The Atlas

THE ATLAS

Montréal, Quebec, Canada (1993)

Cornwall, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Port Hope, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Pickering, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Guildwood, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Napoli, Campania, Italia (1993)

Orillia, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Washago, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

Cairo, Egypt (1993)

New South Wales, Australia (1994)

Mae Hong Song, Mae Hong Song Province, Thailand (1994)

Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (1993) Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. (1993) Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

Mogadishu, Somalia (1993)

Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

Yangon, Myanmar (1993)

Orillia, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Washago, Ontario, Canada (1993)

State of Vatican City (1993)

Mount Aetna, Sicily, Italia (1993)

Lutton, Oklahoma, U.S.A. (1968)

Herculaneum, Near Napoli, Campania, Italia (1993)

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (1994)

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1991)

Tamatave, Madagascar (1994)

Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Mexico (1993)

Allan Water, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Savant Lake, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico (1993)

Sioux Lookout, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Reddit, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Ottermere, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Malachi, Ontario, Canada (1993)

Diesel Bend, Utah, U.S.A. (1992)

Thailand (1991)

Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand (1993)

Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1993)

Winnitoba, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

Rice Lake, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

Yangon, Myanmar (1993)

Battle Rock, Oregon, U.S.A. (1994)

Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. (1994)

Budapest, Hungary (1994)

Zagreb, Croatia (1992)

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

Key West, Florida, U.S.A. (1994)

Samuel H. Boardman State Park, Oregon, U.S.A. (1994)

Key West, Florida, U.S.A. (1994)

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (1994)

Mendocino, California, U.S.A. (1994)

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992)

Karenni State, Burma (1994)

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (1994)

Karenni State, Burma (1994)

The Great Western Desert, Northern Territory, Australia (1994)

Key West, Florida, U.S.A. (1994)

Elma, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

Paris, Departement Paris, Region Parisienne, France (1995)

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

Roma, Italia (1993)Cairo, Egypt (1993)

Berlin, Germany (1992)

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. (1994)

New York, New York. U.S.A. (1994)

The Nile River, Egypt (1993)

Ho Mong, Shan State, Burma [Myanmar] (1994)

Marakooper Cave, Tasmania, Australia (1994)

Jerusalem, Israel/Jordan (1993)

Antananarivo, Madagascar (1993)

Bangkok, Phrah Nakhon-Thonburi Province, Thailand (1994)

Antananarivo, Madagascar (1993)

Vatican City and State (1993)

Afghanistan (1982)

The Pas, Manitoba. Canada (1994)

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1994)

Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1990)

Tokyo to Osaka, Japan (1995)

Avignon, Departement Vaucluse, Provence, France (1995)

San Francisco, California, U.S.A. (1995)

Churchill. Manitoba, Canada (1994)

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1994)

Home (1994)

Delhi, India (1991)

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

New York. New York, U.S.A. (1991)

Home (1995)

Coral Harbour, Southampton Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1993)

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1993)

Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1990)

Poland (Dreamed)

Eureka, Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1988)

Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (1994)

Nevada, U.S.A. (1993)

The Slidre River, Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (1988)

He had used up every place now. Everywhere he went, he'd say I lto himself: There's nothing for me here anymore. No more nowhere nobody.

He had finished.

Once life had been as mysterious as a Sierra lake at dawn. That was when he believed that things would happen to him. Now he understood that nothing would ever happen.

It was time to go back to Canada.

Travelling, especially early in the morning, is equivalent to dying, swimming through a night of sleep-choked houses, carrying one's baggage the last few steps to the place where it must be surrendered, entering the irrevocable security zone, then waiting in monotonous chambers to be taken away. This was how he now voyaged through his days. Of course he knew that living, too, is a likeness of dying. Living means leaving, going on trying not to hear the screams.

Almost silently the train departed its tinsel of darkness, metal, concrete and glistening glass. It left another train behind. Then it struck the sky, which had been bright, cloudless and noisy with seagulls since five hours past midnight. The atlas opened as he entered that morning of birds. For a moment he vaguely remembered those summers that adolescents have, when they think they are about to irrevocably change. Montréal continued under its plague of sleep. Apartments, hotels and warehouses were but monuments.

He sat beside a French-named family of Indians: the plumply phlegmatic young mother, disinclined toward rippling her own peace, her four- or five-year-old daughter, who was the most "native"-looking of them with her cedar complexion and long black hair, then the old grandmother complete in spectacles and purple. The grandmother was reading a book about how to live in Paradise forever, her crumpleskinned arm flat across the type, her glasses crouched on the tip of her nose, her lower lip puffed out. He decided that he wanted to live in Paradise, too. He tried to have faith that the train was taking him there. Maybe it was. No more nowhere nobody.

They crossed the river of small green islands.

In an hour they were already in Cornwall, riding the green ocean whose spray was leaves and needles foaming gently against the sky. Another train passed so rapidly that it became a sky of reddish flickers in the lefthand windows.

When the train broke down and another train had to push, the Canadian ladies merely said: Ooh, this is exciting, eh? — Only one person complained, a man who was going to be late in London.

They crossed a shining river, greeted the shiny roofs of metal sheds, and then said to each other: You meet the most interesting people on trains.

I was raised on the prairie, a woman said; which was enough to make him long for the prairie miles ahead. Canada was already making him well. It was an infallible country. What heart-wound or soul-wound could remain unhealed by Canada balsam? How could death ever gnaw away Canada's birches in full-leaf? Why, those leaves had the power to compose an entire yellow-green sky! The grandmother's book was true. He had come back to Paradise.

Passing along the deep brown railroad ties they reached the forest's end. Wet fields of pale green with trees between the rows, a silver silo, long streams of blond hay on the emerald fields — these things now refreshed and greeted him.

Then, like the forest, the world ended in a darker coagulation of blue sky that went on forever: Lake Ontario. Trestles, canals, whitewashed box-houses; they'd reached Port Hope. They continued without stopping. The center was not at the center but at his left hand, which addressed nothing. On the left, nothing but water (lightest closer to shore, with occasional white diagonals across its middle surface, almost all the way to its thick dark horizon-line of blue).

Not a lot to see, though, once you get west, eh? a man said.

No, not a lot, a lady said. We were there once. We got on the flat prairie.

Now and again trees rose tall and summer-leaved around the tracks, and another reddish train-body hurtled by, but then the water would be there again, nearer or farther away.

Pickering's the most special place, the lady said. Wait till you see Pickering.

More semicylindrical hay bales, then a hot, wooded suburb, a vast golf course, a river half-shored with concrete, two men fishing at a sandy spit choked with seagulls — these manifestations he'd finished with. Maybe that was why they didn't stop at Pickering. As for Guild-wood, that town came into being as a hot wasteland of pipes, bulldozers, weeds and apartment towers, but Canada itself could not hurt his Canada. He remained unburied even yet, and they changed at Toronto. In the waiting room he remembered all the waiting rooms of his life. He remembered a crazy old man in Napoli with bandages around his ankles who'd come stamping rhythmically across the floor, raising an army of echoes. The young men put their hands in their pockets and leaned forward grinning. They shouted: March, march! Now suddenly it seemed that all his deeds and hopes and memories were no more than the old man's echoes. But he said: Never mind. I'm in Canada.

Nobody knows what this government's gonna do, a man said. I'm taking a ten percent pay cut in September.

Well, it has booms and busts, though, Alberta does. That's the thing. Those oil stocks keep gaining.

Trees as woolly as German participles, pale green, and all the two-storey white houses; yellow flowers, maybe dandelion or mustard (he couldn't tell because the train was going so fast now), like wet stars in the grass; a brown creek; a ferny forest not yet overthrown; a scudding lake with sailboats on it and roller-skaters around it; smooth green pebbles under the water; these were the letters constituting CANADA. Now the land was greener; Orillia was hot and green and shrubby. His joy bloomed bright green like swamp algae, and there were white and purple blooms in the grass. The train honked by the boy on the rusty watchtower in Washago, his bike on the weed-fringed road beneath. The boy called something soundlessly. The lady in the facing seat looked out the window and opened her mouth to reply. He saw her teeth and behind them the inward glistenings of her throat. Her tongue pulsed. Then suddenly he was assaulted by all the useless scraps of language he'd learned: A ring seal was a nutsiq. A harp seal was a qairulik. A bearded seal was an ugjuk. No more nowhere everywhere.

Now the crowds of nations and memories overthrew his joy; wasn't there a place where they ran sugarcanes between two motorized cylinders to squeeze the pale green juice? The two cylinders were weariness and despair; and they extracted the freshest liquid from his thoughts, leaving him the husks while the abyss drank everything else, catching each green drop on its coal-black twitching tongue. He had a fever headache, and drops of sweat exploded on his forehead like grains from a shotgun, dense, heavy and painful. The black tongue drank those, too. — So many souls and countries weighting down his atlas — eternally everywhere everybody! — He remembered all the women he'd loved and waited for, all the friends and hopes like fruits in the compartments of an upslanted tray, brown ocher terraces, mottled walls covered with Arabic writing, remembered the happiness, blessings that had come and passed away; and he remembered ants in an anthill. He remembered a late night plane to Australia when he sat in dull amazement observing a woman's struggle down the aisle, a massive gilded vase in her arms; then a man dragged a bulging garment bag which swiped at everyone's faces — useless things people serve and pray to in their useless lives! He remembered ants crawling by the hundreds across his hands in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. He remembered ants in Mae Hong Song. He remembered Bangkok. Behind the grand oval windows of the massage parlor, ladies with numbers, ladies as numerous as ants sat on stairs of pink carpet, each woman a memory for many men whom she mostly did not remember (although the men remembered her, discussed her with one another and made claims, just as each anthropologist argues for the superiority of his own natives); and the women's hands were clasped upon crossed knees, and no doubt they were sitting there still, even as the "Hudson Bay" clacked farther up the track; the ants were waiting to become memories like the Somali women in flower-robes and stripe-robes and check-robes who sold mangoes inside the corrugated metal boxes under pale yellow-leaved toothbrush trees of Mogadishu. That was it. You waited to sell or you waited to buy, but in any event you waited, your consciousness essentially contingent as Hegel had said somewhere; so the Somali women waited and three Thai girls in tight blue ankle-length dresses ran giggling to the elevator. They were through for the day. — But a girl in street clothes entered like wintertide, passing through the hot velvet darkness where viewers and buyers fed upon each other (one girl lay on the sofa there, and another in a bathing suit trod her back quite lovingly). The new girl folded back the drape that hid a long hall of mildew which stretched to the dressing room where girls sat tweezing themselves before the mirror, and she went in and the drape closed and so she vanished. Behind the oval windows, her colleagues sat very still beside their purses, occasionally running a hand through their long hair. A tall German came in, and they froze into winning statues.

Just a massage, or a real Thai massage? said the German. Fifty dollars with sex?

Yes, said the obliging necktied boy, who'd just smashed a journalist's camera.

For the girl in, uh, red? said the German.

OK, sir.

Soon the girl in red was bending her knee in a kind of curtsey and gesturing the German into the elevator.

Next three Thais came in and drummed ballpoint pens on the glass very thoughtfully while the barman swivelled his stool and tapped a pen on another stool. The three Thais lowered their heads and tucked in their shirts.

Body massage? said the necktied one.

A girl in a bathing suit strode rapidly across the pink world. More girls inhabited its steps now, and they fixed their perfect unmoving heads in the direction of those three men who leaned and drummed and worried about prices. Whenever the girls sat down, they arranged their hair, tucked their skirts up to show a little knee, worshipped compacts, licked lips, then became mannequins. In Thailand were people acquainted with the adamantine heads and shoulders which we call tombstones? Beneath this Stone are Deposited the Remains of Cap. John Mackay. Stared a skull with fish-scale angel-wings. Mackay's headstone was canted and darkened. How much farther would it sink this year? H. P. Lovecraft had written that certain gravestones were keys which could be turned to unlock the infernal regions of space. Did all those American flags hinder that? It was Memorial Day in Boston. He sat down upon the mellow green grass fed by so many rotting carcasses of people who had once worried about prices or showed a little knee; and the graves went on like all those houses on stilts just outside Bangkok, each house a patchwork box of rags, an island in canal water green with algae; those were the tombs of poverty, perhaps worse than the tombs of death, perhaps not; and stones weighed down that old burying ground. A panhandler, a paunchy bully, came rattling the money in his paper cup, moaning: I'm doin' real bad! Do you have anybody buried here? and when he shook his head, the panhandler said: There's always room for you. I'll be waitin' for you at the gate because there's no way out! and his face split with terrifying glee.

When the women came down from the elevators alone they always looked happy. They gave little slips of paper to the barman to write on and file, and then they went back down the hall of mildew. The boy in the necktie stood in front of the oval windows and added up profits aloud, smiling. (His favorite thing was to go dancing. But whenever other boys asked him how often he went, he'd hang his head as if caught in some lie.)

And he, the traveller and erstwhile weary watcher, thought: This is not the train station or airport, where travellers pass and go, but a hot round world of women going round and round. Only the men disappear.

But then another woman was finished for the day; she smiled and departed, under over somewhere nowhere.

He exulted, and said to himself: Yes, we'll all disappear at last. We have that to hope for. — He'd become a Buddhist like them.

And so he was permitted one more memory which had to do with waiting, a good one this time, because in the belly of a golden tower, Buddha's plump white red-lipped face hid itself, floating above gold robes and white hands and folded knees on shelves of fishy silver, waiting, not watching, willing to let itself be seen but not displaying itself; and in a niche beside it a woman offered fresh leaves and stood praying while another girl sat with her feet tucked behind her and leftward. After many long moments of gazing downward and ahead she pivoted on one of those two crossed feet, pushed with her toes to lean forward, bowed, and bowed again. Then she vanished.

Now he too would disappear. He was going to travel to the world's edge (which lies in Canada), and he was happy.

They came to a wide, still, blue-gray lake, a river with tree-islands perfectly oval like lily-pads. His joy was strong and wide like the ferns around the trunks of birches. Those ferns resembled immense pale green lichens. Every place seemed a luscious place to spend a summer or a life, remote and serene like those sticks almost sunken in weedy water. There was no flaw in this landscape, because it was full of nature and loneliness.

'Tis purty in here, he heard a boy say. All the trees an' stuff.

His joy deepened like black bogs and black pools in the grass.

Clouds of pale leaves and dark needles swirled by. Sumacs, buttercups, ferns, dandelions gone to seed, grand beech trees, two chrysanthemums in a pot on the topmost strand of a barbed wire fence, forget-me-nots, daisies, reddish boulders gaping out of the softness in the little towns where washing hung between spruce trees like sails too bright and perfect for the whitish plain of water — it was all home even though he'd never seen it before.

The people that are in the sleepers are really nice, but the people that work there are snooty, a little girl said.

The train curved like a silver river.

They were playing cards in the observation car, making fans of their red-backed cards, passing and bidding and drinking Molson in cans as they rode high over so many rock-lipped black pools in the moss, all those ancient folks doing crossword puzzles and showing off pocket knives and laughing and saying: We all gonna get old sometime, but not yet! and everyone happy. — What's trumps? Hearts is trumps.

He remembered Mount Aetna's broad white fang floating in blueness:

Dead trees among the live ones, long blonde grass on the knolls between pools, every now and then a bird winging off the marsh; these things scraped away the last of his unhappiness, which fell into a birch gorge at sunset, into the brown water-mirror of nowhere nothing far below. Thinking he saw some creature in the water, he remembered his friend Joe, who'd said: And the dream was, I was swimming in the Connecticut River with my first love. This girl was a virgin. We were both virgins when we got it on. And her name was Janny and she had long red hair in a ponytail. We were swimming underwater. I remember the sunlight and the trees. We were swimming underwater, and things were green and then the water was so clear. Swimming underwater, and all the sudden I hear a voice — a voice! I say, how can I hear a voice? I'm underwater, I'm underwater! And the voice kept saying: Joe, Joe, Joe! And I realized that I was gonna drown! I didn't wanna hear that voice; someone's shakin' me: Joe, Joe, Joe! It's chow time! And just then they show up with the cornmeal and the beans, and I'm back with bars in front of me! And I say, Oh, no! I'm gonna go back to that place! 'Cause beans and cornmeal, it's the same meal every day. You know, it wasn't anything to wake up to. On my birthday, somebody else gave me their beans. Back in jail again. Nothin' to do but race the cockroaches. Oh, you catch 'em, you shake 'em hard, and you put 'em on the edge of the bed. You race 'em for cigarettes. The stupid cockroaches wouldn't have a sense of direction. You'd have a finish line, but they wouldn't know where the finish line was! They'd just take off anywhere. But you'd just take their legs off, an' influence their direction! I mean, that was if you wanted to win the cigarettes! You'd have a limited quantity of cigarettes; you had top cigarettes, and you'd roll 'em real good; that's one thing I learned in jail, it's to roll 'em, roll a damned neat cigarette. We had plenty of time to do it, so we'd roll 'em real good, tight, tuck 'em all in. It wasn't like nowadays, when they give everybody like ten cigarettes a day. We had ten cigarettes a week, so you'd save that cigarette, an' you'd use it for barter, and you'd use it for favors. Trade it for some cornbread. So the cockroaches… I had one cockroach; it didn't last too long after I pulled its legs off. Most of em got away, though. At nighttime you'd catch 'em. They'd run across your chest. It was real hot at night. You'd sleep like this, with your arms folded. And they'd come out of the bed. They'd run across your chest at night. You'd catch 'em, wrap 'em up, save 'em till morning. The toilet paper was a stiff type toilet paper, a manuscript type toilet paper. I mean it wasn't very good for wiping your ass, but you could write on it. It was the brown paper people used to wipe their hands on. So we wrapped 'em in clothes, stuck 'em in the pockets of your clothes. I had this one G.I. jacket with buttons on it, it was really worn out. I was the Omega Man. I had a button with the omega sign for resistance; I was resisting the draft. . Yeah, I was drafted. I gave 'em a lot of shit. I was 4-F. I'd joined the Marines when I was seventeen, wanted to go and kill some Commies. Even lied about my age. But I got in trouble sitting on the bench when the big black sergeant called my name and I couldn't hear. He'd been sayin' it for a few minutes. I said oh shit. I was the only one left. Get over there! So the lieutenant talks to me, he says: I'm sorry, son, you're just too deaf. He says: You can't pass the hearing test; you flunked all the hearing tests. Well, I was real sad and everything. I went out and said to myself: Well, what are you going to do, kid? I told all my friends: Well, I'm not going. They all shouted: You lucky bastard! — Well, after that I went to college, and in college I got it straight. I had history professors, radical history professors. I realized the whole thing was a scam and I got pretty pissed off. Then we were real wild. We went wild and made a lot of shit, made a lot of noise because we wanted to hit 'em where it hurt, in the pocketbook. So I got a couple of banks, would trash the street just to make a scene, you know, because my buddies and civilians were dying in Vietnam; everything was all injustice, like in Nazi Germany. You had to do something! Can't just go to school and get your degree, you know what I mean? — I didn't burn down any buildings, just threw a trash can through a bank window. Trash can was on fire, too! The police came and charged us. We backed up, threw some bricks and botdes and stuff. The police charged again. Then they caught a guy I was with and they beat the shit out of him and backed off and I went to pick him up and all the sudden I felt the darned presence and I look up, and they all got their pig masks on and they said something to me: budufdudufuu! so I says: Fuck you, pig! so they smashed my glasses, split my head open, and I started running down the street and one cop came up behind and hit me on the back with his baton: whop! I got away, and some Harvard students pulled me into the dorm and they stitched me up. One guy starts to stitch me up, and he says: No, no, let me do it, I'm a third-year man! They were arguin' over who was gonna stitch me up. I went to school the next day. Both my eyes were black and I had a split-open head and the newspapers were saying: 15,000 RIOT IN HARVARD SQUARE, so all the teachers knew what I was at. I was one of the movement heavies. Twice in two weeks I got a chokehold from the authorities. So I did that for awhile, and then I started hitchhiking. Had to eat, so I'd sell my blood — oh, many times. You get into town, you sleep in the park, you'd be the first one to get up in the morning, six-o'-clock, go to Peak Load or Manpower. If they didn't call you out that day you had to do something to get money. It wasn't like those spoiled brats they got nowadays or the homeless people. You had to find money. The only way to do it was through work or sell your blood or jerk off sell your sperm. Oh, you find out. I saw it in Oakland. In fact, I did it in Greece twice in one week. I did it in Utah, I did it in Atlanta; it's just something to do for five or ten bucks. There's nothing to it. Two times in one month, that's too much. You almost pass out from selling your blood twice in a row. Selling your blood isn't much. It's just you get five, ten bucks, you know. But that's a lot of money if you're on the road. Five dollars is really a liberator. Well, now it would be more like twenty dollars. But let me tell you about five dollars. You got five dollars, you can take fifty cents of that, walk around town, find a day-old bakery. You get a loaf of bread for twenty-five cents. And then you're all set. Tie that to your belt, stick the rest of the money in your shoe, keep your change in your pocket, put the three dollars in your shoe, put it between your big toe and your little toe; you're all set, you can sleep anywhere; no one bothers you, as long as you take your shoes off at night, put 'em under your head, use 'em as a pillow, wrap your shirt around 'em. It's a typical thing to do. That's if you're sleeping in a boxcar with other bums around. I wasn't that desperate then, either. Look, if you're hitchhiking around, come into a town, get there early enough, it's a freak town like Denver or Salt Lake City or something, you sleep in the park in a dugout or some baseball park or something, at the first light you get up, and the night before you've looked in the phone book to find out where the Peak Loads and the Manpowers are. Labor pool. So you're first on line in the morning, even though the regulars they're gonna get the jobs. 'Cause you gotta get the job, gotta get that ten bucks, twelve bucks, whatever. Hell, day-old bread only costs a nickel. You just wrap it up, tie it to your belt and hitchhike, hop a freight train or something, and you have a day-old bread on your belt and you're all set for days. Bread and water, that's fine. Cigarettes would be good, too. And then go to sleep, dream good dreams. Everywhere I went, though, I remembered swimming underwater with my first love, and waking up in that lousy jail to find it was just a dream.

As he rode away from Joe he recollected how in Herculaneum steel bars had been installed by the Museum staff in so many of the streetfronted rooms to prevent anyone from damaging the frescoes; thus these curatorial efforts formed an empty afternoon of ruined jails, like Joe's barred rooms reminiscent of prostitutes' cages in Thailand or India. And he wondered which of his own memories were like that, in sight but out of reach like place-names on an atlas page which the eye grazes over. A squirrel descended a tree headfirst. I want to remember my first love, too, he said to himself, but his love was in out up down everywhere everybody. (At the train station in Sydney the man by the turnstile said: Out you go. Off you go. Off we go. Now, where did you want to go?) He'd been too promiscuous. In Cambodia, where everyone talked slowly and dreamily, where even the beggars walked slowly, he could look through the gratings of the restaurant windows and see the cyclists' heads go slowly by. At that time he hadn't finished. He had never wanted to reach through the grating and touch one of those shiny blue Russian-made bikes as it slid by. But the next time he went there the cyclists had begun decomposing into memories; motorbikes had injected themselves onto the scene, in accordance with the smog dialectic. He said: I guess I should start remembering these bicycles. He said: I want to remember my first love, every time everywhere forever. In the French restaurant across from the Hotel Papillon, boys in clean shirts slowly, almost silently tried to sell him things. They squinted and wrote out the prices in thousands of riels, and began to pray the count of bills whenever he bought something. The hundred-riel notes were jungle-green, with a socialist face, stern and green, hair cropped back like some Viet Cong general's. He could almost remember his first love's face. The city seemed empty that first time. Had so many been killed? Of course Bangkok had been very crowded; most other cities would seem empty after Bangkok. The boys in clean shirts went out, and he could see them through the restaurant grating and then they were gone.

They passed an abandoned beaver dam in a winding river that reflected everything in the hue of a sepia-tinted photograph. The river was widening, the trees lowering. Admiring the turf of the winding banks so overhung with bushes and rich grasses, he said to himself: This is Joe's river. If Joe were here with me he'd dive beyond those grimacing branches of dead spruces to be with that virgin he loved; he'd find her here. What kind of jail would that be?

Rocks furred with blueberry bushes sank their snouts into blue lakes. An osprey flapped low with open talons. Knowing that very soon now he'd vanish forever from the atlas, he felt a happy excitement. His eyes drank from ponds whose rich mud tinted them the color of wine.

Then sunlight crazed the river strangely, turning it the exact hue of a sheet of yellow paper on which his first love had written: Last night I dreamed we were both in a double bed with the covers pulled up over our heads. We were wearing karate type pants. You had longish hair. It looked really dark against mine. Our legs were stretched out in front of us and there was a cat purring between mine. She was black and white and her head was resting against my knee. It was all very warm. The cat got up and walked over my stomach to my chest. She started licking my breasts and neck. It tickled and you were laughing and I pushed her away. Then I woke up. At first I felt really happy. My body was excited but I was so tired and warm, I curled up. I began to think about you and suddenly I panicked. I had this irrational fear that you were just pretending to care for me to "get even." You were going to make me care for you, let me love you, and then, for educational purposes, to justify your own pain, you were going to cut yourself off completely from me. I got out of bed and reread all your letters from this summer. At that hour they struck me as dignified, careful, cold, impersonal. Then I cried myself to sleep. This morning I put the letters away and thought: sad, silly girl. And on the back of the sheet, almost at the bottom, she'd written: I don't really want to ask you this and I won't ask it again but I'm rather insecure today. Do you love me?

Did I? Do I? So many years ago now she'd married somebody else. Now she had cancer. On the envelopes to her letters there were thirteen-cent butterfly stamps. In the upper lefthand corner was the address of where she'd been when she was a girl. If he ever went searching for her, he wouldn't go to the house where she lived with her husband and three children. He'd go back to that town of streets now empty of people he knew, long and empty and wide like the boulevards of Tamatave. He did not really remember the town of her girlhood at all. Memory is declivous, sinking of its own weight into the mucky ponds. That new virus he'd read about that converts a person into black slime in three days, perhaps it was but the counterpart of what forgetting does more slowly to the soul. For he could remember the excitement he'd felt when her letters alighted in his mailbox one by one, but the flagrant fragrant emotion that had rushed into his lungs when he'd opened each envelope so long ago could only be faked now, not recapitulated. The letters were now near as old as he and she had been when she'd written them. Once he started to reread them, but some were typed and some were written in her intense and crabby longhand; he'd read only the typed parts because he was tired and his eyes hurt. This is getting too long, she'd written, and he thought: I guess that's true of my life. I meant to be civil but not chatty. I am selfish and nasty now, hardly nice. I like my life the way it is now because it's mostly private and very much my own. Then she'd crossed two or three lines out and continued: I'm being rude. I just want to go away and think again. He thought that he remembered (he wasn't certain) spending an hour or more trying to make out the rude part, and now if he really wanted to do it, all he'd have to do would be to call the CIA. It wasn't that he didn't care; his mind and soul had gone so many times abroad, each time ensaring him in new experiences from which, struggling to get free or to dig himself deeper, he'd dusted and buried his past. That muffledness made him wonder whether the fact that he still loved her (or at least her memory) might be grotesque. Everything made him tired. Thinking of her afforded him pleasure even now; but those stale letters were like draghooks to pull him down. Closing his eyes, he watched her signature form itself like sky-writing on the insides of his eyelids. The words she scripted could never change. Time had split her farther and farther from what she had been. At least they were her letters. His letters would have been worse. The reflections of grass-tufts in dark water all around made it seem that the land was just as green underneath and that it floated on darkness. He'd go under to find the women who'd loved him. He'd live and leap on the islands of red rock in the forest. A bird winged like his heartbeats.

A mother read to her child: In the forest, the Iroquois were waiting for something.

The sky was a ceiling of blue crystal held up with white pillars of birch carpeted so richly with evening ferns. It was that time when the light goes out of lakes.

Near Sudbury it got sandy with hard white dunes and it was grassier and rockier but there were many fish-ripples in the streams. The reflections of birchtop and sprucetop serrations were almost black, and blue cloud-reflections swam in the brown sky. Birch groves fingered evening's green wall with their skeleton hands. That long train the sheen of evening grass followed the sky.

Now the trees began to rise up taller into the night, and the fish-rippled ponds were tarnished blackish-brown. He saw a sudden gash of blue and white light on a lake whose tree-reflections were wide enough apart to let in a little last sky-color, and then he put his head down in his seat and slept.

The next morning was skygray and evergreen. Tall narrow firs were packed together as tightly as poles in a palisade. (He remembered Mexico's railing-teeth on grinning balconies.) Behind and between the tops of them, other trees flashed, helmeted guards of each other's greenness. Then suddenly from the pale bushes rose tall and grizzled stalks like arrow-shafts. There had been a fire here, perhaps three or four years ago. Now the birches returned to flash their skinny white throats, their striped white necks, keeping the firs and spruces small; now the spruces choked everything else out.

Really pretty muskeg, a mother was saying to her children.

Mommy, can we live here?

Well, do you see all the standing water? That means there's lots and lots of mosquitoes and blackflies.

But he thought to himself: They feel it, too. They want to live here, too.

In a field of gray ponds and grass-haired water, he saw three little black ducks.

Past a lake which they crossed by trestle bridge there were an Anglican church, a red building, a log house and upended aluminum canoes. Indians stood in the high buttercupped grass, watching the train. The boys and girls pretended to hit each other, laughing. The older ones just stood there. They loaded some boxes and coolers onto the train, and a few of the teenagers got on. That was in Allan Water, Ontario. Then the train went west.

Half an hour later they reached Savant Lake. There were more Indians, in flannel shirts, old sneakers, windbreakers, tall rubber boots, baseball hats in that town of long ago whitewashed houses among the flowery grass, tall white crosses, some trailers, a propane truck, then more birch trees.

He had begun to believe that this might be one of those perfect days which are sometimes given to you so gently and lovingly that they are half over before you comprehend their perfection. Amidst blackened backbones of dead firs sprung crazily with lichens he remembered the steep streets of Taxco, Mexico, narrower than your outstretched hands, whose stones had been worn dangerously smooth; sometimes there was grass, sometimes a smell of urine, always cool darkness from behind the window-grilles of the overhanging houses; he'd walked there with a woman he'd loved, held back from her heart by arch-windowed, bar-windowed white houses — a world of white houses with cryptic windows to make them into dominoes under the awnings where the juice-bottles stood; and now he didn't know where that woman was anymore.

And the Bible said: Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes; for a harlot may be hired for a loaf of bread, but an adulteress stalks a man's very life. Can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Or can one walk upon hot coals and his feet not be scorched? So is he who goes in to his neighbor's wife; none who touches her will go unpunished. They transected a lovely gray water-plain with brown highlights. The sun shone on spiderstrands as fine and blonde and precious as the hairs he found on his pillow after kissing the first girl he ever loved. And the Qur'-An said: It was said to her: Enter the pavilion. But when she saw it, she supposed it was a spreading water, and she bared her legs. He said: It is a pavilion smoothed of crystal. She said: My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I surrender with Solomon to God, the Lord of all Being. A pale blue lake was sublated.

An old Polish lady got on at Sioux Lookout. She'd lived there for forty years. She had three children, eleven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She said she picked lupines as high as her shoulder — red, blue, yellow, purple, so beautiful! She ate beaver meat all the time: not just the tail, but the whole beaver, boiled an hour, then roasted. She loved to eat black bear meat, too, but beaver was the best, served on a plate of wild rice. She said she'd had a good life and was still having one. — When you get old, you know what you have to look forward to, she said. So why not go on enjoying yourself as long as you can?

She thought he was crazy to be going into the wilderness alone.

Now it was blue and white in Heaven instead of gray, so the land was the color of blueberry bushes in summer and the lakes were the color of blueberries.

Can I try beaver meat in Winnipeg? he said.

I don't know. I have no one there, so I never go there. Find an Indian.

She saw some teenagers drinking from a water bottle. — They brought their own water, she said. That is very good.

Fringy frothy green growth, moist, cloudy and sprucified, guarded an island like a swimming stegosaurus. They passed a still lake's black-streaked white cliff; and a memory of happiness flashed in him like some crescent-shaped brown pond, rock-shelved and hid in birchy wilderness. Everything was good; goodness was water trickling down sunburned rock.

At Reddit he spied an island whose small steep-roofed house was half hidden by trees; at the lake's edge was a dock and a canoe. He wanted to go wherever the canoe went but already it was gone and they passed a station that said BLUE HERON and MOCCASINS and souvenirs; they passed Ottermere with its birch-clumped mowed lawns; then Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament, hence the last town in Ontario; beside a low-wooded lake he read the sublinear gloss: two moose and a black bear. .

Between Malachi and Winnitoba, which is the first town in Manitoba, he recollected for accidental reasons Diesel Bend, Utah, where he'd gone north through the green fields walled in by trees, the little farms and white houses all embraced by those chalky cliffs in which fossil fishes are sometimes found; these, too, were tree-greened. . and farther ahead lay the blue blue mountains that made you know you were going north. Families were sitting on the porch in the evening or hoeing their gardens, and beautiful white horses swished their tails, and everything smelled like clover. Diesel Bend was not so different from Winnitoba. But, like a platter of Mexican marzipans made to resemble miniature fruits (papayas studded with chocolate seeds, strawberries, pale green pears), while in color and sweetness they might approximate each other, there was no sameness anywhere (his clawing at identities but a failure even when he looked out into sunlight, his self but a grimacing face in chill sea-foam). No two things are not disparable, although life's proprieties pretend otherwise. His first love's letters lay sweedy in their envelopes, whose righthand edges had each been snipped just so because he'd loved her so much that he didn't want to mar anything with her writing on it; each envelope was from her to him, with a thirteen-cent stamp on it — but how disparable! The one that had been addressed in crayon contained a page which said: Of course Tina thought I was fantastic or unique. He had no idea who Tina had been. He was fairly sure that he'd never met her. His first love had passionately snatched up so many people, bringing them to her heart; and then when they hurt her or she tired of them she'd throw them away again. He'd be surprised if she still knew Tina. He'd be astonished if she still thought about whether or not she was unique. That was what adolescents did. He had done it. But it wasn't because I was; it was because of the life I led, living in a suite with six young men, drinking bourbon straight in my footy-pajamas in front of the fireplace, knowing the owner of the local Irish pub, seeing a cardiologist, an internist, having physical problems unique to my age, making love, roaming Philly, spending afternoons at the zoo like a child, balloon in hand. When the dope came in I sometimes had to weigh it and check it. But I am the same as I ahvays was, mostly. I am not so unique now because the novelty isn't there. She had tried so hard to be bad, to be glamorous, to have adventures. And she'd had them. Then what? In Thailand all the rigid figures relax into motion again at the end of the national song. (The train passed narrow-needled cones of green.) A mutual friend, now dead, had once told him that she was not and never had been unique. But everybody is disparable, and everybody dies. In answer to your picture: there are no squares, right? Only in three dimensions and I didn't know that counted. Are we getting to know one another quite well? I don't know you too well. But I suppose I'm willing to lean as you let me and to let me know you as you wish. The sweet earnestness of this young girl aroused his tenderness. Now he could be good to her. He could give her money and let her be and do whatever she pleased. That was goodness, wasn't it? I think this is an awful state — being in love. I wonder why people do it. I was happier not loving. That's a lie, you know. You are all I have in my life now that can make me happy. Of course you are also capable of making me miserable. After all, I am still feeling like a part of me is missing. He read that in amazement. Did I really have the power to make another person happy or unhappy? Was I ever that much alive? Jesus, I want to die of leukemia, too. Perhaps we are too much alike in thought. And now she had cancer and he didn't. The weirdness of her having wished that so many years ago chilled him. He had wished it, too, solely because she did: a true puppy lover, he'd yearned to be counted among the hues of her iridescence. Neither of them could have known what leukemia was. He supposed that she knew now. I'll do what you asked about the drinking. I suppose if it were for myself I would continue to drink and smoke. I want to die young, you know, and in disgrace. But then sodden mossy trees bloomed in his brain with white mushroom cups around which regiments of ants hurried on their voracious errands. It was cool and humid in the bamboo tunnels between dripping ivied boulders as high as two tall men. Water leaped down like liquid dirt, spewing and dipping in clumps as of an old dog's hair, seething into brown pools whose mist was drunk by pale yellow butterflies beneath those living fishing rods that grew down, steadying themselves with spade-shaped leaves, reaching wooden feelers into the water. That was the place of reddish-brown waterfalls near Chiang Mai; that was the place of cool sweat and slippery jungle paths. He'd ridden a train from there back down into the lowlands, the ricefields whose muddy rivers relaxed from time to time by forming cloudy puddles in which the travelling sun was reflected. An occasional tree rose out of the rice, with water around its roots. The bitter smell of diesel-smoke was exhaled by the train. The cloud-map rushed across square lakes of green-stubbled water. His wife put her arm around him as they passed an old ruined wat with dogs loping its edges (white birds on the ricefields), then another small wat rising gold-curlicued and red-roofed in the fields and his wife, his dear and darling wife, was whispering: I love you same same crocodile. . He was beside her in Bangkok walking to the seafood restaurant, every street calf-deep in brown water, so the two of them splashed barefoot — so pleasant to feel the warm dirty water against one's feet — and at last they arrived at the restaurant with its decorative tree dried leaves and all, studded with lights, ice and crabs in the windows. You could order Steammed Crab in Shredded Jelly, Fried Frog with Garlic, Peppered Paisa Serpent-Head Fish, or Steammed Crab with Anything. Ladies whose arms glowed with gold bracelets nibbled happily at breaded crab. The windows steamed themselves up against the hot rainy night. The waiters in their immaculate black vests and bow ties always smiled. It was a very happy restaurant, and he was happy; he said I LOVE YOU to his wife. (She cried later, of course, because he had to go away.)

We're going to stop here and pick up some guy we threw off the other day, said the conductor. I hear he's got more money now, or at least some blueberries.

Rice Lake, next stop! shouted the conductor, and there was a lake with grasslike tufts and clutches of wild rice, some sky-spaced pines. .

He saw nothing but a one-row station and grass — maybe a town, maybe not.

I want to make love with you before I grow old and ugly, one of his first love's letters said. I want someone to enjoy what I have, now, while it is sweet and strong. I want to be hard, with many facets and moods. I don't want to be stable. I want to be stable and secure. I want to be loved. I want to spin, pushing myself around and around, living a fast, crazy, creative destructive existence. I want to give myself away and throw myself out a twentieth-storey window. And I want to live with you, away from everything. I want to lie in a bed, garden, laugh and weep. I want to have a baby.

How many twentieth-story windows can you throw yourself out of? he wanted to ask her. That has sometimes been my life. But unfortunately when I aim for concrete the ground always turns out to be Jell-O and goose-down and rubber. That's why you got the cancer and I didn't. Nobody can kill me. Not even I can kill me. You had already been married for years the time the bullet jammed.

Suddenly he wondered what would have happened if he had left college that last year and hitchhiked those two thousand five hundred star-edged miles in order to make her truly know and believe that he wanted to be with her forever. At the time he used to sleep with her letters under his pillow. He was still a virgin.

Probably she was already seeing someone else.

And now, which everybodies, somebodies and nobodies didn't he see?

But he had to know. The telephone slept like a tiny white shark. He seized it by the flanks, lifted it from the plastic it dreamed in, and dialled.

Mrs. Teitelbaum is sleeping, said the nurse. Is it important? Should I disturb her?

No, it's not important, he said. I'm an old friend. I just wanted to know how she was doing.

I want to know that, too, said the nurse warmly. Let me go upstairs and check to see if she's taken her medication.

He waited and then he heard the receiver being lifted on the other end and he knew that it was his love and even five years before his heart would have soared but now his hair had begun to turn gray and his heart never soared except when he smoked crack, and anyhow it was only the nurse who said: She says she'll call you, maybe next week.

Where do you come in? she'd written. Have I lied to you again? Have I made promises I can't keep? Have I hurt you yet again? Shit. I warned you, I told you, I deny responsibility, but in the end, if it hurts, it'll be my fault. I DON'T KNOW. HOW CAN I KNOW? WHAT IS HAPPENING? Oh, I don't know if I love you. I don't know if I don't. Sex is a weapon. It will be used. It doesn't hurt me as much as it hurts the men. We're friends, we're lovers? No, we're not lovers. I am not and never have been lovers with anyone. I will write you before I leave. God, I'm not sure about all this.

Now he did feel something. With all his soul he wanted to say to the girl who no longer existed that it was all right. (Outside the train window rushed the gunmetal dapplings of dark ponds. He saw a squirrel's raised tail in the leaves.) He wouldn't embrace her because she wouldn't like it. He wouldn't demonstrate through any gesture of puerile romanticism how she who once had been the center not only of his selfish desires but also of much of the goodness and generosity which slept within him now remained and would always be his — no matter that he'd long ago lost of her all but the memory; as someone in his past she'd yearly become (in a secret all too well kept from himself) more and more a part of him, her trace so permeating him that he was hardly conscious of it. The proof was the physical weight of the grief he felt (as if he were carrying a backpack of leaden sadness) once he understood that she might die within months. You see, he loved her so much. — He'd confine himself to stating that nothing was or had been her fault, and even that communication could be reburied under his breastbone if its presentation would interrupt her (on the rare occasions when he did telephone her and got beyond the nurse, she'd say: Who's this?); he'd explain that he had no desire to ask anything of her because he had other wives now and would never be lonely. He only wanted her to be happy if she could. If she had any notion of how he could help her, he would do whatever she asked. He'd lay everything out for her with the utmost service and ceremony, just like the waiter at the Hotel Thanada in Rangoon who put on his glasses whenever you ordered, then carefully polished each utensil that he brought you, making one trip for the fork, one for the knife, one for the spoon, cleaning each of these in a once-white rag before setting it noiselessly in front of you on the greasy tablecloth. That was service from the heart. If she didn't want that, he would think kindly of her and return to his various rushing trains. But that scared girl was not there anymore. He could not find her, no matter where in the world he went. She was gone. She was not dead yet, only gone. She did not need his love and care anymore. She never had, because what he'd possessed she never wanted. Now she needed chemotherapy, and then pills to stop vomiting, and a wig to hide her baldness, and more pills for weeping and for pain.

He began to dream, going someplace that he could not remember which made him feel serene. In the gloom of his dreams, brown mosquitoes hung like dust-motes. He sank inside Battle Rock, outside him seedheads of grasses shuddering and hissing in the violent wind of a cloudless afternoon, the sea slightly greener than turquoise, blackberries ripe and past ripe. What a tangled quilt of reeds, ferns, thistles and poison oak there was on this high rock of tall grasses blinking in the wind like eyelashes; and he was underneath it. The globe turned outside of him; outside of him life sped like the winds that pressed any lighthouse cape in Oregon where golden grass-stalks locked the sun in a million-barred prison that continually writhed and gnashed its lips, with the wild sea all around. He might have slept. Then blackberry spiders crawled over him, brilliant silver spider swarms that soothed him with mosquito shade and warmed him with maple leaf sunshine. Time was infusing itself into him; he was healing or perhaps just changing. The train traversed the sky. Green boulders, brown water, everywhere no one forever. At twilight a dark stream sped down its own cusp and became white, the crowded drops playing arpeggios on rock and then separating, falling separately together to the brown pool below that was ringed with fernclaws. Old man's beard hung from dusty shrub-walls. The undersides of maple leaves were translucent green windows to the twilight. He left them behind, ascending a steep gray path toward the dreariness of night rock. — Close your eyes, said the girl in the treehouse, lowering the shirt and pants from the string as if she were bringing a hanged corpse back to earth. — Still close 'em! — The other girl closed her eyes obediently, dancing around on the lawn. — He fell crashing down from his dreams. But when he awoke the train was still bringing him safely away from everything; and the man across from him who was getting old offered him a sausage and then fell asleep quickly and unknowingly; in rest the man looked so happy and refreshed; that was what he'd needed; his head lay on the back of his chair as trees trotted by, the ground with them rolling back up like the receptacle cylinder of a scroll. And he who watched felt that the dreams had left a strange and special residue inside his skull, one of those mineral salts that makes a candle burn in spooky colors. It was like a Sunday in Budapest when pigeons, families and middle-aged women paused before the windows of closed shops. What was in the darkness behind those displays of sparseness? That is what we ask our minds when we're afraid. The greenish river curved creamily round the pilings of the greenpainted bridge, every rivet of which was green. Across the river the tree-crowned cliffs had been cut away and cragged with towers and domes of its own substance. That was Gellert Rampart, and crossing the bridge he'd found it choked with garbage, the aged domes now tarnished, cracked and reeking of the piss of drunks. But it rained birds sideways along those streets of flats textured like waffles, and he liked that. The plum trees were flowering white and pink in Budapest, and a fat raven hunched his shoulders on a branch, picking at wet wood. On the side of a dumpster it said HEJ HITLER. Hitler, it would seem, was still a place-name in many atlases. A stout old man paced slowly down the path, both hands behind his back and locked around a chisel. It was one of those Sunday afternoons in the middle of spring when the wet grass (already transcendently covered by dandelions) became all the more enriched by the sky's gray, while the clouds, so deliciously bruised by the pressure of their own rain, became greener like wet moss on a slate tombstone — all this going on around a coast of steep red roofs which had long since frozen their gestures into spires. Then the thunder began, a little before the rain which now commenced to break out of that sky of polychromatic grays. The birds continued to sing. It came down so hard that he could see it dancing like dust or smoke off the roofs of cars, and whenever it struck the sidewalk it seemed to form stalagmites of water stretching explosively back upward. The streets were so wet now that they crackled like bacon under the taxicabs, and the blush of headlights across a streaming auto's rear window was every bit as subtle as the cloud-shades had been. So that was Sunday, and the next morning he bought his ancient landlady some chocolates in the Lebensmittel store just around the corner from Red Love Massage; and at the train station he changed forints for dollars and deutsche marks with the Algerians who stood near the pillars in the waiting room. His Algerian preferred to speak French. The Algerian agreed that deutsche marks were probably best. He said that he had been in Beograd before the war but not now; he had no advice on what to trade there. Men in fat coats passed, smoking cigarettes; old women in shawls carried bags; old men took only their hats; a tall bald man whose face resembled a sardonic Roman emperor's passed unanswerably, and the Algerians huddled around their pillar and whispered. His future stretched on like the long groove of double railroad ties that went past that bane of the Algerians, the official moneychanging office; and the tracks continued past the travel agencies, the news stands, whose foremost publication showed a woman licking a curvy penis; went on past the stand of canted fruits and escaped at last from under the arches of glass and black lines like cables or wires, some of which formed a face with a gaping mouth; and then they went on under the white sky all the way to Beograd, where he knew that he would be the enemy. Perhaps that was why he went there; he'd always been attracted to lamias as well as chimeras. It is perhaps too easy to say that self-destructiveness is an attribute of certain members of the propertied class. Poor people destroy themselves in their own way. By Lenin's standards he lived a meaningless life which required infantile romanticism to stimulate a spuriously healthy blush in the tissues of pale lassitude. By his own standards he was simply looking for something. He wanted to see the world, that was all. He wanted to know and love the entire atlas. As far as Beograd went, fear was a secretary typing up a long list of scary reasons. He had once been a secretary himself and knew that lists are always revised. Two years previous, in Muhammed's bar in Zagreb the list of reasons not to proceed to Sarajevo had been voluminous, so it became irresistibly prudent to figure out what to do upon arrival at that city's sandbagged airport, now surrounded by snipers. As the brochure from the 1984 Winter Games had put it so magically, The noble Olympic spirit experienced full satisfaction in Sarajevo, and for that reason it will certainly in the future attract travellers from all over the world who are desirous not only of new natural but also of new spiritual horizons. — Fine. Here I come. — So he was buying thick sweet dark To-maslav beers for sundry members of the secret order of Bosnian Dragons (whom the Serbs in Beograd would later assure him existed only in enemy legends) and in return the Dragons were explaining to him exactly how easy it would be. — From the airport go by car to the UNPROFOR encampment, a big man said, gesturing like a falcon stabbing its beak into the meat of another dead bird. At UNPROFOR you can telephone our commander. They have a nice yellow building, about a hundred and fifty meters away. But you must be very careful because anything could happen to you. — And then what? he said. — Tell them to hang in there. Victory is ours. — I want to run through this one more time, he said. Can I walk to this yellow building from UNPROFOR? — Yes! the man said. — No! said another Muslim. You must request five soldiers to escort you. — You must go by car, insisted a third fighter. And never go alone. — Best to go alone, opined a fourth. That way you'll be less conspicuous to the enemy. — I get it, he said wearily. And will UNPROFOR ask me any questions? — Oh, those Serb-loving bastards! the Bosnian Dragons all shouted. Tell 'em to fuck their mothers! — That was when he had realized that he could not expect and would never have any good advice when he went to wars because wars were by definition processes which strove to make advice obsolete. That was why children, old ladies, mapmakers, commandos and wise men all got holes in their heads. Perfect. There was webbing over the windows of the Hercules, and evil yellow lights glared out of the steel ceiling. He remembered all the hours and days spent on airplanes when they wouldn't let anybody look out the window even when overflying beautiful Greenland because that might pale their movie which crawled so nauseatingly and inanely upon its soulless screen. At least there would be no movie today. A man in green fatigues leaped in and mounted to the cockpit. Another soldier came, slammed the entry hatch behind him, shone his flashlight through that steely room, and also went forward. Just before that one disappeared, he turned back to the traveller and shouted over the engine (for the engine was howling like a spoiled child): After you talk about places you'd rather be, there's not a hell of a lot to say! — It was not going to be a nice day. — A moment later the comedian stuck his face back through the opening. He was smoking a cigarette. He shouted: No rules in war! In Beirut some dumb broad told me smoking's bad for your health. I says to her, I says, that's the least of my worries! — A tight-lashed stack of cargo boxes quivered as the plane began to move. His own bulletproof vest embraced him comfortingly, heavy and firm like a wall against his back and his first love in his lap. The groin protector came down almost to his knees. He tightened the four straps still further so that the weight and rigidity they empowered could more firmly encourage his hollow, fuming stomach (the rest of him was cold, numb and ever so slightly drizzled with sweat), and he felt calm and satisfied that he had prepared himself as well as he could, having not yet learned that a certain grasshopper-green Warsaw Pact vest obtainable only through illegal trade covered the armpits and that special cylinder of flesh beneath the chin, the black market vest's shelter for which consisting of a doughnutlike collar that might be useful as a neckrest for snoozing on long bus rides: You forgot about your carotid artery! sneered one of the many well-wishers one meets in this life. One nick from a bit of shrapnel and you'll bleed to death! But not me, buddy, I went Warsaw; I'm protected! — Trembling, roaring and buzzing, the Hercules departed. The atlas slammed open. And then it was very hot and loud and nothing happened for a long time, and through the window-webbing he saw pale brown hills, bare and riven earth, a vast lake of blue, slightly tinted white. So this was the vortex. The plane was circling again. They were going down. The cargo hatch was already opening as the plane hit the runway, and hot white light poured in. Somebody was shouting. As he ran across the tarmac he saw two plumes of black smoke far away, and he heard a thud. A crash. A thud. A thud. A thud. Among the red-roofed houses across the runway one car moved in the next hour. One house appeared to be raggedly half-finished, as if the workmen didn't know the meaning of a straight line. Black smoke was coming out of it. A thud. He entered the airport sprinting, and they told him to sit on the floor behind a wall of sandbags. A departing journalist in a flak jacket of slender stopping power was pacing, unable to stop whistling. The man lit one cigarette after another with shaking fingers. A crash. A terrifying boom. The UNPROFOR security man behind the desk, which was actually a slab of laminated plywood and fiber-board resting on a radiator and a stack of sandbags, glanced out the window, mildly interested. The nearest minaret had just been brought up to date with a new hole. The security man thought for awhile. Then he got out his camera and took a snapshot, like a dutiful tourist who'd paid admission to a castle or museum of small merit. — Five observers got hit by a mortar round the other day and had to be evacuated, a soldier was saying, and another soldier was explaining on the telephone: Well, we watch to see what they're firing and when they're firing, and write down the serial numbers, so when they say we have only five weapons we can say, look, there are nine hundred and seventy-three fucking weapons and here are the fucking serial numbers. — A French freelancer came in limping. He'd been at the cemetery, filming the latest funeral, and was awarded two shell fragments in his leg. — The traveller, the new boy, sat against his sandbags taking all this in, and finally, recalling the directions of the Bosnian Dragons, said to the security man: So, how do I get to the UNPROFOR encampment? — The security man laughed in his face. — That's your problem, buddy. You can talk to MOVCON if you want, but the answer's gonna be no. — There were good UN guys, too, who shook his hand whenever they went off shift and said: See you later. Keep your head down. — He never did reach the commander in the yellow building to give him the message that victory was ours; a week later, in fact, he was informed that the Serbs had captured him and most of his men; the Bosnian Dragons who gave him this pleasant news, before dismissing him with a well-bred rendering of the Bosnian Dragon anthem on a battery-powered cassette machine, remarked that in any event the detachment in the yellow building had existed with no legal basis prior to its liquidation. — After a day of sitting on his sandbags, hoping doggishly for someone to give him a ride, sipping at his bottle of Zagreb tap water, forbidden, like other personnel not connected to the UN, to use the lavatory, some American journalists took disgusted pity upon his lowliness. At a run he helped carry their video camera cases to the car, which received a solitary bullet during the zoom to town; the hole was a few inches from his ankle. There were three journalists in the car. One was very friendly and kind, one was neutral, and the third, a redhead who never forgot her own admirableness, asked what he was doing here. He said that he was writing a feature. — Oh, my God, the redhead said. He's in features. — They said little to him after that. But they had rescued him; if it hadn't been for them, MOVCON would have made him go back to Zagreb on the last flight. They dropped him at the TV station, which was thick-walled; later somebody else gave him a lift to the Holiday Inn, the journalist hotel; and that night he listened to machine-gunners playing their instruments like musicians in that dark night, one flashlight illuminating the room while the battery powered radio spoke of bananas, and the man whose room it was moved the flashlight a little further from the window to decrease the likelihood that the musicians would shoot into it; came a shell, and then an AK-47 burst in a nasty hard rhythm accompanied by its lethal sparkles, and the radio kept talking about bananas. No more nowhere never. So he went inside the pale green foliage of Canada (too early yet to find those yellow leaves drilled with insect holes of beautiful regularity), not into the clouds or lake; each leaf was a thought with a voice, and because they all whispered at once, none could be heard save by dreamers who heard them all, and having heard so much, the dreamers could not remember the words. They passed Elma with its cut logs and white cross, and right there the fields commenced so that his dreams had to be hotter and sleepier now, wandering under the short-cropped sod. Then the trees rushed back. Tonight I am thin and tall: blue jeans and T-shirt, sexy but vulnerable. I feel disoriented tonight. Sis and I talked for about forty-five minutes. I was shaky and a little too intense for her. You are much more suitable as a midnight confessee (confessor?). It did us both good, Sis and I, to talk. Sitting in her room, I felt I was talked into a patch of black velvet. She wasn't visible, and my eyes made funny lights out of the darkness. Maybe I am seeing the aurora that is her "essence." The only thing clearly visible was the top half of her clock and the folds of her bed ruffle. Intimate conversations with a bed ruffle. I want to reach you but you're not there. The waste of my love goes on tonight. Are first loves always unhappy? This question, which echoed precious, rhetorical, absurd even as he posed it (how desperately serious she'd been! Was her young love better or purer then, that the absence of its object could waste it?) was one he did not know how to answer. Her love had not been unhappy in the end; her husband and three small children had led her to a perfection of a sort (or at least it seemed so to her now, because she might be taken away from them swiftly). — Nor had his own career of the affections been ill-starred. He remembered, for example, one woman gentle and sunny, remembered those long warm beautiful sunny days in her house of joy, the fans turning at different speeds, her hips like music, other white houses seen through the blinds. That had been in Key West. At a quarter till midnight he was sitting in her house with a flamenco album playing; and in a denim shirt she sat with her small dark clipboard upon her jackknifed knees as she smoked a long cigarette, her face a little older than when he'd last seen it three or four years ago but also even dearer, her slender body as taut and lovely as ever. The light from her praying mantis of a lamp outlined the right side of her long oval face and her right leg and knee. She was writing very seriously. She lowered her knees, took a sheet of paper off the clipboard, then brought her knees up again, and he looked at her and remembered how they'd made love all afternoon, six or seven hours! and she'd had her knees around his neck, and she'd had her knees across his chest, and she'd had her knees bent around his waist; and he'd been kissing her cigarette-flavored mouth so many times and then he'd taken her pretty little nipples between his lips. She sat across from him with her knees drawn up like a sweet little frog and the midnight breeze stirred outside and the fan made her fern twitch like his straining face between her thighs, and she sat thinking, with all the oils and graphite sketches on the walls around her. There was a young girl painted six times into the same beach scene: once groping and grabbling in the sand, twice wading in the swirly turquoise sea, once sitting demurely in a wick-erwork beach chair, once gangling her skinny legs as she gazed down at her own wet shadow upon the changing sands; and once squatting with her knees out, showing teeth and tongue in a hilariously rude face. Across the room were the drawings that began her "Venus" series: the constructivist figures which were so elfin and strangely lifelike, black and white and black and white with powerful skeletons showing themselves inside the naked girls. (He'd seen how when she painted the German girl naked she used glowing yellow watercolors with a few blues and oranges to form the translucent bones inside. She gave her long slender arms and legs which were bent but still reaching out for the balance of those beautiful geometries which almost always skulk away from us. The German girl dreamed. When she painted the German girl she flexed her legs and danced around the canvas; she said that she had to paint with her entire body.) She wrote on, not quite smiling. And the next afternoon mangoes were falling outside and a lizard scurried past one of her half-awake cats as she came to him on the sofa wiggling the soft tanned toes that he'd kissed; she was resting now, breathing, her lovely face inside her folded arms, all of her still except for her waist gently contracting in a slow rhythm; then she turned onto her back and her homemade dress rode up above her knees so that he could see again the reddish goldish pubic hair he'd played with all morning; he'd made love to her mainly with his hands, her body so deliciously sentient that a long soft stroking of her back and buttocks could bring her to orgasm as she lay on top of him, riding his thigh (it's all done with hipbones, a lesbian once explained); or a gentle clockwise twirling of his fingers in her vulva could also make her happy. The more hours they spent making love, the wilder he became about her. Whenever he'd given her great pleasure she'd fall down limply on top of him, her breasts and back so rich with sweat that he could draw his hands through it and then lick the droplets off his fingers. During intercourse he felt not only the pleasure and power of giving her joy, and the joy of giving to one who took so happily and well, but also an almost mystical feeling that her body was speaking to his fingers and mouth, saying exactly what was needed and wanted for its happiness, and that because through some miracle his fingers and mouth understood and answered and gave, her body spoke to his with more and more freedom and joy, giving him back all the sweetness he was giving and wanted to give, so that when he slid his hands up and down her back, for instance, his fingers experienced like special molasses seasoned with hibiscus flowers a sensation, as thickly material as that liquid which dripped from her clitoris, and her musky moans perfumed him with joy. He learned her silent signs and ways. When he'd first reach between her buttocks and work his hand farther to the mound of hair, the double lips inside already parted to receive his caress, he'd know by the heaviness of her eyelids and the workings of her throat that he'd found the right way to touch her, and a quarter-hour later, when her pelvis began its first slow inchwormings of joyous measurements, this confirmation that he had understood filled him with thankfulness. — Nonetheless, with her he was impotent. On the very first night with his first condom he'd been able to do the deed, but after that, even though his penis might be rigid with feeling or even need as he played with her during all those hours, it collapsed as soon as he put the rubber on. This was not frustrating for him physically. With her he did not need to ejaculate. He drank his delight through his hands. But he was afraid that no matter how many orgasms he gave her, even when he worked two fingers in deep, thrusting and corkscrewing in ways he could never have done with his penis, no matter how many times she collapsed sweatily against him pounding-hearted, whispering that she was happy, still she might want the other. He was not impotent with anyone else. The reason was simple. She was afraid that without a condom he might give her a fatal disease. Knowing this, every time he put his erection into her he immediately imagined the condom breaking, and then her fear and misery and his guilt, and so his penis would shrink. He explained it to her; she was touched, and kissed him; she understood; but still he worried that she was disappointed in him even though he knew that she wasn't. So that was why he made love to her with his hands. At night, exhausted, he'd fall asleep with his head against her breasts and dream of hands, seeing again Oregon's low barnacled rocks carpeted with kelp's many hands, dark green bulbous fingers open, hands upon hands, the squishy bulbs of fingertips reaching down into crabridden channels where dark snails slowly made their way. Those were the places where the ocean came in, searching out every hidden way. The tide was rising. Green anemones pulsed. Mussels clung to boulders. He slept late beside her, and then they made love all morning and all afternoon. Sometimes they couldn't stop long enough to eat. They made love until twilight. Shy khaki-colored palmetto lizards came out of hiding as it got dark. The two cats chased them or gazed at insects and rotten mangoes, the foliage bending under the weight of its own ranks of fingers, its greenish wrists flexed into downcurves of magnificent idleness which now magnified their authority as the darkness dripped down from the treetops like hot tar and the first cricket began to make its announcements in a voice much less kingly than any voice the leaves would have had if they could speak as they grew down out of darkness. Darkness came like music. Just as in an orchestra the drummer hunches forward, having selected from his convenient palate two sticks with the requisite heads, and begins to thrum one of his giant kettles so lightly, so the first thickening of night rippled quietly down from her thick humid trees as she smiled and kissed her hand to him; he remembered how at the Sydney Opera House the tenor and the soprano had stood before the conductor like a bride and groom before the minister. He saw the flash of trombones as the trio in the orchestra raised them like rifles, taking aim at the musical notes which had called them forth (and again for a moment Sarajevo entered his mind in much the same way as in California a muddy-gray wave can come in, sweeping sideways, having been diverted by a knife-sharp shapelessness of lava, then wheels back home, leaving a semicircular deposit of sand; amidst the raveling of Florida darkness he recalled the construction of a Sarajevo morning; how at six-thirty it would be sunny, empty, quiet; and then suddenly came the ka-chonk-chonk-chonk-chonk of an anti-aircraft gun; a car sped desperately by, and he heard individual shots echoing between buildings; then another car fled squealing, almost tipping over. He heard breaking glass. It was silent and sunny for a moment. A machine-gun burst made the windowpane rattle, and he saw that there was a new hole in the ledge outside. That was how it would be all day. The old mother, smiling and tired, brought in a piece of grenade. — On our balcony. From last night. — The Bosnian Dragons had said: If you are killed we will light seven candles. — That meant that they would kill seven Serbs. — In Karenni State, on the other hand, what he'd thought to be gunshots had been but the explosions of burning trees where refugees cleared the jungle.) The opera interrupted his thoughts. As he peered down the concentric golden rings of an immense tuba's barrel, he wondered if he saw what the doomed fly sees in approaching a pitcher plant. As Lautréamont says, to struggle against evil is to pay it too great a compliment. — Should the fly struggle then? Should anybody struggle against his ominous golden destiny? In the secret jungle village the candleshine had been like liquid in the grooves of the long bamboo table when the Karenni soldier in his tunic with the red emblem poured smilingly from a glowing cloudy bottle of Karenni rice whiskey which tasted both sulphury and sweet, while water ran in the bamboo darkness beneath. To fly into the pitcher plant must be like drinking that whiskey, like drinking light without knowing what might happen. How could one struggle effectively against the unknown? And the choir came out, some of them bald and ugly, some frumpy, some overdressed in diamonds, some shrivelled by the light of their own spectacles. The cymbal-player did not have a gleeful face as he himself would in his position but he was compensated for by the happy gesticulations of the conductor. That was how the oncoming darkness felt. Somebody was making it, sifting down clouds of sweet and spicy trickery like the greenish flash of a Li So woman's skirt. It was a very good darkness. The woman whom he made love to with his hands was still writing, so he went out to the adas and fell into it, the outline of his identity staining place-names below him in just the same fashion that a plane descending into the Great Western Desert of Australia casts its shadow on a land like an immense dead leaf with many veins both black and white; and then, sinking deeper into the lichenous red of that continent darkened by blue haze, it loses itself in uplooining, lands lonely in that vermillion country of purple shrubs and broad low W-shaped gullies, becomes a small silver glint in dirt as red as Mars, its belly almost lapped by yellow grass. It is nothing nowhere nobody. For darkness is so vast and wide. That was the shape of his experience when he went out from the house of joy and descended into the Florida night, meeting at the end of the street a large cemetery hunched behind its diamond-meshed fence, the vaults sometimes three high in an immense U-shaped block like apartments, flowers and flags on the ledges by the nameplates, a fingernail moon overhead, the sound of running water from a dormer-windowed palmridden house across the street. Here and there he saw a low white vault, with palm silhouettes behind. So he spoke to all the dead, asking where they were from, and their silence said that they were from nowhere everywhere, and he wanted to explain that he himself travelled everywhere and perhaps he did explain it after the best conceivable fashion; namely, he said nothing; thus he spoke the language of the dead. — He went back and took his woman by the hand, and they made love until dawn.

But there have been other houses of joy in the world; every neighborhood has one; the gazetteer is riddled with their toponyms, although perhaps not all deserve the name. The center is where we are; thus in travelling we but change our peripheries. One traveller may rule (or be slave to) many, many worlds. And other travellers of course leave the flotsam of their extinguished secret planets and planetoids — a faded photograph, a doll, a lock of hair, a symphony, a mineral brought from who knows where, a baby, a gravestone, a pair of dirty underpants. When he met the surviving wooden panels of Gauguin's House of Joy from that dreamworld we call Oceania—les îles Marquises, to be precise (1901) — he remembered how priests had burned the rest as soon as the artist died, leaving orphaned his bas-relief girls with negroid shell-faces, idol-faces, who dwelled within the world he'd once called "Soyéz mystéieuses." A little yellowish-green pigment remained on their faces; their hair was painted red or bluish-green; one tawny-buttocked nymph grappled at a greenish darkness, gazing at another woman's face which shone in isolation like the moon; as it seemed, the nymph supplicated and the moon gazed back at her and the traveller, tight-lipped. On the far left another woman sadly drowsed, faded like so many of Gauguin's dreams — sentimental, pornographic dreams, yet not without merit; the man wanted to be loved, let's say; he was a traveller; he wanted to possess the alien; his flaw was that he was unwilling to be possessed by it. — The other traveller would have loved to see the viewers made up of Gauguin's elect, which is to say, laughing amorous couples, but by the time people got to Gauguin upstairs in Division Forty-Four their feet hurt and they had already seen ever so many images of nakedness. A whitish-grey rainy light came in. A man rushed down the scuffed tiles, following the camera implanted at the end of his arm. A businesswoman trod dully along, half-gazing at Gauguin's panels. Her fat husband pointed to the one that said SOYEZ AMOUREUSES — VOUS SEREZ HEREUSES* (a seductive snake basking round that message), and she touched her shoulder affectionately. That was good; he was being good; but she but half looked. Nor was she to be blamed; her legs ached, held so unnaturally angled in the high heels. So she passed on to Division Forty-Five without glancing to see whether he would follow, which assuredly meant that she took his following for granted, and that was not so good. But maybe he had failed to consider the high heels. The man gazed at the moon-woman for awhile, listening to the lines of her face, and then went on. For a long time, almost a full minute, the Maison du Jouir was empty, except for the traveller. Those squat naked women waved tirelessly — joylessly, he hated to say; almost grimly; had Gauguin disbelieved his own message? If so, what an unhappy man!. . Across the hall, a glass case sheltered his head of Tehura, carved of pua wood and painted. Tehura was the first of his thirteen-year-old wives. Gauguin wrote home that her skin was "an orgy of chromes." Her shiny face was tilted back forever, her dark eyes almost pupilless holes the shape of seedpods. Light crawled upon her cheekbones and forehead. He wanted to kiss her calm, rich wooden lips. — In Division Forty-Five, smiling ladies were showing their little girls Aristide Maillol's La femme à I'ombrelle (1895). When they came to Gauguin, they peered at Tehura and the Maison du Jouir in silence. Perhaps they were hostile. Perhaps they understood what those women had been to Gauguin and they did not want their daughters to have anything to do with his joy. Perhaps they thought: Old lecher! — In Division Forty-Three, which displayed the works of the École Pont-Aven, they lingered somewhat longer, pointing out to their young females his safely unimpresive still-lives and the harsh Brittany women of his pre-Oceanic period. No danger that anyone would emulate them—and, if they did, no harm done! A landlady's calling is rarely despised. — Supposedly Tahitians, a Canadian woman explained. — His feet hurt, too. He returned to the glass case where Tehura's head lived. Behind it hung Et I'or de leur corps (1901), whose skin-hues rendered the title a misnomer, being brown rather than gold; Gauguin had achieved beautiful expressions for the two girls, whose heads were cocked in patient curiosity, seeking the traveller's eyes which they would never find. But Tehura was the one. In this new crowd there appeared to be a wave of wood-carving enthusiasts, since on his current circuit round the glass case he had leisure only to notice the shiny dark chisel-marks of her hair before eye-pressure and breath-pressure impelled him. Another orbit. That melancholy masklike thing never looked back at him. Even when he brought his head down against the glass and looked straight into her eyesockets, nothing looked back. It was not that she was nothing, only that she would not look. He was on the periphery of the world. Another orbit. This time he aimed his gaze according to a lesser anger of imperialistic intimacy, and was rewarded by her looking almost at him, her lovely, sullen lips not quite parted. Halfway through the next orbit, he glanced across the hall and saw how a crowd was grimacing at the panels of Gauguin's house. A man leaned forward and gazed at Soyez mystérieuses with respect. Another aped him, then walked away humming. What hateful and artificial places museums are! But in Division Forty-Three, a man leaned against a pillar and smiled so lovingly upon a Rousseau. That was good. — It was not (be it said) that the traveller wanted to smash the glass case and run off with Tehura's head, although that might well have been the most honest and committed thing to do. Possession is a myth. One enjoys something or someone for awhile, then ceases to enjoy, either because the loved thing is taken away or because life itself is taken away, or simply because enjoyment is taken away, at which time the fabulous head simply becomes a lump of ennui rendered in wood.

There was a yellow field of rapeseed, and then he had to change in Winnipeg.

They pulled out of Winnipeg at ten, the sky still blue but losing color, the lights on in the houses and buildings across the river. Contingent memories followed him like twin blotches of sunlight keeping a train company along the adjacent rails. Hegel writes about shapes of consciousness which have not yet attained to the perfect abstraction so dear to him; that was one way to characterize them; another was as simple crumbs and scraps one held onto, remnants of life's ceaseless giving, like the wasted golden light on the corners and in the veins of the ranked black concrete squares which floored the platform at the train station at Rome, goldness exploding upwards in tiny occasional spangles when a raindrop hit, while the black railings, though they shone as if varnished, remained still. Now the train began to move; the atlas opened, chancy shapes of light rushed down into the seams perpendicular to the direction of travel to make lines of light; then the bright entrance crept by, and then he was speeding on gravelly tracks between fences and trees, observing the widening slices of Italy between train-tracks. . There was Arabic neon under a hand-painted mouth, the yellow letters crawling like dotted inchworms, policemen in black with white belts and flat black caps and white-striped sleeves, black boots, black moustached faces (Venetian red with a touch of yellow ocher). That was Cairo. I am very disconnected, another woman he'd loved had written, and within ten minutes of your departure wondered why I hadn't called your bluff about running off to Spain. I hope that you are not too sad about everything, and will forgive me for needing things you can't give — and for wanting to — as Ivan would say— "respectfully return my ticket" alone. Being alone is very important to me. I will look into finding you some daguerreotyping equipment next week. Everybody was disconnected. Everybody retained some meaningless recollection or other, like that part of Karl-Marx-Allee with darkish apartment buildings, the Stalin Wall; when Stalin died, they took down his sign quietly in the night.

The woman who'd respectfully returned her ticket wanted to get rid of ill-made furniture, too. How could he blame her for doing that? First of all, he didn't love her more than the others. She needed to be loved exclusively, because she was sad in a different way than he was. While his incompleteness and emptiness made him so lonely that he sometimes couldn't sleep outside of a woman's arms, her own disease was self-hatred. Once he sent her a photograph in which, so he'd thought, her beauty had been definitively proved, and she thought it ugly, although at least she didn't throw it away. Some gray and cloudy species of dreariness, some foreign chemical or trace, had invaded her and inflamed her with listless sorrow long before they'd ever met, clinging to her like a poisonous mucus, and although he wanted to brush it away he couldn't; he didn't know how. His own need-driven selfishness, which she'd later name his culpability, only added to her hurt. Because she could not see her own excellence, his compliments rang sarcastic in her ears; sometimes he felt so guilty for hurting her that he wanted to kneel down and give her a revolver and respectfully request that she shoot him. How could he make her see how rare she was, how specially strange? Sometimes for a moment she'd smile at him through her guardedness and pain. But he could not be loyal only to her, and when he was with her he couldn't leave her alone. He'd take her hand on the subway, for instance, until she became angry, interpreting this as a kind of exhibitionistic possessive-ness or territorialism, like a dog marking ownership by means of pungent liquid irrelevancies, when in fact his was a different kind of selfishness, that same desperate loneliness which compelled him to take her hand again and again until she practically shook him off. He was not really bad, just greedy and unmeritorious. (She wasn't perfect, either.) Behind his screen of consideration, sincere though it was, he operated almost ruthlessly, so that his filthy love-claws hurt her again and again.

Clasping her pale amis behind her back as she gazed into a glass case filled with golden figures in some museum, she might have felt distracted from her struggle against the gray cloud if he were with her, because she truly liked someone to identify things to, thereby confirming her empire of names (when he asked what her favorite thing was, she said: Probably the funerary couch), but he just felt sulky and sorry for himself remembering the walnut-paneled hotel room in Philadelphia, with snow outside and the hazy peace inside from her cigarette smoke, the old room with its pale beige moldings, its browns and off-golds behind the netting curtains which hid the white sky and brick towers and roofs. The next morning all the snow had melted. The lobby's black and white floor-diamonds swarmed around her when she went out. In the window-ledges, the holes in the heater-grilles were as big as fingertips. The dark wood around them was cracked by the hot air which had fought so many winters. He stood watching her dwindle through the picture window; she was in a hurry to make her train. A rotund man in a black trench-coat stood with his hands in his pockets, his face pale, his eyes glittering like wet blackberries past their season; and the man was leaning beside the brass-bordered mirror. With a strange start of jealous anger, he understood that the man was watching her also. She never looked back. Possibly she didn't know he could see her. His own train, leaving, followed the parallel wildernesses of track, sooty arches and old snow. The blue sky clouded over with ugly birds. He passed buildings, bare trees old and dirty and dreary, crossed the wide straight river. Useless. He gazed at black tree-fingers in the reddish-brown dirt of spring. Broken-windowed houses looked back at him from over the railroad tracks; that was that. She'd said: You don't love me, and he said again that he did, and she said: I believe you think that you love me. I believe you love me as much as you can. — He sat there, sad and heavy and guilty. That was in the summertime when it was very hot. She made love with him only twice that time, once on the first night and once on the last. The first time he'd seduced her and afterward she'd said: It's not fair for you to make me want you. — The other time she'd done it as a surprise, probably out of pity. As soon as it was over she'd gotten out of bed, put on her clothes and sat staring at him from the other side of the room. The rest of the time they were at museums and she said: Come look at this calligraphy. — Memory-pictures crowded past like the high alert buttocks of cyclists speeding so silently down the river drive. Everything which he now recollected on that train was as clear as another glass of horseradish vodka with the meniscus trembling so alertly on the table whose red roses were less ruby-dark than the wine in the other goblets; the pianist sent out happiness in firm rhythms, turning his bald head in swivels of pleasure; the woman in the dress which was a meadow of black roses moved forward to kiss him, leaned back forking her mushrooms vol-au-vent, smiling, her shoulders shining; and the disk below the stem of his water glass burst into a dozen rainbows; and the beauty in the black dress was happy and frowned and ordered more wine, clasping her breastbone. That night the light had been a crooked bamboo pole in the red cushions of booths, and the woman in the black dress had brought his hand to her lips like autumn's river slow and strange. The crazy piano-notes sank into the coriander vodka; and after more coriander vodka he looked up and the woman in the black dress was gone, only the crumpled white napkin which had touched her mouth remaining to mark her. He sat still for awhile. Then he picked up the napkin and put his face to its lipstick stain. After he'd paid their bill he went outside and stood there for awhile gazing down the long street-canals which sparkled with cabs like square yellow beads. .

He was on that train all night and all day and all night and half the next day, so he came to know the Chinese cook, who'd pretend to charge him two hundred dollars instead of two for a couple of sodas; he'd tell the cook that the check was in the mail and then they'd both laugh; he got a crush on the black waitress, who always smiled and spoke softly and gently when she served his eggs and bacon (she put in extra toast); and his memories spilled ahead like the reflections of sedge-bundles in the ponds.

The river itself was calm, salt-blue in the twilight except for the rich brown shadows that hugged the far side under the trees. He remembered how the Nile, less modest than wide, became greenish-brown where deep, greenish-blue where shallow. Wide wet sandbars were hued like burned corn. The ship passed a yellow sand-hill crowned with tombs like anthills; and a long-necked ibis lurked among the oleanders on Lord Kitchener's island, which was an undulating green tree-strip. The tomb is the future. Perhaps that is why some people are not happy at the turning of the year. By chance he'd attended one Chinese New Year in Opium City. Across the border he'd seen the richly colored Hell Banknotes which the Chinese burned for their ancestors, so he expected fire, which there was, but where lay the joy of the future's dreams? Above that monotonous guitar song in a minor key, a strong raspy soldier-voice was singing to wordless people who danced strangely around a smoky sparky bonfire. — Mainly soldiers from the front, an old veteran said. This festival to make them happy. — Their dark uniforms were thick with sadness as they danced round and round in the cold and foggy darkness. Occasionally they did sing; he even heard all voices raised. Clouds of breath rose like smoke above the arc lights in the black sky. The voices chanted and then were silent. — Strange to admit that this occasion had no more sap than a dead branch, whereas a cave he'd once entered in Tasmania had been almost vivacious with inhuman strangeness from its very mouth where ferny darkness shattered the light into a billion bedraggled strings of limestone like carrots, fat leaves, spearheads; deeper in, bleached cave-spiders surveyed him from walls textured and webbed; there was a peace to this place without sadness, a patient transformation of water into rock which knew little of life and so could not be tortured by it; its history was written only in candle-white stalactites growing down to a pond. It had a sky, possessed its still white constellation of glowworms in the blackness. In that cave there was only eternity to fear. Hell is anything which continues long enough. He remembered a sunken bubble of a Jerusalem teahouse whose domed ceiling was whitewashed and arched, and as he sat in a cushioned niche drinking mulled cider against the chill a young Jew came to him and drew a picture of a dove. The Jew wished him shalom, which means peace, love, happiness, freedom, and all dreams coming true. He said that the young dove he had drawn wished only to live. The Jew's sweetness uplifted him. He was not in hell. But in another niche a man with glowing eyes, filled with the same pride and tenderness, expressed that spirit with words that sought to persuade, compel, dominate. His victim, a young Jewish-American girl, cringed miserably before him. He leaned toward her and said: Do you really like this country? Do you think the mentality and spirituality of this country fit you? — I don't know, replied the girl as bravely as she could. I'm here to find out. — You see, I know a guy, the man said. He came to open a business here. But, you know, he was not happy. This kind of thing disturbs me. That's why I must ask you. — There was no levity in this man, only a merciless sincerity. The girl struggled to speak, but he silenced her with a wave of his hand and told her: I think what you have already seen, that is enough. You must not wait any longer to make up your mind. — The poor girl was weeping. He would not let her alone. He said: To be a Jew in Israel, you must have some deep roots; you must be ready to get married and live the life. Elsewhere, you are only a Jew. Here it is different. If you're asking me, your place as a Jew is here. — There was an impressive quality to the man which only made his speechifying more unpleasant. And yet it was not meant as bullying at all. Another day he who travelled and watched arrived at the Western Wall, where two checkpoint police in blue knife-proof vests met him in a happy spirit. One of the pair said: Why don't you go in the army? The army's very good. . — and put his hand on his shoulder. The physical contact felt warm and loving. The policeman was proud of who he was. He wanted to help Israel; he also wanted to give this stranger before him a place in the world. His wish was heartfelt and had to be respected. Beneath palms and white towers he saw a sticker: EVERY YESHIVA SHOULD JOIN ISRAEL'S ARMY. EVERY JEWISH STUDENT SHOULD JOIN A YESHIVA. He ascended the Citadel wall, peered through the slits once used to pour boiling oil down on besiegers; went out and down the narrow street lined with handwoven scarves and tablecloths, rugs, leather purses and belts, fringed bedspreads, mounds of coriander, and, passing a coffee shop which was bright with caged birds he found himself at the edge of the Jewish zone. Green-garbed soldiers with Uzis stood tense and ready. He passed through a doorway and came out into the Arab side where two men in blue windbreakers that said POLICE were forcing couples to disengage hands; and he decided to visit the Aqsa mosque. He took off his shoes. Two Jewish soldiers were sitting on the wide flagstones, guarding rows of soldier-boots. — I'd like to kill all the dirty stinking Arabs, one said. — He entered the mosque, loving the blue tiles inscribed with Qur'anic verses. Some Jewish extremists had planted a bomb underneath but it hadn't gone off. Inside was the same still hollowed-out beauty as in the Tasmanian cave. Calligraphed Arabic letters rose like swords. There were silver flowers and disks on the ceiling, and the pillars were marbled like halvah. He saw some Qur'ans on a shelf at the rear; people were borrowing them like hymnals. He went to look at one, and a man screamed: Not allowed! and all the other people in that mosque regarded him with hatred. He went outside and was trying to understand the Dome of the Rock with his eyes when the hour for Muslim prayer arrived and an Arab yelled at him: Okay, the show is over! Get out! — And so he returned to the Jewish side, where two soldiers in green parkas stood beside a metal detector. An Arab passed through the metal detector and it did not go off. The soldiers called him back and frisked him roughly. An Orthodox Jew with long sidelocks set off the metal detector and the soldiers smiled and waved him through. Then it was his turn. The metal detector was silent. They didn't frisk him but they searched his bag. Not looking back, he walked down the arched tunnel, toward the flag with the blue stripes and the blue star. . YOU ARE PRESENTLY IN THE AREA OF THE WESTERN WALL. YOU ARE KINDLY REQUESTED TO FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS OF THE GUARDS AND TO SAFEGUARD THE SANCTITY OF THE HOLY SITE. THE FOLLOWING ARE PROHIBITED… A soldier with a machine-gun strolled slowly across the worn white stones. — The train continued to move slowly as it came into a swollen blood vessel of track, then shadowed a long wall of boxcars overhung by whitish-yellow lights on poles.

Then the train was vibrating across a flatness of dark brownish-greenish grass under a dark slate sky with power towers making tall black skeletons of interlocking triangles and a radio tower flashing like lightning far away under the night's thunderhead. He wandered through sleep that was like the soft wet grass between birch trees.

In the morning he saw that it had rained, and waking quickly he remembered Madagascar right away with the umbrellas unfurling well before six in Antananarivo, rising like mushrooms on cobblestones still wet with rain; the green tree above the sand like an immense lung whose alveoli were spreading green trunks, the women carrying their brooms bristles upward, handles upright like flagstaff's in the hollows of their arms: these brought morning to the dirt street walled with low brick houses. He loved someone there whom he would never marry. She knew that. He had never lied to her. But she waited, and wrote him letters, which he kept in the same drawer as the letters of his first love and all the other loves, and slowly the letters became overaccommodating, desperate, and then bitter, and it was his fault, even though whatever pain his first love had caused him was not her fault; which apparent contradiction demonstrated the failure of classical theories. What physicists call blackbodies, namely, hollow heated solids from which radiation passes out through a tiny hole, the rest of the solid being entirely black, prove through their spectra that energy is released in discrete quanta instead of in a continuous stream. He could see himself and the Malagasy woman as facing blackbodies (although her body alone was black), each radiating need and sullen resentment and lust and hope and love and all the other wavelengths in the spectrum, glowing only through their tiny sexual orifices which connected directly with their souls; but the steadiness of hysterical light was only an illusion; they were really and sincerely pulsing very quickly as they locked lips and children leaned out and ran while fresh meat began to go rancid in sizzling brick windows; and he was the one who had the orgasm of responsibility; he was the one to be blamed. He decided never to go back there and then he felt lonely so he went back there. She stroked his sunwarmed shoulders. She said: Je constate tous mes erreurs en te disant que tu n'étais pas gentil et tous nos petites disputes, je — je — je t'aimais trop et je t'aime encore plus, voila pourquoi j'ai faite comme cela… — and he said: Please don't talk like that, honey; 1 myself love you so much. — She said: When I think about you, I cry alone in my house. (A barefoot man in rags came walking past the hot green place where women were washing their clothes in the brown river. He balanced a long narrow cardboard box on his head. He held his hat in his hand. Why was he so familiar, like Madame Bovary's blind beggar? Had it been when the train was pulling out of Bangkok that he'd seen a man sleeping on concrete with his knees up beside a greenish canal in which so many trees reflected themselves as they groped down between blue continents of reflected sky? That man and the one in Antananarivo were brothers who would never meet. But if that were true, were rich men also brothers? And whom was he himself the brother to? Again from the Vatican he remembered snowy double curves of ceiling embellished by golden circles of crowns and angels; from these spheres crossed elaborate wreaths between whose legs lived paintings of rampant lions, monuments, beautiful and terrifying processions, and the ceiling's Saharas of whiteness which separated these entities swarmed with angels. These maps and diagrams were intended to demonstrate to him his relatedness to other beings in this world. Somewhere the two beggars were affixed like stars, still with the same sunken eyes of hunger and sadness, but the Celestial Painter had dressed them in royal purple and their hair glistened and the line between them had been painted in gold. Was there somewhere that those men could truly partake of the existence of angels? He couldn't believe it.) In Madagascar he wanted to explain himself and couldn't. He tried to please her and couldn't. She led him beneath the trees whose heads were as pale and lacy as carrot-tops; and together they journeyed across red and purple earths. — You no same before! she kept saying sorrowfully. Oh, your character not so good now! — And she turned away from him and played Malagasy solitaire, sweating in the hot tobacco breeze. She'd gained a little weight. Her breasts now reminded him of those clusters of green bananas that hang off the trees like grenades. They were now mostly silent together, those two, she playing cards, he slapping his mosquito bites and gazing at the rain that fell upon the street. He watched the bright white sky, the weird pale green trees spreading in the square, the dirty kids laughing, showing white teeth. He kept thinking: What's the use? — He tried to compliment her; one night he pointed to a calendar girl and said that she herself was that beautiful and more so. She thanked him spiritlessly. (Before, when he honey-talked her she'd smile, set down her rum bottle, and give him a big wet kiss, saying: Merci, mon amour. .) Two days later, unable to digest the insult after all, she began screaming at him in rage. It turned out that he'd said the worst thing. The calendar girl was of another race, hence ugly. — But me no want problem with you, so just smile, speak thank you! she shouted. Oh, you no good! — It was like the time in Afghanistan during the war when Suleiman was sick. His medicine was in his packsack which was locked away; and Suleiman was too poor to have medicine of his own, of course. Gholam Sayed kept saying: Suleiman is ill, Suleiman is ill. — But Poor Man had the key and Poor Man was asleep. Old Elias, the malik of the village, had warned him never to wake Poor Man. Without Poor Man the Russians would get them, so his concentration must never be molested. — Who else has the key, then? he asked Elias, knowing that someone did but forgetting the name. — No answer, either because Elias didn't understand or else because by asking he was breaking some commandment unknown to him. Suleiman lay feverish. He asked Suleiman if he wanted him to wake up Poor Man. Suleiman lowered his head and whispered no. So they all sat there staring at one another in the hot red dust; and then Gholam Sayed said again, more accusingly: Suleiman is sick! — If you care for him get the key, he replied, angry now. Then I can open my pack and get a pill for him. — The oratorical effect of this speech was somewhat lost, as he had to consult his Pushtu-English dictionary for every second word. (He would have preferred to be as reclusive as a crow dodging under a bridge.) — Gholam Sayed said nothing. — I don't know how to find the key without waking Poor Man, he added, or would have, but the dictionary didn't have the words find, locate or discover. He couldn't think what other words to look for. He had never been good at crossword puzzles. (The dictionary was really a disappointment.) He managed to say: It's difficult for me. I am a foreigner. It's not difficult for you. You are a mujahid. — Then suddenly Gholam Sayed announced: Suleiman is not sick. — He says he's sick, so he's sick, the traveller insisted. Help him. Or show me how to help him. — It's Ramazan, said Gholam Sayed. Muslim no eat. No drink. — If a man is sick, the traveller replied, then no Ramazan. — At this, Gholam Sayed pointed to Suleiman and said something disparaging. The traveller didn't understand. Then he pointed to the traveller, indicated breasts on him, pointed to Suleiman and said: He want. . and made his culture's equivalent of a representative gesture which suggested that Gholam Sayed, at least, squatted when he did it. They were all Muslim missionaries so maybe they didn't need the missionary position. Whether or not Suleiman had designs on him, the traveller didn't really care. Walking up the unnerving cliffsides, Suleiman had held his arm. He'd picked fruit for him, held his hand in friendship when they walked. Suleiman had helped him. Suleiman was sick and he was not helping Suleiman. — He said he's sick, so he's sick, he cried. Help Suleiman! — It's Ramazan, returned the implacable Gholam Sayed. Muslim no eat, no drink. — The traveller went to look for the other man with the key but didn't see him, so he came back, and Suleiman was moaning with fever and Gholam Sayed was standing there grinning. — He gave Gholam Sayed a push. (Gholam Sayed had pushed him many times on the journey across the border. Once he'd been weak with dysentery and Gholam Sayed had shoved a machine-gun butt into the small of his back.) — Help Suleiman, he said. — He is no sick, said Gholam Sayed. — You are a liar, he said. — It's Ramazan, Gholam Sayed replied. — You are no Muslim if you will not help your brother, the traveller said, fearing these words even as they came out. Those were the kind of words that made people kill. — I am Muslim, said Gholam Sayed simply, grandly, contemptuously. Suleiman is Muslim. You are no Muslim.

And yet love and friendship were not always skulls with no minds. There had been that wife so gentle and sunny in Key West (no matter that she hesitated to meet him again). There had been the one in Bangkok. As for the others, could there be any whose recollection he'd ever fail to praise? Their tears and reproaches, silences, farewells, laughter and whispered words were marked on the atlas pages like nations. The ones who'd loved him still and the ones who'd sent him away, he loved them all so much that it stopped his breath. Proud of them, grateful he was, to each from the very first who'd flashed her young head, telling him no and not yet and not anymore while she ran her fingers through her long blonde hair, whose absence she now concealed with wigs, to the last one, the quiet one, the one they'd exultantly warned him was mysterious. She was the one who told him that anytime he wanted to die she would help him by strangling or stabbing as he preferred, after which she'd bury him in a hole. She was very practical and had killed before. She had dark hair which she sometimes braided; and he loved to take a braid in his hand, lean down and kiss it. Her pale oval face had a delicious odor. Her big hand would reach for his own and lift it to her lips. Then she'd kiss and lick and suck the back of his hand. He could feel her hot wet tongue on his skin. Sometimes they came together mouth to mouth and her tongue would go inside him and she'd hold him tight and stroke his hair. They held hands for hours. He had fallen in love and told her so. She said she loved him. She said: I'm sorry I'm such a shitty lover. — That was because she wouldn't fuck him anymore. Fuck was the word she used. She'd taught her little son and daughter to say fuck and dick and cunt. On her ancient car, whose transmission was senile, whose first gear was dead, whose front passenger seat consisted of the floor, on which her lesbian friends sometimes coupled— on this car of hers, which she loved, were painted a devil and a woman transacting cunnilingus. An old hippie walked by and muttered: Wow, it's flashback time! — The mysterious woman liked girls, and would sometimes bring him to strip bars, saying: That one's really horrible! or: That girl is so beautiful I want to eat her cunt! Look at her pretty cunt! Do you want to fuck her, too? — Sure, he always said. I'd do her. — And he drank his beer. The girl on stage stuck her rear out at them, bent over and studied them upside down from between her legs. He took the hand of the woman he loved, the big warm hand, and said: If you could do just one thing to her, what would it be? — I'd snuggle her and give her a long, long orgasm, she replied. — Later it was too sad to view clearly those pictures of the past as he sat in another hot dry hotel room gazing out at a long blue blade of mountain holding up fog and rain. But the first chilly night in their tiny hotel room in Billings when he'd kissed her lips for the first time and taken her big breasts in his hands right through the sweater, he'd known that she had borne him out of everywhere somewhere nowhere, all the way to the capital city of the central continent; the atlas opened. As they made love she gently ran her fingernails over him (your skin marks so easily! she said in wonder); and she fucked him again, whispering that she wanted him to put one of his pistols in her mouth, which he didn't do, and in the morning they took each other again and then she went into the shower and he could not help following her any more than if she had been a taxidermist holding him by a loop of wire through his eye sockets; he was soaping her off when she said: I don't want to fuck anymore. — OK, he said. Are you sore? — No. — He hadn't understood. All day he continued in his joyous ignorance, kissing her mouth, holding both of her hands. She always kissed back, and his penis was firm and ready like his heart. Even though she'd kept her lips closed that last time in bed, he skated along, thinking himself well-shod when all he wore were his assumptions. So together they unlocked the door of the hotel room in Bozeman and she said: Didn't you hear me? I wanted two beds. — He looked at her in amazement. It was a pity that he couldn't later see his own face at that moment, because it must have looked so comically befuddled. — You don't want to screw me anymore? he said finally. — No. — Why? — I just don't feel it. — OK, he said. I'll sleep on the floor. — But she didn't want him to sleep on the floor. She said she'd go talk to the clerk and get two rooms. He asked her not to, please. He would much rather sleep on the floor than face still another humiliation, although he well knew that he ought not to be affected by any opinion of the clerk's; he was weak and shy just then. Then she said he could sleep in the double bed, but he didn't want to. Perhaps he appeared contrary, although he wasn't. Neither is Aadorf (47.30 N, 8.54 E) the same as Aadorp (52.22 N, 6.37 E). She said she couldn't bear to have him sleep on the floor. So he lay just under the bedspread with his face turned away, limbs tensed, alertness stiffly resident in every muscle and tendon as if he were one of those animatrons at Las Vegas (It was taken directly out of the movie and recreated, said the tour guide; it was spectacular to watch them put it up; in one day they'd have an entire part done!); and his soul correspondingly stiffened into vile green spurious crystal spires of anxiety like tourmaline because there was nothing that his clenched body could do or grasp or fight. He heard her sleeping peacefully. She lolled naked on the sheet, and the sight of that body which he had known and thought to know again and could now not touch inflamed him with rage and grief. After three or four of those caged hours he double-dosed himself with sleeping pills. She continued very gentle and open and cheerful. At night when he was sleepy she'd squeeze his hand and whisper: You're so pretty! and although each morning he awoke aching with loneliness and sorrow, her gentle darling ways always won him over anew because throughout the day she was beside him holding his hand. He felt so happy with her! He loved her so very much! One autumn's midnight they were driving from Idaho to Montana in a storm whose white rays of snow sped towards them in an explosion like silent fireworks; lines rushed outward from a central perspective point which eluded them and drew them on as they ascended the pass, snow deeper and deeper on the road and they had no chains. — This is crazy! she laughed. It's so, so beautiful! Thank you for bringing me with you. — And for hours of dark snowy rivers she squeezed his hand and he would have kissed her but it was not about that. He'd cooked elk and venison for her that night and she had said that it was delicious and he had asked her if they would be lovers again and she'd said: I'm not sure. — She said: Sometimes I look at you and I really want you. Other times I don't. — Her eyes shone when she looked at him, and she smiled and said that she loved him. He threw his amis around her. She said that she couldn't decide anything, that she was sorry, that maybe he should just hit her over the head and take her. He listened and actually considered it, but for him that game was too fearful to play. What if he started and couldn't stop? Rape and murder and suicide shone hypothetically before him, grimly equidistant beacons of love indicated on the atlas page by scarlet pentagrams. He told her he didn't think he could do that. She said she didn't think he could, either. Slowly and thoroughly she licked his hand. The snow-trails were like shooting stars. They reached the summit and began to come down into Montana where a snowplow whined feebly up the mountain, with snow thick ahead of it and new snow behind. He felt so close to her. In pioneer days it must have been that way and more, a man and a woman travelling on together, helping one another, needing each other, not knowing whether they'd make it. These days there seemed no penalty for not being sure. The atlas opened; easy pages lay ahead. When they came into Missoula an hour later he told her to pick the motel and then said as always: One room or two? and she smiled tenderly and said: Two, and he smiled back and rushed out of the car before she could see him crying. It was absurd. — It'd be a lot cheaper for you if you just got one room with two beds, said the night manager. — I think I'll take two rooms, he said. — He brought her her key as she sat there in the car with the motor on and he said goodnight and ran to his own door several rooms down, but as he set down his pack to pull the key out of his pocket he saw her standing there beside him in the cold darkness smiling and his heart flowered until she said again: Goodnight, and she took his head in her hands and kissed him. — Goodnight, he said. — Then he went inside, flung himself down on his bed, and wept. Did it count that he only wept for five minutes? Anyway, why snivel at all? She did love him. Others loved him. If he wanted sex or just a woman to hold in his arms all night there would be an escort service. There'd been a night when he'd asked her: One room or two? and she'd cried: I don't know! so of course he got them one and she undressed and said she felt sleepy and said she just really didn't want to very much now and said: You can jack off or whatever the fuck you want! and added gently: I'm sorry… so he'd waited until she made her darling sleeping sounds, hearing which he rolled stealthily toward her until his knee grazed her buttock and that touch alone was able to keep him happy all night. In the morning she rolled into his arms and began sighing and deeply kissing him and they'd made love. That was the last time they slept in the same room. But on the last night of their journey, they went to see a movie about a boy who ran away from home, and the boy was so happily leaving everything behind on that early summer morning of green forests that he who watched was uplifted (throughout that film, which she'd chosen, she held his hand); so he no longer ached or wondered or sorrowed but just kissed her goodnight in the parking lot of their latest motel as she shivered in her leather jacket and he said to her: Darling, I love you so much. — And he strode quickly and happily to his room without looking back.

Later, of course, he cried.

Past The Pas the spruces were as narrow as wolves' tails and there were ripply warm brown rivers. Cormorant Lake was a pale miniature sea. There was swamp, and then muskeg, and white birch flashing and thrumming by. They passed silver lakes in the green-walled dusk.

Came a blue dawn of tiny skinny trees, of lake and lichen. He was approaching the edge of the continent, soft and flat and wet, speckled and boggy. Some lakes were blue with pulsing stripes of paleness in the breeze. Waterdrops struck the train window, making transparent worlds. The ground was now itself a map, the lakes minuscule blue continents in a greenish sea, all unfamiliar, and so many of them, countries he'd never known before. The world was larger than he had thought.

An old Inuk couple sat drinking from economy-sized bottles of ginger ale and staring alertly out the window, looking for animals. The man's dark hands were the color of bloodstains, the web between thumb and forefinger snug over the other wrist. The woman, who was fat, never stopped smiling. Sometimes they spotted small flocks of Canada geese resting on the tundra and watched them in silence. Sometimes the old man divorced his veincorded reddish hands, leaned, coughed, and spat into the wastebag.

The ground was pale with lichened tussocks. The dwarf spruces' branch-ends were like strange green-toed claws. Memories landed on him with a mosquito's six-legged crouch.

They came into Churchill where the land was spongy brown and green, with so many indigo Swiss cheese holes, with flat olive-colored trees along the river's bank, ocher sand-islands, small infrequent patches of snow like crusty flakes of dryness in the soggy boggy ground, and ahead the sharp cracked white ice of the bay forest with patches of bog eaten out of them. The atlas closed. His train riding was finished. No more nobody never. He was in the snow country now.

He had read Snow Country long ago one Arctic summer in Pond Inlet when people were hunting narwhals. Pond Inlet lies considerably north of Churchill, and the landscape is different. East of the dump, perhaps a thousand paces from shore, a stream wound through a rich bed of moss. If you walked up this green S-shaped valley you reached a triangular arroyo whose walls hid ice and waterfalls. Above, climbing the black-lichened steps of these white and orange cliffs, you reached a green ridge that looked down on the sea where a Ski-Doo slid bravely along one of the last solid spans of ice and the sun was long and white on Bylot Island. A shot sounded. Water trickled down beneath banks of dirty snow (which resembled the black-lichened white rocks). Listening to the splashes of the dying animal, he remembered the book's first sentence, variously translated as: The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country and After the long border tunnel, the snow country appeared. It reminded him of that Faulkner sentence Soon now they would enter the delta. Snow Country is a hundred and seventy-five pages long, and its palm-of-the-hand reduction a mere eleven, yet old Kawabata, who they say was shy and wise and lonely and who gassed himself, not long after receiving his Nobel Prize, kept this sentence even in the shorter version. It was the backbone of the world he must miniaturize. The train emerged from the long border tunnel into the snow country. The snow country was for Kawabata's protagonist the end of this world and the beginning of another, the country of pure mountains of sunset crystal which all tunnels are supposed to lead to, the zone of that uncanny whiteness hymned by Poe and Melville, the pole of transcendence. But on the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, although it was snowing outside and there had been a tunnel, ladies sat reading glamour magazines or drinking piping hot canned tea, while businessmen dozed or fuddled over their papers. No one had been transcended. The snow country was to the north, but they were going west. Yuki said that the snow country had been grossly developed since Kawabata's time. (Yuki was the traveller's wife.) She said that it would be difficult to find sensitively decaying geishas in the hot springs now. He looked out the window and everything was ugly, dreary and clean. Now they passed Mount Fuji's broad paleness. Yuki's father had taken her there when she was five. Her father had put her on a horse when she got tired. It had been summer season, and so beautiful, she said. The top half of the mountain had refracted a special purple color into her soul. He gazed at Fuji's dull snow far above so many dull white apartments and could not see any beauty. The train was born from the lengthy border tunnel; it came into the snow country. Behind Yuki, a man in a silk suit gaped his lips blackly, the lower side of his mouth sagging from right to left. He looked dead. It was too warm in the car although outside it was very cold. The tiny old conductor, whose cap seemed larger than his head, pigeon-toed his slow and pensive way up the aisle. A girl in a sky-blue miniskirt passed, offering a tray of cartons which could have been anything from yogurt to wine. Now they flashed in and out of so many hollowed-out mountains and it was snowing but they were not and would never be in the snow country. From the long border tunnel the train came out into the snow country. There was no border, no special world. Ahead grew more swarms of houses and factories. Fuji was getting closer while she slept. The lower part of Fuji was grayish-green; it could have been the base of a cinder cone in the American west. Smokestacks offered their gruesome twisting homage. Then the train was past. Later they rushed through a snowstorm and it was lovely and white on greenish mountains and raindrops crawled sideways on the windows. In Pond Inlet the stream glowed mirror-like in the moss, and the mosquitoes swarmed. It was almost windless. The evening was the wannest time. Mosquitoes straddled his chin and knees and fingers; when he slapped one he killed three. Dead mosquitoes smeared his clothes. — In the sun's tail, floes glowed coolly. The Ski-Doo had stopped in a glowing yellow place, and presently the shot sounded. But now the stream was frozen and covered with snow, the mosquitoes were all dead, the narwhals were gone for the year, and the solid ice was back. From the long tunnel the train pulled out, across the border into the snow country. He remembered the strange, richly chilly colors which Kawabata's lovers, so distant from themselves and each other, saw through the frosted windows of the snow country. Life lay outside the windows; it throve only where the sunset's rays struck snowdrifts, everywhere nowhere everywhere. — He got off the train.

What then? What had he found? What use had he made of his devices? (In Churchill's bright windy days, silver-brown light drained curvily in the river's tidal flats, flowers nodding their purple heads, belugas in the river like immense ivory-colored snails, birds overhead. The wheat cars were now open, a few kernels lying on the bottom. He ate them raw, crunching them in his teeth. He saw that the water in the river was the same color as the mud: not gray, not blue, but a sunny silver-blue all shimmery like the belly of a fish.) This book being a palindrome, and this tale being the central and infinitely regressive metonym thereof, one might hope by now to have established the center of our traveller's world, but the Earth itself is scarcely a sphere, only an asymmetric rotational spheroid — that is, a pear — and so the reference point, the map of magma which lies precisely halfway through our atlas, is not quite where intuition might lead us to expect. Then, too, mass displacements occur beneath our feet and no one knows their laws. But, as I've said, cannot we make our own planets wherever we go, with even our own idées fixes or lunar satellites to accompany us in orbits of measurable eccentricity? He'd once breakfasted at a café in Avignon, and the food was good so he returned the next morning, discovering himself to be at the center of a polished world of tables, those square lakes reflecting the chestnut trees' green mottlings and marblings even while shaded by snowy awnings. It was a vantage-point for gazing, as the Frenchmen did, at the sunny greater world of cars and breasty women while imbibing a café au lait so deliciously milky-bitter, the foam yellowish-brown like crème brûlée; beside it a fresh croissant half coiled itself, flanked by two thimble-sized butter dishes, a tiny ribbed cylinder of apricot preserves, and a hot chocolate like a grayish-blue cumulus cloud — everything in immaculate white china, the hot chocolate and its complementary milk in two white pitchers each of which was petite enough to close one's hand around, while the fresh orange juice existed imperially distinct in its silver-clear glass. From his table and the world of tables extended the whole world in a succession of unpredictably angled streets which were sometimes trapezoidal when two old buildings faced strangely; streets walled by ancient stone houses with lion-headed knockers, streets sometimes asphalted and sometimes cobbled, sometimes blistered with stones; some streets were long tunnels of plane or chestnut trees that ran all the way to the city wall which bent around the ends of the world. That was the world for but a day or three, and then he had to leave Avignon. His satellite followed him, revolving everywhere nowhere everywhere. His satellite was the atlas. It flapped its pages like an immense square bird, beguiling and terrifying him with its pursuit. Had he been courageous enough to leap onto the page which spoke most sweetly to his heart, the recession of that moon of his would cease; he'd be troubled no more. But he did not do it; he could not. On the lower terrace of the Cliff House in San Francisco one free spirit of an old fellow ran a strange concession whose hours depended on the weather and his own moods. The business was a giant camera obscura. It cost a dollar to go inside. Within the circular railing lay a world-bowl across which long foamy breakers kept running, tilting and curving and rotating as they ran, the birds overflying them in strange swoops because the world was slowly rolling over! In this world-sea, comber-striped like Jupiter, waves raced upside-down to spill down seal-rocks; and on the beach ceiling out-of-focus people lived feet upwards like flies. Sometimes their world was dismal gray and blurred, sometimes so bright and blue. The lens went round and round. And the people kept walking and breathing, not knowing that they were in the camera obscura's world. A little girl, rightside up now, struggled happily across the sand. Headlight-eyes sparkled like mica on the road above Ocean Beach. Spinning foam-braids brought the world time, and a concave horizon sagged sleepily in upon itself. The girl was lost. The traveller was lost. Lives sped like arrows, and the world turned upside down again with the turning of the great lens. The world was so blue and so excellent, and even though it was just outside this dark room, he could never get there. If he were to climb over the railing and lie down in that pale bowl upon which the lens projected its findings, then he could not get there, either, even though the image of that world might be tattooed upon him. The world was lost, and the more precious for being so. Was that so strange? Was it the secret at the center of the world, that the rest is lost?

The long blue train stretched a good half mile. Everybody had climbed down now into the coolness of Churchill, which is to say Church Chill, the consecrated snow country beyond the frosted windows. He walked around still orange-brown-bottomed pools ringed by rock and flowers and tiny trees. Visited by the striped tapering thorax and ochery-brown head of a mosquito, he let it bite. In the cracks of a lichen-spotted turtle-backed boulder grew moss and then eight-lobed blossoms of a Naples-yellow hue, and hollowed centers, uttering spiders of yellow-orange. He saw fresh bearprints in the sand near the water. He entered the smell of salt, blue mussels, crisp reddish-black seaweed. He did not yet understand the way the plants lived in their variously bordering neighborhoods, sometimes mixing, sometimes bowing in the wind.

For a moment he felt as melancholy as he always did the day before some journey to unknown climes, but then he found himself remembering one of those December nights when he'd come home from a trip, brought the duffel bag upstairs and was asleep within minutes; but he'd awakened early, his innards still flooded with another country's time where high over the cobalt sea there was nothing, then suddenly four low brownish-green islands ringed with brilliant white — Taipei? No, blue space again. Now his half-dreaming eyes found the double wake of a ship; then under a long harvest of cloud some blue and washed-out land where his soul still wandered, unable yet to follow himself to sleep in the far-off winterlands, the insides of his eyelids still imprinted by grayish-blue riverfangs, then an immense harbor with gates and channels; that was the city where his mango-colored wife and children awaited his return, so he prayed for them, lying calmly and at rest in his bed for awhile, making friends with the darkness, and then after an hour or two arose, tiptoed surely down the chilly hall, reached into the back of the closet and pulled on his old Arctic jumpsuit over his nakedness. It was like pulling on a skin of confidence and valorous deeds. He went downstairs and opened the front door and looked out. It was black and cold and raining. The clock said 4:13. He'd slept maybe a couple of hours. He was starving. Because he'd been away, there was no milk in the refrigerator for his cereal. Milk always went bad when he left it. He thought he had chicken soup or vegetable soup, but in the cupboard there was only a can of refried beans. He chopped garlic and browned it in olive oil. Then he stirred the beans in and listened to them sizzle. He found some powdered parmesan cheese and some tomato paste and spooned those on and it began to smell very good. Five minutes and it was done. He sat eating out of the frying pan, warm and happy and alert because he still had the power to move freely within the atlas. Then he opened his mail. More memories of people long unseen and things long undone exploded happily, in the same way that in Delhi the merchants showed him handmade rugs which unrolled like fireworks, red snowflakes, gold diamonds, blue flowers, snow-blue crystals. A woman whom he loved had written him a letter which said: Often after I spend time with you, I feel almost ashamed afterwards, as if I were just speeding and babbling the whole time. It's like, there's so many things I want to ask you, and so many things I want to tell you, but afterwards I feel like I was talking so fast I found out nothing and communicated nothing. You remind me a lot of my sister, who is also strong and stoic and unafraid, and who won't ever really complain when she is uncomfortable or in pain. Eventually you become so adept at hiding your day-to-day physical or emotional discomfort that everyone thinks you are kind of superhuman and don't feel things as much. — Maybe I don't feel, he thought. That's my secret, darling. — A woman whom he loved, the one with whom he'd eaten Steammed Crab with Anything, had written him a letter which said: I receive your letter now how about you. I miss you lot now I'm in Bangkok now I'm always sickness but don't worry about me please good take care of your self you are my distiny. When I'm alone I miss you my dear. Joy she always take good care of me after I feel better. Bangkok it very hot now. I love you much more than I can say I send you my love and kisses. Love you much, your wife, and before he got to the signature the world went underwater and he sat there sobbing. She was sick, always in sickness. And he had no face. — Opening the next letter, he learned that he would be leaving again soon for still another place where he had never been, worshipping the mystery called motion. Please good take care of your self you are my distiny. It was another ten-o'-clock dusk with all the orange melancholy of another summer slipping away, the air chilly and good inside his nostrils, an unseen locomotive thrumming on and on in the dim stillness beyond pale fireweed, the horizon made up of brown Canadian National boxcars now empty of wheat — a hundred or more of them having been unloaded at the grain elevator a mile away where belugas broke out of the river long and black and hollowly breathing and chirping like birds; actually they were whitish like giant snails but the dusk silhouetted them. They were all neck; they were snakes. The energy of an oscillating body varies in proportion with the square of the amplitude of vibration. He tried to sense the combined force at the disposal of those immense creatures and could not. The atlas had closed. Great crates sat waiting to go north on the sealift to Coral Harbour, Rankin Inlet, Baker Lake, Arviat. No place was the end, nowhere never. The end was only in the observer's eyes. After witnessing violent deaths in the semi-elongated progress of his travels, he'd begun to gain the mystic ability to know exactly how the people he loved would die should they too be murdered. He'd be chatting with them on some innocuous subject — cumuli, the Republicans — when suddenly their hideous screams would toll in his heart; he'd see their pâté'd brains oozing greasily out of their foreheads or learn how their carotid arteries would urinate the dark liquid; he'd watch life drain from their faces with astonishing speed, the eyes going fishy and useless, the flesh becoming pale gray clay. It was always his fault. And they'd go on talking, not realizing that they were dead; he'd make himself smile, since it was no good warning them. Soon they'd be broken. That was destiny. And of course he remained well aware that most of these people would not die unpleasantly at all. It was all a figment of horror, some parasite overlaying their healthy countenances, defiantly exposing itself like a cartoon pervert and drinking his life; he, not the doomed recipients of his poisoned friendship, was the coward who died the proverbial thousand deaths. But he didn't even fear dying so much; it was more the ritual of watching them end, always in unique ways, the timbre of their screams plausibly calibrated to their well-known voices which he had scarcely if ever heard raised; was this what Biblical prophets witnessed when they gazed with inward-rolling eyes upon their as yet unraped cities? One night what fellow travellers and parlor leftists call "the phenomenon" struck a woman who was on top of him fucking him eagerly, and for a second he thought that his tears were going to explode into her exploding intestines (impish death had blown her stomach open; the insides of his nostrils were spattered with her blood and bile); that was why he wanted to say he was sorry, now while she moaned and convulsed, his penis tearing her open. But she slammed herself upon him faster and faster! Blood trickled out of her mouth. His penis burst out of the crown of her skull (the bone of her snowy like a birch). She screamed. After the Feast of the Dead, souls become turtledoves, as some Indians used to say, but the majority believed that they go together to the Country of the Dead. PIERCE HEAD puts their brains in His pumpkins, and then the evil dog by the treetrunk-bridge bites their heels, seeking to make them stumble into the rapids where they'll be drowned, and then there is nothing for them but lamentation and complaining endlessly, there in the Country of the Dead. She screamed. He held her more tightly and kissed her; how could he disturb or disappoint her now when she was coming? Afterward he buried his face between her breasts and listened to the heart a mere inch beneath the hot sweatslicked flesh, beating out its song: I'm alive; I'm alive. This was the center. He remembered a woman he'd once known for a year or two, a graphic designer, Roman Catholic, a tall brunette (how to characterize a person? what is most relevant?), who'd said to him: I believe that people are here on this planet because they need to learn certain lessons. And I think no one can know what lessons another person can learn. — And now he wanted to shout: What lesson am I to learn from these screams? For a long time that question echoed inside his own mucus-walled chest defiantly, bouncing and flailing against his organs, so of course there was no answer. But one day he asked it sincerely, and then he got a reply. The mysterious woman, the one with the delicious-smelling oval face who had usually slept in her own hotel room in Montana, she was the one who decided to get sterilized. He said: I'll come be with you. I'll hold your hand. — When they stuck the IV in she moaned and said: Oh, it hurts. It hurts, and it feels so cold going in. — Then the anesthesiologist, that representative of superior puissance, took a slender hypodermic, fitted it to the intake port, and slowly pressed the plunger. The anesthesiologist had drawn water from the wells of salvation, and she could not see it because she was locked down upon the table with her thighs spread, and people all around! He held her hand. That transparent liquid which the anesthesiologist had almost lasciviously squeezed into her IV crawled down the tube; he watched it coming closer and then it went inside her hand, scuttled up her armways into her shoulder and up her neck and she whispered: It hurts; it hurts! — When it got to her brain she began acting vague, and it went around and around inside her, and each time it came back to her brain she got drunker and wearier and her eyes glazed; then she was gone. He kept holding her hand until the doctor and the nurse and the anesthesiologist made him go outside. An hour later they called him. She was on a gurney outside the blue curtain, and her eyes were closed. (He peeked behind the blue curtain and saw another woman with thighs spread.) He held his darling's hand. When she woke up, the pain was so intense that her teeth chattered and huge tears ran down her cheek. He called them and made them give her morphine. The morphine didn't take for a long time. They had to give her three shots. After an hour or so the morphine began to make her sick, and she vomited. She vomited all night. Sometimes she was too weak to bring it up easily, and then she stuck her finger down her throat, at which the occasionally visiting nurse would make a face. (The nurse also disapproved because his darling hadn't any underwear.) He was beside her with the curvy tray of pink plastic to catch her vomit, and when he emptied the plastic tray for the third time he understood what the lesson was: The screams were so horrible because life was beautiful. He, the dullard, needed to be hunted by screaming throughout his life, so that the fear, agony and grief at losing life which they evoked would remind him to cherish it in himself and others. — I also believe in the value of human existence, the Roman Catholic woman had said. I believe there are other human souls coming which want a chance. A lot of stuff I don't understand, but I wonder if accidents ever really happen. I don't think I've ever had one. If I got pregnant, I'd probably take it as a challenge. I'd probably take it as a chance to express some love inside me. I don't believe in judging another person. If it's a young girl, she has to be given a choice. — The next day, sleepy from her omnipotent medicines, the mysterious one said to him: I love you. — How do you feel? he asked. — She smiled slowly. I'm so happy, because I'm sterile! — Every day she got stronger. Soon she could get out of bed again. He loved her life's ongoing. He loved his life. He rode the bus and emptied the garbage and picked up dogshit and composed his Traveller's Epitaph: I can't say I know much, but I've loved, maybe too much; maybe from love I'll get my death. I've seen Madagascar and walked the frozen sea. I have no trade, make nothing but pretty things which fail against the seriousness of rice. I'm not well or wise; I fear death; but I've never failed any woman I loved. I never refused gold bracelets to any wife who asked them of me. When they did me evil I received it gracefully; when they were good to me I gave them thanks. I denied none esteem, never heeded shaming words. I can't say I've done much or been much, but I'm not ashamed of who I've been. I don't ask your forgiveness or remembrance. I'm in the flowers on my grave, unknowing and content. — But it didn't ring true. He hadn't loved enough (how can one love enough?); and how could he dare to say he hadn't failed anybody? Whom hadn't he failed? He could only say that he loved life. He closed his eyes, and a screaming grey face exploded into crimson gobbets.

That evening the wind was full of vowels, and it said: ai ee eh uh oh eh ee oh. He listened and listened again. Then he understood that the wind was saying: why we never know where we go. Everywhere nowhere up down around.

He set out for the Barren Lands, always following the coast of Hudson Bay. One of his more reliable and harmless pleasures was to return to his tent after a stroll sufficient to make the cold seem warm, look around one last time at the midnight sun, breathe another breath of that good subarctic air, undo his boots, crawl into the tent, pull the boots off, zip the doorway shut against mosquitoes and rain, and then drink to his heart's content of pure and chilly river water, the bottle having been filled that day by him or one of his Inuk friends from the place where some children swam and others sat with their parkas on. Then he walked to the place where there were no more Inuk friends, nobody nowhere forever, and his walking was completed.

He listened to voices. He loved them. They were always different, although they said the same things; in much the same way that the cries of dogs sometimes resemble those of children, sometimes those of wolves or pulled nails, sometimes those of soccer fans, and sometimes those of dogs.

Then the day came when he realized that he could truly understand some of the words the dogs shouted; and without effort he heard the meaning in the haunting cries of gulls. It was only because he spent so much time alone, eating little; it was nothing special.

He was cold. He shivered and twitched like grass. The skeletons which had been sleeping in the inch-high lichen hills grabbed with rib-claws, vertebral hooks, and tailbone rakes, wanting to pull themselves out of the cold wet place. His lichen-blots were all he owned now, but they were bright enough to keep him counting them in the wind, absorbed like a vampire in wasting all before his dawnless dawn. The grass-columns flashed like skirts.

I know I said I wouldn't write, his first love had written. I lied. The cancer is back. I'm scared to death. I cannot believe this is happening. I am not vain. I do not care about losing my breast but I do want to live. Do you believe in God?

Once she'd sent him a photograph of herself at the zoo; and when he found it years later in an envelope with a thirteen-cent butterfly stamp she scarcely seemed familiar. But he had always been bad with faces. A giraffe stretched its neck in the background. Her beauty was what they used to call "classical." It was a face that could easily have been haughty or cold but in the photo she had a sweet little smile and she looked so young, so young. She could have been his little sister; in a few more years she could be his daughter. He was ashamed that he had ever caused her inconvenience or pain. He could never be hers now. He had thought that the picture, at least, would always belong to him; but as he'd wandered through the atlas, the photograph and he had diverged. On the envelope she'd written: Inside are pictures! Lions and tigers, monkeys cats and giraffes! and Hey, did you hear Nixon resigned? and If I wrote you in French could you understand it?

Sure, he said. Try me.

He listened to the plants.

Willow Lady grew slowly out of his thoughts, hour by hour in that summer of perpetual chilly light. The wind was her breath and the wind's voice was her voice. The wind rarely spoke anymore. She had a face like a sly brown mask. She had Inuk eyes. She smiled richly, showing her teeth. Her lean skull was cradled in hair whose stubby woody strands meandered across the moss, holding her safely down; willow leaves sprouted from them in dark green clusters and sometimes there were fuzzy buds. She told him to walk to the waterfall. The wind said: go. But he didn't know where the waterfall was. He wanted to find it because he wanted to listen to it and breathe the aerated coolness when he hung his head over the clifFside, watching the white foam softer than moss become brown and then indigo as it rushed away, into the world. He asked Willow Lady how to get there but she wouldn't tell him. There were yellow flecks in the sky, the hue of that stone called tiger's eye.

Skeletons buzzed in the moss.

The tundra became an exploding puzzle. Leaves, flowers, stalks, buds, roots, mosquitoes and bones flew apart, leaving white snow between them.

Long green fibrils crawled across his soul's eye. He saw flowers and leaves glowing happily upon pages of snow.

Low clouds swarmed over the water which glowed with colored threads. The mossy promontories reached toward the Arctic islands.

Now grey clouds came over him, and the water writhed with windy lines like springs, and the droplets sprang apart, leaving whiteness between — an atlas page. He could walk along the beaches and pick up pieces of fossil coal polished over and over by the sea. The sky showed blue-green through the cloud-chinks, while pale blue icebergs bestrode the water in equivalent rarity.

Willow Lady was his wife. He didn't really know her.

He laid his face down in the moss and kissed her cold mouth that drooled fresh water. The wind said: oh.

He told her about his wife in Madagascar whom he'd betrayed, about the mysterious woman who "just didn't feel it" when he made love to her, about the sad girl in that hotel room in Philadelphia whom he'd made sadder, about the woman in the House of Joy who made his heart shoot joyously out of the top of his skull, about his wife in Cambodia who needed money for facial surgery and when he sent the money she never got it and so she sent him pathetic color photographs of the operation and after that, although he went to Cambodia to give her more money, he never found her again, about Kawabata's geisha in the snow country, about his friend Joe, who didn't respect him anymore, about the woman in Sarajevo who said that it was too difficult to explain, about his Inuk girl who didn't love him now, who was just a nasty drunk, about the many he'd failed, and the few he'd done well by — he was not even potent enough to fail everyone! — about his first love, one of whose letters said: I don't need anyone very much. It's a cold feeling, a feeling where I know I should be crying and I can't. During those four days there were many times when I should have cried; I wanted to cry; I hung my head as if I were crying but all that happened was a kind of mockery inside myself showing me that I could out-deceive someone; I could hold my own. I knew during the entire time that I would be all right. In the face of outright physical violence, there's always an escape. — Sure there is, honey. Just ask any Pole or Gypsy or Jew or Armenian or Cambodian in any mass grave. — He tried to explain that in spite of his weakness he'd remained sincere, that when he thought about the ones he loved, even if he felt guilty or sorrowful at times there lay always beyond those emotions a shining wall of goodness: he loved them more year by year, and their goodness was as an organ-chord of glory in some great cathedral. — Would that be the end? Not yet! One more, one more. . One more, then, not his first love and not his last, a married woman from Toronto, also no doubt categorized in his FBI file: Jewish, with a husband and a little daughter she loved, smart, a journalist, proud of her breasts, fortyish, with small hands. She liked to go for long walks with him, holding his hand. She had a soft low sensual sexual voice that aroused him even over the telephone. As soon as she said his name he'd be wanting to spread her legs and ride her. He couldn't get enough of her. He was crazy about her. He needed her loving ways. He sensed that she liked handcuffs, although they hadn't tried that together yet. After a long breezy day of walking by the lake it was always so good to go back to her hotel and put his hand up her dress and bring her face down upon his face. Sometimes it would be chilly in the hotel room and he would enjoy feeling cold when he took his clothes off and seeing the goose pimples on her buttocks as they got under the crisp sheets. She brought him life, life! She said that sometimes he struggled in his sleep, but he never remembered that. In those months between "seeing her," as we quaintly say, he sometimes had serial dreams of being a Polish soldier in September 1939, with the Nazis coming on one side and the Soviets on the other, closing in, shooting and killing, divebombing and tankrolling while Hitler in Berlin watched movies of Warsaw burning; he was trapped now in a marsh with a few comrades, all of them wounded, and the sky was red and yellow and stank of gunpowder. The forest was burning and quaking. Nobody could hear anymore. A row of trees smashed down; his comrades were decapitated; he was the last one. Could Hitler see him? Behind, anodized black tanks were crawling out of the ooze like crocodiles. Before him, where the trees had been blasted away, he saw a river clogged with corpses, and then a golden plain of wheat that went all the way to the horizon; the sky was black with Stukas wing to wing, coming toward him, coming down. He dreamed of sitting in an opera box with Hitler and a woman whom he had thought was his, but in the middle of the opera Hitler stood up and began dancing with the woman and nobody else dared to look. He looked though, and Hitler's eyes filled him with pain and confusion. He woke up remembering that dream night after night, struggling to keep his eyelids up so that the dream could not slam down upon him again. But when he slept in the Jewish woman's arms, he felt safe. He felt that she loved him and trusted him. He wanted to be with her always. He wanted to meet her little daughter, which of course he'd never do. Waking up happy and rested, he held her hand, kissed her lips, and she was already rolling on top of him. She was life. He could fall asleep and know that when he woke up she'd be there. It was permissible to sleep. Even Soviets did it. Her body was still quite firm. She said that she was sorry he couldn't have seen her breasts when she was younger, but he said he was happy with them just as they were. Sometimes they went shopping for toys for her daughter: hologram buttons, ribbons and things; when the fog came in they might stop and he'd buy her a beer; by night they walked hand in hand through Chinatown like obedient tourists, holding hands. He felt that he was good to her and she to him. If she were any other creature she would have been a speckled trout. He would have been a frog. They asked little of each other. She said that she sometimes woke up thinking of him. She said that she sometimes dreamed of him. He never dreamed about her; she simply kept the bad dreams away. He never saw her being murdered. Of course maybe that was because her being married shadowed the relationship with such an obvious ending. That would be something to fear. If they stopped in time, her husband wouldn't find out. Maybe he would never find out. He didn't want to wreck her marriage, to make her little daughter cry. Why didn't he break it off, then? Because they were happy together. The way they were, it couldn't be wrong. Sometimes she was a little ashamed. But he intrigued her, and she was his medicine, his dove like the dove that the boy had drawn for him in Jerusalem. Did she think of herself as Jewish? She said she didn't, but then she'd tell him how one time in a grocery store a mean old lady was picking on a man with Parkinson's disease for being too slow in the checkout line, and when she came to the man's defense the lady turned on her and shouted that she was a filthy Jew. Somehow the old lady could see in her face what she was, she said to him, trembling, and he embraced her and wished that he could send his Polish dreams to the old lady. She told him about her daughter's birthday party. And then she, his dear one, wriggled her hot little body in his arms. She was not the end.

Now only his fingers moved. Willow Lady rustled leaves in his face.

He brought his lips to the ice, which at first was merely a glittering white surface of giant grains and crystals under the blue sky, but as the purple cumuli drew across heaven like the underside of a metal drawer the ice turned bluer and cooler-looking with a yellow line of evil running across its surface, parallel to the horizon — he had a longing to devour the horizons of this world; and here he remembered the white line where a wintry noon ended in Nevada, immense and fluffy, shooting cloud-stuff up into the sky like some defense against falling stars, so vast and triumphant and far away across the plains of tan, rust and beige.- His lips did not stick to the ice yet.

Presently the snow began to fall. It fell in big moist flakes that clumped together even as they fell. It did not make a stinging slapping sound like the sleet or the cold dry snow; it pattered very gently down, and kept coming. In four hours there were as many inches. The tussocks on the hills became white fairy mushrooms. On the flats, golden plant-stalks still rose above the snow, not yet choked. Snow kept falling. The ice upon the river hid itself treacherously, and the whitened ridges dimmed gendy into the sky. The world was almost featureless. In places it was relieved very occasionally by the black lines and specks of boulder-edges; only where those were swallowed up in white distances could the horizon be approximated. Everything was very warm and still.

This was the soul of it, this rushing and swooping in winged or wheeled tombs, always straining toward some beauty as remote as the sun.

The train entered the tunnel. The atlas closed. Inside, each page became progressively more white and warm.

Willow Lady rolled on top of him and took him in her arms. She rocked him to sleep. No more nowhere nobody. She grew a blanket of leaves over him, and he was even warmer. He lay at the center from which the world rotated round and round and round.

* "Be loving; you will be happy."