No Enemy But Time

Chapter Twenty-Five

Woody Kaprow was an enigma. He did not consider Florida home, but he paid so little heed to his physical surroundings that no other place in the world (with the possible exception of a marshy area in Poland from which his family hailed but upon which he had never laid eyes) could claim that distinction, either. He was truly at home only in his own mind. A civilian, he let his mind to the Air Force under the terms of a complicated military research-and-development contract. A bachelor, he was married to this work. A loner, he was surrounded by assistants. A genius (if you could trust the judgment of these often fuddled minions), when it came to literature, music, art, or the likely contenders in this year’s Super Bowl game, he had the attention span of a third-grader. Time—its properties, paradoxes, metaphysics, measurement, and maddening theoretical possibilities—was Woody Kaprow’s passion. It was his career.

A vocation that did not prevent him from misgauging the number of minutes it required to heat a frozen TV dinner. A passion that he could indulge while rinsing out a pair of socks, picking his nose, or attending committee meetings.

Kaprow, in person, was unprepossessing. A slender, middle-aged man with dark hair and eyes like bloated cocktail onions, he seemed younger than his years. (Joshua felt that this was because his ruling passion gave him a distracted, adolescent air, like a teenager in love with opera or astrology.) His clothes were always minimum-maintenance: dungarees, drip-dry shirts, chinos, turtleneck pullovers, jean jackets, sweatshirts, deck pants, and, occasionally, an orange, multizippered flight suit that he had purchased from a retiring fighter pilot. Even in the flight suit, however, he looked less like a military man than like one of the surviving members of the Flying Wallendas. Indeed, with his head cocked just so, his eyes afloat in the martini-bright waters of Abstract Speculation, he sometimes seemed to be walking a high wire invisible to mortal ken. At such times the jaunty, orange flight suit merely accentuated the incongruity of his metaphysical derring-do. A cough, a word, the slamming of a door would only infrequently shatter his concentration, but when they did, you could see him slipping from the wire and plummeting earthward like any other workaday Joe of average ambition, intelligence, and inspiration. Unprepossessing. Off the wire, almost—but not quite—a dullard.

Joshua had first met Kaprow in the mammoth Quonset hut given over to his workshop and laboratory.

The physicist had been lying flat on his back on a grease-monkey’s sled, apparently examining the chassis of an ugly, buslike vehicle that took up most of the floor space at the north end of the Quonset. Only Kaprow’s Converse tennis shoes were visible, their scuffed rubber toes pointing toward the skylight. Not the most awe-inspiring of the man’s attributes, these sneaker-clad feet, but Colonel Crawford knelt beside the bus and announced in a clear voice that White Sphinx’s newest recruit was awaiting Kaprow’s pleasure. Whereupon the physicist scooted out from under the bus, jumped up like a calisthenics instructor, and warmly, albeit distractedly, took Joshua’s hand. He looked back and forth between the colonel and Joshua as if trying to connect them to the work he had just been doing. Satisfied that neither visitor was a ghost or an importer, he smiled and slapped Joshua on the shoulder.

“Here you are,” he said. “My dreamfarer.”

“Alistair Patrick Blair thinks I’m his.”

“Actually,” Colonel Crawford put in, “you belong brain, belly, and balls to the U.S. Air Force.”

“Yes, massa.”

Kaprow slapped him on the shoulder again and smiled a sweet, lopsided smile. “A dreamfarer’s principal bondage is to his dreamfaring. All the others are secondary. Isn’t that so, Mr. Kampa?”

“Anything you say, sir.”

In September Blair was concluding his American Geographic Foundation lectures, which he had interrupted for two weeks in August to hold a series of meetings with officials of the departments of Defense and State in Washington, D.C. These meetings had produced—very quickly—an important agreement between the governments of Zarakal and the United States, a codicil to the recent treaties establishing American military bases in Blair’s homeland. Now, having fulfilled both his diplomatic and his paleontological obligations in the United States, he was returning to Marakoi. He stopped at Eglin to confer with Woody Kaprow and Joshua Kampa.

Hands thrust deep in the pockets of his boiler suit, the Great Man stood as if hypnotized before the cut-away body of the vehicle that would eventually translate Joshua to an earlier geologic epoch. Physics and engineering, not being his specialties, intimidated him in the same way they intimidated Joshua. But Blair did not enjoy being intimidated, and he was out of sorts. Kaprow interrupted the paleoanthropologist’s sullen reverie to thrust a small, flat instrument rather like a pocket computer into his hands, then crossed the workshop and bestowed the instrument’s mate on Joshua, who had spent most of the morning session sitting at the physicist’s metal desk feeling like a tiny third wheel on a high-rolling bicycle that never let him touch ground. Blair and Kaprow had scarcely spoken to him. He might as well have spent the day on the beach.

“What’s this?” Blair asked, looking across the workshop at Kaprow.

“An intertemporal communicator,” the physicist replied. “I call it a transcordion, though, because that’s catchier.”

Joshua lowered his feet from the desk and studied the instrument. It appeared quite simple. It had a keyboard something like a typewriter’s and a display area where messages could appear.

“All right. I give up. What are we supposed to do with them?” Blair asked Kaprow.

“Communicate, of course. Go ahead and exchange a few messages. It’ll make you both feel better.”

“Oh, I daresay.”

“You know how to type, don’t you?”

“Two-finger hunt-and-peck. In the early days of the National Museum I was my own bloody secretary—reports to the government, requests for funds, all that sort of rot. I vowed to give up typing forever. Now, for God’s sake, this.”

“Send Joshua a message.”

“What do I want to say?” He pondered the problem.

As he pondered, Joshua decided to plunge. “Now is the time,” he typed, “for all old men to fade from the dreams of their dotage.”

Blair received the message and pointed his chin at Joshua. “Are you referring to me?”

“Touch the key marked Clear and send him a reply,” Kaprow urged the Great Man.

His naked forehead furrowed nearly to his crown, Blair complied: “Old dreamers never fade, they just fossilize.”

“Fossil lies are the stock and trade of fading paleontologists.”

“The hell you say.” Blair played the transcordion to this effect: “Desist and decamp, Joshua Kampa. Josh me no more, I pray.”

Joshua responded, “A prayer from Blair is hardly fair. It’s not the Darwinian Way.”

Aloud the Great Man said, “Rotten doggerel. And what does it prove, Dr. Kaprow? That fifteen feet apart we can send and receive like genuine radio men?”

Kaprow sat down on the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his belly. “It proves they’re operating, Dr. Blair. They’ll do just as well when you’re separated by time as well as space. Every set of transcordions shares a crystallographic harmony that’s independent of temporal considerations. They’d interresonate even if we sent Joshua to, God forbid, the Precambrian—so long as we didn’t displace him spatially, too. Then we’d have to put up with a radio delay like those familiar to astronauts. Between a Now and a Then that are spatially congruent, though, the transcordions provide virtually instantaneous communication.”

“Does ‘instantaneous’ mean anything under such circumstances?” Joshua asked.

“Call it a metaphor, then. The transcordions operate on a principle of physical correspondences rather than on the doubtful proposition of simultaneity. Simultaneity’s an assumption of no real usefulness when you’re dealing with persons sundered from each other by time. By definition, the past and the present do not, and cannot, coincide.”

Joshua said, “Or they’d be the same thing.”

Kaprow accepted Joshua’s remark with a distracted nod. “However, in another sense, perhaps they are.”

“Oh, God,” Blair interjected. “One hand clapping.”

“No, don’t worry. I’m not going to go Zen on you just yet. The instantaneousness I’m talking about derives from a metaphorical simultaneity based on the concord between the time-displaced receiver and its mate. In a physical dimension about which we are pathetically ignorant, the past does indeed run parallel to the present.”

Joshua slid his transcordion across the desk to Kaprow, who picked it up and fondled it absent-mindedly. If the past and the present ran parallel to each other, why, damn it all, they were simultaneous. At least insofar as Joshua could get a grip on the matter. What good was a metaphor that muddled your metaphysics past all rational recourse? In comparison, one hand clapping was altogether comprehensible….

“Wait a minute,” Joshua cried. “Time travel involves movement in space, too, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does. Every particle of matter travels along a world line consisting of three dimensions in space and one in time. Once we’ve transferred the physical components of White Sphinx to the Lake Kiboko Protectorate, Joshua, and once you’ve harnessed yourself to the Backstep Scaffold, we’ll reverse the equations of motion for the finite region of space enclosing you. Then we’ll transport that region backward along its various world lines to the destination dictated by your dreamfaring.”

“My spirit-traveling, you mean.”

“The terminology’s of no consequence. The dreamfarer is himself the key to the journey, because time, like our universe, is an attribute of consciousness. In fact, it’s possible that it has no significant meaning apart from consciousness. White Sphinx cannot shift inanimate objects—these transcordions, for instance—into the past without the intervention of a living psyche.”

The workshop, with its corrugated walls and cold concrete floor, its high fluorescent tubes and hanging pulleys, its snakelike electrical cables and blocky machine presses, seemed more than an ocean away from the grasslands, rhino wallows, and wattle huts of East Africa. Indeed, it was. It was a little cathedral to human progress, a memorial to the evolution of insight and ingenuity. It was a starting place. Joshua was not sure, however, that he liked it very much.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this, about my… my physical displacement into the past.”

“That’s natural enough,” Kaprow said. “And?”

“I’ll be going back to the general vicinity of Lake Kiboko’s eastern shore almost two million years ago.”

“The site of our most productive digs,” Blair put in.

“Okay. But I’m going to end up in an ancient Africa that occupies the same space-time coordinates as present-day Africa. Have I got that right, Dr. Kaprow?”

“Pretty much. I won’t quibble with your construction of the matter.”

“How?” Joshua demanded. “How does that happen? Our sun, the solar system, the whole damn galaxy—they’re moving, aren’t they?”

“Right. At a speed of approximately six hundred million miles a year, foot to the floorboard.”

“Then to what goddamn East African Pleistocene will I really be going? It won’t be the same one that existed two million years ago. The Earth supporting that geological epoch no longer exists. That Earth is a ghost-Earth a giga-zillion miles behind us somewhere, and there’s no way to set me down on it without some sort of zippy, faster-than-light contraption. Right?”

“Right,” Kaprow acknowledged.

“Well, I don’t think that”—he nodded at the buslike vehicle beside Blair—“qualifies. In fact, I’m sure it doesn’t. So where the hell exactly am I going to end up?”

Blair’s expression betrayed surprise, dismay, chagrin. Joshua’s objections, as Joshua himself could see, were ones that he had never considered. The idea that time travel has a spatial dimension was a novelty to him, a revelation. It gave the paleontologist pause. If Joshua did not emerge from Kaprow’s machine into a primeval world of hominids, dinotheres, and antlered giraffes, but instead into a formless void like the clock tick before Creation, Blair had no hope of obtaining any concrete proof of his theories about human origins. Further (no small consideration), Joshua might gasp for breath, draw none, and die. Was it possible that Blair had delivered his developing third-world country into the arms of the Americans for a trade-off of dubious long-term benefit? Had he been duped?

“Listen,” said Kaprow, addressing both men. “My previous work—some of it in West Germany, so that I know I’m not dealing solely with a local phenomenon—has demonstrated that common to every Earthbound site all along its distribution across the time axis, there’s a kind of persistent… well, call it a geographic memory. That memory, Dr. Blair, is objectifiable. In other words, it’s visitable.”

“A pseudoscientific rationale for ghosts?”

“For ghosts, hauntings, and a few other supposedly paranormal phenomena. If calling that rationale

‘pseudoscientific’ pleases you, be my guest.” He crossed the workshop and removed the transcordion from Blair’s hands. “The point is that Joshua is already psychically geared to a specific set of these geographic memories. When we drop him back to the Pleistocene—with his active cooperation—he’ll find himself in a physical dimension congruent with that epoch as it actually occurred. Joshua’s name for what he does in his dreams—spirit-traveling—is a good name for what White Sphinx is all about, too.

Like my term dreamfaring, though, it does ignore the important aspect of bodily displacement. But there’s really no reason to—”

“We’ll be installing him in a bloody diorama of the Pleistocene! A simulacrum of East Africa two million years ago! That’s not time travel, Kaprow—that’s a contemptible fraud!”

Kaprow’s eyes seemed to bob in their almost transparent whites. “That’s what my government thought, too. To begin with.”

“Until they discovered they could sell Zarakal a worthless bill of goods for a couple of military bases.

That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”

“You’re also receiving several hundred million dollars of direct American aid. That played a rather substantial role in President Tharaka’s decision to permit the bases, wouldn’t you say? Besides, he’d made up his mind on that point a month or two before White Sphinx was part of your working vocabulary. We’re gravy, Joshua and I. Why are you making ugly accusations?”

“Gravy or no gravy, Kaprow, it doesn’t forgive the duplicity of this diorama business.”

“Please listen to me, Dr. Blair. Joshua may be going back to a ‘diorama’ of the Pleistocene, or a

‘simulacrum,’ to use another of your words, but it’s going to be a living diorama, a perfect simulacrum.”

The Great Man’s forehead wrinkled skeptically.

“Time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it is an utter impossibility. The future is forever inaccessible because it hasn’t happened yet. It has no pursuable resonances. The past is accessible only because of adepts like Joshua here, a person whose collective unconscious—whose psyche, if you prefer—establishes an attunement to a particular place at a particular time. This is an extremely rare talent.”

“Curse,” Joshua said.

“All right, curse. I’m afraid I agree with you. But it permits time travel of a vivid secondary sort, and it’s not to be spurned as either worthless or trivial.”

“A dream fossil is a worthless fossil, Kaprow.”

“Dr. Blair, you should count yourself lucky that one of the people afflicted with this curse—I know of only three others, although worldwide there may be a few hundred—happens to be a young man with an attunement to the time and place of your own researches. Had his spirit-traveling taken him to the Trojan War, say, I’d probably be talking to a high-ranking classicist from Asia Minor. And you could have kissed this entire project goodbye.”

“Name another,” Joshua said.

“Another what?”

“Another person afflicted with the curse.”

“Well, I’m one, I’m afraid.” Kaprow pulled a folding chair away from the desk and sat down in it with his face in profile to the other men. “The first I ever knew to exist. That’s why I’ve made a career of trying to harness the energy of my dreams.” He chuckled glumly. “Even convinced the Pentagon there was a valuable military application for my work. Believed it myself.”

“Oh? And what was that?”

“Well, Dr. Blair, the introduction of agents—call them saboteurs, if you want—into the time flow downriver from the present. To warn of the attack on Pearl Harbor, say, or to prevent the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Or, somewhat closer to home, to dispatch murderers like Idi Amin and Pol Pot even before they come to power.”

“That’s rather grandiose, isn’t it? Not to mention irresponsible. Those ‘cures’ would invariably trigger events impossible to anticipate. The results might prove worse than the original diseases.”

“You’re correct in theory, of course.”

“And in fact?”

“Time travel of that effective sort is out of the question. We can go back to a past exactly like our real past, but because it’s a projection, or a resonance, of an inaccessible reality, we’re powerless to bring about changes in our consensus present. It’s a vantage without teeth.”

“I’ll be damned if I care for it, Kaprow. We’ll be sending young Joshua here into a landscape of phantoms.”

“They’ll have teeth, though. He’ll perceive them to be every bit as real as himself.”

The paleontologist shook his massive head, shifted his feet among the cables on the concrete floor.

“In one sense, Dr. Blair, what we must accept is better than the alternative you seem to desire. It would be folly to send a contemporary human being to a crucial juncture in the evolution of our species—the old story of the time traveler shooting one of his ancestors. Joshua could conceivably disrupt the course of evolution, bequeathing to our conjectural present a world in which humanity never quite arose from its hominid forebears.”

“I’ll be careful. Word of honor.”

“But by sending him to a perfect simulacrum of the Pleistocene,” the physicist continued, “we sidestep the Grandfather Paradox without sacrificing the concept of time travel. In my opinion, Dr. Blair, what White Sphinx has accomplished is a small miracle. Not only do we have our cake, we eat it too. We can visit our ancestors with impunity.”

Joshua said, “The only danger is to the time traveler himself. He might be eaten by ghosts.”

“True enough,” Kaprow admitted.

Kaprow never talked about his own attunement. He never talked about previous experiments with the apparatus designed to translate a dreamfarer bodily into the past. He never bragged that already there had been several successful trial runs of his equipment—not at Eglin, because Kaprow had never located a dreamfarer afflicted with a Gulf Coast attunement, but in both Western Europe and the Black Hills of South Dakota. He never mentioned that the Oglala Lakota tribesman who had gone dreamfaring aboard his equipment the previous winter had returned unharmed and promptly refused any further jaunts to the nineteenth century. In fact, Kaprow never talked about either his successes or his failures, and Joshua learned about them—a few of them, at any rate—by discreetly pumping the man’s assistants.

One evening in late September, however, Kaprow invited Joshua home with him for TV dinners and drinks. The physicist had a tiny cottage on the beach, and the first thing Joshua noticed about it when he stepped through the door was that every wall was lined with books. Most of them appeared to be math or science texts, but the glass-fronted cabinet near the kitchen was devoted entirely to tomes about Germany’s Third Reich: memoirs, biographies, historical studies, photographs, psychological monographs, and even a healthy smattering of novels, although until this moment Joshua had supposed Kaprow completely indifferent to fiction. Fiction with a specific historical basis was apparently another matter.

The fried chicken in the frozen TV dinners seemed to have been basted with orange marmalade, and the mashed potatoes were like warm lumps of moist flour, but neither Joshua nor Kaprow was a dedicated gourmet, and they ate without complaining. Afterward, Kaprow broke out a bottle of Napoleon brandy that made up handsomely for the minor indignity of the dinner. They sat in the living room, in the gathering dusk, and drank. The books on the shelves grew darker and darker, and Joshua found himself sinking by twilight degrees into a state of mellow grogginess.

“Am I going to survive this business?”

“The brandy?”

“No, sir. The dreamfaring.”

“Well, soon enough you’ll be undergoing survival training in Zarakal. That ought to help.”

“I’m talking about the psychological aspect, I think. The way it’s going to hit me when I come face to face with the substance of my dreams and I’m no longer exactly dreaming. That’s what I want to know if I’m going to survive. The trauma. What do you think?”

“You’re probably a better judge of that than I am, Joshua. I’m not you, after all. And vice versa.”

For several minutes Joshua watched the light dance across the surface of the brandy in his snifter. “What happened to the Indian who spirit-traveled back to Seventh Cavalry days?”

“Who told you about that?”

“Stallworth. I stayed after him, though. It wasn’t exactly voluntary.”

“Nothing happened to the Indian.”

“He quit, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he quit. Not because of any emotional trauma, however. He didn’t like being surrounded by machinery—technological artifacts, he called the components that helped get him back. He decided the dreamfaring process violated his heritage. And so he went his way, sadder but wiser. I suppose.”

“What about you?”

Kaprow looked across the darkening room at his visitor.

“What about you?” Joshua persisted. “Where do you go, when you go? Which when do you visit?

What’s your attunement?”

Kaprow leaned back in his chair and put his feet on a hassock. A moment later he said, “Hitler’s Germany. Dachau. In clever Aryan disguise, Joshua, I visit the ovens.”

They talked for a long time.

That December the elf-sized effigies in the display window of the record shop looked to Joshua less like angels than embryonic bats. Each little figure was outfitted with cottony wings, a gown sprinkled with glitter, and a halo that appeared to be a Frisbee spray-painted an ugly gold. Worse, nearly every “angel” was holding in its malformed hands an album jacket featuring a full-color close-up of either a syphilitic or a coke-disfigured recording artist. (The simulation of disease or drug-induced lesions was a minor show-biz trend this holiday season.) The effect was sublimely tacky. On the other hand, in its calculated contempt for every Christmas bromide, the display was perfect, the sort of flamboyant decadence that gave Big Gene Curtiss fits.

Past other gussied-up windows and shop fronts, Joshua moved aimlessly through the mall. He had money in his pockets and a full month of leave before the Air Force sent him PCS (Permanent Change of Station) to East Africa. Before he left Eglin, he had presents to buy—for Big Gene Curtiss, Cosette Tru and her father at the Mekong Restaurant, and Woody Kaprow and a few of the other personnel working on the White Sphinx Project. None of them expected gifts, of course, but they were the only family he had these days and he wanted to do a little something for them.

As for Jacqueline, well, she was still in school in Washington, D.C., newly engaged to a friend and colleague of her brother Dzu’s in the State Department. She had eased herself out of Joshua’s mind as painlessly as a pickpocket lifts a wallet, in part because he had come to agree with her objections to his suit, in part because the last year and a half had revealed to him the mission foreordained for him at birth.

Jacqueline, for her part, appeared to have given up her hope of being canonized a second Our Lady of the Slums in favor of marriage and a civil-service career. Maybe these last goals were not, finally, incompatible with the first….

Almost against his will, Joshua thought of the family he had abandoned. It had been nearly seven years since he had seen his mother, Jeannette Monegal, and even longer than that since he had talked to Anna, his sister.

Adoptive mother, he mentally corrected himself. Foster sister.

But the qualifiers did not sanitize the guilt that suddenly came seeping up through him like a tide of untreated sewage. Anna he had always loved. His mother he had repudiated because she had betrayed him for the sake of a spurious tribute consisting, in fact, of a sizable advance for a book that he had kept her from publishing. After all this time, that betrayal, coupled with her treatment of Hugo, still rankled, still made him see red.

Et tu, brute.

Dante had consigned those treacherous to their own kin to the first round of the ninth, and final, circle of hell. These contemptible folks were imprisoned up to their necks in a vast lake of ice. Why feel guilty, then, about simply removing oneself from a betrayer’s sphere of influence? In comparison to Dante’s vindictiveness, Joshua was the saint that Jackie Tru had always wanted to be….

“Jesus, runt, watch where you’re going!”

Startled, Joshua rebounded from a clean-cut young serviceman who, but for the passage of four years, could have been the identical twin of the would-be Ranger in whose company Joshua had first encountered Jackie. The serviceman angrily shook his head and escorted his companion—a blue-jeaned ingénue with a simulated lip lesion—around Joshua, who mumbled an apology and backed away. More than likely he would be going overseas soon, this strapping GI. Everyone seemed to be going overseas.

The United States had more foreign outposts than the Roman legions.

Whether by chance or unacknowledged design, Joshua edged along the wall of plate glass behind him into a bookstore.

This Christmas the most prominently displayed paperbacks in the open storefront were a series of photo-novels devoted to the exploits of Count Stanislaw Stodt, a vampire in the employ of the CIA. A boxed set of five of these adventures was being touted as this year’s most popular stocking stuffer.

Joshua sidled past these displays to the hardcover tables, where management had laid out its inventory of serious fiction: hauntings, space operas, espionage thrillers, movie tie-ins, political biographies, and the complete works of Wilkie Collins, now enjoying a renascence in updated abridgments by Stephen King.

“Can I help you?”

Glancing up, Joshua beheld a slender young man with watery blue eyes and the mustache of a Central American revolutionary. The standard response to this standard query, Joshua knew, was “No, thank you, I’m just looking,” but Joshua invariably employed another—to engage, if only briefly, the clerk’s professional expertise and to dispel the impression that he was merely one more itinerant airman killing time. To wit:

“Do you have Jeannette R. Monegal’s I Couldn’t Put It Down, and I Was Sorry When It Ended?”

The young man laughed. “Boy, that’s an old one. I’m afraid it’s out of print, even in paper.”

Now, of course, the clerk was supposed to apologize and wander off, leaving Joshua free to browse as he liked.

Instead the clerk said, “She’s written a new book, though. Maybe you’d like to take a look at it. Our copies came in just last week.”

“A new book?”

“Yes. I forget the title. Right over here.”

Joshua’s heart began to hammer his chest the way a fetus sometimes pummels its mother’s stomach. But he followed the young man to a shelf from which he withdrew a thick book in a glossy dark-green jacket.

Frightened, Joshua could feel the warmth draining from his hands, almost as if his fingers were spigots.

He closed his eyes.

“Eden in His Dreams.”

“I beg your pardon,” the clerk said.

“That’s the title—Eden in His Dreams.”

“No, sir. Not by this author. Here, why don’t you thumb through it? It’s not selling all that well yet, but we expect it to.”

Joshua blurted, “But this is a novel.”

“Yeah. Her first foray into fiction. Publishers Weekly liked it, for whatever that’s worth. Give it a gander.”

The clerk left Joshua alone with the book, which, as hefty as a Hebraic tablet, he clutched in trembling hands.

It was entitled The Outcast. The cover showed a tatterdemalion child crouching in the shadow thrown by an immense barred door. Yes indeed. A novel.

Joshua let the book fall open and began to read. His mother’s narrative style seemed to be a cross between perfervid Mary Shelley and early Joyce Carol Oates. He tried to pick up at least a strand of the story line from this perusal, but so intense was his relief that the book was not Eden in His Dreams, he could think of little else. Gratitude welled up, and another fetid hint of guilt.

Jeannette had spared him. In fact, she had spared him for nearly seven years. That, insofar as he understood the law, marked the statute of limitations for a great many criminal offenses. If old movies and numerous detective novels did not err, a person who had not been heard from in seven years could be declared legally dead…. Maybe it was time he began to forgive his mother, demonstrated to her by word and deed the fact of his continuing existence. In less than three weeks he would be descending the ramp of a commercial airliner at Marakoi International Airport in Zarakal. He would not return to the States until the end of the decade, assuming, of course, that he did not perish in the iffy ghost-past to which White Sphinx would eventually post him.

Joshua carried the book forward to the cashier’s island and placed it on the counter. A dark young woman in a red velour jumpsuit turned the book around, studied the jacket painting, and then keyed the book’s price into the cash computer: $21.95.

“You like Jeannette Monegal’s stuff, huh?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never read a novel by her before.” He put three ten-dollar bills on the counter and waited for his change.

“You’re some gambler, then. You wait long enough and you could probably pick this up on a discount table for less than the paperback. Four and a quarter or so.”

“With me it’s now or never. I’ve never been able to delay the gratification of my impulses.”

“I know a bunch o’ fellas like you.” The cashier raised her eyebrows, slid The Outcast into a brown paper sack, and counted out his change.

Joshua winked a conspiratorial goodbye and left.

On the shuttle bus back to Eglin—he had sold his Kawasaki to an airman in recreational services—he took the novel out of its grainy, biodegradable sack and opened it on his knees like a dictionary or a Bible. Then he thumbed forward from the end papers to the table of contents. While he was riffling these leaves, an inscription at the top of an otherwise virgin page caught his eye, and he turned back to see what he had missed.

It was the dedication:

That evening Joshua telephoned his mother’s Riverdale apartment from the day room in his barracks. No one answered. He dialed the number every half-hour. Shortly after eleven he reached a thin masculine voice that told him, peevishly, Jeannette Monegal had not had this particular telephone number for at least five years. Joshua called information and learned that although his mother no longer had a listing for Riverdale, the directory did show a few other Monegals whose first initials corresponded to his mother’s.

He tried three such numbers with no success and a sense of mounting frustration. At midnight he hauled himself upstairs and fell into bed.

In the morning his first thought was Ah ha, I’ll call Anna.

But Anna had left Agnes Scott in Atlanta at least five years ago, and when he finally reached a hired official in the school’s alumnae society and tried to talk her into divulging the present whereabouts of Miss Anna Rivenbark Monegal, class of 1980, he was met with a distant, scrupulously polite, “Sorry—not a chance,” the implication being that he sounded like a rapist, a salesman, or some other unsavory blight on the stately live oak of civilization.

Then, like being sideswiped by a Greyhound bus, it hit him: Van Luna, Kansas! Where but Van Luna, Kansas, would his mother and his sister retreat for the Christmas holidays? Nowhere else but!

Excitedly Joshua put through a long-distance call to the residence of Mrs. William C. Rivenbark of Van Luna, Kansas. In 1972, at precisely this time of year, Old Bill had died of a heart attack in Cheyenne. He and Peggy had come to Wyoming—their second such trip—to visit their daughter and grandchildren for Christmas while Hugo was supervising the loading of B-52 bomb bays at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam. Under decidedly peculiar circumstances, in the bedroom of Pete and Lily Grier, the Monegals’ former landlords, Bill Rivenbark had collapsed and nearly lost consciousness. Pete Grier had been out of state at the time, attending a bowl game in New Orleans with a cousin from Texas, and Lily, in an exemplary dither, had telephoned Jeannette to come and rescue her father before Peggy, asleep in the Monegals’ old apartment downstairs, discovered that her husband was upstairs with Lily rather than stretched out beside her in connubial repose.

Angry and distraught, Jeannette had answered Lily’s plea, taking ten-year-old John-John with her to the Griers’ house since Anna was spending the night at a friend’s. Upstairs his grandfather had lain supine on another man’s bed, his dentures clamped together like a strip of yellow whalebone. The old man’s eyes had been as elusive as welding sparks, seeming to go everywhere without settling on anything. Bill had suffered a second heart attack in the hospital’s emergency room, and that one had finished him off….

Joshua’s recollection of this incident took on embarrassing vividness as the widow’s telephone rang.

Maybe this was a mistake. He held the receiver away from his head and considered hanging up.

“Hello?” A cautious female voice, girlish rather than elderly.

“Anna?”

“Who is this, anyway?”

Joshua told her. There intervened a silence like the silence a bowler experiences after lofting a gutter ball.

You couldn’t hear a pin drop.

“Come on, Anna, talk to me.”

“What do you want?”

“Is Mom there? I saw Mom’s book, the novel.”

“She’s not here, Johnny. She may get here for Christmas, she may not. Everything’s up in the air. Where are you?”

He wanted to tell her about meeting Alistair Patrick Blair a year and a half ago, but realized that every aspect of the White Sphinx Project, especially the involvement of the Zarakali paleontologist, was classified. Besides, Anna and he were using an unprotected public line. Besides, she probably didn’t give a damn.

“Can’t talk long. I’ve been finger-feeding this squawk-box quarters for hours, just trying to run you folks down. ‘Bout out o’ change. Anna, I’ve got to know if Mom—”

“Are you coming?”

Joshua Kampa, alias John-John (Johnny) Monegal, studied the receiver as if it were the single bone of contention separating him from his family. Deliberately he asked, “You inviting me?”

“Get out here, you goddamn little defector. Of course I’m inviting you. Of course I’m—” Anna stuck, exasperated or overcome. “Just get on out here, all right?”

It took two days to catch a MAC transport aircraft from Eglin to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, but only six hours to claim a seat on a giant, pelicanesque C-141 departing Lackland for McConnell. He rode in the belly of this prodigious bird with twenty other space-available bindlestiffs, a convoy of six haunted-looking blue buses, and several canvas-draped cylinders.

One young airman claimed that the cylinders were unarmed nuclear warheads, while a paunchy officer in wire-rim glasses pooh-poohed this notion, declaring them experimental plastic cisterns for catching and storing water in certain hypothetical combat situations. Their ultimate destination was Fort Carson in Colorado. Joshua did not wait to see who emerged victorious in the warhead/cistern controversy. He disembarked the C-141 as soon after it had set down as the pilot would permit. It was cold in Wichita, and he pulled his Air Force horse-blanket coat tight about his neck and chest.

Once off base, Joshua walked the right-hand side of the highway to Van Luna waiting for a ride. Finally a captain in a 1956 Nash Metropolitan picked him up and carried him the remainder of the way.

Van Luna, once a farming village as well as a modest bedroom community for people employed in Wichita, had spilled over the countryside like the markers in a vast Monopoly game. Tract houses, convenience stores, and motels were everywhere. The highway between McConnell and Van Luna afforded only an occasional glimpse into the pastureland or the cottonwood copses beyond the roadside clutter; and Joshua, despite a long-term familiarity with the mercantile sprawl of Florida’s Miracle Strip, felt betrayed. Even if he had lived here only five years, Van Luna was the Eden of his dreams of childhood. Its streets and fields had represented, at least in memory, the landscape of his choppy evolution toward self-knowledge, a process he still did not regard as complete. This ongoing complication of the simple geometries—the innocent geometries—of the original town was demoralizing.

“Damn.”

“You’re welcome,” said the captain, letting him out not far from the building that had once housed Rivenbark’s Grocery.

The old business district, the cobblestone heart of Van Luna, did not look greatly different from Joshua’s memory of it. Although under the proprietorship of a stranger, the grocery was still a grocery. Even better, the façade of the old Pix Theatre had been restored. Joshua walked through an older neighborhood to his mother’s mother’s house, aware of the townspeople’s tentative curiosity and the chilly tingle of the December air.

At the front door of an old-fashioned red-brick house with Tudor trim and ranks of gorgeous evergreen shrubs around the porch and walls, Joshua knocked. No one came. He pressed the buzzer and heard a thin, protracted raspberry deep inside the house. Whereupon the door swung open and there stood Anna, simultaneously smiling a welcome and trying to shush him to absolute silence. She was pregnant, quite far along, and their enthusiastic hug had to accommodate itself to the salience of her belly.

“Come in,” she whispered. “Don’t stand out there in the cold—come in, Johnny, come in.”

He did not budge. “What’s the deal, Anna? You married?”

There in the doorway she explained that, yes, she was married; her husband was a man named Dennis Whitcomb, but Anna had not taken his last name. An ensign in the Navy, Whitcomb was stationed aboard the nuclear carrier Eisenhower, which was presently at rest in the harbor of the new naval facility at Bravanumbi, Zarakal.

“Zarakal!” Joshua exclaimed in a high-pitched whisper.

“Mutesa Tharaka’s country, Johnny. You know, the place where all those people starved to death a few years ago. On special occasions he wears some sort of early human skull on his head.”

“Your husband?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Right, I do. It’s a habiline skull, Anna. President Tharaka wears it to celebrate the origin of humanity in his own backyard. It’s also a sign of his own preeminence in Zarakal.”

“Good for him. Do you mind if we go inside?”

“Lead the way.”

Anna, who had not yet spoken above a whisper, led him to a sofa upholstered in a satiny floral print.

She made him sit down, but did not herself take a seat. Instead, one hand in the small of her back, she paced a threadbare Oriental rug whose faded pattern reminded Joshua of a paisley shirt he had owned in Cheyenne. The room smelled of camphor, cedarwood, and, strangely, peppermint. It was shuttered, curtained, and wallpapered. The miasma of Peggy Rivenbark’s widowhood drifted from room to room like nerve gas, and Anna, suddenly, appeared to be suffering a convulsion of memory.

“Do you still have those dreams, Johnny?”

“Sometimes, yeah, I do. But I’m undergoing a treatment that’s supposed to help me control them.”

“I was afraid the damn things would kill you.”

“They might yet.”

“But if you’re learning to control them—”

“Scratch ‘They might yet,’ Sis. Melodramatic license. I’m fine.”

“You’ve joined the Air Force. Following in Dad’s footsteps?”

“Not too far, I hope.” Anna took his meaning, and he said, “The President ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to waive the height limitations for me. A blow for the civil rights of short people.”

“Now you have a reason to live.”

“Amen, Sister.”

“Are you being sent overseas, too?”

“Right after New Year’s.”

“Where?”

He decided, unilaterally, that this much, at least, he could divulge to his own sister. “Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in—”

“Zarakal!”

“I thought we were supposed to be whispering.”

Halted in front of Joshua, Anna lowered her voice again: “Maybe you’ll be able to meet Dennis.—No, probably not. They’re set for a long cruise in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. I don’t know exactly when. Soon, though. The Midway and the frigate T. C. Hart were strafed recently by American-made jets flown by—well, they think they may have been PLO sympathizers in the Saudi Arabian Air Force.

No one knows for sure. They’re keeping it out of the news, Dennis says. It’s weird. Weird and scary.”

“Yes.”

“I met Dennis in Athens.”

“Greece?”

“Georgia, you turkey. He was going to the Navy School there. Did you know that Roger Staubach went there in the sixties?”

“No, I never did.”

“Anyway, I’d gone over to Athens for one of the University of Georgia’s drama productions. Buried Child by Sam Shepard. During the second intermission I bumped into Dennis.”

“Which intermission resulted in that bump?” He nodded at her belly.

“You mean ‘intromission,’ don’t you? Well, we’ve never kept count. And I don’t remember you being such a wise guy.” Anna eased herself onto the sofa beside Joshua and kissed him daintily on the temple.

“Welcome home, short stuff.”

Under a gingham canopy in an antique four-poster in the master bedroom, Peggy Rivenbark lay. She had been sickly ever since Bill’s death thirteen years ago, but only over the Christmas holidays, in perverse commemoration of the betrayal that had made her a widow, did she surrender to the elegant purdah of her bed. Who would have thought that, taking advantage of Pete Grier’s absence, Bill would have crept upstairs from his daughter’s former apartment to the boudoir of frumpy, frozen-pie-faced Lily, there to commit a cardiac-arresting instance of extramarital hanky-panky?

“Should I go in to see her?” Joshua asked.

“I don’t think we even need to let her know you’re here.”

“She still associates me with that night, doesn’t she? I let it slip where Mom and I had found Bill, and I’m still the evil messenger of the Rivenbark household.”

“It’s been a damn long time, honey. Peggy’s convinced herself that you’re dead. This probably isn’t the best time to show her you’re still kicking.”

“Okay, I’ll play. No ghosts for Grandma.”

“Good.”

Before he could ask Anna about their mother, she rose by pushing off against his shoulder and beckoned him into the sunny kitchen on the house’s southwest side.

Green glass canisters for sugar, flour, and tea. Knotty-pine cabinets. A bay window overlooking a margin of neat, winter-brown lawn, the kind of lawn that cries out for touch-football players and blithely romping dogs. Van Luna’s suburban sprawl was nowhere in evidence here.

Joshua sat at a wrought-iron table with a Formica top while Anna served him coffee and leftover biscuits. When the heater kicked on, she spoke without whispering for the first time since he had entered the house.

“You just about killed Mom, you little twerp. For two years she was strung out like an elastic clothesline, almost ready to snap. She tore up Eden in His Dreams and couldn’t get anything else going. The third year, well, she spent that right here in Van Luna, as if this house were a sanatorium for terminally bereaved females.”

“Where is she now, Anna?”

“Maybe I’m not ready to tell you.”

Alarmed, Joshua ate crumbs off his fingertips. More than likely he deserved to be taunted in this tender, hair-trigger fashion. If Anna really squeezed, though, he would go off like his grandfather’s heart, in either apoplectic anger or tearful remorse. The latter if they were lucky. He remembered how Hugo had used to ascend from a grumbling snit into one of his infrequent but terrifying Panamanian eruptions….

“You got any Fritos, Anna?”

She turned and faced him, her arms folded on the ledge of her pregnancy. “Jesus, you’ve got the recall of an elephant.”

“Dumbo the Dinothere at your service.”

“I remember almost everything about that little expedition—but, of course, I was twelve. I ought to remember.”

“What about Mom? Where is she?”

Anna crossed the little kitchen, walking on her heels, and patted him on the head. “Neat diversion, John-John. I got a cable from her yesterday. You won’t be seeing her this year.”

“Why not, for Christ’s sake?”

“She’s got a contract from Vireo to do a book on the Spanish monarchy—the impact of its restoration on the people and on European politics in general. She’s in Madrid. She plans to be in Spain for at least six months. She wanted to beat a possible moratorium on air travel—that’s why she took off so suddenly.

It was my year to babysit Peggy, anyway.”

“Shit.”

“I’ll write and tell her you’re in Zarakal.”

“You can’t. I shouldn’t have told you. You can tell her when you see her in person. Then swear her to secrecy. Cross your heart and hope to die.”

“Are you a commando or something, Johnny?”

“Or something, I guess. It’s a kind of grandiose depth-psychology therapy for my lifelong affliction.”

“The one you’re learning to control?”

“Right. At government expense. You won’t see my eyeballs roll up into my head this trip, Sis.”

“Unless I shoot you.” She sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. “That’s why you’re going to Zarakal, isn’t it? A correlation between that country and the landscapes of your dreams.”

“My lips are sealed.”

Conscientiously concealing his presence from his grandmother, Joshua stayed through Christmas. Peggy Rivenbark lay abed like a superannuated angel, decaying into the expensive linen mulch of paradise and dreaming for the unborn great-grandchild in Anna’s womb a future of crash-proof spaceliners and pristine colony planets. Well, maybe not. She was an old woman who had been born five years after Kitty Hawk, and it was more likely that she hallucinated not the future but the past. Meanwhile, she henpecked heaven with her prayers.

What was it that Woody Kaprow had said? The future is forever inaccessible…. It has no pursuable resonances. Joshua was not sure he believed that. The past, after all, was the friable medium in which the future germinated. And the present was an illusion, another aspect of the great material lie known among Hindus as maya….

So much for metaphysics.

For fear that the sight of him would kill her, Joshua purposely did not reveal himself to Peggy Rivenbark.

Anna and he spent most of the holidays talking. When it came time for him to leave, they had exhausted hundreds of topics without depleting their stores of mutual affection. The nametag on his uniform jacket might say Kampa, but he was also a Monegal, and maybe when he got back from his tour of duty in the Horn, they would finally be reunited as a family. Anna and he affirmed this hope aloud over and over again, but on the transport aircraft flying back to Eglin, Joshua had his doubts. His past was a dream, and the future was inaccessible.