took him captive as a Confederate spy scouting Indian volunteer movements in the Northeast) proved to be unconscious word from the Anasazi med’ciner that these quests to the heart of atmosphere, even if cyclonic rotation be a fuller emblem of it than rivers of the sky that meandered and overcame their banks and even paused and halted to test the patience of sailboat crews and rafters while all in all striping that Earthen world like latitudes, were arrived at through what seemed mutual interruption and blockage that were really a promise not just that some work would come of it but that work had.

At which, when the Hermit tried to voice all this to the Anasazi at their next summer meetings in traditional meteorological language, the Anasazi who never owned up to any faults laughed more humbly than ever—and then answered in suitably weatherly words that when airs heated from human breath seek higher coalescence ("Ko-an I ci-quoia") they get bigger till, rising, they get let into the upper landscape his very friend the Hermit was talking about but too smart—’cause it was not an inverted landscape rehashing our own though it was asking us to be in it as if it were our own and protect ("protract" ?) it as it protected ours—unless, however, this now very expanded hot air can’t gain entry into the smoke hole of the Sky’s grand hogan and is returned as sheaves of storm blade and sleet lightnings or fiery rain gods that have forgotten they are one, that would wipe out all the cacti except those in process of turning into birds or transhumans or vice versa, except that over Navajo country this deluge’s downcoming often gets halted as an awful ceiling of smoke for which there is no explanation except that horses sniff it and hark back to when the land was ocean and they swam and flew.

The grandmother’s grandson dimly recalled territorial versus shared weathers, and colored weathers which were beautiful but in the mind felt threatening; and that the earlier Hermit had smelled the Anasazi’s pistol two kilo-miles away, and much else. But in i960 or 1965 Jim had to believe his fragile, clear-voiced, steady-talking, uninflectedly slow-talking granddad Alexander, whose ankles, as always raised from time to time of recrossed knees, were now like pretzels in their blood-red socks snap-gartered and silver-clocked above the perennial cordovans, and though he might forget the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia Alexander did recall Margaret’s heartfelt arguments over of all things weather in ‘45 and ‘46 with her grandson because often she would tell them to her husband who calmed her—"down," as the phrase still has it, not as in "put" (though why the grandson even in later years let himself find in outlying parts of another’s body functions of thinking perhaps, or perception, or half-assed recall, we almost do not know, though hands and forearms and tongues seem more plausible than ankles if we are faithful to the grammar above, not to mention knees and necks).

"Well, it was a tradition longer than Margaret knew, of those two chaps that when they met they talked about weather or did until the old Indian died about the time Margie came back home through all that unemployment agitation. And during the bad period after your mother passed away and you had differences with Margie—which were beyond me, for I never saw her like that before or after (though the death of the older Hermit, her particular friend, threw her for a loop)—and in the middle of that protracted wrangle she said to me one night, ‘And I taught that boy to whistle and told him all the stories he knows,’ but whatever she was talking about when she said you were scaring her with your strange disagreements over what were after all just her tales as if you knew things in all this stuff that she didn’t, you’ll agree grandmothers have their uses. And your dad, who was one for detail as the newspaper demonstrated and so did his somewhat limited conversation though not his obit for your mother, would phone us at six and say Braddie had baked some macaroni and cheese in that big old glass casserole your grandmother would insist on steelwooling the burnt crust off of at least twice a year, and there was likely to be strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for dessert (‘likely to be’ was your dad’s humor), and where were you?, your grandmother would say she didn’t know—better try that girl’s house—Vandevere. But after Christmas you came back to her, I think, and you would get her to talk about the western adventures and how she broke her back harvesting dry country corn, but now you were bickering over half of what she told you, until she berated me her best friend one night as if it was my fault and I recall she said sometimes you made bad jokes about your mother being picked up by a fugitive German submarine cruising the Jersey shore and going to Argentina or Chile instead of dying like a respectable tragedy—and you didn’t talk that way! and I told her once I didn’t believe you did talk that way and she said, ‘Ask him, he told me he gets transmissions because of that eardrum of his that was infected once from swimming and he isn’t sure if the transmissions are from himself or from south of the border or both but they say go away where you belong’ (‘He persecutes me,’ she said)" (and Mayn: "/ was like that?") "—but nutty things like as if you took your grandmother too literally and took it from there until I guess it all stopped and by the next summer you two were both sort of grown-up again, I mean the way you normally always were, and friendly and a little sharp with each other, that sort of thing, Jim":

Oh remember the "pre-sound" of the Anasazi’s last words posthumously conveyed a mile or more to the Hermit direct by breath from the heart of the Anasazi’s materially dissolving mind which slowly peeled and delayered, in fragilest fossil-like blades or leaflets?

But do you remember adding that the Anasazi and the Hermit might have been in another life one person not two (because except for the Indian’s laughing at him and the Hermit’s getting friendly-mad, they often mingled their sciences of shared and territorial? Mind you, if a cloud stops over your country and sheds water that gets all the way to the mouth of the ground (for this had come to the boy-man descending the stairs hearing his mother suddenly break off her piano playing)—you have it, it’s on your territory unless you’ve gotten to be a state ({he grandmother laughed at her grandson’s historic wit), but so what, it might help the corn, especially right after it was planted, you don’t give that cloud away; and point number two, if a tornado comes along with a lot of people’s horses and houses and someone’s gun and a couple of half-busted chairs from another territory, who the heck wants to share a tornado?—which ain’t the same as between weather that just happens and weather that is caused, or between colored weather and black and white—or the Hermit looking into a box he had for measuring, and the Anasazi turning ninety degrees, then turning again, and so on.

Margaret was upset in the spring of ‘46. The Hermit her old friend was very ill, though she never saw him much—some friends you don’t need to see—and the day before she was going to New York to see him after he had told her not to, and he got mad and had his phone disconnected and when he hung up his lung collapsed; he died, and a nephew of his sprang out of nowhere talking fast on a pay telephone, and she went in to the city and she came back two days later—

—don’t remember that—

—well she fretted over him; we do make people into things, and she actually would rather not see that old scamp who never had a decent pair of shoes in his lifetime—

—not even in the West?—

—I bet he wore his moccasins all the way out and all the way back—

—who invented a thing around the turn of the century . . .

—yessirree, it predicted weather according to the exact configuration of coastline but they needed machines they didn’t have then in order to utilize this thing, today it’s called . . .

—a baroclinometer, comes back to Mayn in ‘60 or ‘65 in the presence of Alexander, but he doesn’t know from how far back, not far, did Margaret use such language?, it was ahead of its time, it could predict fronts and pressure zones from the way the coastline was cut and from densities of people and flora correlations between color and rate of C02 discharge—

—sounds like a tall order—

Well, it isn’t the way a modern baroclinometer works—I don’t know where that coastline stuff came from.

Somewhere.

Perhaps. But the words were different when Margaret told it—

So sometimes Jimmy, according to his grandfather, added to what he was told (which is sometimes necessary to make sense, though Alexander opined that a doctor might need to subtract from what he was told as when women working with felt went crazy and to get to the heart of the matter which was mercury you had to discount various answers that seemed likelier) as to the Anasazi’s distinction between night clouds that are young and, near the moon, show colored rings, blue yellow red, etcetera, and night clouds that are old and have less brightly colored haloes because their old gray blood is thinner if it hasn’t in fact become air, for they take their transformations more lightly and with less fuss, Jim pointed out that the Hermit had said the same thing in another way, the color all depended on the pulverized rock out of which the water was made that produced the droplets that the light was bent into shape by, that in turn became the given cloud—and since she had never actually met the Anasazi—

—but the Princess met him one day when she rode alone away from the Navajo Prince and had a bellyache which we call stomach ague-qua and he told her to find some wwpulverized rock and stare at it until it—

—what would she want with rock?

Well, stones.

Oh.

He must have been a very gentle type of healer, the grandmother suggested, as if the boy-man might know what she did not.

You mean because he didn’t tell her to pound the stones into her?

It came back some nights when he told humorously a rather technical-type story to a daughter and a son—and didn’t know who had invented what, or why (no, how) for years he had all but forgotten this stuff especially the "hard" weather of that period apparently ‘45~’46, probably he was in shock from his mother’s suicide though why didn’t he feel so?

His friend Sam came running up to the house and, first greeting Margaret—being more polite than his older brother, the fat one who didn’t look more than flabby but drove like a racing driver and could fist you paralyzing muscle shots deep inside your arm whether you were defending or not—told Jim that Anne-Marie’s brother had probably broken his back and was stuck in the lower level of a tree in the Vandevere backyard where he’d fallen from an upper perch, and Jim jumped up and without thinking said his own mother had just plain left, hadn’t she!—and she’d told him to go away where he belonged and it was amazing what there was in people and what they were able to do, he had just said to Margaret while Sam stood surprised: upon which Margaret, feeling the boys move to go, retorted that there was no connection between his mother and the old talk about weather as given Jim in these stories because the stories started after Jim was born, and Jim, in turn not knowing what was in him, though feeling that some stories had to be started and started and started again and again, said for Sam’s benefit, Was she pregnant? like the night at the ballfield when Sam called to his father, "Out tomcatting around again, Dad?" when his father didn’t do things "like" that and absolutely wouldn’t—but something got across, some possibility?, some true force expressible only against the father?, and his father docked Sam two weeks’ allowance at a crucial period when there were three birthdays including one birthday party—but never "laid" a hand on his son. "What’s that got to do with the weather or the price of eggs?" retorted Margaret, but Jim said, "All that weather stuff is crazy" (taking the four porch steps at one weightless fall) only to hear his beloved grandmother say so clearly she might never have uttered the words except in his own being, "Why the Anasazi medicine man went on with it just to give that lonely Hermit some friendship, who didn’t know how to talk to him standing on that ladder high up against the cliff peering into the dark cell or for that matter sitting in there with him, sucking corn."

What a great friendship! (scornfully tossed over the shoulder running away with Sam to the stranded brother of Anne-Marie whose own neck flowered in the dark to the sounds of their breathing and palms upon cloth and all morning with gentle languorous tension within the steel frame of a borrowed pickup truck unwilling still to forget). The spectacle of the Hermit-Inventor of New York come for a summer sojourn to the West-Southwest calling at once on the narrow ancient of whose shadows in this cell he was the original shadow of watchfulness, smiling with tolerance as the Hermit’s head appeared like a greeting which then took word form: "We were talking about the weather of presence and of absence when I left: now what in your view has that to do with spiral winds?" "Possibly nothing," replied the voice from the grain-scented dark, "yet that would be strange. For presence and absence—the long sky of morning or the thunderhead of late summer afternoon—unite in containing the change that weather always is, and the tiny Pressure Snake that sucks a man’s flesh into that mountain that may someday begin to move eastward once was a creature that worked with the cactus to make spiral winds which in turn can be of use, and that snake could return to that prior shape, for what is prior?, but the mountain moving toward the coasts you study might fill up the sea or make it rise." "Something must be done," said the Hermit; "there must be prayers one can perform." The Anasazi caught his breath, and the Hermit knew someone was outside looking up at the cell in the cliff. It was a white man in a sombrero. "He is studying the Anasazi," the old man whispered. "And have you proved yet that those frozen foam volcanoes back home do not exist?"

Not to the Hermit’s knowledge, but the "snowdevils" he had once doubted had now been seen in the north of New York State, he replied, tracks skimmed off a field of snow by a whirlwind much like the whirlwinds out in these territories but at the base of its vortex stirring cold crystals (while, as a matter of fact, New Jersey and New York are states still seeking to be territories but they may be disappointed).

And for the two days Jim later could not remember his Gramma being away, he reflected coolly on that poor jerk of a hermit being tolerated, politely and humorously, by the Anasazi who would have discussed much else or nothing, but for the Hermit’s endless queries, oratings, floatings upon weather so that some might have found the subject an obstacle that just got in the way of closeness and the boy did not much know what was happening except he was so in love that he must have said to Marie in the moonlit golf course alongside the cemetery that they could wait for sunrise and if it was cold enough see a real sun pillar which the sky used to rest on until it figured out that the pillar dissolved in daytime and the sky would still stand (because it basically knew the pillar was made largely of ice crystals and it knew the shape and size of them). But he knew that she did what she never had done before because it had been in both their minds and had again driven out a strange potential fact he nearly could not think about—but he had been reluctant to ask her though he tried to make her see it in his horny mind, and then afterward she rose up like a tender power in front of him blocking the windshield on the passenger side where he was glad to be, when he was not driving, and then blocking his face, then the windshield:

until an hour later, it seemed, they began to kiss every other second and in the very far right corner of his eye on the cemetery side he found a bright bob of light which he knew was not just him, and turning his cheek to Marie ("Anne-Marie’s") bare sweaterless shoulder he knew the light was approaching from exactly—no, come on, roughly—where his family’s burial place should have been and he remembered not some other things from the last two days but knew and would always remember knowing that it was his grandmother in the cemetery walking toward the town electrician’s borrowed-with-his-actually-illegal-permission pickup truck and Marie read his heart if not the abstruse information behind the skin of his forehead and so much took what he had been offering that he felt at that moment of crying a plume of returning heat root his very spine-hole hilariously in the sky, both ends up (whatever that meant), as the Moon came out from back of some old cloud so he saw the living pattern of four moles on her left shoulder or at least knew they were there and said to his grandmother, "Was she pregnant, is that why?" and felt the rush to weep but gasped Marie’s smells instead and chuckled at their love as the light got closer and he was glad he hadn’t said those words out loud nor pursued the shivery potential of such facts as that Sarah might have wanted Mel to think he was the father-to-be and would then have had to prepare his belief, which in turn gave him a picture of his mother riding a man’s torso in the breakers of the sea and loving it and calling out to the private darkness— but Marie used foam, which he didn’t ask about but saw the tube in her empty Pennsylvania tennis-ball can one afternoon which made her sit on her bed to smile a long time like laughing so if he had asked her she certainly would have explained how it was all done.

But the Moon found another cloud, if not, by some shift, the same one, and the windshield darkened the way a storm will slow a driver down, and his happiness with Marie, who murmured that she had laid an egg as she rose off him and he slid halfway left and toward the gear shift to give her room in this compact bed which reminded him for the future that the bed of the truck was the place—but where, too, that eerie piner kid who seemed so alien and knowing and stole Bob Yard’s property had opened Jim up wide so he didn’t give a damn—and now, later, with Marie, must have brought almost too near the truck the bearer of the light who stopped by a tree across the low wall of stones dividing the golf course from the cemetery, and the flashlight found his grandmother’s face large-eyed with the white hair pale in the night two miles from home doubtless recognizing the truck but he could swear not him and Marie. But then she did not turn away but got on the wall and swung herself around and over and bravely approached Bob Yard’s pickup truck; well, Jim’s mother, drowned amazingly in the so mysterious sea of her troubles so that mystery might attract the cleverness of hearts otherwise hammered to sleep in a corner, had said, Who the devil cared what who felt when and where ten years ago?—O.K., she’d been sick for a year with anemia the doctor sometimes called it, and she didn’t get along with Jim’s father (though never left him) and, though it was not generally known around town (or was it?), her second son was not her husband’s though closer to him now than his own—and she went to a concert or opera in Manhattan once in a blue moon or to an old brick house in a street in Brooklyn called Garden Place where chamber music was played on a late Sunday afternoon Jim heard from his little brother Brad while boys and girls played stickball under the trees outside, interrupted by the tallest boy in the world rollerskating through the game like a man solitary on ice—while also once in a blue moon, though not the same moon, she visited a doctor who was also interested in the music of the last century, and once to Jim’s knowledge asked a singer from Panama to dinner—a very loud-voiced would-be opera singer she reported who did not come and phoned during the excellent, vividly colored dinner Jim’s mother (this time herself) devised, which they began to taste tentatively stopping to listen to what was mostly silence at Sarah’s end of the line in the hall ended by her saying, "Well, damn you" and hanging up to return grinning (as if incredulously) and shaking her head, more intimate with him and his father, if not with Braddie, than ever, it seemed, to say, "Well, we will all take turns singing after dinner and the best man even if he can’t carry a tune might win the extra strawberry rum parfait" (striped in its tall glass)—no failure there, unless the event were committed to memory mistaking memory for the past—

—but all Jim "knew" on the night which was their third or second out here but this time not in the cemetery but on the other side of the wall in the then nine-hole golf course next to it along the fairway pointing toward the ninth green (so he had recognized the sound of a very deep, thick graveled drive his grandmother had crossed all alone) was that his grandmother came close to the cab and before she could say one thing and think another he had said not only Who was she looking for, but something about the West that went away into the night into his memory together with her response which years later when he had his own kids he phoned Anne-Marie in California to ask about one night on a restaurant pier in New York from a pay phone exposed beside the men’s room and his grandmother he always remembered greeted Marie (Anne-Marie) cheerfully, inquired if they had seen any grave robbers, was asked by Marie what she was doing all alone out here, told the two of them in the truck that she had thought it was Bob Yard’s truck but honestly had come out because she had heard a rumor that her grandson came to the cemetery with his girlfriend and she wanted to see if it was true—that was "all"—and could "they" give her a lift home?—and of course (?) Bob Yard knew Jimmy was using his pickup truck? (no mention of the license he did not possess)—Yes, Gramma—

—wondering, with the two females in the right-side seat conversing about the night air and the Moon and the clouds, if Margaret smelt or felt the juice of their whole love in this cab, until with a shock that made him take his right hand off the wheel out of the night or no place, Sam’s brother’s legal Ford jalopy (in those days before inspection) came screaming across the intersection of Throckmorton and Brinkerhoff on an arc that aspired to be a ninety-degree corner and whose abandoned wake was a wheeling, faintly glittering hub cap sprung loose by the laughing, crowded car—

Why Bob Yard had been Jim’s own mother’s (he wondered if open) secret—he did not quite know the word "lover" (that is, to use) and he did not say or think "fuck" though in the next week he could use it in thinking about his girl though never in speech to his friend Sam—and only in the past few months had Jim known him to be the father of his own brother, which had made Bob, in turn, to Jim the lender of transportation in which Margaret might feel Jim would kill himself and Jim might feel he would power his way through the dilemma of whether to kill Bob or not (what a laugh!) (for what if Bob knew where Jim’s mother "was"?) and in which Margaret, his real grandmother and the mother of his own unfaithful mother, was riding home at this moment before he dropped her at her front walk which had been his front walk now turned into intimate, guilty mere nostalgia by going all the way with Marie, but only for the moment while Margaret strode away straight-backed toward the porch light blistering the ivy at one-thirty in the morning when, whatever she thought about the truck’s owner, she was exhausted (and said so, and mentioned that she had had two hard days in the city—where was her husband?), and had, incidentally, not told Jim and Marie they shouldn’t be out there. So the way she fit right into their sex life took him away from the circumstance of her two-day sojourn in New York, he almost persuaded Marie to let him spend the rest of that night in her bedroom with her entire family at home (but her father still up) which would have lost whatever had been given or gained this night—after which that strong girl remarked that she guessed they were not going to see the sunrise sun pillars he had mentioned which he then told her was "just" something his gramma had told him, while he wondered if his mother had made love with Mel so he would think if need be that he was Brad’s father—

—but years later Marie when he phoned her ("up") in California told him Margaret had seemed polite and alone, saying they had "picked a good night" and when she got out at her house (and granddad standing silhouetted at the window, the light haloing his bald head) telling Jim the weather was a perfectly good subject for friendship and in any case to discuss even if you were with people you cared about:

: but when Jim’s daughter had asked if "it was in the atmosphere or in people" and elicited from Jim "Holy hell what there is in people!"—his own lost words on an afternoon when falling within a large tree Marie’s brother had only bruised his lower back (where skin would never after grow) but not fractured a bone—restored for what it was worth to him now at his advanced age the Anasazi’s prophecy (readforecast!) that a young person would someday find ("found") a new reincarnation, and with it restored not only his addiction to fact but the fact of this curious sequence detached within that time when the War was ending as if there could never be another one, we would be too busy, and the boys, Jim, Sam, others, were realizing they were but two years away from landing craft and Basic Training sergeants’ yells and the grand threat of all that enormity of specifics and its promise to remove this town for a time from their lives, and maybe months from getting into maybe the Marines (Boot Camp) who grabbed up, well, sixteen-year-olds if you kept it quiet and looked hairy and tough, and Sam et al. told and retold the story of the fourteen-year-old Eskimo who (against the anger of his people whose economy needed the exact amount of hunting he could provide) went and volunteered, got sent to the Pacific Theater, and won a citation and then a name that got him sent home too young to fight anymore which was a unique retirement and wound up hustling older men in San Francisco’s famed Bay Area, until Sam’s fat elder brother who could punch you so it went inside the bone said to shut up because that was a sad story . . .

When Jim Mayn in the sixties, who knew himself pretty well (knew but wouldn’t risk his well-after-all-dubious luck by saying out loud) and had learned somewhere at the start that when he needed to know things in his memory they would probably be there so don’t sweat it anymore’n you sweat intellect and being Walter Lippmann and history meanwhile even if history provokes us to recall in order to disguise its own possible if perhaps only future non-existence, told his children and his colleague Ted or the colleague-woman Mayga anything at all, he felt that he was remembering what he needed, so long as no one zeroed in and like the scamp Spence, point-blanked their way into ancient conversation demanding—imagine demanding!—to know which day it was that Granddad Alexander and he discussed Margaret’s hermit while they hardly noticed Amyabel Larsen with the large but delicate and slightly moving breasts and Leonardo Hugo the oculist with a hundred neckties go opposite ways at the start of the porch conversation and, with rain threatening in Alexander’s pore roots later, return together (hey!) for the first time as if two directions had been added together to make one new whatsis—dream, maybe, to judge from the immobile pose of trance each seemed obviously to hang their clothes on out there on the sidewalk—only then to continue as a couple and not into Amyabel’s but into Leonardo’s almost identical house (where maybe his mother had died that very afternoon, sounded the joke or joker somewhere well above the ground Jim knew his grandparents’ porch was built on).

But what was the importance of this Hermit-Inventor? asks an interrogating voice that once might have been Jim’s own if he had not refrained from those blunt inquiries close to home that are the mark of the family historian or the truth-chewer who has either lived through and just to the edge of the pain or is crazy amidst it and shouts to those who are supposed to know more than he or she, whereas Jim declined to go crazy and instead got on with a life, left Windrow, assembled facts every day, was unaware till i960 that near War’s end American bomber squadrons nosing into Jap air space were meeting (and irritably meeting if there be such a thing as technological irritation) "jet stream" headwinds often equal to the planes’ maxi-speeds—but he did not leave the messages he carried with him which he imagined he was happy with as is—and was collected really as he had always pretty well seemed even to his wife and to new friends slightly more than old friends so that, more plural than, say, one single account of what had transpired, these statements or messages stood as snapshots of the past into the (thank God) grownup present: for example, "My mother in ‘45 absented herself from my life by rowing into the Jersey sea without a permanent boat"; "Holy hell what there is in people"; "We’re ordinary people"; "Was who pregnant where when and by whooom when they made their egg-zit?"; "You don’t talk long hours for thirty years even just about the weather without having some friendship or other"; or "All of the above."

What was the importance of the Hermit-Inventor? Was it that his friend Margaret, Jim’s mother’s mother-to-be, had failed to persuade a heavy-drinking but collateral and intelligent promoter who’d once studied wind with the one and only Eiffel, to feature at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 a balloon ascent seeking to demonstrate high-speed westerlies at high altitudes hinted by a track of recent cirrus clouds insanely swift?

No, his importance was elsewhere among the timeless isobars of his increasing labyrinth of coasts within coasts within coasts of constant pressure which because they tell us pressure tell us where air will move, thus discovering to us the vertical distribution of air—

No—the Hermit-Inventor got you out of there.

The horse helped.

The Mexican blue mare. No, that’s the Prince’s. Do the Navajos have princes?

It was a horse as far as Zuni, to the south; and then I got a stage, and then I got a horse (that’s what one of those kids yelled at us the other night at the intersection when they nearly hit us: "get a horse").

I didn’t feel I was in their car with them at all.

Why would you, Jimmy?

That was the day grandson and grandmother had things out, almost. Not why was she in the cemetery at that hour when she had just gotten home from New York: but

Why, why had he spoken to her as he did the day Marie’s brother got stuck in the tree?

Stuck! (sticking up for his generation, even though he didn’t like his girl’s brother, against the older generation even its most beloved representative)

—and Sammy came to get him (she went on), and he really was most rude to her (she insisted).

"Well what did I say—cripes sake."

"You know what you said," retorted Margaret, "and in front of Sam."

"What was it?" (though he more or less knew).

" ‘What a great friendship!’ you said" (oh, she was emphasizing that remark), "as if those two surprising men didn’t care about each other."

"But you were the one—you said the Anasazi put up with a hundred years of talk about the weather from that zany Hermit (when the Anasazi was more the hermit) to humor him, that’s what you said" (knowing, as he spoke, that she had in her mind harder blows or queries that had glanced hither and yon).

"Not one hundred, for heaven sake" (she started to—oh God, she’s crying).

"Well, thirty, then!" (knowing that other words of his he didn’t care to recall were in their heads blocking and breathing). "I mean, you don’t have to talk to me about the weather, Gramma—"

"Oh" (she laughed and cried, like laughing tears but instead musical as a feeling may be word-free) "oh you’re the Hermit and I’m the Anasazi six hundred years old!"

"No," he said, thoughtfully, though to himself granting her truth, "you re my mother"—which threw them both down into silence.

"She is neither here nor there," Margaret stupidly quipped, and the boy-man drifted off toward the future where he’d been told he belonged.

"She wasn’t in the cemetery last time I looked," he always remembered saying, badly, while some opposite barred him, with its words, from taking the following step.

"Why would you look?" asked Margaret as clearly as if she forgot his words about his mother from the other day still delayed; he answered himself, not his grandmother: "How could Sarah do a thing like that?" he said his mother’s name.

"We don’t know," said Margaret.

"Holy hell," said the boy-man quietly quoting his father.

"It was in her to do."

"Holy hell what there is in people."

"We’re ordinary people," said his grandmother.

"Well, it isn’t in her now," said Jim and remembered at once, as if the thing he said covered so much it might cover it up if taken seriously.

It was all held somewhere, a load of what we’re capable of, some plural "we we we we" voicing now and then its slide into action. He couldn’t believe this vague thought but it was in him, the sense that somewhere he was in it, a dump, a general dump of what you’re all capable of, a messy cemetery messy because most of the folk weren’t always dead—oh shit.

"You thought I said some terrible thing, didn’t you?" he persisted, and in later years knew only that she had gently backed off.

"She had such life in her but she couldn’t give it up much," said Margaret. "Sometimes I thought it was my doing, but how could it be?"

"What did she say? I can’t remember."

"She said Chopin was great but as for Schumann, his inspiration seems to come between two sobs. I remember her saying that, because I laughed and she said it sounded better in the French where she’d read it."

He didn’t understand couldn’t give it up much and so couldn’t get it out of his head. One thing: he would get away and hear more than these few special emptinesses. His grandmother put her hand on his shoulder. Two facts: his grandmother had a husband; and she had lost a daughter. (If you ever had a person to lose.)

"Your mother had wonderfully bad manners when she chose."

He wanted to say, Stop.

"The day she met your father at his friend’s wedding she told him he came from one of the dull branches of the family remote enough, though, so that she could marry him without producing Mongols, and she told him, ‘If only you could keep up that dashing appearance you had on the running board leaving the church to come to the reception!’ I was standing at the punch table when she said it and he dropped his hat onto the floor, I don’t recall what it was doing in the room."

Wait a sec, there was a connection—

A connection?

—between spiral winds and present and absent weathers.

Oh!—some strained surprise between grandmotherly wonder, laughter, irritation. "Between" what and what? his father Mel in the newspaper office said to someone, anyone, himself, an orderly thinker who was fond (if "fond" could ever state the difficulty with which he paced himself through life) of saying, to someone who had spoken confusingly or with just too many words, "Say that again."

O.K. he answered her: one morning he had come out of the now motherless house and stopped at the end of the walk and found the wind, which he liked, pressing him but on the right side of his back, not his left, aiming right into the wing of his right shoulder yet practically non-existent on his left side; and he turned with the wind, not toward downtown and school beyond downtown, but turned leftward (in the direction of the intersection at the other end of town where the highway ran one way toward Trenton alongside the race track and the other way toward the shore), only suddenly to see Margaret up the street more vivid than distance should have allowed, on her porch just waving to him: the wind had turned him but it wasn’t spiral, you know—it was only strong and a bit curved, the way winds of the Earth will be, but he felt a bit spun, and he believed in mere coincidence so he didn’t think the wind came from his grandmother (anyway it was sort of blowing toward her, "leading" like a forward pass)—but the thing was, you could think what you wanted, and Braddie was known to get so angry when the winter wind was ramming him that he had a fit almost and once went back inside the house and was late for school, instead of running quick downtown like the three hundred jackrabbits Margaret saw all together several jumps ahead of a Kansas dust storm, but the thing was you could think it was hands on your back pushing you, or one hand there and the other not there or not much there— present, absent—but, true or not, you could learn from nature, and so you had to let it do what it did—

(Oh my yes, his grandmother murmured; life is right.)

—and the hands, right hand pushing, left hand not pushing, or for somebody in another town maybe the other way around, could be just your mistake, your imagination, some other hands of yours inside you pushing out: not that you had to believe that, but if you get turned by the wind and the wind doesn’t have real hands so the hands are inside you or something, you can keep on turning ‘cause you’re started and the wind you sort of give in to is inside you maybe as a spiral—even if, outside, it isn’t—

Oh he wanted to have it both ways! his grandmother laughed.

And probably when winds meet, they not only join each other and flow together, but they might spin each other or they might—

"Why, this is our Anasazi medicine man talking all over again, Jim, don’t you remember?"

"But, Gramma, it was the Hermit who talked about the frontier where the breath of the reptile met the breath of the food needles the cactus was tossing out."

"But the inside wind being part of the outside wind, twining spiral and all that, if you recall, that’s our old Anasazi, who by the way had one big lung instead of our two; an earlier lung."

"But he said the spirals got set off in the four corners or something inside us, the four corners facing outward from one another."

"Well, maybe you’ve started a new weather on your own."

But Jim didn’t know.

She said, "Not upcoming or downgoing, but ongoing."

He shrugged slightly and thought of getting away, remembering guiltily how he had needed her. O.K. Gramma, O.K. maybe I’m the Anasazi. He beat reincarnation, and I don’t believe in reincarnation.

Exactly my sentiments.

Right after his mother’s suicide he had to hate his grandmother. How else could he have worked toward this spring victory? He was sort of riding out of town swung toward the future as his mother had once quirkily decreed for him. He would rather be the Anasazi, he told his own daughter years of bedtimes later—because the Anasazi managed for himself a post-mortem cruise in the form of a cloud in order to check if there were foam volcanoes in the eastern states. (And Jim was able some nights to tell his beloved daughter after his equally beloved son had risen above them by formula to the ceiling of the room in sleep, things he knew there was no danger of her believing, and in any case she was more interested in the pistol, what happened to the pistol the Navajo Prince had on him when he pursued the Princess (than in how it had come into the Anasazi’s hands), and interested in what ground-up horse bones etcetera were used for internally—the father didn’t tell her.)

"You can be both Anasazi and Hermit," Margaret told him; for he had gotten up and was going, and all that had been said, like some power that would be there if it were not here, had left unsaid what had upset Margaret to call him rude, rude!, as if to have the power you had to take it from somebody else the way the mestizo spy who had wanted to unload the (later) Mayn family pistol nonetheless used it as a mid-journey deterrent somewhere in the Sonora desert between the Mexican War and the Gold Rush when an unknown but someday-to-be-legendary Alsatian mathematician threatened to withhold specie from his pocket together with a large folded sheet of foolscap evidently valuable, upon which when the mestizo took it from the footsore foreigner he found a numbered design with curved lines radiating outward of varying length dotted or broken, yet with identical maths and figures that all came down one way or another to the number 5—11.125 (she recalled) minus either 3.125 and 3 (successively) or 6.125 equaling, along all these lines of varying length, the number 5 she thought—but here in early 1946, Take the power, Jim, from who? But he knew, he knew—he did, he did—a clamor dividing in him and dividing (when some song his Gramma sang said, "I have nothing to divide"); and he delegated the knowledge, just as he kept a new irritating presence to himself in politely asking, "Did that really happen, with the mountain lion becoming a wolf and the great bird flying away?"

"I had left by then," said Margaret, her hands in her lap.

"Had the Princess?"

"I can’t quite tell," his grandmother said and laughed with a slight wit of unease—she was witty, snooty, democratic; tall, loving, crazy punster, very smart; self-depreciating re: her family having settled the town even before Washington hospitalized his wounded in a church out by the railroad tracks, and she also until after she got sick "went" to the bathroom with magical speed, he could never see how she could do it that fast, so the water was flushing almost as the door was being locked. "Yes," said Margaret; "she, too."

"Did you love the Navajo Prince?" he remembered asking, with Anne-Marie on his mind, in his body.

"Yes I did. A prince only to the princess. They wouldn’t use such words. They use ‘princess’ among the Seattle Indians, I seem to recall."

"Did my mother know?" came the question more indelible than any answer to it.

"Very little. She felt I talked too much and was a busybody at the Historical Association and raising money for those poor old Split Wood Del-awares in upper New York State, and the Indian women in Pennsylvania with their family problems and good sense."

"What did you and the Prince talk about?" (while "Why don’t I ask you things?" his own weirdly memorable words, unvoiced, probed outward like a worm whose blindness was the unlikely staying power in his recollection of what he did not understand, such as Why "Split Wood"?).

"Not the weather. Difference between us, their whole extra family of aunts and cousins, for example; everyone moderately in touch with everyone else; using each other. Only one stargazer, and I let him know the pictures I saw at night, the constellations, when we sometimes lay full-length on our horses—but he tolerated me only as a nice visitor, which I was."

"What language did you speak."

"My own, though I learned some of his in secret so I could say in their tongue to myself what they said to me in English—like ‘Walk in beauty,’ which was quite a thing for them to say of me."

"You are beautiful, Gramma."

"They meant all living—living with the land and its animals and plants, as the land lived with the air and the heavens. They dry-farmed in the plateau and they did irrigated farming in the canyon. Peaches and grapes in the canyon when they were lucky."

But the mestizo spy?

He gave the piece of stolen foolscap to the Anasazi with the pistol and was later turned inside out by two Thunder Dreamers and left to dry on a saguaro cactus.

But years later when Jim Mayn’s daughter’s words had evoked "Holy hell what there is in people" and she had fallen asleep where she was in her quilted bunk—not like her little brother afloat near a ceiling lamp fixture snoring more subtly than a grandfather’s nasal short-circuit potent as the memory of it—he made his wife quietly mad by calling Anne-Marie Vandevere in California who, after sixteen average years of silence, informed him at once that that time in the cemetery-golf-course "complex" (she’d been funny sixteen years ago, too) his grandmother had been in New York for two days because an old friend had died and his apartment had been taken over at once by-

—oh was it that time!

—a nephew who looked just like him and understood all the charts on the chipped plaster walls and had brought his own and wouldn’t discuss things with Jim’s grandmother, he told her he wouldn’t want to risk giving her the wrong scoop and said little if anything and she came back to hear that Jim had had as Jim must remember a horrible fight with that three-quarter breed Creek-Sakonnet Indian Ira Lee (your rival on the football team) in Grandma’s flower bed, didn’t he recall? because the day after Anne-Marie’s brother was detached with Jim’s powerful help from the tree in which he had fallen, Ira, the half-Creek left halfback, had called to Jim, who was on the screen porch, that he understood Jim’s grandmother had gone off to New York to see her boyfriend.

But what had gotten into Jim in advance across the backyard’s spongy turf of late winter asking what Ira had said, what had he said—and before Alexander could hurl unmagical words through the screen of the porch past the grand-girthed maple’s trunk to a point fifty feet beyond it, Jim had raked Ira’s dark cheek red and they were rolling on the earth and Ira had stuffed some of it down Jim’s mouth so that all Alexander heard was Jim’s original repetition "What about my grandmother’s boyfriend?"—but "You broke that Indian’s ear, you know," Anne-Marie refreshed him and behind her Jim heard a man’s voice and a child’s as if entering her house out of nowhere, "split the cartilage right back"—and heard himself strangling Ira who didn’t have to rely on Jim’s bein’ a Christian to save "his neck" for he got so mad at being called "Isty Semole" that he kneed Jim sideways in the balls so it felt like fifty balls or more like only one.

But when Jim hung up and his wife Joy narrowed her eyes half-sleepy, half-upset-about-nothing sitting back in a warmly lighted low, soft easy chair in the cushiony light of a reading lamp, and he laughed and shrugged off her reaction which was based on no prior information about Anne-Marie, not even high-school sweetheart, he needed to call Alexander but he was actually by now dead—but recalled then his dumb challenge to Margaret in front of Sam: Was she pregnant?—more a challenge to himself, but to do what?—to simultaneously pass it over to Margaret who’d about given up the long trek or its tale by the spring of ‘46 but came back with New York and Windrow on her mind—did a woman kill herself because she was pregnant? ("Sure, sure!" comes a breezy, angry, warm voice, "if you’re gonna do it, you’ll find any handy excuse, honey," a voice of later years compounded of friends, orators, scenes seen with objective intimacy displacing the worded facts of his job); would a woman in ‘46 so avoid an abortion as to double the deed? ("That’s abstract bullshit, baby, ‘double the deed’ my ass, if she’s that high on being low, sure she’ll do it, sure she will, she’s got other problems inside her besides a gray pink white work that’s still like coming from nowhere"); but what if she wasnt pregnant? we don’t know, you know—and once more, What if she really and truly was?

Holy hell, what is in people?

Margaret hadn’t mentioned the fight with Ira when she got into the pickup truck, but a day or two or three later she half-unmeaningly got into Jim what she had perhaps thought to get out of him, that Ira’s mother’s uncle (a supposed full-blooded Creek with a lonely background all the more curious) had known of the old scamp, windbag, and geezer in New York from the turn of the century and before and he it was, an "Isty Semole," who had identified Margaret’s deceased ally as her "boyfriend," more devoted than boyfriend, more friend than I still can quite be sure (her face pallid and afraid—afraid!).

But Jim did not tell Margaret that Ira, black crewcut bristling with brain and some bad day of his own, had already mentioned this about his Uncle Willy informally prior to going underground as if seeking some derelict winter bulbs with nose and teeth and had suffered a split lip in addition to a broken-ear and slit-cheek ceremony in a face which for the moment (except for the black eyes) was much like Jim’s own earth-colored face, that would ever afterward respect Ira and refrain from . . . well, it wasn’t him but Uncle Willy, drinking gallon jars of ice water all day on his rickety porch, who’d been tagged an "Isty Semole" ("wild men" hunters who didn’t "agricult" and were regarded as runaways from the Creeks), hence Seminoles, which Willy and Ira declared they were not and would never become.

And when the rain came powering down into the backyard like a simoom bringing its torrential horizon in with it, Margaret blamed the boys for not leaving the flower bed as they’d found it after their fight. The irrigation souped and dissolved and ponded the flower beds so that giant dogs could be seen to have rooted deep—

—for what, Gramma?

Oh I don’t know (she was upset)—dogbane roots, ground horse bones.

For what?

The leaves of yarrow, Indian women made a special tea out of it.

What was special about it?

Oh you’re the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor of New York all rolled up into one: you tell me.

So he thought he should know if he could find, inside this-at-least-double "him," the information—maybe future predictions! he thought, and got faintly depressed—that is, faintly only in his knowing—that is, what was going on in him.

Holy hell what had been in his mother. Well, he had once been. And his little bastard brother Brad had been, although the town’s normality caused this to seem ever incredible. He didn’t probably resent Brad’s having been in his mother, because it made Braddie her son O.K., although in later years an earth-colored brown old uncircumcised prick came soaring into his mind— what did that old nose look like hard?—and it was a later understanding or it was his real rage and interest seeing Bob Yard, a year and a day after Jim’s mother’s suicide, strip himself at Lake Rompanemus at midnight and Jim, who was not especially watchful strip with him for a comradely swim after bowling at the Best People on Earth alley and drinking two bottles of beer each, there, and one more apiece in the pickup truck going out of town with Bob of course as present owner doing the driving—and telling Jim how he wouldn’t know what to do without his wife.

Jim worked it out and then forgot till one time he told his daughter that the Anasazi—

—and we all know that that’s you, Daddy—

—had said that a young person would someday find a new form of reincarnation.

That lets you out, Daddy.

Lucky for me because that young person was supposed to be doomed, as I recall: but I’m not the Anasazi; I couldn’t be, because neither of us reincarnates.

But he recalled on the day of the ludicrous U-2 briefing that, yes, he had been inspired (how didn’t matter) to figure out how the Anasazi at his moment of mortal dispersal could become (at will) a distinct cloud and it had happened during Pearly Myles’s Journalism Circle. (This was a real advanced elective in a Jersey high school in ‘46, though she soon got herself removed from the school by Principal Fulkerand ostensibly for objecting to the course’s removal as an non-essential course.) He is sick of his grandmother this afternoon, sitting in class, though exactly why he doesn’t know: it is in him and can’t get out, his back and arms are going ahead on their own, he sees it all making decisions to go ahead, to raise a little finger to go out of sight and dig in an ear and he is inclined to see, in the midst of a circle with pointers of varying length drawn on a blackboard at the start of the hour by an oddly tearful Miss Myles, geometries and quick and sundry switches of rain rivers falling at the longest possible earthward angles (years later conceived as minimum condensation altitude; years later, when his new though routine weather interest came out of the U-2 fiasco so he thought) so the rain was over one territory but irrigating another, or the fires from the Hermit’s theoretical lightning sprang far and wide from their sky source yet, since shared, ran back to the territory over which those neon-shorted swastika javelins were bent across the sliding sky, and the problem of how to settle what’s shared and what not, like causing someone else’s death-by-forest-fire through weathers caused by poisoned and unnaturally heated breath departures from adjacent people who in the end might not care what they did to their neighbors. And, with these shifts and smoky cloakings and uncloakings, he saw the indescribable non-reincarnal recomposing of the six-hundred-and-(now)-one-year-oldster for a moment gray or faint gold or (sickly?) greenish, then visible no more and found himself with only words to describe, yes, how the Anasazi retired medicine man "did it"(!): one thing was sure, the Anasazi knew cloud formation; he had been seer, shepherd, farmer, hermit, husband, father, and all these things doubled by vicarious interview with others possessed of these problems; the elder had had much experience and had long ago forgotten quite how to worry about it: the Anasazi had known that his body was but a flaky weightless compost so crumbly the air in his cell might decide his end for him except the breath inside him was still just as human as when his body was in better shape: so that on the day when he decided to come to an end, he saw what he had known always but not bothered to tell, that his breath was what kept him in his familiar shape, it was his flesh and his blood-essence and he had always wanted to see his friend’s East before he died, so that, having given a real medical consultation the day before for the first time in generations and feeling therefore pleased with himself to be of use to the eloquent visiting Princess born in a place called Choor where they made many statues and confused them through making them in parts, who might be on the point of betrothing herself to the Navajo Prince who had already given himself in love to her, the Anasazi thought he would not leave the decision of his death only to the harmonies without, and, in an act that was its own thought he slowly breathed all his breath out from within its veil, and as he saw leaving at that moment every thought, he listened for the crumblings of his body which to him waxed noisy as a mountain coming to life so that, emptying, he saw that through the volcanic air he had lived on for centuries in this area his flesh was part volcanic—and, hearing these sounds, he inhaled for the last time his own and other mingled breath so that though Margaret (whose voice he heard calling, "Jim, Jim") had claimed that the brain flakes had settled onto the floor as a last cover for the most recent weather map in colored sands, Jim knew that every flake and feather of that old body had been breathed back in at just the moment when it was turning to its atoms and motes—so that it could have disappeared into its own last gasp filling the still quite moist lung at the moment that said lung dissolved in a manner that so pressed upon its crumbling contents (a man breathing his whole person in) that a bubble (shaped from that smile that was the anchor for the final words already kited out to the Hermit and others in the area if they would but hear) rose forward like a message and, narrowly making the cell door, sucked after it the wild-flower-colored sands of the healer’s last weather map like a wake too valued to be left like other wakes behind, no matter how wonderful the world in which it happened, no matter if, there, a bird became a wind or a drowning human found enough oxygen in the sea to make the transition to a new form possible: while some voice of the future in the boy-man said realistically that we were gonna run out of reservoirs before we ran out of mines to ruin ‘em.

But that was work for others, for brains that cared, and for science— even if, being called on by Pearl Myles’s full-throated plum-hoarse feet-on-the-ground-of-the-classroom voice, he left that explanation of the Anasazi’s cloud formation to others to play with yet felt he ought to gasp his own way to the surface even if what was going on was nothing more than itself, his mother gone, his brotherhood with Brad exposed as something you couldn’t just say simply and briefly and his grandmother now this very week subtly bereaved by the oddball in New York who had once upon a time helped her come back from the West—instead of staying(!) (were she really the East Far Eastern Princess nee of Choor): but was his laziness in the way of something else? for if he lazily let his mind roam into how the Anasazi became a night cloud not to be confused with a reincarnation, didn’t this "how" amount to something too? (perhaps a "what"?)—even if at this moment Pearl Myles, who was losing her job, had called on him for doubtless some What-Where-How answer—mayhap Where he was, or sarcastically How (he was) or (what was left?) When, Who, What—was it like at a boring moment in math envisioning so sexually Anne-Marie’s elbow spectral above him in the pickup truck and dark cemetery that he forgot she was sitting next to him in the classroom taking good notes?—though when he came out of his daydream-of-night she was not taking notes but fluttering her eyelids toward some dark windowed place secretly beyond the nerve-racked man in shirt sleeves erasing one sandwiched unknown with a long finger instead of using the edge of the eraser (which was at rest along the ledge of the blackboard for use as a projectile at certain moments of release in the course of the month), so Jim remembered with a quickened smile like a jolt that having visited her wordless vagina to find how well all came true with her, he had next morning woken in the trough of his own bed’s mattress and lazily considered jerking off but, absent as she was, she felt inside him—oh, some long rest given him that was awake and asleep with him, a power certainly his that took its humor into where he didn’t need to be in a couple places at once; and so far, if he couldn’t when he tried put it into words to Sam who knew so well how to listen without being ‘fraid to snicker here and there, he had found some place that could stay easy and untended in him, in the knowledge that it was there to be let out or touched off endlessly at need, though he wasn’t going to talk this bullshit, except to Sam, not even when he told Anne-Marie (in her permanent clarity audible even then through a phone line thousands of miles and many years away) that he loved her: because a voice he knew (but because of it itself did not tell himself) had materialized for good into the very rest that Anne-Marie’s presence in him could not equal but seemed to have discovered already there, and it said stuff like what he much later learned the code of (which was like an energy of) If this rest or place which is neither real rest nor a place of rest is, according to you, to be touched off endlessly at need (which is by the way not your way of saying things) then quiere decir (does it mean) an endless need or a being touched off endlessly? A plural voice. Not at all "voices," though a man he once had a brief pushing fight with in Briggs Stadium at a Tigers-Yankees game who later told him the story of burning his own house down with seven years’ work in it told him "voices" of that schizophrenic species while they drove him nuts (which he already was) gave him this friendly sense of his mind being endlessly settled by colonists who changed their career goals and departed, then moved back vociferously: but for Jim as boy-man and later man-boy, a plural voice he felt wasn’t only his (and wasn’t always within his own earshot), though he felt he would never care (enough) to decide if he was in it or it got into him; though one would gladly have held him responsible for not being open about it if the game had been worth the candle and the interrogation of the dangerous hadn’t sometimes dispensed with the exposure of such clandestine operations as ‘‘least said, soonest mended," though who "one" is in those preceding formulae may yet be settled by "we."

Yet responsible he knew he was for something or other: and if it wasn’t his mother’s disappearance into the sea, it also wasn’t in later years a cyclone in Sri Lanka apparently "triggered," as NASA said, by monsoons whose flow got diverted there by running into the Sumatra highlands, for he recalled the shared versus territorial weathers from yakking to his children and not from the fact that the winter monsoon (unlike its summer sister that makes or breaks India’s agriculture annually like a natural mistake that corrects itself only sometimes) may precipitate twenty inches of rain in Singapore but next to no rain anyplace else, having originated far away in Russia/China sweeping up en route extra heat and moisture from the South China Sea.

Responsible for what, then? The Rest that could get touched off or not and lay untended in him that Anne-Marie’s bare shoulders erect between him and the windshield or her fine-bared tits, clear-tuned tits (that they were, God! discovering together!) and covered shoulders or, one Thursday night (never forget which night of that energy-rich week it was, call it miscellaneous information, call it what you will or we), at the extreme race-track frontier of the (again) cemetery, her whole, God!, person curved open to him on a quilt under a dim midnight sky when he sat back on his bare heels, his hands spread behind him, and waited for the longest time gathering her into his heart until she smiled a little differently and made a light blind-like pass in the air covering with its current his cock that had been dreaming its very own angle for a week of minutes there between them on what seemed also a Saturday night when they waited for the first time as if she were in him and he in her.

But he never thought what it was like to be her, or not then, and wouldn’t have known if he had thought, and he thought dimly only that you didn’t imagine yourself as a girl though he wondered if the little nibbles he felt in her were her doing or were doing themselves to her or were just a doing: yet he felt she knew him, and one day long long after—and it was a whole day —he found he had knowingly held, amid all that Rest that she could certainly not alone give him, a sinking feeling that she could not marry him nor he go so far as to ask her, and she knew it truly and he knew it carelessly in one of the voids in him between the Hermit-Inventor and the Anasazi, or between Margaret and Alexander, or between his ineptly painfully widowed father Mel (with his professionally compacted obit for his wife) and the brother Brad whom Mel loved very much (and even for his fair piano playing) and who stayed in Windrow—period—and who got angry enough as a child at the buffets of the winter northwesterly some January school mornings to go and find a bag to catch that son-of-a-bitching wind once and for all even if he had to first find the whole cloth with which to make it and before that settle the future questions of whether or not to use synthetic fiber, whether to boycott slave cotton, or get his older brother to help when (if, granted, he hadn’t lifted a finger when Braddie was learning to ride his new Schwinn bicycle) Jim had already given him a hand on scenery for a high school play though suddenly they had to wait while, to Alexander and Margaret’s delight, Principal Ful-kerand refused to "sit on" Miss Larsen no matter how original she was and defended her against Mr. Victor, the math teacher, who objected to the intromission of a thunderstorm just before and just after Act V Scene i as a mad misconstruing of the atmosphere (and Jim’s grandparents agreed) at that point of the play that would only overshadow the "golden couplets" left us by Shakespeare’s endless patience, to which Fulkerand protectively retorted he had no idea what Mr. Victor (who often said n’est-ce pas to his class) meant, but he did not have to read the play in question in order to know where his loyalty stood, whilst the director herself retorted that the play was not written in "couplets." But Jim had in his possession a larger copy he had drawn of a drawing Margaret had made him from memory, an anvil-topped Navajo thunderstorm, and he let Braddie see it in his room but not hold it and when Miss Larsen came to him in the cafeteria and asked to see it, he amazed her by replying he would rather keep it to himself though she told Alexander she did understand and Alexander who from time to time told Jim what he might profit from reading, sent her a token wedding present the next summer of an ancient copy of Hamlet—ancient?, bound in leopard skin—as old as the Greeks and the Romans combined, though when was Shakespeare?—and then she did not get married after all. All of which could seem to fit between Mel and Brad—or between the Hermit and the Anasazi (to stay close to home) the former now suddenly dead in New York in the spring of ‘46, the man who helped Margaret get back from the West having spurred her to go, until the new thought hit Jim and vanished within him, a pollution of gossip not to be contemplated much less peddled and he was happy to joke with Margaret about being himself the Hermit somewhere in himself whom she gave some things to think about at a rough time and whom she inspired to a new weather (well, that’s putting it strongly if freshly) to get in the way even of the old which seemed in turn at times in the way of the new, which made him also (to humor her) the Anasazi medicine man (perhaps in their shared mortality), who "saw" the Princess professionally while Jim, sinking the thoughts slowly into this Rest he had grown within him, gave up, one night alone in his bed as he heard his father breathe and dream, trying to reckon how he could with scary certainty know (we already remember) exactly how the Anasazi pulled off his own death, when this Anasazi who (in Margaret’s fantasy, joke, affection, and fact) he was supposed to be had not been reincarnated, whatever one made of the late Hermit’s replacement the nephew now in residence in that weathered lab or railroad flat where death would have been enough maybe to upset Margaret but Jim still couldn’t see what she was doing coming out to the cemetery at night unless Alexander’s news of the fight in the flower bed coupled with Jim’s irresponsible rudeness re: Sarah’s possible pregnancy had drawn Margaret graveward or to Jim’s known recent haunts at the risk of interrupting him and Anne-Marie in the middle of a kiss. But the Anasazi was a healer and that was why the Princess had gone to him and while Jim could never be a doctor (with all that Chem) any more than go into the family newspaper which was soon folding anyhow, or any newspaper—healing was satisfying if you knew the other person real well. Understanding other people—well sometimes you did or you didn’t! Found a person years later you knew you knew already—forget the past life bunk—Mayga, the Chilean journalist; Ted, his old friend in whose very hands Mayn could sometimes feel a glass or the air moving when Ted got exercised; his own father, pyjama’d and tossed by his stormy bed to make his very bones sick of his failure as a husband; and more which Jim did not identify except to see he could be someone in the future who wasn’t him—well, what was that? and especially if you were somebody else who’s living at the same time—let it sink into the hopper, the tank, the reservoir, the sunken destroyer he had read about off the Jersey coast and imagined airtight that wasn’t where it should have been when they dived for it.

He went down the green street to his grandmother’s house one early June evening and she was not where he expected to find her, reading the Trenton Times or Newark Star-Ledger or poetry on the front porch waiting for the American ice-cream man with his wagon and his horse; Jim pushed in the front door, the figures of the brass handle firm-printed against his hand and the slight sticking of the wood against the jamb, and did not find his grandfather in the radio room smoking a cigar; he passed beyond the Oriental (which his grandmother said wasn’t really Oriental) rug’d mahogany dining room, the corner window thick with leaves, and found only the odor of chicken in the kitchen, the glistening skin traced in the surface of the pan-gravy on the stove, and a mouth-watering rhubarb smell containing like the gas refrigerator he almost pulled open gobs of dark-specked vanilla ice cream but went to the porch where the top deck of the old wooden icebox was open, and through the silk evening of the screen he saw his grandparents inaudibly talking off by the flower bed where he and Ira had fought.

Margaret not so tall next to Alexander, kept gently raking the earth pushing away along the surface lightly pulling the iron back, continuing because she was having a talk with Alexander who stood so timelessly beside her in a way Jim had often seen the two of them here or in the kitchen: she talked low and Jim felt repetition in her shoulders till Alexander said, "Stop it," and she turned directly to him as if to show her profile to her grandson behind the porch screen and she said quite low, "Don’t you tell me" and Alexander said something Jim didn’t hear and Margaret hooted and went back to raking; then she looked around her, everywhere but where Jim was, at the two cherry trees he climbed in and at the hedges, and she turned abruptly to Alexander saying something Jim didn’t hear except the name "Ira," the sound then suddenly receding as her mouth pivoted and without looking at Alexander patted him on the back several times until he turned this into a hug, each looking over the other’s shoulder.

Jim’s mother and father seemed far away, then. And he knew he could get away from here when he wanted, and as he felt this he felt a breeze entering subtly through the screen called not by what he felt but felt because of what he felt, for it had been touching him already. Then Alexander lightly patted Jim’s grandmother on her backside. Jim, she had said, had the same gray eyes gold-flecked that the Anasazi seemed to have.

Well even that old pilgrim cloud he became for his post-mortem tour of the continent watching over the itinerant Navajo Prince, some said seeing America, others said aiming for some stream in New England where he might at long last see those delicate if frozen foam volcanoes that the Hermit-Inventor thought only mythical, though the Anasazi had understood that in the East summer was winter and so he was doomed to go looking for the foam voles at the wrong season or in the wrong direction, South America being a better bet at that time of year. Less man- than machine-made are those contrails of hot, instantly-cool-condensed plane exhausts we already remember having mistaken for a growing cover of cirrus stripes multiplying with each jet passage across mid-American air-space until post-War Illinois observes a steady decrease in the number of rain-generating thunderstorms and a narrowing of the temperature range. Yet on the other hand Mayn quotes a university climatol-ogist qualifying the bad news with good: "A blanket of high clouds could seed a layer of lower clouds with ice crystals and cause precipitation."

His son looked up at him on a subway platform one Sunday a month or so before they lost each other in a subway crowd on the same platform and Andrew boarded a train just ahead of the prematurely closing door to find a door becoming a window through which he saw his distraught father suddenly moving with the entire platform of people, and asked how that old Indian turned into a cloud. Mayn remembered. And this was a thing the Hermit-Inventor wouldn’t have known about the Anasazi’s death—the How. Unless the Anasazi med’einer had described it in advance to the Hermit, who, well, Jimmy also was: yet this was so important as to be discoverable only in its own doing, and while you can’t always try it to know it, though Jim could have "killed" that worm Spence in later years who treated investigative reporting as a proof that other people’s lives were as sleazy as his own—killed him at a bar in Washington and at a launch in Florida—the murderer’s existential knowledge was still more overrated than seeing a murderer executed in the flesh, seeing him walked into the chamber and sat down—like having a haircut, said a UPI colleague fresh from the state capital, that’s all there is to it—to learn that a spark, a precious spark?, may jump from one foot(-gear) to t’other, oh ignorance is sometimes knowledge, as knowledge is often only ignorance with between the twain the chance that the spark was basic speech between two discrete incarnalities of the condemned. But Mayn was usually a lazy guy on the surface where it counted, so one day when he heard an eighteen-year-old kid who was living with his father in Mayn’s building spell out a theory of Obstacle Geometry and recalled how his own dad, Mel, always misunderstood the effect he had when he told someone, "Why hell that’s what I’ve been thinking and saying for donkey’s years," Jim recognized the hu-manness of the shape (whatever sex) left buried in his vague daydream (he did not have night dreams by and large) and heard talking back to him now and then and reversed the process unwittingly and tossed Larry’s way the clinker that while there was no reincarnation except if you were a gene, there was something else. And Larry looked long into Mayn’s eyes as if he made sure Mayn was the bearer of a message he had been looking for, and Mayn was happy to oblige the kid, he was a nice kid and he would take him to a basketball game, and he was very bright, and freaked out about his parents’ split: he had some ideas, all right, and Mayn was happy to give him for his own use whatever he had in the way of disassembled information, name drops, and oh stories like the man who had remarried and named his daughter the same name as that of his other daughter by his first marriage because he had forgotten that was her name or maybe wanted to flatter his new wife who wanted nothing to do with his prior life—until Larry responded unexpectedly one evening, it was the evening, and a young woman was present named Amy who worked at a foundation as assistant to an exile-economist, and Mayn recounted how a Nez Perce Indian known to Mayn’s grandmother had traveled from Idaho across the plains to St. Louis in the 1830s with returning fur traders to get missionaries to come out because the Indians believed the white man had contracted curiously profitable relations with the supernatural—

—But this was true! said Amy, irritated, look how well the Quakers did!—

—But wait a minute, said Larry, the Quakers are anti-war, look at them in Vietnam—but (he interrupted himself on the threshold of a documentary discourse Mayn’s certain)—it’s like contaminated money—I mean can money itself be polluted?—I mean, my mother took her money out of Chase because it was male-operated/war-oriented—I mean she says she can actually feel what it’s like to be the man at the bank who told her friend she was not to eat like raw garlic any more if she expected to keep her job there—

—And who knows where your money comes from? Mayn said to Amy, meaning the outfit where Amy’s an assistant research coordinator with, in fact, part-time, the Allende economist, studying some of the time how the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) which aimed at a national proletariat got lost in the male-run AFL-CIO.

It doesn’t matter, she said, at a distance from both boy and man, we’re free to find what we want—like the woman whose husband wouldn’t ride the subway with her because she’s got a job and taking classes and she got robbed coming home.

Mayn remarked that sixty years ago his grandmother spent days and weeks lobbying against the wages-and-hours argument that women were more prone to disease than men, and he thought there had been considerable hilarity at a collateral meeting on her own home ground of Windrow-town when she described the wrist-drop disease of house painters vulnerable to lead but primarily to demonstrate how the labor market’s alleged weaker sex in fact had called attention to all the occupational diseases, whereupon on being taunted by of all people an Indian carpenter whom people were afraid of, she fell into a faint—shock, we would call it—with all the symptoms of an unusual poisoning reported in an Italian woman who was a skilled brancher and buncher of artificial yellow muslin roses.

But Larry, who was deeply interested in Amy and could not but show it, wanted to know how Margaret had gotten out to the Indians all alone—if she had—and more about her friendship at a key juncture in her life in ‘94 with a St. Louis woman and Catholic convert who was the niece of the beautiful Narcissa Whitman who with her star-struck, long-traveling husband Marcus had taken Presbyterian Christianity to the Pierced Nose people who seldom if ever gave the United States any trouble until the 1877 rebellion of Chief Joseph who, when he surrendered his rifle near the Canadian border and with it his campaign to salvage the lost Indian culture, said to the generals, "My people ask me for food ... It is cold, and we have no blankets . . . Where is my little daughter? I do not know ..." having flummoxed the vastly superior white army for months in the Rocky Mountains, in order then to be betrayed by the conquerors first into exile in malaria country where six of Joseph’s children died and thereafter to what would, but a few short wars later, be known as survival training, here permission to walk fifteen hundred miles in winter without provisions.

Provisions? ask Larry and Amy.

To a reservation way up in northern Washington.

At least they had a reservation, says Larry, who’s half with Mayn, half with Amy, half elsewhere.

So that only primitive witchcraft saved them, smiles Mayn, reaching for a cigarette and not finding one—that is, they were seen leaving the malarial bottomlands and not again till they materialized at their new reservation, their numbers magically reduced by two to one, ‘case anyone was seeking history’s convective links.

(Mayn and Larry were now standing, just the two of them, outside Larry’s apartment but his father was not home, and Mayn would meet him another time, angry almost, though not at Larry, at the hooting and singing in the apartment down the hall of this floor, the door half opening upon approaching voices apparently fighting some silly battle between song and talk—"It’s the opera singer still moving out," says Larry—neither talk nor song particularly inspired) ... of the Columbia River "Dreamers," Smohalla, who learned religion from missionaries, had a bloody one-on-one by a river with the rival Indian miracle maker "Moses," died and disappeared only to be provisionally resurrected downstream by a white farmer, vanished on foot only to materialize much later: he had talked during his death so clearly with the Great Spirit that when he found his true mission and preached the native Indian religion with its four joined, outward-facing coigns, against the White Man’s faith, his listeners followed him even to the ends of a cosmos composed of trance fragments as equal in their order as his history made peoples here emigrating from the Creator’s hand unequal since ranked according to their arrival time, Indians, French, priests, Americans, and Negroes, in that order, which meant the Earth belonged to those first Indians—who if asked to cut grass, make hay, and sell to be rich like whites, answer, "How dare I cut my mother’s hair?"

But did Mayn have to know how reincarnation worked in order to believe in it, Larry asked from a midtown pay booth. Mayn laughed: no, not in either case. Either case? Yes: regular and special reincarnation. Oh, "special" is the "something else" you mentioned the other day. Right, Mayn laughed and Larry didn’t, and Mayn said Larry might take him too seriously. "Did anyone ever tell you that?" Mayn was asked and said, Well, yes—once upon a time his grandmother. "Well," said Larry, "some people feel a lot older than they are, maybe hundreds of years older." Both men found this amusing and upon checking each other out found that getting out of shape had occurred to both of them, Larry thinking of his father who complained about not having time to work out, Mayn of himself, and Larry of Mayn, who was in hard if heavyish shape if he didn’t ponder or talk about it overly, and worked out. Mayn heard himself say: "I guess I had to first believe in an old medicine man’s turning into a cloud when his time came, in order to then figure out how he did it." "He had a reason you said—he wanted to make that trip." "That post-mortem junket," said Mayn, shaking his head. "So what age was the cloud he turned into?" asked Larry, as if the answer might yield data for further steps. "Have to figure it was a newly formed cloud," said Mayn, reckoning not uncomfortably that he was out of his depth, but remembering, then, with a wrench (or a rake and a half! or a shot of sheer void—the waste and pomp of the thank God unvoiced inside-the-mind travel!), a fact he then had only the shape of: "so travel keeps you young, kid." "But," said Larry, "he changed before he went away on his trip."

Which gave them both pause, and Mayn heard the doorbell go and said he had to hang up—but Oh one other thing, Larry—but was it from Anasazi or from Hermit or straight from Margaret, through whom the others came down to him?, and pondering this irrelevancy, he lost the thing about light again, but it was about light . . . "had it and lost it, Larry—got a visitor ringing the doorbell." "From outer space," said Lar’ like he believed it in theory, and laughed somehow convincingly, and Mayn knew he worried about the boy, about Larry; and at that instant he felt he was saying the words that Larry said to him, "I’ll tell you about special reincarnation someday, Jim." "Thanks, kid—what I couldn’t quite recall was about light being associated with weather masses just as much as temperature which we all know causes things to get moving." "But Jim I always think you know more than you’re saying." "Thanks," said Mayn, "that’s a power I have no control over; I often had that feeling about the Anasazi medicine man." "But he’s dead, I gather." "That’s what I liked about him—none of that regular reincarnation business for him." Mayn told Larry to take care of himself. Larry thanked him as the dime ran out into a recorded voice like the average of mortality itself and Mayn thought that he loved Larry—as a son, a friend, and some further way that brought to mind a separation between the astronaut and his traveling salesman’s life-support overnight case. He thought of Dickens—he had once read David Copperfield and remembering the sea in that book with all the light that must have gone into it lidded away from our eyes at some point of death in the book—who died?—and almost immediately upon opening his front door commenced talking about it.

Well, he Jim unlike the Anasazi Healer warn’t especially wise—let a goodish marriage go—were a but-average dad and left his own son on subway one Sunday who turned up identical and eirdly unworried on platform of next station—yet like the Anasazi, Jim wasn’t specially watchful for here’s a limit even among the most official of vigilantes to how much contrail (read control, too) you can lay on the falling sphere of the world, yours, ours. Yet one hour later, by some token (read totem, too) falling controlled downward to ground zero of multiple dwelling (read dwelling-quoia) with wonderful scientist girl movie fanatic who holds her humidity and dryness in seductive suspension when they have to interrupt a quick, passionate discussion of two-week-Europe-package-for-two, for they enter elevator already occupied by two western-rawboned ladies powerfully enthused having come from a group session elsewhere-san in building ("She gives you hope"—"She lets you give it to yourself’ ‘—"I’m not sure about the masturbation; I mean"—"What it does to your expectations—" "No, it’s really pretty boring, isn’t it? But she’s very funny"—"How we look for subjugation—" "But are carbohydrates really the same as romantic love?"—"She didn’t say they were" "She’s so alive, she probably gets mad but when she does she puts her hand on your wrist, I mean Maureen got her mad once I think and she turned to her and put her hand on her wrist, body contact, eye contact, and said whatever

she said without putting her down, but Grace is so alive that the last time after I left I sort of couldn’t imagine what it was like with her, you know what I mean?"—"Yeah, you’re saying a lot of things fast, you know. The South American woman really doesn’t dig Lincoln"—"Lincoln’s sweet"—" No no"—"Shit, man!"—"I mean, it’s a real honest-to-God workshop! We work!" "Sue, did you say’God’? It’s 1977!"), . . . he was made to remember that watchfulness according to the Anasazi healer was a mark of reincarnality or its yearning at any rate, which was ultra-slow-beating to tease the mortality that set him apart (and by centuries) from his people who had all gone on to other things depending, Mayn guessed, on what they watched most watchfully until a luminous javelina behind replete with scent-gland system or, say, a jojoba bush beaned with commercial possibilities ranging from shampoo through fry oil and engine softener to a standing reserve of fuel which that little hustler Spence had doubtless heard might do in sinisterly minute platelets for a future generation of renewable missiles—or a hundred other living identities—would imprint their current essences on some supple mid-grid of opiate-receptor molecules that were the immortal genes’ message bearers, as, that zoometeo-rological night the Navajo Prince took off in pursuit of his beloved, his mad mother’s return to life and lung matrixed ever afterward on each downcoming and upgoing weather in that part of the world (Larry’d tell us how that phenomenon was managed!), and one watcher might return as a javelina’s behind, another as a jojoba bean with a solid-missile future, another as a function of some old wind demon if you’d been watching for it as it breezed in and out of town, or some poor gal’s head at childbirth when, say, her unhappy marriage doesn’t quite leave her thoughts even during labor (though you could be a kid in the next room doing its ancient-Mesopotamia homework where when the gods disappeared upstairs to have at each other or just rest—or maybe economized by becoming Us), the weather was caused by demons and omens and dreams of void-like absences which are early unidentified forms of low-pressure zone, though if James Mayn, his once-heavy life delegated, along with such weathers as leaving and arriving, to those growing relations in and out of him busily at rest and medium cool ‘bout the "we" of it or the "they" so long’s the plural obtains and don’t for the time being bother Jim or James how far these relational structures (articulate and/or blessedly non-so) are something he’s in, since evidently they are as well in him, if James Mayn (we say) had done the regular reincarnation trip he’d have gone for someone he knew so little about that there would be plenty of room for initiative as with the Navajo Prince who suspended his studies of God knows what all to chase after—

—the new friend Larry, as Mayn looked ahead to their next discussion, concerned Mayn, he definitely concerned him; for they had got each other into troubles best left to dream, especially if like Mayn you didn’t ever "have" dreams to the best of your—

—while Mayn, impatiently waiting for the next talk with Larry though not getting in touch with Larry, felt that a century had passed between now and the time when he had known more than he knew and had consigned it to some curving-away-from-him (might’s-well-be-movin’) track in the sky of his private fall away from hometown and from the muted melodrama back there, or six centuries he smiles, hearing some old beginner’s logic of yarrow leaves with now in year ‘77 of his own century in question the forty-nine yarrow stalks introduced to him at a sunset swim-party (at a blue, skylighted pool on the thousandth floor of some quick(-lime)-rise multiple dwelling serving tequila sunsets and cucumber prods) by a seventy-five-year-old real-estate executive as the right and traditional way to "drop" an I Ching: for what he heard was himself, on a day in April or May of ‘46 soon after the Hermit-Inventor supposedly died to be supposedly supplanted by his nephew, knowing without ever having been taught what a tea steeped in yarrow leaves was drunk for by Indian women: and Margaret, or for that matter the East Far Eastern Princess, had been the pregnant one, not Jim’s mother: and that was why she had to get away from the Navajo Prince or she would never get away: and, with spiral weathers, or some genuine obstacle to all this void in the form of a preciously durable friendship with his grandmother, Jim had put away for the future’s rainy week which in the controlled environs rotated for gravity’s sake between Moon and Earth was never to come unless the controlled population voted rain, a marvelous if broken train of thought, if not in a class with the special reincarnation that he knew in his bones (the rest of him stored in that radiant, rumored mountain fed by the minute Pressure Snake of the South) that Larry had or was about to eerily come up with—whereby, O.K., if Margaret was pregnant when she departed her Navajo community in ‘94, then Jim’s mother by some law of non-coincidence was not the pregnant one when she invited the New Jersey sea to take her away from it all in ‘45; but Sarah, it had been firmly speculated, would never have killed herself pregnant. Therefore?

Answer: at least half a generation of falling forward toward the horizon—leaving town as his mother told him to, though then it was she who did the leaving, if only first. (And are the first to leave like the first to arrive?) He heard his little brother play a sad thing on the piano haltingly and realized he hated his mother for good reason, while loving her unknown thinking yes, in a piece she played of . . . "Schumann" (Braddie called, looking up and down from his music to the keys and back as if one or other would get away from him if they didn’t stay close), Braddie her love child played it with beginner’s skills—in an always somewhat energy-inefficient sound-escaping home, out of which Jim was often coming, often starting, hearing things, well little more than basic equipment sliding/shifting/rattling around in him, voices as unreal as Miss Myles’s "You’re a brave person, Jim; this has made you grow up fast; tragedy does that; we can’t always pick the pace at which" . . . or words to some effect when Jim wasn’t being brave at all, but dwelling upon Anne-Marie’s breasts which he had just the day before touched in daylight and for a time thinking there really had been a Hermit-Inventor, that is in the Anasazi sense, and so there had been an Anasazi healer give or take a few prescriptions immortal enough not to have expired after several centuries, though smart ideas can get passed on for a long time and still apply, even if saying the thing in French compelled the mother, then, to say to Braddie in Jim’s hearing that the piano was to the orchestra what the individual was to the mass except the orchestra was better than the mass. But, asks the interrogator so long quiet as to have been legally absent (though always in the wings, his own, and more than in the wings, indeed in the feelings of all these relations circulating like money but also like Grace Kimball so clear about history being written yea razored on the male’s ever-’vailable tabula the female doormat that her power has been to be known and used changing in the imitable warmth of her own that multiplies in lives of women and men where she might be as invisible and inaudible as a spirit that reduces surplus though vulnerable always if not quite ready—for she’s a monologuist—to the blunt male word working at its insidious, non-leaderly worst, in interrogation’s interrogatory, But) were you, about your maternal parent’s embarcation into the unknown not at least as curious as Pearl ("statuesque" but only "-esque") Myles who may have lost her job through inquiries about the abandoned rowboat and the lack of a traditional-type suicide note, i.e., about the How of Sarah’s exit? Or did you clandestinely check on the time-distance odds of her meeting the lofty waterspout reported nosing the ocean near the Barnegat seafront between Mantoloking and Point Pleasant that afternoon appearing so unusually free of its normal thundercloud source a mere-mile-high cumulo-nimbus from which it funneled down to vacuum the bright-foaming salt scallops of whitehorse whitecaps the afternoon she "went"? (Answer at once not only for yourself in the usual rousingly dubious way but up front for all of you—and oh yes are we as history-buffers expected to swallow as mere coincidence a modest interest in weather work in later life and those earlier self-embedding weather trips of the boy-man’s extended clan interracial, continental, ranging upwards and downwards thirteen decades or more?)

"You are pretty hard on that little shit," said Ted of Spence one evening in 1965 (probably), "and you don’t know much about him," Ted added, pushing some cigarette change toward the barkeep.

Mayn would grant this, but not that Spence carried especial violence or energy around with him except as an alertness for profit. What Mayn (and, to the amusement pretty much of both of them, Ted) did know about the worm Spence was at least three things: that through alerting the relevant parents— one pair split and remarried, though not to each other—Spence had sold to a New Hampshire newspaper for $4,300 a photo of two evidently male Americans blindfolded with bandannas and wearing major-university T-shirts facing very close-up an allegedly Cuban all-male firing squad (cheeks crushed against rifle stocks, berets tilted except for one potentially-female member wearing an identifiably Pittsburgh Pirates cap); second, that Spence had sold for a greater sum an underwater photo of a free-lance salvage diver on vacation embracing two luminously dark and universal daughters of a Bolivian general against priceless ceramic tiles of (at the diving-board end) the deepest privately owned swimming pool in our hemisphere; and for a bargain-low barely-five-figures unloaded a dossier (he had first ingeniously "rented" overnight to a foreign "buyer") documenting a blackmail-and-(party-)favors network extending through uranium options on Indian lands, embezzlement of tribal funds, sexual action by civil-rights coordinators ("red" and "black") with pictures involving entrapped foreign acting students and a safely incredible pilot "map" (read project enterprise) to recycle mystery wastes on scales of such "load" and "breadth" and "profit" that its susceptibility to seeming in general "good for America" plus its emergence less than six months after (and thus in competition with) the killing of a President (on the birthday of Spence!) not to mention a tragic twin-miscarriage suffered by a prominent microbiologist right in her lab, caused the whole dossier both with and without its powerful abstractions to fall back into a regularized dump of history to be of a significance as uncertain as were the views of this moral orphan Ray Spence sometimes confusable at will with a part-Sioux part-Ojibway entrepreneur whose name after it was given him by accident he deliberately adopted under stress as noted by clients who may never have bothered to find out about each other, assuming such basics, nonetheless, as that they had been mothered and fathered and come from real places, demonstrable places, whereas Mayn (who amused a woman friend who pointed out that, his humor notwithstanding, she personally had nothing to go on except his testimony) had inferred Spence’s origins as "something else," a message not certainly aimed at eventual re-constitution in human language (read terms).

But if this was all Mayn troubled to actually know about the despised Spence, the rest of it could seem to know Mayn, or be borne by him unknowingly recalled like things he hadn’t understood but recalled and recalled, the dreamlike late night when he opened his mother’s music-room door till he could see her and he had a message for her sort of dumb-in-the-head ‘cause it could be gotten by her not given by him.

But what was this "something else" Spence was coming from? the long silently present young woman Jean (or to her parents Barbara-]tan) asks— who once four years ago in her half sleep heard her motel-mate Jim Mayn mention Ray Spence, a Chilean economist, some "choor" or other until she was awake and he, this mid-life athlete next to her, was the one half asleep —counts down through Spence, Chile, Choor (born into it?), and a long, white mountain that had thoughts if unable, at the drop of a fracture zone or the pivot of a scissor fault, to turn thought into dream: so maybe marry the two, yet she could have sworn they were born into each other.

Now it’s four years later. She doesn’t—he knows—know what their relation is, it’s as deep as friends for sure.

He backed off sheepishly: "Have to think Spence was a snake in a previous life and didn’t make it so they demoted him to a human snake— except there’s no ‘they,’ is there? I’ll say one thing for him: he has the stick-to-it-iveness of a good journalist: he listens and he goes looking."

"For what?"

He knew she didn’t get it, but in his own behalf he could at least claim not to have read the book though he’d had its meager theory digested for him by his friend Ted; but they went into the movie theater they had been slowly approaching, as it them, with its potential images at rest in the money in their pockets, then in the tickets rolled out onto metal by the box-office attendant, images including one at the start that made you think was it mist or was it fog the East Far Eastern Princess got turned to by her friend and adorer the Hermit-Inventor of New York? For mist—whatever its uses in the vigilance of precise umbrellists or poets or measurers in Oregon and Scotland who name it, as a hundred winds are named, for their place—is essentially distinct droplets; and fog is a cloud of condensed moisture as close to the ground as the Great Spirit’s Four-Cornered Ear, oft free enough of wind to hang, yet if wind-moved enough, apt to gather more air to be cooled by the cold, cold ground as if the Earth were the sea.

Spence persisted from talk he had heard, through hearsay he had not, as if infected by the future of jojoba as a fantastically superior dry-land reincarnation of the vanishing sperm whale’s oil, yielding from that plant’s durable bush such motor coolants, human foods, shampoos, commercial hopes for endless other transformations as might explain why (per quoit) an English furniture maker whom Margaret Mayne met on the slopes of Salt Lake City could excite her so with tales of the Japanese-speaking American inventor whose interior wound had been healed in the desert with jojoba balm only so that he might be murdered for having seen the connection between that bush bean’s pod-oil and the (in fact) mw-sperm whales with which a group of Californians tried to stock the Great Salt Lake: and altogether did explain why Spence’s nose for profit led beyond the venerable jojoba bush and its lucrative basic-research future of remedying the particular acne if not spleen damage or excess gravity in the lower limbs and spinoffs of the chemical from which is derived dioxin of Vietnam fame to the woman Manuel who had healed the ill-fated Japanese-speaking Mason in Utah, had herself shampooed with the jojoba oil for years, and had so applied it to the riven scalp of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the lovely sounds that came from her small cranial crater as well as her demon-hassled voice’s mouth foretold if they did not cause that legendary comeback from death usually attributed to her son’s hasty departure. Spence had heard some of this firsthand through Mayn, but some of what Mayn heard from at least two people, whom Spence now in 1977 insinuatingly contacted, seemed almost as far from Mayn as it had unquestionably not been overheard spoken by Mayn in a Washington bar in the old days in or not in the presence of Mayga, the beloved South American woman-friend, at Cape Kennedy before and soon after the liquidation of Dr. Allende’s government in Chile or at one or two other times when their professional paths crossed, Mayn’s and Spence’s. Yet indisputable it was that the Navajo matron upon revival had spoken in the voice of Owl Woman and Owl Woman’s name had been Manuel; indisputable that Spence had heard through Mayn of Marcus Jones, and anyone but Spence would have settled for this—not reached, instead, his fifty-foot extensible arm-hand out of the wiry plastique of his western-wear-clothed body to ferret out the fact that the American printing magnate Morgen, who had been strolling with Mayga when she fell to her death, no one else’s (the ultimate breather), from the breezy cliffs of Valparaiso harbor, was brother to a left-wing job-printer Morgen in Philadelphia—all intensely suggestive to Spence, who though Mayn figured Spence cared not even a fuck for the journalist Mayga noted that in the late fifties/early sixties her husband had helped run the national airline and that Mayga’s work in the States was covering copper mostly and talking up Frei’s next run for the Presidency of Chile—work just ended by her departure for home summoned by husband, now ended with her life.

Mayn had told this Spence years ago to shut up, which Spence did with such a lingering smile that he might in every other respect have been elsewhere.

Mayga was dead, and that was all that had mattered then in 1963, not the tilt at which we received the sun and the rain, nor any historic small talk that was all of it bigger than the death of Mayga—and welcome to its bigness. Yet recalling and recalling how friend Ted had told Jim the news not imagining it would upset him for he had met her maybe half a dozen times in ‘62-’63, he could get to another fact of Spence by the trivialest gnomon yet congenial because he and Ted had tossed this all-purpose gnomon back and forth, the L of the sundial or anything that tells time by the shadow it casts (though what does it tell time?); for one day at the beach Jim had stuck himself strangely into the earth of the Mantoloking sand just on the leaning point of pretty well murdering his little brother Brad:

and that "fact of Spence," conveyed on a gray day in New York in 1977 of the perishable century that aspires to be our civilization’s hour, he heard in the voice of a nice woman he had had steak and enchiladas with (or what did they have?) in a bedroom suburb of Albuquerque hard by Sandia Mount, calling to say she’s in New York, has to talk to him, she was supposed to be joined by Ray Vigil (remember?), she had to see Mayn, not talk on the phone—look it wasn’t possible to put down (put up?) a mountain overnight, was it?, whose mineral "bank" could make anyone near it think it had always been there, and listen, a man who disturbed her but maybe wasn’t crazy had told her that Jim Mayn’s mother had disappeared into the ocean but his grandmother had stood at the memorial marker in the family cemetery plot and said there was something real there and a person had phoned the cemetery from New York to ask if burial had taken place, and the woman from Albuquerque her voice quiet with chill not privacy thought it all might mean nothing against this Spence’s allegation that she and Mayn’s daughter whom she did not know, if not Mayn himself, could be involved in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something she heard Spence call National Technical Means Capability for verifying placements of missiles—but... she had come to New York to talk to Jim about partly this mountain perhaps though she had not heard about it till she got here and of course didn’t believe it but also a strange thing she had heard in Farmington, a west-east nightmare for environmentalists, this mountain minerally capable of making people believe it. They would talk tomorrow, she said, as if it wouldn’t be now. Her firmness brought them full circle but it wasn’t the same spot, and looking over the edge of the phone or the circle, recalling her curly, dark-blond hair and a quick smile in the midst of fact and dedication still hoping she could save part of a landscape from being darkly stripped by some epic modulus but to store that landscape no more than the windmill prior to the giant electronic pylons of Wyoming stored wind for current elsewhere, he remembers her given name Dina like it meant something and despite her having just said her surname he can’t hold it in his mind until he thinks of once itemizing for his daughter a bleached beer can next to a candy wrapper in the desert brush at his feet when he stood contemplating Ship Rock while the Four Corners plume and gasification of cheap surface coal escape him, and thinks of another person a bearded son of two opera stars who changed his name to West which amused his bearded sometime-earringed father and upset and haunted his mother, she told Mayn. Dina West. Dina West. Spence had phoned her. Which meant he had known she was here, and where. Which meant he knew o/her. Which in itself proved for some minutes of this year of 1977 to be so tiresomely credible that Mayn could go back and bury himself in some New Mexico town with one broad street, a desert’s exit and entrance, and drive a new pickup truck and wear dark glasses and pump gas obscurely for the rest of his life. Dina West.

He had told a couple of things to a nice neighbor named Norma one night shortly before Spence’s name entered her ear, touched (and probably lowered) her consciousness (itself less "raised" by the woman Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops than reassured by the stories of other women and the gentleness that let the heart speak for variety more than bitterness, at least to Norma, who made Mayn think maybe his own wife could have been helped in workshops like these though he still did not understand why they had relinquished each other); and Norma conveyed to him some of this gentleness, and while deep rainless thunder-pockets cracked the long clefts of Manhattan (which would have been the name for New York if Mayn had had a say) he told Norma that the woman who had been neither Mom nor Mama, yet Mother, and his, had told him to go away, to become himself, and then she was the one to go, and that way of putting it was the mystery, not what’d happened. Norma did not dispute this. The advice, she pointed out, was still good. But, she heard Jim (this nice, only moderately articulate-seeming, modestly macho man) muse humorously, his mother had taken her own advice, which people didn’t always do. But what was the trouble? asked Norma—that Sarah was s’posed to let him go ahead first and do what she after all had said he was s’posed to do? Norma liked Jim more than a little, and whatever it was was gladly unspoken. He tells her that clouds heal the air. She likes that, but she wants to ask him what he’s feeling.

"You know where I heard that?" he said, and then, "Why I think I said that myself, that clouds heal the air. Almost unprintable."

Norma said Grace Kimball for all the enmity she laughingly bore men would say maybe Mayn’s mother listened to the good advice she was giving her son—a man—and one day decided to—

"—She wasn’t well," he said.

She waited.

"Go on and say it. It’s O.K."

"Decided to take some of it for herself."

"You don’t know," he said, unable to tell her, but feeling passion staggering stagy through his heart, the self-pity of cloaked melodrama.

He knew Norma wanted to ask, What happened with her? To leave a husband, two boys, a home, her things! He waited, for a time, to speak, and knew in his shadowy sense of immediate future time that he would have the chance, and saw for the first time that this sense meant he cared about her. He wanted to know, Did Norma ever have people she’d been getting ready all her life to see?

"Well, you.’9

He didn’t mean himself!

"You mean you look forward to knowing them?"

He guessed he meant that.

"No you didn’t," she said. But she didn’t press him. She said she didn’t buy all of Grace Kimball, her best traits were warmth and intuition that gave her listening a power of itself—though she was supposed to have had enormous influence on dozens of women breaking up relationships—no, that was putting it clumsily, but ... the workshop did get heavy, you know dogmatic—inner-clean, clean-break, get rid of all that furniture, honey—but Grace you know was still in the place she had lived with her husband in, though so what?, but the workshop’s too supportive, so much womanness you sometimes aren’t sure it’s old-time female, but Grace she liked, she had such a lot of bounce in her, she put her hand on your wrist rather than put you down—a beggar on the street with a brown paper bag over his head with eyes, a crazy old lady Grace told her of, some bum she’ll stop as if she’s barefoot too, give him a buck, tell him about A.A., she sees things so simply but what she says about men and history gives her all this preachy power and influence but when she uses it in all the talking she does (which includes putting down words, words!) it’s humor and a little-girl ("little-w^m^m"?!) changeableness breaking habit patterns (being constantly her funny, bumptious self . . .) that is left with you like some good medicine that hasn’t anything to do with power and living-room politics, well Jim knew what she meant, didn’t he? Norma asked— Grace always meeting the most ungodly people, you know what I mean—

—have to get around to meeting this woman, there’s a Lucille in her group of friends, isn’t there?, who sounds like someone I knew—

—the strangest people, this red-bearded Canadian economist who O.D.’s on pastries and attends—

—Which one? Mayn asked; I know two of those.

Do they attend swings?

Do you? asked Mayn—wait, what’s a swing? ... oh yeah.

With tea and apricots. Maybe these other street weirdos "came" to Grace or something.

(Are there never any women bums? Mayn murmured, and then answered his own question, Of course, of course: they’re sleeping in the doorways with their bundles—as if he had to find out all over again what he didn’t know he knew.)

—like an old, irritable man shepherding a demented and beautiful old lady, Grace is looking them up again, she liked them. The man’s a wonderful grouch, very serious, the old woman spoke of his laboratory but obviously didn’t know what she was talking about.

Don’t be too sure, Mayn said.

Then one night Norma received a call which was like a call from Spence. A woman in Norma’s Body-Self Workshop, who evidently did not know that Mayn lived in the building, had been concerned by a phone call from a certain Spence who asked if she knew that her friend Flick Mayn had once lived in the multiple dwelling where her workshop met, attended significantly by a woman suspected by a visiting south-of-the-border counter-intelligence ‘‘enforcer" of collaborating to set up a major act of leftist bloodshed plus the abduction of a venerable Masonic socialist who’s father to this woman’s friend who’s herself more famous than her father and recently seen with a distinguished young naval officer known to be diplomatically trouble-shooting for the regime now in power in her country which may be Chile in her heart and soul and body but not on her passport. "Yeah, sure, the opera singer," Mayn answers promptly, "and I think I know the other woman you’re talking about; but bloodshed?"

But the new friend of Mayn’s who has phoned him this data, Norma, residing in his building and with whom he had talked only two days before deeply about his life yet leaving out one huge space of Fact, now asked him if it was true, as Spence said, that his mother had committed suicide—the one huge fact—and that he had investigated it; and he said very calmly, that there’d been nothing to investigate, nothing to look into, there was a note, a boat, perhaps a motive. She did not ask why he hadn’t told her before, and he was privately impressed because he should have told her—because they had talked about Sarah’s leaving as the thing she had originally told Jim he should do—which, granted, was just a parent telling a kid to make his way in the world, though advice inspired by disappointment.

Mayn remembered Spence being in the bar years ago because he had responded typically to hearing Jim tell Ted about—yes—the day (was Mayga there, too?) when he as a boy in a raincoat had questioned a man surf-casting who had sensed something terrible in the questions and had changed the subject—"Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that"—but when Jim asked if he had seen bodies come in or if a body might sink for good for sure, the man looked back at the high, windy breakers (oh yes, that’s the name of a fine old firetrap hotel, The Breakers) on the Jersey shore, and later when he asked another man down at the pier about the incident, the boat, etcetera, why the man laughed and said there were things that mattered more—gratuitous remark that Mayn recalled ever afterward as being revealing of the quality of, well here come deep waters, "so much" (as very serious folk are wont to say) "so much" that is our life right up to but not including what we call history but do not ever grasp, "un . . . photograph . . . able," but is this a view of history even in its absence? as Ted used to say to Jim, Ted now has a hard knot of cells in his neck on the right side "arrested but merely resting" (Ted jokes very precisely and Jim knows the cancer is memory but can’t take the thought anywhere, potential force resting up inside you that you can’t tap for yourself except, in its time, to launch you out of here). Ted goes on working out of Washington, and now during these curiously pressing days somewhere going round in Jim he found Spence out making a buck, a nickel, again, and recalled he had agreed with Ted he had been hard on Spence, this this this . . . words had refused him like angels flapping humorously at the dim margins of his eyesight, words that were actually there already put, already remembered—this little bastard (simpering scavenger, looking, looking, sniffing, listening) . . . but wondering now, a decade and more after that chat with Ted, if Spence had acquired data Mayn knew nothing of, he phoned Washington to find that old Ted had just left for San Antonio, and in the gap of this phoned also in Washington his own daughter, who was not home; phoned the Albuquerque woman here in New York to get Spence’s number if any and she had left her hotel; phoned Norma for the other woman’s number but hung up in order to phone Amy to ask if her distinguished Chilean economist, who Mayn had never stopped knowing was there at the foundation, had acquired the opera tickets Mayn and Amy had used from the diva Luisa in person, only to hear Larry answer (hey, hooray for Lar’) in a voice very grown-up through a storm, a virtual apparatus, of systematic static Jim-jamming by load factor divided by search-intensity quotient, divided and divided by his journeyman self falling forward in lieu of looking, looking, looking for it might have been Spence sotto voce reporting-in with information in the form of a question—or turn that inside out, a mountain of a dream Margaret thought up for him that supposedly the East Far Eastern Princess dreamt: a grave she saw into but had no mouth for words, words, words, it was too full—of words? of something solid?—and she dreamt she woke and was wet all over with tears of every feeling you might feel, and she went through maple trees, their leaves’ undersides blowing up palely in the wind, and passed an old swimming hole and got to a pretty field and found the grave of her dream which was so deep that all it had in it was the egg the lion left, not a hair nary a finger of that grave’s tenant who kept at best a low if not departed profile until, surrounded by dirt-tired Indians not dressed for our weather, she felt them edge her toward the grave only to get her attention to tell her she had lived the life of this dead person and now was this person and ready to go on as such, and, relieved, she told them they had no such belief in reincarnation, to which they replied in a unison all the softer because they all spoke, that she was the one who had told them: and when she felt awful about this, they lowered gently into one fluid thicker than blood and as live and glinting as the tongue of the whole world and before she could reach for that egg down there, they simply flowed into the grave, which became the hillside:

: inspired by Spence, who was nonetheless real and if (give him credit) turned down by the U.S. Marines nonetheless semperfidelis to know what he would not report himself but package for even Mayn to bear:

: who in turn is uninspired himself no doubt, a journeyman who among the violence of an indelible child’s bike devoid of training wheels falling on a small, caged leg, and the violence of an unknown husband’s head that, with all its holes, would not pass, by terminal magic, through the grid chamber of gut pressure he himself has had strung into his wife’s racket frame so she can kill him, and the violence of an anonymous wife’s love for her husband precisely when he (having spent an evening having Hemingway prove that it’s people that are the matter) is telling her her women’s workshop puts down men, and the violence of a teenage child whose anguished anger normal for her age multiplied by (and perpendicular to) the parents’ separation after years of uncertain vibes (read frequency, read in-frequency) divides and divides until the simple knowledge is too large to quite see, to wit that when you get to the age when you want to kick your parents around it’s easier if they’re living together, two still one—among all these violences which were not a newsman’s reportable Delaware Water Gap development or income-tax reform or wind energy used right in the backyard (read roof) of a Lower East Side apartment building—Mayn could see Pearl Myles on her ambiguous exit from Windrow High School, urging her Journalism Circle swansong fashion to remember that anything might be news but it must be something, something, and while you were wondering remember that in the City was where you found—and some snickered, including Jim—"human nature posing in the nude."

Good material for Spence blown adrift in the vitals of a divided history. Looking through Mayn’s daughter’s keyhole in Washington? Or her address book while she’s down at Tradewinds, having a beer, talking to a boyfriend about another apartment, being possessive or being low-key (well, her father himself would like to know, but not through keyholes), or thinking about conflicted parents but about important stuff like her life? Good material for Spence, who come to think of it liked cappuccino and pistachio or vanilla ice cream like a regular person who, disreputable skew-handed trash-purse that he was, had had at least a father or a mother (grant him that!) maybe the bad bean of a good marriage (for that could happen, like wondrous spinoff of a supposedly bad marriage), didn’t seem to need to go to press briefings to find out, for instance, as Ted, who ran into him "retailed" to Mayn, that the unthinkably rich relation of the low-profile Argentine silver magnate who ran the string of eastern papers Mayn worked for for a time had not gone up in smoke with his plane but was redesigning a private golf links surrounding a green-bean plantation once owned by the Presbyterians of Cameroon.

Spence was the problem. He was no less than making a living. Mayn joked with Norma, the night Lincoln had called her: "If he gave you all the news—" "—not me."

‘ The, uh, storied botanist-explorer Marcus Jones used to object to having to explain himself, why, for instance, he loved the blanched lips of a lady scientific colleague he used to run into in the desert—" "Someone your grandmother knew? I think you mentioned the bicycle before, and . . . and ..." "Spence did, probably." "But Spence called Lincoln, not me. You never mentioned the botanist to me, just that your grandmother traveled to the West in the nineties." After they hung up, Norma came downstairs and rang his bell and she seemed apologetic, as if she’d ask was it true Brad had needed more attention. They didn’t talk about any of this. Mayn was concerned about Lincoln. He felt he had already talked to her—as if Spence, crawling about in some lightless bloodstream of phone lines, shaped time and Mayn knew what was coming up. Mayn didn’t want to talk to Norma and got her gently out of his apartment. He really liked her. She didn’t understand. Probably thought he was feeling a little seduced.

He had to cut off this period, the arc-second segment of these few days. Just say where this unchecked inquiry and publicity stopped. But Spence was making a living.

Yet, like having the power to know and look hard but being convinced that history was a costly drug that played at being a secret that would not be there when you needed it, while he knew he was waiting for Larry Shearson to get back to him, that third woman-phone-call detonated by the creeping Spence made Mayn start again asking himself about Spence if not about such historical convergence as Spence sought or preyed upon the shadows of.

And listening to this woman he’d never met but who’d met him (!) (who had just become "a carpenter," God love her, "it’s like a revelation—used to be in your business")—he could not tell if Spence had or had not heard him one time speak of the Brad’s Day wrangle re: bent winds, so far forgotten by i960 that Mayn’s "discovery" of the fictitious Coriolis deflection of winds when he boned up fast to check NASA’s U-2 cover story did not at once bring to his mind his mother’s words or that dubious giant of a debate that never stopped growing between the Indian and the Anglo of Margaret’s private dispatches to her grandson, and Mayn imagined first that Spence had made up independently any number of events signal in Mayn’s abortive or largely unreportable family such as (though he had no evidence that Spence did know) that the cousin diarist from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Marion Hugo Mayne had recorded from an adjacent table a potentially erotic meeting in New York in the 1830s between a young woman whose lover was in trouble and an anonymous but most powerful statesman-dyspeptic friendly to M. F. Mayne because of the Mayne family’s New Jersey newspaper founded to promote that statesman’s political career; then a moment later Jim Mayn was thinking that Spence just plain knew about him what Mayn did not know except in this windy code of scavenged surplus connections that had a dollar sign haunting it, hence for Spence a credibility value.

But this woman with the rather large, husky, yet naked voice, Lincoln, who asked like Mayga years ago, Who is he? (and unlike Mayga would bleed words into Mayn’s ear for a moment) had not only been interrogated and apprised by Spence, she had been stood up by him maybe because she had told him what she looked like but have to learn to take rejection but that wasn’t the point of the meeting she had thought, and she’s actually very nice-looking especially now that she’s been cleaned up—

"I know what Spence looks like," the voice came back to her and she added, "And I know what you look like and your daughter read me one of your letters."

He did not stoop to the bait if that’s what it was. In his eyes, in some one of the liquid, lucid filters his eyes maintained as memory chips not worth circuiting into the brain, he did feel someone looking at him in a restaurant, and so what?

... but this Spence had called to ask if Lincoln knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where her own whadda-ya-call-it consciousness-raising (—it’s not conscious-ness raising, if you don’t mind, she’d told Spence, or not what you think that means, if anything) workshop, where the workshop met, where there was another woman—

"I know all this, Lincoln, I’ve had it from another source a’ready, and your Spence could probably be in two places at once, he’s something else again, stay away from him, he’s down a burrow half the time breathing his own carbon dioxide economizing on being human while he makes these phone calls on someone’s charge card."

So she went on to more painful Spence as it turned out—"I feel I know you, Jim," she said, "please call me ‘Lincoln,’ O.K.?"—(well Christ maybe Spence was a lunatic, whether or not that was his voice so deep dark inside the still athletic James Mayn it could be where the tawny cirrhosis crouched, budded, unbuilt and rebuilt so process supplanted its normally maintained result preferring to the degenerate future-liver a richly compacted coffee-black hole Indian tandouri, one thousand pork chops, twenty-three hundred New York steaks, eggs rancheros, soft corny chicken enchiladas suizas, and enough veal Parmigian to melt down the James River clear to an Italy where Jim had been but once and once was not enough)

—at each point on this skewed circumference someone stopped him inside himself and he looked across an edge into a dark he had always taken for granted, no use surveying there, do the next thing, etcetera:

Spence—Spence had interrogated, apprised, mingled the two modes: for as a talker he had a voice that could almost sing, high-frank, working, eager to help; and she had answered him, she couldn’t tell why, could-be it was that she’s a carpenter now!, and he in turn asked if she knew this man who had followed the Chilean economist’s wife and Lincoln said, Only his daughter Flick, who’s a wonderful girl; and he asked if she knew a "chick" named Amy who got free opera tickets from the Chilean whose wife (her workshop acquaintance) was friends with a singer whose father belonged to a venerable logia lauterina which the regime like emperor and pope before them would smash if they could as if the freemasons were still stoneworkers and their liberal (here, liberation) lodges were made of masonry or for that matter secrets, and Lincoln, alarmed, said, No she didn’t know any Amy; and Spence asked did she know any journalists working in or out of Minnesota because his instinct told him she did, and she suddenly didn’t know but had asked what he wanted and he said, To enjoy a meeting with her (—enjoy? it was like experience, she imagined) if she (Spence went on) had any related information for sale or barter; to which she retorted she had no information for sale; but he: Ma’am you’ve already contradicted that; and she: Don’t call me ma’am—yes she did know someone in Minneapolis, and Spence replied, By name Pearl W. Myles around sixty years of age? who lost a job because she did some hot-shot legwork all written down but never printed to do with a person who disappeared off the Jersey coast right when a maverick U-boat had been seen in the camouflaged vicinity and linked with a German composer (read perhaps compositor—no time—copy both) who had bought all 250 eel-steel feet of it for delivery in Chile where he was going or already was?— does that ring a bell? Never knew so much talk about curved wind, by the way. But Lincoln loathed Spence. (Like a relation? Mayn asked, and she laughed.) She had tried kidding Spence did he know Mayn had visited Medicine Bow at least twice to see the giant windmills where her own workshop leader Grace Kimball’s non-smoking Buddhist brother Walter hailing also from the southeast territory of Kansas used to be a trouble-shooter for the Department of the Interior—and when Spence after a pause called this sheer coincidence (while Mayn asked if it had been she or Spence that had "never known so much talk about curved wind"—Spence, she said; Spence, Spence, but I don’t know if I told him about what your daughter said about him or he me).

So Spence became formal and polite, different, as if asking her out— and she saw a buggy all painted shiny and black and gold with a Central Park horse distinguished by a large bunch of flowers between the ears, yet no future in that buggy or a dangerous future like a waterfall he for me or maybe me him—for all the world as if Spence was forgetting he’d already asked her to meet him: Had Mayn’s daughter (he wanted to know) spoken of a certain Mayga?—Mayga?—A South American woman with a round and not-at-all-bad-looking face who lost her life soon after being associated with James Mayn, who’s married, isn’t he?

Mayn hung up on her, hearing only the word "not—" then had to call back, didn’t have the number, last name, any sense of her except information he didn’t care about.

Lincoln, he laughed within himself. Oh nothing need happen. He had fallen forward into life beyond Windrow. The house phone buzzed and he did not go to speak into it, for Spence was at work in him; the layers of dirty cloud passing the Empire State tower that looked like it was falling was the atmo healing itself getting ready to "wet-clean" the air in a city where the sun’s light is easier to look right at because of—what?—he had never gotten the cause of the seasons straight in General Science although he recalled it was to do with tilting—maximum scattering of light in the line between looker and light source, you get your man-made brown haze but not your natural gray haze so the faraway ridge is made to seem less different from its sky, easier to understand than the seasons, the salt microns, the soil invisibly infinitesimally tilling the sky’s presence so if you could only see it you’re in a desert dust storm, but give me your poor man’s filter the blue haze, but you have to go to it, to Grand Canyon if Australia’s out, not even an electron micro-eye for auras can bring the blue haze to you, where the milky sky-within-a-sky draws viewpoint through semi-precious distance, opaled, to tell the truth, by billions of turps! yea turpentine, but organic natural, not combustible like the human brain’s troposphere of endless economixes.

The house phone buzzed again and the phone rang—something abstract in us won’t go away—and, seeing that in the absence of knowing what had gone on between his parents he had looked into other lives—a world of workshops helping themselves to the apple pie of change—he took the telephone on the way to the house phone and was saying, "Who is it?" while hearing the puzzled urgency of the woman Lincoln apologizing, then again apologizing ‘cause her house phone just went and she doesn’t know who it is, and he sympathetically allowed as how the doorman in his building was half the time in the deli across the street though they did not employ a doorman in the deli, the illogic of which she seemed to understand and told him she was sorry she hadn’t told him . . . that in the workshop she had passed on a story she had heard from his daughter about the Navachoor Prince and his fate that Flick had figured out—she said Jim didn’t sound like his letters, though "Your daughter in this long thing you’ve probably seen doesn’t read like she talks, of course."

Cut to where he was a week ago and will be a week hence, as if he waits for what Larry comes up with. (Isn’t there at least another person all this years of stuff has been about? Margaret? Sarah? Grace Kimball!) Cut through a movie years ago containing a scene of a movie being made, with director in breeches and a second pair of breeches enclosing one of the actresses, and Jim’s friend Sam opening a crackly-wrapped Clark bar in the dark one week after Jim’s mother . . . "went" (as Jeanette Many, her musicale friend, who actually believed not just in God but Jesus, said, who years later wrote Jim at an address she said she didn’t understand because it was not his wife’s to ask what was "going on" in his life, she "just" needed to know so she’d know what to pray for (read pry; just read on to the "Fondly" at letter’s end))—cut to the Bronx Puerto Rican woman wonderfully at rest who looks at your aura which is what you said you came for, recommended (you say) by the lady Clara, who is deeply troubled but it’s only partly events in Chile (you add, as if you’re a friend), but the broad-shouldered, heavily rouged queen of a vision sees what you said you paid to ask about even if she’s declining to discuss that other client Clara whose husband is mixed up in an intrigue at the prison with the man whom Foley knows less about than his words are able to say, yes Hortensa, here beside the thunderous traffic of the Grand Concourse in a furnished but uncarpeted parlor with the freshest sunlight everywhere so you must be sharp to see an aura, tells Mayn his aura gets denser, like breath that as it speeds up finds more and more energy instead of less, but it has a limit though that limit hasn’t been reached and not only isn’t dependent on who else is reacting to him, it depends on his not being touched by that—but he has been in the future (she says) too long yielding only a shadow here and now, and his aura is of great force waiting, waiting, the light around the torso give waves no less, a person trying to get back into you, she’s claiming—

Cut, past her name, which is coincidentally also that of a guy in prison Foley knew; past Spence; but, though snubbed at bar’s end, it was Spence who did the leaving, if only for a few minutes to ring up a (Kontac: new Russian, poss. borrowed fr. Amer. Eng.); cut fast to a light plane, but not Mayn’s that landed in Spence’s wake and yielded a wingtip vortex-turbulence formula in the form of a dumb grin, passenger-to-pilot, instead the plane the boy-man Jim nev6r saw nor could have looked for except its toy remains: the one that came in like an exchange for Sarah almost to the day, in August ‘45, driven by mind, by wind, some sea-to-land meteorologic reconnaissance?, air-to-earth purpose (do not read porpoise-quoia)—and the man who was surf-casting saw it out there in front of his arched rod, saw it bank sharply, come round, turn ninety degrees plus, and aim at the land on a course that seemed to fix on a house it wanted, not an empty house that time of year but under renovation, the occupants doing most of the work—and at the last segundo the small aircraft aborted the house mission and lowered its sights, reeled in by could-be the God whose "Divine Wind" means Kamikaze, and hit the beach at around six A.M. , the dawn coming down this time and not like thunder and hardly burning. It was the day after Sarah "went," and Pearl Myles asked Jim if his family knew the man, a breakfast-food heir and sportsman-diabetic who had a medical degree but had never practiced. Jim didn’t know the man, but his father asked him what Miss Myles had wanted to know; at school, Sam’s fat brother, always on the move within some larger laziness of nonchalance or rest, casually reported that "Pearl" had bothered the owner of "the" suicide boat and that that was why she was quitting—she was being fired because she was asking questions, according to Fulkerand, about a deceased citizen of the town of Windrow. But Jim never knew. But why didn’t he ask {per quoit pran-quaia)? Too much else going on? But what?

We’d say, today, Heavy. Ever lose your mother in mid-o’bit? Jeanette Many volunteered that it was just her view but she for one would not talk about the Miss Myles matter; Mr. Winekoop, who underneath it all including his excellent, sporty clothes, didn’t "shiv a git," told Brad and Jim that Pearl Myles had had a run-in with the after all very-peculiar-looking principal over a range of activities that had a generally extracurricular tone and had kept answering, People matter, people matter. Jim got stuck. Never told a soul. Stayed in his head ready-formulated. (What? An idea? Himself?)

Who was Spence to think that bent winds were code for what happened to Sarah and that Pearl Myles a colleague distant in time and many leagues west of Mayn’s New York apartment was still on the scene which would not go away because it was connected or waged in the tactics of an action Mayn kept thinking was really all over, and his own interest, as he had tried to tell Jean, who was more understanding of his motive than Jim was, turned not toward such grand machinations as a prison break packaged to hide a violent political purpose but to some coincidental wisdoms that Mayn had been reluctant to ask for right out because from the start the figure of Spence, at Kennedy Space Center and later, had interposed itself making some deal with the Chilean economist who was evidently in some danger perhaps because he was not really incognito yet acted like it, so he was in some fashion parallel to himself.

Ted was away and Mayga dead long years. When had Spence been there to hear, and of what informations was Spence as ignorant as of tact? (Mayn felt language change in him, Hortensa’s auras, or Foley’s prison-bound astral projection threatened to come true.) Yet second-hand and third-hand information for Spence was just as good for whatever uses Spence planned. Mayn could get Spence’s phone number somehow, but talking was out. He phoned Flick and saw her face in profile turned half away from him, a dash of blue-pink across the cheekbone, hurt or made-up he didn’t know, and for the first time an answering machine gave him her voice, in which he heard the accent of his son Andrew, whom he schooled himself not to grieve over, or anyway not wallow in paternal sin. He wondered if it was true he never had dreams. He had felt drawn to ring Grace Kimball’s bell, they had acquaintances in common—but to ask her about non-dreaming. He walked around the dimensions of this apartment now his own by under-the-table purchase from the landlord, it would go for a load of money next year, he never cooked and he believed in hot food three times daily—anyhow he found that the resident roaches had deserted—and he realized that like some saint who had gotten zen’d out, he hadn’t thought of his son in weeks, why here’s the little room that had become Flick’s when she would not sleep in with Andrew any more, family is next rooms, oh the shapes of the rooms with little or no furniture "at the moment" (as Mayn said to Norma) held neither free space Norma said Grace K. was creating by shifting furniture right out of her life, nor a multidimensional movie he couldn’t stop, nor his reasonable body as strong almost as ever, falling through the births of children, the love of flesh and furnishings of habit, orange-juice glasses evened out one rushed morning, a deserted toilet unflushed, a cobweb he watched grow behind a sink for years, hot tears from a peeling onion, cold sweat down the forehead from fear and love when he saw not other wives in those gapped descriptions of final half hours in the delivery room but his own wife, his "girl," howling just once amidst all those steady, working groans on her back suddenly laughing in pain in labor to actually show or was it get rid of the child she had grown almost all by herself out of one of her eggs of which she had already the exact number of all she was going to have—his wife suffering in labor with his cold sweat to show for it—yet equal as fluid to all else he fell casually through, the trivia histories of the degenerating daiquiri which, as he falls unstinting through the strawberry d. or banana d. into the tequila sunrise away from his family as if he had something more important to do, meets, for example (but an example of nothing), a free-lance diver with a taste for Bach convinced after his young girlfriend left him that he was being irradiated by inaudible sound that was taking him apart because it doppler’d back to him having originated nowhere else—and a whole lot of people who could double-up and triple-up on names (be much simpler and no sacrifice) like the man Larry’s father knew who wrote his daughter he happened also to know not really well but somehow for such irritated immediacy and interest and even respect for drive, which the man said he got from his late mother that he felt like one of the two reported women in that man’s life past and present who met each other and talked about him thinking each had her own "Bill" when it was the same guy named, incidentally, for one of the famous millionaires in American industry, friend of the family, that man himself nearly superstitious about one market indicator he would not identify to anyone, not even the boy who was named Bill for him—until Mayn on this evening wished he could name this living room and in some uncertain solitude which obviously he had asked for in reinhabiting the apartment he knew this living room was no more about to tilt or collapse or do anything deranged than those temperate settlements locus’d by gravitational balance out ‘tween Earth and Moon would be successfully reweathered—thundered, hailed, flooded except with the speed of light, while he wished that the multi-d film (not as great as art) of his own life with his wife and his kids would yield to the coming attractions except it worked the other way around. He punched two spider webs—one, two. He wanted to rip out the phones but he need only unplug them. He didn’t find anything at all between the information of his work, which came down to measurement gadgets, and the living life of the people populating his emptiness; between his instinct, once, about the distinguished exile-economist and the purported facts threatening like Spence to cluster round the man’s head.

Nobody was on the other end of Mayn’s house phone. Or maybe there had been a click-off, he wasn’t so sure. Wrong apartment. Did Lincoln neglect to answer hers? He thought so. People were dead whom he could ask; he would as soon exterminate Spence, whose power hovered near, convinced by his need profitably to parlay a history or two that he had acquired in a country where he didn’t speak the language but was ignorant of this fact.

Mayn wrote abbreviations absent-mindedly all down a page, Larry’s initials, Flick’s, some Larry-concepts (S.R., O.G., O.M., D.M.), with crossword junctions accommodating M. H. Mayne and, out of the void, Pearl Myles (ha!).

Mayn wrote his daughter, this night, a letter in his reasonable hand which was the visible presence of a tiny, terrifying, reassuring teacher in fifth grade whose surprisingly full-lipped smile descended over his shoulder as he learned fast; and in the letter to Flick he said he didn’t like her answering machine but knew how helpful it was to be in more than one place nowadays; he wrote that he had talked to a "Lincoln" lady who claimed acquaintance through Flick, and being of "sound mind dwelling upon this and that tonight"—(and, pen poised for thought, such as a lady-colleague he had known socially in Washington who had gone out of his life and of her own at a moment when, he now felt, that woman was about to tell him—what?—something to do with external copper interests opposed to the election of Eduardo Frei whose individual career making another run for the Presidency of Chile she promoted by selective reporting; or tell Mayn something about his own humdrum life, for she’s like that, yet also not prying: she didn’t tell you about yourself any more than she took notes on you down in her little notebook—yet come to think of it, she did take a note or two when he told her the strictly outlandish things—civilized South American hacienda-class, Mayn mused, pen poised above a page destined for his not-at-all-old-world daughter to whom he now resumed)—"but coming round to the belief that a system" he was part of was not sound, he urged Flick to have no dealings with one Ray Spence, who might involve her in harm yet had perversely turned Mayn’s own thoughts to such regrets as he could swear like a trooper concerning (if he weren’t afraid of being taken for an Episcopalian!) thinking maybe he and Flick and Andrew’s mother might have kept the marriage going if he for one had known that he was falling forward, casting shadows backward, anyhow known himself better for starters, though that might have kept them from getting married, which had, as he said, turned his clock back past the Indian Thunder Dreamers he had retailed to Flick and (when he could stay awake) Andrew, from their great-grandmother Margaret who had adopted if not changed them herself as had evidently Flick, but he was very sure the meddler Spence had never heard tell of the Alsatian mathematician that Mayn like their last-century diarist-relative M. H. Mayne (with an e) had (as in responsibility) delegated (to whoo? to wit, to air), but now along an inconvenient wishbone of a path with an old dear foreign colleague haunting the way, better say "person" these days (smile—to a daughter who shrugs tolerantly), just thinking, you know, that your great-grandfather Alexander, who predicted the weather from his elbow-tendon’s infinitesimal contractions or his cordovan-coated instep-tarsal better than his wife ever did with her Anasazi and Anglo or than Mel did with his Bureau bulletin (always itself a few hours late), got so exercised one day when Margaret had gone to the city for a funeral and he was alone on the porch perusing those old (as it turned out) foxed and brittle leaves of Marion Hugo Mayne’s diary that he didn’t hear us come up the walk—it began to rain— until Sam called out, "Hello there, Mister Mayn," and Granddad jumped up from his white wicker chair and clapped a hand to his throat saying "Ouch" and clapping the other hand to his elbow that had somehow gotten banged on the way up and we thought he would die on the spot, unmoving, like a horse asleep, and he wanted to speak but couldn’t, but whether from sickness or some kindred problem we never thought because it passed and he smiled and asked us in for some chocolate milk mixing the Coco-malt darkly to a paste in the bottom of each tumbler then carefully adding milk to get a matchless homogeneity of mix—then looked long at me, while Sam gulped his chocolate milk and looked out the window, and my grandfather said he had been astonished to see in those diary pages he knew as well as he knew the back of his hand a mention of something that may well be what is pictured in casual sketch at the back end of the other volume of these diaries, most astonishing—but grandfather Alexander was cooling down now, sipping his chocolate milk—and Sam had to go—the rain had stopped—and Alexander then told Jim but in a manner of someone dizzy still that the half-erased picture was—he stopped but seemed to feel he must go on and lowered his voice— the picture was just a small circle with corners, what looked like pointers, with angles spreading beyond it, lines running out at different lengths—but when you looked very hard at the parts you saw that two lines looked like a carpenter’s square, and one double diameter had dim curves above as below marking a sort of oval eye in the middle which looked like a carpenter’s level—,vhy did Jim not ask to see the picture?—and an odd dotted arc connected the angles with two other lines to make them a draftsman’s compass or either line into a plumb swaying a little before it found its true vertical— and these were (he didn’t really mind telling me this hush-hush old stuff) devices so important to the Society of Masons they kept them secret. But something was missing. I didn’t say politely, So what, Granddad? But he had something to do and the Indian kid whose job I should have had showed up for work and went on out to the garden where presently he and I had words which upset Alexander and incidentally we had a fight, Ira and I, a pretty bad one, and later Alexander gave me a Band-Aid but you should have seen Ira —and my grandfather asked me if I thought Ira would ever steal if he was this violent, and it was the only time I ever got angry and really angry, I remember, and disappointed in Alexander but he removed the pistol from the mantelpiece but told me he had done so and said not to tell Margaret, but one day I did: and the point of all this was that an Alsatian mathematician Morgan wandering around our West who incidentally once saw a mythical pistol you know of in the hand of a mestizo spy (for proliferation of arms seems inevitable) was a namesake forebear of the printing magnate Morgen (with an e) that presumed friend of Mayga with whom she and her husband were perilously strolling the day she fell off one of the scenic heights round Valparaiso harbor; but, more, the printing magnate has a brother Morgen who is a left-wing job printer—ring a bell?—as was the romantic lover Morgan (with an a) who threatened to divulge Masonic secrets and fled an upper New York State village jail and was joined by his girlfriend, a lawyer’s daughter, who met with Andrew Jackson in New York City because he loved her and she wanted to bargain for her reddish-golden-haired lover’s security, or Jackson wanted to hear how much Mason lore Morgan knew, or Jackson had been prevailed on to come, by another admirer of hers, Marion Hugo Mayne, who had suffered partial paralysis of his vocal cords (he says), represented an unusually righteous New Jersey newspaper whose support Jackson had had and still desired, and was (unbeknownst to the others) aware that the brave master-printer Morgan, exiled from an upper New York village to Philadelphia where he had taken up with such trade unionists as the newspaper publisher Heighton, had ensconced himself at a table in a far dark corner of the tavern. It is coincidence that our relative-diarist-historian M. H. Mayne (who records what anxiety Jackson’s adopted son caused by his note-of-hand debts—he in fact even "charged" a young female slave, according to Alexander, the only person in the family who actually read the diaries—though Jim felt them in his hands unopened tightening that sequence of undone duty, newspaper, father, hometown, and the further knowing of his mother’s recoverable personality and biography; and M. H. Mayne, because of his connections) was thus secret custodian of the incognito Morgan who, if he is not related to the Alsatian mathematician who en route from Mexican War to California Gold Rush was nearly murdered in the desert by the mestizo bearer of what came to be the Mayne family pistol, must be such collateral to the Alsatian as to compel other parallels, ours, Margaret’s, Spence’s, straight or warped if not worse for wear and non-wear, to forks as curious as that given us by our alternative Thunder Dreamer who we think also brought the New York Hermit’s Anasazi weather friend a Colt pistol that had found its way not absolutely curse-proof from the upshot of the Mexican War at Chapultepec where the father of that dying white settler whom the Thunder Dreamer said spoke a bit like one of the Germans of the Plains had begotten his son unexpectedly and darkling upon a Saxon-blond war correspondent so subtly male, or so beautifully so, as to reveal her female center to the blind passion of the in-fact-doomed man only in the strange retrospect of the next day when as a Winfield Scott volunteer he realized at the moment of dust and staccato voices when he was hit by a Mexican ball that the nape of his exquisitely frightened lover’s neck the night before had been a girl’s. And so as the wound and the knowledge that seemed to come with it turned him inside out, the glaze of his eyes might reflect or absorb that the hand snatching respectfully the Colt pistol he had dropped belonged to the future mother of his child, the white settler-to-be. And so the pistol or pistols trace back both to the Thunder Dreamer’s white settler’s blonde mother, an Anglo-feminist war correspondent who, when embraced, had been writing personal memoirs of Jackson, when even the angels happen to know that Marion Hugo Mayne enjoyed a convincing English accent for many years, or trace to an unequivocally male correspondent even more English and a compassionate Quaker as well, who had never been seen with a pistol until the night after he had been interrogated by none other than Marion Hugo Mayne, and then he succeeded in losing the pistol at cards to the very mestizo spy and far-sighted horse fancier who very nearly insisted on trading one of his mustangs to Marcus Jones when Jones on his adjustably corruga-cogged bicycle wheels happened upon the mestizo in the American desert just after the latter, having breakfasted indigestibly on some desert shrimp grown instantly from century-old eggs he had pickaxed out of a dry mudflat and watered with rain stored in a random cactus—had relieved the Alsatian mathematician Morgan of a foolscap paper containing a design and calculations that might prove valuable when in fact Morgan had it in his head and was interested only in finding an exit from the desert and preserving his life from the pistol that continued to stare him in the face even after his accoster who would nevei have fired that weapon with some curse on it had it back in his coat pocket preparatory to finding out how old the person pedaling toward them might be—Marcus Jones.

Mayn’s phone rang and he discovered brilliant tears of laughter sticking to his face and thought how Flick asked him about his work for God’s sake, but that was what she wanted to talk about at present, certainly in lieu of her mother, so let her, though she got flip. He hadn’t made to Flick in this astonishing letter some address he felt in the back of his demonstrably shallow brain pan, and as the phone stopped, he reached and dialed her again in Washington, and reached again the machine, to which he said, "I’m writing you a letter that’s cracking me up except I think some things in it are true; also I need reading glasses." She preferred the telephone to writing.

He felt at his elbow the typewriter, unused tonight, and at rest, ready for overdue copy on the Second Women’s Bank of Connecticut and Pennsylvania. At hand his pen, mightier than phone or machine à écrire or the liquor closet which was just four or five bottles standing on the old painted counter in the kitchen, an appropriate destination for a sentimentalist: yet this material spurred now by its own noxious threatener Spence came out so unsentimental that Mayn could get depressed, came out of the wrong orifice which must be a future designed to handle medium or low not high temperatures out between Earth and Moon in controlled environments colonized by individuals who had once each been two.

Not even supposed to be here in New York tonight, he told the Albuquerque woman; supposed to be someplace else. The Women’s Bank waits patiently for him. Had to tell his boss he’s going after all to World Meteorological Orgy’s spring congress, more talks about global weather network, what to do about drought in the Sahel, go to a new weather make clean break, flood-warning coordination, regional aqua pollution tied in with NASA’s long Johnson Space Center project in conjunction with federal agencies to get automated (i.e., "no human intervention") water-qual monit-system with sensors sensing bacteria and one gas chromatograph thanks to NASA Ames Research (as always) Center (let’s get potable!) while EPA’s dreaming total waste use for pilot apartment complex (or small city), will recycle people glass/metal, turn paper waste to hot water, so let’s economize as if people— let’s economize on our matter—while Mayn in person’s pouring a small four-D "mirror" exactly a third full of bourbon, draining the unfrozen water from under the surface ice of two trays of apparently permanently semi-defrosting fridge (fix-it? second-hand? new?): and sip-launching his body back to the large, humbly furnished living room whose floors could be scraped and twice polyurethaned, thinking, turning, turning, falling forward forward with sufficient inertia to carry an atmo or two with him, sharing information (witness the white 8/2 by 11 paper long-handed daughter-bound under the lamp beside the old black portable), divorced and all, yet summoned, summoned, and from this apartment that was "theirs" and’s now "his"—"his" and "theirs," a room full of so much tiempo it compacts into an empty obstacle to get through.

He drank off his bourbon, one and only one tonight or he’d get corned enough to mail this angelfood shit to his daughter who by instead not receiving it will achieve equality with her brother, his son, whom he knows only in imagination constantly split by Andrew’s blinding-binding disappointment at his dad’s calling it a day, he did not want to look at his son’s face. He buzzed the lobby, did not speak Spanish, learned that a man had asked for Mayn and rung the apartment and hung up saying nobody home and Manuel told him he’s surprised, but—What’d he look like?—Good-looking suit, good boots, dark blue pinstripe with red flower in buttonhole—you get the picture.

"But I was here. I picked up."

"Said he catch you the next time. He sound Spanish."

"Thanks, Manuel."

Mayn dialed the Albuquerque woman’s hotel and dropped the handwritten pages into the wicker wastebasket where they came together as a unit, and when asked if he had left a message before, he said, "Yes . . . Spence."

"Oh yes."

"I want her to meet me for breakfast, I forget what I said the first time."

"You said . . . you recall, I’m sure, sir."

"And did a well-dressed gentleman, blue pinstripe, slight Spanish accent, leave a message at the desk for her?"

"No, she had another phone call but he didn’t leave a message; we’re really not supposed to tell you that."

We’re not s’posed to tell you what we already told you. A memory misfires during orbit, o fires as i, i as o, a "bit-flip." Jot it down, then you can forget. But what if it don’t forget you? Mayn will turn into a phoneman like Spence, funds transferred by electric diaphragm—puts the receiver back down where it belongs. But dialed Amy’s number, eyes fired, with a faintly loaded sense in his hands of someone possibly dialing him direct to potential clot in bloodstream. But got a busy: but then, in the innovation-operative midst of busy signal, got Larry, but not to say Hello or to give what Mayn remembers he has half been waiting for from the founder of Obstacle Geometry, expounder of the Modulus, and determined non-victim of Open Marriage or the hoots and hollers of the opera basso’s weeks’ delayed departure and ("Off-off-4Center’ ") Hamletin negotiations down Larry’s hall of this multiple dwelling from which Larry is this evening absent—for he is at Amy’s of course in order to report that while briefly out purchasing (as Mayn thinks, the most rudimentary obstacle for them to get through) a pizza for the two of them, Larry suffered her loss; for upon reentering her unlocked home (after all even at her and his age), he found her trenchcoat gone from the kitchen, her wallet from the bedroom, her address book from the upright piano, her beret from a bowl molded into the back section and rear feathers of a large china goose leaving there her doubtless second set of housekeys glittering, valuable, seeming to invite Larry to leave. He was not too upset by thinking he had been forcing the pepperoni and sausage pizza baked by this Korean pizzeria at the corner upon Amy, to add that he was through chasing an older female when it was probably Mayn or her boss that she—no, no, Larry corrected himself, no, Jim, it’s jtist that I’ve had it, my dad now hates my mother, she’s really not coming back and she let us think she was (didn’t she?), and she phoned me from the Island to say she wanted me to live with her and her heavy-duty friend and hated herself for leaving for God’s sake.

Does the front door lock automatically or do you have to lock it yourself?

It locks automatically.

"It" was not the time to find out what Lar’ had come up with.

Nor was there time to find time—or, more, not to find time—to locate the simplest answer why "all this now," the answer that answers the most starts, or Why we—who often have to not understand Who, What, When, we are—are slowed coming to the illumination that should giddy us up. Because these many starts ain’t mysteriously endless; there comes a day (as we optimistically say when we must mean "an afternoon" when all clefts align to open our danger and opportunity e’en if but to a zen golfer conceived by a lone green golf course visited by the speed of sun’s light, yet we better mean a borrowed hour, a minute borrowed from a theory we might have heard had we been deaf to the violin or piano whose solo ye theory proved concerto to, for we found when we tested the Earth earlier that we grow abstract in inverse ratio to some relative loss of power we had not decided we wanted or not upon last acquaintance with our best selves, for we were so busy knowing the truth of a new, more limited theory of reincarnation, say, that nonetheless answered the most questions of all the competing theories, that we many of us missed the quiet power we were experiencing being thus reincarnate) so THERE COMES A DAY WHEN WE’Z done with starts and R been found by what we thought to find, which Mn’t all bad, for as one used to say re: Moon exploring, You find it, you got it: whereas in later days of the Locus 5, many of these privileged settlers who’ve been compacted each one out of two original Earth persons (in most cases acquainted to start with) reported an unsettled sense of lasting content on arrival, later thought by the thinkers of those plexi-axial sun-tuned torus-states to have been due to the mythically rich feeling due in turn to the indubitable source of each individual in this and other space-positive settlements of nothing but individuals, i.e., originally a pair of persons, mostly female-male, often female-female, occasionally male-male, depending on long-term needs though all (literally) united by a Locus T platform plate celled by a milliard electro-magmatic chip-templates jointed to form an ovaline elevator-like capsule so clear that as the templates throng two expecting bodies (but we already remember learning this but without remembering that if you describe what happens, you are responsible for it) as the Hermit learned, describing these and more usual atmospheric, if violent, lumen phenomena that signaled the Princess to take her leave, as they did the girl’s nesting bird-vehicle that rose to the challenge of a mountain-jawed cat when neither cat nor giant bird knew bait from hunter and the cat ate one egg and either disappeared into the future which was the egg’s scent picked up hours later by the hind-gland of a javelina thrown off its eating routine by a between-meals snack given it by the botanist Jones, or disappeared into the form of a sudden timber wolf so great in the shoulder, muzzle, and loins it transcended Pueblo lore that called it devil and was taken to be a real wolf, after all butchered in mid-air by the bird, an event for which the Hermit the day of these departures in his responsibility as Describer of the How and Reporter of the What was punished, but only with exile from that territory. But he returned as his own nephew years later to describe experimentally to the Navajo a gauge on the roof of a multiple urban dwelling to predict, through coastline configuration differences between light and heavy air masses as well as to describe to the underemployed Navajo a future Two-for-One process—in those days a pilot project—whereby the two expecting bodies who are presently to be one elsewhere are thronged with more radiance than their God-given cells know what to do with in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin straining to see a future, while an old-style woman or man now and then sent out like Mayn to report feels extra mortal next to these colons compacted by an economy so simple it’s more question than solution, such as what should be the minimum daily allowances of negotiated or unnegotiated love-merger for these new beings who are the tacit annunciation of what they’ve been compacted to and are experiment they are making with their lives and for which they may be said to be answerable in the sense that a "respons-" is an "answer" and if the Two-for-One origin holds vivid its internalized dialectic should comprehend both question and answer (e.g., in issues of the reality of property out there, or the legal obligation to repay capital borrowed from Earth when, for example, the Moon ore from which so much of the torus’s oxygen is farmed does not create a "debt situation" though it comes from an organic Earth satellite, and the near-panic demand for the soccer-ball-scale tomatoes grown rapidly in high humidity in the frothy soil whipped from lunar earth revalues the interspatial basic-barter objects) in these great wheel settlements with their gravity-inducing rotations that make at some hours and angles the giant spokes seem to turn backwards or bend their shimmering into fixity like the outer radiation-shield rim which seems to rotate with us we already recall and keeps down stresses on its light, vast structure paved with Moon mineral which communicates by reflected light as below through the ingested beans of its new soil a sense of secrets waiting in the otherwise open-and-shut "Given": so that as the boy Joseph Smith consuming and consumed by a pre-Mormon fungi-mold strangely empowering the rye loaves his mother baked him one harsh winter in the New York frontier village of Palmyra near Seneca Falls a stone’s throw from Lake Ontario conceived of secret documents and later hallucinated where to find them (though he was not responsible for their being gold or for plural-marriage doctrines implicit in the tablets), so did some Two-into-One econocolons eat beans and know in their hearts there had been built into the torus structure, like a color and promise of which the artist is but half aware, a point of cleft-potential at which the torus may be enlarged and enlarged again, boosting lengthward acreage for sorghum, potatoes, tomatoes, and, yes, the very beans that yield the secret of the growth point so that production will far exceed the mean projection of Earth planners.

Which doesn’t begin to explain why James Mayn would go so far as to really feel his periodic conviction so uncharacteristically broached to the woman Mayga that he is in the future, the largely humdrum if optically violent future, and presents himself to the less economical present like a shade cast back upon a past not yet distinct, though give the man credit he is at one with the diva Luisa quoted in Celebrity Aura as wanting to change her shadow, quiero mudar de sombra, minus her footnote that the words are not hers.

There is, we admit, one discrete break in that shadow of Mayn’s, a gap shaped sometimes like a gnomon parallelogram, ofttimes like a cleft that later Mayn might wonder if the Hermit-Inventor had ever tried to explain in responsible scientific terms; a gap, though, in this shadow as if light or some body of it cast its counter- or non-shadow across the shadow’s effort of warning or survival or understanding emanating we thought from Mayn but possibly a vision he a mere one among others gladly enters into. But that gap is for one thing our amazement at how we could get here without grasping the concrete sources in our collective childhood as if we had had to forget them to get ahead—in order, say, to figure how to inject weather into a "weath-erless" place without ruining everything, balance of payments, bonfires in our souls, constant climate. The Hermit-Inventor could not always believe that lava from a volcano to the west was fundamentally blood of the great giant killed by the Hero Twins a very long time ago. But the inference he had made between volcanic ash up-ploded into cloud layers and cloud piles and high-altitude half-invisible colloids and, on the far hand, wind transport gave him pause on his way home, exiled upon the Prince’s disastrous seduction by the Princess away from his people, which coincided with the Anasazi’s death, which had very little impact on the Navajo—not because of ancient resentments against the people they had displaced or even wronged by the inevitable momenta of progress or accident of irrigational habits, but because of the Anasazi’s low, low profile so low that when Mena the Fuegian zoologist had doubled the Moon upon the pistol that Alexander took off the mantel that spring of ‘46 when Margaret was in New York for the death of the Hermit her friend (not because Alexander expected Ira Lee to avenge his "massacre" in the flower bed by simple theft but because he had derived from the two distinct diary volumes one new idea of where the pistol had been before Chapultepec) Mena who brushed her southern teeth with juniper at first experienced nothing peering into the ancient healer’s high cell sixty to a hundred feet up a laddered cliff (her forehead bound with yucca thongs) except a smell of feathers and untreated ammonia and Sonora bread sculpture, the goodness of the ancient baked dough sealed in with shellac so that shapes of weather goddess or of mandala, of painted house or animal seem to hold the hand-ground grain of the bread’s potential.

A profile as low as Mayn’s, who might long since have found himself far-sightedly gunning a hired late-model along the early, smokier stretch of the Jersey Turnpike rushing to unearth Marion Hugo’s diaries to put together some phenomenon in volume one with a known design drawn into the end of volume two, if he hadn’t had better grist for his attention whether it was his work or his unestranged but combative daughter, her welfare, her work, her voice now often machined from the nation’s capital yet in talk with her father taken more seriously than he let her know when, in the middle of reporting her and her boyfriend’s dioxin trace from Florida through Minnesota’s flumes into a west she entered after her father left, she demanded why he so coolly reported destructive strip mining and in a letter painted the great galleon of Ship Rock into the picture, including relations between women and men throwing in the Gemini astronauts and a taint of archaeology, when a few miles beyond the Rock on the other side Indian miners used by the government to mine uranium wheeze out their half life with lung fibrosis caused by radioactive particles which like asbestos in New Jersey and statistics which strive to outdo themselves will live on after their human sacrifices to the Great Spirit are gone.

Irrelevant to the Four Corners, the father said bluntly.

But, without time to check out Where and How that voice comes his way only What it says, O.K. if you describe a thing you are also responsible for it according to Indian common law by which the Hermit-Inventor was personally exiled from the site of the Navajo Prince’s departure, whereas now Mayn-pere learns you are responsible for it if you don’t describe it. Which is of course good Anglo law in the case of headless bicyclists (left their helmet at home with built-in head) or unidentified vehicle upside down on sidewalk (wheels won’t stop turning so you can’t get close), i.e., accidents you pass by or over and do not report. But the Four Corners energy problem (read project, read diverge, read dig, read Lurgi transformation, read matter, read people) is One Thing, New Mexico, while the expenditure of Indian miners at Red Rock is Another Horse, Arizona, and you take the making of history one buck at a time.

And he feels Spence’s long, intimate voice printing some irreversible code on his daughter’s remote voice though she would not give him the time of day or on her answering tape ask for it: until Mayn has found growing relations someone else likely has cached inside him overflowing from him or into him he may never put into words sticking with the trouble he’s already got while toying with what it would feel like to be his daughter Flick, who when he left the marriage said extreme words he shrugged off until Norma quoted them back to him from a woman in her workshop who asked her parents while they were arguing at dinner, "Why did you bother to have me?" whereupon the husband exclaimed, "We didnt ‘bother’ ": Mayn felt more securely what it would be like to be getting over a concussion diagnosed a couple of days late but updated from the ripped self of an Indian halfback ploughed under Margaret’s topsoil to the skull of a modestly intelligent average-hard-working newsman who once vowed to his departing Pearl Myles he would never go into journalism it was too much in the family, and can now thirty years later feel the bones of his head after a rough night of running around from the Chilean’s foundation to Dina’s hotel to a couple of operatic apartments to a street corner near Penn Station connected by pay phone to a Puerto Rican corner far uptown coincidentally near the Museum of the American Indian dreaming through the City’s rebuff of larger quarters at the other end of the Island of Hills looking out at the harbor and its fixed and moving lights—coming together headache-wise so he suddenly dunno if his caring for his daughter and his son (but it’s Flick who’s been connected by the correspondent-carpenter Lincoln, whose voice he now knows he has heard before and on a machine, to Spence) totally shrouds three figureheads, the Mayga, the Sarah, and the Navajo Prince fixing on each other’s relative motion approaching each other if not him on rough-shod courses of disappearance, for the Navajo Prince still armed with the Colt revolver acquired from the late healer was last seen running up and down inside the great Statue in the aging harbor having seen him pass as he rose up the winding metal stairway only a sweet mist, a smoke of summer humidity escaped from the city, smelling though of those blue berries he had studied the uses of, for which he was also known by the Navajo name of the ceremonial plant they grow on, the Ironwood, or, in Navajo, the Ma’iidaa’ Prince—so Mayn dunno any more, because one thing’s sure: that sonofagun Spence doesn’t work on spec but if Mayn can be threatened into seeing how these three disappearances are relations of each other and report it, then by the old, well-kept wisdom, he’s responsible for their connection which might not be worth the collateral price of being himself responsible for each individually, though those responsibilities would range so wide you would need a solution happier than Spence and simpler than that counter-Masonic rite of mingled flesh among Indians and Anglos in northern New York and central Oklahoma investigated by a President who, upon finding that actual flesh was taken from the paired participants and joined in an aromatic fire, could not believe the reports of greater and greater regeneration, and so he did not participate, although he was not well, though well enough to trace through a man of many turns, an itinerant chronicler, another man accused of having given more and more of himself to these thermal rites, first an arm, then an arm and a leg, then the fingers he had once merely joined whorl to arch with his Indian counterpart neophyte but now for the ritual moment gave up thus risking his trade of master printer—then at last entrails and, it is said, brain or parts thereof, always to be joined with kindred sections of an Indian co-celebrant, each time regenerating at a lightning speed seemingly at odds with loving intricacies of regrowth and cellular resilience instituted in shortcut form by Grace Kimball at a special session promising rebirth without pain, which was less than it gave, which was help in the form of such ordinary tales as a young black aspiring actress’s, picked up in the park by an older man teaching his granddaughter to ride a bike, or, as Norma passed on to Mayn because she could not get very far with Gordon, her own husband, Grace’s own long story of a short marriage, once-a-month pocket billiards at a tavern, the booze softening the game until at a late stage anger and despair settled them down to shots they couldn’t believe they’d made in the morning (or remember); the jerking off under the covers after he was asleep; the creeping friendship possible in a brother-sister deal that rediscovers incest in order to taboo it, till suddenly it was At Last—alone at last, she hears the addict’s words to the romance of his bride but now adapted to being single in order to double and triple and multiply herself forever, alone at last for at last she left him, but in that curious modern manner of kicking him out so he seemed to have been the one to leave, someone was waiting for him some ten month-miles away, a tough, sexy mother not just for him but for his unborn children, who will get help themselves someday—not quite Grace’s help, that night of the bland, adapted, "quick" form of the old Anglo-Indian flesh merger rite, in the much better form late in the session of the interminable good stories with which Norma repays Mayn for his—his what? his guessed-at stories, but his plants, his attention, his face, his very male, gentleman freedom from (not violence but) bad language, dirty jokes which she couldn’t imagine him remembering even at the club (like Gordon’s how do you tell if your lover is gay? answer: his cock tastes like —), but Norma’s story that sounds so close to her it might be hers, of the man who found in Open Marriage (as opposed to Closed Marriage!) a sanction for outer sex but unlike his wife, who knew the difference between feeling and above-average sex, fell in love and, in addition to concealing night after night from a small beloved child what was going down, kept from himself the right to leave the marriage like the house until ... as Norma said, Mayn’s eyes seemed to have dried up into a stare so full of knowledge she found Y&rself crying, until Mayn said, "And one day the kid found out," and Norma, "Worse; the other woman became friends with the kid—it gets worse still," and Mayn, "I know," as if he were responsible—until Norma, knowing at the moment of loving him that she wasn’t going to have any affair and wasn’t going in for Open Marriage and not only because it wasn’t open while she simultaneously did not know if the "long-term" relation (read -ship) with Gordon was good enough, found words for what she felt before she knew the feeling, "You have that quality, Jim, of knowing, I mean without having to give advice and tell about yourself, and it’s strength and helpful strength, too, and don’t ever think it isn’t."

He had not known that he ever "thought it wasn’t"—and he was grateful to hear—in a way about power. And felt Norma had something more to say.

What had Mayga had to say at the end (this end)? Something he had felt almost not withheld. Her few notes about the future in a notebook in front of her on the bar. Random material last seen there, always with a surfacing capability, the mortal matter miscellaneous of Jim Mayn’s extended family so near-flung we could take responsibility for Larry and not go far wrong.

He was about to say to Norma, "You find yourself in other people," but it sounded stupid in advance though he knew Norma would have appreciated it. He said, "I gather my grandmother’s old yarns got into your workshop."

"I wasn’t there that time," said Norma; "but Grace said Clara, the wife you know of that exiled Chilean economist, came out of herself a little and got pissed off."

"What about?—the medicine man that dies and becomes a cloud for a time?"

"You must have been talking to Lincoln. No; calling a Navajo chief’s son a prince and having him follow a white girl like that and lose his pistol."

"They had quite original weather in those days," said Mayn.

During these few days of 1977 when all that had been started threatened to slide into action, Mayn did not ask his daughter her reported version of how the Navajo Prince had ended. (And were there princes among the Navajo? He had never been one of your know-it-all newspapermen.) Yet—perhaps because he hadn’t worked out lately on the Nautilus machines sitting back straining into the mirrored distance, strapped in next to a well-known left-fielder who visited the city in the off-season to buy art—Mayn felt in his actual bones a gap between invented events he was familiar with and some sterner presence shadowing him: a gap between on the one hand such acts once issuing from the Statue in the aging harbor as that unconvincing metamorphosis of the Navajo Prince into the easternmost Thunder Dreamer ever seen, though Thunder Dreamer in but one or two respects, at his critical juncture with the Princess’s faithful admirer Harflex, a metamorphosis due to the Prince’s having ingested a collossal dollop of the uniquely low noctilucent cloud somewhere between Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Ford (or Fjord) of Choor, and on the other hand, some deflected intelligence that, possibly his own once, became now some sterner presence or surveillance—his daughter, who he had suddenly heard from his son had for all she said about operating by telephone, set out to be a writer; his wife, who he’d heard from Flick was getting married to the New Hampshire gent with the permanent tan; Mayn’s own girlfriend Jean, who (one) overnight switched from science journalism to science itself—nutritional biochemistry and global agriculture, a huge career decision at twenty-nine, that she said (and he couldn’t see it) had come to her four years ago in a motel near Cape Kennedy because of Jim, she laughed that it was while they were lying in bed digesting three dozen local oysters consumed at Captain Billy’s, a preparation for a disappointing press conference and a wonderful walk on the beach where there had been no shells but many stars; and beyond Flick, Joy, and Jean, and underneath every stone, that family less Spence, who, on the night Albuquerque’s Dina West called from a New York hotel, and the Chilean economist’s research aide Amy was absent without keys from her apartment, and Larry who had forgotten to press his button entering the elevator found on emerging at his floor at two in the morning that well-known opera singer famously dressed up like a Mexican and her auburn hair built upwards like a hunk of furniture kissing a tall dark man in a blue pinstripe suit and very expensive real-silver-tooled black western boots, goaded Mayn to get somewhere before Spence did: for Spence all activities so long as the dollar flag was up, or, if the mind is a taxi, down, were as equal as distances our bent head unleashes or compacts squaring change with the obstacles to grasping it: so Mayn, who thought he had never dreamed and had been told by Mayga that if he could only, well, recall his dreams, he would not have to lose any sleep over his life, seemed to find his way from his mother’s indispositions in the forties when she was steadily departing yet never seen to do more than be absent in another form: to Grace Kimball’s 1977 apartment at a time she convened the growing Body-Self: to 1965, when a frail, failing grandfather reported how mad Margie used to get at Jimmy and how they became friends again and Jim was the one who came up with the idea that because of shifting collaborations on, for example, territorial and shared weathers, the Hermit of New York and the six-hundred-year-old retired Anasazi healer might have been one and the same (but no): to 1950, when Margaret could not visit him in Pennsylvania where he was in college because she was sick, she had these lumps in her intestines or something, so he came to see her on an impulse on a weekday, she didn’t look so good, puffy along the cheekbone like his Boston aunt who drank only during the day, and Margaret was also a little weary in the focus of her eyes’ color, but able to love Jim and be irritated by him, both of them arrested and at rest, he, half-proud of stupidly jamming and badly spraining his wrist boxing, needed a day off ("What do you mean you needed a day off, for heaven sake?" his grandmother snorted) and so had cut a class where he’d just gotten a B-plus on the midterm, and angry and anxious at having left without telling his girlfriend, who had quite a temper, to put it mildly, as he told Margaret grimly, and he’d like to throttle her. His grandmother listened to him for a moment, so alone and established in her sunny bedroom that the rest of the house felt entirely contained in Jim’s grandfather, who had gone to the post office and come back and was downstairs somewhere, not here where the sun’s light polished the brass of the walnut highboy, and boughs with secret early buds on them swayed in the wind coasting a roof of dark shingles, and though she said she was tired having written a dozen letters in the last three, four days Margaret did not mention his not having written her a card in the hospital though it was a month ago now, the hated hospital, and she had never been in one as a patient before and felt that the purpose of New York was to go to Schumacher’s to buy material or to Rockefeller Center to sit in the ice-side restaurant and have clam chowder and grilled-cheese sandwiches and a glass of dry sherry, and so Jim had had to find out from his grandfather, whom he didn’t have to ask when Alexander phoned to say he wasn’t going to let Margie travel, that her operation had been exploratory, what they called "stretching," and he was more upset than she that she had to go back and have a second, because she absolutely wouldn’t.

"If she has a temper, enjoy it now while you can," said Margaret. "Don’t put it off," she said, and then shaking her head went into hoots of laughter like the "Hoo-hoo" with which she and her cousin but never Jim’s mother entered a friendly house without ringing the bell—"No; my gracious, don’t put it off," as if to say, I’m sure you never do—"but it wasn’t just that one class you cut today and don’t you have class Friday?"

And while they discussed such things that had all been discussed at Christmastime as President Truman, who would never fill Mr. Roosevelt’s shoes but wasn’t trying to, thank goodness, though Jim’s girl’s father thought Harry couldn’t help being an improvement—and Margaret said she had to like a man who bellyached in public about having to be two people, President and an ordinary human being, man, husband, and father, and she and Jim discussed whether the Washington music critic Hume would need a new nose ‘f he ever met Margaret Truman’s dad, who had promised he would, and whether the war in Korea would be done with by the time Jim graduated because at least we had a man with experience in General MacArthur running things, although his mother had run him, and Margaret questioned the dark glasses, but would Truman actually give MacArthur the atomic bomb to use as he had said he would?—no, he would loan it to him—while Jim’s Poly Sci professor got half the class mad for saying the aim of a political party is to get elected . . .

Jim’s grandmother was marginally pensive there in the sunny room, a scent of soap, her oval translucent soap, coming from the bathroom; thoughtful, he sensed—though she was so curiously remembered by him in ‘77 that he was startled to see he couldn’t fully feel any more the time or its span then in 1950 back to his mother’s sudden absence in ‘45, though was able to recall not knowing the terrible wonder that took place the afternoon after he had seen Margaret in ‘50 (while a section of his mind was disloyally stuck back in his college town, gymnasium at the head of the street, movie theater, bookstore, soda fountain, package store)—thoughtful, he could recall her in ‘77 through that sprightly conversation which turned then into what she seemed to be really thinking: anyway he remembered no special sequence—only, at some center of their talk, "Better get it now because you don’t get it after you’re gone": which was, yes, reincarnation, that mortally old friend they joked about that used to come up in the old Indian powwows they had had when they both agreed when you died you died: while when-you-died-you-died didn’t mean that your buried flesh or ashes or even the miles of compact intestines and liver and all the little sacs your personal undertaker (Margaret had a good gruesome side) flushed down the drain didn’t enrich the crops and the seas, too, and the hereditary upgoing and downcoming atmosphere, so what had been an invisible particle of a "you" wound up in the blood of an angry Indian with high blood pressure or in the womb of a terror-stricken adolescent in a suburb of perhaps Rome scared to tell her father or in the tip of an elephant’s tongue (they would laugh, the two of them, even hearing the grandson’s father calling from the porch) or the hind-mounted scent-gland of a nightmare-white-mouthed javelina during threatening weather trying to smell its way home to Mineral del Monte or a Mexico City alley or some impossibly southern pampa it retained only the faith of in its shins and eyelids that in turn reach the garnish of a fat, filmy king’s Egyptian table when the pastrami from New York didn’t fly in on time, but we were not meaning reincarnation by the book, from moral escalation (you white in you next life) or inclination upwards or downwards if there even was a ranking, and witness Owl Woman all in this life abstracting her angelic Body-Self into a hole in a saguaro cactus in time to sing to herself as if from far away and to other auditors from any angle and the illusion of many distances

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling

which for a second gives pause to the exploiters of saguaro potential interrogating the unthreatenable botanist Marcus Jones preoccupied more with how in desert plants the green stem may take over the job of photosynthesis than with danger to himself, who will regrow a lost finger no more than a crocodile tooth sows the desert with the pitless prune, and all stop to listen to the cactus song, and the tortured but cheerful botanist is sure the plant is bearing animal fruit to yield peace on earth if not carried too far: while Alexander brings three cups of tea he says he steeped too long, three slices of lemon on a silver butter plate, six store-bought lemon-flavored cookies on another plate, and "No pills," observes Margaret ("only make you feel better," retorts the husband): until he leaves the old chums alone so they rejoin some dispersed twists of their old reincarnation agreement which seems to include a quite other agreement not to discuss Sarah: until (. . . something . . .) just before he left her to go (only downstairs, Gramma) to help Alexander peel the potatoes ("But you go downstreet and let your father know you’re alive"—"You mean, let him know I’m here?" for Alexander hadn’t answered the door before and Mel had gone away doubtless thinking his mother-in-law was sleeping), she told Jim her visit among the Indians had been dry and difficult, beautiful but hard-working, white man came by with a beard, and a child whom she sometimes cared for thought it was wool, and on being asked by him who her father was, the child said, "My father is unknown," and the man peeled off a couple of chili peppers for them to eat with bread, and the hot didn’t faze the child while when the man asked Margaret what she thought she was doing there among the Indians and she said, "Just living," the brave young man who was the chief’s son and who was her particular friend but was afraid of lightning and she wasn’t, came up and answered for her and never lost his temper; another time she was alone with the women weaving, and she got up and went wandering and heard singing from a hogan and was invited in, incredibly, and there was corn pollen everywhere and the people sang late and when she asked her gentleman friend’s aunt, Tall Salt, what it meant, Tall Salt didn’t joke with her as usual but said there was "a lot of story" in it she didn’t need to know but someday she would—and then was when Margaret reckoned they expected her to stay; and another time Margaret discovered she was thought to be a healer, they had seen this in her, and she had not known, but when Small Canyon Wind got terribly sick in his eightieth year and legs swole up so his bones got smaller and smaller like to burst, she was told by a voice she didn’t identify (for Navajos don’t go around telling each other what to do) to go to the old man and pray outside his hogan, a white Anglo girl darkly tanned in cotton skirt dyed red, and she went and prayed whatever of the People’s prayers she found she knew. They came to her and closed her eyes, these prayers, and she held out her hands and their trembling got uncontrollable, and she heard a man say, Yes, yes, and she held out her hands further and further, feeling a lightning or very white sun come down out of the heavens as if balancing things out that had been unbalanced, and her hands trembled with some force she then knew had always been there at rest and shown now only in the smallest quantity so she was afraid, and she found she was reaching out to one of the singers standing there outside the sick man’s house and he was being pointed out diagnostically by the hand trembling, and so this man went right inside having been picked by Margaret to sing and he did and the sick old man through faith or luck or magic or caring was genuinely healed that night, which prepared him for death the following week; and Margaret even helped the chief’s son’s mother who at her age still had a fontanel that suppurated like a saint’s wounds or from some possibly external sinister mysterious cause and didn’t heal when oiled with a secret vegetable and "actually bubbled with its own pulse which either drove her mad or was the sign of a distemper she had independently arrived at" (subtle differences quickly stated, for Margaret had a very good brain): and she had reached a "personality" there with those people where she was another person, she couldn’t describe it except as temporary, but got to believing what Tall Salt assured her, that like the lightning above them that she had an understanding with, a sacred life inside her guided her arm when she let it and made it longer at times and moved her arm-hand with a—"well, call it sympathy, Jim, I don’t believe I have it now, though if I did then, let it rest." Did she say that? Her voice came equally from all those distances, 1950, 1965, now from a nearby 1977 apartment Mayn hadn’t set foot in, lighting the way back to her love and personality, and equally back to 1893 and the epic easterly trek of ‘94, and the forties of his mother and his growing up; so that when he had become interested in Ernie Pyle’s war reporting long after the fact, he had run into an Indian bridge builder in Canada who laughed about the Navajo language, its fabled difficulty, and told Mayn what Mayn (quin-repente-quoian) instantly recognized, but from where? from the newspapers during the War (though he didn’t follow the War like Norma’s Gordon) or from a movie? till this night in 1977 he recalled circuitously the day in 1950 and, turned through the corner of his unchanging eye which was doubtless as empty as his repossessed apartment, heard Margaret: "They didn’t make up their minds if they wanted me to really know their language. It’s so hard they used pairs of Navajos as radiomen in the Pacific Theater, because who knows Navajo?"

No, they didn’t believe in reincarnation, neither Navajo nor grandson and grandmother. Those fellows running the unemployed march in 1894 believed in reincarnation, but Margaret preferred the Great Unknown . . . big handsome gent who proposed military-style farms for the unemployed and who kept his identity secret until one day he seemed to turn into another person just by being identified at last as, not after all Captain Livingstone of the British Army encountered by a traveling man in a hotel during the Chicago Fair, nor one of Uncle Sam’s shrewdest Secret Service men, but as A. P. B. Bozarro (or Pizarro), a manufacturer of blood medicine at South Peoria.

No doubt there occurred isolated cases of reincarnation, Margaret observed, staring so deeply into Jim’s eyes he thought it wasn’t all funny. Special reincarnation? he said. She sighed. Why did people want to complicate things by coming back twenty years later for a second or third chance? Oh, he disagreed there, he thought people deserved a second chance. Oh, they deserve it all right, his grandmother murmured, and seemed to laugh quietly but for some reason he hadn’t been sure she was laughing. He thought she said, It’s still in me. But his uncertainty now in 1977 slung him along a curve of silly will back to the last century, thence forward to this moment in 1950, for he hadn’t been sure if he had heard her, and it made him the same person as now in ‘77, same immortally dumb body shouldering his attachment to her so it made him dizzy or lumpy of mind, pulled him out of shape, doubtless more formed by her than by his regular uptown-downtown father or the gap of his mother, so he had to get away, out of the room, downstairs; but she was drowsy anyhow, the frown deepening as her eyelids got heavy, and he saw the thing that had been in the corner of his eye as he got up to go peel potatoes. It was a medium-size gray envelope with a stamp on it and Jeanette Many’s name and address, and under it another envelope with only the place visible, which was a town in Pennsylvania, with trees the shape of girls if he had had night dreams, the town he had come from that very day, and he wondered if it was a check, he hadn’t been sending his laundry home lately in the big cardboard suitcase Margaret had given him, a check and the laundry no connection none whatever, but personal mail is personal mail, and who else did she know in that town, certainly not his girlfriend except by reputation, intuition, generalization, and old wit.

His grandfather when they curled the potato skins carefully away from the cool, pear-like moistness of the white did not speak of Margaret: he asked what Jim was going to do; Jim said, Maybe law; definitely not business, maybe a field geologist for an oil company, maybe professional sports management —he didn’t remember what he said except his grandfather was irked, and Jim thought, Touchy, probably having to nurse Margaret.

Jim said, Maybe marry money and live abroad for a while, some similar gag he didn’t much recall later but then was answered by what he did recall, in so many words: "Society’s immoral and immortal," said his grandfather; "it can do anything it wants, any crazy thing, but you can’t kill it." And something also about fragments that survive, laughing at you after you’re gone—that sort of thing.

She was asleep at suppertime, woke up like a drugged child, drank half a glass of sherry, swallowed just one bite of "shark" (the ham steak Alexander had broiled with numerous bendings over to look into the oven), and half a banana, and dozed in her chair. Upstairs again in her bedroom she came very much awake, frowning. He asked who she had written to. People she owed, she said. He could hear her voice in her letters. In 1977 he thought how close his mother’s death had been to both of them then in 1950. (A Russian Five-Year Plan!) And on the wings of such trivia as Spence, who seemed, on the morning after Amy left her apartment and apparently did not return, part and parcel, pocket and contents, of a life lived between old questions unasked or boring to ask, and a mass of fact unneeded, Mayn phoned his neighbor Norma to tell her of the difference Margaret had made between him and his little brother Brad. But first thing in the morning Norma and the two girls and Gordon (who answered) were all maneuvering around the apartment, which was slightly smaller than Mayn’s, breakfasting, playing the radio, dressing, doubtless undressing and dressing again, someone asking what it was like out, everything up to the higher levels of spirit where he could smell each toasting particle of toast, honey gasketing the thread of the jar—and Mayn flashed on Norma trudging humorously into the lobby after a hard day, her legs, her charity—and after insisting on speaking to her over Gordon’s faint anger, he could then only ask if she knew if the woman Clara had been in touch with Grace Kimball and if Norma knew whether Clara and her husband were in town, he needed to know—but Norma, who said, No, she didn’t know, asked, Are you all right? What is it? So he remembered being married and an old raincoat of his that didn’t repel the rain but he went on wearing it, and, saying goodbye to the dear woman, who said, You and Kimball ought to meet, he felt a concrete thing in the corner of his sleepless eye like something that should be moving but wasn’t, or wasn’t there but had been: he could only tell himself how he had accepted his grandmother’s words that evening—he was probably thinking of his girl angry or his father wanting to see him, though to talk about what?—yet Jim had brought his mother up: Do you think about her, Gramma? Oh yes. It wasn’t really us she was leaving. No, but there’s no way of knowing, without asking her. It brought Brad and my father together. Well, they were alike. That’s true. You took it well, Jim, you let it rest. I don’t know, Gramma. No, you knew a lot in your heart, so did your girlfriend—what’s happened to Anne-Marie?—but your little brother was another story.

Was she that bad off, Gramma?

Sarah? Well, we were all raised to get married and stay married, and she was ill with anemia though maybe that didn’t count, maybe it was that trip to France to the conservatory when she was only a girl.

But you went exploring when you were nineteen.

I almost went too far.

You spent three nights in jail for that woman who axed the painting.

Not when I was nineteen.

What was its name?

The Rokeby Venus, in London. There were demonstrations here.

Braddie accepted it, he knew she wasn’t coming back, he knew she was dead!

But he was so little, Jimmy, and so close to her; I told him all I could, he kept asking and I told him I held myself responsible for being too strict when she was in her teens and even afterward and she went abroad all right to study music but we didn’t let her stay a whole year—we kept an eye on girls in those days.

Did Brad want to know a whole lot?

Oh we got quite close the last year or so.

And you told him a lot?

Oh it’s all things you figured out for yourself, and, gracious, Brad’s just a little bit too nice, sensitive and all, but we don’t laugh much; we had serious talks about how people got to be very unhappy in their home life, and he sent me the most funereal flowers in the hospital.

He kissed her goodnight, he heard Alexander in the next room, he saw that Margaret did not expect him to stay or necessarily to pay her a visit the following morning, which was Friday, he never felt he had to explain himself with her, but wasn’t there then in ‘50 and now in ‘77 this gap a part of you was always passing through? Memory kept things from being over.

Go away and come back light-months later and you’re the same person, pulse back to normal, etcetera; nothing’s happened, where’ve you been? Alive there, alive here. But if dead here, get out fast. But he had been mad at her for talking about his mother in that way to Brad. All times were equal and the spaces between if you wanted.

He phoned Washington, early as it was, and realized he was thinking of poor old reliable business-as-usual Ted in a far-off time zone of California, but Flick wasn’t home. A friend had phoned a few days ago to say his wife and son—for he was legally separated—had had their apartment broken into and the super was threatened with a knife, and the thieves, like bad movers, had cracked a mirror; the man’s son had called his dad collect, secretly—the man was upset and Mayn had been too busy to talk and hadn’t called back but would. A film maker had phoned to ask him to play mixed doubles and to inquire how far they were into the lightning-mapping project and were they going to use U-25? Mayn had business in Connecticut and he had been up all night. Amy was not home or at her foundation where Mayn and Larry had talked to the watchman; and the Chilean economist didn’t answer his home phone at two A.M. And Mayn needed reading glasses, his eyes were tired, and the thing persistently existing in the corner of his eye would turn into Spence if he didn’t get some sleep but he didn’t have time, or into a mountain of mind-bending mineral slag Dina West had evoked with the merest of references: and all Mayn could think was that death leads us to reincarnation, and he had a glass of orange juice to prove his reality, and whereas normally he would have to have someone to talk to to think old things over, it was the reverse now, with Norma anyway, and he heard himself saying in answer to Ted’s "You’re pretty hard on that little so-and-so," "Yeah, we all have a little Spence in us" for Ted to carry on, in Mayn’s affectionate imagination, "Spence has more than most."

Where did he come from? Mayn didn’t even know. But maybe he would have to see. The phone rang and he reached it before the second ring to hear his daughter’s low-pitched, expectant voice identifying him.

"Just the person I wanted to talk to."

"Well, this guy Spence phoned me—"

"Long distance?"

"Here in New York. Who’s he with?"

"Himself, Flick. Stay clear."

1 ‘Well, I didn’t think it was a Senate subcommittee but I think he bothered you once or twice before."

"How come he knew where to phone you in New York? That’s more than I know."

Flick gave her father a number and said it was her friend Lincoln’s, the woman who had called him after being called by the obnoxious Spence. "But he must be on to something, Daddy."

The corner of his eye was full again. He saw the wastebasket by the desk before he’d half turned to find it empty. The hand-written pages of his letter to his daughter weren’t there. They’d disappeared during the night. He had been out for three or four hours.

"I wrote you last night, m’dear."

"O.K., that’s a good coincidence, but ... Daddy—you know everything—when your grandmother committed suicide—"

"What!"

"—you told me you were away camping with your girlfriend and having a fight the whole weekend and you didn’t hear until late Sunday night—"

"What has this to do with Spence?" Mayn intoned, but didn’t want to hear.

"Did an old teacher of yours come all the way from Minneapolis and show up at the cemetery and upset Alexander?" Mayn saw the children playing in the backyard in Windrow, their great-grandfather in a broad-brimmed straw hat about to let go of his lemonade glass when the girl with long, light-brown hair races over, giggling at her brother, and takes the glass as it slips from the fingers, which wakes the old man up, who insists on taking the glass from Flick. "Did she come all the way from Minnesota?"

It was drizzling and his bus didn’t get in till after the burial, and his grandfather was uncommunicative and Jim felt horrible at getting to the house when a crowd of people were eating deviled eggs and slicing turkey and a big glazed ham and he felt he still wasn’t there yet. He told his daughter this, and her voice coming back sounded flat, like after he had left his family and would phone Joy and the children and only Flick would talk to him but with a special unwillingness in representing the other two: "And did she meet someone in the group at the cemetery whose uncle had adored your grandmother and said he would have been proud of her decision?" His grandfather took him aside and told Jim that that woman Myles had been "bothering us" again, and Alexander had finally asked her very quietly did she want him to tell her what the gas smelled like and show her the identical messages all over the living room and the back porch saying DON’T LIGHT MATCHES? And Jim had been aware of listening indelibly to what was being said but in order to get it so firm that he could consign it right away from him, but it did not all get consigned, because he remembered, but did not tell his daughter, "This time ..." (said Miss Myles)—"What?" his grandfather said—"there’s no doubt . . ."—"About what?" said Alexander—"About why" was what Pearl Myles had said. The voices in the living room and dining room were not hushed and they drove Jim out onto the porch as if they were a clamor sifting him, dividing and dividing him.

"Spence might get himself buried," said the father calmly.

"And Daddy, I couldn’t decide if he was crazy or not, I mean maybe he’s dangerous but he’s sort of up front, obnoxious but I mean why didn’t he ask you about that printer Morgan who was mixed up with a relative of ours? I mean, what do I care about all those people, but there seemed to be Chilean fathers mixed up with Masonic lodges past and present and two daughters we’re supposed to be involved with, but I don’t believe it, any more than I believe that a German submarine had anything to do with me that surfaced one late afternoon off the Jersey shore and helped a person escape to South America who had a banned opera in her head and was either daughter or great-niece to a strong woman who nonetheless found time to listen to mountains think or knew some people who had—does that mean anything to you?"

"I don’t know a thing about Chilean opera, but I remember the story about the sub. There was a waterspout out there the same day."

"Chilean?"

His daughter had not said escape to Chile; if she knew this much she would have picked up Chile, but only if she had cared to. The follower makes up the followee, who reciprocates: but these cannot be Mayn’s thoughts: he does not know what they mean, he knows the poignant politeness of an unknown economist at Cape Kennedy in December of ‘72, his ex tempore remarks re: astronauts and their overnight bags disappearing into space for a break from domestic responsibilities, wives, secretaries, kids, even the bachelor geologist who, however, was not the one who did a brief dance-like hop before stepping up into the white van with the rusty tailpipe; a Chilean economist who spoke of a prisoner inventing a chemistry of thought or communal-think in the void of a prison Mayn found for himself.

"Spence has to be stopped."

"From what, Daddy?"

Only Norma had a key to "the wastebasket," and she would never have taken the letter. He heard questions answering his knowledge that what he had in his power he would use. But interrogations directed not just to him. Though passing through his head, signatures of lightning that when he heard of he thought they had been in his imagination already. So he didn’t figure where they were coming from.

"He listened to Ted and me talk years ago and then he started turning up in my life. He’s not even a journalist but he’s everything that stinks in this racket." But who was Mayn talking about? He felt his daughter angry, saw her lips puff, her eyes narrow and seem to go vague.

"I mean I don’t care about some old relation of yours or your grandparents’ who described a pistol in a two-volume diary so I couldn’t care less where the diary is hiding. But now the mountain: there’s something in the mountain, Daddy. It sounds—"

"I told you about that diary in the letter I wrote you last night."

"—but that mountain sounds like pure insanity but, like, when the fantasy gets really pure, that’s danger; that’s critical mass."

He was tired of big talk, but smiled at her "critical mass" and turned away.

"Don’t turn away, Daddy."

"I’ve told you about mountains that think—Mountain Capability—don’t you remember? I don’t remember where it came from, I can’t imagine Margaret referring to ‘Aimed Being’ as a form of thought, but I’m listening to you talk about critical mass as if you had any idea what it is. (Not that I do.)"

"Well, I don’t remember your telling me about mountains except Ship Rock in a letter but it’s not a mountain, but some of Spence’s information sounds right."

He had a heavy day and he told his daughter maybe he was the "reason" to Spence’s "rhyme" and asked her to come up to Connecticut with him, but she wouldn’t. She said, "I asked him where he was coming from connecting my family to some people named Morgan who used to carry diagrams across deserts that might be about sunspots and harvests or about pistols or railroad routes but were Masonic messages between the hemispheres and he said you were an old friend of his and he was worried about you."

Mayn saw a hand get hold of the four or five handwritten pages in last night’s wastebasket and pull them out carefully but he had never seen Spence’s hands.

"He’s no friend of mine."

"He said a dangerous character had phoned him in the middle of the night asking him about some of this information but he himself had known only what he had heard."

Mayn wanted his daughter to go up to Connecticut with him, the very first women’s interstate Bank; get her away from this.

She said, Business, Daddy? in that ironic way, and said she had something to show him that she had been writing, and he said, Can’t wait, and she said, It’s in the mail, What’s wrong with business? and they were drifting into an old fight in which he might say technology wasn’t demonic, not evil in itself, the machines were to serve us, the real risk was—but though she didn’t want to hear she asked, then, if he’d gone into this because of the family paper and he distinctly felt her mind reach to hang up her receiver, and he said No, and wished she could see how much he loved her but she sounded tired, the "tired" that would last only on the phone. She said, "He asked what I knew about the death of Mayga—he just threw her name at me like we were all friends. Why did it feel like extortion?"

"She was a Chilean journalist Ted and I knew. She did a kind of respectable P.R. more than steady reporting. Mixed up in liberal politics, working for the election of Frei, opposed to foreign involvement in copper. Interesting person. And there’s more to it than that."

"I know who she is, Daddy."

"Spence doesn’t keep information in his head long, it comes in and goes out the same day."

"Mom told me about her."

"Well, I’ve got to go to Connecticut and I think if you don’t come with me you should go back to Washington. What did you come up here for?" He could brain Spence.

"I think it was a mountain I didn’t know about till I got here."

"What on earth did your mother know about Mayga?"

"I don’t want to go into it, Daddy."

His grandfather’s words exactly: when Jim asked what Pearl Myles, who’d come and gone, had meant about there being no doubt this time.

Then Anne-Marie whom he hadn’t seen since a year Christmas phoned the house from upstate New York from college because her parents had told her about Margaret, and she loved Jim; she knew how to say such things and she found some ease or rest in him or put it there, though she used more words to speak now than in high school, so for a second the funeral lunch felt like a surprise party. And Sammy was there because he hadn’t gone to college but was learning the construction business. And Mayn, with his daughter’s words or some accelerating leverage in the phone line’s magnetic current, could not tell if, in 1950 he had a gap he saw back into that was his own ongoing mystery or stupidity, a congruence that memory teased you with, and that was also an absence of his grandmother, her strong shoulders, her eyes as largely observant as his wife’s, buried nearby, yet also a big nothing of his mother, who wasn’t buried nearby. Lunchtime voices rose in his grandmother’s home, and he felt himself swell or deform in one direction or another for the voices pulled him and rose like a classroom of voices when the teacher goes out of the room for five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes. And feeling inside out in the least dramatic of apartments in New York in 1977 where the elevator stopping and moving on sounded like the power supply accumulating, resting, practicing its power, circuit-breaking off into cerebral lesion as if the group house let a universe dissolve its walls and repointed bricks, Mayn didn’t have words to think the wordless panic bordering on absolute inertial not-caring with which (read congruently; read responsible for two suicides; read We) he had to know and absolutely had to know what his mother who had conveniently preceded both of them would feel about this rational death of his grandmother, her mother, who had had enough of "stretching" with or without anesthesia and wrote her letters and then her last multiple identical notes of concern for all who should enter the household before her death was known but especially her husband, who had cigars on the mantelpiece, Jim saw them, three lonely Dutch Masters, and would never light a match for any other reason except, on special occasions, red candlesticks in the andiron-heavy brass holders on the mantel in the living room or on the dining-room table—and howling to know, he thought that his difficult, remote mother, who would talk so directly to you sometimes when she felt like it that you thought you were remembering her words already, would have wept at her mother’s practical act and have admired the woman, and he could have given his mother his love at a time of shock and sadness for her, she would have been polite to all the people who came, and there were people in the house Jim had never seen before, and in his own apartment a century later he’s standing in all the angles of the house turned inside out and looking outward dazed into his usual ease and fair good humor but not alone—what did that mean?—but ready for anything, which was like being ready for nothing, afraid of people coming to him to say they’re sorry but seeing that they had come to his grandfather, the bereaved beloved, who materialized at the mantelpiece thirty feet away from where Jim was standing near the phone, and was actually smiling and nodding with Jim’s mother’s sporty friend whose speaking voice flowed over from his singing voice, and Alexander paused in his gentle amusement to light a cigar so there were only two cigars left there with the pewter ashtray and a small, pale-green Oriental bowl of flowers Jim knew had come from the cemetery. Then he saw Brad, whom no doubt he had been seeing, his half-brother who hated the devious, lunatic winds of January mornings, and he’s taller in a three-button gray flannel suit and more upright, with his girlfriend who’s touching him shoulder to shoulder until Brad greeting his half-brother raised his hand in the sleeve of his suit jacket, French cuffs and all: so that a quarter of the same century later hearing steps near his apartment door, and finding good old tears standing out in his eyes, he saw his half-brother come toward him so that he knew Brad was here in Windrow and he, Jim, was not, but wasn’t aware of the tears that had passed out of his eyes clearing them, until Brad shook his hand and did not know if that was why Brad had come over to him leaving his girlfriend talking to a tall, skinny man in khaki pants and a corduroy jacket and no tie, and to the Indian Ira Lee, who was working at the firehouse: "She wrote me such a tremendous letter, I got it this morning; I’ll show it to you."

He was telling his brother that he had spent all of Thursday afternoon and evening with their grandmother, but Brad knew this because Jim had spent Thursday night in his own bedroom down the street. He had gone away to Pennsylvania and everything had happened in his absence. He had gone away into the horizon of many years and standing in a city apartment hearing his buzzer go he blinked away the feeling that nothing had happened. "We talked about you, Brad." "You did?" "We talked about reincarnation." "You did?" "Hey, when you getting married?"

Joke or no joke, his brother took it serious and smiled sheepishly. "Grampa didn’t have her cremated. He couldn’t do it. Grampa’s writing the obituary for the Transcript." "That’ll be like an obituary for the Democrat." "Dad says Grampa made it ten times too long." "He’s already written it?" "You know him." "Where were you Thursday night?" "You were asleep when I got in. Where were you Friday night? We were trying to call you."

He forgot what he had answered—something like Asleep under the Allegheny stars, or had there been night clouds?—after supper he and his girlfriend got inside their tent. Which indeed was partly what Margaret meant once, twice, three or four times, by saying—

But it was reincarnation she meant, "Better get it now because you don’t after you’re gone," and yet he did not remember in so many words how she meant it, for what he recalled, like some sought-after obstacle, was all the reincarnation he and she didn’t mean: so that he knew then and now as if by an intuition which meant no one would have to tell him, for they could assume he would know: his hand was on the doorknob, eight-thirty A.M., Larry’s urgent voice on the other side: the door was open, the boy stood there alive with the attention and city urgency that covered all the other stuff: he was talking fast like they were standing in Mayn’s living room already: and in the gap of not knowing where his mother was and not wanting to know (any more than he would want to look at the cold face of his grandmother on this her burial day), and not wanting to think about an unthinkable (a record!) two suicides (in less than five years) which kept becoming one in his always grab-bag, humdrum head, in the gap of what you could talk about and what not, what report for sure and what not at all, for this was no politic time to speak to Larry about reincarnation or let into the open void the fact that his place had been entered and his letter to his daughter removed; in the gap of knowing his mother and grandmother were in both him and his fairly dull, illegitimate, love-child half-brother Brad clothed fitly in a suit inevitably from his girl’s widowed mother’s store, and in the gap between a long (read historic) obituary for your wife of fifty-odd years (read uxorquy; read obsequoias) and on the other hand an obit as brief as a weather report, he realized he had decided what he was going to do, as if decision were disappearing for a moment that might be years depending on your time of view, and surfacing like the very same person, yet with his grandfather advancing toward him to ask him if he was going to have anything to eat, the old man’s calm doubtless dragged out of him by the nearness of others’ very bodies, he absorbed the impulse to tell him what work he had just decided to go into and he grasped his grandfather’s arm, who said, "She loved you," and, in a better mood, remembered the slip of paper in the breast (or cigar) pocket of his jacket, for Pearl Myles had left two phone numbers for Jim to call her and he crumpled up the paper and, inhibited from trying a six-foot set shot at the square wicker wastebasket at a funeral luncheon, he went and dropped the ball of paper in, upon which his grandfather said, "My sentiments exactly," and, man to man, they shook hands again, and when Jim came out of the dining room later with a roast-beef sandwich on a gold-bordered plate, a few people had gone, though Brad and his girl were still standing together, now alone, enjoying themselves.

But hearing Larry now so upset about Amy because he now thought those keys were her only keys, and knowing as if from inside Lar’s skin that Larry was unhappy at having to suspect that Mayn, even in a friendly way, knew things about Amy or her work that Larry did not, Larry was tired because of anxiety—his father had gone out to the Island last night to see Sue, and hadn’t returned; and the people down the hall had been coming and going all night and Larry had twice looked through the peephole to see the opera singer and the guy in the pinstripe suit come back and later the guy in the pinstripe suit leave and come back in a matter of minutes—so that Mayn did not trouble Larry with any self-occupied speculations that someone had gotten into this apartment.

Larry’s repeating that he feels in his bones Amy’s in danger but maybe she was fed up with him and with being but a potential girlfriend, a chill though tender in the hand, a gray color at rest in the green of the eyes and then the green scaring the gray away as if he is the gray and according to her too much in his own head (and don’t say "one" the way you do even as a gag, One feels at times, One has forgotten, One remembers why one’s folks split but then one forgets)—but that’s a dumb way to walk out (and of her own pad); she could have felt they’re getting too close, y’know, she on the rug leaning back on her hands staring and talking, sure y’know you can get pulled away from yourself by another person in fact Amy herself had been saying that, and he felt it too so he agreed but couldn’t tell her it was her the light of his life that did that to him—

—all bent out of shape, Mayn murmured in the midst of the kid’s frank language, he didn’t know what Lar’ had asked of Amy; and Mayn took and shook Larry’s hand and Larry started across the threshold but had to get back upstairs in case of a phone call, he had his father’s new Phone-Mate turned on.

He was at the elevator. "I got the reincarnation thing all worked out. I’ll tell you when we have time, O.K.?"

The wind behind Mayn rattled the windows. "I think I had it figured out once, old man."

"We can compare notes." Larry’s real ready for the elevator.

"It’s lost. The field is yours, sir." Mayn had a breakfast meeting at a hotel uptown. Forget the whole shebang and go for a workout, take some steam and a massage at the mercy-killing hands of Manolo.

The elevator window lit up its diamond shape, and a lone rider might be inside. The door slid back. "It’s never totally lost, in my opinion. It comes back because it’s ... oh probably worthless, Jim." Larry shrugged and the elevator door might have been taking him away forever as he stepped in and was shut from view.

So that James Mayn, not half so sure of everything as this celebrated neighbor, Grace Kimball, well-known warm humorous influence on downcast and even suicidal women (Norma said) cum glad theories re goddess dispersing own flesh to heal patriarchal poison—all preached in an apartment in Mayn’s building that Grace had once shared with her (ne ex-) husband—James Mayn found himself left again where he’d about chosen to be: on consignment facing down the four corners of his one-time permanent shelter, unsure which was margin, which center—Women’s Interstate Bank, or a disappearing if potentially plural, non-curseproof pistol that came to roost bearing on it somewhere a worn emblem possibly miniaturizing a plan of sunspot economic cycles with a lot of 5s in it; droughts in the American West every twenty-two years, or the Great Spirit’s reportedly Four-Cornered Ear grounded somewhat as was the radiation fog of the coast-like Plains-and-Rocky-Mountain upslope challenging the Thunder Dreamer’s progress westward to give up the dancing pistol to an ancient survivor.

But margin and center turned out to be fact or lunacy, too: total-waste-use apartment-complex project, or some movable mountain’s mineral "bank" capable of, upon installation wherever it surfaced, literally brainwashing all those dwelling within its range so as to pan, like gold it could become, the illusion that it had stood there for centuries. Margin or center?—the hopelessly rigged, hawsered, shrouded, and convincing stories where that Hermit-Inventor figured, and the (well) real man, skinny old geezer who really died fifty miles away in New York City and whom Jim had asked Margaret about, and, after her death, did not ask Alexander about any more than Jim had even, over the years, had to struggle to keep from linking these old matters with his sudden interest in the U-2 fiasco and, from then on, during the sixties, its cover story’s subject, which was real weather reconnaissance, a fictional cover story made out of actual meteorology.

Margin or center?—Margaret’s Hermit-Inventor’s reputedly incarnate nephew carrying on original weather work; and some elder maverick in this later routine life surfacing twenty years later in the seventies, sometime employed in Texas and in a Colorado "center" then later as expert consultant on a New Jersey pirate TV station where he first voiced his "coastal" theories till he lost that job, released to custody of self (and social security), there visited by Mayn—but, if disemployed, now at his free work and with barely enough from a forgotten patent to support an old unrelated woman babbling someplace in that railroad flat with shit-eating old walls—

No problem, this original man unwilling to spend time (and living space) telling workaday newsman (covering he’s not quite sure yet what) differential equations for minute variables in evolution of atmosphere—for a weather conceived as scene for or product of a unified field locking together the four great forces: a new weather (according to this lone, unfrocked weather thinker) in that not only precipitation and cloud formation but the apparently local precipitation of wind might be indirectly radioactive in origin: you begin to get a reading on the overhead dynamics in the vicinity of some eastern coastlines—to be specific, vertically stacked interfaces, these possibly due to an oscillating radiance you infer from graphs of upper-air heat-swings and of shifts of cloud cover . . .

(which Mayn checked against the "pictures" done in black and red on opened-out brown-paper supermarket bags on the battered walls of the hermitlike maverick’s apartment; and heard the old lady’s continuing, rather musical talk in some next room; and found in an awful unframed window of understanding become his whole torso and head, that his elder host’s science-on-spec ("Oh, ‘guess science gets the halo nowadays—or am I out of date?") is tracing an old daydream seed of Mayn’s too long ago digested: so unthinkably far away from (apropos of future lasers penetrating storms and reflecting information perfectly back through turbulence) the old maverick’s humble mention of Lewis Fry Richardson (good English Quaker who resigned from the Meteorological Office when it was swallowed by the Air Ministry and who died—just three years after Margaret—having taken the study of wind distinct from its velocity so far as to have formulated a law of turbulent mutual dispersion of particles): and oscillating radiant (O.K., he’s hearing this succinct and separate man) energy product of relations between some near and stationary magnetism and some far and moving magnetism: these due to radioactive parcels or process, associated in some quirk-phenomena of the last decade, with coastline configurations themselves changing in some radical way measurable by image; meanwhile this radiance builds in intensity, mounts because of some mountain-like approach from the West.

Margin or center, or fact or term Mayn won’t yet make up. Two screens of material you don’t quite look at at the same time: old nephew of the Hermit-Inventor of New York who died and whose obsequies Margaret attended; and then this new, newsworthy actual person in an apartment with a face that looks broken and rebroken and complete, demoted to such contemplations as made Mayn contemplate some extra homework; and he had long since told his daughter of this maverick’s speculations, which made her nod moodily and say, O.K. but that word "mounting" made her think about the chance of radioactively produced weather threatening changes maybe due to some tide of slowly heaping government-sponsored wastes.

Margin or center? Mayn went on and on, angelic waste like education passing through him so he mattered so little he would just go on living contaminated to a ripe old age, the "rhyme" to Spence’s "reason"—think how, in quickly boning up what weather he could to at least grasp what the i960 U-2 plane was supposed to be watching while keeping the Soviet Union under surveillance, he could have discovered for himself why wind seems to us on Earth to curve like a bullet or anyway to the Anasazi Healer who could see whatever he felt was out there, but in fact blows straight as a latitude to any observer outside our rotation-obsessed Earth’s (God knows) inertial system— while failing to connect this after all fictitious (after some French mathematician) Coriolis effect with the Brad’s Day wrangle about curved winds—as if in condensing a news release out of California one weary day that, to wit, even forgetting our manned capacity to change the weather we might look forward to Canada and the U.S.S.R. turning hot and dry while some Third World disaster areas might turn into moist green savannahs, soft mountains, hectares of orange soil, black soil, we never connected this future with the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and its itinerant clouds of acid droplets that caused the Little Ice Age by stratospheric blocking of the sun, not to mention the Hermit-Inventor’s symmetrical tornado of ‘83 which seems, within his inertial frame to have been the model for the monster of late ‘93 early ‘94 not reliably chronicled by the Navajo (though woven by Earth and sky) that coincided by convergence flow not strict causality with the afternoon of the long sunset when great forces came out—instead of "going home" and that one-in-a-lifetime alignment of clefts and the new post-mortem career launched all but weightlessly by the Anasazi healer’s will so much at rest among the disintegral dust remaining of him that he became a cloud whose name he had never known and, in his only shrug in honor of the reincarnation he eschewed (long, long before a woman named Grace Kimball was saying she disappeared into her workshop members like fragments of the goddess and then would resurface having swum through their circulations for days on end, and know that simultaneously she had never been away), he passed over Landbridge America aiming, if not before he died, so soon after as to be practically the same thing, to see what he had always been curious to see.

daughter of the revolution

In the old sense of the word, Maureen seemed so sternly "gay" when we met at a swing in my building in late ‘75, so determined to say what she wanted you to do, and how and where and how fast and for how long—and again exactly how—for even moment-to-moment sex, let alone parenthood, takes planning nowadays—that her quite real tenderness hid itself away somewhere. It was like a spray of baby’s breath that at first you hardly notice in a white room I remember—you, I—in a white china vase near white curtains, and in summertime. Her tenderness strangely rested inside the seeming strength of all that up-front explicitness and the strict feminist management of personal power equaling the discovery of personal power—isn’t that how her Leader’s doctrine went? A spray of baby’s breath was what she had in her hand in the elevator one morning, sconced in dark-green tissue, and I didn’t yet know this lovely girl with a beautiful leather knapsack on her back; and though she stood four-square, doctrinally balanced on both feet—for as I learned she was into kung fu two evenings a week—her airy way kept her very light and she was scarcely in touch with the floor of the elevator rising, but "it" promised tenderness, whatever "it" was. She must have been taking those tiny buds of white bloom to her Leader, unless she was taking them for herself, to be with her while she was with her friend.

No doubt about how she came into my apartment the first time, the tenderness at last if not at first. She asked if my body was anesthetized. She found my giant Spanish table with the abandoned treadle built into its lower structure; and she found the brass bed (worth twelve hundred dollars) halfway polished as it stayed for two months; and she found the barstools at the breakfast nook, and found "all these books, Luce!" and found a square, delicate Harvard chair my father bought years after he had graduated and six months before he died, and a tall, noble Windsor chair my mother when she visits from Santa Fe sits in resolutely as if she would take it back, instead of me. Yes, Maureen came in and found my whole godawful history wound up between my shoulder and the root of my strong neck, when I was "dying" of cigarettes, first smoking them, then now not smoking them. Tenderness? It lived in her fingertips when her mind was dreaming. Other times, hardly to be seen when she was talking power, her tenderness might have been nestling in the arms of her Leader.

Oh well, the German word is too close, and her Leader was even less fascist than some of those who are casually called fascist nowadays. When you’ve had a lover who was a political economist—a real love—you get fussy about such things. But who was more fussy than Maureen?—though I don’t mean the sound of her voice coming, nor her saying not quite softly, "Go round and round in a very small circle, that’s all, and then I’ll tell you what happens after that." I mean about words: like "discrimination" could never mean deciding subtly between ideas; and "energy" could never be questioned, I mean as a word, because we all knew what it meant.

She showed me all over again that I had nipples. She found my feet as if I had lost them in their charge of tension. She told me how she had felt at ten wearing a T-shirt to school in Florida and getting sore. I mean she would talk endlessly about her body, the quality of her gums if she went a day without eating a grapefruit, the number of days she might go without taking a shit, how to brush your teeth (though one day when I thought What the hell, we’ll talk about this, then, why she closed the subject as soon as I opened my mouth), the hint of past surplus along her lower back, the exact feel of pubic hair growing back in, how her insteps felt when she came with a man, with a woman, or alone, or—but orgasm was good or better because of how you managed things. It came from the Leader’s talk, though Maureen always went a bit further. I had known that I had nipples and in a sense I did not need to be reminded, and I speak of it here because sex for all the talk and activity in those years when the War was winding down and our aging parents, retired beyond climatic change, would rather not think about what was going on in our lives, and Mr. N. (wasn’t it?) was in the Situation Room taping crises (though I have been told there are no situations, only people!), what I found coming for me from Maureen was not mainly sex, and so the lullaby of her hand on my chest—my breast—seemed mostly deeply loving, though I would add that it also turned me on.

I put this down in a notebook helter skelter like a letter, and why write words after all if not to somebody?

And if you believe, and even if the revolution had already happened, why not take your position with regard to other people: it may not mean they will take your advice, but they won’t go running all over you—right, Maureen, dear? And so Maureen, in the last days of this that I am getting to, would urge me to take a workshop; would even tell me her adored Leader had advised the same, while I added that there are no neutral messages and why was Maureen carrying messages from that star-quality teacher (whom I already knew) to me?

Once I stayed in Maureen’s apartment overnight—not what she wanted from me or from sex—and when I left early in the A.M. finding brief instructions on where to find a bag of whole-grain cereal and to drink from one of the jars of juice in the refrigerator rather than operate the juicer myself (as if I ever would have), I gave in to some silly tenderness of mine and left Maureen a note saying just, "Thanks, Maureen. You’re lovely. I loved being here." And later in the day wondered if that was going too far.

In public the twice I involved myself in all that supposed openness, she was so noisy when she came, so joyfully hard in her spasmodic calls that she could have been being raped—it was like work, or it was too much like the high of a lunatic hooked onto what wasn’t in the end known, though not the wftknown. But then with me one time she did come, and in all those quick breaths like contraction control, then some soft long breaths even before she let go that last private wonder and laughed and I did, too, but I knew it was real and I had felt it in the muscles of her buttocks that must have been drained of all fatty tissue by lecithin or God knows what recent compound. But it wasn’t me supposedly; it was her being (as the Leader said) responsible for her orgasm. Yet the Leader was something else, and I would not pretend to sum her up except that she enjoyed her life enormously and if she, as she used to say in her own famous words, "ran the fuck" (with whoever), and if it was a little on the Olympic side of lust, she was fun and preferred a longdistance variety of body trips to the usual.

I put this down in a notebook but why write words after all if not to someone? Which is anesthesia? Which is waking truth? There came a day when I thought all I wanted was Maureen’s well-being. She came in to see me on her way home, for she was by then living in the building—but not because I lived there, rather because her Leader did. And she said she had had a date with this guy out in Brooklyn—well, the Heights, which is not "out" so much as over the bridge—and he had lived there since his mother had dropped him out of the carriage on his head on a curb of Garden Place in about 1935; and when I said, Did it go O.K., and Maureen said, I gave him what he wanted, and he gave me what he was able to, I laughed and said, But that happens with women, too. But Maureen said, Oh Luce, you take things too personally, you work too hard, you’re afraid of pleasure, you’re work-addicted, you go so far but not far enough into freedom.

I know, I know, I said, I’ve heard all that before, but you can’t think that work’s a chosen pleasure because you and your mother-superior have discovered that some people get baffled and anxious when they’re having a ball.

Maureen got mad, called me compulsive, work-addicted—

—That’s you, I said.

—compulsively lazy, she said—and I felt that I was her other parent, then. And it came to me as if I had left it and come back to it—an idea as solid as a silver money clip (we do not—we have decided not to—carry bills in our wallets any more)—that what I wanted from Maureen was not her passion but her well-being.

But in the excitement of those days, I did not shrug off all that blind talk of addiction, and though Maureen might say I was work-addicted and as with my nipples and my recently very hard-rubbed scalp had not yet begun to discover my body, I would hook into the provincial evangelism of their thinking and remonstrate angrily that addictions were all the same, and being in love was not a cocaine habit which Maureen’s Leader did not have but used—can you use a habit?—experimenting with that eight-foot-tall snuff ground out of that particular hard-to-capture mountain of our mind first thing in the morning to test its effect on her work, which, I tried (pissed off) to point out to Maureen, apparently did not come under the category of addiction. And before she could take the chance to speak, I went on, as if I didn’t want to keep her on the spot, and said Freedom was the issue of course but addiction was such a third-rate, banal way to reduce it, and she should let some of the poets tell her "Isn’t it time our loving freed us from the one we love."

Because there had to be some use in my having had a brief horrendous affair with a young German writer who wrote obliquely about New York City, taking liberties with the street geography on the north margin of the Pan American Building, but spoke to me unforgettable lines of German poetry as courteously in translation as generous toward the English translators; amazingly generous, if you think about it. Meanwhile, Maureen told me that I should not put myself down calling my talk confused except that sometimes I did not answer the question with the information asked for, which was partly not Sharing (I capitalize it in my mind), and partly not loving myself enough to keep my attention on the thing asked for.

But once I found in a scrap of diary of Maureen’s those very lines written as prose and ascribed admiringly to me, so that I would have added what "happens" next except I would have gained only the honesty of admitting I’d been here reading her stuff, which was mostly second-hand from her beloved workshop Leader who had changed Maureen from a buxom Miss America catatonically walking through boyfriends and boozy hotel clubs with dark rustling dance floors to anyway someone who was physically a marvel and mentally at least determined to save herself, if side by side with her Leader, who was herself changing before my eyes though I could never easily speak of that woman to Maureen—except admiringly.

I have written down what she looked like, and my words are surprisingly good, though no more worth recalling than a hundred details attended to in the course of a week administering a hospital, at least a vital part of its work, going round in circles yet despite the relation of nurse to doctor a strong feminist fiber there in the strength of the women, so many women, working there, even if too often administering dubious medications prescribed as simply as a springy intern-priest accepts his relation to a tough, middle-aged nurse-nun—nephew to aunt in the ongoing patriarchy.

Maureen was definitely beautiful in the clothes she made for herself— right down to a lovely pale suede suit (almost western) and linen shirts sewn so invisibly you could find the patterns of that instinctive knowledge in the thoughtfulness of Maureen’s hands touching yours or folding together to brace herself when she did a magical headstand that made the room all except me fall away, the walls opening but not into the other apartments of the building.

Her face, even when some blood beneath it paled, could carry forth saffron perfume of color, half faintly tanned, half flowering coral, half in turn recalling childish freckles that might have begun beneath the light of one summer’s sun but scarcely took hold. The eyes were like the cheekbones, don’t ask me how, some width of hope and freshness stunned toward a fixity of purpose adopted from outside herself. Tall, narrow, leaner and leaner, with the softest wide mouth and the most dynamically drawn feet, arched inward and upward, toes somewhat spaced as if she went barefoot, and she would ask, actually, to have her big toe rubbed and rubbed in a circular motion and reported, once, that her model and guide and Leader used other people’s big toes to give herself an orgasm.

I have written down what Maureen looked like. Her eyes were brown with blue flecks; her hair brown, never dyed like that of her Leader, but for months shorn to the bone so it reminded me not of someone getting into touch with a living and beautiful head but of a model I saw strolling the autumn streets of Napoleon’s birthplace in Corsica totally bald with, evidently, a lover, who looked like a male model, yet in that sculptured skull a victim and later I thought "a victim of the century" no less.

Maureen said, "Power," when I asked her what she wanted. Power over whom, I asked—over which Indians? I asked, cornily remembering her Peace Corps work and her trips back to the Southwest where she had once been— "once"?—an army child and might speak now of how the padres had practically halved the population of the Pueblo Indians by bringing in measles, no wonder they needed those mission churches to get those poor, measles-ridden, smallpoxed native Americans in out of that powerful light.

I knew Maureen when she worked for a bank, a giant bank, the bank (if such a structure has a name) (Oh Luce, you’re living in your head again!) (Oh God Maureen—) (Oh Goddess, Luce, O.K.?) (O.K., oh Goddess, Maureen, you’re the one living inside your head, I’m just a person) (Oh, there you go again, Luce, saying "just" to minimize yourself). And her immediate superior, soon after she was promoted to a position of considerable responsibility for handling Eurodollar accounts, called her in to "discuss" the garlic smell that came like smoke signals all morning from her breath. Garlic therapy, garlic therapy, and did you read about the old nut whose five-mornings-a-week bus driver wouldn’t take him any more though then he sued the company, it was in New Jersey, so it isn’t just women.

And in not quitting for twelve more months Maureen later said she had not been in touch with her anger (I smiled) or with the fascist implications of (Listen, dear, the garlic is Good, but your problem is, you’re not high enough up in the bank and probably not even a man could ever be that high) (You’re doing a smoke-screen number on me, Luce, did you know that?) (No, honey, you got to get up into the abstract, that’s the echelon where garlic don’t matter no more) but a tear came into my eye because I thought, People matter, and the clients matter even if they turn away and don’t dig the odor of garlic because their nosebuds have spent too long in the smokehouse and never felt deep earthsmoke, and Maureen matters, Maureen matters.

She was the girl, the woman, I had stood with coming up in the elevator more than once—months in fact before meeting her (for such is the intimacy of apartment houses)—hearing the elevator coming apart until the current super told me one day not to worry, it was the slack in the cables rattling. But that day it rattled like wind in a house and Maureen, whose name I didn’t know, had a spray of baby’s breath in a cone of green paper in one hand, a knapsack on her back, an odd sweet smell like a foreign food that could never go bad—and I said, "Baby’s breath, aren’t they?" and Maureen smiled like a Midwestern girl and nodded but didn’t say anything, perhaps feeling me too close or finding nothing in the way of words demanded of her at that instant. Baby’s breath delicate flourish of snowdrop flowers.

I wanted to hold her, just as at later times I wanted to hold her down or shut her up—oh damn me, did she really talk much except in dogmatic speeches at intervals? And later I wanted to hold her back, because she followed her beloved Leader but always went too far. To where she wasn’t following her beloved Leader any more, but herself, however you do that. Yet still purchased baby’s breath, for that day in the elevator while she was going to see her beloved guide she was bearing those flowers for herself as well.

Later I heard that a small group of workshop friends, initiates, some strong hilarious resourceful women, who had long since seen that complaining in words establishes a historical record that can stand in place of doing something, planned a fairytale game of sorts which would subject the next man who entered that famous apartment to rape—"light rape," but overwhelming and thorough but "good" rape.

I did not ask what this would amount to, because I saw the apartment in question visited for so many hours a day of every week by the friends of the Leader. This person ran around like a child doing somersaults usually with nothing on, listened like the most shrewdly attentive mother to the person behind the story, and made tea but had long since stopped making meals and bringing them out of that kitchen into her large furnitureless salon.

Rape? I thought, participating in some distant part of my body. And imagined that Maureen was taking too far some trial balloon raised by our friend like energy levels of a roomful of loving friends rapping or massaging—for that woman was my friend, too.

Rape? I thought. "Rape?" I said; "I don’t believe it." "You’re thinking just like a man, Luce," said Maureen. "Thanks," I said; "wouldn’t our friend take that as a compliment?" Maureen blew up at me in some confusion and left me where I stood—not really on two feet the way you were supposed to stand, rather slouching a little on one hip, but frozen in my maturity by her exit.

For a few months, in those days of ‘76, the answer to the "power" question was money. As it still is, a year later, and was in the days of those great castle-women of Europe Maria di so-and-so, Marguerite of somewhere, who handled such power in their hilltown bastions with or without a consort that I would have worked for them in a minute, and gave orders with an ease that Maureen’s Leader might approach only with humor, standing in her fantastic plastic boots at the advent of a taxi and ordering Maureen and Cliff—a curious assistant he was—to get into the cab first. Then the answer to the power question proved in other days quite steadily to be "Self-sexual," where even without a job’s money or success (but don’t assume you ever have one without the other) you can work on your body and be whatever you want to be sexually and find that the goddess was always in you (even, as I pointed out to Maureen, in that part of you that persisted in not knowing the goddess was inside you because where you’re coming from is very important to where you wind up) (No, said Maureen, that was not correct because to dwell in where you came from was to get back into the past, and who cares if you thought when you were a kid that you didn’t have dreams when you were asleep?) (To which I responded that I didn’t know where that was coming from but . . .) (Maureen said it was some friend of a friend of our mutual friend the Leader, who had told Maureen that she was convinced it was possible not to dream asleep but that something had to give somewhere and this man might have unusual powers flowing out of or into the void of those dreamless nights. Some such bull, I didn’t say.) And yet a lot of outside information was making life quite interesting in those days of late ‘76, early ‘77 when I found myself loving Maureen, wanting to hold her, to rock her (which she liked), knowing though that I must also not lose myself in this love for her, loving the charm in how she talked the helpful, oversimplified dogmas of her guide, whose own attitudes seemed less extreme—she sometimes liked men, I mean; she sometimes shrugged off her own rigidity about blocking the transverse colon and blocking the labyrinthine (my word) progress of the goddess in the circulation of the soul, or about the locked pelvis vis a vis our capacity to manufacture self-negative meat acids within our systems even when we were good, upstanding vegetarians (though fruitarians—interestingly the position Maureen arrived at just before her departure—was going too far). Information, did I say? Its flow among us larded surely by mystical fictions put us more on the lookout for it. But the Leader, herself by various accounts one-sixteenth, one-eighth, and one-thirty-second Indian, had a list of women chiefs back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a goddess known as Our Grandmother who really had created the universe and had told the winds to treat Indian women as if they were the winds’ sisters and if the women pulled their skirts up to their waists to frighten clouds away, the winds must not stare at their naked nethers; but the Leader had once humorously told of dreaming a reincarnation of herself as a Navachoor Prince who had actually met Our Grandmother and dickered with her about obtaining for men a standing with her like that she accorded women.

But what was happening? There was the Leader’s career, shifting from week to week, not so much in those public appearances and visiting workshops where she helped women to understand that they were not isolated or freaky or ugly or mean in their needs, as in projects and ideas that came and went, an article in a magazine here, a newspaper piece there, and of course misrepresentation as a sex fiend or female segregationist or male impersonator by the mainly male press even when the piece was by a woman. Shit, she liked people.

And Maureen? Why what was the matter with me that I fell in love with that girl? that legionnaire, that nutritional scientist of the Great Change (let’s not say "revolution" because the corporations go on pricing us up, up, into the echelons of their abstract intuition of American futures), that handmaiden of the goddess whom I of all people (because the Leader was not available that day) had taken to the clinic where she had her first abortion (feminist in clarity as in its experimental source) and it went from her with that distantly gross plummet of flush, that explosion so that any person, man or woman, might be afraid, hearing it from the next room—as if something else got sucked out, too, like your last ovary or your Little (i.e., lower) Heart or five laps of lower intestine, sucked out maybe more subtly as in a promising new trick of cataract removal, and as scientifically as Maureen had experimentally concentrated, at a swing, on controlling the accessibility of her ovaries by pleasure-committed breath-transcendence or a self-induced temporary infertility, pill-free of course but no diaphragm, which is not for beginners! Maureen? She left the bank, of course.

And she left her apartment (clean break, not even a legal sublet) in Greenwich Village, and now when you saw her in the elevator she was traveling to or from her own apartment, often from it to her Leader’s with a large cloudy Mason jar or a wooden salad bowl home-covered with foil. She had given her Leader all her savings becoming thereby for her sake a partner (I hoped in enterprises both multiplying and amalgamating under the Leader’s name— therapeutic, media, even clothing).

Maureen became a leader of the building when the landlord had dragged his heels. There were interesting chips of the upper brick facing that had begun to fall down onto the street and sidewalk first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon and a newspaperman I had known some years before who had moved back into the building was reported to have told a fellow tenant who announced classical music on a small but surviving radio station who had told it to his wife’s lawyer also living in the building who had told it to his wife, who told it to me in the incredible basement laundry (with its underwear-shredding dryer) and back to its original source (who told my source that it was better than what he had originally said) that the Housing Authority (postponing for a week its inspection visit) agreed with the landlord in the theory that somewhere between those upper facings of the building and the sidewalk that was in danger of coming up to meet the aforementioned chips the chips had become arrested in mid-air and would continue so until the landlord received word of Housing Authority action on the tenant report.

Also, the boiler had gushed oil, driving into the normally foodless laundry room two or three (unclear) rats the size of large weasels. Maureen held a meeting, then another. I loved her. There were deranged ladies who had so little surface left in their anciently rent-controlled apartments they had to live on their upper walls or on the ceiling, and they came to one meeting or the other to ascertain whether they could be evicted, and one out of four of them was willing to withhold rent. Maureen retained a young woman lawyer we both knew who would not take a fee at first; and Maureen established an escrow account at the nearest branch of the giant bank until recently her employer. She had about one quarter of the tenants with her.

Her Leader was for buying the building and turning it into a self-healing, self-supporting community; but the building was not for sale. The Leader promised that the following month she would begin withholding rent but had heard that our landlord had introduced rats into another building on the other side of town to get rid of his almost exclusively elderly female tenants. The radio announcer’s wife’s lawyer, commenting on the radio announcer’s "rats the size of weasels," said weasels were what we needed since they ate rats. A leak days after a snowstorm descended down one "line" of apartments from the top floor to Maureen’s and stained a magically colored Near Eastern woven mat during the night and when her bathroom ceiling came down one afternoon while as if by the same token five tenant-complaint calls from unemployed elderly female tenants were recorded on her machine all while she was out picking up four crates of small, dark, non-toxically grown oranges shipped from her native Florida to an organic outlet practically next door to an Italian restaurant where our landlord was a known patron, she handed over the chairpersonhood to a young man with a rare dog on the second floor who checked security twice each night and had found the doorman once across the street at a deli waiting for a western sandwich; and Maureen withdrew her escrow rent money and spent it on redecorating her bathroom and withdrew from the tenants’ association at a time, incidentally, when a real-estate broker living in the building had found out that two, maybe three apartments had been sold to their mainly absentee tenants through some loophole that did not entail co-oping the building or not as yet, and one of these new owners worked at a foundation housed uptown in a French Renaissance delight crazily encrusted with terra cotta mazes. Maureen was up front about all these things that she did.

As about organizing the messengers: When this unofficial union proved to include only one woman, a Cambodian aristocrat who did secretarial work on a hot typewriter and other business in a mainland Chinese haberdashery surprisingly near the aforementioned foundation plus her qualifying messenger stints on a hot bike that was less of a liability since serial numbers don’t function in the bike-turnover world, Maureen wished the group well and excused herself just at a time when the original inspiration for this group of primarily retarded messengers, a black kid with amazingly large, out-of-control teeth, had discovered that he was being exploited by a man who had infiltrated a small theater group because he believed it was a front for some bloody escapade to do with Latin American politics and the clandestine history of a Middle Atlantic newspaper family, and the black kid had tried in vain to get free of this entrepreneur, and did not speak easily but communicated with Maureen.

The night she ended her affiliation with the messenger union, she and I sat all evening in my apartment. I was happy knowing she was content to sit and read. I looked up from my chair and she did not raise her eyes. She was reading, not meditating. And it was not just the book that kept her from looking up to meet my look. It was me. And at first I thought it was a me she took for granted as a sometime lover. Then I guessed she did not look up because she did not have quite enough faith that I had become the person she loved. I did not believe, like her Leader, that most men secretly wanted to wear garter belts and black silk stockings; I did not believe that the sins of the Catholic Church stained the glass at Chartres, I did not believe Saint Joan less or more a woman for having waged war, I did not believe that medication was a global male-doctors’ plot, I did not believe that women ejaculate the same way as men, or that a fruitarian diet lengthens a man’s ejaculatory range if range is what one is after; I did not believe there was a Goddess but I did not say so to Maureen, in whose very body and feelings I sometimes felt myself so firmly lodged that I couldn’t tell if I was stalled in some place of romance where to stay is to be nowhere, or was doubled or reincarnate in her, which I also would not announce to her except as an impersonal principle, and she agreed, convinced the miracle was open to anyone who could participate in the Goddess. Freedom is not sobriety but sobriety is freedom, the Leader had said after an all-night body-trip with parallel—in her "case" multiple—orgasms for both but without penetration by her one-on-one visitor, an Irish monk touring American population centers in quest of funds for his remote foundation, trouble-shooting too: sobriety itself might mean no highs; but booze went down not up, and there were potential highs non-addictive-related, said the I have to confess luminous and warm-hearted Leader to the workshop-ready Eirean—so the Irish certainly weren’t wrong . . .

There came a night when Maureen and I were supposed to get together. I was so near her now that I entertained some insane idea of moving out of this building that I basically loved. I had sensed the day before that Maureen could call our evening off. I had so braced myself for this that, neck-knots, instep-tension, pelvic lock-cramp aside, I was worse off than if I had been a militant Lesbian nonetheless doctrinally devoted to no-attachments, which would be pretty hard in an already terrible world.

I had thought there was something between us beside the void. Within twenty-four hours it was distance.

No response from Maureen’s apartment. Phone, doorbell, house phone (though I did not tell the doorman who it was I was buzzing).

Meditation? I wondered. Something gentle. An unplanned fast. A sprouts study weekend in Massachusetts with the Leader. But I received a call, then, from the Leader, which wasn’t too strange but was part of what had happened.

They had become too close, she said. Maureen had turned our mutual friend into a priestess or mother; and separation was indicated. She sat near me, her legs crossed, a sheen of body glow lifting free from the curves of her excellent skin, the eyes friendly and attentive to me while it was she who spoke. Maureen had bonded. She had to go. She knew it but had to be told. She nodded and nodded, the Leader reported, all through the announcement, nodded and expressionlessly wept. There is a gap here—but who is it between? It must have been sad for both of them. She had been a sister-lover, then a mother to Maureen, who would always go purely too far like a scientist doing basic research around and around the clock. The Leader had been all things to Maureen, with whom she didn’t like to, literally, "sleep" though spent many a night with Maureen in rap, illuminated by the goddess and her messages to all who had learned true history: which is feeling repressed underground to flow in circles or into others unknown to it or them maybe; the repression of feeling, hence fact, and invitation to addiction, hence imprisoning fantasy—a patterning of habit (the words mine or doubtless someone else’s maybe—do I not make sense?—or not originally anyone’s)—the escape from which (I’m boring myself) is both the periodic revolution in your life or, for the Leader, "hopefully" to find a habit of constant self-loving evolution (her words!) that is pattern each time until you almost see it, and right then it shifts: a drug analogy, I thought, as if the Leader were addicted to Change.

Maureen, I saw, had opened the door thinking to adventure into some earth of science, of agriculture, of healing; but at the last moment she turned around (if not back) for Grace Kimball, our Leader, a pretty well-known name by now. But she was asking—as she never asked of me—only to see if Grace was still there. And she was. And in the same apartment that she and her ex had lived in until once upon a time she "left" him. And she is there, when Maureen turns. There like light. There, though, only to then say to the poor follower who thought she sought power, "I am not here for you. You were going out the door. That’s good, dear. Really good."

"I gave you what you were able to ask for," Maureen said one time— because (as I tried to tell her) I prefer body or deeper signals to voicing my heart-blood’s asking via the short-order sex-by-menu that turned honest lust into a strange fashion of honesty. "You gave me what you could," she concluded. As if I were that person she said the same thing to in a brownstone in Brooklyn when he invited her over to view from his windows those national celebrations in the harbor during the late summer of last year.

But I had found with her that I needn’t be a cynic, and not even after she left me, having probably never been with me; for I had not even thought to be sour about prospects, life, and so forth, while I was for a period of months turned toward Maureen. What did the poet say?—Grace and her crowd do not trust old or new books of passion, they make up their own something or other. And what did the poet say? I know he was not my lover but I know some words of his all over me yet even as I set out to say them and am struck dumb and can only point to them because I have really and truly (believe me) come up to those words but as I say can only point to them, meeting them, and having made them mine, say them in my own way: so whatever I do I have the look of leaving. Living is leaving. For work, say!

Is that too sad to be anything but romantic-addictive-ultimately-sex-negative? I knew a prostitute who would not name her price ever, but would take what she was given. Is that sex negative or sex revolutionary? S.N.? or S.R.? Abbreviations recall the hospital newsletter I create each month.

I decided on a certain new type of workshop Grace Kimball told me she was starting. She said she would go back to the other workshops with regret because Maureen had helped her so much and often taken them on her own, though some of the women said it wasn’t quite the same.

Maureen had a mother in Florida. A father, too. She went to Florida and lived at about equal distances from her parents and from her brother, who was the most agreeable soul in the world and would sit with Maureen for hours, or do a yoga trip; they explored enema therapy by the book, by the machine (which might be like a Hollywood chocolate factory for all I know), and by life/sibling experience, and I heard through Grace that for a while it was nip and tuck whether Maureen would go into enema professionally instead of that other amazing land of foot massage that made even me a believer right down to my toes through one of which a Japanese "sister" once divined that I had had a persistent kidney infection when I was younger and more vulnerable.

Maureen returned to me by parcel post my notebook, with all these things in it.

I get abstract and vague. I didn’t so much find something out as found myself in something. Well, there’s a lot of this kind of talk going around these days and I kept it to myself.

You can’t give me what I want, she said in the honesty of these recent days; but that’s O.K., Luce, she said.

What I never knew quite well enough, even in the honesty of our arms freely finding each other, was that her need was not for what she said: and my desire, if it had passed into her life easily and received, would have given her what she hadn’t known she wanted or was it at that time a turning?— some slight curve of a long turning from that life she had found away from the mother who ruled without ruling and, I gathered but only from Grace’s hearsay, did not much love Maureen but did not let her know; and turning from her life in New York—which had ensued upon her tour with the Peace Corps in South America in the late sixties (never talked about except as wonderful harsh landscape, and only if I insisted on Maureen sharing some information beyond the foreground of her abandoned banking "trip").

But her love for Grace became the power behind what we would discuss. And I could get puzzled—even by what Maureen said about my notebook when she sent it back—puzzled by having seen the Leader she followed in her and through her, when in fact that very visible Leader was between us: until I saw that it was me blocking the view and the view was of my future. And in the middle of one night, with Maureen’s words working in me, working away by dark, I found myself imagining that man they had known of who was supposed to have never had a night dream (what was his name? it went unmentioned), while Grace advanced the theory—but I was not awake . . . I was dreaming pretty accurately stuff I already knew.

I had this letter from her. Not worth salvaging. From Maureen, that is.

I had a dream of being a merman. And in it that man reappeared, who does not dream, and I thought I once knew him or his wife. I woke knowing it to be true. And that dreams are what they lead to.

Of my notebook, or the part I asked her to read, knowing she would read only that, she said, "Luce, you could see both sides. The man’s and the woman’s. In fact a million sides sometimes. That’s a problem."

It occurred to me that she might not have read even what I had asked.

I pointed out to Grace Kimball that in wanting to be a "top," a business, a (God! a) vagina that is much more than a subtly hooded cock and its patient balls (lower extension of, i.e., shape of, outer lips), and its claims to ejaculate, and in sashaying around like a boy trying to look like a man or whatever I am trying to say, Grace was further confusing what a woman is. She said I might be right, but so what?, she had seriously considered how she might have a child by Maureen. She laughed, then, and disappeared into her kitchen to bring me some tea. She was talking about the neglected asshole and how she would like to raise its status. She said she felt more comfortable with some gay men than some women she could name. She had a habit of listening that made you feel she was right there with you—closer still—beyond closeness—and eyes much warmer than all her absolute talk re: eye contact could do for me. She emerged with my mug, her warm, wonderfully healthy body somehow covered, though not by the mug and not by sweatpants or sporty camisole, not a stitch. ("Mother provider, hostess house-mouse, that’s me!") She asked if I wanted to go into business with her. The phone was ringing and it was her mother hundreds of miles away, oh more than a thousand, who was speaking to Grace again after not speaking for several chilly months—and they were laughing and hollering—at least I assume her mother was, too.

One day, Maureen phoned me and I knew who it was before I stepped free of the bluejeans I was getting out of when the phone rang; and knowing who it was, I knew I would never be bloodless and so never without whatever was in that bloodstream, whatever smoke or worm or liquor of future. And taking the receiver and drawing it close to my ear and my mouth, I realized that I didn’t see Maureen as a victim any more.

Wall-to-Wall High Reaching for the Ground

The black voices did not dispossess her in the slightest—

THE LEADER INCULCATES IN THE TROOPS FIRST AND LAST

SELF-RELIANCE WITHOUT WHICH THERE IS NO HIERARCHY

and she felt them part of her home, their shoes, the bluejeans of the younger, darker one, the dark green chinos (near prison-green) of the older, lighter one, their friendly beef-acid bellies, the lumbering low-energy-seeming vibe-rest of their courtesy across her Body-Room bending to rip up the old carpet, lay out the new: lay it out so snug at the edges that the carpet in its slight abundant rise at the margins had to be restrained—tamped down—before the tacks were hammered in, along the mirrored wall, the bookcase wall (gotta unload them books, written by men, women, some who didn’t know who they were), the window wall, the sculpture-and-photo wall, all this behind her as she passed under the silver chinning bar to answer the hall phone as friendly as, well, her own mother alive in her and well also in the middle of America surrounded by furniture and sheet music, bottoms-up Revere Ware and a whole family of table lamps, but having at last some Pleasure. But this call wasn’t her mother, yet wasn’t just the person who’s talking.

The wiry voice was Kate’s friend, Rima, a learner certainly, with a lot of balls, who would never give a guy the worship that would take him out of circulation on a permanent basis so he would never know if he had a personality or not, and who had come to three sessions of a workshop and dropped out because she had to check out some similar operations and the Esalen trip on the Coast. Rima was phoning like every week to ask Grace’s opinion. What was the real, bottom-line, everyday effect on "one’s" sexuality of one’s parents (like, what had gone on in Grace’s home?); or, what was the breakdown of activities at swings in terms of preferences (well, Grace had begun to orgy-out, desiring regular hits of solitude, one day a week of silence, for, you know, Silence = Rest, if, as the Chilean woman Clara had said weeks and weeks ago, Rest is Silence—wasn’t that what she had said? although the A. A. friends still got together—yet more for raps than sex); well, was it helpful to the women in the workshops (that is, was it really sharing information) to have heterosexual demonstration as part of the format? (you dropped out too soon, honey!)—and did "self-sex" as Grace called it, as versus either s-s in company (you mean jerkeen off with others?) or one-on-one, conserve energy for someone on the way up in a demanding executive position? But what was Rima’s new name, it was sort of feminist-literary as if she had gone Muslim, but it was a real pen name. But she was asking all these questions, she’s in some crisis but maybe inviting others in. The crisis didn’t feel so personal. Awkwardness bled into Grace from somewhere.

Now Rima had surfaced after a month, etcetera—obviously O.D.’d on work like Maureen O.D.’d on the science of sprouts, catching them at their life point to maximize duodenal flow to make the body feel concept. When Grace said, "What’s going on?—how was the Esalen trip?—are you taking time for self-love?—I’m planning on a rich Arab once a month who knows his place," she sensed in the easy breeze of her own words that this call was different, and knew another self or body had come into her to warn her that this Rima might be O.D.ing not on work but on good old patriarchal-facsimile exploitation.

THE PROFIT SYSTEM MAY LEAD INEVITABLY TO WAR BECAUSE

MEN SEE BUSINESS AS TOTAL VICTORY OR NOTHING. HOWEVER,

TO GIVE THE SYSTEM A CHANCE, WOMEN MUST NEVER DO ANY WORK

WHATSOEVER

EXCEPT FOR MONEY.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" Rima asked, and Grace knew that some trip for herself was just around the bend and wanted to be off the phone and watching the black dudes sling their hammers at the new carpet.

"What if I say Yes I do mind if you ask me a personal question?"

"I would understand, Grace."

"Why would I mind when you’ve been doing it for weeks?"

"It was sharing information, I thought."

"It’s definitely information, dear. Listen, I got some people here."

What followed wasn’t "in" either of their minds. Still doing workshops? seriously thinking of running for President? Yeah, yeah, on an orgasm platform, you know me, right out there in Macy’s window. But did Grace mean a single-issue platform? Oh an everything platform, an abundance platform, we’ll even include a department of patriarchy, and Rima could be assistant media secretary while we give the fields back to the people so we can do the grazing, and we’ll bring Maureen back into public life to be commissar of agriculture. "Listen, I got some guys here."

"Is it true you’re going into men’s workshops, Grace?"

Coming close now, and what was Rima’s new last name? Grace was supposed to be good at names. "That’s right, wall-to-wall: tonight’s the night."

"Aren’t you making problems for yourself?—I mean with nudity and the emphasis on sex."

"It’s 1977, dear. Can’t wait. Body-Self, remember? The men have more problems being with themselves than we do."

"Does this mean that you’re reversing your ground on segregation of the sexes?"

"Hey man," Grace heard the younger black man in the next room say softly and knew he was pointing.

"That was never my trip," said Grace. "Just a nationwide moratorium on relations, that’s all. How are you doing, Rima?"

Everything was wonderful, she heard Rima say.

"Every one of them is different," said the younger black guy in the next room, and Grace heard chuckling.

She should have this woman in front of her, she sounded about as orgasmic as her neighbor with the lonesome dog who couldn’t let go of the leash when the elevator door closed abruptly, leaving the dog on the lobby marble pointing (the right direction) toward a fantastically thin-bred gray monster-beauty leash-less and masterless and at the ready, while the leashed dog began to strangle and the elevator alarm went off. Pets needed to be jerked off too—but off, that is.

"So what are you doing with your spare time, Rima?"

"Oh you know me, Grace."

"Oh shit, Rima."

"Grace, I’m glad I’m a woman; I wouldn’t want to be a man."

"Well, whatever it is, I hope you’re doing it every day."

"I never know what’s kidding and what’s totalitarian."

"Oh, you’re either a top or you’re a bottom, dear."

"When’s a new women’s workshop starting?"

If she had this woman in front of her, she could lay a gentle hand on her, for God’s sake. "Next week. It’s not full. I’m broke. Lucille’s helping out. You don’t know Lucille; she’s got more brains than all of us."

"Is she in with you?"

"No, she can’t handle that. She’s a hospital administrator. I’m working on her."

"But what happened to the nationwide women’s bathhouse idea?"

"I decided to be President instead. I’m going into consultation at a decent hourly rate, Rima. We don’t get paid for what we know."

"Hanging out a shingle?"

"Sex consultation mainly. You know me, Rima."

"You don’t need a degree, Grace. Therapy with demo."

"Any information that needs to be shared, Rima; you can understand that."

"How’s Maureen?"

"She’s doing fine."

"That’s what I heard. I heard Cliff’s working with you?"

"For me," Grace said, and the hammering resumed, and she thought, Of course. Cliff standing nude except for a Nikon, like nose-box binoculars, taking photos like his own life depended on it—the long gray page-boy streaked with brown, her oldest New York friend and still a ram (ask him) especially when he said he wanted Grace to wear the pants and what ram ever went around wearing pants, he inquired, with words, words, words.

"I’ll let you know about the workshop, Grace. How many men are coming tonight?"

"Nine brave men, one of them a part-Sioux Indian he says—plus two reluctant flashers who are on the fence but may go the limit."

"How do you feel about a woman running a men’s nude workshop?"

"I’m glad it’s me."

"Have you checked them all out? Is it the Anvil Chorus?"

"You’ve got me on the chorus but we don’t divide the rodeo stars from the fence sitters."

"I meant the Anvil downtown." Rima just wondered if Grace knew what she was getting into. "Thanks for talking to me, Grace."

"I’ll send you a bill." Grace saw Rima lying down, a naked horizon, but it was Grace’s.

RENT IS THE PRICE YOU PAY PER UNIT OF TIME

FOR THE SERVICES OF A DURABLE GOOD.

"Do you think swings are consistent with socialism, Grace?"

"You mean you think the state should be running them? I’m pretty well orgied-out."

"I mean in their emphasis; that’s what I meant. I mean it isn’t exactly one big happy family."

"Swings are anti-acquisitive. No one belongs to another person, O.K.? That’s why you need a space that isn’t bound by furniture. But I think we should hang up before we start a new interview."

She felt the woman’s fighting breath. "You sound like that woman in your workshop who’ll insist on two minutes of silence in the middle of a conversation?—it’s embarrassing."

"I’m ready for two lifetimes."

She had to speak to these two dudes laying the carpet, only to them; but Rima went on, There was one other thing . . . and Grace knew its dynamic, which was all that mattered; she was braced for its content.

In the next room the hammer duet stopped and energy rose into her ears like a heat binding the beats ("One more thing, Grace . . .") of some future-size bongo or possible flashing of the menopausal current she was readying herself one day to ride: a new trip, after all, maybe on a blue mare by some reports ridden by her incarnation as that Navachoor love-addict energy-scientist hero of the buffalo tongue’s power, in the finest dried portions, to fuel change or so a number of people divined, including the Prince himself, who had grown in her heart since Lincoln had touched a power or a story in Grace that had been there all right, native Paiute as she surely was at least a small fraction to her fingertips or, the label came out of nowhere if there were such a place, Far-Orient Mountain-Tribe, air-expressed (as fast as credit-card payments by telepathy get through the mails) into her (no matter the distance) just as fast as her own sixteenth or thirty-second blood from the southwest territories of old America or other continents in her flesh—and as fast as Rima’s real reason for calling from behind the (of course closed) John door of Rima’s straining little spirit that was getting it on with the business trip, give her credit.

"Maureen said you ran a workshop at a prison; is that true?"

"Oh it’s very true, it’s so true—it was probably an all-time organic high."

"Orgasmic, Grace?"

"Money in the bank, dear."

"You had trouble with one inmate?"

"Yeah, yeah—one guy; don’t we all."

"Yes I knew it was a men’s prison. One wouldn’t necessarily assume it was, I mean in your case; I mean, just hearing ‘prison.’ "

"I like men, too. I just believe in segregation for the time being."

"I gather it was a masturbation workshop."

"We gathered information and exchanged it. We rapped. You can imagine all this from your experience. I told them weeping is like sex. You know those guys can’t put a curtain up, so they gotta go public. Energy level up to the rafters, Rima."

"I don’t really know what that means, Grace. But it was through Clara, right?—the wife of that Allende economist?"

"That which economist? Maureen didn’t tell you that. I found out I knew the legal liaison woman who goes up there twice a week; she got me in."

"How did you manage a masturbation workshop at a men’s prison?"

"We rapped. We exchanged information. It was beautiful."

"Who’d you have trouble with?"

"We reached an understanding."

"Thanks, Grace. I’ll call you about the workshop next week."

"Do what you want to do, Rima."

"I always do, Grace. Oh, one other thing ..."

Grace was glad, oh so glad, of the men’s experimental starting. She would handle it. It would be great. It would be tense and explosive. It would be strangely loving. Some of them didn’t know how to masturbate. They stroked too far down the shaft. And some didn’t know how to brush their teeth correctly. She wanted to say to Rima—but then did, "Sometimes I can’t stand women. Did you ever take that trip?"

"I don’t get the vibes on your ‘sometimes,’ Grace. But, you know, my mother—"

"I can’t hear about mothers and daughters any more. Oh shit, baby, you’re not all women." She was getting everybody else’s shit short-waved direct but not her own.

"What do you mean, I'm not?"

"Don’t quote me, Rima, I’m experimenting. That’s where the surprises are. Women never had the chance to just experiment."

The hammering resumed. Energy breathed away into the clammy phone, and what came back? Someday she’s gon’ be not there for some of these people.

"One other thing, Grace ..."

A fat woman loomed—perhaps an obsession of some of Grace’s workshop daughters—and Grace had encouraged this fat woman to take off her clothes and the woman said she never took her clothes off even in front of the television, which she watched four weekday afternoons, and had long ago given up expecting her antique-dealer husband to tell her she was fat.

": . . . I hesitated to ask . . ." said Rima, and it was part-Grace, part-Rima clogging the phone line.

A thin, athletic woman Grace knew was an as yet unknown woman who in future would come for help (validation, support), sat cross-legged and leaned toward a great dark-peach-colored goddess-candle and put a hand on her Romantics Anonymous tummy and groaned and cried like the gripe was in her gut; she said she rotated upside down sometimes, dizzy like pre-meno-pause, but she’s too young—and told Grace O.K. she had a smashing job now and was split from her documentary-director husband who needed her but needed her to be there because otherwise he couldn’t ignore her and she said Grace had helped her see that his way of having her was inside him, inside his chest, so he and she would live together but all she—God, all she could seem to want was to go back, she’d even had a fine, upstanding lover to give her a sendoff back to Hobby, her still not legally separated ol’ man (ouch, ouch, ouch)—so this must be the first time she had come to Grace. Had Grace forgotten her? Was she to come?—

"... one other thing," Rima was continuing, "since I have you here on the phone and you’re going to run for President: you gave your bike to a black kid, right? a messenger? autistic? retarded?—"

"It wasn’t my bike but that’s right I gave it to him. He’s retarded like Paul Revere was retarded. He’s right out there, thinking it through step by step as good as any feminist. He has trouble getting the words together, but you should read his notes. I love him."

"And he works for one of these reader-advisor spiritualist women who has a sister in the same racket up in the Bronx who just happens to be the one who was consulted recently by one of the doctors associated with that clinic Lucille works at because she told me he went because an opera-singer friend of his went to this woman on the advice of that woman Clara, the wife of the economist, who was in your workshop."

"You lost me there, Rima, but anything my people get up to is their responsibility, just like their orgasms, and it’s all orgasm anyhow."

FEMALE SEX PROSTITUTION FOLLOWS MARKET LAW

LIKE ANY OTHER PROSTITUTION EVEN [ . . . ]:

MANY BUYERS AND FEW SELLERS MEAN HIGH PRICES.

"Well, I only wanted to ask about this guy Santee, who’s in your workshop tonight, because you know he calls himself Spence when he’s at the prison talking to that con who didn’t dig your masturbation trip? and Santee when he’s renting your space to the messenger boy for his bike right next door to—if you can believe this—a warehouse theater that’s rehearsing something with music that no one can find out anything about except there’s a sign under the bell that says LET IN or something—LET IN because a piece was torn away—and Lucille’s doctor friend was seen coming out into the street arguing with this guy Santee, and if you can believe it this aura reader in the Bronx whose sister is your bike boy’s employer was seen going in and out of there, too."

Oh yeah, they were putting on some gay opera, Grace thought she had heard, so maybe she could dig opera after all if they only would not take it so seriously but she didn’t like sitting in a theater basically. "Listen, dear," she told Rima, "I know what’s going on, O.K.? Let me see it, when it’s finished, O.K.? No hard feelings. Everyone doing their thing. And by the way, Jimmy Banks isn’t my messenger boy; he’s his own."

The rug installers had not made a sound for minutes. Rima was saying she would be in touch. (Rima was lying that she would be in touch. A double lie—because she would!) Grace was hearing, like a word "We," a hollow noise in her words Glad I know where you’re at—knowing it was potential death she was passing through, and no words for it and no regrets; and through that hollow came such a heat of uncertainty she said the Prostitution Supply/ Demand formula again and there was still a blank in the middle of it—she reached one hand out to grab the cool chin-up bar in the doorway near this hall phone; the blood was going right out of her, but who could see it?, and Goddess-blood coming in at once but the deed was done and she’s hanging by both hands, and the older rug guy, gray of hair, brown of eye, appeared before her to report they had to go finish another job from last night that they didn’t get to do this morning and would be back sometime in the afternoon, and . . . —she doing some chins? Grace let go, she put a hand on his arm: "I got the men’s workshop coming in tonight, I absolutely got to have an operating carpet by six."

But, no problem. And when the younger man with his long fingers and long nails asked what was that workshop, what were they into, Grace thought, Getting it together, but it came out "Dreaming others’ dreams for them right then and there in the group."

"I had one just last night," one man said, but Grace, who thought to say, People have such potential, said, "Dreams of power, dreams of glory, dreams of hang-ups." "Getting it together," the younger man said.

The older man said he had a workshop in his basement, and they all laughed. "Get it on with yourself," Grace said. "That’s right," said the older man.

She heard, Help, but not as a cry for help but filling something up that had been void; and she said, "I think I dreamed a mountain was coming."

"Far out," said the younger man.

"And you know it kept me from knowing it was coming near me and was right in my vicinity."

"What’s in that mountain?" said the older man.

"It was wide and very, very heavy," said Grace.

"That’s gonna end all dreams, man," said the younger man, and the three of them agreed, laughing. "You know, that was it," said Grace; "the mountain coming meant we didn’t have to dream again."

The younger man asked how come all men in that workshop.

"Men have problems with each other, their bodies, their touching capability; you see them walk around and shake hands and they want to keep holding hands, you know, but they’re not in touch with their bodies, not white men anyhow," said Grace.

"Is that you?" the younger asked, pointing at two impeccably shave-cunt-positive headstand shots Cliff had taken of Grace. She beamed. "Yeah, that’s me."

She asked to look at the nails of the younger one, and took his right hand in her hands and smoothed the back and peered through the delicate paleness of the nails to the flesh beneath, and she turned his hand over and stared at the little map printed in each fingertip. He asked her if she could read palms, and she said she could read fingerprints. The older man said, "Every one is different." Grace said, "Yes, I have a different type of fingerprint than yours." "They’ll catch up with you," said the younger man.

She went with them, when they went. They dropped her on a windy street below Union Square, and all the time she knew that at that moment, when she had become Rima and saw what was coming she couldn’t do anything probably about it; but what the fuck, pre-menopausal, why blame it on the "men"? go with that blue mare she had heard of even if it took her into the evening skyline, she knew she must have dreamed it, though she would not say so. But then she knew, though she did not tell the men, that she had not had that dream about the mountain, it had come some other way.

It didn’t matter, but she didn’t believe they were finishing a job left unfinished last night. But she knew she was going where she had been before and knew that the old man and the crazy old beautiful woman would be there like once before, and weeks ago that seemed so little time, littler and littler, that it might have squeezed right down into being a future the goddess gave her a glimpse of.

A block from where she was going and near a shop window crammed with madras skirts and brass implements from which a fat Middle Eastern stud contemplated her, she stopped a gray grunge of a derelict. He didn’t remember her. He put his hand to the bulge of his pocket. She gave him a dollar and wasn’t going to buy him a shave or bring him home for a bath and shampoo included, old female-hormone head of mop hair tangled all over old scarf ace but shagged soft as cashmere. "What are you doing?" he asked as if he had been interrupted. "There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on Bleecker Street—A.A., you know? Why don’t you go?" she said but with her own secret pace carrying her past him. "I’m not dressed for it," he said; "you got some haircut, lady."

He frowned sharp blue eyes out of the dirty, dim goat face. How to stay thin on pre-processed carbohydrate. He yawned his awful mouth at her like he’s breathless or laughing his way toward sinking a few teeth in her heart. She holds his arm, his good tweed sleeve. "Goodbye," she says. "Why not," he responds. The thick-faced man in the shop window nods at her, smiling.

So it’s a fairy tale or she’s out of her depth. Yet she never is, so long as she remembers that old higher power; but which one, because Rima is beyond her, and unimportant, but leading her into some emptiness Grace might not be equal to: trivial and terrible and a consequence of all words used so largely in workshop as if for the universe casting for each of us our own goddess-shadow that’s bright as we’re dark (and enough to go around for all our individualized auras)—words used very largely, etcetera, but rather used for home (-is-where-the-heart-is) where politics is rampant in the ripest guilt and manipulation while some few people like Rima she helped now cast her on some asshole other-people’s trip which maybe was real politics, Man-type Washington-smelling power Grace had said was any woman’s right and not corrupt except in the use that people made of it, but as far from hearth and home meditated-on by Body-Self self-content taking a solitude trip as Power which she knows she sometime has can’t maybe be; and she needs Cliff but is drawn on to the Messenger-Service/Psychic-Consultation storefront because she was living she knew where other crazies’ dream worlds need acting out, though if this be alternative gross feedback then what’s there to be afraid of? Yet, preceded by her eyes—suddenly seeing ahead that Burmese woman with one leg whom she could help who is not a memory of a workshop but a divinity before her with on one side nothing below her coat, and who’s yelling laughing to a beautiful Occidental guy, "Get over here!" yelling the rings off his fingers—the clear power route broached by Body-Self and the exposure of patriarchal poison-gas-type underground warfare centuries old to subjugate sharing of information to sex-negative male sharing of sisters (the world is your igloo) who are asking not to rule the world but only to experiment with self-image, mutual work, and in-your-own-body love, now seems destined to enfold an only seemingly unknown-type corporate-conspiracy-constipation linking like some unreal science Clara’s opera star whom Grace hoped might join a workshop, and the wonderful (newly spelt) Feaulie who from his maximum-security castle-retreat up the Hudson rejected self-sex (so he said) for astral intercourse with some girlfriend in Manhattan Grace bet didn’t know about it which, though astral, was the physical sensation of telepathic beaming back and forth between two screens like an eyeball of light bounding between interferences, roadblocks, men-type misenergized anal glop when what he was really onto though not yet into was in Grace’s opinion (of telepathy) a communicating by whole body (not its mere insane brain) and as telepathy could get boring if you didn’t keep up your end and be getting it on or about to constantly (and you might get droned-out on Maureen from Florida measuring time-of-digestion of hard-boiled free-range eggs against time of usable energy derived from yolk and/or versus white), so the obstacle to keeping the inter-void tele-rap interesting was not just seeing that each center of the whole-body had its own flow thing (forget the chart!) and the intercourse started high and stayed high like where her sculptor friend Raya (with the husband who three times burnt down the house in Westhampton) began in order to work toward the ground but here with Grace there was no ground, but when whole bodies got in touch either liver to liver, lung to lung, shoulder to shoulder, heart-focus to heart-focus (where heart’s specially noise-prone), or, on the other hand, person A’s (say) ear-focus to person B’s (say) lower-back (an interchange where all that the mouth would not at the moment speak and was being heard growing greater but in these scarily narrower and more and more compact zombie-bombies of "I’m your mother if you want and I’ll lose you if I can just get you inside me" and "Your inner thigh smell mellow-yellow and I own it ‘cause the rest of you don’t catch on," drew to the brain-side tiny bone-faces of the earworks to pulse through them such scoopograms out the other side to the other’s miles-distant, territory-distant lower-back anxiety-knots (potential-knot or cartilage-real) as were so fast answered as to have gotten back before the A-messages (not to be mixed up with the Alpha position) were finished (as at toilet) for she knew these B-cushies, launched from knots of tension to blow so big and soft it takes A’s whole-body ear-mouth to receive that kiss-of-breath message, and no buyers and no sellers but not socialism either, nor even whatever one of her uncles in his cups used to think he meant when he said the word "socialism" (she saw him stand up out of his easy chair with his glass balancing in his grip his whole, pelvis-locked body and knew that this was past and not future but the gap in her demand-supply prostitution cliche was to be filled, was to come, and so were many women and men, and so was, apparently, the athletic, anxious woman with the potential ex-husband named Hobby, so clearly testified to), and the larger set of words might as well be voices but she wasn’t at all sure, now that it’s the goddess on her lonesome we give credit for this wonderful new cross-organ system like wind blowing like constant future answering messages before received so long as it ain’t heart-to-heart or pancreas-to-pancreas but cross-organ, and such a high she’s glad to come down off it to cope with Santee-Spence’s business trip with one or both of these south-of-the-border Reader-Advisor Psychic-Consultation bullshit artists, one of them located where the wonderful old couple passed by, as pair-bonded as their separate lunacies might shape.

The storefront hasn’t moved. Grace is nowhere else but here. And Jimmy Banks worked out of here and still does part-time, she knows so he can cover himself and his bike in case mom and the social worker compare notes and determine he’s nuts or a Mongolian hard-on and force early retirement on him and that giant jaw of his, so poor little cock he can’t quite go public. Yet here they really are, the old couple, still together after a century, and she hails them.

"Oh we are ready to begin again," old lady calls, and a broom comes sailing end over end out of the third-floor window of the building downstreet just missing a hill of fruit-and-vegetable trash part of the Korean landscape at the end of a row of garbage cans; a high-chair follows, vegetable to vegetable, thank God baby not in it, and lands on the hill.

"I came," says Grace, with tears in her eyes, as if she weren’t in fear.

"We could see that," said the grizzled old growler-man kindly reporting a fact worth reporting.

"That silly pair, where are they?" the old girl lamented, so beautiful in lavender dress showing beneath old gray coat with animal fur at top.

"I’ll go in and see," said Grace.

She wanted to bless the old lady, the mole on her jaw, the darkish eyebrows, the prominent nose, a woman maybe not mad or senile after all, just eccentric visionary like a million women whose visions don’t get cared for.

The interior is weird. A gypsy bullshit side. And a counter with small file drawer and telephone and coffee container over there. Senora Wing in gold and red and black sitting at a round table with a sign on it saying "Senora Wing." At the counter a guy who must be Turnstein: vain about all that piled kinky hair shaped like a second head. A man with weight of worlds still untapped on his broad, jammed shoulders, he’ll have a hunch before he’s forty, having been over forty since he was a pube to his mom’s dictator-martyr. But also an inset bunk area where these utterly juicy and fascinating androgynes—great Goddess, Grace would like to be nude with them, their coming awake there, they love each other, what is this window-performance shit? Grace is not still out on the sidewalk where high chairs rain down on Korean fruit-and-vegetable landscapes but she would like to be there with the old lady and gentleman, figuring what’s their trip, what’s going on, such a live pair; something going there, for sure, and she almost needs their story but Rima’s bullshit is like a problem at the bank that, you know, won’t go away, though when will the rug guys return?, and thank God the men’s workshop’s tonight.

Turnstein’s hopeless in the flick of the big eyes everywhere. The dumbly, accidentally sculpturesque detouring line of fluorescent light overhead turns this story away under the table or into Grace’s head, she’s aware of her blue peacoat and her purple sweatpants and high alligator boots. Is this place real, and she’s got things to do. And who cares a shit if Rima exposes Grace for a sex-fiend therapist-without-antiobiotic-conceptual portfolio, and yet:

"Yes?" says Senora Wing, looking her up and down, especially down.

"Yeah," Grace says, waiting to get equality by sitting down across from this heavy-duty bull-mother who gets Grace into contact but where’s that wholeheartedness you need in war and love, and the Goddess, where’s she?, Grace knows she’s into a tricky transaction if not dreadlocked to the ultimate stranglehold. A broad-shouldered man with stud-gray hair should walk in here now, but won’t—but where’s he froml, he’ll come to her, he is in this someplace, and the Santee character, not big but aura-affirmative, something long-distance about that dude, the fringe jacket, get it off him tonight, he might not just be inside: so, is a very large number being done on her for bucks, for expose city? for some higher power?—but all she ever wanted (poor little Gracie!) was ... a blank that cuts in like before, and she’s kidding self (though not Body-Self) kidding herself she knew just what she wanted with workshop celebrity cum taking economic and spiritual responsibility for her life.

WING: I knew you would co’m. What is yr name?

GRACE: Are you a sister?

WING: Yr name, madam?

GRACE: Grace Kimball. Are you a sister, dear?

WING: We find out. Cross my palm with your forearm.

GRACE: (Doing so, so she leans close to Wing) Hey, far out: cross-limb communication. What’s going on, Wing?

WING: You came from the West, some years ago, and you are looking for something.

GRACE: What can it be?

WING: Your friendship vein is your strong suit. You have many women friends from many lands. They tell you their lives. This can be risky for you. You are looking for something they have not told you.

GRACE: You are looking for something they have not told you. You have a sister. So you are one.

WING: (Smiling grimly—definitely not non-orgasmic, but . . .) No, Madam Kimball, you are looking for something they have not yet told you.

GRACE: No, you are, but you’re getting mad and I’m your client. Tell me more, Senora. We’re sisters somewhere down the road.

WING: You have a gentleman coming to see you soon who knows people you know, and you must beware of him because if you let him in on your knowledge of a person from across the water that you know, he may use this so that others will come down on you very hard.

GRACE: Is that a promise, honey?

WING: (Seriously ignoring Grace s implicit acknowledgment of threat) You came from the West with Indian blood in your veins. You have a father who have a problem. Your mother plays musical instrument. You worry ‘bout her. You had a dark man in your life and he went away someplace I am not sure—change arm (points to Grace* s other forearm, which Wing now receives in her palm)—Long Island, he lives there now, I think—never mind. There is another man but he is married to a woman you know and you hear about him but you need to hear more, because he is in danger and you could help him if you get his wife to tell if he is planning a trip—

GRACE: (Humorously) With me?

WING: (Seemingly uninterrupted)—and if you help him you help yourself because you have a career and it is at the turning point, it can go either way, you can get into big money—

GRACE: (Laughing) Never!

WING: (Seemingly uninterrupted)—or into trouble. I see a bicycle racing through the rush hour and instead of a rider there is a blank space, no rider but the bike is racing through the City of Manhattan and it is looking for you where you should be—now no arms but heads (she leans way forward over the table)—

GRACE: Eyeball to eyeball, far out! (leans to press forehead)

WING: There is another man, he is your age, he is the right age for you—

GRACE: A traveling man from Saudi Arabia?

WING: (Seemingly uninterrupted) I feel him coming here between us; he may visit you, he may not; he is close, I can feel it—

GRACE: Is he clothed?

WING: He is well-dressed. I don’ know where he is coming from.

GRACE: Prison?

WING: Who would that be, Grace?

GRACE: Or out of a theater? I can’t quite tell.

WING: Someone from prison? I feel that you were in prison, there’s somebody there that doesn’t understand you like I do and you can be in danger if you go to prison again.

GRACE: Got a workshop date there in a week if they don’t cancel it.

WING: YOU need information from a foreign lady about the possible trip of her husband and I see that when you receive this information you must not tell it to anyone especially one who will come to see you tonight.

GRACE: Describe him.

WING: He has taken off his clothes, I cannot see him except his face, which has a thin, light-colored beard and he licks his lips when he listens and when he speaks he smiles and listens a lot but the rest of his body does not exist for me. We change contacts now (Senora Wing draws away and extends her index finger to touch Grace under her jaw).

GRACE: I see a woman named Rima in your cluster somewhere. I have many sisters. You have only one. I don’t know what is going on with you and her and I don’t want to know—

WING: Good! Let’s keep it that way for friendship’s sake.

GRACE: For the goddess’s sake maybe ... but Mr. Turnstein over there looks freaked out; are you armed?

WING: (Raising her palm) Hand to hand now. (Grace meets her, palm to palm.) You do good work, Madam Kimball. You have to understand the limits of your powers.

GRACE: Listen, dear, my power is from the goddess and takes the form of the responsibility my people learn to take for themselves, their bodies, their trips. My power is unlimited because the future of the people I encourage is unknown and unlimited. You couldn’t really predict how far some woman will go, once she is free of the mother-provider kitchen-trip or helping her invalid husband get his penis into her before it wilts and then taking her own happiness in his coming after three and a half minutes and thanking her; you could not really predict how far a woman will go when she walks out on her family, her furniture, her vanity about her hair, her belief that he has all the things to say; walks out on house arrest that’s lasted twenty years, knowing that the orgasm that puts her in touch with her Body-Self and with the peace that passes understanding might not have to depend on a man, on a man or another woman—she might be able to make a gift of it to herself. There’s no predicting these things, but you take responsibility for the unknown by entering it. It can be more violent staying in it than getting out of it and the tyrant suspects that you’re murdering him, but he’ll survive.

WING: You say things that will get you in trouble. What I tell you about your future I take responsibility for. Remember the man who licks his lips; if you have information about a trip to be taken by the man who is husband to your woman friend from across the water, do not give it to the man who licks his lips and has a small beard, he does not understand how to use it and neither do you.

GRACE: This is gossip. This is unreal bullshit. This isn’t energy.

WING: If you have such information, you can use it to control your own future by tellin’ it to me and about house arrest and murdering the tyrant.

GRACE: (Rising, giving her interlocutor a sunny grin) We’re both encouragers; you do your part, I do mine; you could afford to lose some weight around the hips and the triceps, you come to the workshop next week, I’ll give you a good rate.

WING: I give you this for nothing.

GRACE: What were you giving me for nothing? Maybe I missed it, and what was the nothing?

WING: Advice, baby.

TURNSTEIN: (Bursting—slowly, if possible) You know those old folks out there. She said she watched Jimmy’s bike for him. Where’s he go on his bike?

GRACE: I don’t know them personally. I guess Jimmy runs messages on his bike. (To Senora Wing) Did Rima get more than she gave you? Does she like your politics? Does she know your sister? Are you into gay theater?

WING: (Smiling widely, speaking softly) You think these things are gossip. They are real. Who cares if a woman leaves her husband, who cares what they are doing in bed? That’s their business. Big deal if the woman goes out to work. When the family goes hongry, who the hell cares if the doctor don’t warm up his speculum? I don’t know any Rima. You got nothing to tell me now—maybe later, maybe sooner.

TURNSTEIN: (Seeming to be on the verge of stammering) You see Jimmy tell him I can’t cover for him indefinitely.

GRACE: YOU should tell him yourself.

TURNSTEIN: He says it takes him longer to do a job than it used to, but he’s got a bike now—he says he doesn’t have a bike but we know he does.

GRACE: "We"?

Senora Wing snaps her fingers at the awakening androgyne twins, who tumble out of their bunk nook and stumble humorously toward the storefront window to clamber onto the stage-like shelf and do their thing.

The old lady seemed to stare at the window but welcomed Grace. "They’re not so funny any more, not so funny at all. They don’t want to be there? I better leave them before they leave me."

"I found out what I went in for."

The old lady took Grace’s hand: "I knew you would. But I don’t have anything to go in for. And I have no money." She nodded at the tough old man. "He has our money. But he works."

"Not recently," the old man said. "I feel like I’ve been unemployed for about a century. But I have my own work that I do—just as well."

"Listen, do those people in there want you two to come here every day? Is that it? Is that why those nitwits put on a show in the window?"

"I wouldn’t know," the old man said. His lean, worn face kept its young strength in the full, firm mouth and the clear, ready forehead. "I worked in New Jersey but they let me go."

"Oh, we were in New Jersey for many a year," the old lady beautifully said.

"I was the one who worked there," the man said. "She wasn’t there recently so far as I know."

"Sad but true," his companion said.

"Forced retirement?" said Grace. The city had retreated from them; the hill of fruit-and-vegetable truck had disappeared and with it the high chair as if it had been sucked back into the window it had been thrown from.

"I felt like a friend of mine out West years ago. One day they came asking questions about him; the next week he went to Uruguay. Broke up his family."

"He did?" asked Grace. "No," said the old man, "it did."

"People came asking questions about you?"

"Oh some free-lance gypsy."

"Political?" "Oh I wouldn’t think so; a matter of convergence—I’m a maverick to begin with."

The old lady spoke up. "We worked there in New Jersey for many a moon." The two of them laughed at that.

The man didn’t want to talk about what had happened. They were moving off down the sidewalk, and the wind picked up, and Grace didn’t feel they had snubbed her by not saying goodbye.

Grace called out to them. "Do you know the fortune teller in there?"

"Yes, yes," said the old lady. "No," said the old man; "she hasn’t been there long."

"She said she took complete responsibility for what she was telling me about things to come."

"Did she describe them?" asked the old man, who was looking at, more than into, Grace’s eyes. "Not in detail, really," said Grace; "I guess I filled in the details, like some guy who licks his lips and has a light-colored beard and I shouldn’t talk to him. I suppose she tells everybody that one."

"Yes," said the old man, and stood there narrowing the distance between them, his companion singing a little song. "Yes; it sounds exactly like the fellow who came asking questions about my past connections as if he had been there."

"If he feels he was, maybe he was," said Grace. "I feel that, too, but then I have Indian blood, or my mother always said I did." She would be back in her own space in a second if she could; the men would be returning to finish the carpet; and that unknown Santee and the others would be displaying a full spectrum of excitement and sheepishness arriving and—"hang up your hat and stay a while," Grace heard her mother say to someone, past becoming future if, now that she’s a widow, she is having some fun with the old electrician who fixed the timer on her furnace.

"Yes, if you can describe it, you’re responsible for it," said the old man; "my uncle said he had heard that from some natives he once knew."

"And if you have a trace of something in you . . . ?" said Grace.

"Someone will find it and find a use for it. It’s human nature."

"I used to think I was a Navachoor Prince, you know, in another life," said Grace to both of them. "But then I began to think it’s all this life."

The old woman seemed all there for a moment: "You mean the Navajo Prince. We know him."

The old man clasped her hand tight and raised it with grim affection. "Never heard of Navachoor." This time he nodded goodbye and they turned, and when Grace called after him, "What were you doing at the TV station?" he turned to his companion, who turned to him, and they had words and Grace thought she heard the man say "Prince" and the woman say "Trace Window" and he said, "You’re mistaken," and she said, or Grace imagined she said, "I thought we did."

They were there ahead of her. Why did she not recall telling Manuel to let them in? She had kept him from losing his job for being away from his station in the lobby helping an old lady on the second floor put in a fuse and the guy with the rare dog had picked that time to check security. She could not remember, she tried. The job was all done and she spotted a smudge on one wall low down and a handprint over higher beside the bookcase of books she would get rid of. The men were standing inspecting the great plaque full of to-scale cunts, individually sculptured from life, silvered by the maker, a cluster of real women proud and sex-positive. The older, lighter man had heavy eyebrows she hadn’t noticed and was puffy around the eyes so his recessed eyes came out more friendly. People took off their shoes when they came into Grace’s apartment. The younger, darker man looked at her and smiled and looked around as if for something to sit on. The men had been here once and in their familiarity acted more distant. The older one with doubtless a less durable bladder at his age went to the bathroom; she heard him targeting the porcelain above water level, allowing for the lack of a door. Days multiplied and she knew that in a few minutes she would feel happy about the rug again. She knew they hadn’t had another client, but then again a women’s painting crew had let her down. "I had four women paint this place last month," she said as the older man returned—she was feeling quiet, she wasn’t chattering, she was coming down. The men said they had seen a mouse. "My friend," Grace said; "he gets his bread in his own little container, nothing but whole-grain, the only bread-eating that goes on in this house." The young man told her—he was relaxed and gently, affordably distant, like a friend—of some new traps they had: one was heavy glue and mice can’t see too well so they run across and get stuck but trouble is you can’t pull them off without tearing their legs off and then the trap’s hard to use again at two-fifty per; and then there’s a trick cage and they step onto a trap and slide down into the back and their friends come by and hear them and follow the sound and you get a cageful; and then there’s a little private swimming pool of chemical and they fall into that and it dissolves them better than a school of piranhas. The older man said it was a good paint job. Grace said they stood her up twice and then charged her a dollar more an hour for the labor than they had said. The younger man said they had to get paid for their time. The older man asked where the mouse got fed. She decided not to bring out the little wood-whittled cunt near the garbage pail. She asked if they liked the work. The older man said you could get into it; time could fly sometimes. Grace wrote them a check and got four five-dollar bills out of a large bowl on the mantel. She figured they would sit and smoke a joint with her if she asked them. The younger seemed to respond to what his co-worker had said about really getting into this work. He said he had had a dream his wife died. He had heard she was dying and he took his time getting home but had the sense he was rushing, and she was dead when he got home, but no kids around in the dream; then he saw she was right next to him in the bed sleeping. Grace told how she had helped someone die. It was one of her workshop people who had cancer and came home from the hospital. Grace and some friends had been with her during the days when she went off drugs completely and they held hands and celebrated the growth of people in each other’s hearts until one of the women who had never at that time been in a workshop said, "Don’t plant me in your heart. I’d grow too fast," and they all laughed, and after they spoke to the goddess, who was there with them, the same woman —it was a friend named Lucille who did later on come to a workshop— invoked a magic man who could "mingle" the "look" of the dead with "all that can be seen," and later the dying woman had to go back to the hospital and back on pain killers but death had been admitted into life where it belongs, and her death was a joyous one. The older carpet man said that that was being a real friend beyond the call of duty.

The younger pointed at the great churchly plaque of wavy-lined, flowering vaginas (to-scale) and asked if they were what he thought they were. Grace said they were a recent acquisition done by a friend of hers and each vagina was one of her workshop women—had he seen the coat hooks in the hall? The men laughed politely. How many women had been through her workshops, the younger man wanted to know. Grace guessed a number; it felt like an object she couldn’t get out of her, meaningless and sort of metal. It hadn’t really gone out to him in answer. The men were going, but the older man had something to say, and Grace, touching his arm as he went past toward the hallway, didn’t know if he would get it out. She said, "You should know some of them," and felt instantly better. To prevail not by number but by voices. Over what?

Out by the coat hooks, she put a hand on the shoulder of each man, a good black body she could know a whole anatomy of from the firm flow of the shoulder, the chest and arms were what made her a happy racist. She gave each man a hug, which they bent down embarrassed to receive. "I still don’t remember telling the doorman you could come in without my being here."

"He said you always did that so he didn’t have to ask you."

Yet something she doesn’t remember. And they go, but turning back toward her after he has crossed the threshold, the older man asks how much the workshop costs, and she knows he means the women’s, though it’s all the same, and she tells him, and feels that in the midst of the abundance philosophy she would never flinch from stating her value in money terms, no shit, no guilt, no apology. "Cheap at the price," the younger man observes, shaking his head, uneasy, kidding. "Bottom line," Grace hears herself affirm.

Well, everyone knows about the void. It’s late, and she lay thinking on the new carpet, her sweatpants peeled off beside her, the only object wall to wall besides herself; and the color of the carpet forgotten behind her eyelids and become its cushion of texture. She would have reached into the void for her sketchbook to record "The Void is the nothing you may assume about your future" and "The Void is Divinity—which is the shape of that space that asks change of me and gives room for it," but to let in these voids, she had to be one throat from head to toe holding all her get-up-and-go here prone for them to voice their angels gently fucking with her, winging into bodily form through her so she lets them do a bit of the running of the fuck, for "The Void is the phone’s ring now going on and on for the moment," which it did because she had not activated Call Forwarding, which was "The Void when it’s ‘On’ and yet you’re Tn,’ ‘" knowing that "The Void is the friends you hear a woman proudly say she keeps, where pride is really anger that her new ex-marriage tells her that keeping old friends isn’t the only thing in life," yet granted "The Void is Sunyata—the depending of everything on everything else." The men tonight—coming for a freebie? mother-fuck? coming to look the others over? coming for feedback. A man (with a good body) still in love with his first wife but just married and with a new baby coming; a gay man in love, he imagines, with his former wife; a gay man who wants to compare notes by non-stop talking; a department-store window dresser with boils all over his back (so he’s told her); a young minister; a painter who supports himself by doing horoscopes for artists; a man who wants his small daughter to live with him and is gay; this man Santee who said only that he would like to get in some fine-tuning; also a young musician, sassy and spoiled and darling, a friend of the opera singer Ford North who always embraced Grace and was always in process of moving out of that overstuffed old rent-controlled apartment of his. But not Larry, whom Spence had said he thought he knew and who had just this morning bowed out, no doubt thinking this was some new type of swing with a mother superior telling you how to brush your teeth and let yourself take a shit without forcing it and get cheerful without jerking yourself off into being some old leering predator like Henry Miller locked into genital sex—and eat what your body would thank you for until you found you were all one.

The mugs for herbal tea. Bowls of dried fruit. Some apricot oil. Panasonic consciousness full of rest-energy tactically positioned around the Body-Room. The sound of her vacuum going on under her hand draws the phone into it, and she’s picking up in a second, hoping no cancellation, though la-de-da she is quite able, thank you, to T.R. (Take Rejection, or, by Cliff, Transcendental Rotation) which might be what she is doing as she listens for a moment of agitation (as opposed to energy) to Rima (It’s me again) demanding to know why Grace mentioned her to a sleazy Cuban fortunedealer (One turn deserves another, Rima) (And what was Rima’s last name?) until she said goodbye against the dark shrillness of the wiry voice that would have to be consigned to Grace’s answering service—it was forty-five minutes to the Men’s Group anyway—Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, Rima, say what you will, do what you will, love ya body, ‘bye! and the dark shrillness ("So who is under house arrest, Grace? that woman Wing is dangerous!") turned off here yielded some dark blank there at the door, which had buzzed—with no warning from the lobby—asking for her light and the goddess’s to bend inside someone who had come early, and the vacuum standing in the middle of the new brown carpet.

But the face, the familiar head of Santee/Spence—whatever the last name of this Ray dude proved to be—greeted Grace in the peepscope and she knew she had been getting set for this unknown, wherever his body was.

"Hi, Ray!"—the opening door brings him in moistening his lips, blinking his eyes, taking off his clothes as if rehearsed, and talking as if he has been here a dozen times. Light-brown hair and thin beard, body lean but soft, and darker than his narrow face. "We have friends in common," he is saying, hanging his suede jacket and pants on a hook, lining his boots up, displaying a curiously arresting and confident design on the back of his western shirt as he turns away to raise his knees out of his underpants. And on impulse picking up his manner, Grace says what’s only impulse as unexplained as light, "Yeah, one of them won’t be here tonight," while "You don’t say," said the man, turning his persistent face toward her and ripping the snaps of his shirt open and seeming to reply before she feels finished with her words yet she knows in the midst of this unknown man who doesn’t belong that he won’t demand to know who that is—and she might not volunteer "Larry," the former owner of a bike in the employ of Ray and Turnstein, supposedly, though Turnstein is in Senora Wing’s pocket obviously and the two of them are ready for membership in the Til Eulenspiegel Society who, after all, might well be rehearsing that reputed opera where the LET IN sign hangs if Grace cared beyond slight fear, only slight fear. "Just as well—it might be my alter ego," Spence/Santee observes, and Grace, as the buzzer rings in another much-too-early member of her first men’s group, asks, "So which is it? Spence or Santee?" only, hearing the silence behind her, to find staring through the peephole at her the young minister Ave (for Avery—the nickname is important to him) and suddenly there with him two others of the group like twenty or thirty others; so that to know what it is like to be them she might have to be just herself here where the thermostat for obvious reasons is kept high, and leave to his own resources that Prince, that Navachoor or Navajo Prince she knows she also is, wherever he is, approaching, pausing to experiment with the resting energies of the northern buffalo tongue, continuing among all and sundry, welcoming them when he was the one arriving: until, as she hauled open the door, she heard Spence with that insidious cheerfulness say, "You know Jim Mayn, I think, don’t you?"

known bits II

j. Logged in at nine A.M., concerned about answering machine bought and provided by Santee/Spence. Concerned about risk in lying to mother that phone # of Independent Messenger Unit = Turnstein Messenger Service new number. Concerned about breakdown of negotiations on Messenger Union due to Maureen leaving for Bonita Springs, Florida, plus freaked at George’s stated intent to take over organizing and enroll so-call normals as well as so-call retards (who are now said to know something going on in City nobody else does), while Maureen did not threaten to come back from Florida but sent postcard via Miss Kimball to the effect that any union confined to retarded messengers discriminated against them. Concerned (What do you mean "concerned"? asked Gustave later) that Spence/Santee get hold of log with these records, because silence is golden as mother said. Concerned that messages and/or other materials to be transported by messenger run by Gustave from foundation to opera singer Luisa and from her to dirty old warehouse-theater next door are watched by Santee/Spence. (Why are you "concerned"? said Gustave; maybe we take on another non-bike messenger since you do the biking.) Still little space to breathe. Here at 8:10 A.M. to board bike; then to Turnstein & Wing’s picking up two job-destination to-from pairings—to be fast-slowed by sandwiching with own up here at log H.Q. to be split with Gustave who’s late again in subway rush not reading correctly a single-door opening. Build on knowns always. Mother and social worker will rescind work and bike if they learn of same. Build on this risk. Build on known contacts. Take messenger-related materials from place of origin to place of destination along known routes. Deal with known obstacles arising in lane-related routes. Spence/Santee is friend to Independent Messenger Unit, but is known to deal with Turnstein & Wing, who deal with Jimmy B. like he is messenger bringing bad news unknown to him when really he’s picking up information so he’ll go someplace else and pick up messages or transit materials to take to someplace else, good news or bad.

Jimmy you are the light of my life, said Santee, meeting head of Independent Messenger Unit wheeling bike out on morning message-sandwich job combining own work with T&W fast-slowed messages. Jimmy, could you take this to the same young woman at the foundation? said Spence, though "Santee" was name in upper left of large envelope, which without complaint was put in large twin-shoulder bag out of sight along with log notebook now carried everywhere with proprietor of IMU.

But the young woman named Amy sent material to, and rec’d it from, young woman Jean, who received at least two enclosures from Sarah Mayn, one jointly sent Jean by Sarah and very small woman named Lincoln that heard of Turnstein through Miss Kimball, who no longer uses Tumstein but uses IMU, so business improves.

Georgie did not make mother believe in the bike; she does not believe her son could ride one with his retard and his limp; she does not feel the flow.

Asked Santee what sign meant outside warehouse next door. Didn’t answer, then said he would ask; said, Probably just business, you know.

Was rushing to Turnstein’s near noon and after locking bike by Korean fruit and vegetable boxes was accused by Senora Wing of monkey business and taking much too long. Turnstein’s twins could be trained to carry messages, she said.

k. Would tape-record, but don’t rely on speaking. Gustave reported Georgie said Kimball-related bike was stolen and he had been roughed up by Georgie outside foundation but held on to large manila envelope taken to opera singer Luisa’s who was crying and took material from envelope and replaced it and sent it on to consulate of South American nation on Second near Forty-fifth Street—but first sat back down at piano and played song for Gustave, good fast-slow beat, about words being made of breath and breath of life the coinage of your brain, for love of Grace my pulse keeps time with yours—a long song and Gustave sat down in his coat on a rickety little chair, and the lady Luisa had a loud voice that could be very soft and she cried again while she was singing but she was smiling.

Gustave brave, but freaked by Georgie, who does not know where IMU and bike are located (though he know that what he telling Gustave is boolshit, like that Fuji bikes have self-destruct "nitrate" controlled at company headquarters; bike is a Raleigh anyhow), but now IMU have to ask where did Miss Kimball get it? Georgie tell Gustave he’ll speak to J.B.’s mother, and who is this guy Spence who’s running show, you fuckin’ retard.

Gustave said he almost looked in envelope later going uptown. This would violate policy. These people do not matter; the work matter. The messages and graphics work and other stuff in envelopes, in packages. The client confidence. The cartoon plates. You don’t know what you carry from client to client. You get there in you lanes, you look ahead to obstacles in the lanes, you look ahead to which door is chosen to not open today on this car. You get there, and that’s business. Mother called, got Spence/Santee: he said Jim Banks out on a job, J.B.’s a good man. Mother said, He’s a boy, and Santee/ Spence said, He’s the light of my life.

Who are you? she asked.

Son of Turnstein, replied purchaser-provider of answering machine. Well, I’m worried about his digestion, said mother.

Luisa told Gustave she singing for her father. She sad but all wired up.

1. What was missing? Hopefully the next thing not the last. But bike flow made up for a lot, and gave more than motion, more than power, more than pride: it was giving new thoughts, but no time for them. Find time, then. Messengers all over, but not in organization. Limping, big-necked, lolling-headed, splay-ankled, bobbing real seriously through City that is only partly seen, frowning, splay-eyed, two-handing their big manila envelopes, the delivery package, knowing exact address of destination and shortest distance to it but maybe looking like they don’t know nothing else but mother feeding them their meat and their chocolate milk, their banana pie and spinach and carrots; looking like they got to struggle to hold in their head what bus or subway to take to get there—and first and last employed, employed so long as they’re employed.

Spence asked if log of day’s work was kept—just asking, he said, but he must have noticed that log is now not available in office, but he don’t know it is in J.B. twin-shoulder back-pack as founder of IMU. Why concerned?, said Gustave alone in office at end of day after final base-touching run to Turnstein-Wing’s with receipt from other job and Wing did not say anything, not "How come you so slow?" not "What’s going on?" but nothing, not a look. Nothing going on. Turnstein’s twins reading comic books in bunk. Why concerned? said Gustave back at office. Wanted to feel safe. O.K., O.K., said Gustave; but what was safe? knowing for sure which of two subway doors will open so as not to stand in front of wrong one? I was surprised, realizing that I had not been thinking about dual-door problem. Now thinking of surface problems: like when cab in bike lane will suddenly stop to pick up or drop passengers stalling lane, and heavy traffic coming on right. Flow is where it’s at; and flow underground with limp and large jaw became flow by bike which eliminated limp and streamlined the jaw: but security needed—job security now that Maureen went to Florida and mother and social worker do not always use new phone number but call Turnstein-Wing.

m. Cab came close (if you can ride, why walk?) and ran beside bike like they are locked in for good. And it was Santee/Spence—with a man with a mustache and a hat and a sport jacket and muffler; it’s O.K. if you inside, but if you outside in you lane you need you sweatshirt hood up above you coat (why you want to hang on to that old sweatshirt? mother says every morning—next thing she’ll be changing her mind and say, Better try to go to high school after all).

It didn’t matter how Spence/Santee got there beside IMU founder in parallel lane; he just was.

It didn’t matter why Lady Luisa cried; she played piano and sang, and it did not matter what she said about her father, or what she did with envelope she put music and word pages into and held and then handed over, then took back out of Gustave’s hands, then handed over, then wasn’t sure again, then said, "Go." Because what matters is getting the envelope to destination, not why the sender is sending it or how she feels.

Business (again) = building on what is known. Business is a management trip, Miss Kimball said. Manage messages.

Message waiting on answering machine for Santee very slow: "Please . . . call . . . Mr. . . . Mr. . . . Mason . . . at"—and a phone number, suddenly known but not quite placed.

Checked in at T&W’s where Santee is out on sidewalk while I’m locking bike down block by garbage cans beside fruit and vegetable place where part-full cigarette carton thrown from third-floor window targets IMU founder’s shoulder turning from bike. Sehora Wing out on sidewalk, may have caught J.B. leaving bike, therefore in possession of (a) bike, but ignored J.B. approach; was she dealing with Santee/Spence? He’s dealing with old man and weird, nice old lady, and gave sign to J.B. like "Let’s talk later, not now."

Old man said, "Gave her a brand-new vibrator in a box." Santee said, "But you told Grace—" "She did all the talking," said the old man.

"But you—"

"Get the hell in here," said Wing to secret founder of IMU, yet seemed to know Santee (what showed it?), so J.B. just managed to hear old lady say, "She knows the Navajo Prince too," and "No; she said something else," the old man said, but Santee said, "She said ‘Navachoor,’ but she thinks she is the Prince partly."

Inside, Turnstein said, "Your mother called. She said I had a new number, but then she said, No she was wrong. Look, if you don’t get a move on, I gotta fire you, Jimmy. What are you doing, pocketing the subway fare and walking?"

Wing looked up, weird. "You take a job from the foundation to another party?—woman name Barbara-Jean Kennedy?" but then Wing didn’t go on with it, while J.B. stammering for first time today wanted to get outa there; and she said, "If you can sit, why stand," and turned the page of her Spanish magazine that had a picture of a tower sticking up out of the ocean on the cover.

n. Upon arrival at his subway stop, Gustave was told by wildman on platform, "Come on outa there." Gustave reported subway motorman told him one of two doors won’t open because when it’s getting too slow, on account of the connection-terminals are faulty, they switch it off.

Santee looked at can of silver paint set down in corner near file cabinet but asked if there was more to machine message from man Mason. Only phone number, IMU founder answered and cootn’t help smiling. Santee said, "You sure?" Yes, J.B. policy. Santee said, "If I thought that . . . listen, you didn’t open ..."

And then I knew Mason’s phone number; it was on the envelope Gustave carried from Lady Luisa to Chilean consulate and logged on sheet to be added to main IMU log.

Mother said at suppertime, "That Turnstein’s bad news." That was all. She was not asking questions like she used to. Made me take extra Vitamin C for nerves and said I should take a day off, I’m working too hard. She asked was there anything I’m not telling her. "What?" I asked. "How do I know?" she laughed.

Time flies, as mother said, but I didn’t know where it went except into each full day. Felt light coming from behind riding bike down Fifth Avenue. Asked Santee how much answering machine cost—wanted to buy it. He laughed like a friendly fox and said, "Sorry, J.B., it’s priceless. I mean I couldn’t afford to let you have it." He answered phone—our phone, IMU phone—and while he’s talking on phone looked at me and said, "Oh they know something we don’t."

Senora Wing was fighting with Turnstein when I checked in. "Nobody’s gon’ find out about your kids as long as you’re smart," she said, and she stopped speaking, her golden and ruby bracelets clanking though her hands were on her hips and she wasn’t moving her arms; she knew I was behind her. I was thinking of quitting T&W, taking a chance with social worker and mother. "We need you, Jimmy," Senora said without turning around; "just don’t bring us no bad news."

Gustave reported a message came on the machine for Santee, and Gustave ran it back to where Santee could play it like for the first time himself, told me it said, "This is T.W., in from the West—don’t know about any portable mountain like the one described but I’m ready for Jersey assignment," so the weird words looked back into Gustave and me and we had the same thought that we better find a new office for Independent Messenger Unit—maybe take on another man—otherwise we would have to change a policy of ours in self-defense. Wasn’t "T.W." Turnstein-Wing? But I suddenly saw, Why does it have to be?

o. Turnstein’s twins carried on in the window. The old lady watched and laughed. The old man shivered. Turnstein got a call. Build on what you know. The twins were looking like a pair of girls today, and they fell out of the window into the office. They were tired of sparring. Senora Wing said, "We got to keep the old couple coming here every day," like Turnstein wasn’t on the phone. Turnstein sent me on the job, and Wing said suddenly, "So do you know the guy who goes out with that girl Jean?" but I couldn’t get the words out and it was only one word but it seemed like a lot. "Only good news, Jimmy," she said; "don’t carry bad, because bad news ain’t so good."

Turnstein’s twins were boys sometimes, sometimes girls. They had stole from message envelopes once and got early retirement but he couldn’t have them at home and Senora Wing said they should be locked up.

Every time I made my circuit and touched base at T&W, it felt like I came back to a little different place. My bike might get ripped off, or they might have some bushes, holding them back for me to come through like when we went to New Jersey for July Fourth—and everybody said we’re climbing this mountain but it didn’t seem like one until we got into a ravine and a man who looked like my father held the bush back like a rubber band so I could get through and afterward Georgie outside the supermarket said, "Ain’t no mountains in Jersey, man." But when I would come back to T&W something would be waiting for me except maybe the bushes wouldn’t hold till I was through and I never had nothing but the receipt, and as far as I knew, no bad news, but how did I know what Senora Wing meant by bad news?

p. Gustave was knocked down outside the warehouse next door but held true to his envelope and I came by a minute later and he said he didn’t see who did it and they disappeared so fast he didn’t even hear their feet running away. He wished he was in Bonita Springs with Maureen. He was coming from Miss Kimball’s building where he dropped off a package with logo plate and other material from lecture-booking agency and picked up a giant green envelope from unexpected client (music-composer friend of singer Ford North, friendly, insulting, 4’Think I can use you in my opera!," cracked himself up, laughed and laughed rolling on floor, while Gustave didn’t know what to do until later after I picked him up off sidewalk and assessed situation with sanitation workers and Orientals passing us along Twenty-fourth Street either side, Gustave said glump-glump garoom-garoom the way he speak, that little shit music-composer maybe wasn’t insulting him after all but meant it and got off on it, etcetera), business directed our way by Miss Kimball who ran into little sonofabitch music-composer boyfriend of North in laundry room where he had cornered a rare brown-and-blue-speckled rat he was capturing with a mop for a pet—so Gustave got a quick job from Kimball-North apartment building to warehouse-theater building because composer-ratcatcher who said words in foreign language not Spanish didn’t want to walk the distance himself with what was in the green envelope—and neither Gustave nor I knew how Gustave had held on to the green envelope later against attackers who had disappeared so fast they seemed to have gone into the nearest entrance which was actual destination of assignment, i.e., warehouse-theater.

Locked silver Raleigh on green No-Parking-sign stanchion to save time providing back-up support for combined delivery-investigation-of-premises. We looked at green envelope and looked at each other and spoke at once, same words, no stutter: We got to change policy.

We knew what we meant. Gustave picked his big fur cap off the sidewalk. He looked at it like he didn’t recognize it. I said put it on. He didn’t.

Felt the IMU log on back in bag. Keeping records vital, but no table. Then no time, because door beside LETIN sign was open. Then no light, because entry way inside was dark and clear of persons. Passed up flight of stairs to wide hall with only light from bulb in open closet. We were moving toward sounds of voices talking, piano dancing, woman singing to piano, music stopping, voices talking, piano up-and-downing, woman singing ("It’s her," said Gustave, and we found double doors manually operated we were glad to find). Moving into what we saw and heard was like something but no time to remember what. Wanted to go back to school. Put hand on Gustave’s shoulder, he moved ahead of me and I saw some stuff on the back of his head but there was too much to look at. We was in the theater and nothing except seats seemed to be between us and the stage, but then a moment later that wasn’t true after all. The singing was beautiful and I forgot about Gustave’s head and the green envelope and who had attacked Gustave and how we was going to buy Santee/Spence’s phone-answering machine for ourselves. Because our client the Lady Luisa was right up there on the stage singing, and, because the seats went down at a slant, she seemed to be right near us, it was a smaller theater than a movie theater. There might be someone behind us but we didn’t look. The words were not foreign but, like, the music was; but the words didn’t come easy. But it didn’t matter. Like, "I’ll be revenged for my mother," and "Where is my father?" and "Our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them, / mermaid-like awhile they bore me up / incapable of my own distress" and so on, until this beautiful dark lady with more hair than Turnstein but coiled and like reddish black and wearing bluejeans and gold-and-silver-tooled western-type boots and black highneck sweater and man’s brown corduroy jacket sang a note so high that another client came out onstage singing to her, and it was Mr. North in a long yellowish sack-type outfit, and it wasn’t clear whether she had been singing about herself or someone else but he knew where he was coming from: "There sung those lips that often I have kissed," he sang, and he was crying at the same time as he sang of how in his sleep he fought his heart until he sleepwalked out of his bed and his chamber and found he was on board ship fingering a packet and could do no wrong but knew his hue was rough reflected in a goblin’s eyes steering the ship until he took the packet and—

q. Because of what he said, we knew we had to make a policy change.

1. Two women sitting in fifth row: one turned halfway round to see if anyone else was here, and she was the girl at the foundation with the big earrings who gave me and Gustave some jobs and had the new phone number, and her name was Amy; the other woman was older and turned halfway the other way to look, and she was looking like I was feeling, and she had come out of the bright, sunny office that Amy had gone into and then Amy came out after her and there was a man’s voice still in there talking Spanish so I didn’t know if it was to them or he’s on the phone. "We know these people," I whispered to Gustave, who had his fur earflaps down—he had put on his hat again. He stood like a tree, like once before in the street, but we’re inside now.

2. The singers broke off and were yakking like they’d been doing it all along, and then the piano stopped and Lady Luisa said, "I know this music from somewhere. It is imitation something -di." And Mr. North laughed like he was singing and said, "Are you accusing my young friend of—"

3. But then the very small woman who had consultation with Senora Wing who predicted she was going to take off her clothes came out onstage and wasn’t wearing the trenchcoat but had overalls and a red shirt like the red socks mother gave me, and had a big hammer. "Is that sheetrock you ordered really coming today? I’m all set to—" "I cannot allow the rehearsal to be interrupted by a piece of sheetrock!" cried Luisa ("My dear/’ said big North), but the small woman with the hammer said, "You stopped singing. You were talking."

4. The man at the piano stood up with red hair and beard and we did not know him and he said, "Sheetrock be damned; we need the rest of the score." Gustave said to me, "I saw him before." Suddenly, the little one saw us.

5. A spotlight came on and moved around between Luisa and North, who argued how he was to carry a letter across the stage and whether he would open it on one note or on another note but he couldn’t wait too long. The older woman in the fifth row said why not hand it over and then take it back and open it, and North said, "Who am I to hand it to? The man isn’t here." Luisa started to cry and stopped and was mad and said, "He should open it before he comes onstage; he is saving his own life by reading it before someone else reads it." The woman next to Amy asked Luisa if she wanted a cup of tea, and Luisa said, "If we don’t drink it we get a terrible headache," and they both laughed, and the small woman acted mad and pointed at us.

6. They all looked toward us at the back, and Gustave turned to look back also, and I knew that what I had seen on his head before he put his big cap back on was blood, and I was not sure he understood that the policy change was that we would have to begin opening our envelopes when we deemed it necessary for IMU security.

7. I feared for my bike and remembered riding down Fifth Avenue with light behind me like making me a new person, and I turned to tell Gustave he better hand over the music, but there behind us was Santee/Spence smiling and in position nobody’s going to take away. We were going to have to build on more than outside known fact. Santee/Spence said, "Delivery? I’ll take it, Gustave." Behind me, I heard Luisa singing, "Oh speak no more, no more against me, O gentle son O how the wheel becomes me, O heart in twain, I have no breath to breathe my life out—" cut off but very beautiful and I was not thinking what my mother would think any more, only that I was scared and thinking.

Mike-Whipped Landscape Specially Flown In

He pulled away from his father’s house, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father, who had never after all died, might be closely related; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch here and there in the house at times so unmindful of a car, a dark blue car he could swear had followed him, that he hardly wondered what was on his mind but recognized that he was content and his father was curious, and he had never been content like this with his father that he could recall.

He pulled away from his father’s voice yet took it with him downcellar, and the still surprisingly crisp voice from the kitchen above him, a square-headed, heavy-headed voice, called down, "Jim, did you turn it right three full turns before you stopped at 12, because you have to do that before you turn right to 11."

He wasn’t going to get into an argument with his father, not on top of the rather happy stuff that had obtained since he’d arrived two hours ago. His father called down, "What did you say? You won’t find them in the closet I’m pretty sure, but look if you want."

The diary volumes weren’t anywhere, so maybe they had been taken by the bookseller who had come looking a week or so ago, but he would not argue with his father on that one either. Mayn dialed left to 28, pulled the lock open and turned it out of its latch loop; he looked into the long, so narrow closet made seemingly out of more space than there had later proved to be, and, by the hanging light bulb behind him, he saw nothing but beautiful bottles, shadowed by their very shapes, the raised imprints dimly deepening or lightening colors that closeted their dust in some widow-web-spread network rigged where time was no object and the blues and purples and browns and greens were subtly preserved beyond eyesight.

He had pulled away from his father’s question "What do you want with those old books?" for his father was bound to ask again, but his father wasn’t asking, Is that why you came for a visit?, because the son had answered, "I think they would be of interest to your granddaughter," and he remembered voicing once to a man in jail the considerable truism that the message bearer is never neutral.

It was just a visit to an elderly man who was his father and who appreciated the phone call from Washington; not that Jim wouldn’t call, but it gave Mel something to look forward to, that is, he said, besides the afternoon paper and the television with the news of a prison break (all the essential news of the world, Jim!), just a visit to an elderly man with a heavy, squarish head and magazines on the dining table and homemade cinnamon applesauce by the half-gallon in the refrigerator ("which people seem to call the ‘fridge’ now, Jim"); a slowly sagging, quite old man in a white-buttoned black cardigan sweater once much blacker when visible through the large street window of a modest weekly newspaper office years ago downtown; a man who lived above a dry, cool cellar full of objects including a thousand books that might never have been read even by his late father-in-law, the grandfather Alexander who, when he used to come uncomfortably into this house, would sit uncomfortably in the Windsor chair in the living room which had lately acquired a shiny white cushion advertising the race track.

He would always pull away from his father yet the truth was his father had been the least prying of parents; but this time he did not pull away. He said, "Oh, I miss my family, you know," and was as surprised to say it to this man as to say it at all.

"I know," said his father. "One way or another you miss them, but it’s only for a part of the day, as far as I’m concerned." His father didn’t seem to feel it odd that Jim had spoken so to him after all these years.

"I mean, I would have seen less of them anyway: Flick and Andrew growing up and going to college and Flick with a job and so forth—"

"But you hurried it up a bit by leaving yourself," said the father. "I happen to think it was a constructive thing you did, from what Flick told me—she said she was thinking of changing her name back—’course I never see Andrew—"

"You think I do?"

"He still serious about figure skating?"

"So I hear."

"How are you feeling generally?" his father asked, and Jim thought of the diaries downstairs and knew they weren’t why he was here, and could not help believing that his father thirty years not-too-late had asked him this warmhearted medical-sounding question like you’d ask a contemporary you felt easy with; his father admired his deep bronze tan acquired in six days and maintained by four hours’ talking to a businesswoman at a ski mountain cafe yesterday.

Mayn mentioned the apartment he had moved back into—base-of-operations sort of thing—and his father didn’t tell him it was unwise to go back to where he had lived with his wife and children once, investment or not; Mayn spoke of some nice people he had met, a woman named Norma, whose community volunteer job had suddenly been funded by a foundation so she was suddenly salaried at a crucial time in her life when she wanted a paying job anyhow, wanted more than needed; but want is need, and the outfit proved to be one Mayn knew of—

—coincidence, said his father—

—and Norma’s husband, who wasn’t a friend but he liked him and he bent Jim’s ear one night (so bright he’s scary) talking about changing the weather on Venus and economizing on illness by getting three diseases all at once so you got three immunities for the price of one and came in to have a drink one time and told Mayn all about how he skipped fifth grade but he worked into the story a whole year’s worth of Brooklyn Heights where he was brought up, and the Jews and the Nazis, and the daughter of one of his teachers who was playing on a roof and fell off and was killed, but what Mayn got out of it he wasn’t sure except that this Gordon had taken a voluntary leave of absence from his law firm, wanted to be unemployed for a while, think things through, told me I better get a Medeco lock installed, and I had a feeling through this lengthy story of his life that he kept wanting me as a newspaperman to be full of inside dope, but—

—usually, said his father, it was the other way around, the newspaper people stayed two jumps ahead in conversation.

. . . and a college kid named Larry lived in the building, too, and he came in and talked Mayn’s ear off and Mayn took him to a basketball game and once drove up to Connecticut for the jai-alai matches and Larry won fifty dollars. So it was like a new apartment building in some respects. Private life, you know.

His father nodded. Mayn asked if he was still considering the retirement place near Wilmington. His father said it was quite a wait, and he didn’t like the lump-sum entrance payment. But to the best of his knowledge, it was well run.

The Quakers ran it, didn’t they?

Mel nodded.

Perhaps he pulled away from why he was visiting his father; if so, his father seemed to encourage this. You don’t have to have a reason if you have this need. Getting back to New York from Washington, rent a car, stop in New Jersey and see Mel, who was generous enough to call it good sense to fit the one trip into the other. What happened to those windmills in Wyoming? he went out a couple of times, didn’t he? (Mayn discovered his father was proud of him.) Well, if a quarter million people can plug their toasters into a giant windmill—how do those contraptions work?—the horizon will be full of rotors and blades; remember the Hitchcock movie where you were inside one of those old Dutch drainage mills and you would feel you were about to get mangled by all those creaking cogs of the wooden gear-train. (Was it a drainage mill, Dad?) (They turned to each other in blank amusement.)

His father had never heard of the cooperative wind conversion system on a Lower East Side apartment-house roof because his son had never told him, or Mel had never asked. Like a toy airplane on a steel-strut stand thirty-odd feet high, took twenty people four days to raise it—couldn’t afford a helicopter. So the utility-company lines get a cut of the surplus household electricity the people’s windmill generates? Synchronous inverter (looks like and is a solid-state box) turns d.c. from the wind generator into standard-line a.c. voltages. Never thought how a windmill worked but you’re right we don’t have to think. We don’t want to know. Unreportable information? his father asked, and was treated, as they moved from the dining room into the kitchen to an account of how the air crossing the curved upper blade of a windmill has to go farther and faster than the air hitting the flat lower blade, and the higher velocity on the upper blade creates "lift," and this turns the blades about the generator shaft—nothing to it—though the Wyoming operation . . . that’s something else.

His father gathered he had seen Flick in Washington, was mildly surprised that she was in New York, and struck by the "irony" that she’d phoned her father at his hotel in Washington the night before; Mel wanted to know what was so interesting about a women’s bank, and speaking of interstate how could Jim’s Argentine boss legally own a string of papers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania and so on? even Mel remembered the scandalous rumors of that tycoon’s tycoon-brother’s apparently faked plane crash, and Jim said, Private life. His father said nothing about Flick maybe wanting to be called by her given name.

He didn’t pull away from his father’s hand on the bare skin of his hand asking him to unscrew the kitchen globe and screw in a new light bulb. His father except when he was at work, which was after all much of the time in the old days, had spent years with his hands clenched behind his back or, when he was seated (for after all he was not handcuffed), clenched in front of him. His father below him looking upward as Jim unscrewed the globe, inquired what the prevailing winds in New York City were, and Jim in a low, preoccupied voice as he loosened the holding screws just enough to release the globe, which was a regular fly-trap, thought that the summer winds came mostly from the southwest, the winter definitely northwest, but the arrangement of winds through the city had got so weird because of building configurations that it would take someone who knew relativity to figure out where they went and how fast, and even in a relatively simple operation like that Lower East Side apartment house you need a pointed tower because the surface area at the top—Mel handed a sixty-watt bulb up and his son handed the ceiling globe down—can actually back up winds that are approaching so they don’t get right to the blades but are held up—winds in a holding pattern, chomping at the bit! His father thought there were probably some southeast winds around New York as well, and Jim said he really didn’t know—like a good Buddhist, he really didn’t know. Getting religion in middle age? said his father.

His father wanted to know if he still played water polo at the Athletic Club and was told, in somewhat indirect answer, that his son’s trick knee was acting up under stress and he had limped across against a red light the other day, throwing himself on the mercy of a truck driver who, granted, did not have much in the way of pickup acceleration but was so high-slung you almost thought it would drive over you if steered safely without touching you the way a couple of kids he had seen in a market area of lower Manhattan would not go around an unloading trailer van stuck way out into the street but walk under it. This fellow Gordon had been a City kid, you know. They didn’t ride bikes so much, but of course that was thirty years and more ago, and the bicycle had now become a middle-class adult inner-city vehicle.

Mayn’s father (who notably had not yet expressed the hope that Jim would spend the night, for maybe the old man didn’t especially want him to—you had to allow for that chance) asked if he was going out to the cemetery while he was here—and Jim said actually he had already been—he had in fact come into Throckmorton Street and on the spur of the moment instead of stopping at his father’s house (though, as he did not tell his father, there was that car that started up and moved out as soon as he passed) he decided he would take a look at his grandparents first before calling on Mel.

He told his father the kitchen ceiling fixture might need rewiring and asked if his father had circuit breakers now. His father said he would get a licensed electrician in; and there was a moment of silence for Bob Yard, who had wired his last house or almost, for he had had a stroke and fallen from a ladder and in death had displayed a wonderful dark grin as if ... as if .. . and Jim said really he could do it for Mel, the hourly rates were a total rip-off.

His father asked again how he had traveled on this quick trip and it was too bad Flick was in New York. Mayn said he couldn’t keep up with her, she was becoming an authority on pollution without actually residing in New York and had written something that was supposed to be in the mail to him but he hadn’t gotten it but hoped it would be waiting for him tonight.

His father wanted to know what it was.

Well, she says it’s like fiction. Probably selling herself short. I guess it’s environmentalist.

He felt he and his father were pulling away from each other, and when he had tightened the three screws around the globe’s circumference, he came down off the stepladder in one stretching step.

No, he had flown from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, hopped to Washington and had rented car on spur of moment thinking to make stop in Philly to make purely speculative inquiry, but drove straight here; car’s not his, could have taken the Metroliner (not here direct, of course), but he’d felt like a car. "You don’t look like a car," his father said, and he could hear twenty-five years ago his father singing when he was a bit nervous or unhappy, though the off-key melody made him always sound like he cared about everyone in the house, which curiously Jim Mayn had never thought before.

He turned to his father as his father turned away and sat down with a grunt. Nowadays, his father observed, a small-town paper gets all the news it can handle from your electronic terminals. That was true, said his son, they carried the machines around in suitcases like astronauts; he wanted to get into something else but it was his trade. Andrew’s college expenses were about it, now.

His father asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He said, Nothing to talk about—well, Andrew didn’t keep in touch; didn’t feel like it—and some curious stuff going on right now but mostly it’s a guy getting into my hair for some reason, probably my fault, involving people I know; turn away from it, it doesn’t exist, almost. His father said he knew, and Mayn told his father he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t being pulled into some hard-to-explain activities involving a cluster of other people’s supposings that became something maybe threatening even to a man with as slow a fuse and as low adrenalin as he; but that wasn’t why he had stopped on the way back.

Mel said, "Funny but your life tells you every few years or so—"

"—I don’t believe my life tells me anything."

His father said O.K., O.K., turn it around and put it your way, but—

He asked his father who this bookseller was and his father said to wait a minute—"stock taking was all I meant, I mean your marriage didn’t—I don’t know what went wrong but I didn’t have to ask you about it, you’re a good man and you felt that on balance you had to shift gears—"

The son laughed and ran water in the sink experimentally and then yanked open the icebox door and found a beer.

"—and now a few years later you’re taking stock of how you’re doing: I tried to do that when your mother died, and I didn’t get anyplace except Brad and I got closer, and I started eating better, in fact I developed quite an appetite, and I recognized I liked this town—what was it you and your grandmother named it?"

Mayn said he had left for Hartford and points south the morning they reported the prison escape and hadn’t looked at a New York paper since.

"Well, Adlai Stevenson said, Stick to your profession, whatever else you do."

Maybe that hadn’t been too clear to him, the son observed, and sat down in the other kitchen chair, beginning to sense why he had come to see his father.

"I had a strong feeling in my heart about you that you would survive and you were always there even if you didn’t get in touch, and had wound up by some circuitous route several rungs up but in the family job, and I held myself responsible for your mother, no one else."

This was a longer set of words than the economical obituary he had set up in type for Sarah as if it had never been written by a living soul, and his son told him so.

Mel laughed: was Flick serious about returning to her given name; and what was she doing in New York? Jim said that she was serious about everything; however, the difference between toxic pollution and her boyfriend was that her boyfriend made her laugh. Mel listened deeply, and asked if she was enjoying the old white Cadillac Jim had bought for her.

If you pulled away the parts of Mel that were above his forehead and below the bone of his chin, you would have remaining a man of indeterminate age, eyes you might never have looked at closely to understand that they wanted help in engaging yours—forget their color which was mostly brown with some pale brown threads of orbit targeting a place potentially of pain-free interest far beyond you or behind them.

Mayn kept saying things that weren’t why he had come, yet often these were answers to his father’s genuine questions, which in turn did seem to be why the visitor had come.

Slow going into a tourist’s brief "Story of Geothermal," through some question whether the St. Louis World’s Fair (really just "Fair") was 1903 or 1904 because if ‘04 then Italy could have advertised there its small, virgin dynamo driven by the first steam well. This was at Larderello near where third-century Rome exploited that mysterious steam field: yet had not your Sky lab astronauts—?

—that was Skylab 3, replied the aging son.

Hadn’t he attended the last Moon launch? his father asked.

Yes indeed, and Skylab a few months later.

He hadn’t spoken about Skylab, said his father.

Skylab 3’s same Skylab different crew.

Yes, his father knew that.

They photographed some hot spots in Central America.

Heat-sensing cameras, his father believed (who for the years when Jim would make duty visits with the wife and children would ask Jim’s children before they would go over to their great-grandfather’s to play in the backyard if they could eat two hamburgers apiece and Flick would always say Yes— but had never to Jim’s ear asked Jim like now with an urgency which after all was only a warmth of being curious yet flowed jointly this private afternoon from Jim’s need: which was quietly, inarticulately, to go inside some imaginary polis complete with kitchen and cellar housed amid a warped map of demands waiting far and near, connected by others even if he had declined to do so, and now nearer than New York, for he saw the blue car pass once and imagined correctly that it would be parked by a high, grassy curb down near his grandparents’ house or back near the Baptist Church whose horrendous purple stained-glass window against white Victorian-shingled gingerbread seemed to glow outward at you with some light of determination from inside)— It was the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, he said, whether that’s 1803 or 1804, because I’ve run on the track at the university there that they built for the Games, I think, because it’s three laps to the mile— Well, the Purchase was ‘03, said his father, who knew a lot about the Civil War. Well, grinned the son, his memory jogged, the Fair was ‘04 because a man Margaret met on her way East hoped to organize a balloon experiment there, or maybe it was the St. Louis Fair itself he hoped to organize. Your grandmother got a lot of mileage out of that trip West, said his father.

His father persisted: where were the main hot spots? . . . any chance for New Jersey to—?

Well, the New Zealand area was a regular thermal wonderland, we overtook them in ‘72 and Italy the next year for number one.

What about the Russians?

Well, they’ve got a small unit in Kamchatka.

His father wanted to know how it worked, and he told him, adding how nuclear explosives in the "ploughshare" method could fracture rock, admitting us to the heat that from piped-in water will make steam to be piped out while trapping the radioactivity down around the hot rock level, if you want to believe that.

He and his father rose from the kitchen table and Jim went downcellar looking for the M. H. Mayne diaries he did not find, turning from time to time to address his invisible father who was standing almost directly over him in the kitchen above. ‘To the best of my knowledge," he heard him say for the millionth time.

He kept seeing his father’s mouth open and shut, open as if itself thinking it might be possible to form the word Yes and, upon doubting this possibility, closing it but closing it upon genuine words that were not necessarily No. Mayn looked at the bottles populating the narrow closet. "You sure look in the pink, Jim," he heard dimly from above.

He turned his father’s queries about the future of geothermal and about Jim’s collateral journalistic future in regard to that subject toward the ancient joke relating speech to hot air, but his father persisted; and when they arrived again at Mayn’s interests in weather and missile development which had taken him to four arms-control conferences in a dozen years (and what was the weather on Venus, sort of an outer-space Houston in July? midsummer St. Louee?) Jim told his father he remembered him singing Rodgers and Hammerstein in the bathroom. Offkey, his father added—and Jim couldn’t believe they were having quite this conversation, this mere recollection where details were not in question but the spirit had so changed that his mother wasn’t sleepwalking in Jim’s dreams but just coming slowly up to bed and asking him why he was awake, for he was standing at the head of the stairs. I liked that singing, Jim said quietly. So did I, said his father.

His father asked if Flick was really going to start calling herself Sarah. Seemed so last week, Jim said.

"Why did you name her Sarah?" Mel asked.

"Why did you call my mother ‘Sorry,’ sometimes?" asked the son.

"She was sorry she’d married me—or married at all, maybe. And I was sometimes sorry—not to have more to say to her."

"But it was her name, not yours."

"I felt very bound up with her, we lived in this house in our own separate ways."

"I’m beginning to miss her," said Jim.

His father’s eyes brightened as if he would laugh. "So am I," he said. "Thirty-two years, I mean start missing her again, because I really did miss her at first, though I thought I was relieved."

"I’ve seen that beach at Mantoloking and that boat she supposedly took, a thousand times, and it always slips into my mind out of nowhere, you know like a subway car into a station and suddenly you got this unit in front of you, this package, and then when you look close, you’re back where you were, thinking about a Medeco lock, or this new program contemplated for mapping lightning from above, to check the pattern against storm severity."

"Did Pearl Myles ever get in touch with you?" his father asked. "Do you remember Pearl Myles? She asked for your address."

He could feel the encroachment. He asked his father who the bookseller was who had inspected the cellar shelves. Name was Saint-Smythe, his father thought. Did he leave a card? No card. Carry a bag? Big leather shoulder bag, crazy-looking fellow indeterminate age, hair light or graying (couldn’t tell) and caught up in a rubber band at the back if you can believe that, wearing a fringe jacket; a fringe case but courteous. Came back upstairs with the Jack London Alcoholic Memoirs inscribed to your grandmother just before he went to Vera Cruz with the Marines, you know. He corresponded with Margaret briefly over Wilson’s policy, she loved Woodrow Wilson but disliked the intervention in Mexico and there was our socialist Jack London saying blood would tell and Mexico must be saved from mestizos, but despite their disagreement, he sent Margaret a copy of that Barleycorn confession of his. I told the man he couldn’t have it.

Mayn turned away from his father, who asked if he had ever visited the geothermal installation in northern California (wasn’t it?) called The Geysers. Oh sure: twice. Greeley, Garibaldi, didn’t they go for steam? Jim didn’t know, but did know and conveyed to his father that William Bell Elliott who discovered the area thought he had found the gates of hell. Steam coming out of a canyon for a quarter of a mile. Teddy Roosevelt was interested in steam, said his father.

How was Brother Brad?

All right now, but they took a trip, went to New Hampshire and walked up a mountain and now they’re O.K. Dunno, they’ll never learn to yell at each other. So many don’t, including yours truly. But they sure can take a trip.

"I think I know the guy who came here for those diaries," said Jim.

"Well, then you can find out whether he walked off with them," said his father, who had paused at the dining-room table to open a magazine for a glance. "Did you ever run into that man again who burned down his own house and heard voices?"

"At a ballgame in Detroit, that’s right."

"A Yankee game," Mel said, "and you got into a shoving match as I recall, and made friends afterward."

"You remember that," said the son, who had never wanted to hug his father and didn’t now. "We wound up on an island in Lake Superior out near the old copper mines, the guy was some Norwegian and we stopped to talk with a friend of his at the Ojibway fire tower who was high on foxes: half-cat, half-dog, little bastards know what they’re doing."

"You never mentioned that," said Mel.

The son would like to tell the father he too had failed to live in marriage to another person; but what if that peculiar marriage of his father’s had been not so bad, and why speak for his father? A crowd of unknown voices were sounding off as if they belonged to him, he to them, and why did that Grace Kimball get under his skin when he had never met her?

Mayn asked his father if he had ever looked at the diaries in question.

Never.

"Isn’t it amazing that some people who weren’t at all involved might think Sarah didn’t commit suicide?"

"You mean Pearl Myles," his father said.

"Looking for damn knows what in life."

"Well, how old would she be now?" said his father, and they faced each other.

He pulled away from his father’s house in Windrow, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father might be friends; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch out of the kitchen with the big wooden table where his father and the half-brother Brad had discovered wonderful love that transcended blood by using blood, and step by step through the parlor-dining room where Trenton and New York papers and old copies of Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were arranged here and there like placemats in addition to the two that were permanently set and a pamphlet entitled Personal Memoirs of James Shields; and step by step (Mel now talking steadily) through the now unhistoric precincts of the sofas and fine ladderback straight chairs and the Windsor chair his grandfather Alexander had sat in uncomfortably when he came that had now a shiny white cushion advertising the race track, and step by step past three drop-leaf tables made by early nineteenth-century ancestors, not to mention the nondescript leather chair that needed to be resprung there in the corner with a lamp beside it and a gray metal magazine rack; step by step to the front hall with the music-room door closed and the mahogany table and the giant paperweight with newsprint embedded in glass myopically reflecting the mirror above it. Then, the door and the porch, where his father in black cardigan sweater from the days of the newspaper stood with a hand on a white porch post and waved and waved again to his son, who started the car and waved back, but then his father held up his hand and came down the porch steps and to the curb and Jim reached to roll down the passenger-side window and his father said, "Let me know if the weather on Venus is changing," and Jim replied, "Do you think I’m interested in that fellow’s wife?" and his father, surprised, replied, "Not really." Jim had turned off the ignition and Mel heard the phone far away in the house—"I’ll never make it"—and waved as he straightened up, so Jim saw only the hand at the window, and started the car as his father made tracks back to the porch—must be seventy-three, seventy-four? And Jim made a U-turn and headed out of town toward the clover-leaf, passing the blue New York car parked, now facing the opposite direction from him, halfway up the block near his grandparents’, a car that with some provincial lack of concern he had thought might be following him. And at the next corner he found a tall man with a medium-size red backpack hanging from his hand hitching, and a fur tail hanging out of the pack. And he stopped to pick the man up—he knew he was going to New York—and in the rear-view mirror, so he didn’t have to turn around, he saw the blue car behind him complete its U-turn and slow down, waiting.

He pulled away from the curb wanting to phone his father whose memory seemed better than ever, to thank him, to tell him, "Good; good." And he heard meanwhile the tough-skinned man in suede windbreaker and ironed bluejeans tell him, "Shouldn’t pick people up" (which Mayn agreed with)— for when the man had leaned into the rented car and swung his pack into the back seat, Mayn had reached back on instinct to slide it down flat on the seat and had seen the butt of a revolver with a loop of leather over it just showing from a side pocket.

"Well, this is my day," Mayn said. "So I’m figuring all you want is a ride to the city." The man reached in back and obtained from his pack a box of cough drops and a small spiral notebook which he opened to a page half full of notes in violet ink.

Leaving town, Mayn eyed the blue car following. He looked at the man next to him who was staring thoughtfully out at the road ahead; he had acne pits along the cheekbone and the uneven stubble was dark and silvery. "Do you always leave the butt of that pistol showing?" he asked the man.

"No, I usually make sure it’s out of sight," the man said. "It doesn’t belong to me but I’ve had it awhile and I’m beginning to think maybe it does belong to me."

"Ever been held up by a motorist?" said Mayn.

"No, not by a motorist," said the man; "you?"

"Haven’t hitched in years; generally fly."

"Suppose you just get out," said the man, "and I drive back down the road and come back here and you put out your thumb and we’ll see what it feels like," said the man.

"It wouldn’t feel real," said Mayn; "it would be like middle-class wild-game hunting." He had picked the man up on the chance that he was with the big guy driving the blue car.

At the rotary they passed the road to the shore and the Trenton road and found themselves on the connecting road to the turnpike, the same blue car two or three back that had accompanied Mayn to the cemetery, driven on, and followed him back to Throckmorton Street.

Mayn pulled off the road and nearly sideswiped the phone booth he parked by, in front of a small yellow house with a tarpaper roof. A person in a black-and-yellow-striped garment watched at the window. Mayn took the car keys with him. The blue car ran by, looking violet in the passing lane parallel with a red van. Then it fell back and to the right and a quarter of a mile or more downrange stopped at a low block-like edifice which was a suburban insurance branch. His father answered as if facing slightly away from him, and Jim said, "I just wanted to thank you, Dad; I was amazed you remembered all that nonsense. By the way, you used to dream of owning a white Hispano-Suiza. Remember?"

"Yes, and it was a real dream at night," his father said as if interrupting himself; "your mother told everyone."

"I remember," said Mayn.

"Flick phoned," said Mel. "She wanted to speak to you. She had guessed you were here. I asked if everything was all right. She sounded puzzled. She asked if you had spoken about a typescript she sent you and I said yes, and she said, Good, good, that’s all she wanted to know, and thanked me—then asked me of all people how well you knew someone called Grace Kimball because you were involved with a women’s bank that a friend of the Kimball woman does P.R. for—is that right? Then she said she had to go. I heard voices behind her, and someone said a word or name twice that sounded like ‘Afraid’ or Trying,’ I mean like frying eggs. That’s all I have to report, Jim."

Mayn thanked his father and with a chill like a blush of shock knew (and should say to someone now) that through Norma and not only Norma he could have described to his father the brother of this woman Grace whom he had never known, lying on the front walk in the middle of the continent, with blood on him, and with terrible sympathy and ardor flowing, yes flowing, from the body and eyes of his sister above him in the house, on a porch, somewhere that didn’t matter so much as that Mayn was back there like a colonist of the compacted future unobtrusively regrasping the century his civilization had left so that even if he had no blood-sister, he felt like Grace Kimball nonetheless and could have faked an entire double-column obit of information—"shared," as she said; consigned to print, as he would say, and eternally retrievable.

The hitch-hiker was doing something with the dashboard.

"Dad, did you ever think my mother was alive?"

His father might have been thinking for a moment. "Where would she have gone?" he said. "But more to the point, who’s this man you think borrowed those old diaries?"

"Oh, he’s one of these people that don’t really matter, Dad, but you turn around and find them there and you want to strangle them."

He pulled away into the right lane, having gotten no answer at the number Flick could be reached at, and knowing he had picked up this middle-aged hitch-hiker to use him or include him the way the engine seemed to build the radio right into it, both starting because his passenger had turned the knob while the ignition was off.

Twice during their conversation the news reported the kidnapping of the escaped man’s child and in their listening pause Mayn knew so well that Spence had drawn him into the picture by assuming he was already deep in it that if Spence had sent him a bulletin out of this car-radio speaker that generated the car’s horizontal gravity—"Wherever you are, Mayn"—he could not have felt more surely a violent imprint to come somewhere like change of weight or future species on the bones of his face, nor more exactly and wordlessly the anger of a dark Hispanic woman ahead in New York wildly, silently searching a noisy police stationhouse for her child: what was she doing there? why would they expose her to a microphone? how could Mayn make up so well and truly that scene with the City flowing in and out of it—so who would say for sure which was margin and which was the cash-up-front center?, while what was in the way proved more important than what we had been bound for yet we had been bound for what was in the way, but only for now but don’t ask the people in a precinct stationhouse—a large, green plant on a metal typewriter stand near a dispatcher’s desk, a mobile video unit somehow allowed in there and right by Mayn’s shoulder when he had nothing to do with those people except that if interrogated he wouldn’t even be protecting sources were he to deny knowledge of the man known to Efrain (released) and to Foley (inside), and to the Chilean economist, who had visited the man, who had himself escaped less than seventy-two hours ago and was now said to have abducted his young son.

The blue car had maintained its relative immobility in relation to Mayn’s rented vehicle, and he had sensed that the driver was confused and should be somewhere else.

The hitch-hiker, who shared two Russian cigarettes with Mayn, observed that in his experience there would always be people who didn’t approve of your domestic arrangements and maybe neither did you, but we couldn’t all live in the same way: he himself rejected bus and train travel, preferred driving but did not own a car: ergo, hitch-hike, where there’s waste in the direction of uncertainty and sometimes scheduling but how do you measure time, by clock or by what happens?, and getting there’s what matters; and when hitchhiking the man was always sure to join up with people he didn’t know, which was dispersive in one way but collective in another, and which was O.K. when in a less abstract era he was a redneck kid visiting his starving cousins out there beyond the cemetery road—and was all right now that he had been inspired by—

—"I know you from somewhere," Mayn said, as the blue car passed a red van and swung back in line.

—inspired, the man said, by a man aliased Santee Sioux (no Indian he), who had indirectly caused the hitch-hiker’s father a fatal heart seizure, and by a halfbreed he had hardly seen since they were kids, to revisit that very cemetery he had often passed and apply this little power he was known by Santee to possess to detect a unique strain of radioactivity in the human body: that is, at a certain place there in the graveyard, maybe two side-by-side places: on the possibility that whoever was buried there (two women, he said) had in them this unique strain of residue that, when found in the human body, sometimes wasn’t waste but an opposite, or so some western Indians still said, who according to Santee—

"Didn’t I pick you up once before?" Mayn asked quietly as if from his steady, intent eyes.

The man didn’t think so, unless Mayn had looked different.

They pulled in at a turnpike "gas world" planned with a long approach configuration offering a variety of services. Mayn phoned Flick at Lincoln’s, got no reply, phoned his own place, then tried Flick again; now guessed that he was on the final curve of a collective that was being daydreamt by those incapable of other dream modes Mayn flashed the Hispanic mother about to enter a police stationhouse somewhere in Manhattan north (future? or right now?).

The blue car had passed them again and had stopped in the emergency lane a quarter of a mile down glowing violet now in the twilight; a patrol car pulled over behind the car, the hitch-hiker stopped talking for a second, Mayn pulled out onto the road again, having forgotten to get gas. A state trooper sauntered up to greet the driver of the violet car, whom Mayn half-recognized as they drove by, a heavy, burnished young man in a large pale hat and steely-reflecting aviator sunglasses.

The hitch-hiker was explaining that Santee was an alias for a man who had sold to a New Hampshire paper a photograph of the hitch-hiker and a friend blindfolded apparently before a Cuban firing squad (certainly, despite the hat on one apparently female member, it wasn’t a firing squad composed of Pittsburgh Pirates baseball players), when it was two photos not one, but, alas, his father had recognized his T-shirt and his left ear—Mayn would never forget the pleasant cactus-green double-lobe—and that had done it for the father, and the strange thing was that Santee’s compensation to the busy hitchhiker who had felt inclined to kill him was to give him a job to do—no money guarantee, just the chance to try his gift on peculiar ground: for—

"You said," said Mayn, "that the cemetery in question was on the outskirts of the town where I picked you up."

The hitch-hiker had not said; but this was true: for the halfbreed in this town that Santee gave a code name to had known him in the old days as a "Trace Window"—some weighty notion left with a Creek tribe by one of the halfbreed’s great-great relations though this relation was a Natchay, a unique survivor having by glad suicidal rite accompanied his king the Sun King to his funeral but then curiously and scandalously survived a treble dose of the tobacco hypnotic ritually designed to render unconscious such loyal followers so they could then be painlessly strangled. Those running the funeral did not know what to do with him; they were afraid, and so they used the potent future-dreams he subsequently began to have as an excuse to run him out of their chiefdom—which was just before the French came in again and wiped out the Natchay, which this drug-proof Indian had dreamed, while that ritual suicide he had entered and lived through left him not only with these dreams and other dreams of turning but with powers he never used except that of living a long time upon joining the Creeks to the north soon afterward. He arrived on foot with a bag of bear ribs and a limitlessly self-renewing supply of root jelly, but he left such ideas with them as that some women and men could receive, like windows, light in beam-waves or sun-shadows from people who had in their bodies an alloy mineral, radiant, potential; and this halfbreed—

"What was the code name?"

"You wouldn’t ask like that if you didn’t know," said the gaunt man beside Mayn, "if you didn’t know a’ready." Mayn in the corner of his eye felt the man eye-cornering him.

"Ira Lee is no halfbreed," said Mayn, and stepped on the gas. His companion seemed not to notice that they were exiting too soon, not the New York City exit; he wanted to make a point, he was batonning his finger at the windshield. It was no ordinary homogeneous solid solution, that alloy, not Chilean copper and Bolivian tin woven atom for atom reciprocally in each other’s interstices; it was radioactive but open-ended so the contagion or thrust of it was up for grabs. So this Ira Lee, once twice three times approached Santee, recalled the "Trace Window" kid, grown now to be Mayn’s present company, heretofore held up in an open-air restaurant near Minneapolis with a fishing friend, both blindfolded if not smothered with their napkins while one of the thieves removed his stocking mask because it inflamed an abcess in his forehead and a snapshot taken of the two men in their college T-shirts, spare ribs held hidden behind their backs, found its way into the hands of Santee—

—"also a code name," Mayn added with a weight of miles and miles of historic small talk from this itinerant specialist—

—then or in its later splice with the Cuban squad, and then indirectly the hitch-hiker had been drawn into Santee’s employ to apply his gift to some "Windrow" grave or graves whether "Trace Window" received ordinary garden-variety radioactive message or that residual potentiality now at rest, now dangerously creative—detectible originally among certain southwestern ancients who arrived thirstily among the proto-Natchay of Tennessippi and might kill or cure with the mineral concentration they periodically mustered of which, some generations later, the one Natchay who survived his own loyal funeral to join the Creeks and be ancestor to the halfbreed Ira Lee—

"Perhaps he was a halfbreed," said Mayn, feeling as if he had slipped into another form, feeling the city and the twilight nearer; "we sure called him that, among ourselves—"

—this great-great relation bequeathed the knowledge to perhaps a grand-nephew who found it once in the mid-nineties uniquely duplicated in emanations from a proud, hungry western Indian passing through Pennsylvania as if seeking in the wrong direction his boat or his clan and living on an afterlife of nonetheless fertile if strong-tasting crocodile gums not to mention a mask of mosquito bites targeted around his bright eyes—

"I think I have to drop you off here," said Mayn, but had to laugh at the man’s calmness in the face of interruption, who then said he couldn’t see why, and offered to pay for a tank of premium but was not accepted.

They pulled out of a gas station and reacquired the turnpike pulse; they laughed, they had had a true emergency, for the tank had taken three or four gallons more than the gauge said it had any right to, and Mayn felt he pulled closer and closer to the spirit in which his father had, as he had flatly said, "Come full circle only nobody’s here."

"You have it," said the man, and if Mayn did not know how the hitchhiker had come to be known as a Trace Window, he understood that the man was receiving some trace alloy from him.

And as the tunnel distantly approached upon one curve of twilight and he thought he needed to drop the man this side of the river, the man identified now the emanations from that noble Indian adrift in Pennsylvania in ‘94 or ‘95, bearing a tremendous though dried bison tongue with but one bite out of it showing in the cutaway section live sleeping rootlets of the tongue’s normally soft valve needles which might be where the potential energy came from that this now horseless wanderer studied with his hand in his lion-skin bag around the tongue thinking the miles away maybe unconscious that in his body, spiced or not by the patient force untapped quite yet by hand and mind, he bore the original alloy recently identified to the hitch-hiker as deposits of alloy unique in that their solid solution occurred in nature—

"Do you know what happened to that blue car?" Mayn asked his passenger evenly.

"This is a blue car," said the man who seemed weary from these ancient travels but bent upon bearing out to the end his account of why he had been where Mayn had found him: yet first the alloy, the natural alloy—it had been created way back when by a rare corridor of weather from Canada lofting south (in the spiral forms of future hailstones to be precipitated eventually into one of the morphic mountains of the Southern Rockies said to be fed by the compacted flesh and blood of climbers quick-sucked by the killer sky-blue worm or tiny Pressure Snake) elements of a northern ore gray-greenish and in luster horny but radioactive with mysteriously forked potentiality through, at the northern source, a bind with the spiral forms of hailstone structure and, at the southern end, a bind with flesh and blood of mountaineers so recently sucked and Pressure-Snake-processed into that steep ground that their extreme compression had not yet unriddled its energies into the dispersed dreams or thoughts (depending on which authority you fall for) peculiar to these mountains, and then and only then was the now-or-never moment of alloy.

"Why ‘forked,’ " said Mayn, "because I know this story"—or some of it, he felt; and he asked the hitch-hiker to find a map in the glove compartment, while Mayn reached his right arm between the seats and was able to draw out the heavyish pistol, put it in his lap, change steering hands, and, feeling in the operation able to drive without thinking, transfer the pistol down between his seat and the door, first ascertaining that the revolver was at least partially loaded.

"Forked," went on the hitch-hiker, his eyes closed, the mapless glove compartment shut again, ‘‘because the particle runoff might kill, like your regular radioactive waste, though this was probably crypto-thorium and in those days might cause breaks in skin, in flesh, a hole in your head no less, Ray; or it might—" the hitch-hiker-historian-comedian-dowser-genius yawned—"might yield you energies, some as unthinkable as half the future of the planet was getting the name ‘unthinkable’ ‘‘—but being a Trace Window kept one on the move not just employment-wise but staying away from these contracts which can be tough, witness this afternoon’s consultancy which was now history in the little notebook, info to be passed to alias Santee—that’s right, Alias is his first name!—whose interest in those graves was almost as odd as the driver kind enough to pick up this ol’ Trace Window whatever prearranged coincidence this hitch was due to.

He pulled out to pass a red van and caught sight of his burnished forehead in the mirror. He pulled away and knew he did not increase the distance from his father for he could make it anything he wanted as if he could re-grid his land by what he knew was true in his skull and hands and chest, and was behind his eyes.

"You said I have it?" he said to the dreaming, thinking, resting man.

"Yes, and what you have feels like the vein of it I found coming up in that graveyard today single and double but more odd than really double, it feels like the real original, it makes me feel like a three-dimensional window and then some. But don’t credit me with wisdom. I just have this thing I can do, O.K.?"

"Which graves?" said Mayn, and held back so sternly the jolting guesswork he had just done that he felt news pass from one window to the other and back the news he now heard.

"Two ladies named Mayn. One with an e—you know them? do you come from that town? I guess I know you do, because the traces I registered at Sarah’s grave (died 1945) and at Margaret’s (died in the fifties) had the very same cycle, except the force from one was a lot greater than the force from the other."

Mayn laughed. "I hope it was the second one that was stronger, because there’s no body in the 1945 grave."

The tunnel pulled the line of cars in. His distance from his father had not altered and it pulled away from the son until what stood between was not distance but what they had talked about, which was about half of it garbage but obstacle only to the son’s departure, and so he had stayed for upwards of three hours, forgetting for minutes and minutes the M. H. Mayne diaries once upon a time in the cellar, once upon a time in his grandfather’s hands, who had exclaimed about a diagram in volume two, while the energy questions Jim and Mel had "dealt with" this afternoon kept the northern bison tongue’s thunderous future where it belonged, much less the hand around it of a hungry Navajo traveler once content to observe and describe the cloudy messages of moist air columned up to mushroom out at the top telling a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, a Prince content to record a noctilucent cloud so low that he smelled seared metal and some flesh’s welcome of fresh-ground cornmeal mush, a hunter’s breakfast just out of reach for an eastbound Prince bearing alloy of hailstone-spiraled crypto-thorium and the blue-worm-compacted, mountain-injected lives of those climber-heroes Anglo and Indian whom Indians west and east would seem to have immortalized in traces windowed alike in white skin and red skin and borne not just in red but in the white of Margaret, whose active residue now named radioactive proved less so than the void of Jersey ground below for Pete’s sake her daughter’s earlier marker! So that Mayn, rejecting the passenger’s offer of toll money, had to ask if the man really knew what he was talking about and whence came his credentials.

Why, Uncle Willy. And the year was ‘45. Nobody asks to be a Trace

Window, but it was the afternoon of a fall day and walking out of town along the Negro section parallel with the Jersey Central tracks, he had been yelled at by Ira from his porch and had detoured in that direction not without some amiable hostility only to be transfixed on the first of the three wooden steps leading to the low porch by Uncle Willy, who was Ira’s mother’s uncle and a full-blooded Creek by repute though he gave no support to this idea, identifying himself as descendant of a Natchez who had married into a Creek community. Don’t come any further he said—what do you feel?

And the white boy, who could travel a hundred miles and never know it, knew he felt, and already that day when he had almost fallen out of a careering truck along the cemetery road and had been saved, he knew, by two magic screwdrivers, had felt a fine charge coming from Uncle Willy such that some iron or magnetic message therein cannot be worded but only be the bearer, while the sense of it then and of its having come to him earlier that afternoon out near the cemetery made him sick to his liver, as his own father said, and Uncle Willy came down off the porch and made him drink from the jug of water he drank unchanging all day long and then to the boy’s amazement Willy gave him one of the clay figures that he kept by him among other valuables such as a jawbone of a desert fish, a polished rattlesnake tail, and a hunk of glittering blue-red glass; and the figure was of a woman from two hundred years before, and Willy told him he was a Trace Window, and what it was; and weeks later when he came to Windrow to see his piner relations in the swamps of Lake Rompanemus, he would run into Ira, who had a very short crew cut, and Ira would remind him he was a Trace Window and he must never neglect that power but not to come near Uncle Willy any more.

"I knew I knew you," said Mayn; "but were you saying before that I am a Trace Window or that I carry this forked radioactivity that you as a Trace Window register?"

"I know only the second for sure," the hitch-hiker said. His eyes stared peacefully into the tunnel, so Mayn heard his own father say he liked hearing all Jim’s news and wondered how the Argentine could legally own a string of papers here or at least in three states. Mel seemed to have been enabled by Jim’s workaday interest to actually see those windmills in Wyoming as Jim now heard the tunnel come to life in a small boy’s words, Mayn driving, What if the tunnel leaks?, for the voice is his son, while with his hand on the pistol that his hitch-hiker seems not to care that he is in possession of Mayn knows they might as well see themselves heading through some cross-glomerate of west-tilted schist, submarine pebble, sediment thrust up ten miles into the throat of one’s tropopause which was and is supposed to be a spherical envelope beyond weather. Meanwhile what they call till is your glacial drift just erratically dropped—dumped (you say) without benefit of the sorting and the layering that only water can rework such matter into, let alone the lime spring recalled from the refraction of some unknown acquaintance’s experience that turns wood to stone if you remember: and all this is beautiful and reliable as the knowledge that he seldom had much in common with his father today or any day, and the fair-isolate fact from a young woman named Jean or Barbara-Jean that an "erratic" is a glacial boulder that doesn’t belong with the rock it finds itself resting on, yet cruising this crabbed, coved coast— coast! what coast?—between sea and hinterland, but more—he recalled when she spoke that he had known this "erratic" all along: like the future colony of couple-compacted individuals out in familiar Earth-Moon space: or like Larry’s one-man secret-society/overcharged brain-dump transformer compensating for shit going down in mother’s world/father’s world by a unified-fieldwork when-in-doubt-step-back-a-hundred-paces-and-punt world, force-fed till Lar’ had Mayn himself now "doing" in his own mind how Obstacle Geometry worked to map our turns down to the smallest rotation among each other but also (O.G.) embraced S.R. (Simultaneous Reincarnation) somewhat as Tensor Calculus the multi-mathmouth sculpted and positioned General Relativity’s events in plural coordinate systems, but . . . until, as if the hitchhiker had wanted to slug him, Mayn felt the City ahead catch him under the eye bing on the cheekbone, while the imprint rang into the week to come and its days, and some sound in his body was like thought control, and he knew that one morning not long ago waking up in a space (as they now so easily said) lived in years ago (for years), that was too big now for a pied-a-terre (which in turn measured a sadness so terrific well you’d just have to find the strength on its other side), he had also felt that jolt upon his cheekbone: and he said, "It’s true, I wanted to throw you out of that truck, but what I want to know is—"

"No," said the passenger, "I don’t say I know who is or are under that stone marker with Sarah Mayn on it if you say no one’s under there and you seem to know; but I know there’s someone under there and if they’re not very close to the surface, then there’s an even stronger charge of the alloy coming from them."

The City, as dry and shored-up as the tunnel with its reckless domestic glare, pulled him toward it, let alone the hitch-hiker. Mayn accepted the suspension of all these bits of news in one dumb bottle and felt it was too late to start all over again being an apprentice mind, much less an apprentice reporter, and hoped he had been a middling good father.

"By the way, you said ‘Ray,’ didn’t you? I’m not Ray Spence in case you’re wondering."

"Ray Vigil. In a blue car coming out of that town. You don’t have the hair of an Indian and not quite the nose either, but . . ."

"I thought he looked familiar when we passed him and the state cop," said Mayn, knowing in his chest structure in retrospect a measurable pull toward those objects that was maybe just a quickening all around. The hitchhiker didn’t react. "And why did you take those screwdrivers belonging to Bob Yard?"

"They were rattling around there," said Mayn’s passenger, "and you were running on your own power. I once stayed under water for half an hour without needing to breathe because of being near a creature with Trace, and I once heard what I took to be voices but later found they came from a mountain out West twenty miles from where I stood, and I discovered I had their words. And once not long ago I went to see a man in jail in order to get a reading on him and I regretted it because I recognized that before I reached the corridor that led to the hall that led to the two sets of steel-barred gates that separated me from the meeting room where you could sit around at Formica tables and plug the junk-food machines for cake and sandwiches and cigarettes, I had the power to divide myself and pass through those bars."

"Why did you regret it?" said Mayn, who was so close to the City’s window of complex light, so close to catching up with some attention or laughter he had uneasily left here when he went away, that he asked his question without thinking.

"Because here the power I had was entirely due to this dangerous person I was making a visit to on another pretext, yet had neither use for it nor knew I was using him, though there’s evidence that sometimes a person with Trace gains power through it when it is registered in a Trace Window."

Mayn laughed, but knew that wherever the man known to Efrain, Foley, and the Chilean economist if not to Amy had escaped to, and whenever and however the Chilean economist would want to spend time visiting an anti-Castro Cuban in prison, and whatever the bearing on all this political or nonpolitical question was of his little son’s abduction, Flick was or had been associated with the economist’s wife Clara in a Grace-Kimball Body-Self Workshop and was on Spence’s information list along with the environmentalist-woman Dina West whom Mayn had not had breakfast with before leaving New York but who was expecting Ray Vigil, whom the hitch-hiker might have mistaken Mayn for but who Mayn now knew without question had been the man in the blue or violet car trailing Mayn toward the cemetery and later waiting for him while he explored with his long-found, endlessly Windrow-bound father Mel the warmest of expendable trivia; then behind Mayn and the hitch-hiker leaving town and on the connecting road, then ahead of them while Mayn phoned, then stalled by a trooper behind them again, then alone on the turnpike when they were off, ahead of them when they got back on, though unbeknownst to the Indian Vigil who would be as lost as you could be on a turnpike you cannot take wing from like the wind. "Power?" Mayn said; "I’ve noticed that while I am particularly preoccupied with the safety of my family and the question of why Spence sent you, I’ve been able to drive almost without handling the wheel or thinking how to do it but I don’t mean second nature—it’s like—"

"Yes I do remember you," said the hitch-hiker. "I think you were crazy that day, but the alloy had been in you a long time."

Mayn tried to pull away from why anyone would bring his mother back to Windrow and secretly bury her at her stone. He had decided that the hitchhiker, who now reminded him of some other lone man or men, was kind. He would have to be woken up into the window of interestingly unclean light the City proved to be. Easier to change the subject when there’s no one awake to talk to. Let Jean or Barbara-Jean drive, let her call him an erratic but upon his next step into rock-bottom though knowledgeable ignorance hear her say not to change the subject: so her geological stroke had had some woman’s curve to it—yet he would tell her that this sleeping hitch-hiker who seemed not to care that his pistol had been appropriated had identified Mayn as an interesting person: which, damn her, she would remind him had always been her position, in the shower, at the breakfast table, at the Press Site (as if those dumb viewers and surmisers of the Saturn launches and so forth were at a dig); at a polling place on an election day; on election day the following year indeed, for repetition helps, and he asked her to repeat information because he liked to hear her say it, which she got mad about, yet knowing he was coming from a long way back: from further back than a portly Navajo telling the difference between tribal uranium rights for sale and, on the other hand (a chubby hand), month-by-month real jobs abstractly available to Indians at a plant that reworks what’s gouged up from crusts of Earth as if Earth hurt —yes, hurt, and he believes Earth really did and will again; oh Mayn would rather listen to her talk moraines and all the stuff that a man named Spence might once have admitted ignorance of in the smug surety that Earth had little gossip value even up the ladder to glib homicide, prison intrigue, political plan, the blackmail of kidnap where you figure that if the son aged four or five is abducted the father will surface in anguish and you can haul him in: which by now Spence probably does know something about, since he has passed along a story of some lunatic mountain heading secretly eastward to be deposited for some reason if only to prove that the operation is feasible: run into Spence used to be semiannually, say, in some hotel saloon, Washington, Houston, airport San Francisco where he knew already you’re visiting Ames Air Force Base to see how Venus is doing prior to visiting the weather institute in Colorado all in a week’s airborne work: whereas the young woman Barbara-Jean (B.J.) could tell him on election eve only how the glacier deposited all this rock matter before even the Bible writers got going setting down what they already remembered if they had not actually experienced: but she drove him out onto Long Island and they talked so beautifully, while she cut through (as if her car blinkered them past) similar and equal consumer communities (that he thought he had already foreseen in some voice of a teenage economist he will meet who with delirious precision is observing America) to find then (Jean took her left hand off the wheel to point through the thick late-autumn air) striking eminences that were real moraines, eminences (Christ, they were real like the life you discovered years later you had been living, and as you discovered this, it moved!) that marked the end of an ancient valley glacier, one of these moraines named nothing more than Harbor Hill (he once knew a man named Moraine who owned a gigantic service station in Jersey), another moraine with an Indian name (a lake, too) that sounded like a rock that called to you until you started (Ronkonkoma) listening instead of hearing, and then its music went back inside the imaginary rock, an eminent moraine that (she said) disappeared beneath Long Island Sound and yonder Atlantic waters only (as they say) to reappear as the island of Martha’s Vineyard he had once taken his new wife to in the fall of a presidential election when they had a beach to themselves, white and (the one disappointment) shell-less.

If you are moving (you take on faith) but apparently not forward (as into the sea) and not backward (like the hairy man on the rubberized, banked running track at the gym who jogs backward half a mile for every mile forward), maybe you are moving sideways, for if life is an education it must be to find out what you are already doing because can’t avoid in some way Doing. Lateral transfer? he echoed his daughter in the nation’s capital last month: why "lateral transfer" used to be what the other wire service did a lot of, and now (for how did she, his daughter, know the term?) seems ancient and empty (but why is ancient empty?) like going back into an apartment once lived in and trying it and moving out again for many months and then trying it as a pied a terre and then at last moving in.

The rented drive up from Washington into New Jersey to visit the proverbial parent, drive capped now by that amplified flight through the tunnel, bright, night-tiled tunnel cutting itself not so transparently as his daydream (his only type of dream) through the stripes of mud and continental drift and subsiding sedimental trough—terms, terms, terms—he knows where to find them when that’s where his inquiry into big dollars and cents takes him: through structure created (they say of the Appalachians west) by drainage patterns— but that last run through the tunnel after layers of foreboding recollection compacted into the pavement his tires knew in advance (and they’re not his tires, they’re rented) from Washington to Windrow to New York, from Washington to Windrow where he stopped to visit his father and go through a turpentine-insulated library of books in the basement, and felt followed by a waiting automobile that made him feel he should make some other stop/visit in Windrow before leaving, that is, so the car could follow him there, for how can you be followed if you are not moving? (easy, easy)—but the car disappeared into an intersection as if reminded of the tangle of intrigue waiting like potential for him or anyone in New York where he had been yesterday, left for Connecticut, flew to Pennsylvania then to the nation’s capital thence equally to Windrow thence here to a tunnel bound toward New York where his daughter, who worked in Washington but had been in New York the night before last and to whom he had written a letter that had later been stolen from the wastebasket in his apartment that had once been the apartment he and she and her mother and her brother had lived in, had said unless the mails as usual had screwed up a work of writing awaited him composed to get stuff out of her system but she would be interested to know, you know, what he thought of it and don’t take it too seriously though she hadn’t taken many liberties with the facts, which he now felt were what he drove through in order to at last act as if the threatening system a man named Spence could not take entire credit for would have to be granted a force if not a reality he might be able to take some blame for while inclined to conspire on behalf of—while granting that even if the life of earning a living and totting corporate profit and marital division leading to new lives capable of being imagined parallel and a women’s bank attracting considerable deposits from a male insurance company and the death of babies through marketable toxins as viable as the warmth of mother love and the practical importance of harnessing (read for God’s sake some fresher word, like utilizing) so-called passive wind power across the pampas of America and other solid (routine if not always reportable) facts of the here-and-now didn’t answer satisfactorily whether conspiratorial sabotage stripped the insulation from a wire to cause the Apollo i capsule to go up (ouch) in flames—still, he knew in the sudden midst of "needing" (as if carsick or bladder-full) to stop right here in the tunnel to phone his father "Emergency" (but no phones here except for authorities so phone him in your head, you can do it if you’ll just remember what that voice or two he sure hopes we all share can tell him he already remembers) and thank his father for the afternoon they had because he and his father haven’t been exactly close for (literally) all these years.

He pulled away up the trough of the tunnel exit and woke his passenger with thanks in his humorous heart for all the lore that had not so much stood in their way from Windrow to New York as been it. He asked the gaunt, weathered man if on this professional occasion the contract was not just the graves in Windrow but the driver-host coincidentally met; and the man assured him that O.K. the universe ran on cause-effect but, through some frame of curve he didn’t really understand, it held to a convergence law that he grasped no better than he grasped his Trace-Windowhood, the margin was always turning us to it like a perfectly serviceable center.

"You haven’t foreseen everything that’s going to happen now, have you?" said the man with respectful intimacy as he reached back for his pack.

"I keep getting hit on the cheekbone," said Mayn. "I’ve got to do something about it."

The hitch-hiker told him a phone number. Mayn said he thought he knew it; the hitch-hiker smiled: "Live long enough," he said, and Mayn feared for his daughter while haunted by unknown pages written by her for his eyes, waiting for him when he got home he felt sure, promising him some responsibility he had missed somewhere.

It caught him under the eye before he could pull away bang on the cheekbone, and the imprint rang right into next week and the days ahead, until he thought others had always been able to hear this sound in his body. This sound in your body like thought control, though whose thought? For one day waking up in an apartment you hadn’t lived in in years, the thing that was going to hit you came like a day dreamt memory. Her hand. Your cheekbone.

But wait. The hand that struck didn’t touch the cheekbone.

The microphone came in between and had no business being in that place.

Men and women cops in and out of uniform have been coming and going in the official hallway, a broad-shouldered blonde in jeans sitting on a desk so she’s distinct in every way from the black women laughing at their typewriters, smoking on the phone. Efrain, whose absence from his sister’s when Mayn phoned seemed filled by the address of the stationhouse the sister was willing to give Mayn, isn’t here either. Mayn’s met one of the detectives at a law-school dinner he got invited to by a tennis partner and later Mayn gave the detective two tickets to a hockey game, no a basketball game, no reason to expect to run into him here tonight, which both of them take for granted, the man with a beard now, classier glasses, the same measured manner of a much bigger man than he physically is, lighting a pipe and talking to no one.

Then the woman, Puerto Rican, no, Cuban, rushes in from the street and all the cops and the two women cops, the blonde and a Hispanic who’s in uniform, seem stopped and you feel the width of the hall, the check-in table before you get to the high counter, the width of the place more than its length, and the noise widening as the man with the video unit turns and turns and targets. The woman, the mother of the lost boy, has a young red-haired cop with her, a step behind her, a young, mustachioed, happy-type-of-fellow. And a step behind him and a head shorter comes another Hispanic who’s with her—square-browed, stubble-jawed, slender, tired relative, her brother, brother-in-law, cousin, friend in the night.

So here’s the TV newsman next to you with that nose and skin—Indian? Eskimo?—pushing a mike at her and nobody stopping him, and she’s trying to get through the hallway to the end. To what’s the end on the other side of the glass-paneled door. Blindly you recall your own children climated by the places you used to provide for them, your son the day you lost him on the subway, he was five—you shake hands with the detective, as he comes by, but you don’t mention your son. And here’s the TV newsman—man made of news—pushing a mike at the Cuban woman and her wide eyes are fixed on the far end of this official hallway but jump to this mike with a speed like the speed of—landscape. Which is what flies into mind as a shadow flies at you, at Mayn. But you brought the landscape with you and you didn’t fly, you came by hired car, hardly stopping to phone, and you didn’t go home first, you drove here so it felt like coming past traffic lights and more traffic lights on foot, not flying.

This dark, round-ended thing under her nose is prodding at her.

She opens her mouth to it, the TV reporter is not being stopped, he has cheeks that talk as fast as his dark lips, he’s got on a muscular T-shirt with the date on it, 1977, not today’s exact date but good enough, he’s asking about her kids, does she have other kids at home. The mouth opens wider to cry and Mayn might feel nearer and nearer while not moving, and will she take a bite out of the mike, the eyes in agony. But then she doesn’t care what this thing thrust under her nose can do to her. And before the cop can say, "Let her through," why you get hit.

Bludgeon against the cheekbone, it hits you under the eye, the left.

It’s the mike, not her hand. Her hand was what swiped the mike, swept it to one side because it occupied a position already taken up by her intent. Knocked the mike practically out of the Eskimo, no, Indian newsman’s hand.

But before she could do this you’d leaned to catch her muttered words, and you got jostled, and you asked, "Is he headed for Santiago?"

Got jostled from behind. Which tipped you into the mike’s path. And you were taking up position already occupied by the mike when it slammed your cheekbone. It struck so hard you felt the metal mesh stick in you for an instant as short as the ending of a life—as short as your life. And you remember a phone number, only the numbers a man vouchsafed to you half an hour ago, and the landscape flown in bulges up off its grid so that for the moment of the mother’s frightened, angry words, you know that the bulge was always there and the grid as snug as abstract can be upon the sphere, the sphere, where that landscape lies.

"He ain’t going to come here," the woman said, but in the split-flash before she batted the mike out of the park, her eye knew Mayn.

She is rushed away by the space in front of her toward the glass-paneled area and she doesn’t toss her head at Mayn: but him she was answering, and not the man asking, "Do you know where your husband is? Did you have any advance warning that he would escape? Is he involved in a plot against Castro, is he headed for Florida? Has anyone contacted you about your little boy? When were you told that your daughters were being brought here for safety?" Your hand’s on your cheekbone, a smile on the rest of your face asking Harry—that’s the detective’s name—if a guy name of Ray Spence has been around, looks like a fairly well-dressed drifter, sometimes a fringe jacket, boots, pretty good clothes but he’ll never make it as a person, pony tail and maybe some suspicion of beard. No one like that in evidence here to Harry’s knowledge. What’s Mayn doing here? Couple of cons, one outside, one inside, both knew the Cuban. What’s the chance he’s not anti-Castro at all? Good chance, Harry answers, as if it doesn’t matter. Routine break maybe—but they’re all political nowadays to hear these guys tell it. But when did the kid disappear—before the break, like they said? Light from a ceiling lamp crash-lands onto Harry’s large, muscle-boned face lifted up in fatigue and some not convincing profession of exasperated who-the-hell-knows, and for a reason Mayn wouldn’t claim to know but it seems to be drawn from the man by Mayn, drawn in trust or as if into a fine, irresistible gap of unknown shared experience, Harry takes his light, bright-checked sport jacket off a chair and tells Mayn with the most direct quietness in the midst of the noise that’s out of place at eight in the evening when nothing’s ordinarily happening, "They didn’t give out the news of the break for eight, ten hours; the kid was taken right about the time of the break, it couldn’t have been the father and what would he want with the kid anyway?"

Mayn thanked Harry, and the landscape moved in again, rented or priceless who cared, it was not just arriving, it was on the move, steady, and Mayn knew this as surely as he knew he was on the move, no stopping, and—no sweat—a way’s been found for rest to come between him and the landscape, which is composite anyhow, though American all the way—wide as hell but with that lengthwise aim, and it arrived and could not get round him and was slowed by him. Harry came back and told him the blonde policewoman Mary had had a call for James Mayn a while back, they didn’t take calls for newspapermen, she’d said, but the name lingered. A woman calling, was all she knew.

"You got something for us?" Harry asked, looking like he was leaving.

"Nothing together."

"So shovel it over to me, I’ll take it as is."

"Any clandestine movements of nuclear waste into the Northeast?"

"Sure, sure, I can see it in my mind’s eye," said Harry, and they emerged from the stationhouse under the arc of a football thrown from streetlight to streetlight.

"What’s one more anti-Castro exile?" Mayn said, and the phone number in his head came back with landscape.

"Do you ever hear from an inmate named Foley?"

"George and his economic plan for creativity in the prison of the future."

"He mentioned you in a letter."

"He’s written me one or two."

"He mentioned our Cuban fugitive and a visitor he had."

"In a letter to me?"

"Maybe you’re not opening all your mail."

"Maybe I have help."

"You met the visitor in question in Florida, where some Cubans are not anti-Castro."

"But only seem so," said Mayn. "Foley is a dreamer and a scientist, not political."

"He expressed an opinion about the unconscious of our fugitive after a heated discussion in which they switched opinions several times on the subject of worker control of factories and prisoner control of prisons."

Mayn said he didn’t recall receiving that letter, and Harry laughed. Harry asked him where he was headed, but did not ask for a ride. Mayn pulled away from the curb wondering why he had not looked Harry up, and why, too, he had left the Chilean economist unencountered for so long except through the information received from Amy. Though from Norma, too—about the wife, Clara. He had liked the man, been put off by his knowing Spence, kept him in mind, in reserve—potential.

The city went with him down below the entrance to FDR Drive, which he did not take, down Second Avenue into richer lights of East Side restaurant territory where under sidewalk awning, hard by latest enriched newsstand, fruit-and-vegetable immigrants raise right out of sidewalk plots of blue broccoli and well-priced green grapes, mealy tomatoes and hydroponic watercress plus those spongy basketed ivory-colored squares lurking in water which some future between here and Moon he used to be stuck in is racing against time to create more cheaply, and he had decided not to tell Harry to check his Chilean connections in Manhattan and Washington because Spence had already been advertising rumors into facts.

The mike had been bare, the mesh’s grid still with him, the way it stayed with him in the stationhouse. "Tough mother," the blonde had said, her hair drawn back against her temples by two steel combs. The bruise on Mayn’s face, isn’t there a law saying she had to get equal treatment? Dark warps of hair, tight-slanted down her forehead, made her eyes look closer together. Rican rouge, dark sunsets. Behind the gleaming lips of her mouth, white teeth, gaps of silver; gold, too, from eating the surplus carrots from your old wives’ tale that carrots give you gold teeth (even if you didn’t want them). Her kids were on the other side of a milk-glass-paneled door at the end of that muddled hallway. Who knows what she sees? Them dead, sprawled. Left arm, right leg, put back together the wrong way, like a lake of sand, a mountain of fluid, a household inadvertently launched by Congress. She lives half her life for others. Which half is surplus and to whom does her value belong, maybe her husband, two or three times visited by the Chilean economist, whom Spence, as if inspired by Mayn’s absences, will draw further in, until the cultured, austere, somewhat exiled, somewhat tragic economist won’t be jogging in the park any more.

The woman’s face is seen and not heard. It is with Mayn, as it was before he saw her. The flesh and bones have got fixed inside his own face. The opposite of his own son’s flesh and bones the day they got fixed outside his; it scared Mayn more than a bomb or that deep vapor of a dying man’s breath. The day this boy named Andrew was five. The subway platform between the Brooklyn-bound and Manhattan-bound tracks, the curved white walls of tile inlaid with green and brown and blue tiles for the name of the station, the curve making the tunnel a tube that you—Mayn—once as a child imagined was a tunnel endlessly of these glimmering white tiles like the Holland Tunnel between New York and Holland—the vending machines—for a second your five-year-old son wasn’t there, and then for more than a second. People pushed past to board the train. For the train had come in. He had had some money in his hand, his father looked around for him there on the IRT platform, and then the door began to slide—the two doors in the days when both doors functioned—and the father turned from the mirror of the vending machine— for where was Andy?—and the doors weren’t in motion any more, except in the car where they were fixed. And Andy’s face was on the other side of the streaked glass in another city that seemed the only city moving. Children no hedge against inflation: for look at the figures: a private foundation where the young woman Amy works with the Chilean economist in order to survive in a manner that cannot but allure Larry toward the experience of loving her too much for her to give it back makes public that in one year sixty-eight New York children under sixteen were murdered, and of these thirty-six were under seven, half were black, a third more were Puerto Rican. The Cuban mother’s hedge against inflation is knowing what comes next now. You have your bruise, and she is far away, surging down the hallway through Spanish and English. She knows what comes next. She’s got to get to her kids. To get her kids. They are not overhead in the laboratory of an orbiting kitchen, nor in a tin ashtray beside a Press Pool telephone shouldered to your ear while a known child, who is in the mind before it gets transformed to frequency and wired home to form a report, is sweeping up a mine in the next field before they plant. So his mother searches elsewhere as if she isn’t looking for unexploded devices but just lacks the eyesight to see her son off to one side here, whom she’s really looking for, that is if he’s not under the soil like a coin you run your metal finder over in the dark while the friendly dogs chase each other back and forth between you and others. Stare out the moving window at the landscape that gets flown in from assignment to assignment, and you be fixed. Stare out a window at a steep green and white and brown valleyscape of shacks brightly rising from the edge of a city full of foreign sun. Caracas. Brazil. South.

How could the wife Joy react to his losing their son on the subway, when the son had been found at the next stop in conversation with a small elderly black man in an army jacket and a pith helmet and spurious ribbons? Joy reacted by walking around the living room as if it were tipping the way it was for her husband. As if she wanted to call the police now. And then she was crying at his side, but not in relief.

The landscape travels with him, throw in a Statue on a movable island, he doesn’t return the car tonight, he enters his building with the hitch-hiker’s phone number on his mind, cracked and peeling walls as if the charts on them get revealed as the walls disintegrate; the simultaneous reincarnation his young friend Larry will explain soon turns Mayn’s heart again to some ludicrously ancient threat which the statute of limitations exempts Mayn from, so the threat is inherited by Larry, and the doorman Manuel is standing in his way speaking Spanish, which Mayn returns.

It is a heavy nine-by-twelve envelope containing what Flick said was coming.

"Thanks. Thanks."

"I figure it’s important."

"You didn’t leave it lying around the mailroom. Thanks. When was it delivered?"

Manuel hesitates. "This evening. Two hours ago. I signed for it."

"Special delivery? Couldn’t be."

"Some guy. I signed for it."

"It was the post office."

"No. Just a piece of paper. I signed for you."

"Thank you."

The manila envelope has been sliced open and scotch-taped back. He needs a hot shower, and while he pictures Norma picking up his mail while he was away and visiting those plants, and he imagines where Flick is and what he is responsible for, he sees his own last name, no more, on the return address, upper left, and draws the sheaf of pages, forty or more, up out of the envelope and sees that his daughter has given herself back her given name, as (he recalls in a sweat his own words) "perpetrator of an amazing load of verbiage, Daddy."

It is about something called Effluent Pollution Reciprocal Involving Both Water and Air, and it is by Sarah Mayn, and he almost fails to get off at his floor, he’s electrified but because a wilderness of feeling hugs him like painless chest pains in the factual, explanatory lines. She could use a blue pencil, but he is frightened by the prospect of some form of truth, its real weight in his daughter’s grown life more than this other unpleasant business of how and why it was intercepted and then, this evening, returned. The envelope is coming into this old apartment of his for the second time, not the first. He finds on the last page gas chambers and gas ovens and wonders by what steps she got there; but he wants to get there himself the right way, he’s skimmed so many books, half-finished them. But sweat along the bridge of his nose swells in the corner of an eye and he is looking for his keys and thinking about his divorced wife Joy and feeling someone wants him to explain why it came apart, why it didn’t work out, if that’s a fair way to say it—and he can’t, he can’t explain, he can’t explain, entering the apartment—that is, he doesn’t know why he isn’t with her—he’s looking at his adored daughter’s typed lines, and he can see only between them for God’s sake, all that space between them: for God’s sake he hears some voice say in his brain, for God’s sake so sentimentally empty he could vomit.

He can’t explain why it fell apart. How’s that for maturity?’

IN FUTURE

She wanted him because she felt he would love her. He loved her because she was beautiful and funny and saw through other people even to what was beyond them. But she said, Sometimes I don’t think you want to be loved, sometimes I really think that.

He thought, Well, that’s O.K. You have to ask a lot of a woman.

Sometimes he didn’t think.

He told her he loved her and sometimes told her why. She made him feel newly returned. She understood this.

And he told her stories, some asked for again, some never the same, some that developed into others, some that she (though not their romantic, huntress daughter and hard-headed, retiring son) eventually found odd and threatening and became indifferent to: stories about a diplomat named Karl who carried a small Japanese pistol against his ribs because the secret of it being there at a conference thrilled him like telling on himself; stories about how Andrew Jackson rode a searing streak of lightning at an Algonquian rite of miscegenation and proved his courage but divided his brain permanently in two, or how once he loved a village attorney’s daughter from western New York who understood better than any the disappearance of the stone mason turned printer William Morgan who had threatened to publish a comic testament exposing Masonic secrets; stories also about the East Far Eastern Princess who paid a visit to the American Indians and flew in on her giant bird that was to become impossible because it missed its own food and took to eating Navajo ponies.

He told her a whole lot of stories while often claiming to know very little and be an authority on nothing, and some stories he didn’t understand and at least one was incomplete in his telling if not his soul, and his daughter came upon her own conclusion to it; in the beginning he told his wife about himself, fell silent, touched her arm, her waist—cracked a joke. The two of them amused each other. They got along like people who don’t need to talk too much, though they never took long car trips together. Never say never.

But they would blow up like other people: she when he said she was too damn good phoning his father twice a month; he when she accused him of just tolerating an unusually young navy captain who held down a desk job overlooking the Potomac and visited them when he was in New York.

He was content for her to be a housewife if she was content, but more than once said she shouldn’t permanently give up her job. But they knew that when she went back to it another job would be there. The next job. So they didn’t believe in forced unemployment.

When she married him he was a newspaperman based with a New York task force—that general area—and might not travel a lot. But she knew also that he might. And he was what she had been looking for; he had character and downplayed his knowledge and was physical and humorous to a fault and faintly tragic, but when you are in love you maybe don’t spell out all the details at least to the other person. But maybe this is untrue and you are so open you say anything at all.

Years passed and the two of them looked back, they didn’t always look ahead. But then it was often the other way around, and they lived in the future, which came often enough.

But what came first? What drew her to him or him to her? Easy. Not hard to think about.

They were about the same height, or almost. They weren’t at all incongruous, but their frames were different. She was slender, he was broad. She was tall, like her sister, and her legs were alive and noticeable through whatever she wore. Sometimes she stood with her arms sharply akimbo near a doorway.

Her eyes would hold him a moment too long, then drop with an invisible blink to his mouth. Her eyes were straight and explicit. She smelled sometimes of the lightest lavender rinsed through the cold skin of apples or diluted into, he felt, the spaces of some dry drawer holding a cardboard box of sachet (though he never looked); and it was just a hint of lavender taking him away from itself to remind him of what he could not place beyond a second of very green, almost sweet apples he recalled, which she also smelled of and which he did find—found like a less sweet berry in the smell and taste of her perspiration (as he once years later told to one other person in a rare moment of pinpoint intimacy).

She admired the dark hair on his wrists that went up under his striped shirt cuffs; but, strangely long afterward, she noticed a birthmark on his left wrist under his watch strap, a speckle of pinpricks like a cluster of freckles or tiny moles; he had hair on his wrists and some dumb recklessness in how he paid attention to her, her face, her reactions, and he had the lumbering walk of a man who might be smooth and rhythmic in sports but to her it meant shyness and a slight chip, though she would almost never point out this shyness, but he knew she knew him, as if he’d read her mind, yet found there her belief that he would not hurt anyone—she pretty much meant physically.

She had purposes, and she knew he felt these. He could be boisterous and stubborn, although an eavesdropper on the two of them alone would not have seen much of this in him.

What came first?

She gave him hell the first time they went out, but this did not come first. They had met in New York in a Russian place uptown where a friend of hers spent several nights a week because she was in love with a somewhat doomed, very middle-aged Russian family man who sang deeply to a guitar, sang like a deep-drawn bow across a bass viol—and wore a red, high-necked blouse with Cossack brocade on it so he might have scars on his neck. He had long lines down his face and it was from these lines that the lean face hung. Her friend’s love for the Russian was painful because he was nice to her. And he had shown a quiet deference to this young man Jim Mayn. Mayn was the name.

The first time they went out, it wasn’t at all uphill, but she gave him a hard time; she knew apparently so much more than he about the President’s lower intestine right down to his tan pyjamas and the semi-classical favorites he listened to, while downstairs in the hospital conference room the presidential news secretary was asked if there was still no one-word description of the President’s condition; and this heavy-set guy Jim Mayn smiling at her across a table at a Cantonese restaurant in New York had actually seen the President the preceding Thursday night laughing himself silly in a Washington hotel full of photographers at their annual dinner; and when she said the man must not run again and the whole thing was ludicrous, this heavy-set, strong-looking man she liked drank his beer that they had brought into the restaurant in a six-pack and he said Oh Eisenhower, Stevenson—and murmured in song "Pay me my money down"—it didn’t matter much as long as they could get two cars and a power mower into every garage, and a transistorized hearing aid into an eyeglass frame now. (No matter what you know how to do, you’re not going to phase out the strontium 90 from your milk.)

So she gave him hell—an insider, the cynical kind, do-nothing—and then she shook her head when he shut his eyes smiling like a blind man, and he shook his head, saying, Don’t be so damn hopeful about things. And they were both shaking their heads when he opened his eyes upon her amusement and said she reminded him of his grandmother in a 1900 photograph posed on a bicycle in straw hat, puffed sleeves, long skirt, dark bowtie, one discreet toe on the grass.

She asked if this was a compliment, knowing it was.

He said his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

I can imagine, she said, wishing she’d thought of something better to say, her eyes bright, seeing him for herself, her slow smile made witty, to him, by the pinch of her teeth in her lower lip and then her tongue. And at this point they were aware of time passing—he, of the excellent dark, rather coarse hair held up in back with a comb, and "her own eyes" (which their largeness and somewhat hard though momentary fixity made you identify them as) now turned upon her own hand lying along the table; she, of his large, sluggish or sleepy eyelids, and her hand, and the hazy blue and dark brown of his tweed jacket sleeve; and she suspected he had maybe two more or less under control girlfriends at present and was thinking something like How long till I make the grade, and will I have to ask her?—but then saw she was thinking the question from her side, and out of nowhere she said, Learning to whistle is like kissing, I mean learning to kiss—I mean if you learn from someone you love. It could have been dumb, her speaking so—but it wasn’t.

Then he didn’t call; then in vain she called him, and this was 1956. And then the next night—a Thursday—he called from Montauk and she couldn’t hear the sea so he held the receiver away from his ear for her to hear, but she did think that this independent man was not with anyone, and she was quite sure she smelt unsmoked cigar and garden mint over the phone and wished that she had put her hand out to feel his arm when they had had dinner. He said he would be back in New York the next day, and for a moment they both knew he had said it frankly. She ran her hand through her hair and he asked her what she was doing.

She said she was thinking how to put off a client tomorrow morning.

"Just tell him he has to wait," he said.

"She’s an architect," she said, "and her client’s getting impatient, that’s the thing, it’s this new light the Japanese copied from the Italians and it’s been ordered but it seems to have taken a long time, and now two real-estate guys in New Jersey are going to manufacture it a lot cheaper if we can wait. It’s the lighting business."

"What do you mean ‘seems’?" he said.

She felt some parts of them touching and she leaned toward him.

He said, "Is her client a woman too?"

She laughed, she knew she had tickled him.

He said, "You know me," and he said words he hadn’t known were coming but came from long memory as if he were off in the future, "I want a woman to get everything that’s coming to her."

She said, "O.K., I’m laughing, but you’ll earn that."

"Easy to get into, hard to get out," he at once regretted saying and knew he would remember. But "Hard to stay out," she answered, knowing (as she told him next day) that at that moment on the telephone he had got the grip of her eyes, or (as he knew but never told her) the memory of such grip thrown through his body like a passage of time. He was used to her at the same time that he didn’t know what to expect.

Her name was Joy, a name he wasn’t crazy about. But, though their love had its silly, dependent side, he was no good at thinking up those nicknames like Leafie or Needles, Nuzzle or Lark—or Sorry (his father’s for his mother Sarah) or Sam, his brother’s name for his wife—Sam—or, for a while, Joy’s name for him, Ghost, or Ghostie. It was from the song "I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" and it was he who had sung it to her in a whisper while the black pianist ("Negro," then) had played it in a pre-inflation French restaurant with buttery, average food (quote unquote, James) the second time they went out, though afterward they called it their third Chinese meal, and at the end of the song he said, "Let’s go."

Once when he visited his father in New Jersey he ran into old Bob Yard down at the Courthouse—Bob Yard, black-eyebrowed old part-dog, part-goat, part-horse, the electrical contractor, an Elk, like Mayn’s father, nothing else in common except that neither of them saw much of Jim from year to year. Bob liked to nag and jab with his penetrating voice like looking for inside info that he had himself all the time, and this time Bob asked if Jim had a picture of Joy; and Mayn happened to have a passport shot (in which Joy looked disturbed as if she were about to be transported somewhere). Old Bob—Bad Bob—held it up against the sun. His prominent front teeth and the eyes a little close together though not "bad" looking made him look stupidly like Mayn’s father but with a narrower face: "Your mother would have liked her," he said, "I can see it in the eyes. Your mother’s approval."

"In Joy’s eyes?"

"Your mother’d know how to say it. Your mother turns over in her grave hearing me speak for her. She had it coming—all the times she wouldn’t speak for herself."

The tongue came out and licked the lips. "Turns over with gratitude as if she was alive. The combat boys said it during the War: ‘Nobody dies.’ Though she might not say so."

Beyond the Jersey Central crossing, two men in dungarees came out of the firehouse and stood looking downstreet and one of them was Earl Haight with the red beak of a nose that had been red from the time he was a kid— Earl, from Mayn’s high school class, father a County Jail guard aiming to be nominated for Justice of the Peace. The other man outside the firehouse was Ira Lee, the Indian whose family had lived in the same narrow frame house for years at the power-company end of the black section. Mayn’s grandmother had taught Ira to garden. Crew cut former halfback. Mother a long-fingered halfbreed Creek from somewhere in the mid-South who had cleaned sometimes for Mayn’s grandmother. Father a Saconnet descended from the famed woman chief of that small, not originally nomadic Rhode Island tribe.

Bob Yard brought the photo down out of the sun. "Jimmy, you were smart not to stick around," he said. " ‘Course the paper, you wouldn’t have kept it going, no one could"—and Mayn heard the Jersey r roll through him like a hundred familiar greetings on the family porch three minutes’ walk from here, less than fifty miles from New York, "Get it steady," said Bob Yard, "cook for you, have some kids, get it steady. ‘Course you guys moving around, you get it steady anyhow. She cooking something for you?"

Mayn had to scowl like a smile or laugh. His father didn’t talk like that. Not that with old Bob you talked openly about everything. Mayn was way in the future staring back into the past wondering if his own father had been unfaithful to his wife’s memory even—words made you laugh and history fell apart into tales and isolated mysteries threatening to be trivial. But his father wouldn’t talk like Bob. Mayn didn’t care if his father was a prude or wasn’t.

Joy could be romantic, and she knew he was too, though she played to the other side of him, the part that wasn’t one with her. But the romantic in him was that he didn’t give a damn, though he didn’t say so. (Their daughter one day years later at a restaurant said, "You and Joy didn’t talk things out, I’m almost sure of that, I mean like me and my friends do.") He took Joy to Bermuda once on two hours’ notice, a pretty dashing but a rather funny thing to do to her, though to tell the truth she’d felt like it all day; and he made abrupt statements to her that made her go moist in the eyes (like he’d dreamed of someone like her when he was in high school, senior year, long before he knew her, he meant it)—she felt paid back too much, why was that? but she thought he meant daydreamt because he always claimed he didn’t have sleep dreams—(he liked, he said, the way she came into a room as if she were all by herself and going to be) and when he told her once that he was happy with her, it almost made her cry (she didn’t tell him) and later by herself it, or something, did make her cry. He didn’t give a damn about anniversaries or candlelight on mahogany, but he would buy her two dozen yellow roses, lay the soft greenly crackling cone of paper on the hall table as if it were not to be noticed even after they were finished hugging and kissing. He’d hardly ever written her a love letter, didn’t give a damn about old letters except ones he could quote from, couldn’t play house with his bride, though did tell about his family and his hometown, and Joy (he was asked to believe) recalled what he said sometimes better than he recalled it, though he’d tell (and remember) specially about his grandmother and her house down the street, his haven— for she had told him weird tales about the West and taught him to whistle.

But he didn’t give a damn about blanket chests—or a spinning wheel seen once through the fire-bright window of a New Hampshire inn; didn’t give a damn—or was not sentimental—about their first TV in 1959, an Admiral (and why did he think of it?); and he liked but could take or leave a cave painting they’d brought back from France (without the cave!)—a working honeymoon—yet he did care more than he showed about her favorite record in 1956: (shepherds calling across a valley; a child invisibly hearing a country lullaby; southern sun coursing through someone’s vibrant objection to a wife) Songs of the Auvergne. Sure he liked music. Listening to Dvorak when he’d come home from a trip, he said he knew she wanted to take flying lessons; and she was amazed he knew, and he said, Oh he thought she’d mentioned it (but he knew that it had come out of the blue—he put it out of his mind). She told him he liked the "coming" part of coming home, and he realized she was right. There wasn’t time to mail postcards from where he went, so he brought them home with him. He wasn’t sentimental about snapshot albums or possessions (his, hers, ours), or the soft green and cheesy chalupas at a restaurant on the corner that reminded her of a family place in the north end of Chicago, though a pan of oven-toasted and salted almonds their first Christmas brought back his mother’s furtive eyes with such a dryness of the mouth he forgot he had told Joy she used to make them and he didn’t recall till weeks later, so the mystery of the parallel stayed real. He wasn’t sentimental about Joy’s dough-bake Christmas-tree ornaments lying brightly colored in the cardboard box on the rug one December day he came in from La Guardia Airport to find no one home and in the middle of the living room this flash of green, red, turquoise, gold—a gold elephant, a blue dancer, a dark green shining-shellacked fir tree—but of more interest was a damp towel he sniffed hanging on the shower-curtain rail—flesh-rubbed—a message the skin of his hips took, that was lust in an absence he chose for a message—but more a presence than a real message; and she was so "there"—so "there" now—in how sometimes she watched for him to make the first move and then it didn’t seem only his, or his at all. He could run his hand down her back all night through the last button of bone into a spread softness doubling itself in curves back and forth larger than fingers or hand—and down her side and into the soft, sharp dip above her hipbone that sent his thumb inward in a small arc to touch tendrils only to find eyes glistening in the near dark, and her hands were better than his, you might say, even to when she’d lend him one of her hands to move from one place to another. And Bob Yard said Mayn’s mother would have been grateful for this marriage—marriage of love, he really meant, though those words of Bob Yard’s, not himself a sentimental man, brought back eyes that would have seen what the elder son saw in this person Joy, who he thought saw through other people clearly yet saw through them even to what was beyond them. (Say that again, slow.)

She talked of a house they would build, near water she imagined you’d see through the trees. An open-plan house built around a huge tree—he had to laugh—no, she’d seen it from a car years ago, the tree, a hundred feet tall, six feet thick at least, not a branch on it, all gray like a rock, but alive (she thought it had been alive)—he had to laugh—and her loving uncle had looked away from the road before she had a chance to speak and had said it was a white oak. It was far from here but you could find oaks like that in New England too, and it was what she wanted, like two children, a girl and then a boy, Flick and Andrew, who Flick felt was so much smarter than she was and who when he went to college years later was a maker of riddles.

Joy’s father had been a chemist with the paper company in Chicago— Donnelly. The chemistry of paper, not that you need to talk about your work. Her sister got on better with him.

In the beginning Joy talked of a future she seemed already to have shared with this fellow Jim Mayn her husband, as if it had come first, so clear was she about it, and quick to catch him thinking her own thoughts about fair-to-poor rural schools when he’d hardly known he was thinking about schools though when she told him schools didn’t matter as much as she’d once thought, he had a spasm of caring still more for her, caring twice as much as he did about the two kids whom he was very content to love—while he did feel in his bones that if she was better balanced than he, she still didn’t admit to herself what it felt like to be preferred to her children, preferred in his sharp, erratic way.

Where were the children? Flick, the sharp-spoken girl, and Andrew, the potential roughneck (he’d suddenly start yelling to himself; it was funny, it was like he’d suddenly started digging down through the Earth—maybe he was hearing things, hearing even then those riddles he used to make up when he went to college). Where were Flick and Andrew in the marriage, in all this?

Everywhere and nowhere. (Her father said she really listened, but her mother shrugged.)

Or everywhere, both parents could sometimes feel, though Jim and Joy saw themselves as wise enough to let their children be free of them.

He listened to her build the house she had in mind and fill it; and he had to speak; but then he said only that . . . well, here he was.

Was he her old-fashioned future? As her sister’s minister back in Aurora, Illinois, had said, commitment in terms of marital union is like living already in the future.

He didn’t know if he could keep up with that future (whether or not he ever got to go to China).

Except that when he could admit abrupt rage in himself upon returning to the apartment and then, as he came in, see Joy watching him from where she was (like a neighbor’s ocelot—more like a friend’s shepherd watching a man and woman she knew leave in the morning—though more like a wife who was prepared for him) and just as this irritation of his toward someone he loved rose and then finished toward her in a rush, and he stood roughly and said something and went toward her, he felt that coming home was coming back: and when she said, "Do you like being here?" (so the words came together though they were divided by time and by sense and between said and not-said), "it’s nice here, isn’t it?" (she’d built a record cabinet, she’d fixed the wall telephone’s loose box)—"when I heard the elevator door, I knew it was you and when I heard the lock I knew you hadn’t shaved before you left the hotel—I know what you’re thinking, don’t say it—the children aren’t home yet—the last thing you want is to eat out tonight, tell me the truth"— he felt that what he’d come back from was some future, and what he’d come back to was an abundance threatening to waste itself on him. With his assignments, you see, he made sense of each individual one.

She told him what had happened while he was gone. Not a whole lot. She could stand with her arms akimbo as if she needed to take up a bit of space.

Sometimes she would know how not to come to him at the door, she would stand in the middle of the living-room rug instead and he could put down his case without taking his eye off her. Once she’d been sitting cross-legged on the sun-covered ochre rug, the ochre sun-struck into a growth loose through the spread of dark, interleaved pairs of bloomed coils, once upon a time beaks, each the beak of the rainbird if you please, standing each upside down to the other, and she was part of the rug so that he looked at both and didn’t know which came first, and this was more crazy than being irritated at feeling grateful; she wasn’t asking for gratitude any more than the eyes of his long-withdrawn mother (inherited by his happier grandmother?) really gave him gratitude for marrying for love.

What happens is never what came first, it seems to Jim Mayn, and Joy doesn’t see what he means for he says it even less clearly than that, and then shakes his head at himself and grins grimly as if he has to go off now and talk to someone he despises and once in the middle of an alarm clock going off he smashed the bathroom mirror without a drop of blood and his small daughter came and asked him why he had done it; what happens is never what comes first, it seems, but how about when what comes first has not yet appeared? It is waited for, as if it might be seen approaching through emptiness. It is thinking him! With ways of thought that aren’t his any more than they are Joy’s or his daughter’s, but these broken statements like he was a cracked philosopher in another life, or a traveling charlatan, another system, come into him, out of him.

Flick and Andrew had a lot to say to each other later on about their parents. Andrew was confused but brilliant about it. His father tried to tell him how to write with few words for his seventh-grade English. Did Jim ever tell anything like that to Flick? She and her brother thought not.

Jim was away too much, they later said. But newly returned was what Joy said she made him feel.

But returned from the future where, say, two people had been turned into one, which economizes on feeling: his daughter heard this at the end of a story one night, she was quite sure.

Yet also another kind of One, offspring from those dubious Two, is different from them, and alone; and as he looks back to the former Two, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he cannot see where they went; and deserted by that origin, this One (namely, Jim) feels thrust untimely from that lost Two into the future, where he should be glad to be because it’s where tomorrow’s news is, but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery smarter than he which is that of his unhappy mother disappearing into the elements, he has on one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost river to then find it in the future where he travels (whew!), or, to put it better, his wife didn’t always know where he was coming from, and, believing him not unfaithful, told him nonetheless that he wasn’t all there. But as her never-at-a-loss friend Lucille Silver put it, What man is entirely committed to his marriage? Which for Joy did not cover the thing that was happening to her.

Somewhere in the future Andrew and his older sister Flick who thinks he’s so much brighter have a lot to say to each other but seldom meet.

Meanwhile, hear yourself slog through the noise pollution of a street, what Mayn calls "bedlam," and his daughter years later learns from an older woman friend what Bedlam literally was.

"Grampa said he was tickled pink to see me."

"That’s right."

The little girl giggles, even without her little brother for an audience. "Tickled pink!" It’s funny.

On Second Avenue, that so powerfully carries from north to south the hills and bridges and tunnels of Manhattan’s east coast—well, one tunnel that he knows of—the morning sun low in the sky turns blinding against the snow and slick of the glittering pavement. Anything is here in this city, including all that’s outside, and the winter sun that has been fired silently off into the void above Queens and Brooklyn, the sun that has been launched into its old moment of fixity, stays there above the city, and there is nowhere else for a moment, since the sky east and west and up forgets New Mexico, Chile, Connecticut, the cobbles of Brussels, life that lasts from a Russian subway platform to a peak in Tanzania. The morning traffic blasts cycles of current past people standing on curbs as if the avenue were being excavated. Glaring noise that would be a gaping hole if you could just manage to get the joke, which is someone else’s. Hitler’s loudspeaker has been pulverized and each deaf pore of the future soaks it up and naturalizes it. A child among other children gets up the two steps of a yellow Varsity bus, and the father, his shoulders hunched and his bare hand in his pocket discovering the warm tangerine it’s been holding for several blocks, sees her then through the bus windows shadowed by the outside light, knapsack strap slipping off one shoulder; sees her make her way back to a seat on the aisle and ease around leaning forward away from the back of the seat giving her knapsack room.

The light is in his eyes, the little girl looks straight ahead. The day has begun. The young driver in a sweatshirt with the hood back has drawn the door to, and watches what’s coming over his shoulder, revving the motor. The girl glances at her father, starts a smile—just a glance, that’s all—that’s it—the day’s begun. She sees him with her faintly smiling glance, and that’s it, she doesn’t see him find in his pocket and hold up the tangerine she was going to have on the bus. He has the tangerine but not his gloves, and will save it for her.

The kid on the seat in front turns to speak to her over his shoulder—but the father can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl in the knitted cap under the hood of a quilted parka. They have forgotten home and parents, thank God. His daughter and the other children are in a thing that’s about to move, it’s almost not here, the eye reviews the faces on their way to school.

Sun, like a power now being used, strikes through the bus broadside and the bus eases out into traffic in front of a honking cab and behind a truck. The truck is silver like bare metal and when it is gone he is looking at the same old rainbow-shaped red-white-and-blue Grand Opening banner above the plate glass of the supermarket Joy doesn’t go to any more because they lost her delivery once; and the father is even more still before he turns to go. He feels good. His child’s cheeks were pink, rosy. She’s thinking about what’s ahead, not about her father.

Turning, he is struck—struck on the elbow. The man, the Italian fruit-and-vegetable man—"ey!" knows him and greets him in his arms as if by name hustling across the sidewalk with a carton of half-green bananas in his arms that he’s slid off the back of the Hunts Point truck. The white double-door of the funeral home is like a seafood restaurant and out of one small leaded window, her center-parted dyed-dark hair tight-combed, a woman’s round face is looking, and he knows she has an apron on, he knows her though not to speak to and she holds his gaze with a morning attention his brother Brad back home in New Jersey would think unfriendly—she’s Italian and she looks at you, but then this is New York and she looks away and back. His knee hurts.

His knee is sick, and the fancy deli’s sidewalk is city-full, the baskets of shallots, of beans, of dried stockfish on end with their long gray whiskery jaws like flat fossils for being open, and he wonders if the fava beans in the plastic bags can be the same he saw last month, pale and tough for a long day’s minestrone, flat like limas. No doctor’s going to touch the cartilage in his knee, it’s floating, that’s what it’s doing—it’s not really knifing him nerve by nerve, it’s acting up because he walked four miles back to a motel—two miles in green quiet, two along a highway—and yesterday afternoon Joy saw the swelling while unpacking his bag which she still feels called upon to do. But back in New York today if he can’t get in some basketball he’ll swim laps. Joy’s given up telling him to see a doctor.

He takes another way home, roundabout. He picks a plane out of the air, the noise. His hands are cold. The air seems less acid, more fresh, but isn’t. He’s going home. Not going home "first" before he goes out to work, because today he’s at home. Not working at all until he has to see his old bureau chief for lunch which is soon enough.

Out of the cold sidewalk comes the awful question since no one like them was supposed to get divorced: So who will leave first, he or Joy? Is it what’s coming to them? Stuff comes to him he can’t prove, like that each waits to be prompted by the other. Certain words waiting for them may do it. By the time he gets back she will have put Andrew on the private-school bus—it’s apricot-colored, caramel-pudding-colored, but you know what paint smells like, and like a lot of individual school buses this one suggests police, the administration of the city, not the microbus of the same size but many colors; an airport hotel gives courtesy transportation in this type of bus, and Andrew’s costs six hundred dollars a school year. Will she be home? If home, in the bathroom? Does she want to go back to work? He sees the children arriving home and pressing and pressing the buzzer.

A clear puzzle anyway. More clear than this noise. Who will leave first? Not her.

Joy will say—he knows she will—that if in the midst of this clear puzzle she should leave, he her husband has already left. The house, that is. They don’t think of it as only rented, they think it’s theirs, though they hate rent. The "house," the apartment.

We’ve jumped a few events. A good apartment is hard to find. A good woman is not hard to find; they’re all so damned good. At not quite complaining. Until you’re at last not ready. Picking a time when you were about to think. About to go. It’s painful for him, isn’t it? this traveling—painful quite apart from her.

He’s away often, so he knows the City even better, he’s always returning and what would he know if he had stayed home in New Jersey to revive the family weekly newspaper when it couldn’t be done anyhow, and he knows this part of Manhattan as well as he knows Yorkville, the West Village, Wall Street, Maiden Lane, the Battery, or knows the sound of three familiar dogs repeatedly greeting each other down in the street very late at night or early in the morning long before Joy’s alarm goes off, sometimes he doesn’t want to explain himself, say he’s way uptown crossing East Eighty-sixth Street in the middle of the block at two or three in the morning having found a Puerto Rican former super he wanted to question and thinking now he’ll catch a German bar before it closes but is met in midstream by a drunk sailor with a pale, wiry mongrel on a leash and the sailor grabs him by the arm and asks him to take the dog back there into the Finnish restaurant that Mayn then recalls noticing the sailor coming out of, with the awning—"Where am I?" the sailor mumbles as a few late (or early) cars and trucks rub them both ways—"Eighty-sixth Street, Yorkville"—"Take the dog for Chrissake"— the sailor didn’t want to explain himself either, and Mayn understood.

Mayn’s not with the regional task force any more, though the bureau would have him back; but, with the task force that took him out of New York all the time, he was based in New York—whereas now he’s not—but lives on here—though he’s away even more. Got it?

"So it’s been in your family," a man at a bar once said respectfully, "now that’s what I kind of always wanted—my own small-town paper, I got the clothes for it."

Name of Ray Spence. That operator Ray Spence, impersonal, funky (too early for that word), unkillable (forget the rat poison—he wouldn’t have to vomit). Came back at Mayn once in a Washington bar, "So what happened? Family lost their grip? Those small-town papers ..." But Spence with his clear eye for some rich man’s secret that could be forgotten even after it wasn’t a secret any more, whether money changed hands or not, Spence can’t know so much without a staff but came on as a plain old photographer and had a gift for the instant, and tipped the bartender heavily, and hardly touched his drink, or was it his second or third?

"It’s guys like you made me want to go into newspaper work," said Mayn looking around for another familiar face, finding it.

His child is halfway to school, he likes talking to her; she listens, then turns her attention to something more urgent; he has passed the renovated brownstones—some pink or white—they look childless here between Second and Third, opposite the massive brick blank of the phone company’s operations building, its windows steel-meshed against the morning’s prison of noise outside; it’s his neighborhood—call it Murray Hill, give it a name to remember (sounds like it was changed). Now he passes going the other way. The three heavy guys in windbreakers stand around smoking, there’s a king-size cylinder of beer on the curb and a Danger sign propped in the middle of the sidewalk—a crane as high as the six-story building makes people going to work raise their eyes but they mostly don’t look all the way up at it, it’s parked there and a man in a gray felt hat sits in the cab talking down to the men on the sidewalk, his hand appears along the cab window, he could use a shave, he’s got a plaid wool shirt under his windbreaker and he’s wearing gray kid gloves, Mayn feels the soft, tight give of the leather in his own fingers, it’s in his inside pocket, his small notebook. A gigantic switch console once slow and scaleless lowering against the sky stands in the crane’s truck bed and two men are looking down out of high windows in this building. Far up on company time. They’ll live in east Brooklyn, they’ll live in Queens, their kids nearly grown, wives are maybe at work, maybe sitting in the kitchen, settled in a chair on the phone to a daughter who’s discussing he doesn’t know what— last night. Not nudity you can be sure.

He has passed the renovated brownstones. He has passed the unfinished-furniture store drawing him like a restaurant with its warm sweet pine dust, a chest of drawers in the window, a pigeonhole desk, a rocker if you like rockers if you like the curves.

Meanwhile the Irish free-lunch bar pays the rent just; the shapes in there at this hour, the shoulders, the bill of a cap, an elbow, an anchored hand, are so dim to him through the damp glass, the place so dark, darkness some grime paid on profits of last night, that he might just get a whiff of last night’s slops, but from the sidewalk he sees himself in the long mirror passing behind the bottles.

Along the wide avenue he’s window-shopped the imported shoe store en route to the TV repair. And here’s the small sidewalk office of the plumbing contractor where he tried to buy a steel access door the super couldn’t find for Joy for a ceiling with an old leaky pipe up inside it—the fat woman under a bare bulb will always be on the phone at this hour staring through the plate glass on the lower right of which is JOBBING PROMPTLY ATTENDED TO. He’s passed the kraut deli with a steel tureen of grass-sweet, mealy pea soup to take out. And everywhere the new restaurants appear and fade—one an antique shop that kept some of the stock when they converted to spinach salad and quiche; he’s passed the A&P where women on food stamps buy hamburger rolls and giant Pepsis and you can get the cheapest good unground coffee anywhere but how old are the beans?—a coffee broker once bought him a drink beside the most beautiful lake in the world and attempted to find out what he knew about the tobacco lobby in Congress so he was hypnotized by the man’s multilingual indirectness but kept waking up wondering who this "we" was he spoke for; Mayn knows about weak coffee out of town that you can see down through, and Bridgeport’s ravaged waitresses, and midwestern high-school kids in aprons, and western cowgirl hostesses, they come by again with more steaming globes of it black, but transparent at the edge of the cup. He can reach Manhattan more or less—he’s passed the bakery with its layers and stacks, brown, sugar-dusted, glazed—where crisp butterflies and brown-and-white pignoli-nut cookies touch the tongue hinges as the immigrant eye is touched by the glue-slick apricot, peach, strawberry tarts glittering so toylike they could be a month old. He’s passed the Moravian church with the black-and-gold historical plaque and spiked iron railing where they bend No Electioneering signs around the spikes, on Election Day, and where a friend of Joy’s goes to O.A.—Overeaters Anonymous—where the A.A. "meeting" also meets, and a Senior Citizens coffee group rounded against the backs of the chairs, and a trash-recycling headquarters Joy calls Jesus Saves, and he’s passed out quarters to the bums against the railing who until he gets near them are nodding in serious conversation like personnel waiting to go on duty, and getting away from them he finds himself stopped looking into the New York sky which is cold and possible, pressing down upon you some chance of neighborhood, his and hers, between them shared though more by Joy who’s here more than by Jim, who can’t save a marriage.

Indians and Pakistanis move in, and one shop might hold spices, T-shirts, plastic luggage, and rock records—in suspension—or like in a big old suitcase; the neighborhood will absorb these shiny-haired brown men—he sees their future here—who walk with their feet out and maybe a step ahead of their females and under their overcoats wear white shirts without neckties (like orthodox Jews, but unlike Jews unbuttoned at the neck). The neighborhood will absorb them and their soft women, while they don’t seem to live here, and maybe they don’t—while carloads of them will career out of Park Avenue South and run large old cars into spaces between a dark restaurant and a brightly colored sari emporium, and maybe you see a whole costumed group standing beside a car with its trunk open or its hood up, always one or the other. Strong marriages.

The newsstand has gone out of business on Thirtieth Street, he sees; and so he’ll buy his paper in the women’s hotel off Madison, the occupied lobby at this hour he doesn’t want to think about or look at, Joy said it refutes the syndicated astronomer who says We are not alone—well that’s not "Mother" at her funniest—she gets herself a magazine here or maybe late at night a pack of cigarettes out of the machine, she’s not the type to smoke, why does she? it’s incongruous—"it’s not your sort of hotel," she said, but she knows him for an old cocky blood who’s got all this extra amiability he can give them, they’re women, women in housedresses sitting smoking; and Joy almost understands this in him, rouged women on canes, women in slippers staring ahead, watching the Middle Eastern desk clerk waiting maybe for something to do, or in easy chairs they’re turned toward small side tables with a lamp lighting a tabloid newspaper that spreads open down off the table. An odor of scent passes through him like the music tuned from the front desk, and he smells as if down the elevator shafts or out of the dark phone booths (doors folded half open) last night’s canned beef stew, women neither alone and independent nor not alone, and the vacuum cleaner starts up right behind him and he sees he’s stepping over the hose, while a woman as old as a grandmother watches him approach and holds on to a walker (wading in rapids, shivering in Chicago, slowing as if to thicken against the wind) and when he nods, she says at her own tempo, "Five and a half percent, six percent, six and a half percent, seven" so that if Mayn observes every possible detail of this world, he might never get home—but the man at the newsstand counter, his hand clamping his pack of cigarettes down on the counter next to his paper, says he’s glad to see him.

He’s passed the sculpture-materials store, and the offset printer’s who’s leaving the business to his Bahamian assistant next year and retiring to Lake-hurst, New Jersey, where the Hindenburg blew up. Passed these places often—often slowly, walking with small children (they knew where your hand was without looking), as if those certain presences have been left in the daytime absence of stories he told at night—mostly tales of the East Far Eastern Princess, her giant carrier bird that took to eating Indian ponies on a visit, or the Inventor of New York who did pathmark work on wind stress for high buildings and never got credit, who went west and met the Navajo Prince when he was in love with the East Far Eastern Princess but just as the Four Worlds were materializing together the Inventor had to ride back to New York because in his absence it was disappearing even though he had invented it, maybe because he had invented it rather than discovered it.

A hand reaches for Mayn’s on one side and he for another hand on the other side. And now, after years, it’s because of the children that on the harder days these streets have seemed less a neighborhood than ways to elsewhere, so that he might despair and wrongly—and despair of giving his children something else even though all this is what they know they have and they are busy, and they haven’t the chance to forget all that he knows. But, since they are his memory’s guarantee, it’s also because of his kids that these blocks have made a neighborhood that sometimes when he opens his eyes can’t be residential, but then is. Just as he wonders if the children have anything to do with it all, when Joy stands at a window staring at the decorated beauty of high, turn-of-the-century office buildings and textile warehouses or cutting rooms, underwear, whatever’s inside, with round-arch windows and blue stripes and flowery pediments and scrolls and other decorations the names for which he doesn’t know staring up from the street ten or fifteen stories the way he used to think about New York fifty miles away when he was in high school, and above all that architectural decoration and the overhanging rims of the roofs a sky that on a day like this you’d never believe is better for astrology than astronomy, but it’s Joy at their own high window looking out and she says, "Those water towers, those sawed-off silos, you know something, I have no control over my life."

His wife this morning has said that Flick is nine and doesn’t have to be walked to the bus. He knew that, didn’t he? she said.

Flick objected and asked him to help her wedge her house-shaped lunch-box into her knapsack—"He does have to walk me." She remembers what’s what.

"He doesn’t," said the boy in a soft tone of discovery staring at the spoon gripped in his hand, a monogrammed spoon that belonged to his father’s grandma—staring at it and turning it, staring and turning his neck so slender his plaid shirt looks man-size, the dark mole clear and small below the hairline.

"I think he does," said the mother, seeing through the conversation, and on the spur of the moment tossed her husband, ten feet away in the hall, a yellow apple which for an instant he felt his teeth slowly, slowly, neatly bite into in mid-air but he has taken it without thinking, in his cupped fingers, and in a trice it stands on the hall table beside bill envelopes that need stamps.

"You don’t own him," said Flick. "Yes I do," said Joy. "Does she?" "She only rents me."

"Your hair’s gray," said his daughter reaching up to smooth it at the ear as he bends down to her hand.

"It always has been," says Joy, who sees him take up one of the envelopes.

Joy never liked mailing things. They laughed about it. He said in the presence of a friend that Joy turned it into his obligation, and the friend said it should be easy for Joy to figure out what was behind this feeling.

Andrew has turned abruptly to watch, grinning, and leaves his cereal, goes into the hall, grabs the apple, and flips it to his father, "Hey Dad, can we go to the library today?"

His father grabs him as if to get hold of the question and wrestles the small, ambushed shoulders into a hug. "If I’m back from lunch," he seems to have said before.

He’s passed the new library, second floor just for children. And now he’s walking over the crusts of snow, and a dog ahead has balked and is being dragged but won’t go further, it’s the salt on the pavement—the dog’s paws sting. Salt was tossed all over the pavement in front of this office building, tires slithering, a cab door sounding not quite shut, a black man’s breath into cold air, his breath like engine steam above his two-decker trolley of coffee and Danish halting for him to reach around to yank open a glass door, and in the brisk fantasy of this morning in this commercial residential point in Manhattan—residence used to be good business but no more, says the landlord—Mayn remembers that Joy has started having the paper delivered —recalls on another street a few minutes ago following a young woman— well, not following—but following her too closely, she was swinging her butt but she was moving right along yet was going too slow for him though he couldn’t get past her what with the garbage cans and the tree plots, and she turned her head to catch him in the corner of her eye like an animal—he smelled her powder, her morning perfume, whatever.

He’s almost home and loves his wife. She’s ahead. What’s the matter with them?

A new couple stayed till one, their girl-child is now in public school again and they’re rich enough to believe in it—and Joy said that she thought the man, who was very presentable and well-educated and was in the aluminum business and praised Women’s Lib (—bib, crib—), had wanted to be treated like an invalid. Their child at six had greeted the arriving soon-to-be-nude women of a workshop and had made the gossip column—first name (basis) only. Joy knew them from the library where she and they had reached for an opera album at the same instant.

The man’s feet—extremely big to say the least. And when he had put his drink down he had held on to it unless his wife was talking. His wife had talked about him, and there he was, temporarily, in the room. She shouldn’t have, both because the guy might just have been not there (Jim later said) and because she seemed to make him materialize there (Joy later said).

"Invalid maybe," said Mayn, "and he did have a helluva cold, but she’s sure talking about him instead of something else that she won’t put her finger on, and it isn’t anti-Semitism in Space."

"I like talking to you, Ghostie."

"I think I’m drunk. Well, she’s bored with him but she thinks it might be her. In the kitchen he asked me if he hurt your feelings asking if the rug was genuine and you’d said a genuine imitation, and he asked if there was anti-Semitism in my business and he asked if one thing didn’t come on top of another too fast in the newspaper racket (he’s humble and sensitive and insulting) and was there any continuity?, and I was going to say Yes, but he suddenly said, like he was explaining something, that he had to change his life—before we knew it it would be the seventies—and then—"

"He laughed very loudly," said Joy. "I thought you’d told him a joke and he was the kind who doesn’t remember them well enough to tell them— we heard him laugh out in the living room, we thought you’d said something, and she said she hoped Tom wasn’t telling you about the models he makes, and then she said she’d bought him ten pairs of socks on the spur of the moment this afternoon, his mother bought him six pairs."

The light is now red—how’d that happen?—and Mayn won’t hurry— models of what?—no two of the four of them had gotten around to that—the cars seem to wait, he can’t fly, he considers limping—that is, across against the light. Last night he heard "Ghostie" for the first time in a long time. It’s been a short walk, he hasn’t gone far. She will bend her head to one side combing her hair at night—that’s what she does, the circles of coffee in his gut melt the path to her—he has stood over her holding her shoulder in his hand, as she bends her head resisting the clutch of the brush with that look of arranging something inside her head that she can’t always see. Seeming as if she has an idea what is wrong with the world around her which might be the people very close to her.

Maybe she won’t take angry action on what she knows.

She is ahead; he sees her out there. She can report of herself more than she is willing to know but of him knows more than he for one is able to report. She is funny and beautiful and she wants to let Jim know without words that she knows he thinks this of her. Andrew and Flick’s mother who is quite a character to them had a job before she had them. Before she had a job she had a home with a father in Chicago who, with his large, inky-black mustache, entered the house at a violent, silent run knowing his first wife was busy upstairs. She preferred upstairs and managed always to be there. He pounced on the piano, however, and plunked a few bars of "Meet Me in St. Louis" knowing she would not come downstairs but would be waiting for him when he crept wickedly to the top of the stairs until one day he found her dead, her hand held in Joy’s sister’s. Whereas for his second wife he would also play, but she could never be trained to stay put but could be seen plunging silently downstairs before he was safely out of the second bar of Albert Au Revoir’s "Banana Waltz." Kind of a depressive man, besides. (Had enough? Joy asked, and could eventually communicate this question without words by dropping open her mouth and glazing her eyes.)

She is funny and beautiful. She is not Jim, no matter what their marriage (he once observed) threatened them with.

Once on a morning like this he didn’t have his key and she opened the door in a big towel, her half-peeled banana in her hand, and she said smiling, 4’Oh it’s you."

He knows what’s happening. But not why. Does she want him to be away less? He doesn’t know, and the reason is that he asked; and she answered Oh yes she wished he were away less. But what he wanted to hear wasn’t to be heard in her answer. Ask for her touch; fine. Or ask her which of the people they saw socially she’d be content not to see again; ask her why she lets the phone ring at least twice even when she’s right there, ask her why she said hardly a word when he brought the salvage diver by for a drink—and she’ll say she shut up because, because, it was the absent presence in the diver man’s talk, the man’s very young girl friend, whom he discreetly bragged about in the shape of her record collection, O.K.?—or ask Joy if she originally expected to be happy having made a good match, or ever thought of getting off under the bathtub faucet no hands like Lucille and her workshop friend, or has ever run amok; ask her why she gave up smoking one week while she asks you—call it him—if you smoke after intercourse and answers her own question (I haven’t looked); or ask her to shut up—or be asked to shut up when he tells Joy she should go back to work; be asked once when silent, having been silent for a minute, having been already asked to be. As if some unspoken answer had matched what he’d wanted to hear in hers at other times. But for all these successful askings (no complaints, take care) you still can’t ask her to tell you not to travel so much, and expect to get the truth. You hide your heart in this apartment like a Christmas present not yet wrapped or—for she hides hers sometimes too (yet that prior you is also she)—like a plumper tummy in a Danskin leotard dusky like old-fashioned stockings, while he, the deployed emplaned husband hides between here and there like the shadow or chance of one end or the other, yet seems to be only at one end of the other.

He still had this sneaking idea that they’d always had a perfect understanding, but he wouldn’t claim so to his daughter when she was old enough to talk to—that is, about this—sometime around the time she had discovered a lot of words, including "tedious."

He and Joy—meeting of the minds is relative, you know; it doesn’t mean you agree, like seeing the delicate neck of your little boy looking over his shoulder at what he’s drawing and you run a finger up the neck into the hair and he doesn’t say anything.

Relationship was the word. Relation. Each was the other’s closest relative. Closer than blood, and clearer to boot—clear friction. Not just that he on his back with his knees V’d out licked her insteps’ wrinklable arches while from below her she divided and trained his soft-skinned old beanbag either side of her soft, stuck-open breather (take a breather, sweet) while he broke the V of his knees to run his own instep up and down her ribs, pigeon-toeing under onto a softer flesh to the returning touch of separateness, each soft spot of nipple marking his motion. Well, you can’t exactly tell it, speak of it, except some other way, say indirectly, with the door closed—but where are you? For example, let them watch TV in a room or hunt for change in a dark taxi, or one lie on a bed in a hotel room while the other moves into the bathroom or out. Soft points marking motion. Life’s in parts, and some go together and some don’t, and some incongruously don’t, and the whole scheme is better left to itself.

(She’s ahead. So’s he.) It isn’t an opening, that part of her, or not only an opening; it’s a coming out as much as an opening in—more so; an irregular bloom: he thinks rose, but no, he’s no good on flowers. But heading toward her on a loud morning in New York knowing they may leave each other but on some other hand (whose touch in him is each child’s and his wife Joy’s succeeding each other in dissolving substitution confusingly endless he hopes) she is ahead, and she is funny and beautiful.

He knows what is happening. He sees events fall. And fall back. Away from him. Another self, she might once have been his.

But did he see? Was he a witness? He has known so much, how can he know so little? He wouldn’t have thought he’d get so friendly with Avery ("Ave") of the big feet and the hand on the glass and the tall body that looked for air to lean on and, behind glasses, eyes that wanted like the hands to talk—Ave the metals engineer (well what are you going to do with a guy like that?) making his ungainly entrance on what was proving to be the last night Joy had ever said "Ghostie."

They see into the future, she through him, he through nothing. She is behind him, the two of them Indian file, and she behind him like a wind that’s past. He sees into a future, doesn’t he? The children are beyond them—grown.

And then he is there. He was there all along. A silent transfer from here to there. Truly from the future, she distinctly hears him say.

Certain years are done with. Force that drew them swung them past one another. The years? Or him and Joy?

Only in this way can the new mystery appear. Would he bet on it? Is it just pollution?

Looking back, no longer together, they might try to think what came first. Three, four years after their separation—on course to new decades.

Together they recalled each other. But they did not speak of it. Except once on the phone. That is, they did not speak of how it happened. For it was together, yet they were not together now in any but this way, he and she, nor had been for several years (though each sometimes forgets—he waking one morning out of a hundred, she dreaming and waking in the middle of the night in the country)—"and anyway I’m not alone."

But for one lapse, the time on the phone wasn’t referred to again; they were embarrassed or they were preserving it, that is preserving the oddity, the shade of this secret communication, illicit visiting rights. She told her son, who took a scientific interest.

But this new kind of communication was not the same thing as their story.

They had a story that seemed to get easier to tell. It was that he spent so much time away from home that he was impossible to live with. He moved around. He traveled. He wasn’t a traveling salesman, for he traveled in order to get hold of things, not unload them. Yet get and then unload. For at times he hardly altered the handouts he received on behalf, at first, of an organization he drily pointed out to his wife was non-profit. It didn’t sell stock, like United Press which became United Press International; but his organization was mutually owned. By its members—and don’t call them "subscribers" on pain of excommunication.

So what?

"You liked the idea of me," he said, "you know you did."

He’d never talked like that before.

"You don’t have to be away so much," she said.

"I didn’t use to have these chances. I take them when they come."

"You could be a bureau chief."

"In another city maybe, but not now. We’re so much better off."

"Well, I like New York," she said.

"But you don’t want to stay in the city," he said suddenly. "You want the country."

"But I don’t do anything about it," she said.

"Don’t you!"

A frozen lake and green sunny trees were right behind him, behind his back, even though he was in a New York living room, and she looked right through him and took him along with her into summer-thick weeds under a window that were really the endless crop of furry green mint.

Well he wasn’t proud of his job and he wasn’t at all ashamed. He had gone to work first for a wire service—and left. But later, before leaving again (in a way), he had come back for a time to work, but came from Texas to New York, where he’d hardly known he wanted to be—though everyone else wanted it. Lateral transfer from, say, Dallas to Oklahoma City, was not the policy, or not for promising young newsmen. At least at AP.

One of the great cooperative news services, if the void may say a few words.

He had gone to work for the Associated Press in the early fifties when the new TeleTypeSetting circuits had come in.

TTS. It hardly affected him. More news faster. The operation worked, and so did he. It was the inevitable future.

What would he think of this first job of his? First, that this was not exactly—that he was not—or not yet—exactly his hero Ernie Pyle reporting impressions of drought in the Dakotas or lepers in Hawaii. A man named Boyce developed a national column, but the AP didn’t specialize in bylines.

Ernie Pyle had walked through the London blitz.

"You’ll live," said Mayn’s father in New Jersey, though the son hadn’t complained.

TTS meant that now a story had to go off in just one take. So it might have to be held until the last minute, no sneak previews. You couldn’t send pieces of it as you had them and then follow with last-minute inserts or new leads. More likely wait, then have to rush. Then what? Then where were you? Maybe go home, if you could.

A fairly clear filter comes down in front of you soon enough and it’s a clandestine screen and you see through its history, a blank of words not soon enough if ever said between two married people, some desire for power over the other that betrays itself only as the desire for no-power, also a blank between what goes on outside this home and inside. He didn’t like history in high school, or thought he didn’t—dates were made to look like causes of effects—and he made his grandmother laugh with his made-up stuff about how General Jackson had a stomach ache and had a man shot whose family’s history and that of New Jersey and its view of Indians were thereby altered. Mayn did not like history, didn’t understand it any more than the fourth dimension. Well, all he meant was he didn’t know history.

Well, Ernie Pyle now. He was remembered. His stuff became books, which sold back home. From Africa to Sicily—the engineers’ campaign, making bridges and mine-sweeping miles of beach so the guys could take a swim—in the war that you just missed. Still, if you can’t remember, you also can’t forget "the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines and the perpetual moving." And the Ernie Pyle to be remembered was also the Indiana farmer’s son getting out an undergrad daily that subscribed to AP; Ernie Pyle a college editor in Indiana, received Kirke Simpson’s dispatches on the Unknown Soldier being buried in Arlington. Ernie Pyle was moved by these stories and ran them in the pages of The Student. In 1923 he was a headline writer for the Washington Daily News. Later the real Ernie Pyle rubs alcohol on his hands because he’s told to, though the friendly lepers at Kalaupapa would never shake hands.

His words impress themselves through the white space where there isn’t any type, and in this way they pass warmly through stuttered quanta of perforations on the TeleTypeSetting tape that holds your dispatch and operates the TTS linecaster over distances hard to grasp: "the perpetual moving"— words known by heart—"the never sitting down." Sicily more than a word afloat jaggedly off the Italian toe—"go, go, go, night and day, and on through the night again." You press beyond the Iroquois forests your grandmother (as if she were the smooth storyteller) read to you that also never leave you, you press on through the bare Sicilian landscape, you die and you keep moving (oh, you like the "you" in all its callused corn), you burn and shiver with malaria, you die and are wounded, have a drink, see action, occupy an empty village; you press ahead and your hand expecting anything pushes against a heavy door and there’s nothing on the other side except bad weather and Italian prisoners, a lack of resistance hard to account for unless underneath the landscape filling up with Italian civilians were to be found buried a hundred thousand army uniforms doffed at the flick of the Black Hand’s underground finger, a grand shrug of the Sicilian surface, a nod from the Mafia don answering favor with favor in response to a coded word now untraceable (they said) to the source, namely a secret creditor behind the bleakest, most northern walls in the New York State prison system, and flown (say) by navy fighter, passed (say) mouth to mouth, eye to eye, and heart to heart so that the American fighting man with Lucky Luciano behind him doing fifty-five years in Dan-nemora prison, while here and now he’s led by the Black Hand, advanced to take positions that were often not held at all. So what about it, Ernie, did Luciano help engineer the Allied success? Did the Mafia cool it for the Yanks? Ernie Pyle’s life was there in lives of other men so that his understanding of them takes the place of their future that is not at all there, while the closer they get to the front the less they know what’s going on—they’d know if they were back in New York. All they know is tomatoes hanging in the fields, plasma hanging from Sicilian trees. The front; the popping and deep chug of explosion. "Without water you’re sunk," Ernie wrote. (Mayn’s father in New Jersey liked that one!) And sooner or later "it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull dead pattern—yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo"—Troina, where American blood mixed more with German than with the mysteriously absent Italian—with the sun you imagine coming up out of Etna which is as if islanded upon the sea, but no, Etna’s nothing to write home about, no dragon, the Italian doughboy from Boston, from New York writes home about the future, Ernie Pyle knew them, he saw the engineers lay down beach roadbeds of chicken wire and burlap, he got sick, a kid called him "Pop" because he was "gray-headed," and when soon enough he died on the other side of the world in ‘45—same year as Jim Mayn’s mother—he was famous.

But today the perforations on the TTS tape (that came in in the fifties, the void repeats) are also holes bearing dispatches unmemorable as the tiny waste circles of newsprint punched out with a loose-leaf punch onto a library table by a drifter of a journalism student whose family, whose father ("You’ll live"), ran a weekly in New Jersey that folded (joke!) at the end of the War not because it didn’t rent an AP line but because it didn’t go out and get the county advertising. The journalism student is punching holes out of clippings so he can ring them into the binder of an assignment notebook, getting them all together. And this prepares one for a job; yes, this—while his father (prematurely retired) divides himself between other people’s newspapers, the porch, eventually TV, and always the trotters (whose red earth in great deep chunks is like a friend’s red earth on the Colt’s Neck Road where the horse corn grows so thick and green the earth disappears up into it)—all is preparation for a job. Though not the only preparation for a job. Any more than the marriage union is a preparation for divorce, separation, dissolution, or vice versa, though no preparation is needed for the hammerlock a boy gets on a newly returned father or at the same moment the weight of a girl sitting on the father’s legs.

Joy had called her husband a correspondent. He was. She told him he was crazy not to go for bureau chief. She told Flick.

He left AP. He came back.

He met an Argentine who owned not only one other South American country but four papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to boot, and as everyone saw it, that was what changed Mayn’s life. Later a clandestine backer of a women’s bank. A clean-shaven Argentine named Long who saw something in Mayn. Something beyond the mutual friend who brought them together, an American specialist in languages of the Uruguayan pampas, and beyond the amusing tales Mayn told Long about a friend of his father’s covering the Hauptmann trial and the explosion of the Hindenburg. Long sent Mayn where he discovered he wanted to go, and once let him get mad and resign; and then a month later after dinner with an AP traffic chief in Texas who’d known Mayn for several years, Long rehired Mayn. Joy wasn’t clear how it had come about, and in those days she seemed to act like she knew more about his work, his subject matter, what took him away, than he did, she made it her business to know, but about the rehiring she didn’t know and she saw through Jim’s shrug that he didn’t know either (except for one reason tossed out, namely that Long felt Mayn cared about the work but not a damn about the job). Well, he knew she thought she was proud of him, but then he thought she made too much of his work. (Say that again.)

Yet he did care about the job. They each had a streak of the secretive and indecisive, Flick once said, but the proportions were a mystery. Even when Joy had told him he should be a bureau chief with AP she would say also that if ever she got out of New York she could really get into the country. As for him, he spent so much time away from home he was impossible to live with. And while they were married the phone made things worse.

Too much time away: this story of theirs had run for several years before that word correspondent became a bad gag in the mouth of someone who liked her, who called her (Mayn had heard it) "chere" and said, "Quite," when he agreed. A young divorce lawyer with connections at the UN—well, yes, young—and "divorce"? maybe that was a trifle harsh—who said that in this case maybe there was no corespondent. There was more to him. But how could a guy say a thing like that? For Joy had quoted it to Mayn as if she wanted him to say to her How could a guy say a thing like that? ‘Tedious," their daughter Flick would have called it if it had been three, four years later, "incongruous" was another word, "illusory." She went through a period when she made puns. Some boys got into that, but not girls. But "Who did Mom inherit that job from?" Flick asked one day when she came home from school and didn’t get it—the hair in "inherit"—when her father turned his head to laugh and nearly shed his blood upon the wifely scissors working on his neck.

Well, Mayn had gray hair when he married Joy, but gray hairs or not, the two of them had been through the wars together. That was what Mayn said. Said about her, she felt, as if she had often been one to start whatever they had then been through together. But didn’t Joy say it too? Said it to her friend Lucille. Been through the wars. So? Yet sometimes it had seemed like nothing, like the gap between JFK at 9 P.M. and San Francisco at—actually —midnight Pacific Time, and one year it was one. Blanched shadows receding off to the left along the Rockies visible under the plane’s own moon. Not wars at all. An evening out, days at home—in tune—nights away from home subtracted like bad behavior as if they didn’t count. Not wars. More like falling away from time, falling through your own vaunted resilience, through nothing—but falling. Falling upward, even. And at home as well as in a hotel. Falling out of bed at dawn so your fall was broken by the ceiling. Jim. For Joy didn’t do that sort of thing, her daughter pointed out to her, product as she was of them both.

The void lets out a smile, which he and she might feel as a breath of relief somewhere that what had happened to them could be said so.

Been through the wars. A common breath let out like deep thought that was the two of them or nothing, and much heavier stuff and finer and more subtly worked out than either of them could have thought, such intellects as they were.

Been through the wars. A real-estate hot shot (though nice guy) named Sid living with a girlfriend now, and one day on the tennis court got a phone call from his doctor asking him to come in, and they decided he had two types of cancer, one possibly they couldn’t do anything about, the other his lung, and because his former wife, who was a lab psychologist working with animals, had smoked (at him) for years, he went looking for her and found her at dinner at the Mayns and told her, no less: but no one did anything, including him. The children were in bed.

The void will calm things down. Speaks through you like a whole thing of force and membrane neither yet full-grown. But in the person of those whom that void after all keeps moving, the void disperses time and the particles by which it is told until the equality of all things can become too much and a drag. And the nick in the back of the head that shows barely through the hair is not only a blood type but a section exacted from a singular person who might need to be saved at the expense of someone else.

How he knows ahead of time when she enters a room—is it some throat clearing he has lent her as if she like him were dialing a phone number and getting ready to speak? or is it some warning she has lent him in a private smile he knows (and pays for knowing) is there around the corner of the hall doorway before she comes in sight?—and if he knows exactly tonight how their host will enter behind her, as if for the moment they two weren’t intimate kitchen-sympathetic. Has life with Joy made Mayn this way?

This knowing is like some out-of-character eccentricity; he’s an ordinary guy, for God’s sake (and God would rather he’d stop thinking that)—not much of a believer—and when they arrived a while ago and the host kissed Joy and shook hands, Mayn felt the presence of another woman who wasn’t there, a wife or woman paired with the host. He did have an ex-wife somewhere— though not somewhere in the living room—but the point about the host’s kissing Joy was that his absent woman was imagined by Mayn as sticking out her hand to Mayn, kiss balanced by handshake, well a pair of couples needn’t be symmetrical, need they? yet the messages don’t quit coming; and in a Windsor chair near the fire (the andirons too far apart, the chemical log sagging and collapsing to bridge its break with a blue-green flush) he gazes at the young detective in a blue-and-red ski sweater who’s cutting his law class tonight, who’s on the floor between Mayn and the fire talking equally to Mayn and Lucille Silver who calls him Rick and questions him and he’s responding so Mayn is getting a garbled message part of which is that (which he knew already) he brought the detective here tonight and brought him like a message unknown to the bearer—well, Rick is in an A.A. group with a free-lance frogman Mayn knows, and Rick is cool for his age, his cheek crackles with shadow and color, so (Rick’s saying) he’s got nothing but respect for that guy’s homicidal instincts—so—so—so Rick (he’s saying) is about to get hit over the head, right? so he’s standing in the street telling the kid in the big white T-bird to put that thing down, but there’s someone behind Rick—Lucille crosses her legs in the corner of Mayn’s left eye and a flow of fleshly concern—flesh turned to fluid—gets to Mayn as Joy, having come in, falls cozily into her chair to his left across the white room, knees together sliding together off away from him as if she would tuck her feet up under her in his direction; Joy grasps Rick and Lucille in a look that opens like her lips which part—Rick and Lucille, who’s half again Rick’s age and twice as present to Mayn as Rick is to Joy (Mayn’s sure) . . . and when Mayn (who doesn’t seem watchful) swings his head a little toward Joy she seems to open her eyes in a glance that bears so much condensed attention out of the past so completely and painfully but, for a flash, so entertainingly to him: for example, Lucille likes more danger than the young cop knows (for, according to Joy, Lucille has twice disarmed her son—yes, literally—his father taught him to shoot a big .38 and ordered him never to carry a pistol), but Lucille doesn’t like risk quite so much as she is thought to by Jim, who likes her O.K. and distrusts her more than she knows because he confides in her once in a while. Joy’s teeth show but her tongue crosses her lip and time halts in her face as when one of her children takes a long look at her, a radiant thought that wished its way there from elsewhere in her body because a blankness at once slipped over Mayn’s eyes large enough to include the extra wine glass she has carried in here and has set down on the table beside her first glass—doubling that prior silence out in the kitchen beyond the living room that Mayn has received like rays passing through these minutes of the young policeman’s choice tale. Until a hatch falls in and all the objects in the room course into the foreground, into his eyes but not Joy’s, and there are for him no people, just objects and the space to go with them. But Joy’s tongue tip and a glint there on the lower lash of one eye give Mayn the fine word from her that please believe her whatever he thinks is going on it’s not public, what’s going on between her and the host—Mayn’s nameless witness won’t name him; Mayn is the witness—the host, the glowing, controlled man, has followed her not quite soon enough into the room and at once turns her from the cop’s rendition to tell her her father was smart to give her Texas Instruments in ‘57 even if she didn’t get along with him—but is this a tribe sitting here in this room? is this what it is? Mayn has the words ready to ask—and is he one member of the tribe and Joy another member (whose father if you want to get technical once in his cups threatened not to give her away) and Lucille and the policeman? And the man? The man’s name is Wagner and his place of work is some huge association where he keeps an eye on the pension portfolio. An "inside dope-ster" Joy called him to Mayn, and Mayn had heard it before, from someone else. Or in advance from Joy’s mind. Mayn wondered how much of Joy’s and his own story she’s put into words for this Wagner, and while Lucille, a friend in need, is asking Rick’s hours, saying married people see too much of each other, that’s Jim and Joy’s secret, Mayn drifts toward Lucille like his smell but his smell become conscious reaching her thoughts, and he says— out it comes—"Aren’t you a bitch." Yet Lucille seemed sincere in what she just said; and later when Joy bawls him out because Lucille is one of their close friends, he knows she’s instinctively getting away with it because, though it was true if not visible, he’s had that and can pay for it, and for a moment he and Joy are crazy together, though in a Connecticut motel next week he wakes to a Kansas City motel near the river, near the market too full of very raw animal-carcassed buffalo fish, and will never see Lucille Silver again because he’s kissing her goodbye, having told her in this dawn dream, for he claims not to night-dream, that for an offspring (like . . . what’s her name? . . . Flick) to have your courage shot into orbit by the dual thrust of united parents inc. is a great thing indeed unless the launch pad is unfinished or otherwise incomplete, and then for gawd’s sake don’t look back.

Their story covered many years and it was that Mayn spent too much time away. It even once got called that—a cover story; she’d said it to him in a letter while they were still married. (He remembered it when he took his daughter out to dinner some years later, she wanted him to sign a petition to get a Philippine writer out of jail. Jail? It might as well have been the Death House!)

He knew a handout. Some of his work was taking press handouts off a counter or desk in a busy room as far away as it was familiar and nondescript, handouts that were sometimes little more than a friendly pitch Xeroxed off an electric typewriter hustling a product (this was the point), and a newsman could put these handouts on the wire more or less condensed. But he would also go after assignments where you didn’t get a handout because what there was to peddle, to get onto the wire, wasn’t immediately clear, though he didn’t believe in what wasn’t clear, and he kept after the briefing officer of a natural-gas company who would turn away from figures like 7.5 trillion barrel-miles of various gas liquids and anhydrous ammonia being carried through more than two thousand miles of pipeline in 1961 to the claim that this firm was a "future" firm operating in a frame of reference not less than Energy itself and Related Earth Resources, and how can you be anti-Energy? you might as well be anti-American. Joy understood what he tried to do and liked him for it.

In May of ‘60, no longer working for AP, he did with the government story on the overflights what the story did, or said to do. With itself, that is.

Routine report: pass it on.

Mayn was like any company man or stringer.

So Powers, the pilot, was photographing weather—or (like a mechanical part of him) the plane was photographing weather; and the flights over Russia were routine weather observation—NASA said so. Now Mayn knew—or figured—that the story wasn’t true, and he had heard that it was not true from people who ought to know but also from a man he didn’t like named Spence for whom the extreme altitude of the slender U-2 plane gave to it, gave to the plane’s glinting eye, an exponent of threatening force, a light too powerful to see with the naked eye unpeeled.

Ray Spence was far away but approaching Mayn in the form of Mayn approaching him—that’s what Mayn felt. Well, people weren’t always credible.

Spence told Mayn back a story Mayn had told him about the newsman who got the jump on everyone else at the explosion of the Hindenburg. Mayn mentioned this—that Spence had told Mayn back his own story—and Spence laughed, but too long and softly as if it was understood Mayn had made a curious joke. "How’s the family newspaper?" he then said. "Got any good numbers in your book?"

But the government overflights story which everyone knew wouldn’t stick made Mayn, who was fed up with words within words, curious instead about the weather. What had NASA to do with weather and what was there to know?

So he was in Florida and later he was in California. Not into space he said—not space, not science—not ESP—and you could throw in the Fourth Dimension (and he didn’t mean the bar in Brussels of that name for he had a quizzical way of showing off or the book store in Dallas). Weather satellite —that was the size of it. No, not science—as Joy should know, who knew him.

You called the satellite a grapefruit. And all he was seeing was exactly how a four-pound grapefruit covered cloud belts across a quarter of the Earth. Then talking to the Coast Guard. Aboard a white weather ship about to leave for the Bermuda Triangle. Tall, thin meteorologist in the weather shack up on the boat deck facing aft, a Texan (‘‘originally"), with a German uncle in Chile multiplying bees. A German grammar on a folding chair on the rolling deck. A man in khakis with a bad black Texas mustache, no kidding, and an unconvincing habit of in the middle of his talk to Mayn calling out, loud and jolly, to any kid who came by with a wire brush or an electronic technician’s tool kit, then one who materialized below on the quarter-deck photographing a huge seagull standing on the rail. A global network of weather stations. Mayn could get into that. The man with the mustache lent him a manual which Mayn read and forgot about and later decided not to mail back from New York after the cutter had put out for weather station. This global network looked so compact, but put yourself in it and your neighborhood is endless. This thought followed him, not he it.

Up?

The curvature of space he would leave to other minds than his.

He talked to Joy about the weather. So then he’d be unable to explain his interest in it. That is, to her—at least when she said, "But blue sky in the winter in New York—but in Chicago over the lake, you’ve never seen how the water goes up the sky, it attracts the horizon, it lifts it, my father used to say—why, meteorology—what do these guys know?" ("I know, I tow," said Mayn.) "What about rain against the window—" ("Don’t be an idiot, Joy.") "—against the window the summer we were at the Cape playing Monopoly?" "Look, Joy": he drew her a wind rose:

"The length of the line shows how often you get wind from that direction—during the year, let’s say. And in another type of rose the lines thicken so you see how often the wind was strong or light or moderate." He drew her one of these, too.

"All right, I can see it," she said.

"Helps them decide where to put airports and buildings and vegetative wind screens and factories that smoke up the air. The wind rose shows the horizontal motion of the atmosphere. Now you know all that I know."

She laughed at that, and she didn’t give in. "What about the wind hitting us when the car got past the mesa cliff driving down to Albuquerque, remember how red the cliff was? wasn’t it near the Continental Divide?"

Have to ask a lot of a woman, he knew she was telling him to think. He asked her to please shut up. The one long car trip they’d taken.

And when they had a discussion about the check he’d taken from her checkbook and she said he was a shit but gave it a tired, unimportant sound he didn’t like, he told her that she was really thinking about his being away but, hell, he could be talking about the upper air with the Coast Guard and the civilian meteorologists just as well in Boston or Portland but he was talking with them here at home in New York.

He’d already talked to them in Florida, she said—and, home? she said. Maybe home for him—which made him laugh like the—yes, strangely like the—white pilot balloon ("pibal") that lifted for a second out of his mind complete with information on expansion and air resistance that was safely in his pibal notes—yet what she said stopped him. For wasn’t it her story that he was away from home all the time? But one day he saw (like a—like what singly neither had the words for) . . . saw like a resilience that the story was his story as much as hers, even if he would claim he’d never been wanted by the FBI like the man who among other things had actually bounced a check on the East Bank of the Mississippi which, granted, was real—that is, a snug, bright blue tavern north of Orion, Illinois, and just below Rock Island he recalled, where the river turns nearly west and the banks are south and north (whence come AP dispatches from the Chicago office to small member papers and radio stations). He pops a joke, but Joy is not put off her track, she goes to the bedroom passing the bathroom doorway through which a child can be seen sitting leaning forward on the John, a child whom the father also sees when he follows his wife angrily, who then brushes past him and leaves that bedroom passing again the bathroom doorway and the child who looks up at her and at the father. Elsewhere in time the decks of D-Day ships snap down into troughs like crevasses blown out by the Sicilian storm and as the decks drop down the silver bags of the barrage balloons snap their cables and rise up, up, so high the sound of the bag exploding is very hard to hear, isn’t it? Sometimes he couldn’t recover her face when he was away from home. Only her whole presence, watching him by just living, by being in a next room drying the lettuce or turning from a child to turn a page of the evening paper—to see anything, to skim some news—to check the horoscope, hers first, but his second, though she disliked horoscopes. He loved her; he could say it to himself and honestly tremble while at the same time he recalled her needling voice after him. "I see you going in in the first wave with your big helmet over your eyes, a gun in one hand and a pencil in the other." What’s a gun? You mean a pistol? a rifle?

Away From Home All The Time: Mayn’s story as much as Joy’s, and it got handed down. But this sense of their shared account, this story about his jobs and their marriage, was not the same as the thing that now sometimes happened between them during these years since she had moved away with the children. (They could never have had an open marriage—bodies refracted in the light of absent feeling.) And then—though he’d kept the lease—he had moved away too, and the children had pretty well grown up, and Flick was tougher to talk to but now could be told anything, which Andrew could not. If he was even present. Once her father saw Flick kiss her brother goodbye softly, the fingers of her left hand upon the back of his neck.

Together Mayn and Joy recalled each other, month upon month separated, then divorced. They weren’t together in any but this way; they didn’t live together—and often weren’t geographically close; weren’t in touch, or not so you would notice unless you were tuned into the void or you had high-sensitivity gear that could assess vibrations between the village in western New Hampshire where Joy lived and the motion through which Mayn’s assignments took him.

He and she happened once to find it convenient to be in Boston on the same day and they had lunch with their son Andrew who just about cracked his father’s hand according to his father when they shook, and who wrote his sister Flick that he’d had lunch with them, the two of them together with him in a restaurant near the docks, near the new aquarium (with sharks and turtles in their own custom-made cylindrical bathysphere)—the three of them like a family with an only child drinking Bloody Marys in a window that looked out on a cold, slushy street. They had converged on Boston, the mother from the country, the father from Europe by way of New York and Washington and Philadelphia, and there they were in a restaurant eating tiny bay scallops and baked potatoes.

The son wrote his sister in that fancy style she wasn’t put off by that the parents had been "curiously good" together (so the void either smirks or it’s a long, smudged radar trace of low-pressure front)—good together—a lot of laughs was partly what Andrew meant—Joy remembering the woman down the road who had the choke pulled out to hang her handbag on until her car wouldn’t run anymore and a muscular mechanic found the trouble soon enough, the woman down the road one summer; and Dad remembering the subway years ago, losing Andrew—on the subway, that is—Dad just back now from the arms talks with another story entirely that would have been spiked if he’d still been with AP about the Viennese fearing their cathedral would sink into the ground if the new subway went through, which was at least as interesting as a tall, dark-suited delegate whom the night before one had seen with an excellent young whore in a tailored suit now the next afternoon raising his eyebrows but not his translated, rather resilient voice at the danger in Russia’s ceiling being America’s floor.

But no, the way Jim and Joy knew themselves to be together at instants of recollection was more like a growth, a surprise someplace in the body, more like feeling, and your own bared limbs, nerves, tendons are entangled for you then to see if you can move the one part someone points to, and you can’t, or it’s trial and error, and is it that you think maybe you got someone else’s body warped in here too? Feeling, did you say?

Feeling left over from a dream. Her words. She never believed him that he didn’t have any but day dreams.

A dream like an obligation you wouldn’t put your finger on whose stripe of tooth-and-nail action bled apart on waking and went away, and the residue was this sense. Not a feeling you could really see, like Joy staring when she was embarrassed or nibbling her lower lip if she thought she had an edge. And nothing so real as light reflected off the balls of his smudged fingertips when she read the Sunday paper over his shoulder.

A Sunday morning, a Manhattan apartment, Mozart with his five happy instruments on FM, coffee still in the air, a ham in the icebox, Joy in her long-sleeved nightgown, frills at the wrists, thinking (he knew) of going out for German potato salad; Flick practicing her flute behind a closed door, low and insistent; Andrew old enough to get out of the apartment by himself taking his football to meet Dick or Larry in Madison Park among the sheepdogs and dachshunds and poodles and profound dappled bassets, patrolled at the perimeters by one or two snakelike dobermans too thoroughly bred—while back in the apartment sun smeared your polluted windows high above Manhattan which is still Manhattan even high up there, and Jim and Joy looking out from where he sat and she stood behind him.

No, they recalled each other; and recalling each other they were together. Common enough, after all. Except how they did it. How it happened. How they thought it happened, or knew that it did.

For here was what it was (an analyst in Boston told Joy to get it out of her head, it was just intuition or leftover intimacy, let’s get back to how and why, but, quoting the analyst to himself, Joy says O.K. but maybe not every event has a cause, maybe not the silent anger during the last haircut!—but then what’s intuition? comes the question from the void) well, theirs was the recollection of the other person plus knowing that right then the other person had it also or had had very recently, maybe a minute before, or would have very soon after you did, three hundred, three thousand, or—in the song learned from him which he had learned from a girl in Geneva, Switzerland, that Flick their left-handed daughter one day stroked on her guitar—ten thousand miles away, Flick who accepted what she heard her mother say about this "knowing" of her parents’ though it wasn’t the sort of stuff she would really believe, right.

But being both of them strong people, they would doubt that what they felt happen actually did happen, some communication or other. But hold it a moment—for a little life-promoting, species-preserving exercise, try doubting that word strong used so easily.

Living with someone for a long time like twelve years doesn’t mean you can’t someday lose track of the person scattered like a passage of time all through you, a petition unvoiced. Refractions, Mayn said of his life or that of others. (His daughter remembered later.) Yet when he and Joy were in touch two or three times a year, they knew.

That is, they thought they knew about times in between. Yet why so awkward to talk of? Embarrassing, as if splitting had been a catastrophic mistake.

The hook-up between them? an unknown word between them, word was what you got before you wrote, write if you get word.

Communication between Joy and Mayn? Explain the odd message units passing between them any way you wanted.

The desire to drop the other a line came like a sudden information, came while one-handing a bottle of mountain claret in a mountain motel in Colorado or driving slowly past a colonial cowpond in spring twilight, and they each knew that the desire to drop the other a line couldn’t be hope that things would change between them. They could have gone to bed just like that, probably. If they’d been snowed in, or caught in some future emergency in a city. Or en route, needing a bed for the night. A friendly scalp rub. A friendly hand. A friend, maybe. Your arm under his head. Laughing about getting turned on right after coming. But get back together? They could not. The thought was laughable, so maybe so was bed. The thought of getting back together was as tritely elusive as failure tried to be. It was, then, real at least. And it was preposterous.

Together they recalled each other repeatedly. They communicated but rarely spoke on the phone or any other way. Joy told Flick like a joke.

Communicated, O.K., but how? In their few letters?

A letter might be instantly answered. Oh it would be.

Unless it was from her and he was away. Out of the country.

But after such an exchange, the chance of another on top of it would sometimes discover itself, and they would know at whatever degree of distance from one another that they were a little put off by this prospect.

Of incest? No, nor falsehood.

Repetition. With increments.

Graduated, he thought, graduated from First Marriage, a long enough one, graduated from an earlier hour of intimacy. His heart wanted to stop: for then, graduate angels, he heard her saying on the phone. And he exclaimed, You answered my thought! do you know that?

But then he couldn’t speak.

Go on, she said. He said, You answered my thought, the graduated part.

Oh, she said, with a bug in her voice, weren’t we always doing that?— or have we gotten better?, I mean now that we aren’t together.

Just the opposite, it seemed to him.

His body got enormously heavy. Bone-tired. More slow than tired, promising to give up and let him go on ahead, hands heavy as they were said to be under hypnosis. He shouldn’t have let the marriage go, and yet then she was saying—she was crying a little, she rarely wept but when she did cry she’d been able to without missing a beat or breath of her conversation. Was it an act? What if it was, it was real (it occurred to him). Tricky? she once said, Why I owe it all to you—but now, you haven’t put on weight, have you? maybe I wouldn’t be so bone-tired, she said (so heavy, she thought), if we could just answer our thoughts and not have this phone that makes me think of you inside me—tongue, nose, big nose—inside me—she guffaws against his ear—"Ear!"—and has to cough through tears.

Go on, he says.

Ear bones, she coughs, every one, right down to the lobe, kid.

He felt so heavy the flesh was pulling away and he was with her, yet here.

Repetition, she said.

We’ll try it someday, he said, not knowing what it was that he had let go, a household, a hug, an inner kiss.

He knew she was thinking of his hand slipping down her ribs.

Sounds like some experiment, she said: that shouldn’t be repeated.

But the event, unforced, did just that. Repeated itself. They’d sense together an embarrassment. They’d know it as surely as they recalled her biting her lower lip when she was sure she had him and she couldn’t lose. Or him shutting his eyes when he couldn’t win. As surely as they recalled his call from Washington the first week of July one year when they were married to say he couldn’t join them in the country the next day because of the airlines strike and Joy saying with the slant in her voice down which they slipped like dual sinners, Take a train, Take a bus—when she knew that the strike was an assignment: yet one that someone else could have covered, she hardly knew the people he worked with but she knew that (and she knew a lot about his work and would talk about it). Yet the children—it was the children who were most disappointed that July day; and he knew this and the slant in her voice that was her irritation for not showing more disappointment herself—because she didn’t know how much there was—and she looked through the dry ovals of big leaves up against the window, rhododendron, and to the left the spruce trees, two of them—no, three for heaven’s sake—three, at three in the afternoon, and she looked beyond them into the leaves of the trees down by the pond and through these into the stippled pattern of glare off the pond—it was three-quarters of a mile across and it was called a pond—and she said into the phone, "It’s nice here." And she thought they ought to buy the place, thinking, It’s only the two miles from the village, which wasn’t what mattered—but then she heard the kids yelling, and Andy Injun flashed past the window and Flick came rushing by the house, and Flick stopped short, wondering among other things what she was doing playing with him, her long, fine hair combed out down to her bare ribs, hair across her cheek, and she looked into the window at her mother holding the phone receiver against her head and looked with a blankness Joy wanted her husband there to fill, blank like the children’s two curiosities sitting one winter morning so unfairly at the kitchen table with their father when she came in the front door with last night’s clothes on—so unfairly late when they should have been off to school—and in Washington (with voices behind him) he said to her in New Hampshire, "I can see Flick and Andy, I can see them, listen I see Flick through the window where you’re standing, hey for a second you weren’t mad."

"Oh get out, you only knew because I told you," she said.

"No you didn’t—you were telling me to take the train, and you were thinking of buying the place. You could run it as a non-profit home"—the words came out like that.

For your old age, she’d thought; but there in her ear—knowing she hadn’t said a thing about buying—she had felt him as if he were standing behind her, saying, as he now did say, "No for Christ’s sake excuse me, I only meant maybe I couldn’t get back if I didn’t go away. How’s that?"

"Lousy," she said.

"I need a haircut," he said, thinking of that Ray Spence, his hair as long as the Beatles’ then, and his speckled hand coaxing a goatee he had grown, looked right through Mayn when Mayn said a grim hello thinking of Spence’s hair, not his deals—sometimes she told him it was time—"I feel grubby, itchy," he said, and abruptly he was not so much in her ear as in front of her: not some male to be photographed for a frame on a wall enclosing a room—though she’d seen them do it both ways, woman in all her skirts seated, man above on two feet, but now he was seated in this photographerless pose into which she would put the two of them once every month or six weeks for many years in the city—hair the same matched with the same scissors, times collapsing into the same mindful hands playing above the same immemorial head in the city, and in the country in the summer, in New York, New Hampshire, come to think of it Brussels for a time that she had unilaterally terminated after the school in the person of a large-breasted teacher in a white blouse had repeatedly tried to make Flick right-handed—and in these poses Mayn was always in front of her, the wide head of coarse, grayish hair, a dish towel tucked into his neck, or an old sheet like in a regular man’s barbershop, for she’d taken her son Andrew to the barbershop on wide, prosperous Third Avenue that his friend went to, Andrew tight-roping the curb of the sidewalk, rising up on his sneakers as he did when he and his father and sister walked hand in hand through a slower-moving crowd from the subway to the Stadium, it was an exaggeration of the way everyone might walk in health and happiness.

In the barbershop Andrew wanted his mother to be not there yet not to leave.

It was like acquiring genuine qualifications under pretenses, and the next time, before his father took him to the park to play ball and then sit on a bench eating hot dogs and ice cream while his father recalled one of his own grandmother’s Indian stories about the giant Choorian bird that, like an intercontinental transoceanic steed, flew its mistress the Princess Nay of Manchoor to the land of the American Navajo and Pueblo but, in the absence of its accustomed food, ate the chief’s horses until at last he had to do something about it, Andrew was able first to take his father to the barbershop as if introducing him to a place where Andrew was known—knew the ropes, knew the drill—and so Andrew was glad to find his barber unoccupied and go directly to the chair where, standing, he could say that only he was having a haircut, not his father. (He said father.)

Whereas Mayn favored a barstool. That is, in a bar.

That is, if he was going to be talked to from the side or behind his back. Maybe she was right, maybe he had been massacred by bad barbers for years before he met his wife. Saved my life, he said one Sunday Lucille was there for breakfast. You owe her that? asked Lucille, looking down her nose and through a fresh bagel she was about to bite. You’ll leave her if you lose your hair. But that wasn’t it either (the bad barbers)—for he had felt massacred by good barbers, the alien size of the steel, sounding between the low, stationary voice and the traveling touch upon his soft head, each abrasion between the shears sealed by that higher-pitched tsit raced by the music breath of the blades opening, inching. Joy had thought of cutting his hair, or he had asked her to take over, they didn’t recall who started it. He lent her his head to practice on. She was pregnant with Flick, they both recalled that. He dreamed she was chipping the hair with a tool he couldn’t see and he woke up in sly self-defense when the pieces began coming down on top of him.

Nearly twelve years of his prematurely gray hair piled up around them so now he needed more than the eyes in the back of his head that she’d said once she knew he had because he had thought he needed them.

Oh sometimes he thought that was all he had, the eyes in back. She laughed; she couldn’t help it.

But come on, she said—while he receded again (or was that her expanding with some fit of contentment?), receded through the years of living together, it was several years now—"Come on be serious," how had he seen the two things behind him?—seen her lick her lips and the tear push out onto her lower lashes?

"Leave the eyebrows," he said, and wanting to lean his head, eyes and all, back into her—wherever those back eyes were (she having withdrawn her long scissors, he felt sure)—he must have made some move he did not feel, for she was laughing about those eyebrows in the back of his head, "Don’t lean back!" But he was sure he hadn’t moved.

"Aren’t you there?" he asked.

"I’m there," she said.

But come on, how had he seen Joy lick her lips, and how had he seen the tears weighing upon her eyelash?

He panicked. Why had he known these things? Were they some waste?

Panicked the way when he’d waited for a man he had hit to get up off the floor and the man didn’t, and the panic wasn’t that this was the man’s apartment or a man named Martin Wagner might find his nose had turned more than a corner and left him with a future headache he would not be able to feel in the morning (and it was already morning)—it was a wild space in him flown in by Joy and this guy made of nights spent here—probably panic not about that but the time through which had happened slowly what he hadn’t seen he couldn’t take until there it was. The ultimate push-up the man on the floor seemed attempting, or words out in the open he couldn’t take back; he’d been around, he wasn’t so shockable, yet there he was on the future end of a thick cube of time you saw through, looking back on how he’d awaited a love that was still there on her side too. And was this how, later, he panicked at seeing (when he could not see) the lick of the lips and a grand tear weighing on the eyelash?

Then he saw why.

It was that he’d known what she was thinking. So of course he could see what her face would do. Was he awaiting a terrible loss of her that would bring him some news? What a jerk!

He in front, she cutting his hair right behind him so that with the small of his back he could butt her tight belly as if its hardness were its largeness and he with his reverse face could come only into nosing tangency with it while it went on its way—on with its thought. Her thought. Which he did not presume to know. But couldn’t stay away from. That is, he was minding his own business and she was snipping—still learning—and they were discussing his father: of how, a full ten years after the family paper run by his father and his uncle had folded, his father had said this other son of his would never have kept it going if it had been still printing when he was old enough to think about taking it over, never in a million years, not with more county business, not with a connection in Jersey City or the State House.

"As if you’d been the one to let it fold," said Joy.

"Well, I would have—he was right."

"He couldn’t know."

"I’d delivered enough of his bread-and-butter job printing to know the future."

"That’s what I’m saying—"

"I know that’s what you’re saying."

"Wait, I haven’t said it," she objected.

"Make up your mind—"

"Not in so many words I didn’t say it, but it’s what I meant. He was making you responsible for what had already happened to him years before because carrying the paper obviously wasn’t in your future—not with the weekly competition—they tripled—and getting the farmers around the county, and the advertising."

"Your scissors are soothing."

"Experience is."

He could feel her almost drop the subject.

He said her name.

He leaned back but missed her. She was looking at the job she’d done. She was looking at him. Looking into the back of his head that he knew she would heedlessly nick someday, if only a paper-thin cut—as if the music in the next room were being played by her upon his scalp, and she could heed only some thought that, let’s say, she shared at that moment with him.

A record ended and they heard a fire engine getting louder, and a new record dropped softly.

‘‘There’s a lot to my father."

"Come on, I know that."

"Well, not that much."

She laughed.

He’d brought up the subject. Put an idea in somebody’s head, get it back with interest.

He heard her breathe, and she wasn’t thinking how to even out his hair, she was thinking he’d said this instead of what he felt about that man—as a father, a husband for his mother. Mayn had felt her sympathy but in the exhaled breath he felt the quantity of her knowledge of him, the sheer neutral amount. And he was about to say, well, he’d had his share of choices, his father had let him alone. ("Sorry this is taking so long," she said.) But Joy began to cut his hair again while they both knew that she might push at his weaknesses—until they went away!—and get at him, but not the way Mayn’s younger brother Brad did, who needled brother Jim with what the local electrical contractor Bob Yard had said in the barbershop, in the atmosphere of sleepy talcum cut with a dash of sweet hair tonic, and Bob had said Jim Mayn was too damn independent, a wise bastard to boot, too smart for his own hometown—until Jim let Brad have it, which was what Brad had wanted all along, to be told he was in a rut and had never known enough to know he seriously wanted anything, he was timid—while (wait) in his own business smarter and better than that old cable-throwing fuse-screwer Bob Yard any day of the week. Maybe their father wanted the same treatment but never got it.

"It’s too late to punish him for your mother," said Joy. "Stop dwelling on it. It’s a mistake. It’s tedious for you and me."

Surprised into almost laughing at her "tedious for you/’ those shrouded eyes in the back of his head had sensed the onset of Joy’s left hand, her comb hand. Not in order to comb but to finger. To say that she understood and that it was over now. And to say she was glad she was pregnant and knew he was, too.

They laughed at that—at his being pregnant, too.

The warmth of her feeling went all over the back of his neck, and it went on for years and she wasn’t pregnant now. Children give you something to talk about, but they didn’t need that, and yet when sometimes they couldn’t speak, the thoughts spun off and they had this idea that they were thinking the same thing, though when they were married they didn’t know if they were spending these identical thoughts on each other, which would be a strange economy, or only thinking without conveying the thought to the other. Conversations repeated themselves, but she stopped occasionally saying there was a thing he wasn’t telling her. About the past? No. It feels like the future. (And this was long before he tried to tell his daughter, who had been vouchsafed these gropings by her mother.)

"I said there was a lot to my father—why do you blame me for what might be in my head but I don’t say it? Why have I got to be held for what I’m smart enough not to belly-ache about? I mean"—he was staring into a kitchen wall when the calendar and phone materialized out of it and were there—"why don’t I get credit for not saying some things? What is it with you? how come you’re giving me the business when I’m only thinking my spite, not saying?" (She laughed.) "Is this some punishment I’m supposed to get regularly? And ‘spite’? where the hell did I get that word, I never say ‘spite’—it must have come from you."

Well every event has a cause no matter what they’re saying in the next twenty, thirty years, and behind him knowing he hadn’t picked his moment to be provoked Mayn had seen the tear she raised the knuckle of her scissor hand to catch as surely as he saw her tongue tip come, but—like an emergency support mechanism (he heard himself later supply).

"In future you better watch it, kid," he went on lamely in such sudden unhappiness he thought he didn’t give a damn about this stuff that came out of his mouth as if nothing had just happened, but he was uneasily glad Lucille Silver wasn’t attending this haircut because she would have attempted to wipe him out for speaking that way.

All right, Joy made him say things sometimes; but this was worse— "better watch it, kid," fond slight falseness, that might be then so bad good as to be laughable and she’d either grind off his ear at the head with her shears, or make a funny sound as if having made contact beyond him, subtler than the silly old college songs she sang to her daughter.

"It is the future," she said, "and as whoever it was in your family used to say, ‘don’t spare the horses’ "; and he felt nothing between them but a long range; just as well his chair didn’t face a barbershop mirror.

But the arch cheer in that dumb remark had calmed her eyes, he knew, and he heard her teeth coming down on her chewing gum.

She snipped some more. "Damn," she said, and stopped, and curried him with her fingers and went on.

And so he plucked then out of a void—the void, if the void may say so—a story—every time a story, until their secret tempos {tempi, his mother would have said to a musical partner, No she wouldn’t) located each other again as really the same (as if neither could want power over the other), until years later (still like some future becoming the present), under more experienced shears a story came to him from somewhere in the luggage checked in his head on the flight home last week, and he smiled and he told it to his wife—his wife of ten years, Joy. He’d run into this smart guy Spence. The story came from Spence. He knew Spence from way back, talked in his presence, met him without meeting him, a good listener the shit, Washington, New York, San Francisco, someplace else—and what Spence knew Mayn didn’t want to know; and this time Spence’s back was to Mayn, who, in the lobby, had seen him saunter across from the elevator and enter the bar but whom he now recognized anyway for his richly stitched long buffalo-skin jacket, the heavy slick of now-Hawaiian-dyed black hair, and the speckled hand moving out to the side independently to take nuts from the dish the bartender had set down between Spence and a woman in a suit and a big red hat. Mayn knew Spence’s face before it turned and the high husky voice easily included Mayn in what—after the too brief reference to a job he of course knew Mayn had been offered—Spence had resumed telling the bartender.

About a pounding (the pounding) in the Earth that Spence had heard and felt, so that the crowd voice that came with it seemed to come right up from the Earth he was standing on, right?

Yeah, said the bartender, who was very big, well that’s a funny location for it right next to the cemetery.

For Spence had been in a fine American cemetery hunting for the caretaker so he could check the lot chart and take a look at a grave—old mound that had never had a headstone—but he happened to find the family on the far edge of the cemetery and just when the pounding faded and Spence later recalled some bright colors moving through spaces in the trees, he heard this swishing and scraping. He had found a space that he thought was the unmarked grave and he was turning around to check exactly where he was when he heard a click nearby and a golf ball skipped off a gravestone apparently and rolled past and he watched it stop a few paces away; and he now realized he’d had a sense of being watched on this weekday among the sweet-smelling green and the personal gossip among the breeze-freshened gravestones and the doors and windows of the mausoleums, where he was exposed as if bright day was creepier than darkness honeycombed inside, but this sense did not go outside the cemetery on the side where the golf course was—but was right here.

And then the door of the little mausoleum next to him opened out a bit and a young man in white jeans appeared and watching Spence every foot of the way went and picked up the golf ball and returned to the mausoleum, closed the heavy door and stayed looking through the glass and ironwork until the glass absorbed him and he wasn’t there.

But Spence is grinning at you, is very open—as everyone’s beginning to say—the word, that is—and Spence includes you so you can be part of his ongoing business—and incidentally at this point grabs with one speckled hand for the peanuts, looks between Mayn and the guy in the red jacket behind the bar, and says, "I know what you’re thinking"—goes back to work, checks out the stones in the vicinity of the unmarked grave, and, without giving the guy in the mausoleum the benefit of a so-long-buddy glance, slopes off down an aisle, his hip-pocket notebook in hand. But runs into a big angry blonde who materializes in a red-and-white polka-dot sunsuit with an iron over her shoulder and she’s looking for the golf ball. So Spence gives her a smile and says he saw the ball but didn’t get a chance to pick it up and shows her where, and they separate just as Spence sees on the other side of the golf-course fence a sturdy Oriental gentleman all in this loose bag of a pale blue costume flanked by two golf carts (his and hers) with a hill behind him. But now the blonde calls back to Spence, What did he mean, a chance to pick it up? Well, he feels that he’s half-interested and he walks back to her and tells about the guy in white jeans and points out the mausoleum and she’s looking at him pretty sharply, she’s got a couple of inches on him and he says, "Yes, no kidding," but grins again and he watches until she gets to the mausoleum and tries to yank at it and can’t, and other sounds come from the side of the cemetery away from the golf course and Spence looks at his watch and thinks of the dead conversing with one another lying there on their backs not turning their heads. Give Spence credit, he’ll hold your attention if he can. And the blonde is over there shaking the door of the mausoleum but she stops, and, shading her eyes, she leans in against the glass. Then she yells that there’s no guy there and Spence shrugs and laughs and goes away toward the gatehouse where his car is and when he hears that pounding in the Earth again he thinks it’s what it was, but then he hears her breathing and it’s her and she’s striding toward him her iron in her hand like a drum-majorette baton and she says, "You bastard," and he starts laughing and runs like hell and they chase all over the cemetery until he shortcuts himself to a good enough lead near enough to his car so he can get to it and make it out the driveway, and he’s thinking about the guy who went back in the mausoleum—relative of an old fragrant guy in overalls maybe—and Spence looks back and, you know, she’s still coming when Spence is out at the highway waiting his chance to turn, and here she comes so he’s got to get onto the highway the only way he can, going the wrong direction, and almost steers over the white line looking back at her. And at the cemetery, the whole place somehow.

And when Mayn asked what were the other sounds, the bartender said with a frown, "It was the pounding he mentioned."

But no, it wasn’t. "You know the pounding," Spence had said.

"Horses’ hoofs," said the bartender.

"Oh man, she was beautiful," said Spence, "but she was angry. I stay clear of angry people."

Pulling the bartender’s leg surely. But if the tale was true, say the pounding was Spence himself. Does a man with speckled hands have a heart? If so, the tale had left in Spence more than a smile accelerating down a highway in the wrong direction as if the blonde had commandeered a car and left her lama boyfriend holding two bags. The horses (spared or not) weren’t just one of the seven American winds, and Spence was no touring humorist, he meant something; the speckles all over the backs of his hands looked scaled but as if scabs had melted back into the glistening skin.

"Your golf course next to the cemetery, the cemetery next to the race track!" Joy said.

Mayn felt his heart surface. "The race track? What track? He didn’t say a track."

Mayn found the scissor point upon his temple. Joy would tell Lucille for sure, and he could see Lucille’s hair, a lock, come down over her forehead as she lit a cigarette and listened. She called them two hundred percent married. He recalled Spence once telling one of his own stories back to him, a guy who was Bob Yard’s niece’s friend by marriage whose shoes had hurt so much that he hadn’t gone out onto the Lakehurst airfield with the other newsmen for the Hindenburg mooring, and when the silver bag let out its potential fire and blew but not sky-high and somewhere a radiocaster was crying, this man with tight shoes who hadn’t gone out onto the strip had a headstart on everyone else getting to the phone.

"What’s Spence doing in your old backyard?" said Joy, who didn’t know Spence. Her hand was smoothing, smoothing, as if thinking, but not about the haircut. Call his cemetery a backyard? There’s a distance and he’s nearly there in Jersey in the town where he grew up. Cemetery, race track, mere coincidence.

Mayn thought, "I’m crazy, I can’t help asking again." And he said—but without turning to look at his wife with all those years of cut hair around them—"But you know what I was thinking."

"Oh I suppose, Which were the names Spence was looking for?, because maybe they’d mean something to you, does Spence do that kind of thing?" Joy’s hand ruffles the back hair upwards, then smooths it down and lightly left to right.

He said, "I know you hate newspaper work, you do." "Just what I was thinking—but the names that Spence was after?" "It crossed my mind," he said, "but I don’t know any unmarked grave, but I was thinking, Was the fellow in the real mausoleum or did Spence make him up?"

Mayn did not ask to be caught up on what he’d missed, but you couldn’t tell if the bartender was falling for something or Spence himself had fallen into some unexpected field of the cemetery—Mayn hadn’t words for this likelihood—a field—a field of pounding inside the Earth (O.K.). Who was it said the Earth was the roof of hell?

Mayn, when they had met after the U-2, had thought he wouldn’t want to get drunk with a man whose mood jumped back and forth (let alone the speckled hands) from these little stories say of the Chicago wire service (AP had he said?) borrowing the weather off a radio station and then selling it back to the station, from the cozy, maybe-it’s-the-end-of-the-world-tomorrow interrogation of others as to facts he seemed already to know, to an inquisitive fear one night seeking Mayn’s eyes out while plucking the mouth with the speckled fingers (God, were the tips speckled? he didn’t remember and maybe he had been drunk, so a past he didn’t recall was why he told himself that he would never do any serious drinking with this adroit, neutral, orphan man whose curved fingers plucked at his lips) as if to tempt out the idiotic rage Spence (neutral?) had betrayed in Washington the night of the U-2: it was the camera’s beam, that’s what it was, the reconnaissance plane is beam of laserlike (well) venom multiplying down altitude upon altitude (but upon Russia!): so Mayn had felt drawn into that cemetery. Well hell! so what if no one least of all Mayn talked lasers in ‘60.

He told that whole story to his barber. "You know what I was thinking?" he asked to the wall in front of him, feeling the cool blade rub down off hair onto skin.

"Oh my God!" Joy said, thinning the sideburn near the earlobe.

"What?"

"And right now you’re thinking, How did you manage not to guess Spence was talking about your own hometown."

What happened then was that—his head whipping round toward her— no music, it happened without music since the last record had finished—his head came about so suddenly that he thought, How could I not have been afraid to lose my eye, for where would the scissors be? And he heard Joy cry out—at maybe his anger that she’d heard his story better than he had—though she had made him feel, yes, not alone; but no, she had cried out because of what she had done to herself, she’d pulled back the scissor point as her left hand came across and he turned—and her left hand like a padding had followed the scissors faster than they jumped back, and the palm of that left hand caught the point with a surprise as sharp as the medic’s detonating prick in the pad-tip of the middle finger for a blood test now no longer jabbed in the finger.

"Hey," so quiet he had surprised himself; and he took her hand and licked it almost before his eyes could see the thick point of blood there. Kissed her hand as her nails clawed in against his cheek and he stuck out his tongue and touched blood.

The music from the other room seemed long gone.

He had a hair on his tongue, which she did not know about.

But he’d already found the thing in her palm.

It was the future he’d been living in and coming back from. He would like to tell his son someday, but his son would believe it too easily.

"In future," his father had said at bedtime after Bob Yard and the newspaperman with all the stories had gone, "you will not be eavesdropping under the porch when I have visitors." But Jim had been there first. Under the porch. Just there, not waiting for anything, much less some bald-headed visitor talking about death and about trotters, methods of execution, evidence and verdicts—rendering a verdict, the word was. His father had it all turned around, there’d been no eavesdropping.

His father did not hit him.

A slap might have been a relief, a kick from one of those shoes scraping overhead in place of that punishing tone you couldn’t quite see. A punishing race, the local paper reported.

Mayn tasted blood, but he was in Joy’s body looking from that future he habitually came back from. Came back to this marriage even as now with the salt of the blood sequencing to him he wanted to tell her but did not dare feel the reaction he’d get from this smart person, tell her that as the holding pattern at the end of his latest trip went on he had for a while not known where he had been—that is, where he’d had a quick shower and breakfast; that is, where he had Departed from (with a capital DEP)—so he’d squeezed a hand into his pants pocket to find the ticket, and seeing Springfield he then found next to TO (next to three or four TO’S) the typed word VOID, and he started to show it to the woman in the window with its tight shade down against the New York afternoon sun just as he caught her eye and he wished Joy could observe her.

And in the blood that clung to his tongue—moist to moist—(so his tongue felt creepy sprouting), he knew that he would give up, he and Joy; they would do it together, that is give up, as staringly as he had once said to Flick alone, because he didn’t want Andrew to hear, that he didn’t blame their mother for feeling him impossible to live with—so smoothly said that the girl answered with a diplomacy of her own smoothness to say that that wasn’t true—definitely, you know, not true.

But when the blood went down and he gulped and he heard his lips smack a little as he opened his mouth and closed it, he was in the wind like the tatters of plastic wrap caught and streaming in the trees up Park Avenue, wreckage of things not said though chased right up to the skin of these things by what on the other hand had been said—"You said I should take a job but it’s not easy when the children are getting home at three, three-thirty in the afternoon." "Three-forty-five." "And you thought you were thinking up ways to pass my time." "That’s how I passed my time flying home from the motor capital of America." "Is that all?" "Wasn’t I right for the wrong reason at least?" "Pay attention, man, don’t you understand—you’re never right—" "—or am I ever right?" "You sound like my father." "I don’t complain like he did." "You’ve only heard me say so, Jim." "You made me feel like I was there." "You gripe about your father." "So do you about my father." "I hardly know your father." "O.K., then, neither do I know him." "At least I take the children out to see him, Jim." "Not always by yourself." "Once with Lucille." "Once?" "Another time, too." "Then twice." "And I will again." "With Lucille?" "I will again."

Did he draw blood? No, the blood he tasted rose to her scissors drawn by her. But tasting it he knew what she was thinking. He felt it in his throat, drying. That all he and she had been doing was having him a haircut. Well, the void from her point of view of his was the void between them out of which he had found elbow room to pluck a story to smooth things over. Oh but in those days (he’d say), in those days (speaking to Andrew or Flick who liked such stories less—or Joy) in those days when the great tribal roads were strung out like pavement with silver dust and people in certain quarters of the world had ways of disappearing into next month—in those days, he’d say, speaking of the monster in the form of a pyramid that came traveling up out of the south from Mexico propelled by a barrel revolving or below to trap the Inventor of New York while he was dickering with the Manchoor Princess, the Anasazi healer, and the ill-fated wanderer-scientist the Navajo son called by the Princess "Prince," dickering not (if possible) about the giant bird’s steep rise in horse consumption, but about the treaty agreed on (in principle) setting up the Four Worlds Adjacent which discovered in the Creation’s Four Corners meeting back to back and looking outward a new weather we make ourselves so as to have something in front of us (is that it? fit it in); in "those" days, he would say, but then couldn’t help thinking also of right now, the children growing, his job developing, his wife deciding not to go back after all into the lighting-design business—get a degree, a degree—and think that now was "those days" too.

"Can I see?" he said to her.

She showed him her hand and there was nothing, no blood.

In that future, then, they’d do it together, give up.

That is, split.

Compared to their parents, this was progress.

But oh Christ he knew her! It would have to be exactly mutual, the relenting; and like long-distance phone receivers coming down at the end of a call, it would have to be at the same time.

Was that due to suspicion? Was it stubbornness? United we fall.

He loved her young face. Her father had looked young up to and beyond his death. But she looked at you as if there were something in you that was beyond you. She got like Lucille Silver sometimes and would look at him so he felt elsewhere or like falling apart, scrambled, and she’d musingly say, "I don’t think you care about your work enough—isn’t that crazy?—the thought came to me—it doesn’t make sense, I mean with all the time you’re away doing it—but the thought came to me from you."

Like their daughter Flick, Joy remembered every damn thing he said, or he felt she did, and sometimes more than he, and she knew he had an idea of what it was like to be her—as if the story or thing he’d said that she recalled more of than he had been delivered by him to her sealed—and she remembered not just stories told more than once. She told Flick about Spence and his cemetery story. And the man who sabotaged a wire-service plot at the Lindbergh trial: the plot pretty tacky for these later days of free-lance electronic technicians traveling the AP circuits, old stuff compared to days of video monitor screens that AP bureau staff watch hour by hour; but still a pretty advanced plot for the thirties—to scoop the Lindbergh verdict. And this man, this saboteur of spies, who knew nothing of the lady handwriting expert who, instead of being allowed by the defense to testify, hid out with a farmer for she was afraid for her life, knew the men who were to be secretly stationed up in the old wooden bell tower: for there they were waiting to get word from their own man in the shirt-sleeve-sweltering courtroom below who was the only one in the courtroom wearing an overcoat, he was hiding a transmitter —but the men in the bell tower, poking a head up now and then you can be sure, got along so well with each other that they reached a state beyond mere news—and by the time the jury came back in, the men in the tower were so well along snorting and recollecting other times quietly guffawing that they got the code wrong from the man in the courtroom and in their turn signaled from the bell tower to their relay at an outside phone that the guilty verdict included a mercy recommendation (which it did not) and this news hit the headlines first.

But for heaven’s sake, Lucille’s musical, witty, calm voice of the Now future says, What’s so great about the Lindbergh case, I don’t even like him, what’s so great anyway? I know he was a hero flying the Atlantic all by himself—it was a chance to be alone!—but why did the kidnap sell so big? you can find more awful things to sell than that.

It was an immigrant stealing an heir, said Joy.

Mayn’s own words, pretty near. For he had said—more than once, he saw—"An illegal immigrant appropriating an American hero’s son."

But Joy hadn’t picked up that that answer didn’t satisfy him. He was too dumb to do better, even the ransom notes had been written by someone other than Hauptmann. And he saw that his words coming from Joy had come from him and not just previously but right now (and off balance because of Lucille)—as if he’d said them now instead of quite a while ago.

Listen, said Lucille, that case was a sensation before they arrested Hauptmann.

Newsprint can make anything a sensation, Lucille.

That’s my name all right, Jim, but if you want to get personal, do it right. The papers don’t pick up just anything. They had a direct line to the family mind.

It was a two-way flow and it was all one mind, Lucille.

But what did it?

Lindbergh made history.

History made Lindbergh.

No, Lindy made history; newspapers report it; a daily paper is like a molecule of history—how’s that?

Not good, said Lucille.

Not bad, said Joy.

She was looking at Jim the way Lucille did, with that precise, clear, yet tediously sexual attention that was like sympathy yet maybe meant to make him need something less good. Need something less good? (He couldn’t say it or feel it better than that, he surrendered to a nation not himself, voices that passed through him. They wanted him to weaken, to say dumb things. Did he hate them?

Wait—hold on—did he hate anyone? Displaced at left halfback by the Indian Ira Lee, he’d taken over fullback in the single-wing days of Texas A&M’s line-bucking Kimbrough.) And he said in answer to Lucille, even to Joy: Oh the big deal was wealth and safety, wealth’s safety, the safety of safety—oh (he said, feeling as free as not knowing what came next) safety in a country house with the cash stacked up in the basement with a flag tucked in around it, but—(he ran out of freedom) . . .

Yes? came a fourth voice after him, a male voice, Yes?—money in the basement—incredible—unheard of!—and it might have been a brother voice speckled with electronic shivers in transmission and pressing him from an emptiness—a what?—but what fourth voice, when here he had with him only Joy and her friend Lucille, suddenly her friend, and he knew it hadn’t been like that always, not in ‘64, Lucille’s year of the young cop Rick ("Don’t let me hear you call cops ‘pigs,’ darling!") nor ‘65, Joy’s year of Wagner and the year of that awful scuffle leaving Wagner on his own floor with nose and neck deflected left and right respectively, but Wagner’s trouble or pain distinctly greater than his assailant’s jealousy, which in its lessening was a new unknown.

—but a fixed trellis up the side of the house must not become a movable ladder, said the semi-retired assailant, how do you like that? how’m I doing?

You’re crazy, said Lucille, that’s how you’re doing. It was men, it was a men’s promotion, said Lucille (who had once been heard to say, like a quietly embarrassing bad joke, that she preferred to be with men once).

But what if the Lindbergh kid had been a girl, then? said Mayn.

Men even more, said Lucille at once.

Innocent women and children, said Joy between them.

They’ll say "my son and heir," said Lucille, but never "my daughter and heiress," and even if they thought those words, they’d mean her honor, they’d mean the money that laying her would bring.

A gap occurred, he was sure, and as if he were being commented on beyond him, it was a model invitation to him to be not here, or he was the head of a slain enemy now honored with best tidbits stuffed into its mouth, insert an honorary cigar and a word or two—and if the gap or void was different from him, it still gave off a scent of almond, nature’s unsalted, unskinned almond, sweet wood (familiar but thinned past something or other, the grain, the tongue-dissolving grain or meat of the actual nut)—was it Joy’s shampoo? and was that tongue of his her tongue, that dissolved the way crazy people thought they had someone else’s limb, say? And he looked at her hair all around her eyes while she and Lucille looked at him.

And together with this almond essence (bathroom cabinet) occurred a creamy-salve slipperiness to his mind, yes—well this is getting pretty hairy, pretty sensitive—and this slipperiness (damn it) was being where no traction was, but none only if he tried to find it, tried to move. And an impression passed through his lostness that friends Joy and her confident (confidant— conf\daunt!) Lucille would like him to go back where he came from though in the wordless interim Joy seemed to (damn it) say to him: You never wound up the Morgan story, the man in western New York? (oh yeah) who in the middle 1820s had threatened to tell certain local secrets of the greatest secret society in the Western World, the Masons—are there Tibetan Masons, aboriginal, arctic?—and one day was charged and jailed in Canandaigua and still more dubiously allowed the next day to disappear with the help of an abductor pretending to be his friend (I did finish it, I just didn’t fill it out) (or, said Joy, connect it to anything else like the price of eggs or—), his friend whose identity and connection with a famous resident of Washington was learned by a village lawyer’s daughter from her secret lover, a plump journeyman printer, who vanished from Canandaigua taking with him only his secret, the tools of his trade, and the heart of the attorney’s daughter, and reappeared in the employ of a Socialist Free Press run by a workingmen’s party in Philadelphia: there the village attorney’s daughter joined him, was pursued all the way from western New York by her lean and wheezing father, a prominent Mason, and through an agent of the great man met Jackson himself in New York City where that yellow-skinned gaseous and indigestible smoked Hickory fell in love with her, for herself or for her secrets none knew except, apparently, the father or uncle of that very Hermit-Inventor of New York City who helped Mayn’s own grandmother Margaret when she came home from the West in 1893 or ‘94.

That is, that is . . . Joy only seemed to say to him, Tell us how Andrew Jackson defended women and children against the childlike Indians he thought he was the father of—

and how (Mayn continued) the woods were full of insane survivors missing the tops of their heads which had held each its own Manitou or private god dreamed in bird or snake form, say, and these were being collected to make a new common denomination of mutual god. And Mayn asked himself off the top of his head, Why do I tell these stories as if they were finished? (He heard his little daughter start to sing in the next room.)

But Joy had not spoken out loud.

Joy ran a hand through her hair and looked as dumb as her husband had felt, but she’d gone pale in honor of his picking up a piece of her thought, her picture, his scalped lunatics, her bumpy debumped scab heads, his Jackson, her Andrew, their woods, woods owned mutually, like the dreaded Red Sticks, the Creeks, the Cherokees, what have you? more hatcheted than hung, tradition had it—and in which woods were to be found the Choctaws who gave slain enemies a month of mourning to make friends of them. But Joy and Lucille could not hold out and their eyes met and they shook their heads at his whimsy, which, like the message the blindly obedient messenger unexpectedly opens to see for himself, turned out to be a remark that he hadn’t foreseen and that seemed smarter than he was, while—wait—

But he wasn’t there (was he?)—since that was future. So Joy’s absence was not either.

Which accounted for why right now (right here and now) he could jolly her gently, here and now in a kitchen with Lucille: "Flick’s no heiress but thank God she has Joy’s looks"—Lucille ignored him—"and brains"—the three of them hearing also the words that traditionally occupied the space of "brains" understood to be Joy’s—but what the hell, only a saying, and men can’t equal women—all in all he didn’t have to cope with this new tedious intelligence thrust around him by circumstance in order to accept their— their—all-around strength. They were agreeing, Joy and Lucille; agreeing— there in a kitchen more or less with him and as, suddenly, the mid-sixties looked up at him like a mere substitute for the late sixties—agreeing with some nodding of heads, Joy’s dark, Lucille’s gray-blond, with papery craters under her eyes enlarging their blue more than showing as her full cheeks and wide mouth worn and used and powerfully impressed by its own thought and coming-on-to somebody to move and to kiss (he felt—he felt her final contempt)—they were agreeing, Lucille and Joy, that you was never safe from relapse, the words you said always carried other words underneath them that said it isn’t really you making the demands; no, be your gentle self, kid, be cool, that’s a way to yield, and later tonight or tomorrow you’ll get him to give in and stop the check with which you paid the black (chauvinist) electrician who left one dimmer switch so it won’t hold the brightest notch, or 'That’s a relapse?" said Mayn, crinkling his grin, Lucille looked so steadily at Joy, while she recreated a mid-marital reveille the gist of which was her arm, "my big soft arm," slamming over onto her husband’s sleeping face—"Oh I did that once," said Joy, quite happily and Flick never got quite into her mother’s head at these times "of" Lucille, so what Joy felt or agreed etcetera, was kind of clear but only kind of—at an instant when Frank had claimed to be dreaming of a good fuck that cleared the air whereupon he opened his eyes into the inner spaces of Lucille’s arm, got out from under, dripped blood out of his nose onto the sheet and was so angry, not yet awake, that he cocked his leg and kicked her out of bed the way you break down a door.

Into a next room. Of things said but too long unsaid. You tell me what I’m feeling.

A void of things ran through him he’d never said: You never tried to have power over me, you thought; and this was because when I made love to you you never had to ask for anything, not that a woman could ask.

A void of things he’d never said ran through him, fronts hitting him but a ground beyond him to be known if he wasn’t so damn lazy, known like some math he didn’t yet know for weather prediction, evolution of the atmosphere, ray on ray breaking him down into future—was he in the future? —redoing him more than a pretty fast stick of Acapulco Gold when an ounce had not caught up yet with the price of fifty minutes with Joy’s shrink (the man himself used that word)—wait, he meant not that, not that (and he didn’t smoke much)—he meant rays like when he had a fast stick alone having started smoking apparently full of relief at having phoned Joy in New Hampshire (therefore summertime? not necessarily) after he’d had dinner with their eighteen-year-old daughter Flick (eighteen? but she’s only ten in ‘66—Flick? Flick? from flicks, flickers, movies) who wasn’t getting along too well with her mother and didn’t always listen to her father’s jokes and stories but would break in sharply—Who was this Spence Mom said was snooping around New Jersey? But relief wasn’t what he was full of after all as he took his second pull on some good ballooning Hollywood and held it, thinking (or letting himself be grown into a thought), but instead losing breath, his heart running around him, and for being wrong about his own state (for it wasn’t relief he was full of but fear and absence) he paid the price of dying and dying and dying—his heart turned pot black, then no-color—until, afraid to call room service for what he wanted, he wobbled, sallied forth like rolls of a wave yet down the elevator shaft (and as if up) and then out into a midtown wind and to a newsstand he created as he walked toward it over the pavement in brand-new size 11!/2 wing-tips springy and slippery, a newsstand where all the tough guy standing outside his stand had was two big stacks of the Daily News and Mayn asked—he didn’t know how slowly—for an orange—"Have you got an orange?"—and the man (broader even than Mayn) looked at him like a leper disliking another leper and scowled like a competitor in a card game who’s been successfully asked by his neighbor for what he happens to have —and then—because Mayn (along some multiple web-route of New York veins and cracks) knew the man would—the man reached inside the counter-window of his stand and produced one, a large, thick-skinned eating orange, and watched Mayn as Mayn bit it skin and all, while families of tourists three or four abreast—one grandma whose feet hurt—sauntered like incognito posses uncertainly home to hotels, seeing him, he was sure, and maybe not telling him that while he thought his one-time wife Joy was in New Hampshire, she it was who was the gap standing beside him smiling into the orange, though not knowing that whereas he suddenly wanted, like a pastrami sandwich and another where that went, a News, he would not give the man the business as if in return for the life-saving orange Mayn had foreseen, but would give the man something in future even if he had to through a substitute.

Some good news to sell? You’d want to give it away, good news. Like a good story, which they’d just created with the aid of a clairvoyance operating through a scope of Hawaiian at the far end of which he’d seen an orange. Like the world’s mercy. Given in a headline to Bruno Hauptmann, if only a recommendation for mercy.

The man with the tight shoes had told that one, Bob Yard’s niece’s friend by marriage who’d scooped everyone else the day the Hindenburg caught fire and blew up at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Those weren’t the stories Andrew asked for, sitting on a park bench flipping and catching a baseball with one hand so it irritated his father who didn’t interrupt the story to tell Andrew to stop because he knew Andrew was showing interest in this way.

And so Joy and Jim, Jim and Joy, sat at the kitchen table without their girl and boy one December night. (Looks like Jim must have been home!) But wait: here’s Lucille, too. And it’s not night. But it’s the kitchen table— kitchen sink, white light, brilliant new brown-and-orange linoleum. And Lucille has trapped them in an entertainment that shows no sign of ending, it’s all ending, and so the situation is this: Sally, who could never tear herself away, you know, partly because her parents had bequeathed her the faith that you never get something for nothing, is getting five hundred a month from Buck for the next five years, right? (and after that a dollar a year, which is another story, which as it turns out we won’t be coming to), but Sally will lose the five hundred a month if she spends more than twenty-one days per year with any man, cohabiting or just company for dinner. And I (Lucille) called Buck one night and told him he was afraid to let go and he should take a look at his girlfriend, scarcely out of high school so he must hate women, right? Right! he said at once, he must hate women, that’s half the population, and he gets off the point telling about a Christmas birthday present this kid just gave him wrapped up in newspaper, you know, but an unusually beautiful newspaper collage was the way the wrapping turned out, and I said don’t get off the point, the point is Sally and this twenty-one-day arrangement. Buck gets huffy. She was the one who wanted out, he says.

But Buck, you should really let go of Sally.

Let go! he says, and for a moment he knows there’s nothing more he can find to say.

Yes, let go. You think you’re being a good daddy to her but you’ve tied her up for five years in this chastity prostitution and the only alternative is secret affairs as if she were married.

Two days a month, says Buck, is good for her health.

More like two nights if you divide twelve into twenty-one.

That’s the only time she does it, anyway, says Buck.

Things might have changed, Buck.

Things have, Lucille.

Why don’t you drop the alimony idea entirely? she says to Buck.

It’s Sally that wants it, says Buck to Lucille (which is me, and imagine me putting my hand gently on his arm over the phone).

It’s both of you that think you want it, I suggest to him, and I think he feels the hand on the arm, he’s on the attack but he’s got his cheek on his hand and lying on his stomach and he’s beginning to feel the massage.

Suppose, I say, I get in touch with Sally and tell her how you feel about the alimony.

Go to hell, he says. But they have the same lawyer; you know Jack Beebe, who takes notes on envelopes wherever he is, whoever’s talking, and since Sally thinks she’s setting up her own little catering company, she’s been having dinner with Jack at her place and one night Buck phones and Jack picks it up but Sally grabs it away from him and Buck wants to know what’s going on and Jack disappears, and Buck tells Sally he thinks alimony is beneath them and doesn’t she? And she asks him if he had her favorite charity in mind as a substitute and he wants to know who’s with her, and she says someone incredibly nice and she’s really busy, Buck, and in the silence filled by the music and, as it turns out, Jack Beebe’s breathing on the extension, Sally is heard to say, Buck I don’t want the money, if you want a witness if you want to draw it up I’ll put it in writing, and in the pause with three breaths on a two-way hook-up (two male lawyers and one lay woman) Buck is upset enough to say like a kid in a small voice, "OX., Sallums." And she hangs up and starts crying and is comforted by Jack at her end.

Then before they know it, they decide to take a vacation in England go to the theater and to Scotland, and Buck’s going crazy not putting two and two together and asked me to dinner but it wasn’t possible but then we did have dinner at a Greek restaurant and I said I hadn’t seen Sally, and the upshot is that Buck draws up a paper one night which his girlfriend is probably too young to witness and invites Sally to cancel all alimony payments and he puts thirty thousand dollars into Sally’s bank account so everyone’s happy, but Jack Beebe doesn’t want Buck’s money because Jack wants Sally and they’re going to get married but Sally has given Jack an ultimatum, she won’t marry him without Buck’s money. And so they’re getting married but Sally says basically she’d like to just borrow a husband for twelve months. And that’s not the end of the story, kids.

(Mayn’s own true wife observed of his unfailingly courteous handling of women that when she saw a man rude to women she would at once think he didn’t like women, as if women—whom she sometimes heard her husband call "girls," even when not out with the "boys"—required her husband’s special treatment.) Fit this in.

And so, to return, Joy and Jim sat at the kitchen table one December night late facing each other, wondering who would go to bed first, their fingers near but fixed and heavy. She wondered if the apartment house would go coop, and he asked if she was interested. His hand was around his coffee mug, her hand lay on her purse, a leather purse with a brass snap.

He was going away for two days. Plenty of shopping days left.

He asked her what she wanted this year. He put it quizzically enough and with a plainness of feeling, he thought, but they both knew she liked surprises.

She thought a moment—or waited—and said, "It’s something practical but obvious."

He had to think—and he knew he wasn’t too good at presents. Her purse was worn but he wouldn’t get her a purse. Flick could, though Flick was almost twelve; she could, but she had big ideas. He wondered if Flick was asleep. She slept with such abandon, while her brother slept with huddled concentration.

"I’d like to buy you all a house in the country."

"Sleighbells and woodsmoke."

"I mean the house was always your idea, but I mean it."

"We will."

"It seems far off."

"We will."

"But you want something practical and obvious for Christmas. Is it something that you have and you want a new one?" He was just talking.

She got up and she heard Andrew snorting horribly.

They laughed at the noise, and the noise softened.

They were scared, and the fear passed between them, according to the void.

He couldn’t think in the midst of what must be her thoughts too. She’d made a fist around the purse. "Obvious, you said. Is it visible? Can I see it?" he said.

Joy sat down again. She seemed to have forgotten him. She looked at him like a zombie and she said mechanically, "If you were more observant, you’d know."

He wanted to be dead for a moment. She was offensive.

What drew him toward her? He’d lost time.

"If I were more observant—" he began but ran into such interference he didn’t catch up with the words he wanted, and in their absence he half rose and reaching out lifting onto the balls of his feet he struck at her with his open hand as she pulled back.

Off the top of his head he struck at her, and the kitchen bulb turned them into bilious kooks who might have drunk too much and woken to some such fact or other—but they’d drunk a third of a bottle between them and three hours ago.

Her look at him was still empty, but not void.

He heard himself say (getting up), "Why did I do that!"—getting up maybe to try again, this time not to miss, but he was so sure of something else that he hung there on his hands leaning at her, his eyes like mental cases all by themselves—she saw through them into his head but emptily, uncryingly clear through his head to a point beyond him—his eyes vomiting drops of dumbness, imbecility—he was sure that he had said, "Why did I do that!" —said out of his murderous belief that if he should ever hit her he would have to leave but said too because she, who had pulled back just an inch enough, had thought those very words he had said.

Had thought them first. Or at the same time.

They were both crazy, but no he was protecting himself thinking that.

"Give up," she said—had he heard it in the future and now could hear in the present? "Please give up."

That was all there was to it.

That was it.

But later, during weeks when she was getting ready to leave, she asked him questions about himself. She asked how his grandmother had taught him to whistle.

"Who knows?" he said. His brown leather grip stood in the hall where he’d left it hours and years ago—well, that was a cheap comparison, two to three hours was the time—if he was confused, the lease was one reason, for he’d been thinking about holding on to the lease of the apartment as an investment (though the landlord would let him out of it), holding on to it as if because he’d seen in the elevator that very night a woman (but it wasn’t that she was a woman) who’d recently moved in—into this building he’d spent so many years in—a friendly woman in the elevator, short fluffy hair, smiled right into him but no man-baiting bullshit, but with beside her the tallest Oriental he’d ever seen, and standing beside her as if hung from the elevator’s ceiling, a metal plate you would push out if you were moving something too high and then you could look right up the dark glimmering shaft as if you might fall down through its greasy hairy skylight—new to the building the woman was—was that it? it should have made him in his present state of mind want even more to go, get out, be forever away from the apartment house—but he was confused, too, because he was repeating and repeating the information he’d just received that Joy had gotten Flick a partial scholarship at a boarding school in Vermont not too far from their town in New Hampshire, an "academy" Andrew called it humorously because in the fall he was going to public school, which he said could be worse because he’d have in his class two of the town kids he’d played with every summer as long as he could remember, and one of them had a snowmobile. Andrew became more sweet; he was more than bright.

"I mean," said Joy, "how did she teach you to whistle?—did she tell you what to do with your mouth?"

"I don’t think she ever told me." He spoke deliberately, slowly.

"You just do it."

"Well, I do remember it was in bed early in the morning, I was four going on five."

"My father was cooking me breakfast by then," said Joy.

Mayn looked at her with a question she felt they couldn’t use, which was—and he picked it up—You sure we ought to be doing this? Isn’t this a bit too charming?

"And I would stay with her some weekends and I’d crawl into bed with her, my grandfather was in another room sawing wood with knots in it, and her gray hair was let down in plaits"; and he thought he smelt apple, but maybe it was hearing the doves outside in the morning air and the house floated upon the day; "I remember her soft skin."

Joy looked at him as if to say, You’re speaking differently.

And his grandmother and he had giggled over his attempts at whistling. He knew the true sound was there somewhere in the void and he went for it. Her pale lips puckered. Her eyes watched his lips until she couldn’t help laughing and then herself couldn’t have whistled if she’d wanted to.

Nor could he. Until one morning he could. He’d woken her up. Her back was to him. She turned over and right then she smelled of oatmeal and what he maybe didn’t know then was witch hazel, and she couldn’t get her eyes quite open or she could but didn’t see yet, and then when she did she woke up—right there with him—woke up with a smile at him puckering and trying so hard he saw his own nose—or was he five?—looking down below her face so as not to catch her eyes and he wet his lips again. And at the instant when she would have giggled, even with admiration, a couple of things happened: she didn’t laugh, number one, and number two he found, held between his lips and his tongue tip that moved up and down behind his teeth, a free space of air and sound that he could do what he wanted with, and he couldn’t now recall what tune he whistled—maybe "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"— but he was proud and smiled with his cheeks, and they giggled facing each other while he heard his grandfather, whom he loved to listen to the radio with, snoring in the other room, pillowed head shining as it did, even in the long dark, big nose up in the air. "You can whistle anything now," his grandmother said.

And years later—not so many years later, and well before there was a Flick or an Andrew for him to retell a couple of her stories to—he’d written her a letter when she was very sick, but he’d gotten into it, recollecting the whistling they had done. He’d described all the whistling he’d done since. All the cities he’d whistled in. Across the landbridge connecting the coasts. The bathtubs and the nights, the classical records he’d whistled to, and the cabs he had heard doormen whistle for, and whistling he’d been doing at a street corner sometimes only to break off and wonder why he’d been whistling, and two beautiful girls that a group of sailors had whistled at in the rain in Tacoma. He wished he had that letter to his grandmother Margaret, their letters had crossed. She had filled her letters with news but had given the town the name she herself seemed to have inspired him to think up when he was very young, and they would look each other in the eye and he was stuck on his autobiography that everyone had to write for eighth-grade English and that she’d said not to get into a state about because it would come soon enough, and later his grandmother Margaret always referred to Windrow when she wrote to him and, with one lapse, used that name to no one else.

"Are you going to unpack?" said Joy.

"Who screwed around first?" Flick asked him one evening in New York, no longer in a mood to reflect upon an amazing grandmother she’d never known—her grazr-grandmother.

Flick was eighteen and he was probably going to South America in a couple of weeks and she was in a brief period of not being in touch with her mother in New Hampshire, though both parents wrote her every week. The waiter would probably not have been curious, but the waiter had gone away, while the father was telling the daughter that old Bob Yard the electrical contractor who had wired Flick’s Uncle Brad’s house and the town’s streetlights all the way up to the cemetery but not including the traffic intersection near the race track had never relinquished his war story of the man who died twice in the Pacific and, coming to, after death number one, correctly predicted that six American ships would be sunk by Jap suicide pilots in the battle for Leyte Gulf and that we would stop the Kamikazes only with the granddaddy of all bombs—then died again for good with a magnetic halo shining golden over his belly.

Flick said anyone could have predicted the bomb: it was just bigger.

Mayn said he never knew if Bob Yard—Bad Bob Yard—believed the story, he wasn’t the type to believe it though Mayn’s mother might have believed it; Bob was a horny old wolf, but his wife thought he was a scream and they had an understanding, which meant that once she ripped a tuft out of his head (save it going gray), but the understanding must have included her and his, his and her, absences from home, and his words (shaking his head) that they were both getting on—at which she laughed looking to Jim he thought for agreement that her husband was droll—"getting on in years, I mean," said Bob, and they both had to laugh at that, and because crazy as it or they might be they did sort of get on together.

Flick said she would have shrimp kebabs.

Her father was trivial, then? But then he got the grip of her eyes like a memory and she smiled and said it would be nice down where he was going, it was summer, she seemed to remember. And he said come to think of it her mother and he had had an understanding that worked best at a distance— which got him a laugh that was a bit off—but then out of Mayn came the unforeseen notion that over the phone the diaphragm waves retained a remainder of message units that did not get translated back into words at the receiving end but just went on. He had some of that stuff surprisingly in his head, and it made her think of how her mother had sometimes called him "Mayn," and once in a letter he’d consoled Flick for her supposedly barren imagination by telling her that the void was not just a regular void and empty but was full of all that we did not expect of ourselves—which actually surprised him, that is to find himself saying things like that.

He told the waiter they would have the grape leaves and some roe, and the waiter said, "Taramasalata," translating it into sharp, frank approval.

The waiter went away.

"Who screwed around first?"

"It was officially mutual, I don’t see how that happened," the father said; "but on the other hand, it wasn’t much. From time to time we both felt our hearts weren’t in any of that stuff. A shrink—pardon me—"

"—very funny—"

"—asked her if she’d ever cheated on me and she walked out of his office. But she came back because she wasn’t sure if it was the word ‘cheated’ or the surprise, and she knew he was better than that, he was a good man even if he used stupid words—well, square. You know. And there was cheating."

"I know."

"We were cheating ourselves."

"Oh, great. Of what?"

"I don’t know. Frankness? Because we were more afraid than silly, can you understand that?"

Flick tipped up her glass and finished it and seemed to drop it back down to the table. She made him feel he was pausing and making her wait.

"Sometimes I was afraid I’d find you all dead when I came home."

"From where?"

"Anywhere."

"Like Washington or out West?"

"Or someone’s apartment."

"I remember you called from Washington and Mom cried when she hung up."

"You know something, I always got the grip of her eyes when I phoned, it went right through me like a memory you know, it felt like a passage of time," he was saying, thinking of when he’d once felt this but hadn’t said it.

"I guess you were very married. She told me you were shy, but I never saw it."

"One part of your mother and me was very conventional, O.K.?"

"But this screwing around went on. And I don’t even want to hear about it."

"You want a one-word description of it all?"

"Like Eisenhower," she remembered.

"Very good!"

"Maybe I can think of a two- ..."

"Funny, it was more an emotional screwing around, if you can understand."

"I don’t see what you mean."

"Long talks. With the other person. Agonized, inconclusive. Helpful."

"Sounds O.K. Sounds weird."

"It was close. While on the other side, we had a high resistance, went at it tooth and nail, on foot and by word of mouth—I mean the marriage went on."

"Why didn’t you end it?"

"We did," he said, and saw that she felt his stupid pain in her unsaid charge Not soon enough—she always acted like she knew what was what— and her pain was for having wanted him to think those words, go on thinking them, yet his and maybe Joy’s was to have covered up the signs over the years, the warning signs, so the children were more surprised than they needed to be when the time came. Andrew had said he had thought it had happened because his parents stayed up all night arguing. This was what he had said to Flick and Flick had started to cry when she told her mother.

Flick said, "We’re all going to have a good life, Dad."

"Whew!" she said with her breath.

Mayn’s cheek came up hard; did he look skeptical, smiling?

A Greek place up in the German neighborhood and they’d only had a glass each, but he relaxed his cheeks and managed to say, "See what the booze brings out," guessing she saw what was in his eyes, though then he suddenly thought of how good the crusty sliced loaf of bread looked in its napkin.

"It’s not booze," she said, "it’s wine, it’s golden wine."

He wondered if she liked the government agency job he’d gotten her in Washington? Or helped her get. She didn’t want to go on with college and she’d been gallivanting around the country in some kid’s car and they’d crossed the Mississippi four times on the way west, camping bright-eyed under a dark curve of continental sky. He didn’t bat an eyelash when she asked him who Mayga was because Joy had told her she was a woman in his life and her death had looked like murder. He said, "How did she ever hear of Mayga? She was just a colleague." But Flick thought he was wiped out.

Later he said, "Call your mother." He had hard, dry crumbs all over his place.

Flick didn’t answer for a moment. "One side of my head says O.K.; the other side says Oh shit why should I?"

She seemed not to know what was obviously in his head.

Andrew, Andrew.

Jim visited him occasionally totally unexpectedly, but more often he kind of worried about it and thought he must make a point of flying to Boston or having Andrew to New York or Washington, the maker of riddles. All but one of which riddles came out as clear and economical as a good lead: the one in question, however, sweaty and long-winded like the sweaty expensive late-night grass it came from, and assembled mostly from what the father over years had said to one or another about himself: Somewhere two people are turned into one; yet witness another One, lone species offspring from these preceding two; and as he, this One, looks back to them, who were not much together and preceded each other when departing, he can’t see quite where they went; and, deserted by that origin, this One feels thrust from that loss into the future, where he should be glad to be because, newsman as he becomes, it’s where tomorrow’s news is; but he isn’t glad, because bringing some bits of that aborted origin always along with him jetsam of a mystery far more intelligent than he which is partly the Shock of his unhappy mother once upon a time disappearing into the elements, he has on just one side of his mind the lone One of himself evolved adrift from that lost origin as if to find it in the future where he travels—

(whew! a lighter voice exhales returning or retelling the riddle to its subject on another late night).

Not the night here, though, toward the end of which, after a Greek dinner with his daughter, Jim called Joy when he was alone, feeling steady then, but not very solid.

Hello, he heard her say, softly so he felt no one had been thinking about him just before he’d called—which was kind of maudlin, which in turn might be the tariff on what was possibly just plain true. But her second hello wasn’t your enthusiastic Hello! but the same quiet, thought-like word, so he felt that she had been thinking about him, or she’d been thinking about her relation with Jack.

So here Joy was and was willing to talk but she made him feel it had to be about something. Then clearly she thought maybe he’d had more than enough. Her voice hit him and he got a still breath of the New Hampshire night from behind his eyes.

He thought he would (he said) drop in on her and Jack.

Has Andrew written you lately? she asked.

She didn’t quite say not to come, but she didn’t want him.

Which let him feel he didn’t know what she wanted. Which was, he knew, what she wanted—mutual debt minus time.

He expected to be in Montpelier and he could get a plane from there to Keene, he thought, and he wondered if she was looking at Jack while she talked. What the hell is it that happens anyway, he thought, you get a divorce from somebody you love because there’s too much between you, too much nerves, too many wrong pauses; and you go from there into a lesser relationship, isn’t that what happens?—and were these some words coming from his daughter’s private thoughts at dinner?—or somewhere else?—or from him alone? He didn’t mention dinner with their daughter Flick or the book that Joy and Jack had sent her for her birthday, The Letters ofF. Scott Fitzgerald; didn’t mention a disturbing and involved and unanswered letter from Andrew many weeks ago, but like a blank Mayn saw the dark back of Jack’s head bending toward the different-shaped stones framing a hearth that had seldom been used in summer. He said he didn’t know how much time he’d have after Montpelier, and Joy didn’t ask him what he’d be doing in Montpelier. He said it was about an insurance investment in South America, he had to ask a few questions without telegraphing his moves by making an advance appointment, though a lobbyist who was trying to get a rider onto a bill that was still in committee and who was pretty good himself at being in two or three places at once might have told the man in Montpelier that Mayn was quite capable of materializing.

No one was running for cover exactly, but—and he asked if she recalled—and she interrupted him with "the letter I wrote—why wouldn’t I recall it?" The "wouldn’t" stopped the flow, if there’d been any, but he was dazzled and his heart was on the move, he bet she heard it. But she was demanding that he not stop, he felt that. And so he told her O.K. if she came on like that O.K. then, he was answering the letter now ten years late in which she’d said "cover story."

"But it was answered," she said. "By phone, by letter, and"—he knew she’d dropped her eyes—"by nothing."

"But I wasn’t always away, and I wasn’t away that much, was I?"

Meanwhile she was saying under him and over him, We had all that out—Christ how he got into her mind and she couldn’t think straight, they were into each other for more than either could afford, or at least afford to think about. No, he said, she’d said his being away too much was their cover story. Corny, said Joy, but we all get that way. She was quite fond of the old apartment—aesthetic distance, she said (and he saw the night shadows of maple branches and couldn’t make out if the spruce and pine were pale with snow). Please, he said—and felt he was inciting her to hang up—and said then not what was in his mind but something truly trite, which went something like What world are we living in where it’s wrong to need the warmth and familiarity of another person, your spouse—bad word—your man, your woman—too possessive—let me finish—

Oh for God’s sake, she said (and didn’t say what he felt he distinctly picked up and without a "dear Jim") "You’re in your cups"—oh the unfairness of that!—he knew he’d phone and tell Flick, who would sound interrupted, whatever she was doing, except she’d pay close if tired attention and even get a little laugh out of it. He let his hair down more than ten years ago, he reported probably quite exactly what Joy had said: "What’s between us is what we were and you’re not going to fix that. Men and women often don’t get along. I hated it when you were away. I knew I would. I kept track of what time you arrived places, sometimes it made me feel more like an old person than a sailor’s wife. Then you came back. Then you went away to Bridgeport, Cape May, Boston, Florida. You came back. You went away, and a box of grapefruit arrived from the Coast Guard. You came back from Portland with four serrated spoons and ate some of the grapefruit. Suddenly you didn’t go away—it often felt like that—there you were, pinning up Flick’s hair while the tub ran and the faucets and pipes were groaning and you were still getting the last hairpin in and she was stepping into the tub and you thought she’d fall; I was thinking whether to pick Andrew up or let him yell and you got the pin to hold and your hand touched that little shoulder and I had to admit that, well, my husband touched me too like that, but damn it all (yet it’s a family, it’s a family!) yet I thought damn nice of him to borrow us—to^Hit in an appearance and put up that little girl’s hair for her bath with my hairpins, two years old, three years old, four years old, she didn’t get private about herself with you till way past what the book said but she did with a babysitter (that Irish girl from just the other side of Third who lived in the tenement brownstone they tore down to put up the apartment high-rise everyone kept saying wrongly for months was a Howard Johnson motor inn, who would tell you when you walked her home that the priest had been getting her alone a lot), with that Irish girl in the room Flick wouldn’t get undressed at the age of seven. But I was used to you being away. It affected my thinking. What thinking? I did a lot, I thought, but now I don’t think it even was thinking, it was like years of our both play-acting that we didn’t claim (you know) power over each other. So there you were. I thought I shouldn’t turn the TV on; you were home. I had suddenly to be contented. I was crazy. You didn’t talk about big events, and I thought I was glad you didn’t, and you think history’s a mess anyway. So I turned on the TV anyway. There it was, Judgment at Nuremberg you’d thought you’d missed. Playhouse 90. Good. You were glad it was on. You went away and it was like coming into range. But I must have had that range; listen, when I married you I thought I knew all about your being away and then home, and you would be—

Valued in his absence (yes he knew, he knew, he told Flick these phone conversations word for word as if she would change them), and remembered loving his grandmother because in her letters she didn’t nag him—the letters so different from the few "official" ones he’d come across from 1893 when she traveled west with her distant cousin Florence and sent back a regular column for the Democrat: Chicago (the World’s Fair was the excuse, the New Jersey exhibition which was a colonial house staffed with blacks, and a great horticultural exhibit with crystal rocks, and an African village with fifty huts and a witch doctor) but then Florence got ill and dropped away from what proved to be Margaret’s westward course, Colorado, Arizona, no kidding; New Mexico, pretty incredible for a Victorian girl—and come to think of it these letters were also rather different from stories she’d told from the time he was too little to remember—about Indians, stories less than The Last of the Mohicans which was the first grown-up book he’d read, though she’d read most of it to him and it made them both (somewhat secretly) cry at the end (and he’d been glad no one else, like his sissy brother, was there) but if less exciting, her own tales of the West and the Indians were more peculiar, more memorable (is that the word? you could build on them) word for word—more human—that was it, more human—so that even though they were made up out of who knew what weird hearsay and daydreams (twice removed) and were not true, you really felt she put herself into them; as indeed she did in her letters to Jim much later at the end of her life when she said she guessed she had it coming after all these years, a Victorian feminist who was hard on her own daughters and corresponded with Jack London, a fact which Mayn never perhaps had told his daughter, who was a socialist and had to find out her own way, which was just accident—her illness—and he heard the clear, familiar laugh in the words he read—not hoots of laughter like when he was a kid, but a—she once wrote him that his father had said to her daughter, Jim’s mother, when she, Margaret, was present with Brad, "We all get what’s coming to us—even you" (who never got "whipped" in her life)—and the grandmother’s letters which were strong and informative would never nag him about coming home to Windrow to visit, the way his father even knowing that his other son Brad was tied right into his girlfriend’s mother’s haberdashery store would make Brad feel guilty about the mere prospect of taking a temporary job in a department store in Trenton. (Andrew. Andrew. With the unconvincingly bone-crunching handshake all by himself studying zoology. Andrew. Andrew. Had lost his father, hadn’t he?) But Jim had had an experience of being valued in his absence—was that it, dear Joy? Crazy idea. Did he make Joy that way? Kind of nuts, but strong enough to leave him— to find words to leave him.

Valued in his absence. He was a bit drawn into that, but so were two or three other guys whose names he’d heard her mention. But he could think of two couples who weren’t having children and lived so close that—well, didn’t he envy them?—well, if they weren’t reading In Cold Blood together or Dickens, or doing their laundry together (well, he must have read one book by Dickens in high school but he couldn’t say honestly for sure if he’d read a second and never cared to open those diaries of the 1820s—30s—40s. Mayne who must have grandfathered the man who never knew an ancient healer’s weather secret until it was too late to keep it from spreading eastward), or holding hands at the supermarket checkout or (breathing tandem) swimming side by side (or—who knew?—single-file in one economical lane) in the pool on the top floor of their building or, month in, month out, playing tennis inside a giant sagging but taut half-dirigible laced down above a parking lot, cooking together, or (peeing possibly in unison) shitting together so to speak, which Jim Mayn had no hesitation about as Flick and Andrew might know and neither did Joy (most of the time apparently) though the issue didn’t seem to come up with her. Could you say she kept modesty a secret?

He thought he was better about secrets than she; he had no use for them, yet that meant he would also leave them where they were. The first time he and she had talked in the restaurant in 1956—and her friend’s Russian was getting ready to sing—Jim had told her what he said was the only real secret in his family, told it like an afterthought or like a "lady’s pistol" in the pocket of an attache named Karl at an arms-control conference in Scandinavia; but as soon as he said it was, he said he realized there were some others. But, O.K., the only one in his family not to know that Brad his younger brother was a love-child had been Brad himself (like he’d been adopted and never told)—"But why didn’t you tell Brad?"—and yet, of the two of them, Brad was the devoted son—at least to his supposed (and Jim’s real) father—while Jim actually had preferred Bob Yard—"preferred" that raunchy, explosive old bastard (though not "old" then), the byblow adulterer in question who had maintained a running (at least) conversation with Mayn Senior over the years while Mayn Senior, known as Mel, was supposed not to know about his wife and Bob, but did, while the New York grandchildren didn’t know till years later and the Windrow grandchildren never—as if they were adopted (which they were). Supposed, that is, by one who liked Mel Mayn (or warmed to him) least, the gifted grandmother who wrote action-packed, plain, not especially feminine letters and told wild stories to Jim and who couldn’t love Brad and his older brother Jim the same and at some point stopped trying to keep up with the unhappiness of their mother, her daughter, Mel’s musically gifted wife, Bob Yard’s one-time relatively secret lover.

But when this family secret got told and somewhat enlarged upon one night years and years later after Joy had been Joy Mayn for a dozen years, she said astoundingly, as if the world were not after all going to end, "So that’s the way it fell out. Must have been heavy, but I don’t pick it up."

"You’re saying ‘So what,’ I guess, and that’s what/ felt in the beginning, I thought, but I guess I felt like blowing my brains out."

Their voices blurred into their persons.

Funny, I was thinking of suggesting it, Joy said.

I need practice, he said.

She had never questioned whether she totally liked him, and knew he had picked this up now.

I could practice with blanks, he said.

That’s no good, she said, and they could have burst out laughing, the capability was there.

No, he said.

Go and see a psychiatrist, she said. They had a laugh on that note. That is, if that was what he wanted to do, but not because his mother committed suicide.

Mayn knew what she meant. And that she’d been shaken, and not because Flick and Andrew would know, like kids learning that one of their parents had been married before.

Now was too late to be helpless; she had known for ages that he had never been able to understand being married. Or, which might be worse, he knew this was her feeling, right or wrong, about him; and now, that family secret got tiresome to believe—which devastated them both as if the story could be a substitute for further secrets and was unreal and temporary.

But knowing what she meant, he couldn’t speak. The weight was not in him of those experiences—it was near, but not in—like a near limb that’s gone to sleep, yet not uncomfortable (but come on, was he kidding?).

And the subject returned as if by itself to her complaint about the TV. The same complaint she made now on the long-distance phone.

"But I could enjoy TV with you. Why not?"

"Remember when the sound went off on Claude Rains?"

"He was the judge at Nuremberg."

"Sentencing Paul Lukas."

"Yes, and suddenly they bleeped the sound. The judge said ‘extermination’—no, that wasn’t it."

"It was ‘gas ovens,’ ‘ said Joy, and they laughed—which was like a moment of silence.

"You didn’t say what was being covered by this cover story of ours." He wished that he’d called from a pay box. He’d have asked her to call him back, and she would not have said, "Get the operator to charge it to your number" and he knew she hated the expense of long-distance calls, and he wondered what that pressure would have done to this call in 1974.

"Covered? Oh I guess letting you travel so much."

"Would you have stopped me?"

"Your eyes," she said into the phone, "you’ve got them closed."

"But," he said, "if you bite your lip now you’ll nip your goddamn tongue." The cuteness got to him then, but so did such expensive knowledge.

He heard a man’s voice behind her—but whether speaking to her or someone else was hard to tell—while she said, "Oh we know all the reasons. Pick one. Pick one angry reason. Remember how my father loved me and then kicked me out to be a high achiever, remember how your father never left your mother, or was it the other way around? it was the other way around."

How could Joy?

He heard himself in a soap opera, but he couldn’t see himself.

She’d lived with him for twelve years, at least twelve years, and knew all about his family. Distance was what she had now, and she had the range, oh didn’t she! (And coverage.)

He said, "It was the other way around. She died." Joy had always made him feel he owed her something beyond him, but then she said it, "You make me feel I owe you something that’s beyond me."

"Listen," he said, "did you really forget about my mother dying?"

"I agree," she said, when he was just thinking Oh why did I phone?

So she knew she would hang up, and they both did, and he had the edge this time on account of having encouraged Flick to phone Joy tonight but now that he’d made that virtuous feeling explicit to himself he’d lost the edge, he was always in the wrong, but then he was convinced she was saying the same thing at that moment, though to a country gentleman with brown cheeks and a fair liquor budget, and a lot of books, and a rack of firearms. What was their cover story?

Always in the wrong? But Flick with her start-fast-and-suddenly-stop voice, her quiet tension, her inquisitor’s indifference, her way of shifting to the other side of her chair like she was preparing to get at you or to leave, she didn’t make him feel in the wrong even when she said one night when he arrived in Washington and phoned her and because she didn’t want to go to the football game with him Sunday she went out to dinner with him right there and then though she’d already eaten—said like a child blurting out what she really means yet so that afterward this seems one more thing thrown into the gap of what’s really and truly felt—"But how do you know your mother committed suicide, they never found her!"

"Oh well," he grinned at his daughter, who knew him well, "can’t blame her if she tried and failed."

Mayn blinked and he remembered yes that in that letter that used the words cover story Joy had said things about their parallel parents and a mother who left, at least for a long time which was as good as forever—he didn’t buy a word of it—but he’d jumped ahead of this stuff that Joy had arrived at with a nice analyst who’d taken her to the theater—no, it was the young lawyer who said "Quite" when he agreed and took her to hear him argue an appeal in the old court building on Madison Square with the sculptures of philosophers, or they looked like philosophers or some such charlatans standing on top and Joy had said the carved and cushioned stained-glass courtroom was like Lüchow’s restaurant when this lawyer had taken her there for dinner—but oh Mayn had jumped ahead, plunged on beyond likenesses between parents and childhoods into what, he did not know—some accelerated coverage—until years later he now in 1974 looked back to a 1970 phone call (thinking his work used him, not the other way around, and why was he going to Montpelier, Vermont?) and thought he ought to have been able to stay married, he was so close to Joy.

For it was the one phone call in which mention had been made of this thing that often happened between them at the distance that had sometimes seemed to work better the greater it was, but then seemed always to be the same, like a voice sprung out of the phone’s diaphragm from Paris or Chicago, it didn’t matter, it might have been Kilimanjaro where he’d never been, but this time New York had been where he’d called from—he knew damn well some of what was in his mind, he didn’t live in New York any more than Joy did but he’d just (after all these years) become a landlord, an absentee landlord—at noon he’d put his name on his late landlord’s son’s new dotted line because this quiet heir by agreeing through the state attorney-general’s office never to evict rent-controlled tenants in order to sell their apartments had bypassed co-oping, which would have required approval by thirty-some percent of the tenants, and he had begun quietly to sell off what apartments he could—a vacancy now and then to friends, or a deal like this with Mayn who had held on to the lease when he’d moved out quite a while ago and now for the time being would pay a reduced upkeep, get a good rent, and figure to resell in four to five years, and it was all very clear: here he was at the club half-dressed, he’d asked a waiter to bring him a drink and he’d reached for a phone—he kept his membership at the club though he wasn’t in town much—his hair was damp, it was wet at the neck and a drop ran down his ear, she never asked him about money, his salary or how he lived—he knew the waiter, the waiter knew him—he had the phone in his hand knowing only that he wanted to call her and knowing that she was going to call him—he knew this with absolute certainty—and knew that she when he got her would not say she’d been going to call him because it sounded phony to her: and with this in mind their voices then met and when he had said, "This is totally unrehearsed," and she had come back with "Impossible," and he, "Don’t tell me what you were just thinking," and she (at a flirtatious slant), "But you know," and he (pressing into that awful empty gap which might be just long knowledge of each other but now as if they were inside each other’s body which was a third body—or fourth—that wasn’t anywhere), "I love you—you know that" (which wasn’t what he’d phoned to say, he thought) and she, "It goes without saying—almost," and he, "You were thinking . . ."

And then against some bitter amusement with which she kept guard, he did not continue, did not say more, for it was being said, what there was of it, and it seemed to be but one word; yet like interference through this one word he then also heard in the air between them what she would say tritely, sentimentally, dumbly four years later by phone the night he’d taken Flick to the Greek restaurant, "Women and men maybe weren’t meant to get along": something less far-reaching was what had been meant—by the meaner, that is—and her father didn’t say the angry words of contempt for her thinking that she knew were in his mind and she liked him for so then she said, "Sometimes you don’t think," but beyond the interference which made him feel alone he heard the one word as if it might go on like a vibration that goes on borne by he wouldn’t happen to know what—inertia—how would he know?—and wanted to say it to her but hell she was thinking it and more than thinking it he felt she watched him to see if his eyes shut in despair or he let out a grin and took a quick big breath which could mean he would tell her a homecoming story about an arrow of lightning scorching the crotch out of Andrew Jackson’s pants until he couldn’t ride it any more but took it in both hands and, identifying it as Indian, slung it thousands of miles west where instead of disciplining the not-really-so-red Indians it lanced the Eastern Princess’s giant horse-eating bird, wing and heart, which rejoiced the Indians to be rid of what to them was an unfamiliar monster, was alarming to the faraway Choorian parents, but was as much an inconvenience to the Princess as the devotion of the Navajo Prince, and a challenge to the Inventor of New York who had hoped to get a ride home on the bird, which took off in the wrong or anyway other direction while the Navajo Prince with useless secrets on his person followed the Princess to the east coast only to be turned into a nocti-lucent cloud by one account or shot by the Princess or Harflex her suitor in a field looking over the town of Windrow, by an account that maybe not even Flick’s father knew nor why his grandfather was out in Pa. in early 1894 talking to union people planning to join Jacob Coxey’s march on Washington and a Pittsburgh astrologer, Cyclone, Jack London ran afoul of when he himself came on the march disguised as a San Francisco hobo—man and wife (you don’t say "wife and man," remarked Lucille who impressed Flick for a long time until her smartness wiped everything out except a miserable and witty and glittering cynicism)—and Joy would wait like an actress counting and would say O.K. she would, or he’d find it hard to give her a short answer, or any answer, to a question about his work, and she’d say "Don’t look down your nose at me," though she watched him with attention and love, which sometimes he thought were the same and sometimes not, until he couldn’t bear it and, here in a club the annual dues of which she’d more than once asked him, he now leaned back and spun round to catch her watching him though she was in his ear, and he hit a voice not quite at the instant he saw spots and had a jolt in the back of his head knocking the tray the waiter had brought though not upsetting the old-fashioned glass and while he stared at the waiter whom he knew, he said into the phone and she said to him with as perfect timing as the timing with which simultaneously he said to her, "You made me think it" and he knew he had called to know she was, for whatever reason, thinking about the one word which was a name and was the person she’d asked him pointedly about before because she’d guessed the person as dangerous and she had seemed once to have listened to this person (only a name to her) more clearly in one story than her husband himself had listened though she had never met the man and had heard Spence’s story only from Mayn and had never been near Spence, for it was Spence who had been in her mind, Mayn knew that, and the reason might be the intimate and painful night of the haircut or might be all these stories she’d liked at first but come to fear as she feared this motion sickness—no, habit—her husband had, that kept him moving though she had guessed also that his work was dangerous also to him and not in the crude and usual sense, but dangerous like dope, yes? but Spence, like a code word, had been in their minds at this moment of 1970 in New York and New Hampshire and he and Joy both knew.

And it had been in the gap of their separation during which he had reached for the phone amid a stream of white towels, green clanking lockers, clattering squash-racket heads flickering by his chair, a clank of scales, a sweaty essence of rubbing alcohol, shaving lotion, the breath of sweet whiskey, and other words and sights altogether heavy enough so that he might have thought to see this word Spence materialize here but Mayn knew that this was unlikely in this absence of his own in which he could no more conceive of his children never having been than miss any more a real ten-year-old boy named Andrew (who’d start talking to him as if he’d never been away saying, "See, Jimmy has this dog that’s having puppies") and whom at five he had lost on the subway, and a real three- or nine- or twelve-year-old girl named Flick who listened at eighteen to his tales of—let’s tell the press it’s called—telepathic separation (though he never put it that way), telepathic separation, there’s the inside dope—and didn’t say a word, and whom likewise he didn’t live with any more—partly because the boy wasn’t five or ten any more (though he might live to lose his old man on the subway) and the girl, who was two years older than the boy, wasn’t nine sitting in a yellow wall of a school bus any more but was fourteen now and would be eighteen in 1974.

But say the word.

Mayn said it. Spence.

"Yes," said Joy into the phone as if she were part of an experiment, "I was thinking it all right."

They exclaimed at how this correspondence occurred. They didn’t know. Did Joy know what Spence had said to Mayn once when a prominent importer had committed suicide—said he knew Mayn’s mother had committed suicide because Mayn had told him but thought maybe it took a second suicide to balance the first—but "I never mentioned my mother to that son of a bitch—" "Remember you’re not very bright, pal," Joy said, "he’s given you your own stuff back so you didn’t pick it up." Well that wasn’t accurate, but he wasn’t going to argue. They joked and he exclaimed again and said he wondered if their interstellar communication was the real thing, but he said he didn’t believe in this real thing anyway, it was coincidence, but Joy said she didn’t care about the proof of it, which (he at once said) was beyond him in any event (and beyond the scientists too, he thought); still she seemed uncertain (uncertain for her), and he thought she was seeing someone seriously, it was two years since 1968, and he asked to speak to the children at the same time thinking that the knowledge he and Joy had of each other sometimes made the children not there, and Flick wasn’t home but Andrew was and asked when his father was coming to see them, he’d made a headband and a belt with the leather kit and was going to make a pair of real beaded moccasins. Mayn felt his hand getting cold and felt it on the dry compactness of kapok —the life jackets Joy had spent time pricing one spring—and he put his drink on a table, then took a quick sip and put it down again and said to his son that yes he would visit them in about two months but he would have to ask Joy and maybe they would take a trip in July, and when Andrew said he would ask Mommy now, Mayn managed to hold him, knowing Andrew thought he’d meant all four of them; but then he couldn’t bring himself to say to Andrew, "You, me, and Flick" and he asked Andrew to put Joy on again, but after Andrew said, "O.K., Dad," he said to his mother, "Dad wants to take me and Flick on a trip," and Mayn called into the phone "In July!" so that a man standing in a towel who had just said "Six percent" to another man in a towel stopped talking and looked at Mayn as if July reminded him of something he didn’t want known, say he was speculating in kapok futures, one hand protectively over his balls.

Joy said, "You never told me you’d been in South America and I do read the paper and I guess I happened to hit on Spence because you’d said he had a bad reputation and took chances you wouldn’t take, but worse than chances; and I knew it was business you were on but I worried."

He had believed her, but her worry had been a new kind of distance that scared him—was he, well, another person now to her?—but what did he expect? And she hadn’t gone so far as to say he ought to have told her.

He didn’t owe her anything.

The waiter’s bar check had had a dark-gray arc across it from the glass. Now he and Joy had said goodbye and he had forgotten to say, Give my love to Flick. Maybe the marriage had not broken up.

But here was Flick in ‘74, and the future he had once felt divided from by these trips back home to his family was his state now.

Yet multiplied with more than interest and fascination and capability and a push of what might have been lonesomeness if it had been all around him instead of just behind him—multiplied also into what he recognized as having been once familiar, namely being in two places at once: in the old days, one of them was that household of his parents where old troubles were reinvented every day or week and the least of troubles was his father’s getting out a paper every Thursday—and the other household was his grandmother’s down the street where he looked at albums of brown snapshots of his mother on a tricycle, his mother on a swing hung from the maple in her backyard, his mother at six and seven darkly calling with her arm thrust out into the sky; the same unusual mother who once before her own disappearance into the elements had told him of a mythical town his grandmother (her mother) had named—and then Jim’s mother caught herself—that seemed also to be their own hometown, and Jim had been able to tell his mother that he knew the name of the town, which did not exactly enable her to die with a smile on her face because she didn’t die—at least, not then—but enabled her to smile remembering stories Margaret had told her too—albums, albums, and albums at his grandmother’s down the street where, when he stayed there and heard the doves like liquid flowers opening again and again, and the distant sleep of his grandfather, he would get up twice each early morning; the household where (in bed) he learned to whistle; and where he unearthed clippings from the nineties when his grandmother had traveled to Chicago and the West, mailing her indulgent impressions back to Windrow to be printed in the Democrat, and never let herself become an old person leaning painfully forward in a chair in order to hear.

Multiplied now into a life he could not explain to Joy. Except in some condensed report of acquiring information, and getting at the truth. And not wasting any more words. So many covering the distance they’d come. While feeling also that a world for which the word world was wrong was happening to him like a long-range capability and he might be part of its vein and cracks if he knew more, but the knowledge brought out the coward in him if laziness was a form of cowardice; and if he would not bang his head against someone else’s table at night thinking again how he might after all have found a way to live with his wife, he could feel wasted by his freedom, he could phone the dreaded Lucille once, and he could like her, and be told to see a movie called Persona and see it and wonder if women were Lesbians, this freedom of his renewing him to be courageously annihilated in future until he became half-convinced he’d been turned into some future more fearful and less original than dabbling imaginers had already worked out. And so he would try to get away from that distant future through which he fell, by seeing such other times as perhaps had not been altogether lost and seeing them so well that they came back into being, times the world had passed through and times when he and his wife had hurt each other—had shown some soulmate kinship in how they moved apart—had even had a lot of laughs—even to finding in the paper at the same moment the morning after Playhouse 90’s Judgment at Nuremberg that the actor Claude Rains had had the last two words of his outraged question deprived of sound—kaput—because the sponsor was the American Gas Association which in 1959 supplied almost every kitchen range in America. The question was "How in the name of God can you ask me to understand the extermination of men, women, and innocent children in gas ovens?"

news

When the phone comes up in his hand, he has thought out this death of his ahead of time all by himself. For a second, it’s like huge, empty-headed stagefright, and no lights dim but the day pursues him with all the light of all the people he can’t become. But it has been given to him, this, and it is an awful thrill. "Thank you," he remembers saying just now to the man who was phoning as they had agreed, and he meant it. The human voice at the end of the phone line has done the best it could, authoritative and professional, a man, a friend with whom he might still try a set or two of tennis in the early evening under a pillow-like bubble on a city pier. Isn’t the news positive? The news has a future so pressing that his first thought was that he didn’t need to do anything. That is what he doesn’t need. He doesn’t need to do anything. But he doesn’t have time in which not to do anything. His thought has a funny side to it, and he weeps.

He is weeping for the first time in he doesn’t know when, standing alone in his home, his apartment, knowing his front-door buzzer will go any minute. Not having enough time in which not to do anything. That was why he started crying: he has interested himself and knows it. Amused himself, as a parent tells a child. He has wept suddenly but, despite the news, not tragically. He has interested himself and he smiles. It comes upon him, the widening of that smile in the life of his face. He’s going to keep the news to himself instead of giving away his life, damn it. He snorts the snuffle in his nose, feels his socks inside his shoes.

He dials his first wife, listens to the regular sounds and when another woman’s voice answers he remembers she is away and he hangs up. What if he were to tell the strange woman the news? Just a moment now; hold still. He smiles as if he is his own oldest friend behaving familiarly. He is bewildered, but he knows it. Some other being is here with him and it comes to him that it is not the angel of death because he doesn’t believe in angels. He has to wait here in the apartment, he can’t go out yet; but if he doesn’t, he is finished. But outside he is going to be embarrassed by the plain weight of what he now is. He will be thinking about every step he takes. Learning to walk again! That’s pretty good. He weeps. Destination unknown.

He dials his second wife and sees that a child of his might answer and today he hangs up. He feels good. He doesn’t need to do anything. He has to do everything. He doesn’t need to do everything. He doesn’t have time to do nothing. Has he ever done nothing? The buzzer is going to go in a minute, and there is someone or something else not unfriendly but interesting here in the apartment. His girlfriend is going to phone, and he is looking forward to that. He has arranged for her not to know, but though he doesn’t think she knows, he has always loved her for knowing things even before she knows she does, and so today when she asks him how he is, she may not mean merely his whole beautiful and beloved being and self. She will tell him what time to meet her.

"Could I have that in writing?" he joked with his friend, who then trusted him enough to say, "Going to hit me with a malpractice if I’m wrong?" "I hope it won’t come to that." "I hope we’ll talk."

The buzzer bursts and the thought comes to him that his doctor could have less time than he. And with this thought comes the thought that when life comes down on top of you you might imagine, just imagine, dying to get out from under. He has interested himself again, he has done just that; and as he opens the door to the superintendent’s daughter, he sees that he has been interesting himself for a long time.

She has her father’s heavy toolbox and she stands with her shoulders back, confident as a licensed electrician. "It’s in the kitchen, Carrie." "I know," she says. He has seen her so regularly over the years that her pale brown face looks much the same as when she was six looking up at him in the elevator, vivid with her kinky black braids and large skeptical eyes. In those days the mail got delivered by the super’s wife, who was Austrian.

"Can’t sit around and wait for you to burn the house down," Carrie says over her shoulder. "How come you’re not in school?" he says. "Had one class this morning. I go to the Community College." The phone rings and he takes it in the kitchen. He points to the double-socket fixture where the refrigerator normally plugs in, and takes the wall phone off the hook.

"How are you?" his girlfriend asks as if it is fifty mornings since she set eyes on him.

"What time will you be finished?" he says, and his girlfriend pauses familiarly: "You O.K.?"

He stops, because sadness hits his throat and is about to embarrass his voice. "No, as a matter of fact."

"So what’s going on? You mad or something?"

He isn’t going to tell his news to someone else in front of Carrie. She finds the circuit-breaker box. She has on pale blue overalls and a small black-and-white disarmament button pinned to one shoulder strap. She returns to the shorted socket, looking him in the eye as she selects a yellow-handled screwdriver. He says into the phone, "Actually, I’m raring to go"; and, getting out the words, he then does feel mad. Carrie smiles slightly, unscrewing the socket frame. He holds the phone out to her but she pays no attention. "Hang on, I’ll take it in the living room." He lets the phone dangle to the floor and feels curiously accompanied into the other room. "I’m on again," he breathes.

"What do you mean, ‘raring to go’?" says his girlfriend. Some small object falls in the kitchen and Carrie mutters something. His girlfriend wants to know who’s there with him, and, feeling in two places at once, he tells her. She asks how long Carrie will be. "Didn’t her mother die?" That’s right; a few years ago.

"I want you to know something," he says. He hears Carrie in the kitchen, tall and proud; he feels a presence near that other kitchen phone, maybe the enlarged reception, nothing more. "I am mad," he says very quietly.

"What about?" his girlfriend asks.

"I’ll tell you when I see you."

"Oh, great," she says ironically.

"I love you," he says.

"I’m very glad to hear it."

"I miss you," he says, and can’t go on.

"I think about you all the time, even when I’m with you," she says.

He feels, curling into his ear, the possibility that the kitchen phone is being listened to, like a speaker. He is going to die and he doesn’t give a damn how it comes out when he says it to her and to other people he loves, but he is not going to say it at the moment. It is here with him but he almost doesn’t know where.

His girlfriend gives him a place and a time; they say goodbye; something drops in the kitchen. He sits down in an armchair and is unable to weep. "I’ve got to get out of here," he calls to Carrie. "I won’t be long," she says, preoccupied. He thinks about his children, he gives it up for the moment; he knows he wants to see them every day as it is, to feel them come and go near him; he knows they are not overwhelmingly disappointed in him. He thinks of his two former wives, neither of whom regarded him as especially thoughtful. He sees them but has consigned their names to another room and is interested in this brutal feat. The brunette will remember him as an entertaining splitter of hairs; the blonde will think of him as the absent father of her children. He will not be around to miss them but he knows they do not expect him to die like this. When he phones them, he often hears a precise degree of impatience coupled with mild fascination, perhaps at what moved him to call.

What do you owe someone else when you are going to die shortly? A phone call, comes the answer, and he smiles but does not weep.

"I forgot something," says Carrie. She passes from kitchen into foyer and pauses, detained, at the front door to look back at him.

"Does your father cook in your family?" he asks.

"No, he’s out at the airport all day. My sister and me do the cooking," says Carrie. The door slams. He doesn’t want to leave her here. She’s like family, but he doesn’t want to leave anyone here when he goes out. He doesn’t want to go out. He does have time in which to do nothing. He once upon a time in fantasy thought he would leave home if he was going to die. Be sure not to get tucked into a hospital. Go to an island beach to feel the water move; go to starve decently, or starve death out of his bloodstream.

There’s still someone here, and he finds himself in the kitchen putting the phone back on the hook. Carrie’s toolbox is on top of the stove. He is not about to phone his first wife and tell her. It is a failure she would have to share like marriage, and he puts his hand on the phone and knows that she loves him. How does he know? It’s only himself telling him. When he was with her, he sometimes preferred his own company. Sometimzsl

His girlfriend will not accept the news; she will touch him with her hands. She will want at least five more opinions, and she is right. She’s a fighter. His thoughts are no good to anyone. He inventories all the chairs and tables, pictures and rugs and lamps, three small Irish harps and two American Indian shields made out of hide from the hump of a buffalo, and he thinks that they will be here when he gets back and that were his thought made audible it would turn from words into laughter. His daughters and his son will live many nights and days with their father’s death, countless moons burning through the sky of their sleeping eyelids. Is it the presence of the superintendent’s daughter, even her absence, that keeps him from thinking about money, his job, his girlfriend’s face in deep, fortunate sleep when he will secretly and silently talk to her and she will sometimes answer him, though she would not believe this. Is he thinking more trivially than ever? Is he thinking about nothing? is that it? He weeps and laughs quietly, quietly, as the front door opens and Carrie must see him in the living room as she passes from foyer to kitchen.

"I gotta go," he calls to her. He loves her.

"I won’t be long," she says, a pale black girl in the kitchen replacing a short-circuited socket.

He has to get his keys, his wallet, his medicine; has to brush his teeth, go to the bathroom, phone his son to ask how a college interview has gone; has to put on his shoes, put in the small silver cufflinks his girlfriend gave him, write a couple of checks and put them in envelopes, find some stamps, phone for theater tickets, put some albums back in the record cabinet. But this is not the nothing he has no time for. His eyes water at the thought, which is of interest no doubt only to him. Something drops in the kitchen. "Can I help you, Carrie?" he calls. "Are you kidding?" she says. "How you feeling?" she asks. "A lot better," he hears himself say. "That’s nice." "Hey, where’d you learn electricity?" he calls, but he doesn’t go into the kitchen. "You don’t have to stick around," she calls back; "I can lock up."

In his bedroom he finds a five-dollar bill. He hunts for a stamp under a soiled blue handkerchief and something drops off the side of the bureau. He sees his hand in a mirror as he bends to the floor to find whatever it was. It’s a cufflink and it has rolled all the way under the bureau. He almost calls Carrie. His heart turns upon a point of pointless anguish while the cufflink waits. Something tells him to stop trying to move the bureau and, blindly with a gray oblong of laundry cardboard from one of his shirts, he sends the cufflink shooting clear out onto the rug.

When he is ready, he goes to the kitchen and gives Carrie the five dollars. His fingers touch her palm. "You didn’t have to," she says, happily. "It’s appreciated," he says. "Anybody can do it," she says. She plugs in the refrigerator and it hums.

"I’m afraid there’s a leak in the flusher pipe by the toilet handle," he says.

"I’ll leave that one for my father," Carrie tells him knowingly.

"For some reason I don’t want to leave you here," he says.

"Some days are like that," she says lightly.

"This is a big day for me," he says.

"Good," she says, and smiles at him.

"Yeah," he says.

"Go with it," says Carrie.

"I found out I was interested in myself," he explains. "You did?" she says. He laughs and so does she. He sees for the first time what he will be leaving.

"Do you find you have enough time to do all the things you need to?" he asks.

"There’s never enough hours in the day," she says, as if she might have heard it from an elder. Something in him looks for an extra hour. It is an interesting search which he decides not to share with Carrie. "What do you do, then?" he asks.

"I just find that extra hour."

Something moves all over the apartment and comes toward him. He wants to tell her his news. There’s something he mustn’t forget to take with him. It is what made him laugh. It is what he is leaving. He doesn’t quite have the thought yet.

"Is it because something unexpected always comes up?" he asks.

"No, I wouldn’t say that," says Carrie, and looks at him. "It’s always the same." She brings the top tiers of the toolbox together and latches it. It has a large blue-and-silver sticker on the side with a picture of a wrench and the words I MAKE MY LIVING WITH SNAP-ON TOOLS PLEASE DON’T ASK TO BORROW THEM.

"That’s a fantastic toolbox. What did you need downstairs?"

"I had to make a phone call."

"So where’s that hour? Where do you find it?" he asks, as if she will be able to tell him.

"It’s in here," says Carrie and points in the general direction of her heart.

"Oh, there/’ he says, let down. "What do you need it for?"

"Nothing much," she says. She hoists the toolbox off the stove. "Listen, I got to go," she says.

"I know," he says.

On impulse, she shakes his hand.

known bits III

r. Sometime you got to know before you do. But it’s still Doing, because it’s building. Told this to Grace Kimball, first-name basis, and she agreed, because she always takes time for you. Told her other data but not key policy change Gustave and me initiated of opening message envelopes if deemed necessary whether large envelope or small. This was what the show in the warehouse-theater said, I told Grace: you better check what you’re carrying around with you before you get there, because it might be bad news and people don’t go for bad news and if it’s on the heavy side what if it’s a tinder box as the mother of Jim Banks would say, and you don’t do anything?

But Grace said the Hamletin was sposedly a gay camp—not to worry, you’re all right, darling—while Cliff came off the phone with just a totally shrunken T-shirt with SANDSTONE on it on, said Maureen was coming up from Florida for a visit and thought the plan to light-rape a random male could be actualized for the occasion of her visit, and Grace hugged me and asked if I’d like to be a tryout and how old was I and I kidded her, What year is it? and she said 1977. What if victim suffered heart attack, J.B. asked G.K., who replied, handing over envelope to be delivered at once to women’s organization sponsoring and graphicking her next Love-an-Audience slide-lecture, It could only enlarge your heart, Jimmy. Cliff asked, How’re you doing? Do you flow-chart your week’s business on a space grid? He explained.

But I had explanations for him that I cdn’t speak out: (1) if arriving at red light in left lane of north-south street at intersection with cross-street that runs left, then bike can run the light if any car instead of crossing intersection turns into north-south street momentarily blocking potential intersection-cros-ser behind it; (2) but if arriving in right lane at same red light, bike may turn like pedestrian to cross to left side in front of vehicles stopped at light, and then proceed as in (1)—and if, on approaching same light on right side and fellow vehicles have not quite come abreast of intersection, bike may curve over to, in this case, left. In general, bike makes possible the charting of many flow-curves reducing distances along blocks of city grid. Gives most routes a curve through flow, yet not to make J.B. ever forget his friends, such as old geezer outside T&W who helped him get up, and old lady who minded bike, who would understand J.B. later view (when Independent Messenger Unit established though prior to new location not run by Spence/Santee) that sometimes possible to build when in motion and only when. And since business goes on in present location or at future base, "place of business" is not same as business—business is not place. But what is business? Gustave could only laugh, had weird laugh potentially not good for business. He met saxophone player doing gig on subway—same one as before—who identified self as angel from outer space requiring legal tender to establish self in present planet; but Gustave said that Spence/Santee had called Jim Banks an angel.

Gustave laughed. J.B. said he liked being called Brother, as Grace Kimball did as did sometimes Mother, though J.B. had no brother or sister. But Gustave said that maybe retard messengers were all angels and Spence/Santee said "they" knew things "we" didn’t. Bike lanes beginning to prove curved sometimes and may be taken away. Where’d you learn to ride a bike, cab driver yelled at me, at J.B., and there wasn’t time to say learned in secret in trashed lot in Brooklyn that they took away one day.

s. Lane is in mind of operator, and in mind is always more than one lane, is lanes to one side or both. And since operator and sometimes bike operator, with hopefully body-signal, shift lane and think ahead, lane is how you think and so lane can zigzag, can curve, and you look ahead like psychic consultation and see lanes not parallel, or parallel but not straight, maybe not even on bulging and potholed north-south avenue white-painted sometimes, and even if parallel-painted the lanes you really track they parallel the m/nd right up onto the sidewalk like when a tall white woman in a black coat with bright fur collar like a fox glitters her eyes at me when I’m passing at speed, when she don’t know me but the man with her does but didn’t seem to look at me, he has sport coat and hat on and scarf and like man in cab that passed last week with Spence/Santee in it but is not that man but the one who wore black pinstripe strolling in Central Park with Lady Luisa the singer loving him but now as I passed the tall lady with the fur, this man laughed and said (to her), Parallel!, or words to that effect which when spoken do not need to be opened like potentially hazardous envelope carried from Lady Luisa’s pad uptown (where probably this same man’s foreign voice was heard probably back in bathroom or someplace singing) down then to singer Ford North’s pad (with sofa out by elevator like moving) (though envelope handed examined and added to and handed back by same red-to-gray-bearded man already last week seen beside piano in warehouse); to foundation then, where received by girl Amy who went away, and Xeroxing whoom-whoom was heard, and came back with envelope to be carried direct to warehouse, but Gustave he phoned at that moment right there to foundation hoping to catch me but then could not speak except to say Wing, Senora Wing, and I could not speak because envelope was moving slightly in hands and kind Amy was on the watch and I had problems in terms of saying the correct words, especially with Gustave laughing weirdly at his end so hands shook and Amy came and held one and said it was chilly. The foreign man who was in the cab with Spence/Santee came out of office and was bald and said to me, She is a girl with the most true grit, and we all laughed at that. Amy said to him, You were saying about the void. . . ?

t. People coming down off the sidewalks like the light was green, leaving the sidewalk to take up position in way of outer-lane vehicle such as bike so either brake and miss civilian and be hit by truck or in some cases passenger/ pedestrian-to-be stepping off stopped bus. Sidewalk leavers take up position by ignoring oncoming bike, not looking at it and at rider-operator, and turning slightly away from it like you didn’t exist and like they are looking at something else worth looking at too. If you knew any one of these people, you might find they was divorced with children, or was junky, or was former movie or opera star just out walking to buy a present for someone or themselves, or had concealed video gear, or had unseen cancer. People that took up position regardless of themselves and of oncoming bike and messenger and his business and would be unknown quantities except would make you think you better go back to school get some more education, they’re smoking their cigarettes and talking and thinking and not thinking about position they take up in ignorance of oncoming messenger bike, they just take it up.

Stopped in cold sunlight southbound to check contents of envelope and envelope gave feeling of many days, many weeks, years, and bike leaning against phone booth led to phoning Mother: How you doing? I asked her and she said, How you doing? but did not ask, Why you calling in the middle of the day? and I said, I think I want to go to school and get some more education. She said, You got your own business now even if you didn’t tell me, and you are a man, not a boy, you a real man, Jimmy, and I am proud of you, but don’t you get hurt. If you got your own business you don’t need to go back to school.

u. Coasted on that one, spiraling back and forth down Seventh like my own daytime streetlamp in the middle of the avenue until cabs on either side hollering straightened me out but I’m still in the middle until I reach a red light and cut over and onto sidewalk. Envelope contains—but social worker’s dream comes to mind, Mother passed it on to son J.B. only yesterday (and where did it go? and who knows why or how? goes song Mother sang in bathtub and at kitchen stove) that in social worker’s dream J.B. didn’t stick to his job at T&W and went to electrician school and met a whole team of new people preparing to go out searching for positions, and J.B. stuck his finger in the Boulder Dam socket and blew out all the colored string of lights one end of the Mississippi River to the next and he was O.K. but the country was in a mess—like a dream could be anything but relates to them not me but never to future because how could it? and the future would be the one thing that dreams do not tell but when the envelope opened while I’m straddling my bike tells what will happen to messenger "then and there" as "preparation" for "what is to come": all this and more in margins of music pages all in pencil and name of music work is Hamletin, and J.B. had seen Lady Luisa penciling one more note when J.B. arrived and was let in and she pulled stuff out of envelope, scribbled, and replaced, but handwriting not all the same and Lady Luisa would never say messenger be liquidated then and there, so this note was someone else’s, so hers must be, for example, "music like venerable Verdi yet original": yet she started to erase in a hurry and then gave up and some of erasing was on backside and in capitals, and read, together with words I recognized from the regular music lines ("And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe But even his mother shall call it accident") various initials across and down such as RS (which could be Ray Spence) and with a U over the S and then an SR (reversing Ray Spence/Santee) and with another U over that S, so you had US and USSR, if you tried, but meanwhile a sharp arrow digging down the margin from the Rs to first PM (which could be afternoon or evening) and actually between the P and the M, and then written in, so you had PRM, but with "Miles" written in, and below it an AM (morning) with above the M a J and below the A a B—which would have strongly indicated a JB for Jim Banks (throw in M for messenger), except vertically down the margin went, then, old familiars

PM PRM PRP SR

plus, this time, P (luton.) R (eact.) 1964 / USSR / ABM, plus, then, the words Since there’s no help followed by PM PRM MRM PRP SR, with, then, a big H drawn so it looked like an R and a big R drawn so it looked like an H, and then a big question mark curling around

if R = H, then MRM = MHM

leaving little room at bottom of margin for "Delivery Vehicles" and

UNO

N S G 1975

as the margin was needed when the backside of this page was all the time blank unless with invisible ink, and scrawled at bottom, Now at something’s latest breath with a question mark over the "something" which began with L and was certainly not Otto which is Gustave’s last name, but could have been Luisa written small.

v. Took hold of gooseneck and right handlebar; examined front wheel alignment in front brake pads, greasy dirt in rear chain sprockets; found potential trouble spot in Teflon brake-cable housing slightly bent and scuffed when I upside-down’d bike to check wheel spin before leaving office last night no longer felt to be secure. Though they might be right that "we" know something going on in City no one else does: but wondered what it could be.

Riding down avenue before turn, recalled twilight some days ago and feelings then and need to act on knowhow.

Reached warehouse-theater, spotted Senora Wing but would never give her the envelope (which she saw anyway plus bike plus me plus truth that Independent Messenger Unit was in operation but she said nothing and went on in), saw big-man singer spring from taxi making it rock back and forth and side to side so it rocked circular for a second—and swiftly I handed the envelope to him, seeing no rapier at his side and not looking at him but mumbling, No need for receipt, but hearing from him in song-type tone, I am afeard you make a wonton of me & A hit, a hit, a hit—so I would have asked him for tickets if I had not thought him ready to open the envelope.

So I was gone with his Thaaaaank U, dear boy! lowering after me and Gustave and the office on my mind yet something else—the twilight of some days ago, when I was another man at the same time that I was the one my mother now called a man: for was considering grabbing a free tow on a slow-moving Checker cab practically falling apart: but looking back was diverted by something way high and slipped insanely out into center of evening traffic in Fifth Avenue and brought bicycle to a position of stationary rest and looked back up at the Empire State Building and there were birds circling the Empire State tower devouring moths (I didn’t dream) for that was what they were doing, having studied insects, with the cars sides wiping trousers and bike structure, making own wind, and I answered in my own mind the question my mother asked me and asked in presence once of social worker who didn’t know then that I had a new business, What month is it? can you tell us what month it is? Because looking up at night at the birds circling the Empire State way high near the giant antenna devouring moths, I could say to myself, It’s beautiful, it is a beautiful night.

w. Until, upon opening door and spotting big Gustave hunched over answering machine and quick craning neck around at me in case I was Spence, Ray, or Ray Santee, I would have asked How are you doing? but heard a man with an accent begin a message with "Mason" and say in no uncertain terms that they had to discuss the messenger service—and then a new message cut in and it was that voice called T.W. saying a direct phone contact was essential and leaving a number I somehow knew but I didn’t know how followed by the words new evidence of trace and a buzz, as if the voice had been interrupted by its own power. And Gustave turned and opened his mouth to start to laugh and his jaw was as large as mine and he held out both hands but did not laugh. He turned machine on.

I informed him we are in danger and must move the business from this dump, it isn’t our office anyhow. Phone rang and we looked at it and the machine and all the time I listened with my hands on handlebars for sound of steps coming upstairs but none, and on machine came voice speaking so careful it was inside both me and Gustave circling down almost our throat but not throat—only ear and head—and Gustave started to laugh and put his hand over his mouth and his face got like those dogs that have all the skin and the voice which was the one called Mason and foreign said: "We are becoming impatient with you and your little operation and it is obvious that you and S.M. ‘s father know the links between this stolen music and much else including the Cuban and time is running out for you and your boys, you little insect, there in your little base of operations"—followed by a buzz like a phone and then nothing and I thought of Amy’s boss and his accent when he spoke kindly in the foundation office, and sometimes stayed in his room and you only heard him.

I told Gustave we build on what we know and sometime we got to do without knowing. He laughed and was shivering and began taking off his big coat but I said not to. We got to deal with known obstacles in lane-related routes. Forget Santee called me light of his life. Angel. Forget breath of life, coinage of my brain. The business has to survive.

x. Gustave had a headache. Examined the back of his head where he had blood last week. Loose ends of other people no concern of you and me. Go on what you know. Go on policy. Remember what can happen to messenger with bad news. We got no bad news in us, Gustave—it’s only in envelope. Gustave laughed. I gave him log to read.

y. Senora Wing came on machine. Jimmy we need you, you better get down here, you lose out. I told Gustave we got to go. Move business. Wipe prints off phone and desk. Took log out of Gustave’s hands. I said we would go see the old lady and old geezer, if he didn’t go on working vacation he said he needed yet. We would watch for them two corners away so Senora Wing or Turnstein not see us. We in danger. We get out of here or we never be heard from again. Machine comes on again with piano music and singing in background, and hammering. I said That’s O.K., we get a new office. Machine voice is a woman talking fast Spanish I didn’t understand except Spence.

Outside I saw bike rider I thought was white jerk with gray beard and orange headband who looked like my father only white except my father not alive probably, and I told Gustave what Chilean gentleman at foundation said to Amy. I said it to Gustave: ‘The void is the decent interval between exposure to our parents and the time when we can inherit their habits."

I was surprised I could say it.

I walked my bike south and Gustave was right with me.

Other words of the man at the foundation came to me but in bits, but I remembered "structure," yes I remembered that word "structure," and I remembered "small-scale units," and I remembered feeling he was a fine man, a kind man, a gentleman, and how he and the girl smiled when at the end of this bunch of bits that I couldn’t quite remember, he said "as if people mattered." I thought I might take a vacation sometime like the old guy said he was.

THE CURVE SPEAKS UPON THE VOID

If it could speak—and he and his new friend were discussing whether it actually could—his heart would have had a thing or two to say about how two older friends of his, Amy and Jim, had acted. Larry’s heart wasn’t going round in circles so much, and had let some part of itself go. He had plenty of heart; he wasn’t cold no matter what his mother had once said about how he kept the lid on, and no matter if his father said Lar’ needed to see Martha and he paid the bills.

But, O.K., what had looked like danger the other night still might be; but he cared a lot less now. So hosting his new friend Donald Dooley from Economics class in the clear light of a cloudy day, Larry thought of Amy as quite far away, far more than thirty blocks’ bike ride (or walk); an older chick, an older (O.K.) woman, or anyway person; or a government agent implicated in something. She had vanished from her apartment (and she only five or six years older than Larry!), and, that night, had left her things all over that made it look like she had been abducted. Meanwhile, Jim Mayn mattered much more to Larry, who could not understand how on the morning after Amy’s apparent disappearance if not abduction Mayn had emplaned from La Guardia airport on a tristate business trip without knowing if Amy was all right for God’s sake, so maybe he didn’t even care; yet the night before upon learning from Larry that Amy was gone, Mayn had made with him a whirlwind visit to the East Side foundation where she worked (maybe one more interruption before Lar’s life finally began): it was a building and block where nothing was happening at that late hour, no abductions, no light rape (like what Maureen and Grace kidded they would subject a man to someday), no thefts, no cop cars screeching up onto the sidewalks, no execution of babies, nothing at that late hour except a Mexican watchman Mayn knew in suspenders playing a battery-powered electronic game at a rickety little logging-in table, one knee crossed over the other (while, as a bike flashed past exactly like Lar’s old Raleigh and come to think of it with a black kid on it but painted silver—repainted? a bit thickly?—down the street in a closed but brightly lighted shop that sold mainland-Chinese shirts, pants, and trinkets, an Asiatic woman who stayed in Larry’s mind had been sitting on some phone books).

Anyway (but God! nothing was anyway), the next morning and early afternoon Larry had bothered to check out Amy’s fate, though she was drifting away from him, well always close at heart for he would never change toward her, he’s her friend for God’s sake and prob’ly on some strange parallel trip to hers, meet for a beer some year or cross jaws on some far-future phone waiting maybe just around the rincon if some angel (Hell’s or other or all of the above) hasn’t ripped its hookah out by the roots in anger at the system, drifting ‘way from Lar’ along her own parallel path, but his own orbit had to be his course, which was no-going-in-circles any more but was heady-looking toward unknown new friends, new people, wing out to the West Coast (New York’11 be here waiting) so, then, if, given, a heady orbit into the immediate future, well just a bit of a spin, if skewed—but fuck skew! let it go, let it crawl up Dr. Rail’s blackboard graphed out of someone else’s mind who was controlling the economy if not every day—Amy, Amy, the fine beautiful elsewhere-skew-orbital Amy’s all right—she had come to work at noon, having called in; and Larry had finessed the switchboard lady into telling him that Amy was wearing what he knew to be the same clothes as those in which she disappeared the night before, though then he contemplated her underwear and that upset him, skewed him, he didn’t know why, it was because (yes) he started to take off her clothes only to fear her helplessness. But having finessed the switchboard operator he then spoke to Amy in the flesh and she sort of said she was sorry. Oh she had been summoned on an unexpected research chore— What chore? Lar’ didn’t block himself from asking— Oh a deadline, some music, some ethnic music, they had to get some information on it, her boss needed her, she should have left Larry a— Sure, sure, he said—but she was O.K. And Larry did not seem to surprise her by not pursuing the matter.

But now four days later, Larry thought he was over Amy, and Larry’s Economics classmate Donald Dooley, a new friend, put his great backpack on the floor of Larry’s room and leaned up against the edge of Larry’s rolltop desk purchased for Larry by his mother shortly before she had split (split? but she was the one who had stayed—or, that is, stayed on in the Long Island house). Donald was agreeing at length, that the heart as a bodily organ had little to do with your feelings, for that was bullshit, though your chest was for sure a key area in the feelings and the heart of course could be affected by the feelings, even a plastic heart, if there were any yet; feelings, whether heart-rooted or not, must never be dismissed, especially your own, and happened to be the basis of most thought (not all) and might be more (than brain) why thought went on and on, though sometimes it was hardly, you know, thought.

You say "sometimes" quite a lot, Larry said. Actually, Donald and Larry awaited Donald’s girlfriend, who was meeting Donald at Larry’s apartment house in Murray Hill. Larry and Donald were discussing not exactly anatomy or "capital pun." or Mai thus in a Radioactive Era or straight Economics assignments, but reincarnation; God, Donald had brought it up, not Larry, Larry was sure of that, though they shared the view that there were different forms, some in action from moment to moment though Donald wasn’t sure how.

Donald had raised his chin aiming his brown beard at the photograph of Sequoya, the Cherokee genius whose English-alphabet syllable notation for his people’s language enabled them to put out their own newspaper and influenced them to write their own constitution. The picture had been given to Larry by Mayn and had come from Mayn’s father’s basement in the old hometown in New Jersey. A relative of Mayn’s had taken the photograph. Donald said he wasn’t sure they ought to be discussing reincarnation, because it didn’t feel too good today, he didn’t know why, did Larry know what Donald meant? And Larry, who was envisioning Donald’s girl, whom he had never met, recounted a dream he had had the night before.

First, however, he added that he had an elder friend who claimed never to have had these regular sleeping dreams, and Donald, who turned out to be surprisingly just Larry’s age to the week and with whom Larry realized he wanted to be . . . not outa here, though it’s like that, but—outa here and here at the same time, or left alone ... but with Donald (or whoever) who had seemed militant and superior when Larry had heard him in Eco class try to carve Professor Rail limb from limb, silver horseshoe belt buckle and all, but now was just Donald (yea D.D.!)—nodded rapidly as if he too had known someone who didn’t dream, and, though listening to Lar’ here, then abruptly so softly interjected, "You might be dreaming/or him—know what I mean?"

In Larry’s dream, driven on but braked and reined in ("You’re a dream, guy," sillies D.D. suddenly), a dream that in fact Larry had set out to dream so maybe it didn’t really count or so he’d told himself as he dreamt it—and Donald shook his head reassuring Larry that it did count)—Larry had (and here was the point) lost his father’s name. Martin, Dave, Donald (!), Ted, Stanislas, Asa, Lou, Beebe (! there was a first name for you), Jaime, Manny, Angel, Sandy. But then it came back to Larry underground like a thing or animal and so he could introduce his father to an eligible woman who by chance had shaved herself according to the cunt-positive program of his mother’s friend Grace Kimball who dropped in on Larry and rapped about whatever he wanted to rap about and licked the drip flow off the rim of the buckwheat honey jar having generously sweetened her coffee hit—for Lar’s into making finest (home-ground) Colombian lately. Donald Dooley frowned at all or some of this, maybe the Cunt Positive?, but tilted his face to show he was still here—and it was still hard to see through a piss-saffron shower-curtain-type robe which in the dream Larry knew was no big deal, it was like taking a pee, and the "underground" through which his father’s name came back to him in the dream was ducted into Larry’s vein so when that name "Marv" came back to him it was wired into circulation desde luego (at once) if he could only figure how, but in the dream his heart was a big octopus-eye with its friendly arms curved back into it and it knew how the stuff in the dream got wired into circ but didn’t let on how except within the motion of its own "dream" system, except Lar’ felt that where the curvature of the at least left ventricle was greatest the pressure of the emotion was, too—which was the reverse of some Dreaded-Modulus-mode ratio stuck in the back of his mind like he had a windpipe in his mind but the curvatures in question under varying degrees of dilation might contour-code an actual other person which in some mode you were—under certain unknown pressures. Yet, God knew, Larry was so tired coping (and mainly with his parents), that—he had given up and woken, knowing that his father was not here and knowing, as he resisted the coincidental drive to make waking up congruent with getting up, that it would be all right to lie in bed—chewing chalk, his gums felt like—and let his dreams—(Be good to your body, said Donald.)

Larry had a lot of dreams, a real load of dreams, while this older friend the newsman Mayn claimed never to have ‘em at all, and Lar’ privately, because it was complicated to get into with Donald, knew that Mayn awaited Larry’s latest and (who knew?) definitive views on Simultaneous Reincarnation—not, he hoped, so Mayn could retell them over a fatherly beer with Amy (who Larry knew now could never love him), or even to a humorous, husky, and husky-voiced man named Ted though Ted had only a few more months to live and wanted to spend it in memorable conversation—but to settle if Jim’s past life could really have been in future, for Larry cared about Jim and not in just the sense that all people matter more or less). Jim, O.K., did have waking dreams, though ofttimes thorough and far-grasping. Larry could say almost anything to Jim but could not for some reason disagree with him on this if only to the point of reminding him that infants dreamed far more than grownups. Champion of all dreamers was, you know, the fetus. And if with twins or triplets (the Ur consciousness-raising group) your fetus didn’t have on average as much privacy and freedom of growth to get the circuitry developing, maybe on the other hand sibling interference multiplied the voltages, and if during gestation the individual fetus didn’t have much content to dream about, God, think what it had been recently through, arriving into being !—plus the fact that humans had nothing to do during gestation unlike shark fetuses that had teeth from the seminal moment or absolute beginning— Conceived with teeth? challenged D.D.—and went after each other in-womb, getting right down to it, obstacles each to each uniting a good fight and nutrient value where only one can win, that is, the one that survives for the mother-sub to fire forth her one surviving offspring (but shit! it’s astern, of course) full-speed on B-day.

"Ur?" asked Donald, and Larry explained, while envisioning with some happiness or other the Chinese woman seen the night he and a tight-lipped Mayn had gone in search of Amy at the foundation ("Nice space here," Donald indicated the apartment as a whole) and Jim when they were on their way downtown later gave Larry a five-dollar bill when he left the cab. But now Larry hardly heard himself answer like homework the "Ur" query, for he and Donald had not necessarily stopped discussing the heart, and a beatless, perhaps timeless measure came to him and was gone as if it had thought better of him!—md he reported that Mayn had told of a lighting designer-dealer whose girlfriend had had four miscarriages and had been told by her doctor that now she was again with child she would have to take it super-easy virtually like a flat-on-her-back invalid, and the man, who had once been Jim’s wife’s employer (when she had been, obviously, Jim’s wife) had actually seen the thumb-size fetus, and the fetus (if you want to hear the news) was all heart, and he talked to it and hoped it would know his loving voice when it came out; but Larry could tell that other parts of the body could dream, so why not a heart?

This was Larry’s first new friendship since his parents had split up— hey, he had just come out and said that! to himself, that is—yes, first since his parents had split up, launching him into a Manhattan apartment with his dad, while his mother and her friend lived on the Island (whom Larry wanted to talk to Donald about but he was shy about betraying his mother and also didn’t really know much on the new road of their life—their life? their life?—which was in the house in Long Island where Larry grew up. Donald pointed out that your feet and arms could go to sleep, so presumably they could dream. They laughed and Larry said there was some vino in the fridge. Donald asked if there was a vacuum handy and Lar’ said he’d been cleaning house when D.D. arrived. Good, said D.D. Yeah, said Lar’, what did he need it for? His typewriter needed a vacuum, said Donald, tapping his pack beside him on the floor. Larry felt that Donald liked taking off his backpack with its twenty-degrees-below-freezing down bag rolled on top, and putting it back on. Donald was rural-oriented but also, he said, urban-oriented; and Larry could see he liked being on the move. Larry had not been reaching for the phone to dial anyone when Donald Dooley had rung from the lobby to say that he was here, unexpectedly, and he would like to come up (because D.D. made statements more than asked questions).

Out by the elevator, there was a giant dark-orange couch left by the opera singer Ford North ("Please call me Ford, won’t you?"), and it had tasseled cushions and had been arrested there in the public hall on its way out of the building, perhaps to a new apartment, but it hadn’t moved in three or four days, and anybody could steer around it or could sit on it, for example the liquor deliveryman, while waiting for the elevator, which seemed to Larry too small for the couch even if they took the roof off; and this little guy Ford’s friend with the big eyes and a huge charge of dark-haired energy sat there waiting for the elevator or something like Napoleon on hold, but he had had a fight with Ford North, and Larry had learned from Grace that this strange little dancer-type gay guy who wrote music was probably going to be in her first Men’s (Nude) Workshop. And if Larry had any outside obstacles (not his own) to dropping all this obstacle (well, not course, but) hunt, he had no objections to their leaving him (alone, that is—that is, alone with his new-type friends). So Larry knew that there was a lot going down, but he had not been inclined to reach for the phone (like, to call Mayn, who was back). Mayn had gone to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Washington at a hell of a time, when Amy had been missing and Larry had had an insinuating call from a son of a bitch who asked if Larry had the phone number where Mayn’s daughter was staying, and Larry had had a dumb inkling, like a gentle dopy looping boomerang that came back to him, that the caller already knew the phone number.

The new plug-in instrument (in addition to the kitchen wall-phone) seldom rang, but when it did, it felt in its off-key tinkle like the middle of the night: which it lately had been, for his mother Susan phoned him once at midnight, he told Donald—and once at three-seventeen A.M. in red on his clock radio —in tears, wondering how Larry was (so he said, Are you awake?, the very words Amy had said when she called to ask when Mayn was coming back and if Larry knew if Mayn knew this guy Spence and a messenger named Gustave part of a strange group of retarded messengers Spence was said to employ in connection with a warehouse-theater over on the West Side)—Sue’s call and her words and her tears were light years from that Larry’s gotta get laid crap in front of other people, Grace Kimball’s friends many like healthy-looking TV-commercial actors/actresses, none into marriage though some still in it, lots of eye-contact friendliness boo-buoying up a confidence training itself by supporting others-others-others, some of these folk in training to see who can be most trim-line, most "up," most free of habit patterns but confusing when they called work "addiction" and love likewise, and listen, quaaludes were definitely not the same thing and less like love than like heroin, O.K.?, so Larry held to his small corner of history, of conviction, surprised that never in the dark of her Major Life Change (though Marv had always done dishes, some cooking, shopped for food, bartered money for forage after hunting down the money in hill and valley), never had she plugged into the available jack of probability circuit in order to imagine that her son upon the Person, Object, though no Obstacle ("Treat me like a piece of meat, Larry!") of Diane of Port Adams already had lost his virginity (if of guys it be so called), for he had given it and to himself as much as to Diane of the Visine-rinsed eye whites and mouth and eye sockets relaxed into soft stone, Diane of the slow tongue and of the shopping-center shortcut when they all lived in Port Adams—while Susan where she was with the Other or ‘‘Great Spirit" she’s trial-living with seemed for the moment to be doing all the dishes and cooking—simultaneously apologized for waking him up, it didn’t sound like her and not because it was three-seventeen till his red L.E.D.s turned three-eighteen, she didn’t sound like that toughie she used to be, but oh the luxury of having this extra ear against his and being able, through the bedside plug-in, to turn on either side or on his back, to curl up or down (curving his whole reception of the voice so it became part of him), it made other people only as important as they were, not more: unless you gave in to them so you let yourself think about waiting for them to phone, which if he had done with his mother (who was still a strong mother through these flowing, glistening, misting tears, but he might just not say that kind of thing because) it would be understood as pigeonholing women into vulnerable, weak, etcetera, which wasn’t what he was feeling at all!

And while receiving feedback from Donald Dooley on reincarnation as arising out of crisis in your life when the void opening in front of you could outguess you if you put yourself into it so you found you were more than one person which was O.K. and scary and creative, Larry went on savoring the dream of the names, savoring even some reach within the nest of them to a next he didn’t quite get his head around where he was subject of a prediction.

Donald agreed that the evolutionary reincarnation ensued through social history as a whole, not in literal reappearance of souls in new forms they had earned or longed for—speaking gently, slowly as if knowing that Larry had something wonderful and troubling to continue with. But savoring Donald’s words and friendly manner, Lar’ wanted to detour around reincarnation, and not because he savored the dream of names: from Martin (which was one letter off his father’s and the closest but really far away from his father’s self) to Angel (a Puerto Rican name in all probability), Lar’ comprehended a nest of dreams coming up out of good ground bearing more messages than he had regular time for or light to see by, and these included his dad’s own name, which had proved upon waking no substitute for his dad’s presence standing under the shower so quiet inside the falling water, bending his head and curving his whole contentment along the path of the steam iron ironing some shirt of his (he didn’t iron Larry’s, and neither did Lar’!).

So when the phone rang, Larry saw he had been slipping away from Donald, yet was it because Reincarnation of which un branch was Simultaneous Reincarnation (S.R.) threatened Larry? No big deal because Jim Mayn looked forward to Lar’s definitive formulation in good heart and faith and a good casual smile lay between them and related to the possibility of breakthrough vis a vis S.R.; yet it was in the air, and Kimball breathed S.R. in and out and Mayn did not oppose research into it, and there’d been this near-dream involving Larry in it as target of a prediction, and somehow shit S.R. in its theoretical warp seems playing into the wilderness of those older people’s lives full-up with dejd vu (see recent scientific studies of) cum painful recollection cum should-haves and shouldn’t-haves etcetera so heavy all in all and wall to wall with after-lives that come to think of It they are downright abstract, and Larry doesn’t just now want these people’s sympathy and the strings attached, or even praise, specially for his no doubt epochal concepts. Nor wants to even, like, explain that he’ll settle for the mainland-Chinese lady sitting on the phone books.

And let Mayn muse in the night taxi that the noted man whom Amy gal-Friday’d for—where research might well cover surveillance—at the foundation, continued still, upwards of four years after the final manned Moon shot, to be mixed up with a hustler whom Mayn would like to throttle who even Mayn the world’s (according to him) least-prone-to-lurid-plot-speculation-much-less-conspiracy-peddling of "current historians" is coming to believe may now be engineering news without quite knowing it in order to make a buck out of being there when the lightning strikes; and let Mayn muse that he felt he might be indirectly responsible for the death of a fellow journalist in Chile in 1963—Mayn’s great to know, etcetera, but this morning Larry thinks he would never have moved back into that apartment where Mayn and his family had lived even if Mayn did have some co-oping deal with the landlord (according to Lar’s father) plus Lar’ knew of Mayn’s daughter-inspired interest in a landlord syndicate’s link with insurance groups, O.K., O.K. already— Larry would frankly rather listen to Donald Dooley reveal how tobacco firms borrow great sums from insurance groups in return for soft-pedaling cancer when approaching that mass of client-insurees who matter too deeply to their insurers to be asked to worry about the mysterious workings of inflation or cell play: and if, for an awful moment right out of some poetry that Lar’ had read in high school, a shadow passes Between, an unembodied smile, deja-vu’ing weeks-ancient words of the Dreaded Modulus that People (not just) Matter, People aRe Matter, till as—quite far from Lar’s dad Marv’s 1940s sexista /18 (‘less dey raise de age)—R turns into (and therefore equals) = , the wind, with perhaps that secret curve attributed to it in an "off-the-wall family discussion" Jim Mayn half-recalled from "outer space or outer something," bore Larry toward the phone a la part slippage from Donald via daydream warmed by abstraction, part Donald’s fulsome conceptualism (where one sentence became an oration) since his girlfriend was coming over but it wasn’t Donald’s but Larry’s abstract and traced not by D.’s word-content but only by his voice-print though Larry knew Donald was taking off on some of Larry’s guarded remarks on reincarnation being Now and a matter of crisis and a void that opened in front of you that you filled before you hit it, in his opinion, and as Lar’ rose to go for the phone and heard D.D. say wine was good unless he had some Cuerva and saw gratefully the particular Chinese woman of four nights ago sitting on three phone books with covers ripped off, her gray wool socks puffed by her plump feet out of her slippers, he had to speak and hardly knew what he was fast saying (or, rather, why) between the first ring and the second: "Look, my mother is living with another woman out on the Island, and I was freaked out about it underneath all this insane fucking Open Marriage BiSexual Cool that’s going around, you know, but I didn’t know who to talk to but now I’m freaked out that she isn’t happy and probably wants to get back with my father but I didn’t see why they split in the first place but now I don’t feel good about them getting back together." He was moving out of the room toward the kitchen, looking back not at the plug-in phone but at Donald, who was nodding and smiling and saying, "You’ve had a lot to deal with, man, but it’s all right, you know?, it’s all right. It’s all cool. Let it go."

We gotta get outa here, Lar’ thought—a piece of him out there beams back but not so fast as light to its old spot in his shoulder-neck-tension field finding in its place there a living-breathing eye{\), wait, an eye in his newly relaxed neck-and-shoulder area? as he concentrated it became an all-purpose heart (up there) and in touch with feelings though others’ (don’t please try to explain it!) as fast as light, attractive as somebody else, and charged with such communicative volts it flares the contradictory decadence of the would-be returning weak piece into one a billion times less weak as if to take the measure of—

"I think I just saw my father’s death—" Phone ring again before he seize (about to sneeze) . . . "—but it didn’t look like him."

‘That’s heavy, Larry," said Donald Dooley from the bedroom, "but—" Way ahead of him, Larry took the call and sneezed beyond it, receiving in return a current of nothings sidestepping him as they came at him and flowed by, while the voices in the ear-mike of the receiver were not the Chinese woman in the shop who was as real and there as D.D. or D.D.’s girlfriend approaching through the City—or the raspberry on Mayn’s cheekbone acquired in an uptown police station the night he got home and he told Lar’ about it, O.K., O.K., but meanwhile here’s this phone call, ‘n . . .

"God bless," interjects the quieter edge of man’s formality like an interruption before he has begun, though opening upon (what?) marriage?, for the courteously strong foreground voice is heard against a woman’s in the background, oh along the waves of a whole life strung out behind him not just accented like his but speaking in Spanish, so Larry, who’s (a big piece of his Body-Self) light yards back in bedroom with new friend Dooley, is hardly into this call and picks up from this female background a hysterical "curva" something, and a moment later (curva what?) amongst all the other words a highly dramatic "curvadura" (it sounds like), the man meanwhile calmly asking if he may speak to James Mayn "eef hee ees theyr": and here it is again, this living web that’s nought to do with Lar’ who’s anyhow so far from it back with new friend Donald the noise level rising behind the Spanish-accent man comes down over Lar’ too as if it’s a hood over his heart beamed to Donald’s voluble hands with which he talks, but fuck it’s this outer crisis again, this living maybe even breathing web Lar’s let go (man) & doesn’t matter if Lar’ turn out on someone else’s breakdown to be, unbeknownst to him, an employee of this courteous Spanish-accented gentleman, Lar’s having his own crisis, and he names himself (Larry Shearson) at this distance of curve and of letting go and of courtesy and asks if Mayn gave the man this number, and the man’s voice with hassle or anxiety skipping a breath tells clearly the truth that he found it on a pad on his secretary’s desk with another number and Mayn’s name (Let’s get outa here, Let’s get outa here!): but sure enough the intrigue of these older people’s lives is nipping through the screen or something, and Lar’s own crisis you can’t put an equals to or formula, its task though is To Be Real—yes, with new friends and the ordinary stuff like the random Chinese woman on the ragged phone books, O.K.? "Sorry to trouble you," the man has said. "No trouble," said Larry. But the man went on: "Everyone has trouble." So Larry: "But not everyone takes it." And the foreign man, who has turned into his sound, is answering strangely (Ah is this the young man who has understood a strange pattern of reappearance, interhemispheric reappearance?—a young woman of the Spanish-accented gentleman’s acquaintance reported she heard this from the man Mayn himself), while Larry, sidestepping whatever trap this is, coming at him with the woman weeping in the charged background and carrying on (curvadura, he’s sure he hears but it’s another woman’s voice there), and Larry’ll see this cluster not on old two screens but (shrug) one, he knows that the curve (not Rail’s economic graph line or some part of the body) having left him has taken some spinoff force decaying off his Let-it-go into Let’s get outa here:

(who cares?

both true—

hey Don!

that you?)

And Larry hears and smells motley clothes skin-deep laying another’s matter on him (dig that! another is mattering him—so what if it’s the current moon we’re passing through or period we live and light and have our We in)? and another’s bent brain, like potential, arrowing through his own (Nothing to write home about, we want to emphasize, but... ) and Lar’ has wordlessly and in an instant said No to this alter embodiment, toward which "a piece of him" has got Curve-slung, like look no matter how much People Matter (which can be a drag on an off-day), nor R matter in the poor but earfelt phone pulses that they become in order to get reconstituted at the long end of the line by the in-house soul attached to the ear, like this Curve itself that is not so on its own since let go by Lar’ to find other articulate host-solids to Be through that it decays in-continentally into that old We, muttering or would-be mattering some refraction where Larry just now isn’t, "If P R M, when, as ever, MRM, then maybe P R P" (People R People—where R for Rotation that here means "Rotationally Activate oR Turn To"—embracing also the sense of "get cracking"—oR "Turn Mo" or for that matter "Equal"—read also "Will Be"): yet, jettisoned by Larry along with its sometime-angel-fleshed ever-lonely-abstract Curve, this communal breakthru is lost on the aforementioned bluebird waiting for its fencepost which, cut from osage orange and not knowing it could serve as a feeding station, has gone in search of aforementioned crow lost on the Spence or Person the Curve bends into:

Who is both called up and unknown by that faithful gap Larry shares with the Chilean economist, whom Larry, making a minor mental note hanging up the phone and wondering if that sound was Don and why Don did not answer, has to like and whose secretary (the Amy he is supposed to be getting over, having never kissed more than her lips) would never let herself be called "secretary":

and this Person (turned to and from Crow, let’s stick with that), like a third phone-party though not talking at the moment to this extended son of the man Mayn he Spence most watched (until very recently) or to the distinguished exile the Curve now recalls he has hounded on business since shortly before they met at a Moon shot four years ago, stands before himself in an office with a full-length mirror sniffing still the odor of his serious and funny and tough messenger’s silver paint, his own strangely (for he’s never been able to do anything about it like his orphanhood) sandy face—yes, sandy— lit up by the desk lamp near him and returned to him by the mirror and by the smiling frown he also conveys into the phone as he works his way (they really both know) around the resistance of this woman Dina West with "a family" (he said) in Albuquerque (So what? she said) and a husband running a radio station, only to himself skid up short round the bend half past ("Hey, here’s another Dina I didn’t know!"). ("You didn’t know me at all, Mr. Spence") ("Oh I mean I know you’re in the Indian Youth Council water-rights litigation and all—") ("Well, that’s slightly inaccurate, Mr. Spence") ("—and I gather you’ve had a few things to say to the Interior people but you turn out to be as environmentalist-oriented as Mayn’s little girl"—) bent on documenting what she thinks Spence already knows ("Well, don’t you?" Dina West asks) from having scanned those many pages Flick Mayn turned in to her father while Dina West hears a man she imagines insecurely contemplating his technique or himself ("Oh hell, lady, I’m standing here in a nothing old office looking at myself in a full-length mirror and if you want to believe I know what’s in Flick Mayn’s document, I can’t stop you, ma’am").

Hearing a scream of tires at his end and the gunning of an engine right afterward, she asked what it was (adding, "Oh we’re just talking, it’s just words"), and Spence said, Business as usual; and she said, You are in the business of information, and he, I’m getting out of it and go settle in the West, run me a boots-and-tack shop someplace small, maybe manage a supermarket; she said she hardly believed him and he said he hadn’t known about that supermarket or the boot shop till he had said the words.

There, she said, you see?, but she caught at a gentleness they both felt in her vowel, and she said, I’m sick of city phoning, I’m all phoned out, I want to talk to you face to face. Who had she been speaking with on the phone, he asked, that is since she had brought it up, and in the moment of her being nonplused by his "move," she brought up his strange charge of four or five days ago, four or five? the City made her lose track, did he even know what he was making up? she asked—Collusion? he asked, and their voices met beyond them, seemingly beyond any concrete shape of line or spark of arc—He knew what she meant, she said, oh she needed to talk face to face, she hadn’t even known what National Technical Means Capability was when he accused her of teaming with Mayn’s daughter whom she didn’t even really know against O.K. her least favorite company at least in the West, that was destroying land and life.

What? he asked, she never heard of NTM? She knew about it now, she said. More than she used to, he bet ("Long-range satellite photography," she said angrily, "laser eavesdropping," she said, "sophisticated earthquake devices," she said, "God knows what they’ve dreamed up"—"But you know what it’s all/or," he said)—and she knew, she added, more calmly and with more assurance, that it didn’t much work except the earthquake-sensing stuff her husband said was better than nothing. Spence said he had thought her husband was involved in this, and she said, Couldn’t they meet face to face? it was important to her, and Spence said it was no skin off his nose if she and the Mayn girl were into exposing this destroyer of landscape as being also indirectly in the NTM hardware business as part of a long-term commitment to missile network in the western states, but this wasn’t what he was most concerned about.

She paused and said could they meet, could he come to her hotel? she would pay for his cab; he said O.K. she come to him, the corner up from where he was right now. Good, she said, and by the way, did he know somebody named Santee?—so they both felt they were suddenly looking at each other yet with something new between. Why yes he did (he sneezed and she did not say God bless you—Paint smell, he said) name of a part-Sioux he had had business dealings with—may have been part Ojibway too. She had never heard of that. Oh he had heard of some Creeks mixing it up a little. With what other tribes? she asked in his pause. He didn’t—oh he had heard it from someone. Who? she asked. Some hitch-hiker, he thought. Which hitchhiker? she asked (like a woman).

This guy was a professional.

He was? she said—I feel I’ve heard of him (and they both believed for a moment that she had).

Spence didn’t say anything, and they heard the phone line, which was there but nothing to speak of. All right, she said, if it wasn’t the missile trade he was concerned about, what was he concerned about? Survival, Spence said—but, he added, how about the mountain? All right, the mountain, what about it? she said with slight finality—did he mean the mountain she’s heard about here or the same one maybe that somehow she forgot she had heard the rumors of back home before she left? she’s getting talkative (Oh don’t say that, said Spence softly), the mountain that had some mineral resource that affected people near it, some said (she said) a mountain that was on the move, hidden by what was inside it. Did she come east looking for it? Spence joked; he had learned that some type of trace radiation had been picked up near a cemetery in New Jersey, but there was something going on right here in Manhattan and even closer than that—ask her friend Mayn—hard to know just why Dina West had come to New York, but had she brought her family with her?

Are you implying I came to see Jim? You really do look for trouble, she said. A surviving observer was all, he returned. More than an observer, she said; where had he learned about Mayn’s family. Oh, Mayn and he went way back, said Spence, long before the daughter knew the difference between bedtime stories and fact, fertilizer and explosive, before she knew the real Indians out there from that Prince who came a cropper. Well Mr. Spence I don’t know your ins and outs but if you knew how he was murdered, you must have found out the same way Sarah’s father did, and he was amazed at what she knew.

All I said was he came a cropper, said Spence, who knew what they both did—that each wanted something from the other, and they were just missing.

I been slightly acquainted with him for years, said Spence.

The Masons and the global network (was it weather stations or Masonic societies?), and the weatherman’s German relative in Chile and—

Oh there are still Masons in Chile, said Spence, and one of them is under house arrest.

You couldn’t resist saying that, but I don’t know what it means, it’s unreal to me, but I have to talk to you face to face, Mr. Spence. I feel you’re dangerous, to yourself anyway. I feel you’re right in my mind right now; I didn’t know it till I said it.

Just waiting to see, he said.

You’re probably not as bad as I heard, she said.

Spence identified his corner she was to bring the cab to, and he gave her directions. She asked him, before she got off the phone, who Harflex was, and he said, hesitantly, that he didn’t know, so they both knew that he had it back there somewhere but not quite on tap.

Well, you phoned me, Spence said, I didn’t phone you. She replied that he had phoned her two times at her hotel when she had arrived in New York.

Once, said Spence. Twice, she said; the second to have breakfast the message said.

You sure that wasn’t a phone call you made to Mayn?

A Mr. Spence phoned twice, she said.

Sounds like you didn’t bring your family, he said.

What do you know about my family? she said, and hung up, though doubtless en route to a Manhattan cab. The phone rang and rang, stopped, then started up again.

Spence, on the pavement, and Senora Wing, decked in platinum opaque sunglasses as she emerged from the entrance to the warehouse-theater, seemed to catch each other simultaneously; they liked each other’s embodiments but not each other, which was suddenly now clear to each as he looked to his left only to find her as she pulled back the operating half of the old steel double-door and stepped forth into the bright, gray day. "You knew I was going to be here," she called; "I feel it." "I do now," he said. "You’ve been in here" (she tossed her head indicating the building she had come out of), "so you know." "Know what?" "I’m almost in the play," she said, "the opera. It’s destined." "What’s destined?" he asked, rotating his wrist to check his watch; he took a tooled-silver money clip from his jacket pocket and looked at his bills and returned it, and she touched a curl at her temple as if he should have understood something.

"Is the messenger still working for you?" "He was never working for me." "You make problems for yourself; anyway, he is not in the same place any more." "Oh is that where he is?" said Spence, and they both laughed. "You don’t know what you doing," Senora Wing said seriously, and she shook her head as if it were only her eyes and it was light she had to dislodge from between her and him. "I used to know," he said; "do you know the name of the old lady who comes around your place with that old guy?" "Does she have a name?" Senora Wing asked.

Spence followed some glint of her glasses and knew as he did so that the Chilean intelligence officer in, today, beneath his open overcoat, gray pinstripe, purple flower in the buttonhole (cum soft-looking black boots) was known to them both and that she knew this, too. He was crossing the street in their direction, and Spence stepped to Senora Wing’s side and asked, "Did the old guy ever call her Sarah?" "You would be amazed at what she knows," said Senora Wing, "for a nuts old lady."

The Chilean gentleman paused at the corner and deposited what looked like a sealed letter in an ashcan and then inspected the can’s contents. "You want me to ask you what you mean by that or forget it?" Spence asked. "Did you want to avoid me?" Senora Wing said, and they were both keeping an eye on the man at the corner. "I didn’t know you would be coming out of here," Spence said—"you always meet the ones you want to avoid, and it’s O.K." "Are you looking over my shoulder behind me?" she asked. "Yes, I was, there, for a second, I thought the door was opening again, it was in my head, an optical illusion." "Of course," said Senora Wing. "You make trouble for yourself," Spence said; "is your sister in there, too?" "You make trouble for jowrself." "That’s where we’re all coming from," Spence said, and Senora Wing, as he sidled around so his back was to the approaching Chilean, said, "You didn’t know you was going to say that, did you." "That’s right." "You going around in circles, Spence? What’s your business in here? you know these people doing the opera?" "You’re on the crest of something, Wing, you’re not just getting into the Off-Off-Midtown theater." They both felt the surprise coming before it came out of Senora Wing’s glitter-illuminated mouth: "That old lady told Goodie and Baddie she liked to see them fight because they didn’t hurt each other and she would always be their friend if she could come and watch, and they said they would remember. And she told them she knew of two brothers who carried messages from their mother and their father separately and stole them and never got caught. But they must never tell the people inside what she had said; and they didn’t until Goodie told Turnstein, who isn’t their real father, and Baddie told the old lady who told the old man right then and there, who got mad as hell and said that that was a long time ago in another state and Turnstein was sure the old lady knew about his freaks ripping off one of the clients and maybe she have second sight, who knows?"

The Chilean gentleman was upon them as a cab drew up on the northwest corner, the very curb where the wastebasket stood. There were two people in the cab, a man with a burnished face at the window glinting against the light from the day and the few drops of rain roaming in a light breeze. "She has a mole on her jaw," said Spence, and the Chilean bent abruptly past them as if to just turn in time, and inclined his handsome face so the whole curve of his behavior joined the two of them.

"I know the woman in that cab and so do you," said Senora Wing. "She came for a consultation and she asked if I knew where she could find you— it was wonderful how she knew I knew you."

The Chilean entered the warehouse and the door banged behind him. "Where were you headed?" Spence asked. "Where were you headed?" Wing returned. Spence nodded at the heavy metal door. Wing said, as up at the corner the taxi door opened, "The West woman asked if you had a brother and I said I did not know you but maybe I knew your brother."

Spence hauled on the door. "I don’t have a brother that I ever heard of." "The West woman said she didn’t believe in such powers but she asked if I thought you might be brothers though I didn’t know the two of you." "Who was the man?" Spence asked, and the City touched him in a way that drew him away from the words passing between him and this highly colored figure who was no fortuneteller he was sure, as he was sure also that he was carried along by a track or current he had tried to figure out so that now he was less himself but only like being a whole lot more than he had been for years and years of mere motion. The cab could be ten yards or a hundred yards away. "The man’s name is Mayn, and he is interested in that old couple, too, but it is the man he is interested in, I think." Spence started across the threshold, and Senora Wing said, "They’re not getting out after all." Spence left her without a word.

At the top of the dark entry stairs where the wide, old corridor that would serve as a lobby went away to the left into the dusk of dim music and voices, a child was holding her bike. "Can you ride that bike?" he asked. "Yes. I learned in the park," the little Puerto Rican girl said. "You’re a long way from the park," he said, but the child said, "No, it’s over there," and she pointed at the stairs with a grand motion and brought her hand back gently bending to smooth one of her dark braids. "How old are you?" he asked. "Seven," she said, looking at him. "Do you ride in the streets out here?" "No, there’s too much traffic; I’m not supposed to. We go on the sidewalk and we ride in the park." "Who are you waiting for?" he asked. "My uncle," said the little girl. Rising on the far pedal, a girl’s bike, she eased back onto her saddle as she rode away down the glimmering corridor. One of the doors to the theater opened, with a sudden argument of voices, and she seemed to almost decide to ride right through but a tall young man in a khaki army jacket came through and when she didn’t brake he grabbed her handlebars and laughed, "Hey, baby." Without a word she turned her bike and came back toward Spence, who thought he was recognized and thought that in some way he would know this sauntering, cool guy. The little girl braked and stepped forward onto the floor. "How old are you?" she asked. "I don’t know," said Spence. "Are you a hundred?" "Amy," said her uncle. "No," said Spence, "I’m not a hundred, but you’re a smart girl, can you count to a hundred?" "She talks a lot," the other man said, and picking up the bike by the frame under the saddle with one hand, he took the little girl by the hand and they went down the stairs, but the little girl said, "I can carry it. Efrain! I can carry it."

The man Talca, or de Talca, was in one of the last rows, intimate of the great lady singing onstage with another woman and a large man Spence knew as Ford North. Spence and Talca became aware of each other at once, and Spence’s dangerous contact (though hardly then releasing some curl of sight that he left in motion adrift for Spence to worry about as the diva stopped and said, "I keep hearing Otello" laughed, said "Good!" and resumed) might have been sweeping the small "orchestra" with a cool hand to say to Spence, Certain people are not here:

the exile economist, for one, was not here, whose wife was particular friend to Talca’s lover onstage turning and walking away now from the big man North as if to leave with him what she had just finished singing while the composer himself was at the piano half-singing with them; and some other figure was not here:

but here Spence and Talca parted company and both felt it at a moment when Luisa turned back, like that gracious lady mayor with a white feather in her piled hair ordering a planeload of snow flown down from Nueva York for her island waifs just beginning to get wind of P.R. liberation—and Luisa sang so gladly to the audience or at least Talca if not the big man North or the tall, ghostly black girl who was in the scene too,

You ask the matter but you have forgot,

Forgot me in my inmost part which part

Is yours, yours, too

(and repeating this song so gladly) that the hammering notes of big North being nasty and the thin black singer singing high high above them seemed not to touch her and Talca’s head swayed until Talca rose to come back to Spence, a standing-room character in this give-and-take, and then she did respond to North, who half drew his sword and they acted like they would like to kill each other though singing all the time, as Talca arrived and the black singer sang

I have remembrances of yours I long

So long had longed to exchange for you

That now it feels I long have longed to re-deliver them

while North seemed to sing at both of them, left right left right,

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt then sunlight doth move

and more words that Talca (or de Talca) and Spence hardly heard:

for involved with each other even for the moments when Talca strode to a small door and disappeared and a toilet flushed instantly and he instantly returned to where Spence stood gazing at the stage, they were communicating almost too fast, like actors (though as if over each other’s shoulders) before the words like lyrics against the enthusiastic pianist-composer’s music even started uttering themselves:

Why have you followed me here? To see that Puerto Rican con who just left?

You know I like the music.

You don’t know a Fedora from a—

His name is Efrain, that’s all I know about him and his little niece was in the hall riding her bike.

He has been seen with our "friend." So what is the connection?

The prison, maybe. Which friend?

The one who is not here, said de Talca as if not to say the name.

Hortensa, the aura reader, is not here, said Spence.

Wing’s sister?

She is friends with Clara.

Who is not here either. Nor our "friend."

Oh you mean her husband.

Your client, yes. Ah, you thought I meant—

So you’re the one who got hold of that communication whatever it was.

Ah, Spence, were you there ahead of me? perhaps waiting in the Mayn wastebasket with the other shit?

I guess I haven’t had to since I’ve known you, Talca.

Quite right. Right on the button. I was intentionally rude.

Deals are deals, Talca. It doesn’t matter.

Of course. It is not a matter of style with you, Spence, you are fed up with your client the economist and you and I have interests in common anyway, your side of which I do not inquire about.

I have a wastebasket, too.

You are one, Spence. Look, I grant you the letter in question—

It sounded like more than a letter. There’s a lot between Mayn and his daughter.

Obviously, and so I will grant you the letter—

Grant me? Maybe you mean something different in your own language.

I know you speak Spanish, Spence, and we must speak it sometime if you like but what I am saying is that I grant you that I have seen the letter, O.K.?, or at least the longhand draft of it; and our mutual interests will be served if you will amplify for me what is said there concerning the woman Mayga Rojas Rodriguez: you knew her when she was lobbying copper but in reality promoting Frei’s presidential future. Mayn’s young friend, how much does he know?

I may not know much, but the music is beautiful, Talca.

I can only guess all that is in your head, Spence. The music is excellent, and strangely familiar. The work is not some mere folie that North is letting his boyfriend show off; and Lady Luisa is not herself, she is waiting for something to happen. Preparation is all, as the poet says.

And you are waiting . . . ?

O.K., I am going back to my seat in a second: we know the letter Mayn wrote to his daughter, I at least the longhand draft. But Spence, you must tell me where are the diaries of this corrupt clan of invert begetters?

Marion Hugo Mayne you mean? The legendary Chapultepec encounter with the girl who looked like a boy.

Marion Hugo Mayne I mean. Information relating Mayga’s death to the Masons.

Talca, next thing you’ll be relating her death to the famous false ring finger Jackson had to put up with after that blood-ritual game in upper New York.

Spence, even you who do not matter may be in danger, because if this entertainingly mythical mountain approaching is code talk for an attempt on a South American President’s life by Cuban elements posing as anti-Castroist—

Is there such a thing as a South American President?

—then we have to weigh the meaning even of some presumptuous Indian’s rumored prophecy that a friend of Mayn’s, possibly young, possibly gifted, will die for discovering a non-lethal radioactivity that enables one to be two people at the same time and in two different places and then apparently the two can become one just like that, because with the educational system here in the United States, such future-madness may just be possible.

If Mayga’s death is related to the Masons, said Spence against the rise of the passionate piano, it could be related to you, Talca, as easily as to Mayn, because there’s plenty of Masons down in your corner of the hemisphere. Yes, the more I think of it . . . yes.

What do you mean "yes"? It is obvious from the letter and evidently from other "effluent" documents that certain Masonic order secrets connected with an engraved pistol Mayn’s grandfather and others before him kept safe from Indians who needed it for something and sought it may explain not only the origin of their family newspaper designed to promote Andrew Jackson but the death of the woman Mayga—

—I was there when he heard, said Spence—

—in ‘63, I believe—

—she went off a cliff near Valparaiso harbor—

—while walking with a well-known German-American printing magnate named Morgen connected on his mother’s side to an Alsatian mathematician whose solutions yielded designs instrumental in the development of Chilean railroads but also formulae bearing on other matters and connected on his father’s side to a Communist printer protected by Marion Hugo Mayne after he ran off with Masonic secrets and threatened to expose them.

The Anglo-Indian blood rite in northwest New York State was not ridiculous, said Spence.

The Masons interest us only insofar as—

Your family had some Masons in it, said Spence. Like Luisa’s.

The piano had stopped, the tiny woman Lincoln was onstage with an electric drill, the singers had been shouting at each other and now Luisa called to the rear of the orchestra, "Will you please be here or not be here, I am doing this, this, Opera perdida chilena because you urged me—"

‘ 7," said Ford North with a deep frown that projected far beyond the house lights, ‘7 urged you, my princess, my priestess, my—"

"—please to discuss your business outside the theater."

De Talca raised a hand and tilted his head in humoring apology and turned to Spence, who had stepped back as if to go, as another hassle ensued onstage with words uttered so richly they sounded sung, and at this, other lyrics came back to mind that had been actually sung during the interchange between Spence and his client, but whether Spanish or other, Spence, flickeringly alone, could not tell, while the bright sword of the big man came out again and he made a pass at the curtain and the pianist became engaged in a three-way argument repeating what sounded like desde Menal (the pianist saying it; Luisa saying it perhaps first; North saying it)—while through all this Talca turned and turned a bit too slowly to Spence and—

Do not speak of my family, Spence.

I don’t spend my time in wastebaskets, Talca.

Which reminds me of one last thing: what do you know about these crossed initials?

I’m a free-lance photo-journalist.

Did you photograph the prison break? You know the man Foley or he knows you, and he predicted the break.

He dreamt it probably, said Spence.

He said he was in touch with the Nos Otros (is it two words?) and that’s how he knew. Is it true the child is being hidden in Mayn’s building?

You know more than I know, Talca. I don’t know any Nosotros.

You came up with very little information altogether, Spence.

I’m waiting for something to happen.

Will it be here? said Talca. What has it to do with these ... are they people, these initials?—S.R.s up-and-down and across, and O.G., L.S., P.M. (maybe afternoon?), and other abbreviations or initials. Who is O.G., who is D.M.? if they go backward, too, it is a whole new ballgame. M.R.M. may be M. H. Mayne. And S.R. abuts upon O. at one point.

I don’t know any S.R.O., said Spence. What did they mean by desde Mena?

Oh Spence, you don’t know Fedora on a bike from Louise with a pot au feu on the stove and her father dying. S.R.O. is Standing Room Only.

Talca turned contemptuously toward the aisle to return to his seat and Spence said, And is it the pot you’re waiting for or is Luisa’s Masonic father dead already?

Talca paused a split second and showed his profile, and Spence heard the word insect and said, The Cuban who escaped, does Luisa know who’s got the missing kid?

Again Talca paused to show his profile and the turn carried Spence away on the sounds of lyrics he had partly heard while not paying attention; and again, after another call from Luisa to her lover, the words Spence had understood before but now in another voice harder to understand not because of accent or lower register but because of some meaning given to them by the strung-out composer-boyfriend of North’s took a moment all to themselves, Este opera perdida chilena! and, looking back once more, Spence caught Talca’s angry eye; and a red-haired, red-bearded man was suddenly standing near the piano, and North at the back of the stage by a black curtain ran his sword back into the scabbard only to haul it out again like doubling its shape and stab the curtain, stab it again, half singing, half saying as he stabbed it yet again and again, "For a ducat, for a ducat, for a ducat, dear ducat, dear ducat, dear ducat," but Spence was through the door into the corridor choking on the word insect while hearing fall away from him his own familyless name.

An accelerating sanitation truck ran a light with a racing yellow cab on either side, as Spence and a good-looking woman in a fur coat were about to step off the curb, and the phone started ringing in the booth at t)iis corner and they turned to look and watch. After several rings Spence smiled and slid back the door and picked up. He shrugged and the woman turned away and stepped off the curb. "Drew a blank," he called out through the glass, and she turned to frown and smile with an intensity that seemed to surprise them both.

"He’s supposed to be here," the older woman’s voice said from the foundation office; "he has an appointment."

"Oh my God of course!" said Spence expressing cheerful surprise. "He’s meeting an old friend of mine. It’s a small world. It slipped my mind completely. An old old friend. Have you tried his apartment?"

"If he’s there he’s not answering," said the woman uncertainly.

"Well, it’s urgent," said Spence, "maybe I can track him down. Thank you so much for the information—oh, and give her my best."

In the pause, during which the woman did not ask who Spence meant, Spence said (and sounded it), "I’m breathless and I don’t have another nickel, my number here is . . ." (he read it off fast as if the dial were an interruption)"—oh you don’t need to know that . . ." (he laughed genuinely).

"You don’t want to speak to Mrs. Myles?"

Spence said, "It must be not having any more change. I’m saying things, you know what I mean? I mean I’m looking out the glass into the street, and there’s nothing much there and I’m saying things I didn’t really think of so there’s something there by the time you get to it, do you know what I mean? I’m sorry."

The woman said, "Strangely I think I do."

"You’re a pearl," said Spence, laughing excitedly.

The woman laughed back with affection as if it were her name instead of the person waiting to see the Chilean economist.

"Who shall I tell her said hello? I have a call on another line."

"Oh, my brother," said Spence, and laughed as if he were surprised. "God I must be in a rush. I mean Jim Mayn."

"Don’t I know your voice?" said the woman. "I don’t know him."

Spence hung up. Coming back across the street was the fine woman in the fur coat; she looked haggard as she caught Spence’s eye, a dark cut curved down her cheek like a shadowy parallel to her nose and nostril and so dark that the blood looked like it had never been bright. He went out toward her and found himself extending his arms in comfort and she did not shy away at first but stepped over so the wire trash basket was between them, yet smiled at him, but this might be because the phone started ringing somewhere at a compressed distance from the mass of traffic emerging then around them. She looked at him puzzled and leaned on the trash basket and vomited onto her hands.

Spence went and answered the phone and it was the low, resonant voice he had heard before with the definite, almost audible Mexican capability though the voice was not a Mexican’s: "Mayn, is that you?" And in his hesitation, Spence heard, "No! It’s Santee, hello, Santee. Dina West knows your twin brother named Spence (joke, eh?). So whatever happened to the technical specialist I was supposed to pick up in New Jersey that Mayn picked up, did you run across him again?"

Spence laughed and asked how Ray Vigil had found him here, though he knew.

"Or should I say Spence?" said Vigil. "Because it turns out I knew of you before we first met. So you are the Spence I heard about. Listen, I heard Santee knew where the child is."

"What are you doing there, Vigil?"

"Watching the cars go by standing in a pay booth with an empty can of grape soda on the floor and a non-reusable straw coming up out of it. Sounds pretty noisy at your end, too."

"I keep the windows open," said Spence. "Did you know this is an unlisted number?"

"The lady at the foundation gave it to me," said Vigil.

"I don’t know where the Cuban’s child is, and I don’t even know where the mother is," said Spence, and the sick woman watched him hang up the receiver.

It came to them together that they each were coming full circle, if that was ever possible, and she was in a new line of work and interested in life all over again almost, although he had never known her but he could see this was true. How had she known enough to find him? This hardly mattered. He had found her and she found him to be not the person—there on the street outside the foundation—that she had thought, from his intro, and then he told her he had heard of her through Mayn. Which was indirectly why she was in New York now from Minnesota. Hearing about her was, he said, like actually hearing one-time words of hers. What did he mean by "through Mayn"? they both wondered. Listening from the far end of a bar for years, he said. Which bar? More than one: D.C., Houston, Colorado Territory; and, right here, an Argentine joint near a saxophone store. And listening with much better ears than the guy Mayn would sometimes be talking to.

Heard so keenly that once Mayn had been heard to say he had not heard something—the last of a sentence—of hers—of Pearl Myles’s.

Which one?

Something said to Mayn’s father in a cemetery. How begun? Beginning, said Spence responding happily, that she had been "shocked to hear ..."

When was that? she asked.

You were getting out of a pickup truck.

She laughed, then, as if at everything, at having thought him Brad Mayn because he mentioned learning of her presence at the far end of a phone call an hour ago and had known her instinctively when she came out of that old foundation and looked at the sky—a woman strong and inquiring, maybe five feet eleven or six feet, in a red tailored suit and a black cloth coat with collar that looked like a sexy cross between a marmalade angora cat and a fox that had outwitted all but the smartest team of Minnesota hunters (part Indian, part Anglo!), she was funny on the subject of clothes. She kept her coat on in the coffeeshop on the corner across from the mainland-Chinese clothing place— they had a window booth, she and Spence—and she told Spence what, he told her, he half-thought he had already envisioned, the camping trips she had taken near the greatest of inland seas though she had never felt the warmth of a trigger in the crease of her index finger’s second joint, while naturally she had her ups and downs though living more and more practically in the same house out there for thirty years.

Jim’s grandmother got mad as hops at her once, and Pearl felt reduced to a primal mass of jelly, the woman had this firm, Victorian charm and would sit you right down and bring out a tea tray with the biggest cozy in the world stitched with blue patterns and ask you what your pet hates were and whether your people had traveled. But in the middle of all this act of hers she had some painful trouble—maybe it was just all that character she possessed— and she would get short with you. Pearl had said once that she shared the lady’s sorrow for the death of her daughter Sarah, and she didn’t like Pearl’s saying that. Those people kept the lid on their feelings really by seeming to show them but so confidently so elegantly you know that the job didn’t get done. But the morning of that earlier day when they eventually went to the cemetery, Margaret looked like she would kiss Pearl, this relatively unknown teacher from the high school who had come uninvited to the house at a time of crisis and saw a strange light in that hall mirror coming from upstairs but from within the mirror too, and suddenly there was Margaret out of the kitchen, and Pearl Myles remembered grease on her fingers and a real leaning of the lady toward her as if to embrace her and kiss her without having met her. Pearl Myles in redecorating her home years later—in fact two years ago— had gotten so confused and fascinated by lighting that she likely had "redone" that entire time of her life, mirror and all (she laughed again). She was in Minneapolis when Margaret got sick and committed suicide some years later.

She knew the family, Spence said. Oh she remembered a low-pressure zone in her orange juice now that he mentioned it—("it?" murmured Spence)—that day of the cemetery.

Not the funeral, said Spence.

No, it was when the younger boy had a fit of grief. And Pearl Myles heard from a local lady who had it from the father that the boys were having a crisis at home that morning and when she got there and stood by that mirror the grandmother Margaret came out with grease on her fingers and like to have kissed Pearl, the teacher, and then didn’t kiss her. Was Spence close to Jim?—but hadn’t he said he was his—? —no, she was fuddled by the city the last twenty-four hours but maybe by why she had come here, which could have been business but wasn’t, for she had not found what she needed for her home in New York or Minneapolis and so she had done the next best thing, which—she laughed—and so did Spence, funnily enough—which must sound like . . .

She paused, and Spence, delightedly, said, Words, words, words!

Oh, you are a scholar, Pearl sighed ludicrously and then lifted her cup for the "Greek devil" in the white shirt and black pants to raise his eyebrows and nod to both of them.

As a matter of fact, no. Spence knew where his bread was buttered but was no scholar though if he had it to do over again he would—but did Pearl Myles know that New Jersey family well enough to know . . .

Well, she had dreamt of that mirror and then put in a phone call to Mel Mayn the following morning, but . . . "know" what?

If there were other . . . surviving children, Spence said.

She had to wait a second and look at him . . . someone had been with Spence on that phone call, and that person knew her, she had thought: but he knew her, through Jim—but who knew that she had had an appointment?— or was she imagining that? What was it, in some fatigue she did not actually experience that was in her, that screened what she was picking up? Spence knew time, and it was wonderfully slow, here. Slow enough for him to stare in a friendly way at this quite young woman of about sixty and trace a day that began in a pay booth near Mayn’s home calling the Chilean economist at his, turned away to Turnstein & Wing’s where there was no Wing, sloped upward to the office rejected by Jimmy Banks where Dina West had tried to give a little hell over the phone, and wound up variously here, north of Mayn’s but suddenly closer to that New Jersey town with the code name than to the Chinese shop across the street. He told Pearl Myles that he understood time now, and she put the back of her hand on the cold glass of the window and said that now she understood what she had been feeling a moment or two before. And that he had changed jobs, too. He said he wouldn’t say that. But they watched each other and turned, as one, to see an Asiatic woman come out of the Chinese shop, change her mind, and go back in, and they had a quick, quiet laugh about that. Pearl Myles inquired how he knew the Chilean economist and Spence replied that they had a mutual interest in an American company’s actions in Chile.

But it was this family he was into.

Oh yes.

And as to surviving children, he knew of course, didn’t he, that the brother Brad was an illegitimate love-babe by another, but had grown up as Mel’s beloved son; they got along. Spence knew this. But she hadn’t thought about them for years, but something rubs off. Oh yes, said Spence, he himself had been insulted earlier today by a man who—another Chilean—

Oh yes, she had heard of him (as if there were only two in New York!).

—who Spence thought had called him an insect though the word might have been "insult" (Spence an "insult"), but we ask for these things, hit our head up against a stone wall in order to get somewhere and find that we thought we were only observing but were much more than that. Pearl knew what he meant and asked him if he had been to the Statue of Liberty but he hadn’t. He asked if she knew Spanish, and she said New York really was like this, with people running into each other and then talking without any actual reason to begin with. Spence thought there was real value in it, he had found a part-Sioux businessman in the Utah desert and they had discussed the commercial possibilities of a nondescript bush only to learn in the course of what turned into a whole night that they were brothers in knowledge if not in blood, that each knew of a woman named Manuel who had healed with the balm of this desert bush’s pod a Salt Lake City Mason who spoke Japanese so synergetically (Pearl smiled and smiled and nodded rapidly) that he had grown to sometimes look Japanese though very brief-spoken. And before the night was done, Spence had forgotten both the "bush" business and a legendary pistol that had been his original reason for meeting this part-Sioux-part-Mormon carpenter-businessman Santee. However, Santee then found that Spence knew both that the Japanese-speaking Mason had been killed for guessing in his own very medication and recuperation the link between that dry bush and the oil of whales, and that the famed botanist with rock-oriented corrugations on his bike wheels, who had been modestly mutilated by a father-son team of saguaro-cactus exploiters very likely responsible as well for the Jap Mason’s death, was loving colleague to an itinerant Chilean zoologist-woman who at the top end of a ladder once cast the famed double Moon, like a destiny, on a handgun that later could not stay in one place and that Santee-Sioux’s grandfather who somewhat earlier had almost certainly carried it across the Plains to the Rockies had always said there was a thing in that pistol strangely hard to find, so precious in value as to be, like what the South Africans call "future platinum" or the southern Indians of Argen-Chile "wise silver," the true unit of value.

Mena! exclaimed Pearl Myles and Santee-Sioux (in Spence’s voice) simultaneously, and Spence had added "from that musical family" a split-instant before Pearl Myles added that that Santee was cousin to an Ojibway who was why she thought she was in New York, certainly not to buy a giant thousand-dollar lamp designed by Alvar Aalto with tiers like a fir tree (wonderful in its way, too).

They waited, knowing that this was the Soon through which they would come to be silent in some other way. It sloped gently through both their minds—as if they didn’t need to worry about it because the slope was the thing and in charge—that they were drawing near to one another because something quite beyond them was the matter, and the matter even in a good way. Let the world’s interrogations go on outside this big pane of street glass, go on and on; and for a moment she told him how her husband had been very young when she married him and they were both affectionately (or something) repressed, or (you know) shy and were just right for each other, really cared for each other sexually, and when he hadn’t wanted to share her with a child she got nauseated with sex and felt guilty at denying him, well they really enjoyed it but she couldn’t help herself. Years later, neither of them was so repressed but it didn’t help. Spence said he thought she had skipped something in there but he wondered if something like all that had happened with his parents. She asked why. He didn’t know.

A fury came through him, she told him.

(On the way somewhere else, he thought.) He said, What?

Yes, through his shoulders—shoulders like magnets, did he know that? Sure, sure, he knew that. Well, she was going to leave him two phone numbers where she could be reached. Yes, through—through—through—all the many thongs of cowhide fringe ready to move, underneath that hair of his, she said.

They shook their heads laughing skeptically, while sunlight slid away and came back (via speeded-up dawn). On the way where? she said—now why did I say a fool thing like that? (I know, he said.) (You’ve got my number, she said, a bit intimately.) Buffalo hide, please, he said, and, glancing at his watch, pressed the date button.

They talked some more, but she said he wanted to ask about something and he said it wasn’t what it would have been if he hadn’t run into her.

And how it happened didn’t matter, she added, and he nodded as if he had added it, which by running into her he partly had. How old was he? she asked, and he didn’t know and used to think it didn’t matter, and then uncomfortably asked, Which Ojibway was Santee-Sioux a cousin to? and she said only some faraway part of him cared, which was true (though he understood out of next to no experience at all that it sounded like a New York woman), and he tried to crack a joke, Are there any more surviving Ojibway cousins?, but she said, Ojibvva; but why had he asked about surviving Mayn offspring? she had to know.

They looked away from one another, the long-time Minnesota woman in appearance as executive as her current physical position coat-on, boothed, and windowed, was more visitor, her companion as sandy-faced a buckskin-fringed itinerantly ageless trader as a hinterlandsman could imagine erroneously was no New Yorker, and they saw the Chinese woman leave the shop across the street listening to her companion eagerly talking. I think I know that woman she’s with, said Spence. She’s got a baseball cap on, said Pearl. Pirates, said Spence. You don’t make it sound like urgent news, said Pearl Myles. It probably is, said Spence, but I feel like I’ve never seen her in the flesh, and he leaned back in his booth, placing his fingers on the table, but finding not a keyboard but only Pearl in front of him.

She was asking for it but nonetheless said, Well, was this one of those rare moments in life or were they two doing business or about to? He said she had asked him how old he was and who were his people and he didn’t know, they might as well be Californians who introduced whales to the Great Salt Lake. She hadn’t asked him who his people were but thinking they were the whale people or they were a last-century private meteorologist of New York who dreamt of a new weather and then passed on his dream like the Good Advice a Bolivian-general client of Spence’s had had from his own assassin-to-be and swimming-pool contractor, namely "Pass it on," took Spence sort of out of himself like when this lady across the table from him had seen, she said, one day that she would make up her own lighting for her house, having found nothing that did the trick on either side of the Mississippi.

Presently, the Devil stood at their table frowning at them with deepest attention and with no other customer in sight—a large-straight line in their peripheral vision, an example, though of what? of recent Greek immigration?

Pearl said that when Spence’s client the Chilean economist and she had talked he had said Spence was a New Yorker from way back and he had praised Spence.

Too far back, said Spence—so far back his mother and father merged in the distance.

When Pearl and the Chilean economist had first talked—

On the phone?

Yes, long distance. He was friendly but it was tense for him.

Well, you know his situation, said Spence and then smiled at some awkwardness they both may have understood.

O.K., said Spence deeply enough to be noticed, why had she phoned him? And Pearl wondered out loud if he wanted to get into this and when he said, Sure, it gave them both pause, and like a couple of lovers she said he had been after something else she thought—further surviving offspring of the Mayn family. Why had she phoned the Chilean all the way from Minnesota? Spence asked, but— Oh, he had phoned her, she reported. This is some nightmare, he smiled as if unused to speak or think of nightmares, etcetera, plus the fact he had to be in two other places right now.

How did he have your number? Spence asked. Oh, such things could be explained, was the answer. As easy, he in turn asked, as turning away from where you were focusing and bending over backwards to be friendly only to find you were being pulled this way and that back into what for years you hadn’t known you didn’t want to be in any more? but—

You poor thing, she said, I heard you were the smartest. He just made her remember giving Mel’s father-in-law two phone numbers of hers the day of Margaret’s funeral.

But Spence didn’t know what he was doing here; he was supposed to be at least two other places by now, and Pearl Myles smiled and said he was not free to go, and the Greek pillar withdrew as if temporarily.

And if there were more Mayn offspring, where did they come from, and when?

Well, Spence had always said he was only an observer and now knew for sure he was being turned this way and that in the course of—but someone would throw you a curve if you asked for it, and the issue of further Mayn offspring was what Spence suddenly had come to think he had been sent to settle through some obstacle course of all these years, and now he really did have to go, if Pearl would only let him (they both smiled). For she, she said, had gotten drawn all over again into those strangely silly circles of—

—of news, Spence abruptly and sadly said, and they laughed again, discovering each other again as if this scene would pass the whole afternoon and turn it into evening.

Yes, of news—that doubtless he knew she had worked in and around for years, telling high schoolers about vigil sidebars (—what’s a vigil sidebar? asked Spence) and contributing items by the dozen here and there, and eventually her marriage busted up, she added for some reason. But she had known of the Ojibwa named Santee—

—she hadn’t said he was called Santee—

—because in other days she had been drawn far enough into the—

—isn’t it funny, interrupted Spence again (as the Greek proved again to be standing at their table), that in the midst of all this there are people who may get killed and it may be somebody’s doing . . .

—she had to go, too, but let her just get this out: in other days she had been close enough to the Mayns to catch in passing the fact that the suicide-mother’s sister lived in Boston and was active in music as a sponsor not a performer, and feuded periodically with a very rich sponsor (Life Patron, was her category) over the matter of ticket pricing and allotment climaxed by a terrible skirmish over the matter of the Metropolitan Opera’s spring visit; so the scuttlebutt regarding the diva’s dramatic weight-loss brought to the long quiescent attention of Pearl Myles the fact that the Pride’s Crossing dowager’s son was the diva’s devoted Park Avenue G.P. lately most uncomfortably billed as a specialist in ulterior weight-loss regimes of such threatening grandeur that he was getting the wrong sort of name: but having long ago stepped out of it, Pearl had found herself back in it: in what? extended family junk or queer tragedy? endless local peacetime in a medium town or some plan that was receding out of hand but who from who?—back in it again, she recalled now going to the opera one mild night, driving in from New Jersey when the Met’s dark old barn stood southwest of the Public Library and she had a ticket from the math teacher’s sister two rows behind Sarah Mayn and her younger son, Brad, and Sarah whispered in his ear and at intermission put her arm around him, brown velvet short sleeves, and she kissed him and he stretched. And though Pearl had been out of that for so many years and lately engrossed in lighting design right down to nice clusters of hidden forty-watt bulbs, she found it all adding up again—or dividing and dividing—and one morning she found she knew that this Ojibwa healer had been enrolled at the diva’s doctor s expense in a state aeronautical program and since Minnesota is not normally a great state for New York City gossip a little goes a long way and before she knew it she—

—she was Pearl Myles High School Teacher all over again, Spence observed, who looked at his beeping wrist watch and said it hadn’t been a lost Chilean opera that night, had it? because he didn’t know anything about classical music, and suddenly he told her that he had had the wildest nightmares all his life and he didn’t know what they meant and every time he tried to escape them they got worse—

—How would you escape a nightmare? the woman in front of him asked.

And when he made an effort to see them as concoctions of the future and lies out of the past, he would lose them, some horses, hermits, Indians, all talking and as one, plus regular people he had never met and wouldn’t know if he saw them again unless he could get these awful dreams back but they went away when he went after them and he heard them but couldn’t see them.

Because they would vanish inside of you, said his extended coffeeshop companion.

. . . when he and . . . and they . . . knew they were waking him up in the middle of the damn night whether in the mountains of the American desert or in an underground shelter whose "government" contractor he was quietly tracing by photo-investigation to a South American operator who owned newspapers here but had faked the plane-crash death of a brother in order to establish, for corporate purposes, the originally quite dubious existence of this brother complete with jojoba-bush investments and substantial gifts to the Presbyterian world mission.

Pearl Myles said, O.K., bad dreams were dreams we asked to be affected by, and though Spence asked her what a sidebar was, she went on: she could care less where dreams came from—a brief journey across our brain from one locale to another during which an infinitesimal "flam" of daylight where the head is thin lets some part escape, and what’s left was a piece of the ideal but it wasn’t where dreams came from that mattered because anyway who really knew about ‘em, they’re scandal-ridden—and she had only her own testimony to go on, but what she could share she could be sure of, and one real effect of some dreams she had had was that she put in a phone call to Mel Mayn, for instance, though upon hearing his blunt, inquiring voice nearly unchanged after thirty years, she just blurted out that her husband who always walked with his hands clasped behind his back had left two years before which was a good thing for them both because they became instantly closer until disaster struck—when why on earth would Mr. Mayn or for that matter his son care about Pearl Myles’s married history though she had said her husband’s departure made her recall that great mother-in-law of Mel Mayn’s who on the day of Brad’s Day in the hall mirror had seemed the pillar of practically everything. But in the few weeks after her husband split, Pearl had first slept like a stone then dreamt like crazy, then commenced changing the house around till she got drawn into the lighting business.

Which erratic period—together with a dream that took her in one night to that mirror but more to the light angling into it from the small-shouldered, tall, strongly sculpted woman with the thickly stream-lined gray hair plaited and neatly and tightly bunned in the back with a small copper feather that could glint through you fearsomely and could keep you from following and maybe make you think she was with you even after she had gone back into the kitchen—brought her to phone Mel Mayn out of the blue and learn that his son Jim had phoned to ask if an unknown old-book dealer who might have pocketed a nineteenth-century Mayn-family diary had had speckled hands.

Spence pointed out that he had speckled hands, speckled with blue and amber dots patterned past ordinary freckling. The Chinese woman came back along the street and went into the shop, and Spence said in his case these bad dreams taught him how to forget, because he remembered everything else, and too much. You have to want for it to come to you, she said; and Spence said that he had not been able to wait—he couldn’t for years. He had to go. He asked if Pearl Myles was all right, and she said everyone was asking this nowadays, even in Minneapolis. Spence could not confirm this, though he had been out there. It was getting to be another Silicon Valley what with all the technological companies but without the valley, he said.

But then the phone call and its cause in the dream of Margaret lighting up that terrible mirror outside the door of the music room where Brad’s choked mourning beat the floor like some artifice or alien custom brought wonderfully back for Pearl so it could pass to old Mel yet stay with her that flimsy kite flying high in her very body four-sided now for perhaps twenty-three months but seen for the first time now with on each side dreams she had had in those days and a kite big enough for the nimbus of Ben Franklin to sit beaming inside and all she could tell Mel was this ancient silliness that she had been in a borrowed bathysphere beached but rolled by a great tide and as the water in windrows of white crests rose and a child inside her pressed upon her bladder (she hoped Spence didn’t mind) this sea-going room proved skeletal at best, its walls but windows and not closed off but striped with light like beams of darkness, so the briny deep was kept from coming in by—

The Trace Window man Spence had to see appeared incredibly on the far side of the street between the foundation and the Chinese shop, and Spence told Pearl he feared for her safety yet didn’t know entirely why.

Until, she went on, the room or light box was picked up and she was carried roughly and well aware the chair she dreamed she was sitting in and having trouble riding was obviously set off (but so what) by all the capital punishment talk then, when the point was that it switched into the next dream she told Mel Mayn where she was at the stove and literally transparent because of salt sweat and could be seen right through like a jellyfish and she was cooking up a pot of chili except her husband, who in case she sat down on his lap was sitting right behind her in part of the dream following her knife chopping peppers, was also in the next aisle under a tilted mirror because he’s a guard and the kitchen is part of this supermarket and just when she’s accused of stealing some of the vegetables she’s cooking up—for him—he is taken away and the earthquake that bursts and splits the ceilings and floors and warps the aisles seems O.K. with the customers and the most natural dimensions for them to slope along and she looked up with some nice ripe vegetables in her hand and saw the guard in the mirror holding up some robbers in the other end of the store and at the instant she learns how to stand she looks down at the warping and buckling and upheaval and it’s South America with dark-scaled armored animal or submarine pushing up everywhere. And Mel Mayn, who wrote such a brief narrow little obituary for his wife it was widely talked about, suddenly said that when she looked back up the guard had escaped, right?

Spence held up a five-dollar bill—a fin, he told the Greek, who nodded and took it, and Spence rose awkwardly from the booth. Pearl continued: Mel said he had had the same dream: escaped prisoner, salt waves, imprisoned child: and now that Pearl had had it, he knew what it meant.

Spence cautiously observed that there had been a model, green and reptilian, of the South American continent in the high school where Pearl had taught. Tears came to her eyes and she was amazed he knew, but shrugged it off. She said she had known then and there (but had not said to Mel) that dreams meant for sure only what you did as a result of them, and—

Your husband had left you by then? said Spence anxiously.

One dream before he left, one after, she was sure, but not the order; and then she did not have to ask Spence who the man was across the street because Spence knew she was thinking it. How about this young friend of Jim’s? she said.

There’s sand on the supermarket floor, a lot of it, said Spence stupidly, and his words curved gently, dumbly to hers: That’s not stupid, that’s right, that’s right, there’s sand; and I knew that the meaning of the dreams was (when no one would tell me which of the vegetables I had stolen), We’re on our own; act accordingly ... but Mel Mayn saw them another way.

Spence said he was concerned for Pearl’s safety, didn’t know if it was what she had said or hadn’t. She said she never knew what that word concerned meant. He had to go. Nobody was stopping him, they both felt.

It was because of Mel Mayn that the Chilean economist had phoned Pearl and she was here. This young friend Larry? he had a theory about interhem-ispheric reappearance . . . ?

Spence stood waiting and the Greek waiter came and stood nearby with some change in his hand.

Well. Mel had told his son; and the next thing—

Which son?

Her old pupil Jim. And the next thing, well a day or two later, this cultivated voice with an accent was talking to her on her kitchen phone in Minneapolis asking her—

But how had the Chilean gotten Pearl’s number?

Wasn’t it easy if he had her name? Couldn’t Spence manage that?, though of course he was in the racket.

Spence said quietly—out of character but into another maybe—that the object of this little coffee break had seemed for a time to be to go away from all that information into—but how had she made him talk so much?—and who was that imprisoned child? (He darted a look out the window and she knew he was out there for an instant.)

Oh a mutual acquaintance had had these dreams from Mel’s son and relayed them to the Chilean (a fellow economist, apparently, though the Chilean seemed to joke), said her receiving these dreams meant that she knew much more and—

Spence was looking down at Pearl and out the window, and asked what Mel’s escaped child had to do with it all.

Imprisoned child, said Pearl, with a laugh and a shrug. But what about this opera in the warehouse?

I’ve been pulled back in, said Spence glumly.

So have I, said Pearl Myles. Mel said my phone call meant I still questioned his wife Sarah’s death.

You do? said Spence.

Which would never have occurred to me, since I merely believe that sometimes we become the person we’ve been in the dream or always were simultaneously.

Spence thought this didn’t make clear sense but he had had a dream or two like Pearl’s and there was a We talking in some of it.

Yes, said Pearl.

The opera involved favors Spence thought three or four people were doing and what it led to was anybody’s guess, possibly unknown, but probably a feather in the cap (or someway utilized) of an opera star’s boyfriend—

Ah, Pearl had heard of him.

—but where the opera came from was getting to be another matter.

You like opera? said the Greek.

Pulled back in? asked Pearl, rising as if not to be excluded yet maybe to

go-

From where I was when I left the .rehearsal, said Spence.

You are in the opera? asked the Greek.

You were feeling something when you left that place, said Pearl, and Spence said, It’s why I’m concerned about your safety but I’ve got to go. Why do you look like you’re already in a couple of places? said Pearl—you probably know what your associate asked me over the phone as well as you know I got in touch with the Ojibwa healer Santee at the aeronautics school as soon as I learned the Park Avenue doctor had obtained a tapeworm through him.

I used to know all these things, said Spence. As recently as yesterday, in fact. I guess I have to go on being myself.

Your associate was upset underneath that pleasant sophistication of his, and he asked me if I had heard further from the Ojibwa as to the progress of his aeronautic training and if it was true someone was presenting him with a plane upon graduation.

And? said Spence.

And if certain journals of my old pupil’s family that had been taken by his brother contained information—

I am concerned for your safety, said Spence.

She asked him why, like a woman rather sternly on her own, and said he could have her phone number if he wanted it.

Because of what you are carrying in your head, said Spence.

Well, if he meant the information that had come variously to the Chilean economist—a charming, rather funny man, but in some kind of, pain, yes? —it was of a German sub that had been borrowed (or, he said, perhaps rented!) in 1945 for the escape of a thirty-year-old composer who had with her an unperformed anti-Nazi symphony with odd subject matter but a very plain message—

And it passed near the Jersey coast, said Spence. The Greek took one small step closer. Spence glanced at his watch and pressed the date button and— What’s the matter? she said—Oh either this thing is flipping afternoon today into tomorrow morning, or— Maybe you need a new battery!

—and while there is no question that she surfaced in Chile and was known to be trying in the most unselfish way imaginable to get produced a mysteriously original yet popular or somehow familiar opera partly composed by her great-grandmother, rumor now had it that the submarine had paused off the American coast to take on or let off some fugitive and had been threatened by a waterspout and disappeared but that the composer had more importantly been the great or grand niece of a legendary Chilean zoologist who had traced the scent glands of an inter-American mammal to the night habitat of a hermit-healer where she had left her mark upon a firearm later to figure in the Mayn family fortunes and that whether the reference was to her work with desert javelinas or to the opera still unperformed, there had been nothing equal to it since her day—

—since who? said Spence reaching and jamming his hand into his pocket so the Greek waiter stepped back.

Why, since Mena, said Pearl, shouldering her bag. Since Mena—the obscure sister (think I got it right) of the young symphony composer’s great-grandmother.

Desde Mena, said Spence.

This was the information you meant? said Pearl, and Spence opened his mouth to answer but could only ask what had been the opera’s strange subject matter, so that the tall and dear woman in front of him could quickly say, Mountains, mountains that could speak and think and dream and so forth, did it sound like Wagner or Berchtesgaden? certainly not New Jersey!—and still keep alive her query (This was the information you meant?): and Spence, who felt he could not see straight while Pearl Myles felt he saw her through a fearfully expanding angle, and each understood the other, told her that Jim Mayn never dreamt, whereas he, Spence, had never ... but he could only let it show, not find the words, but then said, You think I may be a brother of Mayn’s.

Now I do, said Pearl. Some information is worth more.

They were going separately toward the door, feeling somewhat clothed amidst the booths. Spence asked to know why she had really looked up the Ojibway—Ojibvva, as she said—and she said it was because of her husband who had left her after an argument to do with a father’s death caused in her opinion by a retouched composite photograph of two other shots taken by a pro with the same name as the Indian healer-flyer.

At the door she bent forward slightly to kiss Spence on the cheek just where an abandoned tear stood. Yes, he would like her number, he said. The Greek nearby sighed, amused—but when she said, Here or home? and Spence/ Santee said, Home, and she named that old number, he lifted from his pocket a brittle oblong of paper with two phone numbers on it. I like a little permanence, he said. Oh my God! Margaret Mayne’s funeral! said Pearl Myles, and felt in her fingers the paper she had handed Alexander on the day of his wife’s unwanted burial.

A bookmark, said Spence, and was gone.

In the plate-glass window of the bank the two knew each other. What do you think you’re doing? you were following me, weren’t you? asked the gaunt-faced, once-murderous man in the windbreaker (suede), medium-small backpack (red), foreign cigarette burning away. I’d just given up, said Spence, you turned away from where we were supposed to meet and I’m going there anyway, I’m looking at myself to see what was wrong with me. Was? croaked T.W., exhaling as Spence turned to face him. Yes, in the eyes of the man I’m going to see I hope, said Spence. That’s his problem, said T.W.; who is he? He might have been my brother all these years, said Spence. Listen, said the man, if I got into tracking down my family, it’d be a full-time occupation. A fur tail was poking out of his backpack. T.W. pulled out two small green lozenges Spence knew to be eucalyptus from Sweden specially made for singers, and popped them into his mouth. T.W. scratched the cactus-green double lobe of his right ear. I’ve decided to believe you that you didn’t dig up that firing-squad picture yourself but got given it like you said, though how you could have thought the restaurant in Minnesota went with the Cuban firing squad I still can’t see but my father’s dead and my mother I hear got married again so who cares? Probably not even the electrician who married her.

They’re both talking low and fast along the edge of the City’s engine, their separate urgencies splayed outward from the point of a city sidewalk where passersby like blind people who knew where their lunchroom would ultimately be found parted to let them stand where they were. Well, T.W. had been still going to meet Spence up the track a ways though the track was always curving, but he had detoured after a ghost in the flesh and lost her and thought that in the crowd crossing the street he’d overshot her even with the distinctive headgear she had on and looked back and then really lost her only to find Spence. Spence said it didn’t matter now, and T.W. said he was delaying his Trace Window trip to Portland where a sadomasochistic businesswoman who’s a quarter Kwakiutl and her very young slave-husband who she’s afraid is going through some changes and causing her a load of suffering had contracted T.W. for an on-the-spot body-reading hoping to develop potential residue trace as power versus poison and had kept it secret because no one in the northwest coast believed them. Spence said he felt he had been led all day, beginning with an old person he had once thought could be Mayn’s lost mother but because of the absence in her immediate vicinity of the person Spence sought he had been slung around northward only to be diverted, detained—

T.W. likewise as a matter of fact, yessirree, on the incline all day, thanks to—

Spence too—

Don’t want to talk about it except waking up this morning a flame of daylight except not quite a flame windowed simultaneously outside and inside T.W.’s, well, thinking; and he went with it and knew he was more than a Trace Window, he was a Trace, and could have known years ago if he had talked to that halfbreed kid Ira Lee then instead of yesterday—

Spence didn’t want to hear about it, and T. W. said he knew—and Spence said it was all like something some relative had never told him—yet T.W. held Spence by the elbow so Spence felt it might go off like a pistol, yes Ira had thought T.W. was after that old double-breed Natchay-Creek Indian Uncle Willy’s things, specially the hunk of blue-red glass which curved anything you could see through it there on the porch in the black section of town with the old guy’s always-full pitcher of ice water, curved even the other "things" of Uncle Willy’s that Ira liked, the jawbone of the huge flying fish found over a thousand feet high (and dry) on a desert lookout crag cradling like a gateway or the mothering mouth of a tender tabby cat the figurine of a woman s’posedly famous who under the blue-red of the glass not only curved but sang of how far she had come to see the land—

Spence disengaged his elbow and T.W. seemed to lean away, far away, but still talking: Ira Lee therefore had never told T.W. that Uncle Willy wanted to see him and T.W. hated old folks in those days because of an old piner who scared him by jumping ten or fifteen feet right up into an old dead tree at will and took others with him, but if T.W. had really troubled to talk to Ira, T.W. now said he would have learned from Ira that that old double-breed Uncle Willy had known the redneck boy who’d been visiting his piner relations in Rompanemus Swamp to be a Trace Window because Uncle Willy, himself a Trace Window, had felt the womanculus start to vibrate to the boy’s trace waves as he approached, meaning that the boy whom he had seen once before without event must have become that ultra-rare "personal-contact" Trace through having been locked in conflict with a Trace who was under some mortal pressure from either burial grounds (and of course the cemetery was out near Rompanemus Swamp) or from demands made on him or her by another Trace afflicted with one of the original radioactive abscesses in forehead or fontanel forked in potential and spiral in spirit from origins in both Canadian-border hailstone cores and the exponential esophagus of that southern-Rockies sky-blue Pressure Snake in actuality also alternatively insect-fleshed (hence the spiral thread of the throat)—

I didn’t want to hear this, I don’t need it any more, Spence was saying, I am going to find my brother. He pressed the date button on his watch.

—if you have a brother, you have a mother, said Spence’s gauntly agitated belaborer—and so at dangerous dawn this morning came the near flame (the "flam"!) of day, a light infinitesimally cleaving the head so it felt it lined it up with many other heads, T.W. had stopped dream-hiking major arteries into endlessly hitched future and had seen that that client who had indirectly (in theory) caused T.W.’s father’s death could have been telling the truth; and seeing this, T.W. had ‘‘seen" coming out of the jean pocket of the greater Minneapolis restaurant robber with the inflamed abscess (or other) in his forehead, a highly compact black case that could have been an instant camera—

But Spence didn’t care now, he said, who had taken the picture or—

But T.W. cared, because—

You didn’t let me tell you, you wouldn’t listen to where I got the picture and your father wasn’t alive to say whether in fact he did die because of seeing you s’posedly in front of a Cuban—

Don’t get me mad, said T.W., but Spence was pointing into a moving crowd—and don’t try to distract me, said T.W.

The woman in the picture, said Spence, the woman with the cap.

Vigil, called T.W. to Spence, who had moved away—you know Vigil you used him; well, Vigil says "Wide Load" is code name for—

The Cuban woman with the baseball cap, shouted Spence but could only, now, stare at T.W.—who with scarcely an interruption was saying,—for a mountain, a mountain, and only Mayn and his daughter—

—She’s gone around the corner of that bank building, called Spence and a limousine backed onto the curb just missing him—

—and only Mayn and his daughter and maybe you know, and it’s some national mountain that moves and Vigil said "N.T.M." like I would know but he wouldn’t elaborate.

She’s there again, called Spence, stepping further back, his hand on the rear fender of the long black car.

But all I know is, said T.W., that the day I got to be what I am Jim Mayn was at crisis and they were at the burial ground but the mother wasn’t there, as everybody knew, because she was out in the ocean somewhere or lying on a beach or on a three-day train west for all anyone could be certain—and the grandmother wasn’t dead yet but someone was resting there, I know that as sure as I know that someone is going to get killed.

What do you mean you talked to Ira yesterday? said Spence, and a firetruck was on top of them suddenly and as suddenly gone, whistling up the avenue as if the avenue were a building tuning the city, so Spence moved closer—a thing was speaking through him and he was alone, and it was not a thing. What do you mean? did you go back to Windrow?

The fire siren rammed its curve onward away down the City and T.W. seemed to bend for his shoelace but he had boots on and was kneeling, the engines of all vehicles drew away from him and from Spence, drawing Spence close to what he had moments before thought to go around in order to pursue his way toward an apartment building where he now knew at least four apartments though he had been inside but two; and T.W. was on his side resting against the fixed pillow of his backpack, people stepping deftly, almost stopping deftly, over him, his head then arching a bit back to see Spence/Santee, who was suddenly with him, feeling the simple blood on T.W.’s bruised cheek, catching his latest words like finest advice: Go with it. You warned me. The gal in the cap, baseball cap. Her name is ... I think it’s Nos- . . . Nos- . . . I did a trace, you know, on the guy in prison. Mayn knows, because I told him driving back from New Jersey. She shot me.

Spence found the dark mark on the suede windbreaker. Am I a Trace?

No, the wounded man said. You’re not a Trace. That’s O.K.

Is Brad a Trace, then?

T.W. seemed to shrug an inch or two along the pavement, and a cop appeared. Brad? murmured T.W., Brad?

He’s been shot in the back, said Spence. The cop began talking into his box.

But what was the "flam"? said Spence. That’s what it was, said T.W., SL flam; why didn’t I think of that? Specialist. Got drawn in . . . but into what? Yes, said Spence: what? Yes, brother, said T.W., what did I care about that family, what did I care about a Wide Load with its own built-in . . .

Built-in what? asked Spence, torn, saddened, receiving bodily what he would as soon sling away far down to the sound of the engines down the avenue though it was a mysterious shape-like "nothing" in that sound.

National . . . technical . . .

Means? asked Spence.

. . . music. What’s in the way makes it. Mean a warehouseful, wonderful, store a Nazi symphony for a generation, what energy . . .

The cop was asking Spence who T.W. was. A black boy in a tweed overcoat knelt down to watch. He wore new thick white sneakers, and he straw-sipped from a can of soda in a brown paper bag.

Nazi? said the boy.

Means anti-Nazi, ‘xcuse, murmured T.W. He took my gun, said T.W. Who took your gun? said the cop, and looked at the boy and at Spence.

Pull the fur tail, said T. W., I want you to see the . . . the light’s changing, said T.W. That’s right, said the boy. It threw me a curve, said T.W. Right, said the boy. T.W. grinned: I’m already on it; see me out there?

You’re right here, said Spence.

Let’s get outa here, said T.W.

Right, said the boy.

Portland.

Right.

Don’t leave just yet, said T.W.

Spence remembered his hand on T.W.’s shoulder. National technical . . . music? said Spence, as blood appeared on T.W.’s upper lip slanting into the corner of his mouth.

Nose is bleeding, said the boy. They heard the clatter and static on the cop’s box. I’m dying, said T.W. I’m flush up against it.

A smell of scent came down and an elderly woman with chapped, rouged lips bent down: You’re not going to die, she said.

It’s only way I could see what was going on, said T.W. Such a waste. Made trouble for myself. Pull the fur tail.

The black boy reached for it and the cop told him Don’t touch it.

What waste? asked Spence.

We’re the same, said T.W. wearily.

Same what? said Spence looking back over his shoulder.

People, Santee, people. You’re out there someplace, aren’t you?

Yeah. That’s it. Are you the one who found the new reincarnation?

Up against it. Asked for it. Flush up against it. Drew me in so I can be just this one person, but drew me in so I buzzed right through it. Or around it, too: I can’t tell.

Who is the Chinese woman? said Spence.

She got the kid.

What’s his name? said the cop, and Spence looked up and said, T.W.; and T.W. murmured methodically, Thomas Winwooley. Of the Mayo Win-wooleys.

And where’s the mountain? said Spence; does Mayn know?

Can’t imagine being anyone else no more. Oh the load on top of the mountain might just be a lost anchor.

The mountain? said Spence, sorry for himself. He looked back across the intersection and saw a familiar broad-shouldered man with thick gray hair watching from across the intersection and rose and took a step or two and raised his hand. A cab came by, over there, scarcely stopping, and when it passed on, still seemingly empty (though the light turned its inside opaque), the man was gone. Maybe Mayn was still going to be at his apartment, but Spence did not check the date again, he had lost a day somewhere along the line.

What did he say? said Spence, turning back.

Mega death, said the cop, who had a mustache. Mega death. Do you know what that is? Do you know him? Do you know what he was talking about? Mega? What’s mega?

Spence reached and pulled the fur tail. T.W. seemed out of it. The cop told Spence, Don’t . . . but the fur tail came all the way and attached to the end was a figurine of a woman. She had an owl face and she looked whittled, as if the wood had gone to stone. Spence gripped it. We’re buddies, he said to the cop. This thing belongs to both of us.

The boy looked up at the cop and back at Spence.

A cab pulled up in front of Mayn’s apartment building and Mayn came out with a young woman with thick, dark hair who had on a sailor’s peajacket and bluejeans. Mayn reached for the cab door and opened it, but the woman was talking to him; he answered her, throwing out his hand in some gesture; she grabbed his arm and went close to him, talking fiercely; she got into the cab and could not pull the door shut because he was holding the handle; he got into the cab and closed the door, and the cab pulled away from the curb and stopped at once. The door opened and Mayn’s arm could be seen and then his trousered leg, but his shoe never reached the street. He withdrew his leg and the door closed, and the cab accelerated to make the light, and as the cab passed him, Spence raised his arm and by coincidence or kindred force, the familiar man in the cab turned away from his evidently intense conversation and caught Spence’s eye, and Spence continued in the direction of Mayn’s building.

The knot of his mother Sue’s Knuckle (he knew it was her fine knuckle as if he could see it miles away) on the phone instrument at her end of the line spoke to the Eye so newly established in Larry’s shoulder-to-neck field. It had been established by reciprocal Weak Force slung out of another context yesterday though it seemed only half an hour ago, a context out there that he hated to think might be a coordinate system. And slung from distances so meaninglessly much greater (equal to these other distances, say from here to Long Island or to Donald Dooley’s girlfriend’s apartment find or Amy’s foundation, etcetera, or the place from which the Chilean guy who’s friend to Mayn possibly had phoned, equal distances all, like light in theory) that Larry half wearily yet sniffing some change knew would be tied in with the other discovered systems and forces, and he was determined to either make these discoveries go from him or make himself go from them. Meanwhile, she was telling him she loved him, his mother was, and he was seeing so clearly, against the sporadic down-the-hall, next-room voice of Donald as if D.D. thought Lar’ was still there, his mother and her friend (her mother? her daughter?) massaging each other and talking late into the night, and he was just bottomline bored with all that, and here she was seriously wondering what it would be like to come back to him and Marv. Marv, Lar’ knew, thought he didn’t want that any more, and Larry tried to find words to speak that would be between saying nothing and saying something and only succeeded in knowing that, parallel to her out-loud words, this messaging of her Knuckle to his Eye (though an earlike Eye) newly situated in his shoulder-to-neck field, proved again the Differential Telepathy whereby, even against Lar’s determined refusal of a future in it and other recent discoveries, voiceless communication over no matter what size area between unlike body-parts (as from shoulder blade to instep, or heart to hand, or ear to intestine or thigh, or, here, knuckle to eye) joined the two persons via the most extreme experience of each body part or organ in question so the memory became the power, i.e., of being winged or of so mutually taking one another’s life that a new one arose elsewhere or of caring to hear another’s circulation poured into your own without knowing if’t be ichor or terminal toxin. And while, on this phone with new friend D.D. now pausing in his speech in next room, Larry had his mother down his ear, up his brain, congruizing his personal body-envelope like that plode-plast invented in one of his bad dreams that’s tucked like a rubber into a wallet and when set off by hostile touch of mugger-thief as he takes your wallet blows up into plode-plastic head-and-torso-hugger to neutralize the mugger thus encased and threatened with suffocation—until he was able to not only be joined to his mother by mutual memory of friendly fisticuffs at bedtime when he was eight, with mutual heartfelt bloody noses, but could thus separate from her and say, "Try going with it, Mom, I don’t know how I feel about your coming back and I can’t speak for Marv, y’know," while simultaneously seeing that sure he wanted her back but in an earlier time that he had access to only in dreams and not at this present spiraling end of conversations bridging two days with D.D. and girlfriend who had come and gone and might come back and conversations that in an almost sexual way felt like negotiations in the real world plus being in the best cool sense warm. "Darling, I said some things to you I shouldn’t have." "I know, Mom, but I wasn’t a virgin, then, and that wasn’t what I was threatened by." "You weren’t?" "I can’t explain. I’m still going through it." "If you need someone to talk to, darling." "I’ve got some people." He had to say goodbye and said he was sorry in order to get off the line and also away from this uselessly intense Differential Telepathy he’d as soon forget about much less take credit for discovering when no doubt the guy Mayn knew in prison and half a dozen other transponders around the infinite network clinging to the Earth’s made-to-measure finite sphere-cozy of a surface had already figured out what anyway Lar’ would leave even to his well-after-all-pretty-down-to-earth older friend Mayn and/or Mayn’s smart, young if science-oriented girlfriend in favor of being more real, via new friends, via regular existence, even not too economical if need be, and via, too, that Chinese woman sitting on three old phone books knitting (or was she sewing?) in the Chinese shop after hours, so ordinary and routine she might be a youngish grandmother, she was Just There, thinking about the work she’s doing, planning on a snack before bed, on some television, on whatever small matters mattered to her and that Larry loved without knowing.

Meanwhile, if such a new friend as Donald Dooley (cum, or not-cum girlfriend) might intellectualize at length upon genetic engineering, weather modification, seismic surveillance of nuclear tests, and taking the measure of Earth and its chains (food chain, profit-tradeoffs chain, crisis-intuiting chain, et al.), Lar’ nonetheless felt from these new folk who mattered in his life their physical nearness, their waiting energy of concern in terms of concentrically expanding small-scale self-help vis a vis total-global—their moment-by-moment, particle-by-particle evolution in Spontaneous Creative Faith—an experience coined by a woman writer apparently so important he had heard her quoted without ever being named.

But back in Lar’s room D.D. proved to be reading a poem or poems aloud and talking to it, or them, or the poet; yet talking to Larry too, it might seem, who, on reentry, said that that was his mother, his "ma," and it had been heavy. D.D. shook his head smiling and said, "Cut the tie if you can’t loosen it," and asked if she ever played music to him when he was a child because Mira played the piano in the evenings, like Schumann stuff and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Chopin, nothing heavy or loud, music to unwind to. Larry said sure he knew what Donald was talking about, and he hoped to hear Mira play, and Donald threw out his brown-bearded chin, "Say ‘when,’ Larry, just say the word." Larry said if we got it together globally we might not need dreams in the future and when asleep we might just hear music. But not cut-rate prescription, courtesy of Big Brother, put in D.D.— No, Lar’ went on, hearing the door buzzer go, more like a fantastic waterfall flowing out of the mountains of the right brain into the— Was Lar’ going to answer that?—Lar’ said he didn’t want to—but D.D. said it might be Mira and stood up and left the room, Lar’ saying, Sorry—"It’s O.K., it’s O.K., I know where you’re coming from," he heard his new friend quietly say. Lar’ went to look at the book of his that D.D. had picked up and put down, and on that page was a poem of D. H. Lawrence Lar’ had never seen and didn’t know Lawrence wrote poetry, "Piano" it was called and was about a woman softly singing to you, but at a glance it wasn’t just about that and probably when you got past that, you found it was about—but Lar’ got just as far as "betrays" when D.D. came back, looking puzzled. "Must have had the wrong door, got a glimpse of his back and his hair, then he went out of sight from your peephole, should I have opened the door and—" but Larry said No, it was O.K., though if it was someone off the street the doorman should have buzzed but maybe they did buzz the right apartment. Donald was telling how he and Mira had the whole floor, where they were, and it was good space but too much, and this older guy he had run into at the college told him he had moved back into a pad he had lived in years ago (Hey maybe it’s a friend of mine, he did that, said Larry) and someone had stacked it full of junk (—Same thing, said Lar’), couple three statues of women, y’know, and a rusted-out drill press and some other useless machines and he discovered while he was clearing all this shit out and thinking, Is it worth it? and is this junk telling me the place doesn’t want me?, that it was his own body he was . . . (Getting in touch with? said Larry—No, said D.D.—Looking for? said Larry—Well, . . . —Looking to find, said Larry; unearthing, he added; it almost sounds weird enough to be my friend; there was a weird bust of some woman he didn’t know where it came from, and a busted machine with a lot of small functions he didn’t have a clue about and gave it to the super or the doorman but they threw it out, but this was different because he had kept control of the apartment during the time he had been living in other places after his marriage broke up and his wife and kids moved away) . . . "Right," said D.D., staring at Larry’s photo of Sequoya: this guy was pretty interesting, he had been around the country a dozen times and had slept in many rooms and once was sure he himself was the person in the next room yelling in his sleep (You know it does sound like my friend but he doesn’t dream and never did)—"O.K., O.K.," said D.D. trying to reach the point, "because then he woke up, y’see, and the person next door was a woman (he’d only dreamt she was a man yelling) and she wasn’t asleep at all but being given the third degree by a man you could hardly hear until it got very quiet and then the man started yelling" and this guy D.D. had run into right outside Eco class and . . . and . . . (What? said Larry) . . . "and I hardly ever saw him again," said D.D., puzzled and staring preoccupied at Sequoya. "But you had quite a rap for just first meeting him, you know." "Well, he said that he felt incredibly empty like he was surrounded by nothing and he went back to sleep in that room and dreamt he was burnt to an ash, a perfect ash facsimile of himself and woke up and was afraid to move for fear he would crumble and had a shipyard foreman he had to go interview about his work when he was really looking into some smuggling racket he had heard was using dry dock work as a cover for unloading, and he was lying in bed ("Strange, it could almost be this friend of mine," said Larry)—and he knew then and there that it would be good for him to live with somebody, like maybe a family, and as soon as he said that to himself he felt really together and jumped out of bed and knew it was impossible, he could never find anyone nor could bring himself to do it, but ("Did he ever find his body in all the junk in that other apartment?" said Larry, unsure of his own empathy for whatever’s happening right now with D.D., who said:) He really dreamt that, but he knew it had happened in the past and it made him go buy a horse and stable it in New Jersey, he didn’t have a clue why although he had ridden in the West now and then."

"He’s one of those missing persons," said Larry, wanting to go out and look through the peephole." "That’s right," said Donald Dooley, "can’t afford to have them turn up because they’re living your life and you didn’t know it." "Didn’t want to know it," said Larry, and left the room because D.D. was about to discover Simultaneous Reincarnation. "God, we can’t stay off reincarnation," called D.D. as Larry strode to the front door and, through the peephole, saw an ageless man in the outer hallway in a (best) western-style fringe jacket and bluejeans and a ponytail at his age, standing next to Ford North’s giant couch but not like waiting for the elevator: Larry imagined the Chinese woman jumping down off her phone books, removing one to look up a number, putting water on to boil, sitting down again on two phone books, saying hello as he entered her store to turn away from a street full of parallels trying to turn into people where this man in the hall by the elevator was, say, Mayn reincarnate but not because Mayn was dead and returned for we had here (5.R.) Simultaneous Reincarnation like the two screens of truth that, on his previous bike, Larry had reached by descrambling Mayn’s informations about some future existence in a very real torus-shaped libration-point space station and his conviction that his grandmother had done a number of peculiar and heroic things out West as someone else, a princess or something, plus much more information that when Lar’ had descrambled it yielded theory weeks ago, and Larry felt it wearing him down and bothering his very existence as the man out there moved from the couch to ring Ford North’s bell, and like a body of light went up close in case North’s peephole was open so Lar’ himself, riding some curve of (call it) relativity away from his new friend and the Chinese woman so he might be in danger of—and Mayn’s voice, on the topic of his romance, came into Lar’s body—of standing in someone else’s place. So keep away from being inhabited by that curve. Oh how (but Lar’ knew the answer) could we be simultaneously incarnate elsewhere (he tried to wipe from his head, returning now to D.D.).

"I thought he was coming on to me," said D.D., "he walked with me the first time—I don’t think you were in class, because Rail read your name off, and this guy asked what we were studying in class and whether there was good interaction and what type of fellow students we had, so he could have been looking for someone else."

And the second time D.D. had run into this guy was just last week near D.D. and Mira’s space and he said he had never been to college but had dreamt of D.D. finding a new home and asked if he had any friends at college who would be interested in horseback riding in New Jersey in, actually, the vicinity of a good undisturbed cemetery, and though this drew a blank, it turned out friend D.D. and this guy shared an interest in the relation of Earth chemistry to sudden layer changes in weather and D.D. had mentioned Larry as a likely contact for this guy ("He sounds like my friend Mayn," said Lar’, "heavy-set with gray hair, wears the business suit"—"Not the same guy," said D.D.)—and he asked if we were into any secret societies at college such as the antique hand-gun sect in Texas or the—come to think of it—Masonic offshoot he had heard of that seeks a lost degree of radioactive effect that divides people into two without their knowing it and—("I think someone’s at the door," said Larry, "the buzzer doesn’t always work"—the Chinese woman was on her phone books, the weird guy in the hall was just stepping into the elevator and the light was still green, the man D.D. described was right out of Mayn, and Lar’ had to deafen himself to what was to come, a reversal economy by which two people then became one, although if Mayn never dreamt, how could he, this rational guy, find himself so sure of his presence in the workaday future of an Earth-Moon system?, the Chinese woman was a random particular, Lar’ loved her, she was remote even from our after-all-quite-real smelling-of-ginger-grass (in a green bottle) Amy, who worked at the foundation in the same block as the Chinese woman, and the threat of abstraction wasn’t just abstract, there’s a memory maybe Lar’ needs to dream up that puts him in danger from these tangled others—otros—and in need of new friends, he feels the encroachment again of some special relativity that corresponds to oW-fashioned reincarnation (time travel yet you come back out there not here and you’re one, not two) and feeling drawn to new people because people matter but, by turns, are matter drawing seemingly him toward them as if they were empty chance landscaped pathwise (fuck gravity), he knows what he after all did not (so well) know, that people are the obstacles we choose and by a system that is always double we are inclined toward these obstacles in order by some last-second correction like multiple-reentry of missiles to veer away around them at risk yet with awful chance, too, if we can find the way in to the risk of our lives, of tricking our old computers into passing right through, the way a medicine man Mayn joked of made his death an event horizon of new obstacle, which brings Lar’ so close to a threat to his life that he is back in company with Donald Dooley before almost either one knows it, and Larry knows now that the man D.D. reports knowing is of or in or from Mayn.

"So he was going out to N.J. to a town where they tell direction by the nature of the wind rather than the wind by direction, and winds have natures not compass prongs, he had to do some digging he said, some final digging, he said, and I said, You a newspaperman? and he said, More a photographer, and he was looking for some old Indian who had turned into a new species of weather in order to avoid being—yes! by God there it is!, to avoid reincarnating as—"

"Please don’t," said Larry, "that was the Indian who made a prediction a hundred years ago that could fall on my head, I have to keep some stuff out of my head, Don, you got to help me but I can’t tell you what it is, though I will say that even if General Relativity does confirm Obstacle Geometry, I would rather pretend at least that General Relativity won’t help us understand local events, like life, for instance."

"Get your head out of here," said D.D., "especially if your mother’s freaking back when you’ve accepted her leaving. Anyway things aren’t always relative."

"What do you mean?" asked Larry, but the phone was ringing and he hated this need he had for privacy, and he rushed to the far phone yet it kept ringing (no doubt accented, no doubt demanding to know from him what he knew or had worked out, demanding surely some particular thing that then turned into events already going on in the hall by launch-elevator and opera-star couch) still ringing of course because in the curve or his small piece of it he had been abstracted once more to the front door which was not ringing, and in the peephole he saw only what he could not afford to believe was there, and D.D. was calling, Do you want I should answer it?, while Lar’ saw also that these outer people were extremely dangerous like the embodiment of that tensor geometry of, really, Time which made Obstacle Geometry law but law he must leave to Time to work out, for the Chinese woman he had so treasured was there in the peephole approaching Ford North’s door with a very small non-Oriental child, and she had a key, and Larry rushed back to his room as the phone stopped (but not, blessedly, picked up by D.D.): "What did that guy look like?" asked Larry, leaning against the door jamb. "What’s it matter?" said D.D. "The main thing is you could help yourself." "Yes, I could do that." "Me and Mira got more space than we need, we got enough for three, or even four, depending—and the place is designed with plenty of acoustical privacy—and we need a share to swing the rent. So how about moving in with us? We discussed it, and Mira thinks you’re great ... I mean ..."

Larry’s heart stopped for a moment. Life accelerated, but he had felt that for quite a while, y’know. Life seemed as dangerous as finding what tensor may plot the obstacle curve of the heart and other interweaving parallels; and he said, "I want to, I really want to; but my father might need me and . . .

I want to but I want to think about it." "Sure." "I might talk to a friend about it." "Sure." "This friend is upstairs, she runs these workshops." "Sure," said D.D.; "we like want to get somebody by next week, so there’s time." "I think I might not," said Larry, "but I really have to think about it."

And for an instant of nebulous future containing all the new people Larry would meet, with their strange but no doubt often familiar names, the eyes of Sequoya upon him as they had been upon that last-century relative of Mayn’ s who took the photo and recorded his travels told Larry he might economize and find the basic unit of value and that here at the edge, full circle but jogged up a notch, he might throw his light into the void and whether the void we had encircled with a kind of pseudo spiral went upward or downward, he need not worry about his light coming back to him.

BETWEEN US: A BREATHER TOWARD THE END

We already recall what has just happened.

But these events left in their stead a light which is our faith that we have enough to go on even in the face of awful interrogation as to how many things can be meant at the same time on the point of the torturer’s pin.

Have we not teamed in research of one solution to two or more problems? Like, how People slope around Obstacles may prove how they’ll sometimes go right through them. If so, we may find ourselves explaining at one blow or, if it is the next to last thing we do, in one breath, both the Obstacle’s power to repel approach causing refraction-detour, and the Obstacle’s power to be passed through, though this is due as well to the Obstacle penetrator’ s at least short-term understanding that since if you look at the history you find that the Obstacles we are dedicated toward can be seen to have been made by Us out of what from a parallel angle looks like the very void through which we passed in order to reach the Obstacle in question, it in turn must contain sufficient void for us to pass through it.

Yet not so much that we feel nothing.

Surprised by brotherhood maybe between Jim Mayn and him (while granting Mayn a perfectly real half-brother Brad already), Spence we already recall turned away from a sensational puzzle converging upon a less and less gay opera. But in turning Spence found himself drawn in all over again. Yet with the actual danger outside him and some inkling that everything outside was really inside, he thought to locate within him whatever still was to be unearthed on the actual site of the Windrow burial ground to judge from what the late T.W. had sensed there. One evening Spence discovered that the messengers Jimmy and Gustave were no longer using his office space. The next morning Spence decided not to redye his hair and this proved to be the same morning that the visiting (DINA) intelligence officer de Talca, suddenly the day before contemptuous of our exile-economist Mackenna as caring much less about Allende’s programs than Neruda’s history of mud and sweat and the man moving like a ship among the barley, and suddenly the day before seeming to Spence perhaps satisfied that there was no New York-based Castroist plot to kill a key Chilean leader yet seeming this morning on edge about his diva’s warehouse-opera dress rehearsal now ten short hours away, warned Spence by machine message and in Spence’s return call that, just at a time when de Talca had concluded the most risky arrangement for the release of a famous important house-arrest detainee in Santiago, a New York State prison inmate by name George, who had been friendly with the dubiously anti-Castro Cuban himself now fugitive for several days from that same New York State maximum-security prison behind whose gray concrete ramparts founded in dark-forested hills Spence himself had received more than once the fluorescent visitor’s stamp on the back of his hand, had claimed to be in contact (hardly the first time this inmate George had announced this sort of thing)—but chemical contact—with a woman named Myles who proved not only to have been telephoned by our exile Chilean economist Senor Mackenna at her home in Minneapolis and to have come at once to New York to see him this week, but had said privately that she believed she had an acquaintance in common with the Cuban woman in the baseball cap whom she had seen in fact arrested for the street-murder of Thomas Winwooley (whose initials, de Talca added, were his real name, referring apparently to geo-chemical gifts through which he contracted out as a "ray reader" to clients as far away as Seattle and as close to home as Spence himself), the Cuban woman assassin seen by Myles and others in the company of a Chinese woman with diplomatic immunity who in her turn had been seen with a child identified (by a tiny but luminous scar under one eye and by two pistols in twin holsters) as the prison fugitive’s kidnapped son; but on top of this, the woman Myles had accompanied the journalist Mayn and a young, dark-haired woman to New Jersey this morning to the same town that T.W. had apparently been sent to at least once by Spence, and a young woman had followed them in another car who was identified as the daughter of Mayn. At this mid-morning moment with the warehouse dress rehearsal but a few hours away and the Lady Luisa in a state, due to inquiries she had been subjected to that she could not discuss with de Talca, Mayn had re-emerged as a figure "in" this opera: for a Chicago mountain-climber economist on General Pinochet’s staff, originally trained as a classical trombonist and recently interrogated on his association with a homosexual meditation troop of Araucanian Indians near where de Talca had had military training, had wired from Valparaiso the news—personal and private news—that the excerpts of score that de Talca had photowired him were taken from a legendary opera score Chilean and feminist never performed in the day of its composer because of its curious re-emphases of the Hamlet story but surfacing most strangely, one brittle, brown, folded, and envelope-sheathed sheet of it, on the person of a woman dead at the bottom of a cliff near Valparaiso more than a decade ago, and of the two inscriptions, the older one read "To the healer, muchas gracias, this is yours now," the name a mere scribble, Men-something, while the fresher inscription read, "To Mayga, a lady who spoke softly in my ear goodbye, here’s ancient music from my grandmother who would have liked you—I’d like to say this came to me in a dream of the future, Jim Mayn," the handwriting verified long since from Washington.

So Spence in turn must conclude that whatever of the "traced" burial ground he might locate or unearth within him, this being furthermore the day of the night when he must be present at the Hamletin dress rehearsal, he must post-haste visit Windrow itself as if it were in reality outside him. Meanwhile, he was feeling deep inside some need to arrive at a semi-permanent home where he could hang T.W.’s fur tail with the female figurine or stub his bare toes in the middle of the night. And while having for these final days to pursue what in some way he was pursued by (including the wonderful Pearl Myles, whose marital breakup Spence knew had come after an argument over an event indirectly caused by Spence), and follow out to some provisional ending his relations with the two Chileans and several other persons with the annoying outside chance that he might already be targeted for death, given the awesome excess of data de Talca with reckless menace had poured down into the compound pulses of the phone’s ability to hit the body system’s addictive brains within brains within brains . . . Spence felt—he felt, and felt he felt —in possession of enough knowledge to live out the rest of his life if only he would decipher that knowledge in him though with help he knew was near in that common consciousness (was he speaking?) that was more than community spirit yet less organized and tense than the seeming collaborations spun, for instance, from the original words he was told of the opera in question if not leading to an anti-Nazi symphony about the very mountains that went way back into the American Southwest as if the same discovery had been made six thousand miles apart, certainly involving much traveling and explosive links with the Mayn family about which Jim Mayn’s personal unconcern must have been due to some numbing process caused by the very mass of these networks that clung to the world. Spence’s hair was growing out dark again, the jojoba oil might keep his natural black hair from looking, as it always had, dyed and false, he could see it grow so terribly slowly it had a mind as much its own as many. And if Spence began to make out conversations in a bagful of voices, he could secretly think of himself as We and begin to stop caring what Mayn’s relationship was with the young hunger technologist Jean in her Village apartment apparently festooned with Native American paraphernalia, or for that matter how it had come about that Jim’s former wife Joy had never made the acquaintance of the terrific and funny Grace Kimball and her army in the days when Joy lived in that odd, large old brick apartment house built the year Marcus Jones was in Montana, we believed, or for that matter how it had {if it had) escaped the attention of de Talca and his people that one of the two men who had been with the airline executive’s journalist wife Mayga Rojas Rodriguez was named Morgen, with an e, himself related to— . . . examples by the gross with a continent of earth t’bury them . . . mouths all by themselves talking ... or an invisible event . . . yet, beyond Spence’s mere head trips, circular possibly because of the slight torque given his emerging hair by the follicle root, work to do, the old woman yakking friendly in the street near the Wing lady’s racket, and the old guy with her, who was unquestionably into meteorology and had unquestionably been visited by Mayn as if that was all there was to it.

We had learned we were a language; or was it we’d been asked to be? For questions came our way at such speed they were only implicit, such as Wie gehts?, full of such problems as the uses that that language had been put to during the War, so for our part we would right out up front respond, "Say la question." We had been told or had learned we were perhaps words; or we were of all things the collision course along which larger matters tracked; or we were the "all" that proved Part to be oft greater than Whole; or if not "all," then we were the "us" {in we) so buried that we could but bear with it, for then at least if it came to light, so would we, though if not broken now and again toward parcels of life seen by bent parts of light that from another system seemed straight we when we are most turning seem, multiple by multiple, most dark as if by an anti-light.

Sometimes we imagined we didn’t know who we were, and this was sometimes in turn because when told we were angels (or, as "file ‘em"-type category, "angel" as in "vegetable" or "mineral") it came as an accusatory interrogation painfully circular could be so don’t take her serially. Yet from different direction came dual charge (1) that Light, which had theretofore been not understood, was totally devoid of rest and the energy that goes with rest (thus all up front and restless), and (2) that all the time that we didn’t know it, Light was Us (or, speech-patterned the way the late century in question sometimes couched information, What if "Light is Us?).

That there ran threads in us of Light who could question? not even an interrogator in a sequondam language-quoia whose pay don’ go as far this month because of inflation in your tight-money Chicago-school pocket-pool export reinvestment system. But when both women and men took to seeing their own trademarked thread of illumination outside themselves in Others and at the instant when they themselves (qua selves and, more deeply, quoia) felt the loss of these light threads, and, feeling this, then felt, lo! the threads of light return! (return like parents we had no less than off sprung!), . . . why then a faith spread among us and evoked its supporting arguments like those ancient preliterate metal clays from which life after the fact claims to have arisen (like a smell)—and this faith threatened to prove that these threads were our collected and collectible brain. Needless to add, faith’s threatening argument relied on such jumps as dreams are laid on and such acts as belong to, say, terminal segments of their own tail that certain earth-red once-purely-Chilean lizards will jettison when stalked by the sky-blue hypnosnake of the Andes whose attention (eye and tongue in terms of snake-minutes of attention) is so drawn to these independently twitching links of lost tail that the lizard for its part makes its getaway so long as it never looks back, in our opinion. And by acts of jump such as the above, or, better said, without such acts, why should we have supposed it would be in the end a literal bomb, when it came right out of our own restless Light: a burst responding to a passing intimacy of our own contrary matter, which is almost like love except with no time to admit there’s hardly time. Only the gates that light turns to and into, dark gates the obstacles Light finds and leaves in memory which is also obstacle and gate.

We think now that we knew the why for all these things once upon a time at the beginning but then the things ensued and the reason got left. At the starting gate? asks the interrogator with his idiomatic pedantry from the next room knowing no more about the future than we except fingering his well-wired (solid-state import) Persuasion Button which inclines us to give not a double answer to one question yet neither one to two—but . . . one to one, that’s it! Yet we’ve got such a staff working on this we can forget responsibility almost, there’s such a wealth of history and we are making it, and by all continually processing ourselves into one we are transcending the old outmoded individual responsibility thus not passing buck but saving it. We wanted to tell our friends that we were pregnant.

O.K., I got the point: I am only the second person you’ve told these things to. So who was the first, if it wasn’t your wife? (It’s good you had some practice!)

A journalist named Mayga Rojas Rodriguez.

The one who died, the Chilean.

I don’t know that she was mainly a journalist. She lobbied for liberal politics back home and she had some big friends who weren’t friends, and she didn’t talk about all that.

You cared about her. But go on, what kind of settlements were they? They sound quite real, routine like they’re based on mature technology.

I wouldn’t know. Yes, I guess so.

Maybe not planned out with all these sophisticated alternatives we can think about now, but when you were fourteen or fifteen the agriculture and the torus-shell stress stuff wasn’t even in Galaxy I bet.

I wouldn’t know.

I know.

I simply saw a giant silver doughnut with spokes.

You keep saying you don’t know, Jimmy. But thirteen, fourteen? that was when these daydreams began.

Who knows where they came from.

I couldn’t care less about that; but what kind of settlements were these Earth-Moon stations?

My father would say, Don’t say "kind of."

To you?

I recall him saying it to my mother, too. I mean, he was harmless, he had a weekly quota of discomfort he had to absorb from us, from my mother’s irony and so forth. But he would say, Don’t even say the noun kind by itself, because it’s always more than you honestly mean.

Now, torus shape you said.

I didn’t know the name then.

It’s been arrived-at as the best shape for the space stations. I mean mathematically. And it gives you horizons and it gives you the option of building up from small units which are more fun, instead of macro—

I don’t know if that’s true of toruses alone.

I’m sure you don’t. Your mind sneaks out, Jim.

In 1945 I didn’t know any math. I had a geometry teacher who stood up in front of the board and looked like he had lost his next-to-last friend. He used to go in to New York to the opera and would tell us about it when he walked into class in the morning with gray-green moons under his eyes.

So the doughnut came from your mother’s kitchen.

God no—it might as well have come from my wife’s.

Joy didn’t do much cooking?

No, she did it all. All except doughnuts, but that’s asking a lot. And I never asked her.

You wouldn’t dream of it.

Homemade doughnuts were out of fashion. Pop-up waffles were what validated Flick and Andrew’s Weltanschauung hold the italics. But you were making a point. I got it. But of course Joy and I talked about dreams. Like any other couple.

You are funny.

Apparently, with you.

But you can’t kid me: you didn’t dream.

Didn’t read books either, to speak of.

But you did.

You make me say funny things.

So the truth comes out: you and Joy swapped dreams, and you did dream, all those years.

Not in the least. These were dreams that all came via her.

You make her sound like they didn’t come all from her.

It’s where they get to that matters.

Aren’t you a smug old thinker, really.

Now, you’re sounding like a slinky vulnerable intellectual lady I met actually in Bloomsbury when I was writing a piece on English breakthroughs in waste-disposal.

I can see why your marriage didn’t last.

No, I don’t think you can.

Well, help me.

Oh, it lasted. It would have lasted longer if I had said these things to Joy instead of you.

I’d rather go back to L5 and check out the future from your daydreams and forget where they came from.

I’d just as soon retreat to us.

No, you can’t do that. You said "via," and you have to say what that means.

Some came through her from her occasional paramour, a man named Wagner, a dog I once almost cured of his habits.

Through her from him?

Some dreams she had and some he had. And they would tell them to each other, according to her. It was like her going back into her family history for the whole last year we were married, a glut of family lore, she read some old letters that had been stuck inside her father’s piano and she found she had some close relations she didn’t even know about and it was big drama for several months and took her mind off—

What about her and Wagner and their dreams?

I reckon some were made up.

Do you?

It was the use they were put to.

They were telling each other things through these dreams?

How did you know?

Maybe the gods were communicating with them.

Let’s get back to us.

Or communicating with each other.

You’re some scientist.

Was it raining upward at the pole?

I myself have no memory of that and cannot be made to confess to ever having believed it. Not even at the South Pole does it rain upward.

Amy told me—

Oh yes, you said you knew her.

—that in your grandmother’s day, when I gather she claimed to have been pursued all the way across the continent by an Indian you never told me about, they had winds that blew straight up from the ground; so why not rain?

I do recall an overhead mirror in an indoor pool someone took us to in New York once. I went off the high board and thought what if I spring high enough to reach the pool in the ceiling, there were these huge oblong panes of tarnished mirror-glass. Later I entertained some daydream of very-low-gravity swimming pools.

In your space doughnut?

What’s more it can’t be held against me.

You spoke to me of Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer, one night at Cape Kennedy.

That was the motel that launched us, I remember that time. You weren’t so much of an interrogator then.

I have to know things if I’m going to pray for you.

Pray or pry?

Cry for you. You remember speaking to me of Nansen?

He locked his ship into an ice floe and tried to drift up the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. Sure. Nansen.

It’s like nothing has happened since you told me that stuff.

Then there were the Norwegians who figured out weather fronts.

What is "93"? Is it the distance to the Sun in millions of miles?

No. It’s the year Nansen tried his stunt.

That isn’t quite what you said.

Well, I am subject to factual error. It’s the story of my life.

I’ll share the burden with you, Jimmy, but let’s include the mountain that compacted to next to nothing.

Let’s get back to us.

We are.

Feels more like me.

Your daughter, according to Amy—

—Amy doesn’t know my daughter—

—but works for a man who knows people your daughter does know—

Flick has traced toxic waste right into the conversation of mutual acquaintances.

Amy said Flick thinks the Indian pursuing your grandmother across the continent is a terrific putdown of native Americans and probably some old family legend.

I didn’t know she thought that. I did know that she had figured out two of the possible ways this mythical Navajo met his death.

Also, she wants to be called Sarah.

Maybe so.

You’re getting mad. Did you say Let’s get back to us?

We are.

O.K.

But we have had other curves to trace, trusting at times they would be parallel in their surprising ways like the pot calling the lid empty, or the lid we seek for our unconscious life mirroring with its dark storefront underside our incessant approach to it, uncertain if all this means People Matter or Are Matter, Are The Matter, or, by turn (potentially) of mind, first Equal (=), hence ARE (if not already Were), thus R (ARE’s real sound that hence turns back to us the (phenomenon, hence) law (of the letter) Rotation containing our now verb rotate) M—once the study of our child in the next room who went on beyond Rotation to other things, leaving us turning and turning in wonder and love at having been exposed to this multiple child, for, left alone now in a room that recalls departed tenants and so much major that by turns proves margin, we feel (or feel we feel) that, if less group-safe than Grace Kimball officially backed rape-proof group sex for being, our own group-shared discovery of a new reincarnation ensured that the Anasazi healer’s prophecy would not come true, for no one of us much less one "young person" (quote unquote) bears sole responsibility for discovering that wonderfully commonplace if mind-bent simultaneous One-into-Two, the S.R. that the Anasazi surely meant when, prior to the cloud he became, he predicted that the discovery of a new reincarnation would doom its discoverer (—though to what? for S.R. was always there) a l-screen-into-2 basis for that 2-into-l coup that might lead like Matter’s largely Rest Energy to Bad News as well as Good News, from knowing your spouse so well you might so become his attaché case or her bag and/or its absolutely familiar and known contents or, say, your spouse’s body and with it his-or-her desire to jump out of it so that at a moment’s lack of notice you’re willing to risk said spouse or spouse-hood (all the same thing) in a game of chance—all the way to, say, knowing a loved parent so ill with one power of your soul that you redo that parent inside you without first asking and wind up possibly legal tender (to recall the name of a famous Pennsylvania reincarnationist’s child) for a future transaction in which you lend yourself to that miracle witnessed by a ruddy-tan daydreaming adolescent lying bemused on his slightly sagging bed in an upstairs room of a New Jersey house whereby two regular people (maybe accustomed to twin candles at the evening dinner table) are trans-mattered (perfectly safely!) outward into Earth-Moon space arriving as one person, not two, at the destined pioneer place so as to give new sense to our question Where you coming from?, and since two persons, two personalities, have become one, should not their parallel warps of past come to rest in some new time? For how do we compound a deadfall animal trap set upon a western mountain and a treehouse nailed and wedged into an eastern maple? how mingle memories of an elder voice haunting you from behind as you stare at a dismembered Statue, and an explorer’s sight-unseen fantasy of that Statue’s harbor and that harbor’s city while the identical voice warns you not to embark eastward toward that fantasy? We already remember, as if we always knew.

His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare a shadow rubbing her neck along the sinew of a sky-gray tree like others recently seen. And a smell that nearly spoke to him, spoke like mist from this curious, long silvery cloud close overhead that had materialized above him at night containing waters of light. His bed a river edge of earth, leaf mold, cold web of boughs. His fireless camp tonight alone at such distances, yet many of them all one.

At a distance now from those farmhouse doorways he had been passing. A distance no different from where he might journey another day, rain or shine. Other farmhouse doorways, maybe Virginia under the same sky, or the territory whose name of New York was heard for a generation and more among his People through the tall and talking knower named the Hermit, Hermit of New York, who had lately described with his own hands steep, cloud-high houses of rock that would be built in the city of Chicago where the East Far Eastern Princess had been and would be built soon in his own harbor home of New York, and some of rock carried from mountains down to the water, and some of rock that could be mixed like adobe out of water, bricks laid so that the walls would give with the wind like sail. So that the name of Hermit must mean him who knows and talks much. Whose voice was now near at last, and with it the territory of New York, the place which the Hermit and his ancestor had left to come to the People in the Southwest so many summers to sojourn near the mountains that could think or dream.

Mountains that had always been there, not like that other mountainous Rock called the Ship, that most men said had sailed down across the People’s desert from the northern ice lands, but with no sail now except in memory, there in the desert where the People had walked and lived and that was theirs long before it was given to them by the white men of the East. Yet, No, some said—and he heard his mother say—that Ship sailed instead from the ocean to the west. Twice she had said it in his hearing, if it was even a ship. Once he had been in the Northern Arizone with the corn-eating people, finding at first power in seeds but then receiving a command to go away, to migrate.

The farmhouse-doorway people here along this river said, "New York," and pointed the finger of an outstretched arm east or north so the hand looked like a pistol. The smell of the low silver cloud this night held the softest, most inaudible voice. Through the forest to the further curve in the river, a farmhouse doorway always was: and coming from it, and from the faces, a current: coming out and through him and back through him and into the doorways: so he would not think about it.

Faces knowing, unknowing; the constant doorway not like the People’s doors. Distant, distant; so now his bed nearer the sky; the near lumen cloud lower than the sky. His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare softly stirring. His hunger forgotten for some moments now contemplating as he never stopped doing what his hand held warmly in his buckskin pocket, the dried, strong-warped cut of tongue he had had with him since he had left his people and before: cross-section of northern bison’s tongue, while now in the night of this rich, moist territory sloping always eastward toward that ever-homing white girl who was no more the one reason for his journey than were the pistol and its designs he carried after her and some more and more bodily part of his soul, this collop of northern bison’s tongue compacted such old forces that suddenly he knew himself not just here two arms’ length above a river for the night but also far away in motion across an isthmus thinly hinging the top of this one world to that other world whence mammoth and bison came to this; and the power secretly at rest in the dried, grainy section of tongue in his pocket came out and enclosed the meat like the skin of his own knowing hand, much as the pocket of cured hide held its source, the great deer that he had so trapped with his own advancing eye that he had felt himself to be the human form of that demon-timberwolf, and he killed with his hand that great deer and opened and divided it under the afternoon and all-night eye of the mountain lion that could turn itself into a huge timberwolf, it was said. Watched closely and with understanding by the mountain lion. Not with the haste today and yesterday in the eyes that stood in the doorways here in Pennsylvania. He would stand waiting until food would be handed to him that he never looked at as he ate it. Haste in the eyes of these farmers, these people, like what came from their doorways and passed through him where he stopped, then back through him into the doorways seeming to make them close up tight again, for they did then close, and the thing that had passed out through him and back through him and into these doorways was a current that could injure him if ever he woke up to what it was, a fluctuation he did not need to know of while, at the riverbank at night, his hand upon the bison tongue with all its waiting power took him closer every time to the doubled sight of that isthmus at the top of the Earth, where the two continents could not be looked at at once unless that isthmus could be seen for what it also was—a moving, a turning from there to here, a motion, a moving which, if seen, made the mammoth and bison and the hunters with foreign seeds clinging to their leggings, frost in their eyebrows, no longer move but wait like pictures carried by this perhaps-soon-to-be-broken land from the world out behind to the world here before, one sky behind (oh quoia, he hears, or more exactly, oh quay a, or even, oh quay), and one sky before: though the Great Spirit ought to be near either sky, yet some power in the Navajo Prince’s science said No to that: the Great Father was not always near, and then it came to him that that was why he thought "Great Spirit" ‘stead of "Father." Yet if ahead, where the East Far Eastern Princess sought her home, then the Navajo Prince might take strength and faith from his own hunger: not at the door of some farmer who did not even see the true figure of the Indian in front of him (for the Prince did not see that true reflection in the eyes of the farmer) but at some longer step the Navajo Prince envisioned far further ahead than the thing hanging over him tonight was above him, the cloud lumen with some shape in it, wheel yes, but wheels, but one many-wheel, as though a ring had blossomed laddering faint vines up and down its many rounds that now the Prince might spy only if he did not look at this tower-like shape for then it would not be there but it was in the cloud, shape of some memory of withheld storm or force-to-be that he would study if the cloud would come down; and for a moment as his blue Mexican mare’s neck abrading the gray-blue body of this river-tree he might name before he left this territory tonight or tomorrow seemed to take with the briefest sound a split of bark although his horse was not hungry enough to eat bark, whatever bark might be made into as you turn bison spines into jackrabbit traps and bison feet into saddlebag buttons and into such wind handles as only the Prince knew of though he their accidental conceiver did not yet comprehend their workings, he found himself across that ancient isthmus (so brief a hinge between huge world-islands yet also so puzzlingly long), found himself in motion there if he wished to see that way just as the riverbank here in Pennsylvania night he now saw might be what moved and not the river that it thus left behind, so the cloud that almost should not be there above him alone in a sky of broken Moon moved also and with him— and, crushed once again though for the briefest moment by what lay always around him and ahead in the person of the white girl he wastefully in love pursued together though with the other things all unequal he sought too, plus the anguish that if he let himself be in that far isthmus long enough to discover what he was doing there apart from witnessing and rooting forth what he knew from his own living and dead family forked world-dividingly from that point that the Hermit of New York when he’d once heard said was just the old Bering Strait, that’s all, when the Navajo Prince knew it was a place in motion and between—he now also here in the cold eastward night knew that the split-sound he’d just heard wood-like, bark-like, was not his horse again meeting the tree that he must name before leaving, but was of another presence nearby, and that if he slept and dreamed, he might lose his horse stolen into his very dream by night to ensure that he would not recall it in the morning on this bed of eastward riverbank he so nearly rises from, in impending sleep, that he wakes with a start hearing half in half out both a questioner deep in him saying, "Eastward? which was eastward? the river, the bank, the passion-slave’s Oh quay-a head? and what means ‘broken land’ and what will he someday use this forked force for? to speak dupely and find the sky’s light in the very Earth and weigh it and wind his way into it to speak out of both sides of his tongue?" and, "half-owr" (hearing) that split-sound again and the weight, then, of two steps he felt were a woman’s (but why? was it that she should at this cold moment come back to him? but how?—did she know where he was? had she not only the power to leave him as she had done the night after the strange storm, to go away into the land alone as if never to come back, but also the power to come back to him at any time?)—while he knows that whatever happens here, someone stealing his horse or even picking his pocket of the bison tongue, he must risk being elsewhere on that far-north icebound isthmus he has only heard about and never actually seen: for there he will be able to understand what he knows he has the spirit of inside him already; and he knows this as he knew before he met and heard tell from a Zuhi outcast under a red cliff that his own already storied departure from his Navajo home in pursuit of the East Far Eastern Princess had caused his strange mother to come to life again together with the demon-raw hole in her head that shifted from forehead backward and forth, and that had closed up when she had died but opened when she had, according to the report, come again to life following her son’s sudden departure. And he hears inside him and outside the words Go away, but mixed with other words as if he is mixed with other people, who recall him in honor and remember him as man and child, and the words are here near the riverbank yet on the lips of a medicine woman speaking out of a cactus while his mother, who has tried to tell how her chronic malady came upon her, is restrained by an old woman and a young woman while the lips windowed by the head-like cactus explain for her that the Prince’s mother went walking in the mountain and saw a hunter withered suddenly to his mere skull and clothes and saw another man who told her to go away for there would be another flash hailstorm and she would be broken by those rocks of ice if not sucked away into the mountain. But these words (interrupted by the small boy’s being taken away from the sick person’s lean-to though he heard more words for a long while after that were carried to him or reached by a wind where they already existed in him) in turn have come, this night in Pennsylvania, from that immemorial isthmus the Prince, who is only a would-be knower, cleaves to a knowledge of that he seems, under the night light of the strange-smelling lumen cloud above him, to have come all this desperate way to find mixed inside himself: and these men, these hunters crossing from one world-territory to the other following the mammoth and the bison feel the brief isthmus breaking up under their strong feet—"strong man," he hears, but asks, Where are the women?, and thereupon finds them tracking the brief but in some way unthinkably long isthmus, children on their backs, things in their dark hands, coming closer and closer to the men, from whom they are indistinguishable, falling back from the men as if drawn to the homes they left—"home," he hears, "Home is where one is," he hears, though the words come back to him from inside him where he has yet to go, if ever in this life, though "home" he hears as well outside him in the eastern night cold, holding still to the isthmus at the top of the two worlds breaking apart as the fur-skinned hunter people flow unconcernedly onto this world hardly looking back but he knows one man, no, one woman, no, a man and a woman near each other, turn away from each other to look back for each other and see only the isthmus dissolving into mist, reshaping all the other animals besides mammoth, bison, sheep birds of the long mountains bearing asleep in their stomachs the egg from which the whole rainbow range of most powerful snakes will uncoil upon and give motion to a heaven of new mountains and within grasses thickened by weathers not yet breathed: until this man and woman pair turn further and see each other and know it was each other they saw shaped and fluctuating and lighting up and glancing off the animal mist of the isthmus’s dissolution into sea.

But the blue mare snorted long, and the Navajo Prince who sometimes now began to think of himself as "prince" felt without looking at her off there by the tree that her neck was tense, and he felt her eyes roll, and the isthmus of the two continents withdrew before a woman’s voice: "Are you a strong man?" It was what his mother had said to him sometime after the hole had opened in her head but before it had begun to shift position. But he must hold if he could to the isthmus, or to the pair standing together on the shore of the disintegrating isthmus, who saw this developing bay of suddenly broken land, this Bering passage of mist-hung water, curve away from them, or so the Navajo Prince now in another age saw from his riverbank in 1894; and now above them all, all of them, he felt a cleft or clefts opening where the heavens dropped a channel of such light as devoured some thing in those fixed in its anchorage: so that, as he looked up—"Good heavens, there’s nothing here, why where’s your camp?"—he could see sun-risen that old hunting couple rejoined into one aim so that, with safe canyons to the south in their single mind they turned as one, turned to the south . . . that is, he could see what he found he had wanted to explore in his own memory maybe set off by studying forces ripe in the bison’s dark tongue both fresh-killed in the North where his mother had secretly, wordlessly hinted he must go away as if from danger, and later dried so that the forces had compacted and withdrew into such intensely sleeping force that he heard in his taste glands their vow to sow this Earth with food that would never make the People hungry again: "Where is your home?" came the words, his mother’s when he had returned from the North convinced that in the narrowest compactions even perhaps in his very mind rested some chance of food, of trees, of health, and even unity between his own old Athabascan ancestors now the Dineh known to outsiders as Navajo, and far away where tiny fires bobbed on the water the Yahgan and the Ona peoples he knew of from an old, old man the Anasazi healer who had not healed anyone in centuries and who had chosen to die precisely when the Navajo Prince needed him yet could sit quiet and remote in thought no matter who came to ask him questions and who was honest in his knowledge, ascribing it to those who had brought it to him, in this case the irritable and thoughtful woman with hands like desert crabs, Mena, who studied (and reputedly sang to) desert javelinas as the Navajo Prince studied bisons’ bodies and who reported with such exactness she would say two different things at once and had told the Anasazi of these peoples from the South where she came from who wore no clothes part of the year and slept in the cold and rainy beech trees, though she told as well of other peoples who made feather cloaks like sand paintings and split and hacked out and ground mirrors of obsidian rock and sailed as far up as an island called Cuba and studied the heavens as well as the pods of food bushes: and again, "Where is your home?" he heard, looking up now mto the long and quite friendly lumen cloud immediately above containing, he saw, lensed widely into liquid, precisely that part of the bright Moon that was darkly missing from the sky tonight, a cloud he saw he had just plain not admitted to himself had followed him for days to pause each eastward night like a miniature sky or giant trunkless tree, or some threat of cloudburst in these regions so much more watery than his own, for in the moist messages like those columns he had pondered as a child mushrooming out at the top to tell a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, he smelt now seared metal fleshing such welcome with as well a hunter’s breakfast-taste of cornmeal cake that the distinctly communal "Oh-quaya" or, so faint was the last sound, "Oh-quay" (not unlike the "Dee Quay" he had been told was the Hermit-Inventor’s (quick) Anglo for Dineh quaya, "the People always") that came to him seemed to be out of this bright break in the lumen cloud opening a Moon-reserve he knew to be at the very least his old neighbor the Anasazi healer’s will though not his body unless his expressed wish not to be reincarnated had been ignored by those self-breathing airs into which he had given his life—"Oh quay," though, was what he heard, and it was the same secretly painful current the farmhouse doorways had passed through him showing him he now saw just how far he was along their river, yet, in the outward and returning threat of that current, telling him what he might not catch onto without losing what? some portion of his sleep? some swath of pride that went with him on the way to that East Far Eastern Princess and other inquiries and studies and explorations he bore in mind? some bottomless power in the bison-body he held in the pocket sewn of the great deer’s skin? And yet this loss—of anything, of everything—of the Anasazi’s heart-voice dropping light down through the Navajo Prince so he must turn and face the woman voice that likewise said, Oh quay, but in the question "Are you oh quay?" turn away too from the Bering Strait hunter couple with one aim now bending south seeking not just food, but not each other either—this loss that divided him like one who bleeds from two wounds far apart came at him faster than the fastest attack, suddener than the Pressure Snake that drew the sky into the mountain as the second hunter man had said—his very last words to the Prince’s mother one afternoon before the Prince was born when she had wandered away up into the mountain like a lone visitor—and the loss came at him now in the "Pennsy" night (for he heard in his head and in the knuckle of his left, free hand the land’s name thus shortened) so he knew he was watched by what he watched and by, if not the Anglo girl Margaret doubled like the Moon, doubled as Margaret and the Eastern Princess, doubled as a strong-faced woman who endlessly asked about drying vegetables for storage and about crop-planting season and rainfall, and about irrigation, and about customs of rolling in the snow for strength and birthing babies by hanging on the branch of a pine tree (and many female questions to Tall Salt and other women) and about the use of cedar for houses and dead wood for fires, and must learn to weave and must think through thoroughly the cooking of what she named "less sweet yams," the fruit of the blue yucca, and make very small circle cakes with no middle so the women laughed at them and looked through the hole—this person who was also the soft-cheeked young mother, as he imagined her, singing, "Put on your old gray bonnet with the blue ribbons on it, and we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," this foreigner who toward the end of her stay gave him the name of Prince, Navajo Prince (their private name for him he wasn’t sure he liked, though drawn possibly from the plants he taught her) and kissing him like an animal he had seen in a dream with her lower lip and upper lip separately though together many times one night upon a mesa watched by the eye of a tall, ripe old cactus, while she softened like late light so he realized how tough and strong she had been, watched as he knew he was now, months later, at his poor camp on the bank of the Juniata, not just by the pale-haired woman standing urgent near him but by some pale-faced boy somewhere—in the smoke-bright cleft of the cloud overhead or in the dream-blink of after-image when he looked away, some pale-nosed boy lying—where?—wide-eyed but asleep behind those eyes, who was also a man and yet who was always dividing and dividing in the pound of the Navajo Prince’s ears and temples and eyes, pounding into two, into two boys: but, thinker and studier of things and of force—and of terrain reaching always behind him to mountains that, whether it was dream or thought they sent outward over the land, had changed and plagued and sickened his mother since before he was born, and terrain ahead, east and north . . .

east to the Susquehanna Iroquois who he had heard nearby would tell him the meaning of two dreams he had had after fighting to the death a Plains Cree warrior with six rifles lashed to his horse over the way he had wasted half the body of a great queenly bison in order to get her hide to paint his conquest of her on—in the middle of one solitary morning’s vast and silver dawn during the spring when he discovered invisibility both in the presence of his father and far away while watching a Thunder Dreamer at a campfire wrestle a many-fingered yucca-creamflower-eating mestizo until the two of them became one suspiciously looking for the young nomad Navajo studying them while chewing a local winter-loving plant like prince’s pine but up there called by the Cree pipisisikweu ("it breaks it up into small pieces")—though he felt so firmly his invulnerability to their single-minded search for him that he knew the leathery leaves and pink and dark-pink flower had dispersed his material appearance sufficiently for him to be quosi-quaia unseeable for a time . . .

and north to the Iroquois of the New York State where Margaret said a relative of her family had visited a league of Indian nations so devoid of poverty he had written her big-footed cousin Alexander that to be poor in America was your own fault in general and here was a society where no one stole, and white men in other worlds had heard of this and would copy it . . . the Navajo Prince, thinker and studier of things, will not put mere vision of one or two pale-faced boys over truth, guessing from the Hermit that, just before leaving, Margaret was with child: so it was way too soon for those two to be his own sons looking pale-faced up at the sky: nor need they be two! for suddenly they are one again in the face of the pale-haired woman wrapped in a green blanket here at what she pitied as not much of a camp at all, talking to him about being out of work and of a man who will lead an army of jobless soon and she was his beloved cousin near here along the Susquehanna but is not any more, while the Navajo Prince knows perhaps in her honest face that the vision of the two boys who were one and then one again is their vision and theirs is of him, here, and thinking of the waste of his forces wandering these continental paths in search of knowledge and the Princess and the eastern coast, he feels the sweat of his buckskin pocket’s bison tongue and wakes to such residue of that current that flew through him forth and back into the farm doorways he has visited that he is stabbed to understand that the hunter couple crossing that disintegrating isthmus were a nearly unthinkably long time past and the boy or boys seen by him are ahead in time so that while he cannot understand how that can be, for he knows that that boy is not yet born, he knows he is seen by the boy, watched in wonder, it comes to him in the midst of the woman’s words about a man named Jacob Coxey he doesn’t know and a cruel town named Chicago he does know though through the Hermit, who had watched over Margaret there and had studied the shadow of the wind blasting off the Chicago Lake and the secrets of new stone buildings in which people would work—knew of Chicago also through Margaret, who found it a wonderful meeting of all nations—meanwhile as that boy who is at once a man lying as if buried where he sleeps looks straight upward not over here toward the Navajo Prince in 1894, the Navajo Prince by some turn knows himself to be there before that boy’s eyes, light that glances off the boy’s speaking lips and that bends vision to oneself and gets bent and divided by it into other people’s stories that ours become, divided by it into the useful and the great, the colored and the penetrating, and is a mask through which the orphaned Prince recognizes the holes in his head, the eyes forming and the nose and mouth, holes opening even before the face forms in some time held glimmering within a cloud maybe like the cloud above him that he knows contains his old acquaintance the Anasazi in his interim and humorous compromise with reincarnation; and the Prince is glad that this future boy-man he has seen sees not only him but other worlds, other moons, other mesas, valleys, skies, new food sources that could keep hungry people from weakness (for Margaret’s circle cakes called doughnuts that she had said did not puff out well enough gave strength though made one want more and more, indeed like Margaret’s words), even new beings in those other worlds of the future that like the bison’s tongue-flesh could compact the past and life of other beings into power that the Great Spirit or all the gods dispersed in smaller scale could receive and return as creative force for living at peace; and the Prince now could read the very light on the lips of that boy who is somehow Margaret’s boy, and the lips meet and part, meet and part, was he recalling happily something eaten? was he saying Margaret’s name?, for the Navajo Prince can’t be sure he’s not finding himself on that dividing mouth, having found his creature self inside that glimmering cloud, with something like light running out of it which was only unfriendly when it came from farmhouse doorways that did not understand a stern, hungry Indian who refused to steal field roots or chickenhouse eggs, only unfriendly when it was that current that passed out into and through him and then passed back, returning into the farmhouse doorways from which it came so that he did not want to wake to what it was, lest he feel pain or die, until now he realized it was Time.

How long have you been here? the pale-haired vagabond woman asks and she sits down beside him tight and tall in her blanket as the cloud closes above them and his wrist presses the metal of his pistol and its designs.

How long is the future? he asks.

The future takes too long, she says. The workingman is forgotten every day. That is why Coxey’s Army will set out on Easter Sunday from Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York to march to Washington.

The white workingman, the Navajo Prince replied, feeling in his right palm the sweat of unknown compactions breathing from the cut of bison tongue, word of him among his People, his going-away, his mutual teaching with an Anglo beloved whom he told of the original casa blanca not in white Washington but in sandstone Canyon de Chelly, oh word of him, his love for an Anglo and for his studies, his mother’s death, stories woven larger and larger in the future he now had a terrible belief in, or pressed smaller and smaller by ostracism and forgetting.

The woman opened her blanket and reached and gripped his shoulder to the bone. Tomorrow is what matters, she said.

Will they march from New Jersey? he asked, and wondered if the pale-faced boy who was not his son, yet was, and who he knew watched him here from years ahead in future but might not know he did, saw this night’s scene in his dream of the past or must rely on Margaret to tell him what he knew.

The woman said she did not know. She brought a loaf of bread out and asked if he had any food to go with it and asked him for a knife. The Mexican blue mare rubbed her neck along the shadow of a beech tree. The cloud, the night-lumen cloud, had moved. I have a horse, the Prince said, but then he said what he had meant: I have a woman.

He felt himself grow so sleepy the sounds of his horse were magnified.

What is Easter Sunday? he asked.

He was born on Easter Sunday, the woman said. It doesn’t matter.

The woman looked hungry and he found a potato and an apple in his bag and gave them to her. He got up and bade her goodbye. She was looking at what he had given her. She looked back over her shoulder at the horse, which snorted. You need to sleep, she said.

He changed his mind. He lay down beside her where she sat.

We too: that is, along the curve of our resolve to be just lying or just sitting, not think angelic we can do both at once regardless of that same old brother’s-keeper-type interrogator bent on making us toe a line while he painfully (read painlessly) unhinges one of our toes each time we say two things at once like that crocodiles when extinct will not be able to grow new teeth: when we already remember it’s best to be all the elements in a dream, the person bravely setting forth, the sea chopping at the gunwales, the pickle sweating in the wax paper on the thwart, the boat itself so regardless of the person said to be sitting hunched amidships that the boat can be seen as empty, all the elements we are, the Moon mistaking itself for the Sun (as Mel mistook Pearl’s telephoned dream for his own), or even the double Sun that the bodiless Anasazi healer on his post-mortal tour was amazed at the last to see when he arrived above the famed fog-towers of northern Maine and felt the sleeping light in the cloud that was his transitory form turn literally liquid to some point of his own happy satisfaction.

Is it feasible (read bearable) that we may never see these people again whom we already forget their names? Or may never have seen as we may never get to see our own heart? If they are parts and parcels of us, we must be biggish and can’t even see our knee. What is (read was) length, anyway, another shape of void? We are a function of our habit of periodic one-hood not to be confounded with that last-gasp or between-histories (read B.H.) sans-space sans-time sans-everything Singularity, a trans-essential Absence within, though, a non-rotating overall Absence inferable from accelerating activity in its vicinity threatening yet not, in turn, to be confused with Presence so deep, so far inside (± Y) our/your head that one has gone beyond the chance of coming out the other side until the rotation once taken like inertia for granted yields untold other sides coming to and from us: and we would tell the interrogator and his abstract incarnations that sometimes the distance between our eyes is two feet five inches so if he upped and tried to single us out, firing right between the eyes, he wouldn’t go far wrong if we were still there by the time the fire arrived.

For who knows where it will end? who the hell knows (I certainly don’t, ‘least since Schlesinger blew into Defense from the Atomic Energy Commission in ‘73 and dreamed up selective-strike target packages, says M. as Barbara-Jean has taken to calling him) that is, where this late-century last-minute course-correction reciprocity race will end (we thought) whereby the homed-upon target itself acquires shift capability and an entire town according to our pre-negotiated input can be moved off "Home-Zero" at the eleventh hour screwing up a multiple-reentry vehicle’s target-package program that itself can make multiple random course corrections at will: is this keeping things in balance or is this escalation (read speculation)!, especially when with research reaching breathtaking informalities or even small-scale intimacies of in-flight breakthrough, the other side’s disguised improvisations as word of them is fed in are capable of being countered by original "Command-Thought" within a real on-board micro-lab already launched weapon carrier’s and thus countered faster even than old Light itself could have moved with its still very special speed regardless of its late inclination to, incredibly, Change—change traced not only dawn to dusk in two pairs of lancet windows in a cathedral each showing, he was pretty sure, a man on another man’s shoulders with a fifth lancet in the middle with definitely Mary carrying her child on her left arm, but change of light toward Rest, which light heretofore has had none of but now seems ready to be given (given back? given back its original Rest Energy?) yet Mayn will settle for the dawn-to-dusk change of light in that cathedral he will casually visit again in this upcoming "business" trip he has mentioned to B.-J. (sometimes Jeanie)—if he can just get away (well, he has to) on time—it’s a non-official therefore maybe interesting National Technical Means conference (Barbara-Jean surprisingly didn’t know NTM, "means" of surveillance)—para-disarmament, para-national oh god a brains convergence (though for cause) in the French Alps near Grenoble (fly to Geneva), geologists and thinkers and a black CIA executive named Andrew B. (for Blue-sky) Jackson posing as a "close-look" satellite-camera designer, eee-und some happy gentlemen and ladies who interpret reflected-microwave signatures like uniquely readable wakes left by all manner of missiles passing through Earth’s already troubled ionosphere—National Technical Means to catch present and unknown future cheating within of course the Balance of Terror. Meanwhile Mayn’s deadline seems brought closer and closer by a prisoner’s message (incidentally floated upon his announcement that he is getting free of his personality in order to exist within his essence) that Mayn had better attend that fringe Shakespeare opera: that he had guessed independently from his daughter’s marginal but stubborn involvement with unreliable elements and his friends’ curious convergence on a local cluster of events including though hardly keying upon the opera production, all this regardless of how close the prisoner in question often had said they two already were through a (what he called) colloidal awareness (colloidal? said Barbara-Jean, thinking) mutually multiplying this fragmented dispersion of particles bonding their knowers one to another by this universe of surfaces and their concomitant surface-frictions (Mayn thought it was), but more than the message and the opera (and word from Flick, nee Sarah, that her brother, his implicitly estranged son in outer space up in Boston, had phoned her and was to appear in New York), there were these events surrounding (or surrounded by!) the surfacing of an old high-school teacher, and the nagging interrogations of a person (B.-J., Barbara-Jean, or, by her preferred, Jean, by name) whom he had come to love, plus the street death of a man he had talked deeply with on a pickup ride from Windrow to the City who it had turned out was coming back into his life and shifting some key point from Nowhere to a cemetery if not to the home of which it once had been a part or, ‘least, that home by its other name.

That was your name for the town? I like it.

My grandmother’s name for it. No, ours.

How do you make up a name together?

You just do it.

You have to be in love.

Well, she did teach me how to whistle.

Did your mother love you?

She said she was so frustrated by her life she could kill herself.

When did she say that to you?

I think more than once. Probably when I was thirteen or fourteen.

And you didn’t say anything?—or you told her not to kill herself?

No: you make me remember: I said it must be terrible to feel that.

What did she say?

I remember. She said, No it wasn’t. Because I said, O.K.

Did she accept that?

She said, Your father doesn’t approve of O.K.

What did you say?

I think I went out. I don’t remember where. I asked my grandmother Well, what about O.K.?

You always went to her?

Depended which way the wind was blowing.

What did she say?

My grandfather told me what O.K. came from, but something else— another meaning some friend of theirs . . . I don’t know.

Did your mother love you?

So much else has happened since then.

Didn’t she?

Yes.

I know she did. How did she?

By being herself. By telling me to be.

But she killed herself.

Even if she didn’t, she went away.

I know.

But the Interrogator, sleepwalking while on duty among his victims, must trace this albeit idiomatic "O.K." that he has heard. Secure in his victims’ relative dismemberment, he won’t settle for being just in or on someone else’s flesh, feeling himself them while at once himself. Absolutely will not settle for just living their informations, divvied near-sensually by their light, turned double and then back to single by their quaint myths of weather, cosmos, trajectory, charity—myths as gently sexual as

Oh Woman

Old Woman

scrape the sky

clear it up

make it good

all over

with your little knife

the copper one

scrape it down

good

but he must trace this "O.K." that he has heard because he knows in his ignorant heart that it is related to our long-aforementioned "D.K."

Yet in the dark thus, and, his torture workday over, gratefully so (despite games-theory mind-set employed in torture training to simultaneously tap one’s energy secret and auto-relax), he feels through his sleep some half-light coming off his would-be decaying victims as he strays across a next room stepping on our occasional flesh or going out (he smiles) on some strewn limb or steering clear of a passing clutch of bloodlessly extracted nerves beeping like Frau Doppler herself alone and seeing waves from a passing boat gather in frequency as they wash into the shore of a native Austrian lake which seems also to be moving (shore or lake?). Yet the interrogator is at least not talking in his sleep (whatever he might in his heart of hearts think), for we absolutely will not see ourselves as victims of voice-over for your reality is made by youse (the interrogator has heard) and is known as youse value or basic unit, nor need we be angels to know this, nor need we give off light to see him start tracing "O.K.":

first, to "O.M." (as in Open Marriage) from the Indian humdinger song about the "Oh Woman" with which the East Far Eastern Princess like Margaret the wife of Alexander was familiar:

thence to "M.K.," short for that volcano-of-the-decade that an implicated young friend of Margaret’s grandson James named Larry time-framed (we’d already forgotten) ninety-four years after Krakatoa’s mountainous eruption with the also circa 1883 locoweed-naming spree of the botanist Marcus Jones and the rhythms of his original bike tires congruent to all surfaces through some adjustably cogged memory of any landscape, but also time-and-space-framed in an elastic year with all the weather work that Krakatoa opened up, the new twilight effects, the layers of stratospheric aerosols, the staggered New Mexico sunsets protracted sometimes by the cosmic-cleft synchrony the Anasazi healer explained:

and from "M.K." (with its proven fallout of noctilucent cloud so influencing the Anasazi’s sense of his own resolutely non-reincarnational future that he, who in fact gave us our word "fallout" for a certain kind of mild and generous death, planned on becoming such a cloud—(at an experimentally lower level) the interrogator, dreaming on from wherever he is to New York, New Mexico, and from w/zoever he is to being a roving intelligence officer (naval in training like the lover de Talca, high-caste and broadly cultured in origin, individual in personality), double-shifts (codein) to "D.M."—which may be the Dreaded Modulus of Lar’ fame whose meaning the interrogator has temporarily forgotten, though more likely (since lives hang upon it) is DeMilitarized, without the "Zone," which has disappeared in a puff of once-up-to-date bomb that rules all acts to be transitive, hence, as a prepositioned hit man "offs" an approaching or receding contract, "disappears" zones (a "zone bomb") much better than simply demilitarizing, or witness the reciprocals P.M. and/or P.R.M. (shorthand), each derivable we now know from the other (like Some People) with or without we disappear the R (he knows by rote): he hence leans toward that "old friend" (as he puts it in his second language) the Dreaded Modulus by which one system can be turned like tables to another (though the Friend concept functions more really in terms of the white American males Mayn and Larry, himself the user if not proved discoverer of D.M.) by which the even slightest Nanosecond-degree Rotation normally needed to turn from one pivotal view to another may, in sleep or some alternate refiguring, be bypassed, so that, say, hearing what some bond teaches you to hear can instantly by Modulus mean not the duplicity of answers tortured (or not) out of interrogees, but a woman’s thrilling hunger for her lover in an aria betraying maternal hunger for a son sung by a curvaceous diva to a man in her life listening in a small theater, fellow national at heart who this afternoon arranged the release of her faraway father precisely at a moment when a news flash erroneously had him falling from the roof of his sixth-floor bayview casa de pisos—doubtless a victim who only thought he was her father, dreams the interrogator, and anyway in the southern hemisphere we fall upward, we already remember, which gives a lightness and unreality to events and whole centuries—and for a second he knows he is not dreaming but witnessing in his sleep facts and could move with that implicated white male, age eighteen to nineteen, from the either I or system-switch of D.M. to the twain egal individualized screens seen bothland, and thence to the theory this newly real interrogator can embody so why trace it as a dreamed-up substitution (occupying conveniently a position) in the way, which might be calculated for Through and Around, but better instantly (codein) shift M., whatever this constant scrambled or unscrambled equals, and, through the D. of dread and the K. of that volcano thinking through its dream to spread twilight effects into the air we see for years beyond, even unto the present, reach D.K.: but by now he imagines he is no longer himself but solely into the flesh of that other, de Talca, and can leave a Don’t Know, with, inside it, at secret rest, the knowledge that, like information shared, Don’t Know is the answer to two or more questions.

Because people often don’t answer the question asked, Grace’s friend Maureen had been fond of saying—who had been all for going ahead with the "spontaneous light rape" plan (first man to enter Grace’s apartment after a randomly set hour is to receive multiple, painless, nurturing rape by sisters assembled —"like the millionth couple to make it across the Verrazano Bridge get an instant free legal separation," Grace joked with Spence).

Spence himself, it transpired, would have been the man in question, that day, if the first candidate had not failed to ring and gone away; but Grace had called it off, and when Larry had come up to see her soon after Spence had left, she had taken Larry into the bedroom to get away from it all and to give him support for changing his life at least so far as leaving his father and that apartment downstairs and moving in, à trois, with Donald Dooley and his girlfriend not because Sue, Larry’s mother, would then be more likely to move back in with Marv (which Grace figured she was going to do anyway because Sue was too sex-positive to accept a pair-bonded hyper-romance-serious Lesbian relationship) but while men living together was healing because it opened them to each other’s bodies, an experience pretty much taboo’d in male heterosexual society—Larry was a natural Top, Grace was convinced, and had lately run a number on himself in habit patterns of misplaced loyalty and compassion and identifying with one parent or the other, and had faked himself into playing Bottom, when his father Marv was the natural Bottom, which was probably what Marv was going to his new girlfriend for and likely why he didn’t bring her home but stayed at her place (didn’t he?). So Grace had supported Larry’s moving out, getting into threesome sex and healing self-sex at a time when he wasn’t so sure what he wanted. But the upshot was that Larry had thanked her and said he most probably would stick around for the time being, which only proved he was still Bottoming out while closet-Topping.

It was late afternoon of dress-rehearsal/preview day of the Hamletin warehouse opera. Grace and Ray Spence contemplated Grace’s body. She sat cross-legged, small, wholesomely rosy all over, freckled along her shoulders and with a lovely, perhaps yoga-related light that curved across her very flat abdomen. Spence was not the same person as a week ago. He told of his sense that he might be brother of Mayn. Grace told Ray that when one of her workshop women Lincoln had told her months ago of the Navachoor Prince she had recognized through her own part-Pawnee blood and her sense of that strange Indian’s centuries-old need to grow beyond tribal/racial roles that she (she was smiling like she really but only half meant it) had been him in an earlier life that nonetheless included Now and partly because of the obvious S & M dogging his trip in pursuit of the pale, doubtless Oriental East Far Eastern Princess.

"Your abdomen," Spence said; "you could fly, I’ll bet."

Grace looked at him and said she was willing to believe, O.K., that he knew what he was talking about. Spence was enthusiastic. He said he didn’t know really why he was here. He had heard there was a new type of reincarnation that could be scientifically proved. Grace said he thought like a newspaper. Grace said she gave Larry a week in that apartment downstairs, he was such a great kid but was freaking out telling her a Chinese woman he had seen in a shop uptown sitting on some old phone books was real and then he had looked through his peephole into the hall and there she was but with a little boy who looked Puerto Rican ringing the bell of his neighbor the opera singer but still he knew she was real. There. An ordinary non-freaky person. Spence said there was a report in the Mayn family that the young person who discovered a new form of reincarnation was doomed. Grace said that was masochistic thinking. Spence said she was mixed up about whether it was good to go along with S & M roles or they should be exposed for the silly numbers they were. Grace said that was male thinking. Spence said it probably was, and he asked whether the Chinese woman had actually taken the Hispanic child into Ford North’s apartment. Grace said Spence was into intrigue like Larry. Spence said Well she was coming back as a Navajo scientist for God’s sake who died in strange circumstances apparently two thousand miles from home you know. Grace said, "Unless he turned into a slave cloud"—because a friend of Lincoln’s had said that was one possibility. "Well, his Princess evidently turned into a mist to give him the slip," Spence said.

"Oh I figure I’m a couple of thousand years old," said Grace. She had urged one of the women who could not let go of her grown children who were living back in Chile but they apparently thought the regime wasn’t so bad, to go with her husband to Past Lives Therapy, because Grace knew in her body someplace that Clara and possibly her husband had had such a hard time being born into a previous life that they felt hurt and guilty about it and had projected this onto their children who they thought (or maybe dreamed) were saddled with this terrible load they couldn’t see was blocking them.

"I’ll settle for just plain mcarnation," added Spence, and, they both knew, was surprised at himself.

Then Grace said—but Ray, too, then, and simultaneously, "We ..." and then again and simultaneous, "We . . ." they said and touched each other laughing, and then started all over again and all unexpectedly said "We" together a third time but then said together like a longer effort, "We’re onto—" but stopped and said, rehearsed, "something."

Where did we learn to do that?

We were together.

Let’s try it without sound.

We already are.

You rippling?

All ripple.

What time is it?—oh, two hours till curtain, but they’re doing it without a curtain.

That’s why you got a light in your eye. At least it’s gay so they won’t be doing that opera trip.

There’ve been some changes. The composer’s more serious than anyone thought. He might even be a crook. Historically speaking.

So we’ll go together.

One on one.

Let’s be nude.

You already are.

With the women two days ago at the moment the steps came to the door, we were in battle and it was long ago and we could have been seen by the future then if we had known how, and we were on the move goddess-like and by a dark river that moved like an isthmus between partially congruent globes, and to break the cycle now in the New York Body-Room one had to turn away from that well-meaning but reincarnated group and be alone, and time collapsed like the Goddess into one self and another person was at the door with whom one could turn away and be alone, younger brother-going-on-son, maybe not yet a natural Top but a Larry.

O.K.—and by like token wanting to tell about our life too but frankly not knowing anything about our life (except it was expensive especially our beginning that we didn’t know about)—we found ourselves in a mountain probably of flesh and trying so badly to get out that we seldom caught on that the mountain with this stumbling bloc of us inside it did not want us to, until our motion and the mountain’s mixed, like pulse, and, no less no more representative than that one life left at Krakatoa the heroic micro-spider not Mayn, not Ted, not Pearl, not acid-tongued de Talca knew we were at least as interested in as a Boston-born internal medic in live physics more far (worm-thread) fetched than the dark, flabby leaves we have heard about in some northern New England Indian swamp—spider so tiny that Krakatoa had not seen it, surviving ultra-privately under a horizon that was beyond itching and disease, just acres of ash and igneous and seismic junk ... we (O.K.) fought our strange way out head-first guilloteeny or feet first (we already forget) mutilated unit by unit as the clockless hermit notches his stick till the head (all that’s left) comes out and there’s only it with all its relations asking who that first comer was before Spence, and hearing what we did not know we knew that the man she’z shure she saw from her peephole, with one, two, three women and Maureen behind her, was walking away down the hall toward a dark-haired, much younger girl in a sailor’s pea jacket waiting at the elevator and seeing him like he’s her own grandfather, and we were born in that previous life dead and had to get over that while the mountain moved on.

He made ready to leave in anger and doubt. He stared into the paragraph his still-prospective father-in-law said might after all be usable and he could just about crunch it in his fist so it would crackle like fire. Anger that Margaret —Oh God what was going on out there along the footsteps or railroad tracks or horse trails of the continent! Anger that Margaret—for what was between the lines, was there any curiosity as to what Alexander had been doing all these months? he had had tea with a Senator’s wife in Washington and she had asked polite questions about the Democrat and had urged him to visit Boston, he had deplored the need for troop movements after the panic of last year, she had asked him if he knew the poems of Matthew Arnold, whom in fact he had read with this damned Margaret who he was sure had been sinisterly changed by her visit in 1885 to see the Statue of Liberty before it was put together, her father’s strictness seemed only to indulge her, while Alexander’s indulgence and intimacy ("Ah, love, let us be true ... So various, so beautiful, so new . . .") only made her more—more strict! (the only word for it) and now, instead of her at last coming home, this damned paragraph from Cincinnati. His cousin who was visiting for a weekend watched Alexander yank open a brassy highboy drawer. Anger that Margaret, who had his trust, could write so outrageously intimately this account of sleazy commercial types in a hotel parlor discussing paperworkers out of work in Chicago, a rein(t)arnationist spouting at the Chicago Fair last summer, the future of ballooning, the next world’s fair in St. Louis maybe, but nothing this time to Alexander about when she was actually going to be home, though something between the lines. Between the lines there was—"Look at this darn thing!" he handed it over to his cousin who was at the university in Philadelphia, who said, after a moment, "But this Jacob Coxey who’s organizing the march on Washington—if she’s really interested in what he’s doing—I mean, a self-made businessman who cares about the workers—" "It’s sinister," remarked Alexander, looking into an empty satchel on the bed, "a sinister history, this slowdown coming home." "Oh it’s probably her pre-wedding trip," said the other, who had amusing ideas undeniably and was going to Paris in July. "It’s one thing," said Alexander, "and it’s another thing, and which fits inside which I do not know." "You want to go to Paris with me," said his cousin, "that’s what you need. Get you out of your books for a couple of months."

Her father could bring Alexander the copy and seem worried to death and ask him what he thought, that bluff, bearded gray gentleman with a family mole on his jawbone like a dark stone beneath running current; and Alexander knew then that he was going to go after her.

"Uncle Jim will be glad to have word of those union people in Pennsylvania, but how far do you intend to go?" his cousin asked with a light of humor in his somewhat nasal voice. He laid the crumpled paper on the white bedspread beside the satchel that now contained socks and long underwear.

Anger—"Do you know that Mrs. Lodge asked me if I had seen any Venetian glass with that special exquisite crudeness. I took her reference as being to Ruskin and asked in turn if she found the living wage advocated in the Gospels, but she may not have taken my reference for she said God helps those who help others to help themselves, I think that’s what she said, maybe not, maybe not, and she asked me what sold newspapers and I said sometimes it seemed to me imponderable, but I had lost my wits because I felt she was telling me something I wasn’t comprehending, or making fun of me, and she said she would like to introduce a young man like me to Mr. Roosevelt."

His cousin laughed and straightened his necktie in the mirror. "An imponderable young man. A vendible imponderable."

"Oh dry up," said Alexander, examining a stickpin Margaret had given him a year ago Christmas and wondered if it was a real emerald.

"Are you really going to Pennsylvania as a journalist, Alexander?"

Anger at the imperfect curves and edges of Venetian glass, anger at Paris—for, yes, he might just go to Paris with this cousin with the square head and fat jaw—while between the lines and more finely still between the words, he felt his dear Margaret was in trouble and he didn’t know what it was and it might be his trouble, and, worse, it might not be his at all.

"A self-made sandstone-quarry businessman from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, indeed," he said. "Is that where his quarry is, then?"

"I know not a thing about Jacob Coxey," said Alexander’s cousin, "but his heart is in the right place."

"What place is that?" said Alexander suddenly and did not know why, but felt he was watched, no doubt by townsfriends and family who wondered with him what his supposed fiancee was doing between the lines of her less frequent dispatches—so he could not see in the great banks of leaves out the window anything but the future as if it already existed contemplating him with doubt.

His cousin was laughing at what he had said. "Where is Selinsgrove?"

"On a river," grumbled Alexander. ‘The Susquehanna, or anyhow close by it."

"What did you mean ‘one thing’ and ‘another thing’ and you didn’t know ‘which fits inside which’?"

"Don’t dissect me—I don’t know what I meant," said Alexander, looking toward the bedside table. "It’s between the lines."

"I wouldn’t read there if I were you," said his cousin.

"Hmpf," grunted Alexander, placing two small leather-bound volumes in one corner of his satchel. "I read wherever I go."

His cousin laughed and reached for his jacket where it lay folded on a chair. "I meant between the lines, not Selinsgrove-hard-by-Susquehanna."

"I will be near there," said Alexander.

"It should be an education," came the answer.

The river in late February was moving. A brown bird stood briefly on a miniature raft of ice. The town nearby was for a few tranquil hours a future that could not be rushed. He vowed that whatever happened he would come back to this point on the riverbank. He had a stone in his shoe.

In the wrong town you can still pick up news. Jacob Coxey dealt in scrap iron before he went into the business of quarrying sand for steel and glass manufacture. Now raised race horses in Kentucky, though didn’t live there. But didn’t live here in Selinsgrove either. Selinsgrove—more woods than New Jersey, but much like. But Coxey was only born here. Moved, at five or six: picture of small boy directing adults which bed to load into which wagon, the wide wagon, the narrow wagon. Settee and wash tub. Fire-irons and spade. Caned chairs sitting on top of crates. Somewhere a German accent. To Danville, downaways. But not far. And furthermore not where Coxey, with a growing name among Greenbackers and Populists, lived now. The farmer he asked, the storekeeper he asked, the man with the unconscionably high forehead he asked in front of the church did not ask him the question he asked himself, a young fellow with a black leather satchel and an already somewhat distinguished scalp: What was he doing in Selinsgrove if he was looking for Coxey? The question took him some miles back to the riverbank he had come from, but not to Danville—but not because Jacob Coxey was no longer there either but in Ohio, if Alexander had only asked, to begin with.

He had mailed an exemplary dispatch from Philadelphia. He had mailed another the next day to Margaret’s father from a place called Laurel Summit.

Some said armies of unemployed would take over the railroads. Constantly, it was only Margaret he had seen—Margaret on her way long since to interview—but who knew?—a man "of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania," as her written words put it. Alexander had waited for months for her, and now in motion himself had "waited" for word to come to him somehow as he had made his way into north-central Pennsylvania as if her word in print meant she must be there where Coxey was "of." But a most irresponsible way to seek her—as if he had bent his will or had needed for months to cut adrift in his own small way westward—to be not home if she arrived—his absence noted: while now he had uncharacteristically built himself a lean-to and produced from his bag shadowy food to eat beside the current of the shadowy river, arrived there for no good reason, but watched—by his children, it suddenly came to him, of which he had not yet any—for he had not yet his bride.

He understood only brief, separate things, like beginning nowhere. He was tired. No good cause explained his being here. The wistaria that he could smell but weeks away outside his bedroom window at home was named for the man who wrote the first American anatomy (two volumes, Caspar Wistar, honored hardly more than a year ago at the opening of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology housing the collection of anatomy he left at the University in Philadelphia). The night came around so mossy-cold and so blank that it was no different from the river at first, even the dubious head of the night’s body through the maps of tree branches, that moon tilted away far where things of true importance were going on while Alexander, instead, pursued some alien education, as his cousin the medical student predicted. Some new history, was it? A voice nearby, a woman’s voice, for a second seemed caused by the darkness but (no) came with it: "I camped last week by a river under a long shining cloud and a man there breathed in a dollop of that cloud, I saw him, it was a long spill of light and he breathed in a whole dollop of that cloud, I saw him, it was a long spill of light and he breathed it in and coughed and talked, and he was well-informed."

Alexander saw that he had already seen the blonde woman when she spoke and had trusted the human figure in the corner of his eye. He had predicted her appearance through some study of history; that was it.

Eyes closed, resting, he’s a very old man, his hat in his lap, the straw upon the heel of his palm, fingers resting in the crumpled crown, air sliding and curling like water over his skull; and he foresaw what is happening in the sun of a backyard the ownership of which hardly matters any more, only the people small and tall who use it, the little girl with long light hair throwing a ball up and up and up again and catching it in one hand nearer and nearer her grandfather in his chair; and he is not dopy, and knows his grandson whose daughter this little girl is knows he is not dopy and would not make anything of his not at once replying to the question his grandson asked; and when, with his eyes closed, he had an answer, he heard a powerful whoosh and did not open his eyes, it might be an exciting death coming his way and he heard a young gasp and knew his great-granddaughter had caught her ball practically in his lap, but he had the words in his throat answering Jim’s question: "In his letter that he wrote me when I was all of six years old, his last letter and he was up in New York visiting the Indians and the envelope had a bright red scarab seal on it, and he said he had dreamt of swallowing something, I know what it was, it was a storm he swallowed, complete with rain, thunder, lightning, what’s that other?, hail—the works—and then singing out his name in the dream which was Morgan of all things, but something else, Jim, I really forget but it had to do with the spelling."

"Oh Poppy, I’m not Jim; I almost hit you. What are you talking about, Poppy? I almost hit you. I stepped on your beautiful shoes, Poppy, did I hurt you? You have silver on your red socks, Poppy."

He opened his eyes and his mouth in the sun, and remembered how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been.

Their smoky fire held their faces close to it and kept the Moon’s clearer light far down the course of the tree-shrouded sky. The blonde woman gave Alexander an apple and wrapped herself again in her blanket.

"This Indian said he did not need to eat much. He had been followed by this cloud. I did not believe him at first. I know what work pays and what it costs to buy a blanket, I don’t believe in magic. But then neither did he. He said he knew the cloud contained an old friend. He said he himself contained spirits of ice stones that had come from the sky, and they were spiral—and he made the motion with his hands, and then he went to sleep. But later he woke up."

"He did not dishonor you," said Alexander.

The woman shook her head pensively. "Some mad Indian you mean?" she said. Alexander smiled into the blazing, smoking fire. He felt compelled. " ‘What work pays’?" he asked. "I don’t understand."

The woman ignored his query. "Your clothes, your shoes," she said. "Do you travel like this?"

"Almost never, but my cousin who is a medical student says I am part porcupine."

"He had a horse over by a tree. It looked blue in the river darkness."

"Near here?"

"Not the same river. A different river. The Juniata, south and west from here. He was on his way to consult with the Iroquois. He had come all the way from New Mexico territory."

"To do that?"

"He was on his way east. He said he was going to meet a woman."

"Going?"

"He asked me if I had seen storms rise up out of eastern mountains. He asked me if I could smell seared metal coming from the night-glowing cloud above us. He asked me if there were tall houses that cast a wind shadow."

"What did you say?"

"To all these questions I said I did not know."

"How did he swallow the dollop of night-glowing cloud?"

"He said the friend up there was hundreds of years old."

"Perhaps he meant that through his people he carried a long history in him."

"He was more of a scientist. But I liked him because he said he was studying secrets that would give his people more food to live and more water to grow their crops and he was looking for material to build with that would last. I told him that white workers did not have enough to eat either."

"Old Marion Hugo, your" (Yes) "in those journals, Granddad" (Yes) "Was he the one who mentioned a Morgan" (Yes) "a mathematician from" (Yes) "from Europe, an Alsatian, I think, who played the pickel flute" (Yes, yes, the pickelflote) "and did he know—did he know that zoologist gal who had the mother back in South America who wrote music? what about that, Alexander?"

Later he woke, and he reached at once into his pocket as if to see if something was still there. She herself never slept except when a dream was coming on and then she would find a place to sleep for the length of the dream. He told her he was going to the Iroquois to find the meaning of two dreams. This was a turning from where he was going but he had faith he would meet his beloved. She was carrying his child, he was certain, but she had left without telling him. There was a great emptiness between them and they were in touch with each other because there was a river like an underground river in their bodies, a river of blood and milk with a thousand invisibly small beings flowing in it and each was a thought of theirs in common.

Alexander felt like he was asleep and the campfire was losing itself in him. He asked why the Indian’s woman had left. The blonde woman said she had to go back and see her people, he said. The Indian loved her very much and he loved his studies. Alexander could understand that.

Yes, said the blonde woman. And she had in common with the Indian that she had a beloved who was apart from her.

How so? asked the young man with the black satchel and red socks and muddy shoes.

Her beloved was married and lived in Ohio, and she had known him once in Pennsylvania when he was only a boy working a stationary engine in a rolling mill. She knew what he knew. She knew how the ingot is rolled and rolled to become the right-shape sheet of steel. How the mills use sand from quarries. How much the owner sells the steel for. Her beloved knew the workers. He knew the farmers, too. He had General Grant’s love of horseflesh. He became a rich man but cared for the workers. He was leading a march on Washington at Eastertime. She was a fallen woman, but she did not care now. Her lot was cast with the real people who made the industrial clockworks run and who made the corn grow and who walked long roads to get to their work and to look for work as well. Her lot was not with the hundreds of Pinkerton detectives ferried by night up the Monongahela (Alexander nodded), but with the men who needed greenbacks to seed their fields (Alexander nodded, thinking that Monongahela was both an Algonquian name and the name of a whiskey). A river has two coasts, she mused.

He said, You are talking about Jacob Coxey. He is the reason I came to Selinsgrove.

The woman frowned. She told him that that was what she had heard in town and why she had followed him here to the river.

"No, of course you’re not your daddy Jim, sweetheart; I was replying to him ... but I took so long that . . ."

"Oh Poppy."

"Dumb old Poppy."

"Yes, you’re very old."

"I’m almost ninety."

"Sweetheart old Poppy. See how high I can throw the ball."

Two rivers, the Juniata where things were heard and the Susquehanna where those things were told.

"That’s very high, Flicky, very very high. Who taught you to throw that high?"

"Nobody."

"Where did your father go?"

"In the house. What’s the matter with him?"

"Nothing. I think a friend of his died."

"Is he going to the funeral?"

"I think she died far away in South America."

"Look at Andrew. He can ride his bike."

He said air came in vast sheets that water might ride on or ice or poisons, or bad spirits or mixtures. He said these planes controlled the wind and might raise water like a hundred buckets so it ran nearly upward into the great bush of a cloud and might well pass back above the river guided aloft by the river’s course and empty down into it so you could wash in the same water seven days later. He said he and his woman talked all night and each learned to hear new things that only the other had been able to before. Each bent the heart and will to the other. She told him of a Statue that was the highest in the world guarding an ocean harbor with light and she had seen it when its head and limbs were scattered over an island. When she went home she would go inside it. He must have been talking about the Statue of Liberty.

Yes, said Alexander.

He said his woman had a friend among her people whom she respected very much, and he had very big feet and was wise and went fishing in a lake where there were pine trees only smaller than the ones in the West, which was of interest because, as this man told me, they might be smaller because they were weaker or smaller because they grew for a different purpose. His woman’s friend back among her people went fishing because there were many lakes there. She must go back and see him someday, she would say. She called this cousin an angel.

Alexander was wide awake and got up to find more wood. He offered the blonde woman the apple she had given him but she shook her head and he bit into it. He brought a great branch and left it beside the fire and sat down.

He began to fear the blonde woman like sleep you don’t understand. She asked what was in his satchel. He showed her two books bound in calf; she shrugged, and said her beloved was now under the influence of a man who believed in reincarnation and was a dime-museum speechmaker and called himself the cerebellum of Christ but could not spell Calvary. A passel of rogues will try to make use of that good man Coxey.

Alexander asked where the Indian had gone. She said she had told Alexander this already.

He said, Two Indian wanderers, perhaps a child between them.

No, said the blonde woman. The woman was a white woman.

Alexander felt a long chill across his face. He threw the apple into the fire.

You throw away food? said the blonde woman.

Will Coxey’s marchers all come from Ohio? Alexander asked as if to say, Don’t talk to me about an apple—and felt terribly watched and cold and inflamed as well and felt the sweat in his smooth palms.

No, said the woman. They say marchers will come from all over the United States. Why do you ask?

Because I was thinking of something else, said the young man.

They say he is worth two hundred thousand dollars. One marcher for every dollar by the time they reach Washington. They will force Congress to help the unemployed.

Was the Indian armed? Alexander asked.

Well, she had thought he had a pistol in his pocket but it was a hunk of dried meat. Alexander contemplated the large, damp branch and the lowering fire. But he did have a pistol in his saddlebag, said the woman.

In his saddlebag, said Alexander.

We had been asleep, we already remember, but this might prove our patented way of being awake. As when a thing is done to us, and instead we are brought closer together and see some bend of will by which so far from our being acted upon, the responsibility belonged to us, and no hassle at that.

Big Foot Porcupine; or anyway, Big Shoe. The woman asked to sleep against him in the late February stillness. He said it was against his religion and at once corrected himself—those were not his words, surely. His thighs were resigned with cold, his mackinaw bulky. He felt behind him the tuck of her hard arms in the taut winding of her blanket, and after a mysterious time which was motion both absent and present she reached one slow arm around his ribs and he found that he took her hand between the thumb and palm of his woolen glove and she seemed to press a ring on his finger. They murmured with the soft, bed clarity of wife and husband. Where, then, was Jacob Coxey? Why with his family in Massillon, Ohio, three hundred miles from here, two hundred and eighty to be exact.

Anger, horror, pain, curiosity gathered him up into some darkling person and he knew he would sleep in the cold, despite Margaret, despite the Indian wherever his eastward frontier had gotten to. Alexander was thinking of geometry, of all things, and his loins felt better than he could have said. Have you borne a child? he asked the woman over his shoulder, the late winter and the undreamed solidity of near, dark trees cold against his eyeballs.

He asked me that, she told him. He said he had thought there was more time but he had been absorbed in his studies of secret force and of earth veins and mountain messages and mixtures and absorbed in this woman of his from the East, to the cost of his People, yet also forgetting this woman who was sometimes all he remembered from hour to hour. His studies are for his people, but his march is not revolutionary like Jacob Coxey’s which will be an army as great as any Union.

Your news overwhelms me, said Alexander. Your heart is with the workers, said the woman; trust it.

But Alexander had not meant Coxey’s march of the unemployed. But have you borne a child? he said. No, she said, I have not borne a child, though I would have done so for him, though I am a fallen person anyway.

Do you want to be married? asked Alexander.

He thought of what the future expected. New thoughts shifted this trip as if the land it was grounded on—a land of dreams, he had once read to Margaret—mattered no whit more than farmers clamoring for paper money or Idaho silver miners forcing recognition of their union or railway-car workers getting a company model-town to house their families at dubious rent. A curiously compelling map grew like land in Alexander’s mind containing it (but which containing which?) that moved—this diagram of distances moving if he chose but making him choose—and he could not tell the woman that Margaret over the magnetic slopes of this darkling state rested but was in motion restlessly toward home while talking to a Jacob Coxey whom this woman behind him loved and had brought to Alexander by converging lines from Massillon in the west and from some bank of the Juniata in the south or southwest, while Alexander’s various trek for news and for Margaret was west while hers, upon a parallel equally various, came east, pursued (no question) along another parallel by a man with a pistol who was ahead of her, and was between her and this Alexander who went out to meet her: yet what if even now, and east of here, she was fingering a Navajo silver buckle passing through Pennsylvania on a sleeping train whose parallels of track curved some collision course of war or the American continent atip toward unknown commerce (west or east, inertial calculi of ours could trick suns into dramatically dying in the direction of morning if our cost-benefit figures arrive at such results for the sake of World’s Fair or parallel answer to multiple question) —and when he said to this now silent woman, This Indian is not my enemy unless I choose . . . , and got no reply except a whole bodily pulse coming into his spine from possibly more than the woman ... in these coordinated parallels that could lean like a curve-fleshed parallelogram or converge into some terrific clusterhood, Alexander eased over to the quite exhausted woman he had not bothered to ask about her home and about what she, a "fallen person," did here in the vicinity of her at least former home of Selinsgrove where the beloved had been hardly more than born, according to Alexander’s information—and he tipped her dozing chin and smelt on her breathing raw potato’s moistly glimmering root, and kissed her lips, and turned back to, briefly, a diagram until sleep caught him up loins and all into that gathered voice that could include what the future expected, conferring with him as to whether (damn all this land of dreams that lacked light though not geometry which itself equaled or was in the way of geography and of seeing clear, so he wondered what Margaret looked like now and if she was big with child), conferring with that gathered voice as to whether he would go to Paris with his elegant cousin who wished to study epidemics—or, as an obvious possibility, would not go to Paris but live as he and the future tacitly had agreed he would.

The woman spoke and hummed and spoke in sleep, their sleep it seemed: "He said he carried in him unknown mixtures spirited from a mountain that moved with shapes fine as snakes and some said formed by them and through human flesh and weather that sometimes came down a long, long cosmic room from a North he had once thought timeless, yielding spirals grown dense and tight as the inside of a tree bole that might help us or end all weather or might bore holes in us as in his mother who had died of such a demon-hole that moved around her head from forehead to top and back—and these mixed spirits or rays (though not visible like sun) he carried some of in him—in him! (I nearly laughed, we were hungry, we had already forgotten why we were sitting by that tireless riverbank, and he brought out a potato and an apple, and later his saddlebag proved to hold a pistol with devices or signs cut into the metal so as to make the finger fear touching them could make the piece go off) until Alexander did not know who talked to who, but thought the woman would not steal from his old black satchel his shirt or his forgotten long underwear or his books, his three books—the two diaries at this long instant of embrace humanly useless with their neutral needlework reports of Chapultepec passion or sun-swallowing dream or, as yellowing perhaps as one of President Lincoln’s greenback salary-warrants, that strange sheaf of foolscap music with Italian words shaken by a Thunder Dreamer coolly under the nose of a lean bicyclist-botanist at a remote trading post—and always, money-getting Democrats from rude wigwam to Congress hall, easing past mountains of, what was it?, salt and iron, lead and silver; while in this woman’s orie-armed embrace he dreams of freedom, yet not from her, though he would never see her again more than he saw her now curled not so uncomfortably behind him: freedom in fact from those impediments of Margaret’s months, for let life start and let’s go home, to where (with what help from the person behind him he could not think, asleep or half-asleep) he heard himself read to a young girl he had named before her birth, words (words words) recited to her by her father, of motion that could not stop and so was stopped for, in some sense spaced so intimately far to one side current history that the name of this child came to him who looked at him from the near future bearing naturally the name of this poor, strong woman behind him humming like a cello in her apparent sleep now, and Margaret would accept that name, he would make sure of that.

Neither porcupine nor angel: yet with, between them, some relation that would be Us: so mightn’t we prove upon the twain drawing boards of everyone’s peripheral vision to be what rose from such thoughts as that not Matter became God, but God at’s own developmental pace became Matter, plus that the Whole seeking Parts to share, give way, and lose its mind-set force to, must force them Parts into being in its way.

We had first heard of relationship in the early forties. But of what century?

Or two burning eyes shared among four eyes of two driven people flowed with the greater burning stranded through Nature.

Regular coughing like that of Alexander’s one-night landmate so went through the body of his dreams that he, too, at his own slower intervals coughed his way at last out of a western mountain only to find, clear of the mountain, that the woman Sarah had left and that all this time the independent territory of the nightmare mountain with its luckily only internal contagion had been moving in another direction.

But we in our day have learned that we can accept other systems. Yea, incorporate them. We are about to forget but have not yet, that right in the middle of apparently major events we had been mispronouncing the hard T in Chinese Tao, which should mean "the way" but in practice embraces like the whole show/flo as if Nature, spied back through one of its own eyes, was stratified ocean or at least successfully liquefied. The Chinese invented T, so they should be allowed to sound it like our D if that is what they do, but if they then cannot accept the topological relationship with Dow the chemical concern, lest by western pun linguistic contaminant find its way into their Tao, they may in long run have to let the original source-compound go—i.e., DOw (Dual—Di—or two, Openings, or Obstacles, to each power of Waste), which reframes (for easy reference—in other emergencies other times when the older transformation equations got us through ethereal obstacles as if they existed or plotted our inequalities up L slopes and round R curves) to: either DOw (one unpredictably divided atom of waste—or was it water?—for each ho-muncule of reaction), or doW (where the lower d o designating the W’s "prior power" identifiable uncertainly as "di-obstacled" or as dioxide or -oxen or -xin, or the more and more widely used interhemispheric verb do) acts on a W which is Waste/We where if We will = Singularity Rotated to Unity or I, we’ll still get W but a new W shared between the Waste and the We in relationship not yet known, in part since relationship at the present time is reciprocal with whatever this We proves-out to be. For as with angel and porcupine, dream and its forgetting, relative viewing screens one in each of two next rooms reciprocally showing (if we would only get them together) no other responsibility than our own to end the agony (and at least half surprised that a leaf of music from one North American person should join by way of a soft pocket-in-motion the suddenly parted legs of a warm-hearted, calm, fine-looking South American person who has plunged toward a long sea whose choppy swells the moment fixes into rocks), so with Relation at large in the nutshell of Our sea-to-land base, it strives now inertially, now non-, to be a We we have been privately assured is us.

"We didn’t decide if your granddad actually went looking for her."

"I wouldn’t know; he never talked about it. I think he met with some union noise-makers in Philadelphia somewhere in there, maybe February of ‘94 (? I guess it would be) and fired off a couple of pieces to Margaret’s father at the Democrat—maybe a farmer’s group in eastern Pennsy, I’m not sure; he did mention a band of jobless vagrants at a riverbank campfire."

"In his sleep?"

"You’re in a funny mood."

"We haven’t decided if we’re staying there for the night or coming back for that silly opera."

"We could cover both."

"Let’s not divide the labor."

They stood toe to toe beside a turnpike phone-booth capsule, and, occupying unbudgeable a cleft that perhaps they themselves made and were, in the ambient oxides and simultaneously approaching and receding noise particles of happily stabilized vehicles-in-motion, the world that could not easily get lost for love (so close about them was it) still promised in their silly old bodies to be waiting for them when they got back. And he stepped aside from all this hotline lovingly between them whose telepathy he had known of long since with his wife but then only as they receded from each other—and had now a thought or two private to himself wondering if he could even reach his daughter (who might be on this same turnpike right now if she had turned again to some link between the death of that weirdly gifted Trace Window guy’s murder and the place where he had recently used that gift yielding however information that Flick-Sarah was unlikely to have obtained)—and then also accepting that he had not thought about his son by love or image-signal reconstitution in hours if not days.

But he would not stay within himself apart from imagining himself each of the elements of this scene according to her serious-hearted dream theory (that he would like to tell his old friend Ted if it would give him a remission from sickness)—so he came up with:

(1) himself as the turnpike cars en route to Windrow et al. running on automatic leaving fauna, flora, other machines to breathe what he gave off;

(2) himself as the glassed-in phone booth both target for relatively faster-moving eyes and slot relatively removed from a person who knew him and loved him and was not always charmed with his charm but would stand in his way like a guard fully exploiting the rules and with her lovely arms outstretched toward him;

(3) himself as her, as B.J., Jean: too strong to be split between resting here with him, marrying, living for this long moment, and winging off to an endless nutrition project in East Africa—as Jean? he felt her legs warm and conscious and knew that she was not telling him to go away along a warp of age differential as if he ever would die and come back either younger or in her body that he knew pretty well;

(4) himself as also his own (actually leased) car, accelerating like gravity from a city tunnel toward a past home (decelerating to then use the speed of sound to phone to check on a daughter’s safety and with marginal disloyalty to call an extended son, Larry, whose life and thinking had changed dramatically)—but this was not the mere car—it was him, it was Jim Mayn . . . part of a multiple scene but not any one answer to it: until he rather casually and humorously spoke: "If I put myself into each of the components here, the cars, the pike, the phone booth, you, it comes out pretty dreamlike." She laughed with a tincture in her throat of contempt, and shook her head and said, "Make your call, and let’s get going. I was talking about actual dreams. You’re bullshitting me for some reason. I mean, you don’t believe this is a dream, this is a pretty odd day, I grant, when we have to go to a thing in New York tonight and you think you have to visit your father and the cemetery which is O.K. with me even if I don’t know what’s going on and you’re bullshitting me; but I know you’re more serious about the not-dreaming than even you are telling me." "If I don’t tell you, does that mean—" "Oh shit, man, ‘holding out on me’? Yes! When it’s this important."

She was bitching him as if he hadn’t been through twice her life. Larry had given over his systems hunt and relative reincarnation hypotheses, but they lived on. Say this Obstacle Geometry made a middle term by association with life on one hand and on another with how paths of astral bodies—light itself!—got deformed by massive bodies they neared: how did you—how did Larry, who said he wan’t talkin’ like this n’more—get from that middle-term stuff to being in more than one place-time at once? Mayn wheeled into the booth and told the operator to bill it to his Manhattan number, glad he had never installed one of those singles-people answering machines, but Flick/ Sarah was not at Lincoln’s or Amy’s or a club her mother’s fiance kept up his membership in, and Larry was out also, and Mayn seemed never to have stopped facing Barbara-Jean (Jean!) as close as a shower, close as some trip he left in a mind bag of unsorted non-news, though facing her to say he did not really think he had been through twice her life, not even twice his own —hers was her own—"I dreamt my own death, I think, once," she quickly said, glad they were friends again—"No," he said, "I know we get along." And he conveyed to her without more than a touch that he could explain something maybe in the car, which she then said she would drive—asking suddenly and lightly what the pistol was doing half-concealed in the lower sidepocket by the driver’s seat. Oh he had forgotten it the other night, in fact got into a discussion with a police detective and forgot even that the pistol could just as well be returned to the man from whom it had been easily taken except he’s dead now.

"You sound thorny," she added—to what had gone unsaid. This thing down here beside her wasn’t the Mayn family pistol she had heard about, was it? That? he said. But she really didn’t care. The driver sees more along the road than the freer passenger and might talk and question more. She said that a bicyclist in her rear-view mirror back a half mile had been sideswiped by a car and had disappeared smoothly into a ditch. Jim suggested that turnpikes shouldn’t have ditches. She said that as long as they existed you might as well use them. She said she didn’t see anything moving along the ditch’s horizon. She put her hand on his.

Jim explained that he had given up trying to see recent developments as unimportant or as necessarily unconnected to mysteries and oddities he himself was marginally confounded with. She laughed and asked if this would interfere with his work on anti-missile particle-beam weapons. Work on? he said, and laughed. Oh sure, she said, why wouldn’t he dream up a missile or two on his own? Or an anti-missile, he said like a proposition to her knowing she would not confuse it with some old anti-missile missile. Made of anti-matter? she suggested. Too easy, he said. Anti-light, she said. He had tears in his eyes. He said he had been downright fond of the modest short-range Sprint in its day, one of the only mildly threatening curiosities of Mr. N.’s regime, and it had been trotted out again after the ABM ban in ‘72 as a short-range tactical. You sound like a salesman, she said restoring her right hand to the wheel. For "enhanced radiation," he went on, finding her thigh with his left hand . . . low thermal yield, cut down on damage, leave motels and churches and the Congressional Office Building standing, kill the T62 drivers but leave their vehicles intact right there in the main streets of Dusseldorf and Paris— Livermore Labs were playing around with it for God’s sake in the fifties when she was having Babar and Little Miss Muffet read to her.

Men know so much junk, said Barbara-Jean (Jean!). Hey, he said, she could explain the fusion doughnut to him better than Lawrence Livermore himself, and she hadn’t even been there. Simple, she said, you get this ring of magnetic material, keep changin’ its field real fast so you induce an electric field that’ll give a bunch of particles a push and then another push and then another and oompa-pa oompa-pa, but there isn’t any Lawrence Livermore. Well, that’s a linear accelerator, he said, I can tell, and thanks—anyway that particular one was trying for fusion energy, which is more sanitary and peacekeeping. Oh, she sighed half-intelligently half-contemptuously, we all end up the same either way, right? But she was there with him, turning turning to him constantly though she never took her eyes off the "ribbon of highway" he briefly hummed. That bullshit about fusion makes me mad, she said, it’s so fucking expensive you know. Actually, he countered, he’d prefer to wind up ashes more than dust. She laughed and took one affectionate hand off the wheel: Angel dust, she added, to whatever he was thinking, if anything. He said he imagined she didn’t know what angel dust was. What are T62S? she asked. Russian tanks by the hundred was the answer.

Had bicyclist been resurrected? No, she murmured, without looking, but—can’t even see his ditch. Mayn reported a multiple-car wreck between Lausanne and Geneva along the lake road, in fact extravehicular and intramural (—what?—hit a wall), an acquaintance named Karl, this was a year ago, expert on arms-limitation protocols and on potential Russian cheating on the overall strategic-launcher ceiling, anyway he was declared by doctors on his arrival at hospital to be a miracle, and with that he died.

A miracle? Yes, that he had arrived in two pieces.

Why are you telling me this?

Because this is an arms negotiator who sat at the tables of our international power vacuum always armed with a small pistol.

What’s that got to do with your daughter and your grandmother’s trip west and your grandfather’s diaries that your daughter is returning to your father today and your grandfather’s briefer trip west, and dreams, and us?

Because if you don’t dream, you get something else.

What?

A fairly advanced design, your doughnut, Jim.

Oh sure, I had all that energy left over from not dreaming.

You read the old Galaxys.

Never heard of it. I don’t even know now exactly why a torus is better than a dumbbell-shape or a sphere or cylinder, I know it’s the inside usable surface and the strength of the shell, but—

And it had spokes?

They were just like a bike, but not all the same length; but the wheel—

Doughnut—

Torus . . . was circular just the same, except, yes, there was a break, there was a break.

It broke in two? she asked.

It separated at one point and they added to it, but it stayed in one piece. God I’m tired. Why are we pursuing this total fantasy?

I’m pursuing you. You discussed all this with Mayga. Also, now that I’ve postponed my food trip to Africa I feel I want to justify my existence, so I’d like to know if they grew potatoes in Styrofoam with the roots hanging free and if they developed whole-wheat rabbits and sun juice from specially treated squeeze-paper—all the fruit juices direct so you bypass the fruit.

Oh I knew, as surely as I made that trip down to the shore playing the detective at the suicide site, that when they made that air-lock cut in the torus so that for a few days while they added a segment the torus was like a pair of nearly closed calipers, it let some of us or maybe it was only me make an unofficial escape.

Maybe you were a dream the system in the torus had.

You know me. I wouldn’t count myself among the distinguished or the mad.

You went around convinced you were in the future and needed to warn others what had happened.

Why didn’t I, though? I went on with my job.

You always say that. But what are these things happening around you? Old meteorologists, your daughter involved with a journalist named Lincoln who stagehands for an opera starring a friend of the woman who runs Lincoln’s women’s workshop.

Waste.

The mountain that compacted to next to nothing. What about that mountain?

I don’t remember. Was it made of moon matter flown in to the L5 station?

When did this future all begin?

I don’t know. But I always got transferred Earthside out of the break in the torus, let me draw it for you, no, touch my heart; and when I arrived, I was in both places, the future and the present, and some weeks the present was my past and I had just about made it up, but this was all in my head, and years later it still happened, sometimes when I had a couple too many or woke up in a new room, a motel in the desert, where I had been sent, I felt, not just by assignment, and I would think the problem was tequila or the worm in the mescal but it was like the things that happened when I was fourteen, fifteen: I had been returned unofficially to earth, which was both past and present and insofar as it was past, I had to make it up, but it was real enough, the M/E transfer zones where colonists went two by two and stood on this plate to be launched, to be really off’d into the Earth-Moon-space settlements and would tell them what was happening to them but they wouldn’t believe me, and at some point in time but not always time I might see that the settlements weren’t dazzling or original but heartrendingly functional, and God I’m boring you too.

You’re interesting, Jim, don’t you know that? Or did you mean you had bored Mayga? I keep wondering about Mayga. She died.

And I would find myself back in that settlement and later on in my life I would have stuff to add to that picture, although it’s not my bag, I’m a humdrum type, professional—

But how did you get back?

Well, that’s what’s odd. I would wind up back there, swimming in a very low-gravity pool where the water waves stacked up slowly and then subsided like sandy gravel; but while I was the same, I knew that I had gone through the same thing the colonists had gone through, I mean again.

But you would have had to go through it with someone. Probably some woman.

But I couldn’t remember.

Neither could the other twosomes who got scrambled into frequencies and wound up in the space colony one person rather than two. Maybe it was happening over and over again.

Maybe I had some memory of it. Search me. All because I didn’t dream.

You need to think so.

It was important to me to let the world know what was going on, though you know I was never a muckraker investigative type like what my daughter might have wanted. And so I would arrive suddenly on Earth and go to one of the departure centers where these metal plates with electromagnetic-plate domelets received and processed pioneers two by two (so there were always at least six on the way because the units wouldn’t work singly but only three at a time), and I would stop these people and sometimes they were descending from government buses and I would say, Hey, when you get there you won’t be two people, you will have been turned into one. Do you see how this isn’t me? how it doesn’t get us anywhere? not even to Mayga, who was a nice woman and I have never understood her death, it cast a long shadow—

Onto you?

Yes; onto me. I mean, I read a novel a year, maybe every two years, standing up in a line at an airport check-in counter or waiting for the shuttle (then fall asleep when I get into my plane seat) and I recall a chapter at random and then throw the book away or leave it in the seat for a stewardess, it was a pretty good book—

A particular one, you mean?

I think so, yes; I was reading a dream, the author had put in a dream which switched on and off as if it was ... I don’t know . . .

Each dream was displayed on the side of a box kite? How about that?

And I had just picked up the book but I didn’t need to go back to the beginning to find out what the dream was referring to or what the dreamer felt about it all, and it was obviously the author’s way of taking care of some tricks he couldn’t pull off in the regular story, but mainly you felt the story got stuck in there in place of something else or to communicate between parts maybe, in place of some work, y’know, I mean some real work of storytelling.

Oh that’s it: dreams don’t take enough work; that why you don’t go in for them?

Oh in the book it wasn’t just the past. It was the future that was so slick: the guy had this dream and then he knew what to do next, his life had made sense, and the author didn’t put him through a scene that demanded some thinking and some guts, but just made up this . . . where did you get the kite you mentioned?

But why shouldn’t this dream of yours come from somewhere?

I told you the thing wasn’t a dream. I was awake.

But why shouldn’t it come from somewhere?

Well, I wasn’t any junior birdman, and it didn’t come from studying Galaxy up on the roof at night, though I did have a subscription to Popular Science the year I was in the Boy Scouts and I didn’t like Buck Rogers in the movies any more than I liked jungle nonsense, I went for westerns, the saddles, the boots, the hats, the horizon. What about the kite?

We could cover them all at the same time, the four-paneled dream-kite flown by a couple of newly weds making plans, the visit on opera day to Mel Mayn and the cemetery, attendance later at the opera, and some experience of waiting for what must long since have happened to a young Navajo whose tracks turning up here and there across the American landbridge from sea to sea break for stretches sufficiently impressive to account for his joining the un-precedentedly low-leaning noctilucent of the late Anasazi but not remaining with that old spirit young in cloud—as if making way across the also moving but inertial continent, he merged his non-inertial coordinate system with the inertial coordinate system of the Anasazi’s stably humid afterdeath. We could cover them at the same time had we the people available. Which means for us actually finding a preferably live body (Coxey’s or the dime-museum orator Browne’s only if the era was right) in which to incarcerate this idea one of us might have, might be, if the price is right, if the chemistry is right, and the idea might be just our self (helped) or selves, sometimes a locked-pelvis-type-focused person, sometimes a man such as Mayn feeling again the ache of wings long-halyard-vectoring to "where" he knew he was telling the truth about the future and more nearly to his father’s house where two cars parked in driveway so we would not have Mel to ourselves hearing an elder doctor-friend of someone’s intone that the last thing you decide (according to a patient of his who had gotten back with his waif) is what comes first (prioritywise though in a coordinate system full of a multiplicity of small-scale inertias you better not wait too long or she will be gone and waiting elsewhere if in motion)—so that, seeing the cars and knowing his daughter had come already bearing the diaries that a guy in a fringe jacket and black-and-tan hair had left with the doorman of Lincoln’s apartment house, Mayn could contemplate bypassing this visit and going straight to test his Trace heritage at the cemetery with or without the wonderful girl who might rather stay with Mel and Flick before she and Jim returned to the City for an opera called Hamletin, and he could be glad that, tired as he was, first he and Jean here in the car passing as one unit a chain of bright-capped bicyclists as they approached the turnpike turnoff, had settled the dream question even if at his expense.

The mountain that compacted into next to nothing, she had persisted. What about that mountain? Obviously, he said, I talk too much; was that at Cape Kennedy? I don’t recall telling you a story about such a mountain; I don’t have one, in fact; but there is a mountain around at the moment. Yes, she said, I’ve heard—it’s both around and approaching; but you don’t talk too much. Try not to disagree with me, Jeanie. I could try, she said, except it’s a losing battle. Well, you’re so damn smart, he was saying while she said, Some things I don’t know: like "Visa to China" then "Along the white mountain" (is that a pop song of the forties, sir?). And some things like "Beagle onto corporation," then "Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving."

You’re speaking telegraphically.

I have to be careful about attributing: I feel I’m on dangerous ground.

This is a service road, the town’s up aways.

When did you first know you were not dreaming?

What a question! First time it’s been asked. I remember a Thunder Dreamer, and I remember my brother Brad screaming at night and a voice passing through his screaming—there’s the cemetery, by the way, but we turn into town—and later I remember more screaming but different and a deeper voice passing through that, and in the morning my mother and Brad were comparing dreams, and I don’t remember his but I do remember hers, which my father kept interrupting like he’s calming her to a point where she won’t talk about it, though I doubt that he cared about what she was saying.

What was hers?

Now I can’t remember, except it had Thunder Dreamers in it and I never asked but kept this in mind but I thought about it at my, yes, at my grandmother’s house one afternoon, maybe the same day—it was raining, of course—and she could have read my brain because she told me a story about Thunder Dreamers getting pistols and music and carrying them hundreds of miles across mountains and passing them on and she said she had never told anyone this.

Well, was that true?

I love you for asking. I love you, Jeanie. I love you for picking something up. But it’s done with, and who knows or cares why what happened happened?

Now you’re the sentimental one. But your eyes just lit up.

Pay attention to the road. I told her she must have told my mother too, because my mother had mentioned dreaming that a Thunder Dreamer (what’s a Thunder Dreamer?—I’ll tell you some other time)—had passed music to a man who studied plants who had passed the music to a woman who had studied animals all the way from South America to North, and the Thunder Dreamer had passed a pistol to a man who used to cure people but now let them do it themselves, and there was a picture on the pistol but my father kept shushing her like a nurse soothing her.

What did your grandmother say?

She said my mother must have heard that stuff from someone else, maybe a friend of hers—because she had never told the western stories to her because they were . . . they were something, I’m not sure what. But where did you hear about the box kite with dreams on it? You turn there.

Never mind. It’s attached to that mountain we’ve been hearing about.

I’m an old factual hand but I’ve been dragged into that mountain at last; it’s the other reason we’re here.

Seems like we’re here in New Jersey in order to get back to New York to the opera. It’s a long route.

"Good grief," my father used to say whenever he began to get exasperated, and that’s as far as it went.

We’re getting close.

Pull over a second.

"Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving." Ring a bell?

Sure; you said it before.

"Beagle ..."

Same thing.

"Visa to China."

But the question is, who told my mother about that music and pistol? I mean it hardly matters now, but . . .

These are direct quotations. And add also, "Compacting down to next to nothing—Indiana, Chile, Choor, blonde." Is that right? "Blonde, Choor"? Is that the end of a sneeze or some word I didn’t get all of?

Are you asking me because I’m responsible? I didn’t know I had mentioned—

Naturally you wouldn’t know.

I can’t know everything.

I don’t know why I’m so mad at you.

You’re sort of in love.

I hate "sort of" and it’s further from "twice" every additional year. Shall I turn off the motor?

Where did that kite come from?

It had dreams on it, and it was flying inside someone’s mind.

It feels familiar without being.

Your young friend Amy heard it from the Chilean economist who got it from a woman who flew in from Minnesota. It had been flying inside her mind from time to time since the time of her divorce.

It’s a fine thing to hang your dreams on. Amy’s your friend, too.

We share a messenger named Jimmy Banks, who has an incredible head, inside and out. The woman who helped him protect this bike of his that changed his life is a strange old woman who is always with a strange old man who is a defrocked meteorologist. I went to see them both, because of what I had heard through Jimmy, that this man had invented new weather according to the old woman and was a hermit but lived with her, and they were both from New Jersey and she named a town that was eerily familiar.

You’re telling stories, said Mayn.

You’re upset, M.

Start the car.

What was the other reason we came out here?

I want to introduce you to my father.

I feel I know him already.

We already remember the difference between dream and wake. We heard of a seminar, all-day, all-weekend in fact, part under the table, part up against it as the interrogator translates into colloquial. We remember the seminar as a generally articulated structure capable of accommodating a multitude of small-scale resource and promotion weaponry. We learned later that in the next room we could have learned something about receding from our embodiments into pure idea under command or electromagnetic auspices or mere stress. Later still we learned that we had been doing this anyhow, as if it came natural to us, angels, porcupines, closet-exhibitionist hermits, incarnations of others who have already remembered in order to forget. Until one of us, a journalisto named Mayn clustered his signals together enough to see a dark-haired beautiful young woman-technologist speaking to an old spine-crust of an unemployee who said he needed a vacation and had one in mind—north-coast working vacation—who might be called Hermit-Inventor of New York, though not possibly connected with those wages of exploration and stupid risk and disperson that we have made become us in honor of such late persons as Margaret Mayne and Alexander her spouse, plus the Navajo Prince and so forth.

Then you don’t see how I could treat the Hermit-Inventor down in the Village as separate from—

Was that "Choor" the end of a sneeze?

It comes to me, it came to me, it came on top of something, it didn’t come from Margaret, it doesn’t matter where it came from but where it goes to. But I didn’t know I had mentioned—

Naturally you wouldn’t know. Here we are. Your father has two cars?

Are you being caustic?

About your not knowing? No. Historical.

Why would I naturally not know?

Because you said these things in your sleep, some in Florida that time and some in my place the night before election day.

In my sleep?

Got you now!

In bed I relax. I blather, I run on, I sort of chat.

Like you sort of love me. It was night. You were asleep. Believe me.

I believe you. But even the night allows space for daydreams.

Even nightmares allow space for someone who cares about you to be there and not get translated into a frequency.

I love you. My father doesn’t have a car. He has visitors. I knew my daughter was ahead of us. There must be one of his local friends here, too. Maybe this isn’t a good time. Who is the old woman who is with that old man down in Greenwich Village?

Your pal Spence has been visiting her, but she’s crazy probably, according to Jimmy Banks.

I have to go out to the cemetery by myself, but I want to take you in and introduce you.

That’s so incredible it’s almost not rude.

We’ll get back into town in time to have dinner before that thing.

If you have been dreaming all these years, how do you account for that leftover energy you said enabled you to travel into the future?

I don’t know about any of that. Maybe I can dream now.

Maybe by forgetting your dreams you found energy for the other trips.

Mayn introduced (B.-J.) Jean to Mel. Flick was downstairs with the books. The diaries lay on the table. Mayn excused himself, hearing his daughter speaking with someone downstairs. It was her boyfriend he hadn’t met. He said he was very upset and wanted to go to the cemetery. Jean said he was very tired. Mel put a hand on Jean’s elbow and asked Jim if he wasn’t going away to Europe. Jim said he supposed so. Mel said he didn’t understand. Then he laughed. "Don’t know," he said. " ‘D.K.,’ your grandmother’s friend the hermit said, because I heard him."

The news woke us. It was like having holes in our heads in the right places, all the right places. We had proved just among ourselves that radioactive decay acts generally so we can figure it ahead of time but is not only capable of accommodating a multiplicity of unpredictables it is made up of them, the parts that are not greater than the whole but just not predictable in the same way if at all. We had proved that this proof was like other proofs that would displace it. We absorbed Larry to us in order to prove to him that he was one part pure abstraction—one part pure, he jibed back, bodiless—and while we had him we learned that Simultaneous Reincarnation might not be simultaneous when occurring between divergent frames of reference and because he was disembodied while voicing this he was apparently not a candidate for that doom the Anasazi healer predicted for some young person who would describe and therefore have to take responsibility for a new form of reincarnation. All events are connected by their horizons, independent words say, and the dream Mayn enjoyed in the cemetery might seem to come before the opera but came after it, as witness the time of day, and, ultimately, witnesses who came there for related reasons:

The Dream as Later Reported

The news woke us, or the frequency of phone pulse approaching our own rose into our sleep. It was Ash’s voice, and his information seemed ancient and unreal. Another bomb, another secret rising from the drawing board—a device this time that knew what none had known before.

We felt still asleep, but in a future that followed from Ash’s brief report. Our new bomb was resolving a multistage executive tower so that I-beams and bricks, bolted-down furniture and solidly transparent walls condensed to nothing. A thousand people in recognizable attitudes, and as if on an infra-material photograph, were caught by our vision still distributed according to the now vanished grid of their building’s floor levels. This was a bomb that left people more or less alone.

The voice on the telephone-speaker came through so matter-of-fact that one thing equaled another. Was the nuclear device in question no more earth-shattering than the experimental motel where Jim Ash had stopped for the night? This passive-energy accommodation had been built from ground-level downward to take advantage of year-round moderate temperatures just below the surface, but Ash was phoning from a hilltop pay booth, private if exposed. His voice would recede for a second as if he were turning away from the receiver to keep an eye out. "You see, this thing discriminates between what’s living and what isn’t."

"It does what?" we asked.

He meant what he said. The miracle of the bomb was that it would destroy non-living structures ("resolve" them) while leaving anything alive unharmed. We asked Jim if anyone else had it. He didn’t know. We felt it was our bomb. We believed Ash when he said it didn’t make any noise.

In those days the men and women in the labs dreamed of the unified force field, but they got up in the morning and did their work. Economists ran their cost-benefit breakdowns, and we all took it one day at a time because that is the way the job gets done. We knew roughly what to expect. But a device that wiped out everything except life? A bomb that leveled buildings but left people very much alive? How alive we did not reckon at first; for who was prepared to understand what was happening in the colossal quiet of this uniquely silent weapon. People it left standing, Ash quipped grimly—a joke that took hold in those days of queues and informal marches.

Left standing, maybe, but not sitting. Unless you were sitting in a live tree or on a live horse or upon fertile areas of organically arable soil. For if you were within the bomb’s silent scope hearing the clink of an unbreakable coffee cup in its saucer or a random radio playing, you could not hope to go on sitting on anything inanimate or inorganic. It would be blown out from under you. If you were sitting on your porch across the domestic hinterlands of the continent or at your office desk, get ready to be inconvenienced. Porch and rocker were instantly gone, your desk in the city likewise demattered. Not to mention the building that housed the desk—three hundred desks. For this bomb liked structures made of steel and stone and the more transparent substances.

That night when Ash phoned, none of us knew how close we were to the strange advances in personal power and self-possession soon to occur in a large number of citizens who now seem legendary. We slept and dreamed a dream so natural it did not come back to us as the answer to our waking question until later when what we had dreamed happened. Happened again and again on the limited but vivid video footage available showing a building’s entire population of dark, luminous persons making their way to earth like sky divers before the chutes open. Which answered our first, waking question the morning after Ash called: how would survivors descend?

The silent bomb would not be hush-hush for long, Jim Ash had predicted. His opinion was soon matched by hard fact. The desert, like the sea, had always seemed beautifully right for tests of megaduty devices. This time some sites were ruled out as being too near one or more of the hexagonal dwellings called hogans owned and/or inhabited by the Navajo. Then a man named Babe who had never contributed a dollar to a presidential campaign offered his jojoba plantation. He hoped to dramatize the hardiness of that remarkable bush whose pod contains a waxy liquid that was already replacing whale oil and would eventually find uses in auto lubrication, scalp treatments, and cooking. But this desert entrepreneur hoped also to prove the scientists’ claim for their bomb; and to this end he volunteered his ranch and his jojoba-processing plant. If the thing went well and the buildings were leveled, the government would replace his home according to his wife’s own plans, and would import, lock, stock, and barrel, a whole new processing plant from the Orient as if he had bought himself a Saudi mosque or a Roman bridge. His loyal staff would stay on the job during the test, whatever the uncertainty about the bomb’s "discrimination profile." Anyway, it would be an experience.

At detonation, however, to the surprise of practically everyone, sections of the desert as well were suddenly not there; they had dropped away, swept by some local collapse of time or accelerated into silence by some unseen wind. The sandy, alkaline landscape had vanished around the blast, leaving gaps deeper than craters. Two men and two women raced out to take samples along the rims. The targeted buildings had been not just leveled, they were now nonexistent, leaving their occupants shaken up but grinning with some knowledge not quite yet theirs.

Religious leaders wanted proof of the bomb’s powers. Unfriendly continents demanded Washington share its bomb. Reaction in the financial community and the construction industry was mixed. Meanwhile, we needed to know in a hurry what happened with larger structures. People who worked in them at first preferred not to take part in the upcoming tests. But when a sensational test in a major seaport "resolved" a modern three-story outerwear factory, employees in other buildings came forward. This was a double development, for people were volunteering not only themselves but also the buildings they worked in. Our man Ash, having covered the first test, had now covered this second one where, after the detonation, the factory workers were seen descending so slowly from the vanished upper floors that it seemed to be against their will; so slowly that many escaped with the simplest bruises.

Ash checked on the survivors of the first blast. Where the narrow, deep gulfs had opened east of the jojoba groves, soil samples tested out devoid of life. Not even a jojoba bush would grow there. When Ash phoned to ask the planter Babe if he was really going to get a new house out of this, and what were the authorities doing to his employees during the follow-up examinations, Babe thought Ash knew more than he did, and divulged the location of the lab where survivors had been sequestered for debriefing. Jim Ash flew there. He posed as a hermit and met a woman he had seen at the desert test. She moved among hillside trees with a grace so centered that, as Jim was able only much later to express it, she might have been a continuum present elsewhere as well as here.

She wore a linen headband, and her name was Mara. Through her, Jim Ash saw the grasses and the orchards as if he were on their far side looking back. Where were the fences? Wasn’t the place classified?

This was Biomorph Valley. The debriefing lab was in a bunker nearby. The survivors, most of them, were very much alive. Jim felt Mara saw through him, yet she seemed to tell the truth when she said it was natural for him to be a hermit now. Back at the lab it was important, she said, to seem to know less than she really did, in order not to disturb work going on. A friend had had all too much life in him, she said; he had died of his own very intensity yesterday at dawn. Only then had Mara found both a power of peace beyond attachment and a new connection with this friend. She loved him and Jim Ash too. She was one of the few women he had known who when they knew something did not ask him to guess what it was. He did not pass on to us what she had told him, or not until the late changes alluded to above were widespread. Tests went on apace.

The employees of the three-story outerwear factory had learned what was happening only one minute ten seconds prior to blast. Therefore, none experienced prolonged preblast anxiety. An outerwear executive who was a part-time major in the National Guard and so had kept secret the pacemaker he had had installed next to his erratic heart was restrained from jumping to safety during countdown; most of the building’s occupants did not take the test seriously. But when the countdown reached the ultimate silence of detonation, participants suddenly found themselves following the one simple instruction: concentrate on the locus area both between your eyes and between your ears and think of this as a source of both choice and buoyancy. But those who descended with surprising ease to ground level after the factory was resolved experienced this not only as the result of concentrating as instructed; they reported to postblast debriefers a veritable flair for this mode of concentration and controlled movement.

What was this? Where had this flair come from? The debriefers and lab analysts were not prepared to say; and the survivors were urged not to speak of what had happened to them. Who had given the instruction? The personal physician of the National Guard major objected to the sequestering of survivors, but when phoned by Jim Ash, the physician had no comment. Ash wondered which had come first, the "flair" or the blast. He told us he himself had concentrated on the locus area between his ears and between his eyes, and thought he recalled (unless he was wrong) Mara telling him the blast came before the inspiration. But we, whom he had not yet told of Mara’s other confidences, reminded him that Mara had experienced blast in a one-story jojoba-processing station, so she had faced no threat of falling or problem of descent. Yet there was a basement, there was a basement.

Pressure at home compounded pressures from abroad. The limited video footage available was shown again and again. The government was beset by demands for future tests.

But the government must decide more than merely who were to be the lucky survivors next time, assuming there would be a next time in the supposed increasing sophistication of our somewhat low-key device. Jim Ash reported that enemy tanks would vanish by the hundreds but not the soldiers occupying them; car factories and high-rise dwellings would "resolve" into nothing more than marginal weather, but not the people in them. However, Jim asked privately if we were not faced with a curious problem like what you do when you have achieved the capability of reducing the food supply but not necessarily the number of eaters.

He talked to slum redevelopers. Obviously we had within our grasp rubble-free demolition of buildings. But citizen groups pointed out that the buildings in question had been condemned and the risk to life and limb in getting people into position prior to blast was prohibitive. But when, one spring day, a thirty-five-floor insurance tower was resolved in a test to explore breadth as well as height, the government saw the truth in what a small group of observers had lately urged.

For the space vacated by the blast proved to be not just physical but mental and most mysteriously environmental. Visiting the site, the Secretary for Urban Communication said, "It was as if suddenly, looking into the revealed distance, we could think."

Tests with the creation of space in mind began to be carried out in selected cities at sites where the authorities saw no special need for vertical economies in the housing of equipment or people. Meanwhile, the influential group of observers extolled unenclosed space as a virtue in itself. Philosophers argued there was no such thing as unenclosed space, but they were moved by the group’s tranquil conviction.

Now, Jim Ash knew the members of this group and was not surprised when a spokesman for the building trades pointed a finger at them as being bomb "survivors" one and all. Next thing, architects, anthropologists, and the incorporated Committee for a Sane Bomb converged upon the issue. They got hold of debriefing dossiers from the initial examinations right up to the present, including hard information from follow-up surveillance. Had not the survivors sparked a general disparagement of architecture, as if buildings were in the way? And had they not tried to give the awful crux of deterrent strategy an aura of charm? (The executive of the outerwear factory had resigned his National Guard majority and was seen ascending steep hills and surfing with a board.) Why had the survivors not been detained pending fuller analysis of changes in their behavior and further inquiry into their affiliations?

Two watchdog anthropologists insisted on attending the debriefing of five new survivors. They had not known they were within target range. No one else had known either. The five had been inside a local church the principal threat to which had been the ongoing excavation of a new subway branch directly under its east corner. The moment of blast came, and the house of God was gone into the middle of the afternoon. Two widows were arranging flowers; a male derelict was relaxing in a pew; the sexton, who had been fishing under his cassock for a coin to buy a paper, had significantly at the instant of detonation wondered why blast survivors had never to his knowledge wound up naked; and a boy in a baseball uniform was leaning up against a pillar enjoying a breather away from his friends. But these five found themselves suddenly at large in the city under the pale window of the sky and still supported by the old floor, doubtless because the church was half a mile from the main target.

More curious, they did not mind being naked; for that is what they were, and each knew the others didn’t mind. At the post mortem, as Jim Ash called it, the two anthropologists zeroed in on the sexton. He had ever been a man to accept coincidence below as design from above. Moreover, this paradox suited his everyday inkling that once you have noticed a phenomenon, you find it again and again. But had the bomb been waiting for him to spot its inconsistency regarding clothes? Which bomb? The bomb as developed tradition? The bomb as conscious formula? He granted that he and the boy baseball player had been wearing polyester, but the derelict who’d wound up like a really quite fine nude on the ancient stone of the holy floor had been wearing a tweed jacket made of natural fibers which, as any tailor will tell you, "breathe" as polyesters do not. On the other hand, Mrs. Holly had been wearing her plaid wool skirt, though mind you all but one of the chrysanthemums she had been arranging had gone up with the church.

Both anthropologists insisted on talking at the same time. The sexton in his survivor’s robe answered easily, as if the questions were all one. So why’d the bomb zap clothing now but not before? Did he mean us to believe that that thought of his about clothes just before the bomb detonated was just a coincidence? And how come he wasn’t upset about his church being demolished? And had the thought preceded the bomb?

Ah, what would be the point of getting upset? said this increasingly benign elder, his glasses intact; and in any case in the absence of debris what evidence was there that the church had been demolished? If the bomb respected life, perhaps it had one of its own both in substance and in its eternal formula and was therefore capable of growth; and if so, perhaps its growth was reciprocal with our own, and coincidence no more than the powers of the multiverse converging as the hand learns to love the leg, the body the mind, the brain the heart. And the sexton raised a hand in greeting or farewell, and his lips hardly moved, if they moved at all, as he apparently said, "The main thing is that all the survivorsjfo?/ so good."

Whereupon his questioners were distracted by the appearance here and there of other robed survivors. The two anthropologists remembered they had neglected to ask this humble savant why the hundreds of other survivors had not been denuded in this latest test. They saw the boy baseball player, the stubbly derelict, and, from the building that had been the bomb’s central target, two male elevator operators and a female draftsman raise a hand in the same manner as the sexton simultaneously although they were not all in sight of each other. The sexton turned away, and the anthropologists were ushered out before they knew it.

Jim Ash, who, humble journeyman, found himself drawn inexorably toward hard science, noted that the two investigators did not report back to their watchdog subcommittee. They volunteered for the next available test. The debriefing lab teams weren’t talking, and Jim Ash reported that they had now been sequestered. Asked how they had fallen safely from great heights, many survivors smiled with a new form of wordless generosity. An elevator operator said it wasn’t like falling down a shaft; there was no shaft. A pilot, who had been weekending in the penthouse of a targeted structure, said that for her it was like being struck dumb by love and that instead of support being taken away when the building was erased, on the contrary some impediment had been removed, and she knew deep within herself that she and gravity were friends. An anti-abortion group said the women survivors were hysterically possessed. The small but vocal political opposition to the government charged that survivors ate and worked sparingly, seemed at times drugged yet suspiciously alert, and stuck together. Large groups of survivors turned up in parks and open plazas and brought with them a silence natural and fascinating to bystanders—to "non-survivors," as Jim Ash called them. In these hushed gatherings the survivors would nod or shake their heads, smile or open their mouths as if to breathe something more than air. They communicated among one another without words and often without looks. Two sailors reported that in the vicinity of a group of survivors odd shifts of air current and moisture-dryness ratio were felt.

Eventually a survivor was kidnapped. It was the former National Guard major who had been an executive in the seaport outerwear factory. The kidnappers phoned Jim Ash to report that their captive had disappeared on them. Several known survivors phoned Jim Ash to say they were convinced there had been a raid on the rural lab where the bomb formula had been discovered. The ex-major was accused in absentia by the Committee for a Sane Bomb of stealing the formula to sell. The kidnappers reported that the major had had a peculiar incision in his chest before they had worked him over; the committee accused the government of altering the survivors. A hundred survivors selected at random were called in and found to be feeling fine. Ash was known to have visited the missing ex-major’s physician. Ash phoned to give us in strictest confidence a fuller account of what Mara had told him in the valley. Several foreign powers complained that the varying effects of the bomb made its formula difficult to infer. Unaccountably, Washington offered to share the bomb. The sharing would be phased. Demonstrations would be given abroad on targets mutually agreed upon though chosen by the United States. Then the formula would be passed to nations that could show a real need for it. Gradually, postblast findings would be shared. A mass protest of archaeologists in a green field near England’s famed ancient baths was given a surprise bombing, to demonstrate good faith by the targeting of an area where there were only people and no buildings; the archaeologists reported afterward that they, in the American phrase, had a good feeling and in terms of their profession were looking inward as never before.

Unavailable for almost a month, Ash was reported to have said that the increasing sophistication of the bomb’s effects—its growth, if you will— might not be the result of tinkering with the formula. Jim was usually onto something when he was not in touch with us. Now he phoned to report that a top science adviser had told him that in fact, from one test to the next, no changes in the bomb’s formula or in the operational nuts and bolts had been contemplated. "They" were letting the device "have its head." They were going to clear away the Golden Gate Bridge in an upcoming test in order to prepare for the construction of a new bridge which the contractor had promoted by enlisting several survivors as advisers.

A brain-scan technician at the original Stateside postblast debriefing had asked to be included in the upcoming test. His request had been denied, and he was in a dangerous state. On a day when saffron ceilings of pollution over New York, Denver, and Los Angeles mysteriously turned into three great gentle gray clouds suggesting the forms of future animals and then almost simultaneously condensed into a rain so rich that acid lawns turned blue and the very police stripped themselves naked in the avenues giving thanks to that tonic flood of new weather, the technician whose request had been denied expressed his rage by calling a press conference. He would tell all, or at least more than he knew.

It was a violent scene. Jim Ash and others blocked the double doors as long as they could. The technician was letting it all out—anger and information. Survivor brain voltages, if anyone cared to know, had hit levels so far beyond parameter models as to be either freakish and lethal or an adaptive mutation that made this a whole new ball game. Moreover, these unthinkable sharp loads of electrical charge—if it was electricity—were coming from such a small fraction of the brain that large areas "looked" positively dead, and this was presently borne out by the trimensional pictures, though they came out spotty. But one thing was clear: there was endless variation from survivor to survivor as to which brain areas were nonfunctional, yet the actual amount was a pretty consistent fifty percent in most of the subjects, while from other brain sectors came these giant flows of more force than you would think a head could handle.

The technician stopped—his mustache drooped—something in him had stopped, or his powerful rage at being rebuffed in his effort to be a bomb survivor was beginning to translate force into guilt. Newspersons scuffled with federal officers at the door. Facing a dozen questions at once, the technician ignored them and talked fast. These survivors had seemed to know each other. No matter who they were. Yes, and they laughed too damn much, many of them at the X-rays. They said the machine must be one of the early models. Big joke. What happened to the synthetic sieve my surgeon tucked into my liver last Christmas? one asked. A more potent X-ray "eye" was flown in from the Caucasus. One survivor had laughed so hard he clapped a hand over his chest and his eyes stood out; his hand covered an incision. He wasn’t the only one with an incision. Like some others with incisions, he looked at his X-ray and said, "There’s nothing there." Big joke.

Jim Ash, struggling with federal officers who were trying to enter the long room, called out over his shoulder, "Was that man a part-time major in the National Guard?" but the technician, in whom for a moment resentment had seemed to slow down into nostalgia, pressed on: These people! Secretly communicative people! Happy, frighteningly happy! Well, when their follow-up scans came in, the voltages had risen again but now the huge charge had distributed itself, and amazingly the voltages were coming from all quadrants and yet the new trimensionals showed that the dead hunks of brain were now gone, obliterated, what have you, removed—

"Vaporized?" a woman called, and Jim Ash picked her out.

—but the measurable brain power now perfectly spread itself, the technician continued, and came alike from the cell matter that had gone on living as well as from these gaps, these vacancies, these voids with shapes that you had seen before . . . these voids . . . presumably left by the bomb.

The fugitive technician had rediscovered sheer science. His ruminative pause made Jim Ash and the other defenders at the door turn to look, and this was just long enough for the feds to rush the room. This happened so suddenly that Ash had a moment to get away.

The officers were not interested in him then. The former major’s physician phoned to ascertain Jim’s whereabouts. A medical hardware firm phoned, wanting Ash to see their lab in a remote wooded area of New England; they sounded too nice. One of the six biggest cathedrals in an unidentified eastern European country was reported to have been resolved and absorbed in a test employing American advisers and technicians. More and more survivors were being sequestered because their common problems of adaptation were thought to be best met among their own kind. A woman known to be checking out the links between the breath of survivors and recent changes in weather patterns was visited by Jim Ash, who tried to explain what an early survivor woman had revealed to him—how total-body auras dispersed pure vibration prior to the light of dawn.

Ash at last phoned in to report that two California survivors, who had been about to present to the bridge contractor their plan to replace the Golden Gate Bridge with a force field spread like an airy milk by the energy of people who had been resolved by survival, had suddenly been sequestered. A test on an Austrian concert hall was called off because Ash was reported to be racing there in order to become a survivor, but later a group of heart specialists convening only a stone’s throw from the concert reported that Ash had come and urged them to support the bomb as a cure, whatever it did to the pacemaker industry.

Above the Hungarian pampas an unidentified hovering object was resolved without residue in a test that failed to determine if any aliens or Hungarians had been aboard. Here in the U.S. in areas where homes had been resolved/ subtracted, we arrived at a new clemency of weather. The government investigated a link between this meteorological change and a diminution of wind velocities at what had been the third windiest place in America. Jim Ash was caricatured in the newspapers as a man both hiding out when no one was looking for him and trying to discover the next test site in order at last to become a survivor himself. The Committee for a Sane Bomb advised the President that these unpredictable alterations in the weather were due to the wholesale elimination of building across the continent. A philosopher replied that Memory is the estranged spouse of Prediction. We could not put all these facts together but we knew again that the contemplation of a completed past might yield not just regret but certainty.

The government shut up shop and declared the so-called "People-Oriented Bomb" illegal. We were not clear if the now very great number of survivors sequestered around the world were letting themselves be sequestered or couldn’t help it; and were they affecting the rest of us from their safe distance or not? and was it safe? Widespread information on the dynamics between the extant and the vacant areas of survivors’ brains achieved fabulous proportions. It could now be told that many survivors had disappeared during extended debriefing; they had relatives to prove it. More disappeared than reappeared. One day a man called to say he was the kidnapped major whose landmark pacemaker had been vaporized; he had felt so good after the resolution of his three-story outerwear factory and subsequent debriefing and hilarious X-rays that he had tried to double his luck and had got past the guards claiming to be a physician in attendance. So he had been resolved twice over, and this second time he had had exploded out of his overall person that last anxious urge to maintain his body as constant evidence of the past and assurance of the future. Thus, he had found he could suck by means of a quickened circulatory system all of himself into those new gaps of brain vacancy that this charge, so curiously equal in distribution, disguised as regular cells. But he did not take to invisibility and was glad of it only since it had helped him escape his kidnapper-torturers who were prepared to impose old-fashioned nuclear blackmail upon a major city to be named later even though everyone knew the government would not buckle under.

When we spoke of Mara’s love for Jim Ash, we knew it was the truth. Her two loves, really. We remembered the first, who had died of excess charge and died at dawn. Jim, then, had been the second love, but it was the two men together who were the love of Mara’s life. And Jim she had loved too much to attach him to herself. He must remain outside the company of survivors. This was a familiar issue. Had the sexton called forth by his thought about clothes the new added capability of the People-Oriented Bomb, or had the potential in the bomb caused him to think the thought that proved to be prediction? Likewise, Jim had often said he wanted no part of survival and would rather be himself, as long as he had all his faculties and, if it wasn’t asking too much, his limbs and principal appurtenances, and would rather from his limited angle look at these people and the powers which survival gave them—and here the former major was saying Mara had wanted this for Jim, perhaps destined it for him.

In his absence Ash was being discussed. He became the current history he had been unwilling to sum up. Why didn’t he get back in touch? He was dead, if that was possible. He was sequestered. He had been put to sleep, or we had. Wherever he was, information from anonymous sources kept reaching our news bank first. At perhaps the birthplace of wind power where Nile boats translate taut sails into authentic motion, a fugitive archaeologist discovered in the inmost burial chamber of the one pyramid not yet leveled both the formula for the pyramids and the original plans for the Parthenon, which had recently fallen apart in gratuitous sympathy with what was going on. The archaeologist disappeared—twice-resolved, sequestered, or stowed away.

Mara had told Jim that blast preceded flair. The flair, of course, for controlled personal descent but also for concentrating upon the buoyancy-choice locus both between the eyes and between the ears. Yet who had given the outerwear employees the last-minute order to concentrate on this locus? It was an order that became standard in later tests. Jim himself had tried concentrating on this locus. It helped him forget a whole lot of what he didn’t much want to know. But when he had gone hang-gliding off a two-thousand-foot ledge during an energy trip to Vermont, he had felt it was the wings and not some subcerebral buoyancy that held him up. But we knew in our banks that he had never been the same after Mara confided in him that day in Biomorph Valley. The test at the jojoba ranch had left her with a white rim beginning to grow around her head and the knowledge that if she kept changing she might have the dubious chance to go on living indefinitely. The radiance given off of her and the other survivors would be measured, she predicted, but its source, no. What had been cleared away in her left room for motion; but the motion was a growth form of what had done the clearing; and the life she now held in her was wholly in the motion between what had stayed and the new gaps. These were partly in the flesh of her head and her calves and her waters, and were partly the activity freed as if unknown hopes had become space.

Scientists eventually knew pretty well how the "persons" of survivors had worked. Elimination of dead matter in the brain both concentrated energies already present and opened gaps that let that energy jump and grow; the void left where internal body parts had been, set off kinetic potential uniting upper with lower. How this turned the whole or entire person into a multiconvergent window radiating communication and genuine feeling outward was not yet known. But meanwhile there was work to do every morning—"chores," as a prize-winning physicist put it.

One evening a freak storm put us in mind of what Mara had told Jim the day he posed as valley hermit. When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightning by an imbalance between earth and heaven. As Jim once said, this wonderful person may have meant by "heaven" nothing more than the lower, positively charged edges of cumulonimbus thunderheads, but then again she may have meant what she said. In the middle of the night we all got up to listen to our freak storm and check the terminals and endless tapes of our information bank. Just before dawn we looked at each other and knew that the storm had covered a silence we had not heard and that the bank was gone and with it the storm, and that we had contemplated all this before it had happened. Someone had saved one last P.O.B. device, or the government had; and if it had, it would announce that that was absolutely it, the People-Oriented Bomb had been unilaterally liquidated.

We found we could let go of all that data we had been doing. It had impacted and condensed into such a hard load that perhaps only the government could have resolved it, albeit through local control.

The weather was changing back to its old self. Sixty thousand new homes were built to be electrified by the great single-blade wind rotors of Wyoming. The World War Two one-and-a-quarter megawatt device atop Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont was repaired. Tales of the P.O.B. survivors persisted. Thinkers posited that if the People-Oriented Bomb had in fact generated a thought about itself in the mind of someone about to receive the naked, concrete effect of that logical possibility, the bomb’s new attention to the sexton’s polyester and to a derelict’s hoary, living tweed argued not only that the bomb might always have been under the control of the communal mind but, as the government suggested, might have been a figment of that mind.

Scientists had a harder time getting up in the morning, much less addressing their spectroscopes and proton skimmers. It was not that they were still dreaming of the unified field. It was the feeling that we all had missed something.

Which in turn kept us going. Which in turn kept alive—if memory is alive—the memory of our sometime bomb’s discrimination profile and what might ideally have happened if its aim had not been dispersed by so much adjacent non-living material. And so it was that we overheard, by chance or our own nature, that somewhere a People-Oriented Bomb would be set off in a chamber surrounded and sealed by life alone: a chamber planted with soil and ceilinged by soft, breathing skin, a chamber walled by leaf and hill, by live animal flesh and blood, containing at its target center an unborn child.

Spiraled back then into the waking night, we saw we should have believed ourselves when by the light of our own broken breath we had guessed ourselves to be relations. As among pockets of weather bagging here and there out of a rubber sheet of atmosphere; or like stories of the unknown that our light bends into in order to come out as some further end that we make near; or like these witnesses, some known to each other, watching a man wake in the middle of the night hearing his name called across grass and gravel and stones of a burial ground, each with its own name.

But it’s going to be O.K.

For whatever else we said, our relations are ourselves and there’s still time, though for what? It kept us going. For we had succeeded during that moment of the people bomb in forgetting all that had preceded it.

The past, though, is beautiful and, according to recent healers, "done with" (what you will) up to but including a singer’s physician with a countryhouse interest in plumbing, so secretly arrived at a New Jersey cemetery that he had a long walk from his car with his anguished companion, and he remembers as if it had happened this same dear magic one beside him somewhere in a dentist’s chair and leaning over to the porcelain bowl and vomiting such worms that his imagination apologizes with silent passion adding then the vacuum system he knows of designed in all its lines (and, not least, into the straw-mode-tube mouth-sucker) to handle a sea of saliva under city regulations "hopefully" ensuring that in the event of cloggage in the basement, the backup won’t upflush the plumbed waste of the building’s other users into your very mouth happily tickled or alternately press-sucked by your dentist’s gurgling tube. A definite mouthful! but why—in the medic’s darkling mind at the instant when a woman’s voice called a man’s name in the night cemetery who stretched and stood up as if we had been asked if on the horizon we lacked anything by chance or our own nature’s guesswork and suddenly a figure proved it such as an event that collapses two years into one, or folk, or two lost instants.

And when the man’s voice, its hand upon a New Jersey headstone under a moon multiplied only by all who saw by it, called back hoarsely, "You were right," our heart had burst had it been not already divided through all of us and more.

Though he had not sounded a word during his whole sleep.

The wind had come and turned about him.

He had been returned from one surface of the universe to another.

He was thinking, The unborn child was Margaret’s; was Sarah’s; was what you do as the result of the dream, wherever it slipped into you.

We stood on not the head of the pin but pin-pointed. So we’re upside down-loded only to find in that state of liberation that gravity is what you make it. Long as you keep talking round or under the tables of power. We could talk not so much in our sleep as in others’. Light pursuing other light. Which is what light is the pursuit of. As when (as Shakespeare could have said) throwing the gist of life’s book up against an adhesive partition you can’t throw it all up at once so it arrives in its own time but then is known to have got there also all at once, its speed everywhere the same, and to describe a curve. So life describes itself, in which event it must take full responsibility.

"The Hermit-Inventor!" called the man across the Windrow night cemetery suddenly aware of others here besides the young woman walking toward him. "He said that!" And in the silence he turns a degree or two staring toward what might be in back of him, the direction of the wind? no the presence of or scent of someone else here in this stage of his life where he came he recalls in order to test his windowhood tracewise like a do-it-yourself EKG (for don’t go near a hospital, his plant-waterer neighbor Norma, now happier in her marriage, reported the woman Kimball virtually ordering her when Norma had a serious, even painful dragging in her uterus and her husband lately engrossed in non-invasive medical technology, malpractice precedent, and newly opening areas of environmental law had told her it was fibroids while himself contemplating a new Kimball workshop in part because Grace Kimball had intrigued him with strange talk of new weather generated by new air in part told her by a manic old lady who remembered only that she was from New Jersey, which is not why Mayn is here in Windrow cemetery in the middle of the night having dreamed what he can only now know was not his first dream): while we, who will take his part even if he will not, recapture the events of three hours or so ago that now remember us, having happened in the ancient city fifty miles from here; and, remembering us, these events find local habit in us; and, in twin next rooms, two screens we’ve found out how to join in us need no Dreaded Modulus to trans-hither and trans-yon.

But we don’t now know how we found out how—except we had the heart for it because, come to think, we had bypassed the phosphorus-detecting trace that told us once upon a time if we could only digest its information about the left ventricle’s muscle tone! and learn to join two hearts and more.

As to what had happened at the dress rehearsal, prevue, or one-shot deal, Clara and her eminent, bald eco-husband were in agreement on no surprising number of things regarding Hamletin, Hamlet, and the real show out in the audience. E.g., that the newly basso Prince (after eighteen previous Hamlet operas where he’s a tenor), singing of poison that was so vividly heard trickling down the ear of his in-process-of-being-murdered father’s hearing that some heart in him failed ere henbane could curd his fine milk or waste his glands of smell that felt like they’re at the rear of his brain, uncannily paralleled the lovely aria in Verdi’s Otello though the parallel seemed curved or semicircular where in the soft opening two alternating notes and succeeding amorous fourth Iago love-songs his dusky master’s ear and soul’s aorta to seal some tornado of his love forever in the amazed semen framed by jalousie—surely Verdi here in this warehouse Hamletin!—and Clara and her beloved agreed also that collaboration had here flowed everywhere on wings of love pressure plus other arts unknown: for Luisa’s father had been released from house arrest but then had disappeared in Santiago while Ford North’s stammer had, albeit operat-ically, invaded his singing just before or just after the pianist-composer-conductor in the pit (such as it was, shallower than other pits) his doughty, diminutive young boyfriend in lush black evening clothes had angrily shaken his head during Fordie’s aria compounding the "my offense is rank" soliquoia normally Uncle Claudius’s in Shakespeare’s family drama, with Hamlet’s own "I must be cruel to be kind" speech da da "That monster custom .../... is angel yet in this / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery . . . / but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me" da da deliver’d message-like some shadow moulting from some dream, where the boyfriend’s ambition shoehorned Ford into this warehouse showcase and Ford’s bulk compacted to manipulative pathos for Luisa precisely at a moment of her history when guilt for fatherland tinctured in her body to a terrible readiness of her house-arrested father that there let flow along the satin legs de Talca kissed such lust and tenderness for that elegant, terrible, vulnerable agent trained in Chile’s fine ships that she would fuck so deeply with him as to risk her and her father’s life by making her favor seem to depend on the favor of de Talca’s influence in Santiago, himself already stranger to himself than he had known, here "variable and uncertain" (Clara’s husband quotes to her in bed) as Hamlet when placed in a predicament worst possible for the display of his nature and gifts, where like Shakespeare (Clara’s lover gently quotes again from some critic read long ago) Hamlet had not fully planned the course of his action.

Many more agreements which we will get to as they to us, and no surprising number of things to these two who held hands in the theater, disengaged them when moist-warm, looked at each other’s profiles, sat sometimes one or other forward in the seat so the other gave the spine a firm, wonderful rub as much the breeze of passion as any light bending down at them from the stage, this immigrant couple who argued and played and talked and argued always in some suddenly and glimmeringly unpredictable agreement of near-touch like lovers who ring each other up three times per day and, at that, can aria and game through their pair-bonded circulatory systems to heart’s content like aliens (with green cards) who are three hundred percent married and flying always into loss of home and into the sea between that still takes them out of themselves and to themselves, let Grace Kimball (whom he has never met) reincarnate herself as she will as priestess of le Swing, doctor of Open Marriage, promoter of posture, poet-lariat of addiction that explains everything except Clara and her husband, isn’t that true . . . ?

In such shorthand (he by the way loathes dotted ellipses in fiction) and in conversation they two could forget the shadow of their country far away and hence huge—or the source was far away, but then the whole Thing was inside them (to coin America)—forget for hours "on end" (but which end, my love, which part of the—? —The umbrella?—Which point of the umbrella, oh God bless you darling for— Aiee, she broke in again, I just remembered I saw the green grass rains of the south coloring the Pole in a dream and— And where was I, Clara, where was I? was I the rain, wasn’t there an out-of-wok economist cooking up weather-predictions like weather itself like Michelangelo’s visions— Oh you move me, you move me, and a hell of a lot more than that opera—Only if subtracted from the theater as a whole!—Oh you move me, you move me, oh by the way, have you been spinning lately? because you haven’t mentioned the spins, your head-trips dear, maybe you won’t have to have one of those American scans) forget for minutes the wired skeleton of an unjointed country that shaded every impulse almost, except the impulse to themselves, whate’er that meant in this bison-torso-shaped land of dreams that all claimed New York was not the center of where the self helped itself to language of such weekly obsolescence and instant package that— until all over again these two elegant immigrants, but with freshness like the drama that’s rehearsed by you in a state of faith that you have it inside you to ... we sometimes forget what comes next except faith, spontaneous faith. . . that the next will come, e’en be it some near room . . . and to forget yourself, my darling . . . shading all impulses except such love that they might sit together in a downsloping audience in a resinous or wood-oil-smelling dubious theater (for we are particular who we go to the theater with, for we must love them) and Clara and her husband know that if need be, they completed (joyfully) this Hamletin (the suffix compacted from -tina, large leather jar, wooden vat, bathtub, where they themselves repaired at three in the morning when they could not sleep because the phone would ring once and not again and then again once but not again and they would think de Talca or someone was thinking again and even of them, by that connection that breeds reactions to a void of guesswork and fear though fear was not their problem, they could lie together naked to their necks and independently not be afraid, that is not be afraid in themselves of an agent’s revenge, abstract or personalized) yes, they completed this Amero-Chile-esque spiel-fable with a lithe black dame as a contralto Ophelia singing sometimes lines that had been the mother Gertrude’s, "Oh speak no more," yet wired in fury to those raised arms and her outraged throat, a tough Ophelia insisting on being present when her lover drags out his weapon, and insisting on holding it (though back and forth was not clear) in some fight that then propelled it through the arras into the next act—all impulses this shade of their country crossed except their impulse to themselves, these Chilean exiles watching Hamletin because their friend Luisa coerced herself into it—up there above them on a stage while they so private were in love yes beyond the friendship they had once for starters unfolded in each other in a London park, a friend’s London kitchen, a pub near the British Museum laughing at each other sometimes silently until they had to hold hands to keep from singing crazily in whatever place they were that had been forgotten. So put that in your vibrator, Grace Kimball, a continent well lost for pair bondage, she said to her husband, who shrugged with such subtle sexual fondness she jabbed him in his bicep and he turned to briefly mouth the tip of her nose that he had once in vain promised to write a poem on, and now he told her she had overreacted Kimball ward (he’s heard "overreacted" from Amy, but he meant it) and they laughed, and then Clara said it was true and that someplace between meeting Grace while seeking to help the one person in her world and later finding some new crushing load of silences controlling what she said to those naked women (one of whom ominously inquired if Clara and her husband saw a lot of other expatriates), she had seen the pretext become real, but not so he would notice it in her arms, her cheek, her voice, her love, but . . .

They were in agreement about Hamlet’s mother’s ghost appearing just when an intense hushed unsung argument arose in the audience between evidently de Talca and some other ticket holder; in agreement that the greater event (though center and margins might gently shift each other inside out like light disbelieving it found state of rest at last) proceeded on perhaps three separate tracks: (i) the sung text individuated as per ego continuum, yet ensemble; (2) also, some real and "now" intrigue involving a number of them and climaxing now or soon; and (3) pieces of unknown individual life for instance frictioning North/boyfriend; Mayn/Jean (seen by Clara once kissing lightly shoulder to shoulder and Clara pointed them out to her husband); a family of four including two teenage daughters who kept leaning across the adults to convey messages; a well-known black model whose name escaped and her sleepy little boy; Grace Kimball/Maureen (who herself several times at end of row got up to leave and sat down again as Grace said Go ahead); the ex-con Efrain and the aura reader Hortensa to whom Mayn had gone asking about Clara; a long-headed, slick-haired, slender, predatory-svelt dark athletic man next to fat, russet-bearded type; and several empty seats that might raise again the rented question how much life is required to be exchanged for a thing you want if only to use, not own, where own means not wife but our wigwam we are at liberty to tear down.

And Clara and her husband, though only later in the privacy of their bed suddenly afraid, agreed as well:

that de Talca moved about and sat in three or four seats during the scenes when Hamlet devises his play with the "coagulated gore" of that other, most un-English woman Hecuba’s monstrous fate

that (for they recurred to this) Luisa had done this strange performance stint in the first place because Ford North, coerced by his boyfriend, had urged her, yet because it might somehow help influence her lover to help free her father

that this work was not some mere folie North was helping his certainly dangerous young, highly metabolized boyfriend show off

that in the Play-Within or self-styled ‘‘wormhole" (phrase unquestionably translated out of a nineteenth-century Spanish phrase for, among other furnishings, "mousetrap") Hamlet played Claudius, who dumb-show woos the Queen, who spurns him richly, delicately, only to be kissed long in her ear which maketh her mad if not literally to suck out of her the "her" soon to appear

that it was a pity the aborting of this perhaps after all dress rehearsal had to cut the famed Yorick skull-session not to mention the tricky spread of toxin at the play’s ultimate good night

that Yorick nonetheless got mentioned earlier in a line neither Clara nor her husband thought was in the text and would check tomorrow having decided to get some distance on the opera by going home to their exile-home’s seamless bed, and maybe Hamlet was no more than regional literature recording what it was like to live on the coast

that the line "My heart lies buried there" which came in the amazing doubled scene of Gertrude’s ghost sleepwalking near Gertrude herself had been lifted from that later Yorick scene we never saw that upon the singing of that line by Gertrude’s ghost low words were said, though whether onstage or in the audience wasn’t clear, that caused a sharp pause, a static suspension, during which the journalist Mayn rose and left, and the villain de Talca after him, and a man with long hair Clara described to her husband who did not turn soon enough to see

that de Talca reappeared, followed by a heavy-set man heretofore un-apparent but recognizable by both Clara and her husband as an employee at the Chilean consulate

that Grace Kimball called, "Right on!" when the black Ophelia sang a totally interpolated aria about woman’s lot being to lift her bloatprince up out of his rank bathtub vat where he daydreamt new lives more animal than the last that in the scene where Gertrude’s Ghost dreams out loud her own self-sought death, two upstage-directed spotlights seemed to cross and join each other’s body-beams to make, as the Queen and her Ghost patrolled their brief area, an illusion of mutually embracing light unmoved at source but, through the elevation of the strange principals, casting a very singular Moon, but now single now double, and disturbingly so, as all the appearances we—

that at a moment when, visiting King Claudius, Gertrude’s accompanying Ghost, played here first by Hamlet her son, tells Gertrude herself that her Prince (sic) so becomes his horse, so grows into that brave beast’s back as to demi-nature and encorpse himself into—

that at the moment when Hamlet himself appears in this painful but luminous scene at full blast necessitating Gertrude’s Ghost’s disappearance and reappearance now played by the hence absent Claudius who, as Ghost, now embraces the real Gertrude, an echo drummed from a known early Elvis Presley folk-burst light-motivated certain shadows cast by the double Moon—"pale breasts, tanned neck to last a century, keep out insidious rains"—and through some freak of angle a spotlight retargeted itself so fine there seemed an entry or an exit from—

that at this moment Gertrude’s Ghost—when Hamlet, not seeing his actual mother, rushed slowly across-stage toward it—sang of having dreamt that she would cost her young horseman prince his life unless he dreamed his way away from her by—

that at a later moment a photographer flashed upon Luisa’s scene a light that seemed to come not just from his bulb but from behind him for the double door at the rear of the orchestra, one young man seconds later said, had swung open briefly, and Luisa stopped in mid-note and cried in anguish "My love, my love!" having seen something, perhaps some truth, however broken by the life onstage that must go on, though a moment later it in fact did not go on.

But, awake again at two, two-thirty, two-forty-five, arms along each other, so warmly known they were afraid for once and told each other so and found it was that they had dreamed—probably the same dream and now mutually forgot—Clara and husband found they also ^agreed on what had happened at the Hamletin.

Whereas Clara, as they had flagged a cab and boarded it to go north on Sixth, felt a woman’s work restitching here the famed darkness and brilliance of the Shakespeare and the dependent plight of Ophelia/Gertrude as the axis to catch our conscience, her husband easing back in his re- or de-sprung seat and looking suddenly back out the window into the glare of a street lamp felt vaguely a crisis that never comes, a music half-Italian half-Hindemith half-mountainously supernal that continues with utmost intensity independent of the drama of the love of man and woman, "plus" the Moorish virago Ophelia with her sex and dancer’s strength and spitfire and height hardly commits suicide, don’t send flowers! but was briefly said (wasn’t she?) to have plunged her rage into the long and troubled sea, witness steam rising from some strait of the Baltic misting our eastward window so the obstacle of Sweden dissolves!, though the lull in the music evoked, he had to say, really that old rippling canal (remember?) in Bruges with the market belfry in the background, yet it was nothing he wished to identify—her hand upon his cheek to say he was crazy but original, and he "Yet I feel myself in some other’s words"— "A critic’s?"—"A dead critic’s?"—"Long gone"—". . . into the long and mountainous sea"—"You’re thinking of home"—". . . of bed"—"of bed, too," so he knew she had meant "Chile."

And whereas Clara swore she’d heard the agreed too-early- (and Polonius-) mentioned skull’s name Yorick with "New" before it, her husband scoffed and had his hand upon her lap,. . . "from know—as in, ur families knew de Talca’s family"; and whereas Clara knew she had heard nearby some cry of surprise upon "My heart lies buried there," her husband knew he had not; and while Clara felt some earlier palimpsest of Camp in making Rosenkrantz and Guilden-sterno woman and man then absorbed into a large, secret unity of art, her husband felt parts never really met but as if ideas were buried here that could conceivably be unfamiliar, like, oh well, new boundaries discontinuously defined not just by what they contain but also by where they are in their course, a quality of translation even in the double Moon and that sudden retargeting of light upon Gertrude’s forehead as if "this arrow of song" (was that Shakespeare?) would burn a hole full of—

—but no, said Clara, resting her hand on his so he crooked vaguely his little finger where it touched the valley orbit of her groin, no hole but a glint of glitter she had applied to her skin that came out under the—

—no matter, Ford North’s bombastic stammer was Hamlet turned briefly buffo, said her husband yawning; but no, his wife retorted softly, Ford felt a ray of trouble coming from that little bully at the piano before he knew why he was mad, and responded in advance—

—like provoking a fight because you know it’s coming—

—exactly (though a car blows up in bed their minds silently in Central Park but two bikes rented with the two of them hiding away was dangerous enough to be trapped for assassination) a few moments later left again, had hired a Chinese woman to spirit away the kidnapped child of the Cuban just escaped from the prison so familiar to her husband, he believed he had—(say that again?)—though neither of them as the cab wound past muddled old Columbus Circle into the older lights of upper Broadway believed the missing Cuban posing as anti-Castro could succeed in killing "Pin" whose Santiago security was in inverse relation to the Food-Employment curve’s Reassurance Skew; and whereas for a second both Clara and husband believed that the man Mayn’s leaving precipitately after the "buried heart" line had nothing to do with de Talca following him, Clara shifted her lap in some abbreviated irritation or anxiety, and disagreed—while neither she nor her husband could talk in a friendly way now for a block or two about the relation of the aura reader Hortensa (present in the theater) to the florid fortunist from downtown, Seiiora Wing, known to be a Castroist information service, who sat actually near a black boy with a large, somehow familiar head that was turned right round facing back so one saw his lightning-bolt T-shirt when Clara and her husband looked back and saw Mayn leave and heard someone say, "You all right?"—doubtless the young friend of Amy’s, Jean, said Clara, but her husband added superiorly Amy was a friend also of Mayn’s and had been escorted to Madison Square Garden by him on one occasion:

until, easing away from their clothes, murmuring of the Leipzig Ring last year they would have enjoyed seeing, where a white web spun by the Norns ensnared the whole stage, they said simultaneously, "Yorick" and looked with humorous sadness at each other and moved gently toward each other’s welcome strong bodies:

until, in bed, they disagreed about Grace Kimball’s doctrines regarding women, money, and the patriarchy though their minds were elsewhere, and disagreed softly as to the nature of Margaret’s Ghost—Gertrude’s, he said— What did I say? said she, oh! and laughed—Your grandmother! he said—he then feeling the Ghost was a living double Other reincarnating Gertrude here and now by some scheme divined by Shakespeare and kept to (even lazily) himself; she feeling (with her hands now, and while one sole ran up his hard shin) that the Ghost was a dead thing in Margaret, a dead part of her— Gertrude—Yes, Gertrude, yet "Margaret" was also from Grace Kimball the other day meeting a demented old lady in the street in Greenwich Village who had had to leave New Jersey, and her name was—yes, the Ghost was a dead thing that had wound and fumed and circled its way up out of Queen Gertrude’s ear earlier-sucked like priming pump, to recompose in the outer world to be seen at least and last as the trouble it was, and make trouble by just, you know, standing in the way, and by the way (were they falling asleep or would they make love?—why, love made itself over and over with them—and under!—yes!), and by the way, Clara said, he had heard the young fellow behind them say "reincarnation" then—but her husband rolled toward her so she loved that mouth of his and brought his hand up in hers, and he said he had heard nothing behind him but she said that was the source of his thought, and he disagreed, here in bed, and then disagreed on the issue of Luisa’s "My love, my love," not sung but called sharply {porque?—well, Clara thought Luisa had not liked leaving abruptly like that, but Clara’s beloved knew deep at the base of his own horizontal, tense neck, which he therefore asked his love to gently but firmly rub, that in that sudden light-shed in the opening of the double doors at the back of the warehouse theater she had seen de Talca her lover in difficulties, but he did not say this to Clara) and he also disagreed about their not visiting Luisa after the outrageously aborted rehearsal-quasi terminus given the performance in disastrous arguments onstage and, too, because Clara was tired—and getting out of his seat he had known that he had seen this reincarnation boy in the row behind someplace before—and disagreed, too, on what the young Prince growing into his horse meant, and the issue of whether all our appearances turn double at times so that in the botheration of their obstacle-hood we help oneself to find (but he did not express his disagreement here either)—to find ... my love, my dear, this April night when our grown children may be lost to us like our country, we will always love each other, true love born again all the time in a wild land, music isn’t it?, side by side combatting fear, fear, which we’re not so prone to but as, with sex-sleep’s congruent drug encroaching and sex always between them whatever they got up to, be it nothing even, the phone rings and stops, rings and rings, and stops, in some void of headtripville threat, until, passing through each other toward first sleep which is like the most ancient first love he senses like blood not his own splashed from some passing adult onto the face of a small child and for one flickering frame of wish sees de Talca turned into news in next morning’s newspaper dying as he lived by bad works though he could not have been all bad if Luisa loved him even as she did, and Clara murmured Maybe the real ending of Hamletin tonight was elsewhere—and he didn’t care to discuss it and they passed into sleep and the mutual dream they will eventually forget for they’ve too much good stuff to remember already, each other’s ventricle of memory.

We already know what will have just happened next, Mayn’s dream in the Windrow burial ground (known as Maplewood Cemetery by people who lived in that town who would not necessarily know more about it than someone gone far away from it, say to name it). But Mayn and his grandmother named the town Windrow while he was still there in it, gentles the interrogator. But, we counter, she had already long since gone away. Yes, but come back, compounds the interrogator who fears what he can’t put into words, which is some newly arrived-at integral personality we wordwise help-ourself to.

We already know what will have just happened next, but not what that touching new bomb device will make its dreamer do—beyond laughing; rising by his personalized gravestone; and taking certain steps toward the girl Jean through the night obstacle course of model edifices capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale unit-memories, a stone city built up rather than out. He bears on his very tongue words he will say to Jean because you can’t rely on mind-touch here, and you can’t pick your place; and he loves her and will ask her despite his age to marry him. But then he hears a voice abstracted in him of our very interrogator now more himself than once, who disagrees "You can pick your—" and O.K., O.K., growls Mayn, damp as hell and with a granite print upon his upper back’s mind and his thick-haired cerebellum; he will go along with that; and when "We don’t know enough about Barbara-Jean" is dimly pursued, But I do, spreads answer into the body of all of us —and, for one thing, she is coming from a different place, scientist (or, precisely, technologist), prospective childbearer, she would not lie dreaming above family graves making herself accessible to what traces be windowed by a heart’s half-memories, which collect right now only parts of the Jim Ash dream, but enough to go on as the distance closes.

We saw the Indian on a wheezing blue horse at night; saw him come near and then there was no horse; yet he was on a train describing some diagonal through a land more and more settled, until there was no train—no more than the buckle-like silver money clip he had traded for money which would be the speed to reach the coast, lightning speed if the Spirit of Good Power allowed, to reach a place where, his beloved Margaret had said, harsh January winds blew always behind you even when you turned, and the rich, red fields of New Jersey were deeper than even the greatest planted fields where he came from, where the sun now would be bringing out colors of the desert and beyond, the purple aster, the blue-eyed "maiden," orange clown locoweed named by the two-wheeled nine-fingered man who knew the javelina-tracking woman who brought strange written music to the Anasazi who didn’t want it, the dwarf yellow-wort, the white sand-lily, flowers blooming but always there in the life of the land, like the weather that the retired healer insisted to the retiring hermit might go away but never could arrive because that weather was always somehow in this original place—power, though sometimes without body but only there like a track, a good bear-claw track, or the rattler-jaw arc-like sunray

but with teeth drawn inward

or the lightning arrow reversing the Anglo letter Z, for these signs in absence of the thing itself meant it would come back in body as would some Abundance known to be in a big mountain and waiting and remote yet close as rays of thought that took him back to the isthmus at the top of the world that he had told the blonde woman of (for he could not help telling her) where something he did not yet understand had happened, to do with the two trekkers from that other world and with some air or storm that ... he was not sure, except that the rays of thought took him back as fast as the train dissolved in the power of his poverty (though hadn’t the money gone too soon?) though the silver had mattered only as a means and the sun graven upon that Zuni money clip stayed with him as certainly as the bison-tongue chunk in his pocket and a huge dollop of light that had thick-watered down into his upturned face-mouth from the night cloud so it sucked him as he drank it, and then he could not be sick, could not, but the waterfall dollop-tongue from the Anasazi’s noctilucent cloud stayed in and he accepted what had happened like new weather that came from new acts and seemed to help him go on east but both for the sake of the bison tongue and the Anglo girl Margaret, white but so deeply tanned, neither for one alone nor the other alone, he said to himself, regretting his blue mare but knowing life left death-things and was right: so the pursuit of Margaret? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself; the quest for knowledge-energy? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself to explain this trek of his over the—the landbridgtl the land-sea bridge! it came to him like one answer to how many questions. Yet he looked back at least in his dreams of coasts and guessed that she was on some diagonal like his and had been thus behind him some of the time, and he met an old man with a wagon and one horse working their way up a hill toward trees and rode with him and realized Margaret was both behind him and ahead, and remained convinced she was with child. And stranger, he felt close to many people who would not protect him from his wandering but he would gain from many knowledge. So much in him still unknown seemed to know, as we, that an ending had already come long ago. But what was this?—these senses that others and he converged and were all equally alike whether from moons of distances or from nearby, from New Mexico mountain and Arizone and Ute-Colorado trails, or from Chicago to New York—it made no sense, drawn though it began to be along the curves of his thought: for people differed as the bison from the eagle, even as the pistol from the saddlebag, or the track from the gila "dragon" making it; or Mena’s words about this written-down music-messagery she showed the An-asazi and the use she might make of it, taking it home to a woman of her family who made powerful music for many voices and instruments but no one would play it. And the Navajo Prince as if his Margaret-given name drew the curved eastward parallels of these people toward one coast or point felt in his belly hungry for some fact, a soft shape drawn within them by not all these people but some very few he knew of, west to east, and the shape pulled him on toward where he would meet Margaret.

So that one day along the Hudson River close in to the ancient city of New York or New Yorkondo or -quoiandam, he had within him not so much food for thought (as Margaret had sometimes said when he told her things) as thought for food, and the question whether thought followed energy or energy thought, thought its way through his feet and his loins knowing that, close to him in time, others who were close to him had passed, and passed him, but he was almost there, the outer parallels, the inner shape, the strong sound of Margaret’s voice in him, the bison tongue in one pocket, the metal implement in a bag across his shoulder.

Yet where was she? they heard each other think, and what had she done? it was still inside her, and not all the words she could think up helped her forget, mmhmm not words written down in secret pain (the interview with Coxey, interview words) and posted in gaiety from Ohio to her father in New Jersey made what was still inside her speak, so she needed to just understand it and think that it was not the same as the new burden she carried with her on a train that could take her almost home to be met anyway in New York by her elder friend if he had had her letter, and she held (she smiled at her own phrase) on for dear life to the parcel wrapped and layered in years of weeks to hold its breath until, once home, she could do what a dream of her lover told her to do which (she smiled again and was smiled back at by the gentleman facing her) justified her in what she might well have done even without the dream which was wrapped like the cocoon she had in her arms, and she smelled the brown wrapping paper, breathing it so crazily and desperately she could smell the color, which kept her from crying but may have made her look a lunatic, the glass and upholstery and even the sound of rolling stock dissolving away into a sadness that might have been freedom but was not yet freedom, so that herself dissolved leaving for the unknown gentleman across from her only the smile which in turn recreated her by reminding her of the lady and the tiger, and the rhymes, and then the whole thing; but she did not laugh to let her fellow passenger approach what she puzzled through, which was a dream about a daughter she did not have:

She and her lover had ridden across a mesa into a ravine of strewn boulders so largely tilted they seemed about to roll together, all different shapes; and she got off her horse and the horse vanished and she saw a cave in one rock which began to move as she entered it but so that, once in, she did not feel the motion; but because of this she could not get out but could only call to her lover who called back from his rock where he was living similarly. Then she heard but did not feel all the great shapes of rock come together, and she looked out her cave door with a terrible pain in her stomach to see a warren of levels and corridors—because all the boulders had been connected—but she didn’t know where they were going because she couldn’t see out, and she resolved to tell her daughter when she got home—her daughter? yes, her daughter—but then she saw through awful mists that maybe they were not going home, for her lover called to her that this was how she had gotten here from home. But he was somewhere else and she was afraid to go look for him until she saw that she was the awful mist in the complex caves of some other stonework all here joined in a great artifact but then saw he was right there but could not see her, and she had woken in a friendly stranger’s cold Ohio house, her secret hospital, weak and in a state, and reaching suddenly and with pain for the parcel under her bed she found she literally poured like vomiting such quantity of tears onto her nightgown sleeve and the floor that she thought the bed was full of blood, and she thought, What if it’s a boy?, when, after all, in a way, there was no child.

But when she boarded the train having heard that Alexander might be in Pennsylvania or even seeking her and wondering where her elder New York friend was, she felt boxed in by these men east of her, west of her, while seeing that they all took her side. But the box was on the move and she knew that her dream of her lover had determined her to do what she was doing which was bring her stillborn child swaddled and sleeping in its mother’s dreams which were all it had, to Windrow to tell her faithful Alexander. And when she found the Hermit waiting for her in the smoke of the terminal and looked about lest Alexander be there, or, who knew?, the Indian, she knew she would tell him her dream. But when he said to her Did she plan to go west again soon, her reason deserted her and she thought she could smell the package, which he reached for, and she cried, "I love him, he is my own true love," and the man said, "There, there." But later, when she told her dream, the act it had now determined her on seemed one answer to two or three needs: to be honest with Alexander, whatever it cost; to be faithful to the Indian, whatever he knew, so far as honoring the stillborn child; to obey her simple, not morbid need; and thus to hold some freedom that began to shape itself in her head as a taxi drew them gently to her friend’s house, among all these New York bicycles, and she knew she would be a good and firm mother.

We are waiting for it to come to us. We know it does. It was, like something to do, in us a long time back, where it ended to tell the truth; and thus transit angels not always out "thataway" to incorporate but inward to this other body of information so lovingly marginal we will let ourselves not know which we are, the margins or the core-core; yet we have found within us a pair of high workshoes given him—Who? asks the interrogator—by a doctor driving a one-horse shay who found them under the seat and they fit and the doctor confided that that coming Saturday he was remarrying (no wonder; he had been happy the first time); also a dark blue woolen shirt, held out to him by a fair-haired girl in a doorway holding a tiny red baby in her arm; an old, sun-singed straw hat with holes in it a short, bald holy man with a white, round collar gave him on a Sunday in front of a white mission built entirely of wood; a princely new pair of overalls donated by a fat young woman who found him asleep on her property and said he must be tired not to wake when she come along; a green-and-black-checked bandanna given him by an underwater swimmer, who came up out of a lake near Yonkers and offered him any clothes he wanted from the pile by a birch sapling. No one knew how he had come so far, but the Hermit-Inventor, who tried to comprehend his own responsibility here and what might happen, did not quite wonder how the Navajo Prince had come so far, not only because Navajos travel vast distances but because he had heard scientifically proved that things might appear at widely separate places with no apparent movement in between, and so why not people?, and he had voiced it to Margaret when he had interpreted her dream for her a few days since. If the Prince detected anxiety in the Hermit looking fitfully out a begrimed glass window into a street full of yelling and horses clattering metal hooves like weapons on the stones of the street, and bicycles running in and out, each felt somewhat cared for by the other, and they spoke of the people here—some girls coiled their hair in squash blossoms each side (Yes, replied the Hermit, they are Jewish); and they spoke of the weather and of the late Anasazi whom the Hermit joked about affectionately and warily until the Prince said, "He is in Maine by now and I will join him there," which turned the Hermit from alarm over Margaret to alarmed fascination over this after all strange possibility, the single tie or question between these events, these consequences, these "event horizons!" in New Jersey and in Maine being this long-haired, long-fingered, diamond-eyed traveler so honest and so momentous that astounding strength in him had made him perhaps an answer not a question; but still they did not speak directly of Margaret. They spoke of seacoast and its limitlessly varied and mayhap variable outline north to south, of the east wind that may penetrate a thickly settled coastal area well inland whereas an inland wind from west has forests obstacling its progress and is deflected and dispersed, yet why should there not be forests that will take that force and use it as the Navajo barques coming across the sea kept on when reaching land and sailed the land as well? The young man stood by a window and asked what were the shapes upon the posts in front of the houses across the street, and his Anglo elder said they were pineapples, a fruit yellow and juicy on the inside, prickly on the outside, a sign of friendly welcome, of home, and nothing to do with pine trees. The young man said he would go to both places. Both? Yes, to Margaret’s town and then north. When the Hermit upon being asked with such directness of vision what Margaret’s dream had been and what it had meant, that he must answer (and having anyhow previously brought it up himself as if to put it between him and the incredible young Indian who had walked into New York and found the Hermit and on his way here inspected the new great arch not two years old) answered at length concluding that her dream had brought her home, for it was evidently of the Statue of Liberty, whose parts had been the occasion of their meeting almost nine years before on Bedloe’s Island and which had now been assembled (She had told him, she had told him, the young man answered, not of meeting the Hermit but of the Statue in the harbor, and she had laughed about it and said it was big but not very good, but he would have to make up his mind himself and maybe she would meet him there, too)— anyway it was there, said his Anglo elder, whose charts and instruments cluttered his home, that he had told her to go west and later on her way to Chicago she had seen him in New York and—

—and the Hermit-Inventor of New York had been the one, said his visitor, to tell her of those sojourns in the Southwest, the mesas and canyons, the washes and the great grasses, the crown around the moon caused by nectar from the cosmic ocean (I never told her that! said the host) and flower colors and the cliff colors and an old former healer who made predictions.

The Hermit told him his mother had been restored to life on his sudden departure, and the Prince retorted that a Zuhi outcast had told him long ago; and when the Hermit said the sooner he got up North the better, since the Anasazi would see what he had traveled to see and then would be no more, the Prince returned that he would go to both places, to find Margaret and to see the Anasazi in his cloud, for the Prince had within him a huge compacted dollop of that cloud’s light.

Yet when the Hermit did not believe him, he told him his mother had also not been believed when she told his father, her husband, of seeing a hunter on the mountain withered instantly to mere skull and clothes and of meeting a second hunter who sent her away down the mountain saying another flash hailstorm (though she had not seen the first) would come from the north sky-path and she and her child would be sucked away into the mountain, for she was very pregnant, and she had never been happy with her unbelieving husband after that. Never. And had become sick.

The Hermit-Inventor was so fascinated by this that, about to take it up (for he sensed some tie between the corridor of hail and a coastline intimation he had long had), he both half-forgot Margaret’s danger and simultaneously half-forgot his own discretion and, with wind-dispersion absorbing his mind plus that strange source of spiral winds due to shearings between cactus’s dry and a certain vegetarian reptile’s moist breath whence spiral winds faintly green due part to cactal skin part to the reptile’s prior incarnality as the dreaded Pressure Snake he now years later realized he had heard of first from Owl Woman who had known this young man’s mother, he blurted out, "Let her be; she’s home where she belongs; she’s got a good life with a young man who’s waited for her all this time; let her be—I’ll find the money to get you on a train back home yourself; let her be, let her be—I don’t know what I been thinking of, if you go back West you’ll serve yourself best"—but in the pressing silence that ensued, he found in the energy of his fear this fascination, and began again about hailstones from the northern corridor and their effect through apparently the blue Pressure Snake that Mena had said existed in other but like form along the extreme mountains of the South; but the Navajo Prince said simply, "My horse dwindled into death, and the train I took faded from what lived; life leaves death-things and that is what I will go to Windrow to show her."

"That life leaves death-things?" said the Hermit-Inventor, who, suddenly older and Anglo and insane for a moment, laughed at his amazing visitor who had just walked in off the great table of the American continent. "She is with child," said the young man. "Not to my knowledge," said the Hermit. "You told me she might be," said his visitor. "She is not with child now," said the Hermit. "Life will leave death-things," said the Navajo Prince. And if for some minutes they pursued this other matter of the precipitate air that mattered to both as knowers, the elder knew that the younger was already gone and must wonder if he was armed. Did he happen to know how the spiral interior of those hailstones carried every so often down this corridor from the north to join with the stunning work of that blue snake actually made these whatever-they-were, these rays that came from the mountain? The Navajo Prince, who was an unusual Navajo, removed the black, brown, and gray chunk of old bison in his pocket, and took then from the bottom of his pocket a small lump of red-orange clay-stuff. The red might be from the blood of those hunters who had been caught upon the mountain at the time of a particular hail and been sucked precipitately right out of their own bones into the high slope where a big cat might watch from among the trees. The Hermit did not touch the lump. The Prince squeezed it respectfully in his long fingers and it looked to have a softness of very cool butter. The Hermit did not like it and did not like the bison chunk, which the young man was talking of as a compacted secret that his hand would someday absorb. And then he would go back to his people to help them.

"Don’t wait," said the Hermit, and then, "Where are you going?" for the Prince had politely turned away toward the door. A box kite came up even with the window and there were yells from the street. The Prince looked and must have seen the strange writing on the kite, which disappeared, tugged downward. "The Statue is worth seeing," said the Prince. "It is on my way." "You can see it any time," said the Hermit too casually. The Prince was such a fine young man in his gift boots and overalls and blue shirt. He seemed to say his cells enabled him to be in two places at once, and to be those two places; he spoke as if he must risk being elsewhere. He knew something about that couple who had trekked across the Bering Strait, and had become one, according to the Prince, during a north-wind storm, and this was thousands of years gone by.

When the Indian left to inspect the city, the Hermit followed but at once lost him and went to a small hotel nearby where there was a telephone. Outside the hotel a carriage was leaving for the Hudson River pier with a gentleman and a lady going to Europe, trunks stacked behind, the two of them looking at each other as if they couldn’t wait for the romance of Europe. The Hermit knew the porter at the hotel.

He made a phone call. Margaret’s father did not answer. Margaret did. Her voice made the Hermit’s whole face spread outward as if it had exploded, and he knew he was in love with the girl who so many years before he had jokingly told to go west.

He told her what had happened, where the young man was heading, and what he had said about life leaving death-things and her being with child. Margaret said that she had an idea. She sounded strong. But she asked, then, "How did he seem?"

The Hermit thought of saying nothing. But he replied, "He is in love. He is dangerous. He has found the way to New York. He will find the way to you." The Hermit said he had told her dream to him.

"In ten years," she said through the static of the phone, "I will smile at the memory. I will make sure my daughter understands such things."

"Your daughter?"

"I have none yet," the young woman said with such life in her tone that the Navajo Prince might have been a dream, no more.

If he could help, would she call on him? She said she thought she knew where the Prince would go. She sounded different, as if telling some story.

In the street again, the Hermit found the Indian waiting for him, as if he had been following the Hermit. "Was she carrying her child with her when you saw her?" asked the Indian. The Hermit could not find the answer. "Is the child dead?" asked the Indian. The Hermit looked at the young Indian’s hands and then his face. "I know where she will be," said the Indian, and turned away.

Suddenly the Hermit said, "She will go to the Statue."

"Why do you say that?" said the Indian, but did not wait to be answered.

He had waited long enough.

Boxed in and watched by even the future she felt; hating all of us in her, but calm and so determined—she felt him in her very eyes, how she saw maple trees here in Windrow that he in fact had never seen, how she saw faces she had told him of; and she loved him and was sick of him and could have killed him if he would kill her. And wanted no bad thing to happen to Alexander, who had waited a long time for her but because he had chosen to, and who was so kind she had kissed him once on the mouth, and it was different and friendly, and there was a slight smell of tobacco and she wondered if Alexander had had any experience. He told her the family place in the cemetery looked good as new and she smiled at the phrase and lived a horror of it fixed somewhere beneath the skin of her smile, which Alexander told her sweetly was the light of his life.

Why did you go down to that woman’s apartment and buzz and walk right away before she had a chance to come to the door? I mean, did you know she wasn’t home? I mean Grace Kimball.

I heard people in there, and I knew I didn’t want to ask her anything after all.

About that old lady and the meteorologist you—

Yeah. That’s ended. It’s repetitious.

Isn’t that what your friend Ted said history was?

Like cancer cells. Like memory cells.

But why is history repetitious?

Take the Middle East.

It’s a hot potato, Jimmy.

Ted said he was pretty sure he would die before the world did. But he had an idea how it would end.

So your dream decided you about us. And that’s getting back to the subject.

So he walked miles and inspected the City from farmyards down to the Battery which had been a place of guns once. And he took a boat and thought the Statue threatening the more he looked. He could not stop the boat taking him to the island. He could not stay on the boat when it docked. He did not go in the Statue. He watched from a grassy lawn, with the harbor breeze turning him ever and anon to look at the great cluster of buildings on the Manhattan Island far off.

He knew he would go inside the body of the Statue which was made of metal and he smelled its cold, dead smell where he sat upon a stone walk, but he did not know when he would go on in, because the afternoon was getting on, and he knew the time would come when he would know what to do.

He was half-hidden from the Statue behind a large piece of stone that had been shaped; so he did not see from the harbor side a new boat approaching until it passed, and then he watched it dock, and his eyes hurt but he saw Margaret’s face shadowed by a large straw hat, was he asleep?, and she had on a long white dress, and when she got off the boat and the sun brought the wind on she was with another woman. He thought he had been asleep, so cold had the afternoon become. She looked around her and spoke to a lady who was not with her, and went with a group round out of sight, and the Prince thought he had been asleep and dreaming, because he had known she would come and that that would be the moment to go into the Statue. He looked keenly toward the group, who were far away from him, but she was not with a man, there was no young man with her.

Why would one nation receive such a giant carving from another nation? What could America give back? Would not the New York white people always be in debt to the nation that gave this Statue? He had thought about how he would go inside when he went. He had seen where he would track his way, the people he would have to pass.

He did not want to go in, but if he waited until she came out, he would have missed a chance he did not understand but must not miss.

In the Statue he waited below. He climbed some stairs and went deep inside. In the Statue he was far below, and he did not like the metal stairs. He heard the clatter of steps and the echoes of chatter, of women and of men. Of laughter. Of silent upstairs stepping. Or were they coming downstairs too? He wanted to give her a present, but he had nothing. He wanted to know if there was a child. He listened for an engine; there must be an engine in this Statue. He wanted to go outside to see what he was in again. He thought a woman might turn into many things here. As if here, far east of where he came from, it was later time. A woman’s laughter hooted up and down the tower, but her laugh was like a Navajo woman’s sometimes, surprised and unrelenting.

He did not wish to hurt her. If he knew she would stay here, he would go to Maine to see the Anasazi before the cloud dispersed, but meanwhile he pictured how the dollop of noctilucent cloud which was also the Anasazi might move in his own blood and flesh. The Statue here inside was not like that dream of hers that the Hermit had told. It was not blue and yellow boulders gathering their caves together. It was more like his own dream of being invisible that the Iroquois healer had called a wish to best his father. Inside the Statue were cold steps and walled-in tower, a cave like an engine. No one knew enough of what was happening to keep silent. The voices hung downward toward him. He started up. He was strong. He saw he was sad in this damp shadowy space. He put his hand around the bison flesh and wondered if it did have a secret after all. He forgot where he was going and remembered. He was sad not to have Margaret any more. What was sad? Maybe it was just the buzz in the ears and that he could not move and was chilled and removed so he could not hear his thoughts living. He had come into the Statue but a new thing had come into him. He met shiny shoes and shrill voices coming down. He heard himself identified as Indian. His climb reached a small side place where he could sit down; and he waited, looking neither upward nor downward, and people passed and he did not look at them. He wasn’t going to the top; he did not care to be in the head of the Statue. He would see the top when he got outside. He heard Margaret’s voice and stood up as it swung closer. He thought of the second dream he had taken to the Iroquois, and instantly forgot it. He sat down again and the holy man’s old straw hat slipped over his forehead and he wanted to sleep but could not, and he smelled Margaret’s body and some flower on it.

And remembered the flower from the beginning but not from later, as if it had gone out of season while she stayed with him and his people but now she had it with her again. And he felt light come down the stairs to him but closed his eyes and wished he had a brother near and remembered clearly when he had had his body inside Margaret’s, her knees hugging, and her fingertips pressing, and her life needing whatever he had to give, and she had said, "The sky and all the stars, the sky and all the stars."

And he slumped on the bench, his gift hat down half over his face, and he felt his held breath whine like an engine in his chest where she still lived like a naked soul that is now more than one person.

Their skirts rustled, he glimpsed their shoes, a mist came across his eyes from within him and he held within him the soul in his chest and thought he would die of the engine in his ears. The woman she was with said, "He’s an Indian, see his hair." Margaret, invisible except her shoes and ankles through the mist of his narrowed eyelids, paused, and with some minor sound agreed, and when her friend said, "Seeing the sights, I guess," as they passed on down the steps, Margaret said, "Probably sees more than we did right there on that bench." Her companion laughed and said she didn’t see what she meant.

He felt for the pistol in his bag and with his other hand he gripped the greasy and dry cut of bison meat and he pulled it from his overall pocket and put it there on the bench. When he got to his feet and straightened his hat, he knew that what was bursting inside him was her heart as well as his, and he knew that she had recognized him as she passed.

Then he fainted.

And so your dream decided you about us? we already can foresee Jean continuing—very slightly bothering her mid-forties beloved.

I would be a fairly old father but a humorous one.

And you already have children, though where this son of yours fits in I "haven’t the slightest," as my mother used to say. I think you’re a romantic about marriage but who would ever guess it?

Ted said that.

Ted said how the world would end, I seem to remember.

Yes, with a digression.

But what in the dream persuaded you?

The humor of nothing but life.

Amy thought the dream was great.

A female colleague of mine thought we might see a family therapist.

Suppose we make it up as we go along.

Far out.

The Hermit’s second call came as Alexander entered the printing office and Margaret’s lately somewhat shaggy-haired gray-bearded father was at the back with the pressman and Alexander strode to answer.

What will Flick say?

She’s Sarah now. I think she is getting into family history, what there is of it. She’s welcome.

But Spence the other night—he was coming across the cemetery like what he had to ask was . . .

You’re right; it was scary. I thought he had gone nuts. Which is better than what my opinion of him had been.

Alexander hung up the phone and asked his future father-in-law if he had seen Margaret and ascertained only that she had discussed her future with her father who had found it, as always, enlightening; her father had hoped she would go on writing for the Democrat when she got settled. They had reviewed several topics and one she had particularly cottoned to was revisiting the Statue of Liberty, having never visited the fully assembled "monster." Alexander observed that of course he and his cousin had paid a visit to the Statue last autumn when Margaret was still in the West. His future father-in-law observed that the spiral stairs had made him dizzy. Going up or coming down? asked the future son-in-law. Both, I think, was the answer. The men chuckled. Alexander said he must find out where Margaret had gone.

Her father said that it was interesting what she had said about Indian language having a word for water in a pitcher for drinking and a word for water in rivers, harbors, lakes, and so forth, but not a bunch of words to distinguish among those various bodies of water as we do.

Alexander politely rejoined that he believed the word for "geyser" was the same as the word for "waterfall." He had to go, he said, and bade his future father-in-law goodbye.

"The Hermit-Inventor—he said that," said Mayn loudly as the first dark figure moved toward him among the gravestones. "If you can describe something, you must take responsibility for it. My grandmother must have told me."

Jean was calling to him, she was horribly upset—what had he meant by leaving like that after some aria of Gertrude’s?, she kept waiting for him to come back, she thought he was sick, and then the dumb show aborted and before anybody could leave the police came in to ask questions because that Chilean de Talca had disappeared and there was blood and one of his handmade English shoes lying on its side in the theater vestibule if you call that a theater, and it was being said that de Talca had either murdered someone or had been murdered, the flurry had begun about ten minutes or so after the end of the show when no one was sure it had ended, and she had looked outside and couldn’tymd him, and from what Spence had said—she was crying somewhat tensely, not sadly—she had guessed from what that Spence had said that Jim had returned here of all places, she was crying excitedly and he held her so close she grunted into humor and ran her hand over his grass-and-gravestone-clammy back, and he said he had been intensely tired and had lain down and dropped off and had had an incredible dream and he was sorry he had put her through this, and she said As long as he was sorry, while he half-wondered how she had obtained a car to drive the fifty miles.

But three other figures were making their way across the turf and gravel of Maplewood Cemetery, and it was God knows two in the morning almost.

We already remember his dream, since, thinking to find being in it, we had encouraged trace matter to beam it up to him where he lay hoping to window what would come, until, like queer turns of coast weather, we found we had been the trace but knew this only after we had passed from it to being its effects so much less bodied we hardly recalled tracehood except the glow so red-orange in the cold, cold ground it might have been a heart.

He was coming across the Windrow burial ground, he knew he had come as fast as the wind and he had not actually passed all the places between the Statue and here. He could see himself by the misty force of a Moon that was turned mostly to another world and gave this one tonight only its doubts. He kneaded the vermilion clay in his pocket. Her ancestors lay here and he knew the place was by a field on the far side with a short hedge on the field side and two maple trees on either side of the family stone, with small stone markers also here. And so he found the place and smelled the recent turn of earth against iron and found this trace of digging a few feet apart from a stone whose name his fingertips and eyes read to be that of Margaret’s mother who had taken to her early-hastened grave secrets in letters known to have come to her—confiding in her—from a great man in Washington who "lost nothing save honor," Margaret once said, when he sold railroad bonds to friends in Maine, where even now the Anasazi healer might have arrived and found what he had voyaged the continent to see. The pistol was as warm in his other pocket as the lost bison cells had been precious. He wanted to be with the Anasazi seeking those small famed foam volcanoes that form below waterfalls when it has warmed up and then gets cold again, towers like buildings, though two or three feet tall only. The Hermit-Inventor had doubted such existed, but the Prince had wondered if the Anasazi needed to go so far to find them. He heard pressures upon the ground at a distance and knew the dead do not walk and he crouched to the place that had been dug, and his hands felt the shape of his child there in the New Jersey soil. He felt the pistol again and remembered the Anasazi saying he would give it to the right person when the time came if he had patience. The pistol was outside him and he outside it; but long time had entered him, he knew his people were thinking of him as best they could, and he recalled what Margaret had liked best in him, his way of thinking about objects they would contemplate together and after a long time he would say what they made him feel. But there was a thing in him she had said she did not like, and she scarcely told him what it was, it didn’t matter because she loved him, yet it would matter. He saw the figure nearer, and felt the steps in his very fingers, and it was not Margaret coming across the burial ground but a person he knew as well as the thousands-of-years-past people he had seen join into one, descending from the north straits toward better country. But the long time that had entered the Prince was now new, it was not back in time but forward but as if not so far ahead in time from that old Bering Strait crossing that it passed beyond this moment: as if nothing strange should happen to him.

But Spence, his ringed hands flashing wildly, his voice deeper, his need immense, was telling and asking, and could not say enough except this was not what he was really about; and Mayn, who tolerated him in the damp aura of faint danger here that would pass, recognized that de Talca had been convinced of Mayn’s involvement with Chilean interests from way back though it had been de Talca’s own family that had been responsible for the death of Mayga Rodriguez upon the discovery that her intimate liaison with Mayn around the time the U-2 cover got blown extended to pages of a music score known by certain Masonic elders to have circulated its never-performed opus plotting the demise of patriarchy in the haciendas, the business of the mines, the male-decreed alliances of marriage, the public power of the arts, and education in the sciences and techne even to the organization of Chilean shipping and the redesign of the railroad system.

The other two figures came more slowly, but, but for one, all the speeds equaled out—Jean’s intensely attentive silence and her soft touch upon Mayn’s neck and ear and ribs; Mayn’s strange easing of Spence, calming him, reassuring him; the man and woman hand in hand approaching close enough to be now the diva, her hair not piled high but over her shoulders, and her friend the physician who was talking to her steadily; and always Spence’s final, frantic summaries of what he understood to have been de Talca’s deal through an ultimately warm-hearted and tactically unreliable Chinese woman to get hold of a child and thus lure the Cuban escapee in return for the risky freeing in Santiago of that renowned old logia lauterina liberal the diva’s father at a precise moment when de Talca’s superior had found tampered-with a messenger’s large envelope containing coded music and a fortuneteller’s witness that Mayn and Spence were brothers and in cahoots with the woman Kimball who had arranged a secret retreat to some supposedly spiritual center in Colorado near the national meteorological research center for the Chileans her intimate the wife Clara and Clara’s exile-economist husband who had openly criticized the American government for clandestinely supporting the operation of DINA right in his own adopted backyard of New York—

all speeds equal to ours so unincorporated if still accommodated to a multiplicity of—but ours until we felt again light that did not have to reach us nor anywhere, light at last at rest, not gong nowhurs no matter how real the people who claimed to brang it to us cheap, split, fused, shredded, exploded like possibilities, imploded like an uncertain East Far Eastern erotic praxis— until, arriving to ask what was happening, what was happening, and full of such should-haves and should-haves as would have driven a less dramatic person into chaos, the distraught woman Luisa was, she said with a smile, now calmed by the anguish of Swiss citizenship, and her doctor, a polite man of perhaps Mayn’s age though less healthy though less used, suddenly said, "I believe my mother knows your aunt ... in Boston?" while his beloved diva looked into all the faces there as if to know them and one day become them, and Spence and Mayn communicated agreeably by Colloidal Unconscious to say they were sure what they would find on this old site if they should pursue it, but—

what had long belonged to us was the nothing that thus was strange in his heart if he could only leave his child here in the ground with its surely mountainous heart where it would rest its own light even in this New Jersey territory. He rose, wondering if he would return to his people or go elsewhere. He imagined a foam volcano risen as some hollow cylinder when bubbles formed in the unexpectedly overnight thawed water and froth oozed from its holes and froze—or so they had heard from the nine-fingered botanist Marcus, or perhaps from the traveler who had been in Chapultepec and in California and in Utah and northeast among the Iroquois and alone.

And seeing the figure of his rival Alexander slow his steps, he found the other figure clear across the burial ground, rushing toward them with that girl-mother’s imperious and loving swing of her wonderful hips, her dark hair now loose and thick, a person with the most beautiful large eyes in both worlds put together, eyes in which he would see his own country again when she came nearer, yes she was finished with even the fears that she had seldom admitted to him when they had smelled the ponderosa bark and seen the sunrise out of the mountain and laughed at a big-pawed wild cat halfway down a tree, and he had said, Nothing lasts for too long, and she had said, No . . . no— this brave person who scoffed like him at magic.

He wanted to throw away the pistol and the man near him was angry and was going to speak to him, and the Navajo Prince took out the pistol to give it away perhaps as a present, but to give it away as the Anasazi had said, which now seemed wrong and unknown but here it was in his hand, loosely, not gripped, and as if the trigger were two thousand miles away, he understood the man before him as if he became him at the same time that he was himself.

He extended his hand with the pistol, and Margaret called, and he saw into Alexander’s hand and saw that Alexander was going to shoot him.

The northern sun spread through the overcast, which hung like no noctilucent cloud if such had ever existed at the height at which the young Indian had claimed their reincarnate friend the Anasazi traveled. The Hermit-Inventor had reached a place where indubitably three foam volcanoes rose evanescent out of the ice-bound April stream. But the Anasazi and his cloud were not here, unless precipitated in some happy form here during some recent night. Nor was the young Navajo, who might be anywhere, on his way home, on his way here, or speaking curiously to some resident of the land.

And then, for seeing was believing, the foam cylinders risen from the stream or descended from these brief waterfalls drew his attention upward to what he had not seen before. A double sun replying to itself through the overcast. An optical illusion. Hard to explain. The Hermit gazed at it until it became the one sun, though it was still clearly two. He heard a motion along the surface of things. He thought he would stand here awhile.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph McElroy was born in 1930. He has received numerous awards for his fiction. He lives in New York City. This is his sixth novel.

Table of Contents

the departed tenant