Toward the End of Time

iv. The Deaths

INDEPENDENCE DAY: my American flag flapped noisily on the pole in an east wind off the sea. For a time it was tangled in its cord and twittered like an insect with one wing stuck on flypaper, until I loped across the lawn and lowered the striped and starred cloth and sent it back up the halyard free. Out there on the blue width of water, sailboats tilted in the morning breeze and sleek white stinkpots gathered on the evening calm to see the fireworks sent up from the public end of the beach. You could hear the sounds and music of beery parties already in progress. I wondered how my boys were doing collecting tolls along the path. Downtown, around the convenience store, white boys in droopy loose shirts and shorts and girls in tighter foxy duds watched the holiday seep away like spilled soda on hot concrete. The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs. Sometimes I think the thing I’ll mind about death is not so much not being alive but nc longer being an American. Even for the losers there is a liberation in the escape from divine order.

In Gloria’s rose bed the blooms, so red and white and pink against the sea, are tired, their blown petals littering the smoothly mounded mulch of buckwheat hulls; but her back garden is profuse with odd-shaped flowers I cannot name. Yarrow? Artemisia? Snapdragons and nasturtiums in any case, nasturtiums with a curious flower-shaped blazon on their petals, the dirty tint of a tattoo. The clematis on the sunny side of the garden shed is amazing, clambering on its quick red stems up the lattice I had made and drenching the clapboards in a density of lush purple flowers banded like church vestments. Gloria cuts it down to a virtual stump every spring, and her faith is always rewarded.

Within the garage, the barn swallows, so slow to start their nest, have in a few weeks’ time hatched their eggs. It happened today: the air was suddenly full of careening baby birds. They fly swervingly up and down, on the edge of control, like children first on a bicycle. There are three, and they rest from their adventure perched on the wooden gutter of the house as tightly together as if still packed in the nest, frightened by all the transparent space around them. Gloria and I had observed them, as we passed in and out of the garage, from the day they were hatchlings, blind mouths held preposterously wide open above the nest’s edge, their tiny bald bodies wholly devoted to the strain and distension of sudden post-ovum appetite. Tirelessly the dapper mother and father dipped back and forth across the lawn and shrub planting, harvesting invisible insects. In a mere two weeks the helpless and hideous babies have been fed into feathers and wingpower enough to be launched, blue-backed and roseate-bellied, as darting, dipping predators in their own right.

The baby birds had swiftly become complete, down to their flickering white-flecked swallowtails. For a time they will stay on our property, learning from their parents (how?) the fine points of survival, but the mud cup of a nest, given fibrous strength with grass wands and pine needles, has been emptied. How do birds teach birds, elephants elephants, without language? Even imitation implies a simian brain. In less than a month our babies will fly to Peru, and the dry brown leaves of the crabapple will accumulate in the open garage, and the thin breath of autumn dull the verdure. The asphalt of the driveway takes on a different texture then, and scrapes differently under our shoes. Our shadows are drier, more dilute, and an expectancy of closure flavors the shortening days when the swallows are no longer here. But for now they are still with us, holding a family seminar in mosquito-catching, and the Fourth of July fireworks burst into sight a second ahead of their muffled bangs, as viewed from our front yard, on the sea side, in the moon-bleached sky above the trees’ silent, merged, beseeching silhouettes.

Gloria went in almost immediately, saying the mosquitoes were biting her to death. I stood on the flagpole platform as our bedroom lights came on and the air conditioner started to hum. The town fathers, whoever they were, had managed to scrape from their depleted budget a handsome display. There were types quite new to me-hovering white flares that shot out from a two-leaved orange butterfly shape and encircled it for some lingering seconds; a giant silent chrysanthemum whose rays were blue at the tips and gold at the source; drifting constellations of cold white twinklers; and several fireworks that unfolded from within their packet of chemical reactions a sharply violent color I had never seen in the sky before, thus spilled on blackness in transient splinters. Combusted salts of strontium, barium, sodium, magnesium, and mercurous chloride etched their signatures on the dark firmament, an infernal rainbow owing nothing to the sun. Gloria’s golden window clicked off just as the finale of overlapping bursts died away to a chorus of grateful toots from the assembled stinkpots. I felt chilled and bitten in the dark. Where was I to go? She hated it when I crept into bed and disturbed in her the fragile succession of steps whereby consciousness dissolves. As I turned away to tread the damp lawn, something rustled in the sunken area of wild roses beside the platform-where we had once thought to dig a swimming pool, a dream that lives only in our still calling it the “swimming-pool area”-and I sensed that another presence had been watching with me. The deer.

And a week or less after this, by daytime, the giant dim torus in the sky, the ghostly watermark on the atmosphere’s depthless Crane’s blue, grew larger, moving toward Earth. Vast and then vaster, it stealthily expanded until its lambent rim touched the sea’s horizon and disappeared behind the treetops; it was encircling the visible platter of Earth; we were within it; our round planet was like a stake to its quoit. The torus’s blue hole, for these many months no wider than ten suns across, had swelled to become the empyrean itself; the upper edge of its “matter”-for matter is just what it seemed not to be-sank, distending, and lost itself, a line of faint pallor, behind the lateral stretch of distant, mountainous summer clouds. All the while a creamy, weightless sense of irreversible reassurance was flooding me. It was near noon; I had stepped out onto the lawn in obedience to an impulse. The young swallows were still careening, a bit wildly, about, but the other birds were hushed, as during a solar eclipse, with its out-of-sync dusk. I remembered standing on a hillside in the Berkshires under a shouting clarity of stars and seeing a comet through binoculars handed me by my father’s work-worn hand: a tailed ball of fuzz, not seeming to move at all.

I would not die, I realized; all would be well. All the fleeting impressions I had ever received were preserved somewhere and could be replayed. All shadows would be wiped away, when light was everywhere and not confined to loci- stars, hot points, pinpricks in nothingness. But just the concept of light, born of combustion and atomic collision, was too harsh for the peace that was promised within the torus. All the shards of my spiritual being united-Perdita with Gloria; the old Hammond Falls house, poor in possessions but rich in meanings, with my present mansion, poor in meanings; my children with my stepchildren and they with my grandchildren and all the world’s uncomforted waifs. Time was a provision that would be rescinded; its tragedy was born of misperception, an upper limit of conceptual ability such as keeps the bee bumbling among the clover and the faithful dog trotting, loving but puzzled, at his master’s heels. (I have lived with dogs, though have none now. In Hammond Falls we had a mongrel called Skeezix and then a female successor, Daisy, who was part cocker spaniel; then Perdita and I kept a succession of golden retrievers as nursemaids for the children, and once bought, not cheaply, a bronze-colored Doberman who was run over by one of the last milk-delivery trucks operating in Massachusetts. Her back broken, Cleo writhed in the middle of the street for twenty minutes before a young town cop arrived to put a bullet in her skull; she writhed and yelped and kept begging us with her amber eyes to forgive her her misfortune, to still love her as she had loved us.)

That the joy of creation, flowing through the generations of birds and bacteria, human beings and arboreal titans as they rise and fall, is not an illusion but an eternal basis, and that a heavenly economy to whose workings we are blind will redeem every one of our living moments and carry to completion each inkling of beatitude: such blissful certainty of universal reconciliation travelled like a great magnetic field across the depleted planet as it was passed, as in a magician’s trick, through the cosmic ring, which receded in the midnight skies above Australia and vanished, a faintly glowing ringlet, in the vicinity of the constellation Octans. By morning it had vanished from all but the most powerful telescopes.

Everyone had seen it; everyone had felt it; yet news coverage of the event was spotty and diffident. Different people, interviewed, gave different times and durations for their mystical sensations. Exact words were hard to formulate. Scientists and psychologists were quick to jump into print with theories of mass hallucination powerful enough to affect even photographic plates. A growing school of opinion holds that the torus had never existed at all-had not hung in our heavens for years-or had been no more a three-dimensional phenomenon than the ring arond the moon on a foggy night. Doubt and mockery have become fashionable, on television talk shows and among schoolchildren. T-shirts appeared on the young, displaying the torus encircling a question mark, or diagonally barred to form the symbol for negation. Even among lovers, it was embarrassing to talk about the transcendent moment. Comparing notes elicited disturbing discrepancies. It is true, the memory of bliss fades, like that of pain. I write my description not ten days after the event in order to fix my own memory, but even so, doubt has crept in. What really did I feel? People are grotesquely suggestible, to facilitate sexual congress and tribal solidarity. I feel depleted and irritable, immersed in the poisonous and voracious growth of midsummer. Lately I wake twice a night to urinate, and sometimes there is only a dribble, and an icicle poke of pain in a nether recess of myself, a dark and inaccessible underside I have always preferred to pretend is not there.

Gloria brings flowers indoors-nasturtiums in shades of orange and yellow overflow a fat stoneware bowl, and the velvet purple of clematis burns for a day or two on the mahogany table in the front hall, in a swirl-ribbed vase of a blue as pale as her eyes. A burst of baby’s breath hovers in a water tumbler placed on the dining-room table, between the silver quail.

While she was off at aerobics, I went out into our woods to visit the boys from Lynn. Behind the barn I startled a deer; with a thrash that set my heart to thrashing he or she- a glimpse of russet flank, a flare of white tail swallowed by the foliage-bounded into the impenetrable area, thick with thorny greenbrier, this side of the Dunhams’ paddock. As I proceeded a bit farther, along a faint path my steps are wearing down the hill, I felt the heat of the creature’s great pelted body lingering in the air. Pieces of bright gray sky clambered overhead between the treetops.

Only Doreen was in the hut, reading a textbook edition, shortened and simplified for junior high students, of that twentieth-century master, John Grisham. She was a brainy girl, it occurred to me, who had put herself only for the time being on a low road. She was sizing life up, ready to experiment with it. Her stockinged feet were up on one wire chair while she sat in another, its metal grid softened by a dirty blanket folded into a pad. In the close heat of the cabin she had taken off her T-shirt and was bare-armed and bare-bellied in a white bra. My shadow, as I entered, dimmed the glimmer of the startling undergarment; her face lifted and also looked shady, smudged, a defensive sneer beclouding her lips. With an intentional gruffhess I asked her, “Where are your buddies?”

“Out, doing deals. José and Ray got themselves suits like you said to.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Seems to. They say the people treat them more like they treated Spin and Phil. They cough up.”

“Good. Didn’t I say?”

“They look pretty silly.”

“To you.”

Our silence was not as uncomfortable as I would have predicted. With a sigh I sat on a third chair and looked out the square window, to take my eyes from the freckled breadth of her bony upper chest, the glossy rounds of her shoulders like inverted china cups, the single navel-dented crease across her lean belly. The square held an abstraction, a silent still gnashing of sharp-edged leaves and broken rock-faces and stabbing branches and scrabbly shapes of light-soaked sky. The boys had reinforced the stick walls with inch-thick plywood nailed to the vertical members so as to provide a crackless, relatively smooth inner surface for their shelter. This added privacy had imposed a cost: though bugs and prying eyes were better repelled, so was fresh air; when the door to the screened addition was closed, as it was now, an unstirring damp heat was sealed in. I liked it. I have always preferred the closed to the overexposed, the stuffy bed to the stinging shower.

I wondered if the boys had known I was coming. They watched me closer than I could ever watch them.

“So everything,” I said, “is working out. I keep looking out my window to see if Mrs. Lubbetts’ architecturally inappropriate beach house is burnt down yet.”

She took a breath, momentarily erasing the crease on her belly. “They said,” she said, “you could touch me wherever you wanted, but no penetration.”

I cleared my throat in the sticky air, anxious to avoid a misstep. “That’s very generous of them,” I allowed. “Is this instead of giving me my cut of the take? And what do you want, Doreen? Not to be touched at all, I imagine.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind too much,” she said, removing her feet from the wire chair and setting the Grisham in their place, marking her place by resting the bigger, unread half on the seat with the rest hanging down. “This book is awful macho and preachy.” She stood up, taller and more womanly already, her blue jeans insolently tilted on her jutting hip bones and so low-slung they bared the hem of powder-blue underpants.

I was frightened, and set my fingers on the white skin of her long waist as if testing a stovetop or iron for heat. She was cool to the touch, surprisingly, and clean-smelling. As my warming hands timidly investigated the ins and outs, the givingness of her waist, the immature firmness of her buttocks, I had no intention of removing any of her clothes; but the skimpy elastic bra slipped off by itself with a shrug that was her idea. She helped it up over her neck and wiry ginger-colored hair mass. The shadows between her ribs flickered when she did this. Her breasts smelled powdery like a baby’s skull, and her nipples were spherical, like paler smokier versions of honeysuckle berries. In whispers we de bated if my tongue and mouth were included in the permission to touch. We decided they were. Her fingertips toyes with the whorls of my ears as she gazed down upon my poo old scalp, naked as a baby’s beneath my transparently thinning white hair. It moved me, how much, in even so relatively undeveloped and flat-chested a sallow-skinned gir her breasts were there, jutting, reaching, even; her sharp-chinned face loomed above mine like a mothering spaceship as I slurped and nuzzled and groaned. She graciously offered to touch me, where I jutted, to relieve my groans, but I said no, the boys had made a bargain with me, and I had preached trust to them.

“A hand-job wouldn’t be penetration,” Doreen said.

“It would penetrate my soul,” I said. “I would become a love-crazed pest.” As a reward to myself for this renunciation I slid down her jeans along with her underpants, cupped her taut, porcelain-smooth buttocks in my horny old thick-fingered hands, and planted a tongue-kiss in her shallow navel. How white her belly was! Her pubic hair was just a ginger fuzz, thickest in the center, but even so she had shaved the sides in conformity with bathing-suit fashions. I stroked the pimples where whiskers would grow back. What is this human need to mutilate the most precious and tender parts of ourselves? Nostrils, earlobes, nipples. Circumcision. Art, I suppose. Taking the knife of criticism to God’s carefully considered work.

Abandoning Doreen with her jeans not yet tugged up, I hurriedly climbed the slippery hill, away from this low part of the woods. I was panting and tumescent. I had become anxious to reinsert myself back into the slowly turning works of my orderly world. The patch of heat where the invisible deer had stood and started was still there, on its spot in the path, inflaming my face. Gloria must be home by now. She mustn’t see me like this, hot and bothered. One icy-eyed question would lead to another, and there was no re-sealing the pit of truth once it was open. The curve of her car, her teal-blue Infiniti, gleamed in the driveway. The island of repetitive safety I had carved from the world seemed abruptly precious. I spit the acid taste of honeysuckle from my tongue, and emerged from beside the barn with my husbandly smile already prepared.

Over at the club, I had come in to change back into street shoes after an irritating round in which Red and I were beaten by Ken and a new sidekick of his, a younger man named Glenn, Glenn Caniff, an airline freight supervisor. There was no comparison between the way Glenn hit the ball and we did-his best drives were sixty yards beyond ours and took off on a different trajectory, low to the ground and then rising along a parabolic curve induced by backspin. His shoulder turn was exaggerated and his knee action too loose, but when he brought the club flush into the ball there was no stopping it. His chipping and putting weren’t bad either. Usually with my intermittently picture-book swing and Red’s ham-handed forearm-power we don’t lack for distance, but Glenn made us feel old and poky, and when we tried for that little extra the wheels began to come off, into the weeds. I topped two drives just up to the ladies’ tee and Red couldn’t stop his right hand from wrapping the ball around the left-field foul pole. The more frustrated we got the more smooth and affable Glenn loathsomely became and the more slowly and deliberately Ken played, giving u that sleepy silver-haired boyish pilot’s grin. Still, I sank: long putt on the last hole, for a sandy and an extra welde on our final press, so my concluding mood was not alto gether disgruntled.

The other three, wearing soft spikes, had gone straight t the members’ porch for the drinks and peanuts and payof and gleeful recapitulation of their best shots, but I was loy to real cleats (I love the menacing clatter they make on corcrete and asphalt), which are forbidden on the wooden porch. Also I needed to urinate and to be alone a few minutes. There is something photophobic in me that can stand only so many hours of the unrelieved sunshine of boon companionship and seeks the shade of ill-tempered solitude.

The locker room, newly recarpeted last winter, when in one of the renovations urged by the younger members its friendly old green metal lockers were replaced with expensive, less capacious ones of varnished beechwood, appeared at first empty. But then with a start I saw a naked man emerge from the tiled shower room. He seemed terrifically hairy, and, with his broad chest and bow legs, he crouched, like an animal thinking of pouncing. Seeing me, he also started; he had been no doubt lost in the reverie that follows a shower-the steaminess, the forceful needling water, the face blindly held up to the primeval thrash-as the large rough towel reacquainted him with his tingling surfaces. It startled me to think that the club was now admitting such brutish-looking members: but then I reflected that young men all, even I in my prime, have a brutish aspect, un-evolved since the age of tribal warfare and the naked group hunt for the sacred bear and hairy mammoth.

This menacing shadow in our renovated cave advanced toward me quizzically, blinking and dragging his towel in one hand. “Ben?” he asked in a light, civilized voice. “Aaron Chafetz.”

Of course. My doctor. My new young doctor, unrecognizable in his shaggy skin, and nearsighted without his glasses. My doctor of many years, Ike Fidelman, four years older than I, had had a stroke. It hadn’t much bothered me, since he had always talked out of the side of his mouth, with slurred, impatient diction. But he had abruptly retired and moved to the so-called Oregon Wilderness-Chinese missiles had devastated the cities, the bridges, the Boeing plant-to live with his daughter, who had become a Buddhist priestess.

“Ike,” I had complained into the telephone, “how can you leave me in the lurch like this?”

“It’s no lurch. A great boy is taking over the practice. He’ll be up on all this new stuff.”

“I don’t want all the new stuff.”

Ike had been homeopathic in his approach; Gloria called him the only Jewish Christian Scientist in the medical profession.

“You will when you need it,” he told me. “They do magic with superlasers now, Ben. Thirty years ago I’d have a flipper for a left arm and a bubble in my brain. Good luck. Easy on the coffee, the booze, the fried food, and the young girls.”

Had he forgotten how I had given up, at Gloria’s urging, alcohol and caffeine altogether? In her guilt at secretly wishing me dead, she took an overactive interest in my health, from vitamin pills laid out beside my morning orange juice to a constant nagging about what I put into my mouth.

“Dr. Chafetz,” I said, absurdly formal but unable to address him in any other way. A doctor is a doctor. We thought of shaking hands but thought better of it. Our costumes were disturbingly reversed: usually I was the undressed one. I had never seen his body before; its thickness and hairiness did not go with his thin ascetic face, his somewhat receding hair, his gold wire-frame spectacles. Without the spectacles he had had to come close, to identify me. I ignored the bestially bared body and concentrated on his face, pale and sensitive and shaven. He had a deferential, hushed manner never more so than when he was testing my testicles for hernia and probing my prostate gland with a greased forefinger The last time he had done this it had rather scaldingly hurt, which I wasn’t sure was normal. I had hoped he had not taken my tears for those of erotic gratitude. I can just barely make out, at the fuzzy far rim of my psychosomatic universe, how male homosexuals could get to depend emotionally on penetration of the narrow, fragile anal passageway, which makes the vagina look like a tough old catchall.

Another universe, thinner than a razor blade, sliced into the sinister locker room. Chafetz was a naked Jew, and I a uniformed good German recruited to guard an extermination camp, thus releasing a younger member of the master race to the Russian front, where the Slavs had shown themselves perversely reluctant to embrace the blessings of the Third Reich. The sky was low and smoky day after day. The sun was hiding its face. All color had ebbed from the world save the dull brown of dead underbrush and, nearer at hand, the occasional bright splash of blood. It was Poland in early 1944, winter. Iron ruled the bitter air-the iron of guns and of barbed-wire fences and of the rails upon which the steam engines dragged their crammed human cargo in iron boxcars. Thin snow on the hard earth was quickly flecked with particles of ash. The view from the watchtowers was of monotonous and swampy terrain that in the distance reluctantly lifted in low rows of blue hills that mirrored the low blue clouds, viscid and wavy, close above them. In between lay a bar of silver light, scored by slants of weak sun. Winter rooks circled above snow-dusted fields of stubble.

A sickness had settled in our bowels as the news from the Eastern front, however brazenly presented as strategic triumphs over helpless barbarians, ever more clearly spelled defeat. Allied airplanes, though downed in devastating numbers, kept bombing the homeland: droning flocks of them cruelly seeking to obliterate our wives and innocent children. The mongrel brutes of the Jew-polluted earth were pressing upon us with a sullen weight not all of the Führer’s magic could dispel. A complicity of doom was coming to exist between us and the verminous prisoners. They stank of illness, of vomit and the yellow shit of dysentery, though we endeavored to keep them clean with frequent hosings in the open air, even on those mornings when the piss in the latrines was frozen solid. To this one as he stood nearest to me in the shivering line I said, camaraderie rising to my lips like the acid of nausea: “You will die, sicherlich. Ohne Zweifel, you are going to die. Verstehst du?”

What sick demon inside was making me talk such gibberish? There was no response from the young Jew. Perhaps he was not as young as he seemed at first glance. The young men generally died before the older, who were more gristly, less easily broken, their spirits longer welded to their bodies. This one stared past me, through me, with eyes like globules of black oil, the oil for which the Reich is starving. His white skin in the biting cold had a sallow waxen lustre repugnantly different from the clean pink purity of Aryan skin. His eyes were infuriating in their shining opacity. Even men totally a our mercy were capable, I saw, of insolence.

I continued, “Schwein, you must die, because you are evidence. Loathsome evidence. Abscheulicher Beweis”

Even in the freezing air his waxen skin gave off a warr human aroma. I wondered how many treacheries and ob scene acts in the bunkhouse had kept the fat on his bone There was something horribly animal about the way h hunched neck thrust forward from his white shoulders, with their hideous Jewish epaulets of black hair.

“With all such evidence destroyed” I told him chummi “the world will never believe what we did to you people.” And I fought a nauseating impulse to throw my arm around his shoulders, in a camaraderie of hopelessness, and to fiddle with the hanging weight of his circumcised prick, shaped like a turd leaving a warm ass but bluish-white, its skin thinner and finer than that of a woman’s body anywhere. Instead I lifted my sturdy Mauser rifle and smashed the butt into the side of his expressionless, bestial, liquid-eyed face. He staggered but somehow kept his feet. “Answer when I speak, Jewish swine!” I shouted. The other captives, and the other guards, and even the rooks drifting overhead, did not flinch, as if they were from a still photograph and the two of us from a scratchy, twitching movie. The movie was not black-and-white, for the red smear on the prisoner’s temple grew brighter as I watched, and two rivulets trickled in parallel down across his gaunt cheekbone.

I was beginning to panic in the search for something friendly to say. A taste of iron had appeared in my mouth, though no time at all, time as we understand it, had passed. I brought out, “How was your game?” Having taken a shower, he must have played a game-tennis, most likely.

“Good, Ben,” he said in his thoughtful, preppy, deferential, and delicately hesitant way. “We got three sets in. And yours?”

“Lousy as usual. It’s like I have an enfeebling disease and don’t know it. I sank a putt on the last hole, though; that’ll bring me back.” My auditor resumed rubbing himself with the towel, discreetly keeping his genitals covered as he did so. He was about to turn away; I blurted, “Seeing you here reminds me, I must be due for a checkup.”

Dr. Chafetz turned his back. Black fur covered his shoulder blades with symmetrical whorls like hurricane clouds and formed a dark downy triangle at the base of his spine, above his buttocks with their more transparent gauze. “Sure thing,” he said over his epauletted shoulder, with his accommodating, preppy ease. “Call my office for an appointment, Ben. We’ll work you in.”

The midsummer refulgence takes to itself the dust of days. The trees’ green is a duller tint, as if in a Barbizon painting whose varnish has darkened. Purple loosestrife, acres of it, blooms in the broad marsh we see from the fourth fairway, as its dogleg curves around a pond choked with lilies. Gloria’s garden holds a fluffy, morning-wet profusion of cosmos and daisies, veronica and salvia, black-eyed Susans on their wavy stems and tall thistles with their little blue sea-urchins. This year, for the first time that I can remember, she has brought to vegetable health a single dahlia of an indecently vivid pearly pink, the lush electric flesh-blush of a maiden’s labia.

In town, hydrangeas flourish by the porches, in color mostly that rinsed blue which suggests balls of laundry. Vacant roadside spaces play host to goldenrod and chicory. The goldenrod nods, bowing to its own allergen-rich weight, while the chicory aspires, its stems darting upward like lines connecting dots. On the walk down to the mailbox I admire the clusters of orange rowan berries on the two spindly trees that Jeremy and I spared last fall by the stone retaining wall, orange berries that, along with the tiny white berries, like beads of frost, on the cedars, suggest Christmas From my bathroom window as I shave I notice a rusty ting to the topmost leaves of the burning bush that has over grown the path the previous owners had laid through their rock garden. Here and there in the woods, a sugar maple flashes the merest pinch of yellow while the other trees-the oak, the beech, the sassafras shaped like a Tiffany lampshade-hold on to their green monotone. On the little pears a few worm-warped bubbles of fruit are shaping up, and the blueberry bushes, I noticed the other day, are producing more cankers than berries, and their leaves have been chewed to lace by Japanese beetles.

In early August the dusks start shifting in, so there is an elegiac, dimmed, dry quality to the seven-thirty hour, which in July still abounds with blue sky, high clouds, and mental lemonade. The garage is silent-the swallows and their cheeping, dipping trio of hatchlings have departed for Peru, leaving the nest woven of mud still cupped against a rafter. The dew-whitened cobwebs of earthbound spiders are conspicuous on the morning lawn, as ominous as the streaks of cirrus where cumulus yesterday ruled. Monstrous fungoid growths have overnight appeared in the grass, some resembling the toadstools in children’s books but others shaped, like cancers, by nothing but the random outward push of greedily growing cells. At a kick, the brown mass, tougher than it looks, scatters into meaty shreds.

Several days after my appointment, Dr. Chafetz called to say that the PSA test on my blood had come back with a reading of 11. He paused.

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“Not, not extremely bad,” he said, with his deferential hesitancy, a preppy near-stutter. “But it is high.”

“What’s considered normal?” I felt I was dragging information out of him. He was already deep in a medical crisis that hadn’t yet pulled me in, and down. My mind was darting about within the meagre facts, looking for a way out.

“Anything under four”, he said. “Even five asks for a second look.”

I held stubbornly silent, annoyed at his embarrassment on my behalf. Whose PSA count was this, mine or his?

He offered, “Your prostate didn’t feel unusually enlarged in my manual investigation. Or seem to have any rough spots.”

Seem to have? What was he doing up there-gathering vague impressions? “Well, O.K. What’s the next step?” I asked, so briskly his voice came out as not just deferential but boyishly scared. I was the Kapo, he the naked, shivering, doomed prisoner.

“A biopsy. In Boston. We have ties with an excellent man at MGH, a urologist. We’ll set you up with an appointment.”

Where did this “we” he was suddenly hiding behind come from? “What’s his name?”

“Carver.”

“It would be.” I laughed, encouragingly. I had to bring the boy through this.

“Dr. Andrew,” he, interrupted, went on.

“Handy Andy,” said I, irrepressible, unkillable, immortal

Hanging up, I wandered through the rooms of the house It was as if each had been given a scrubbing; a film of tin drearily familiar had been removed. The house appeared splendid, ample, priceless. It came to me as I passed through the rooms that I was and always had been a slightly different person in each one. In the dining room, with its torn an stained antique wallpaper of fantastical vistas through the ages-temples, grottoes, castles, cathedrals; Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, Nineveh; Alps and the Alhambra, snow peaks and spiky cypresses-and its standing platoon of Gloria’s shining mahogany antiques, I was courteous, host with lurking eighteenth-century graces and a grave gray-haired timbre. In the kitchen, where I microwaved a cup of water hot enough to soften up a teabag and extracted a low-sodium pretzel from the breadbox, I was Everyman, a stomach on legs, a trousered relic of the paleotechnological era when refrigerators and electric stoves still had weight and thick skins. In the dark little library I became a crabbed squire, a cranky country hobbyist, a nineteenth-century-minded custodian of uniform sets of Balzac and Dickens, O. Henry and Winston Churchill (the statesman, not the American novelist). In the living room, which I moved through on my way to the veranda, I was momentarily a breezy, translucent person, a debonair proprietor of mirrored and velvet-hung spaces carpeted by a single great rose-and-blue Tabriz; I became a throwback to a romantic time of gin parties and yachting, a light-hearted butterfly emerged from the narrow and dour chrysalis of that asphalt-shingled farmhouse lonely in its tilted field of drab winter stubble, on the edge of a dying industrial town. From Hammond Falls to Haskells Crossing: not much of a pilgrimage, really, considering that I had had nearly sixty-seven years to nudge my way along.

The out-of-doors, too, as I settled on the wicker sofa (which creaked under my new weight of dread), loomed with a defining distinctness, a dazzling room of another sort, in which I was an insignificant insect rapturously enrolled, for these brief bright instants of my life, in a churning, shining, chirping, birthing, singing, dying cosmic excess. From the quasars to the rainbow shimmer on my dragonfly wings, everything was an extravagance engraved upon the obsidian surface of an infrangible, eternal darkness.

My pulse fluttered. I felt girlish with my secret. I told Doreen before I told Gloria. Doreen couldn’t understand that it was a big deal yet; she had no idea where the prostate gland was and her whole face wrinkled with disgust when I told her. Gloria statuesquely enlarged at the news into the tragic grandeur of eventual widowhood. Long cast in the role of wife, she had endured years of dull lines, but now at last the part was proving worthy of her gifts. She foresaw her new, elevated status and wished to do nothing henceforth less than impeccably wifely and loving: I could see the determination written on her otherwise smooth, broad forehead. She would see me through to the next world and then take as her reward a singular dignity, no longer regent on behalf of a senescent male but queen absolute. She would pour forth the melody from the center of the stage.

The mornings have a nip to them now when I walk down for the Globe. Certain tall yellow-headed weeds-hawkweed, I think-have taken root in the cracks of the broken concrete drying-yard and I bend down to pull a few on my way, and throw them onto the burning pile as I pass. Since childhood I have loved this month-the flat dry taste of it, the brown-lawn look of it, bouncing the heat back up against your bare legs, and the lack of any importunate holiday marring the blank days on this side of Labor Day and the return to school

On Saturday Gloria directed Jeremy and me to dig up th Siberian iris that has flourished on the stony slope behin the two scrawny pear trees to the right of the driveway. We attacked the clump first with shovels, which met too mar stones, and then with the mattock, which I swung with powerful effect. Jeremy suddenly exclaimed and darted hand down to seize a garden snake liquidly wriggling away through the grass. The little snake’s undulant motion at the sheen of its polychrome scales were so beautiful it shocked us both to see that its tail end was mangled and raw, oozing muddy reptile blood. A shovel or the mattock in my hands had caught it, a blow from heedless Heaven, as it coiled in concealed innocence. Jeremy put the snake gently back into the grass and it slithered off with unimpaired fluency, but I thought that a snake was not a ribbon that could be snipped anywhere: it had an anatomy, intestines and an anus, and no more than I could it live long with its nether portion crushed. I hate it when our human attempts to inflict order upon the land bring death and pain and mutilation to these innocents, whose ancestors enjoyed the earth for tens of millions of years before the naked ape appeared with his technology and enraging awareness of his own sin. I blamed Gloria, for having us remove this harmless, thriving clump of iris because it offended her frosty, simplifying eyes. Who are we to say what is a weed or a pest? Now the pretty snake, stricken in its perfection, must lie in some crevice feeling its slender body dam and slowly fail; a glaze of nothingness will close upon the little jewel of its unblaming brain.

Working alongside Jeremy made me try to remember working beside my own father. He could do things, up to a point: hammer and nail, handle elementary wiring and plumbing. He worked for a time for a roofing contractor, and though he said the heights didn’t bother him he would come home complaining of how roofers cheated people, even the most trusting poor widow. He had a vegetable garden out back that he would stand in at the end of the day, and a workshed on one side of the garage full of aligned jars of screws and nails getting rusty. For a time he had a job on the floor of the GE factory in Pittsfield, but the monotony of assembly, he confessed one night at supper, made him physically sick. He went from job to job, with his poor skills, his indifferent attitude, his lack of a trade. We did complete a few projects together-a doghouse for Skeezix, a soapbox racer, with the number 9 in silver outlined in black-but generally he was too tired. He just wanted to sit in his brown armchair with the fake leather worn off the arms and watch television and have dinner brought to him. I vowed I would never get that tired in life.

Last night I was in the bathroom when the commuter train thundered, louder it seemed than usual, along the tracks on the far edge of the woods. In a few months, when the leaves are down, I can see the golden windows flickeringly flowing by. I clenched with love of the muffled racket, an ecstatic sensation dating from my earliest intimations of traffic, of large things hurtling past on the road into the valley. I love thunder, too-the cascading and smashing first in the distance, like a strawberry box yielding to pressure, and then wildly, dangerously overhead, thumping the roof so the window sashes tremble in their sills and the thin clear panes shiver against their putty, and then the semi-satisfied, still irritable receding mutter, as the sated gutters gurgle. Things passing safely by: this intensely pleased me. Now perhaps I am the thing that is passing, my body a skin I am shedding, with resistance at some points of attachment.

The biopsy was neither painless nor painful. Giving myself the Fleet enema the night before and then again in the morning, on the cold bathroom floor while studying the underside of the sink and waiting for my bowels to feel revulsion, numbed my spirit to the humiliation of the ultrasound rectal probe and then the actual harvest of the tiny plugs of tissue-preceded, each one, by Dr. Carver’s murmured formula, “A little pinch.” A little pinch, a little pinch, and I was back in my street clothes striding, a bit tenderly, with tingling empty bowels, up Cambridge Street to State, where the old gang at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise seemed friendlier than usual-perhaps my expectations of friendliness had been lowered. I felt myself as a perambulating bushel of defective innards, and they treated me with civility as an intelligence, a faded eminence.

The urologist had been a young man with a head of receding blond fuzz and a complexion that had taken a pink humidity from the underparts that were his specialty. He had a big-shouldered, stern Irish nurse who stayed with us and, while the snipping was going on beneath the discreet blue sheet, unexpectedly held my hand. It was one of the many impersonal mercies that descend upon us, I saw, when we weaken. Our host the world is extra polite, even effusive, when with relief it sees that we are at last about to leave.

But I had not weakened. I was no snake with a mangled tail. The tingling singed sensation at the upper tip of my rectum merely goaded me to brisker efficiency, more aggressive know-how. I was there to do some shifting in my and Mrs. Fessenden’s portfolios, plus some few others still in my care, away from cyclicals, which were in for a troubled time now that the Asian low-wage platforms were giving signs of revival amid the vast destruction, and into technicals-live-gene transplantation and atomic-scale miniaturization, possibilities that at last were emerging from the theoretical stage. The big windows looked down upon a Boston of slightly curved streets traced between blocks of brick-red rubble and commercial buildings abandoned- some so precipitously the windows had not been boarded up-after the dramatic population shrinkage. These empty blocks seemed from on high a great bowl of opportunity. We survivors were heirs to room for expansion, to a future of unpredictable possibilities loosed by die relaxation of order. Evolutionary change proceeds through small isolated populations; widespread species tend to stagnate in their own success. We had been horseshoe crabs and crocodiles; now we were nimble niche mammals, ruthlessly thinned, rapidly developing hooves, lemur-large eyes, and specialized gizzards. I would not see it all happen but it was in the air, a kind of planetary expectancy vibrant above the rubble.

Gary Gray was the one who dealt with me. He seemed less wispy-indeed, he had developed a little pot belly, rather preeningly displayed in the logoed T-shirt which has become standard business wear for his generation. I still feel naked without a suit, though my suits in retirement are going stiff and shabby on their cedarwood hangers. “Where’s Ned, on vacation?” I asked.

“You could say that,” he said, and his sidelong glance did not encourage me to ask more. My heart leaped up gleefully, to think that Ned had come a cropper. One’s own rise offers a precarious happiness, shadowed as it is by the threat of reversal and others’ greater triumphs; but the downfall of another provides permanent satisfaction.

“I could say that, but it wouldn’t be the case?”

“Extended vacation would be the optimistic formulation.” Gary grayly smiled. “He got in the way of the number crunchers. He had too verbal a way of expressing himself.”

“And Pat? She was his assistant.”

“I know who Pat was,” he said, in an overemphatic, peevish manner that may have been a parodie declaration of his own sexual preferences. “She’s made a sideways jump, to Sturbridge, Morrissey, and Blaine. They promised her some accounts, and a cubicle of her own, if she’d take night courses in financial management.”

“She seemed very promising,” I said. “A people person” I have never understood homosexuals: they make their choice, or have it biologically made for them, and then become very caustic and indignant about the party they have chosen not to attend-the party of breeders, of fertile male-female friction.

“She was a tramp,” Gary told me. “You can use this office. But all the transaction codes have been changed; there’s a hard-copy printout in one of the drawers. The crunchers don’t like their numbers used by outsiders, even cherished former insiders like yourself. She really made your heart go pitty-pat, didn’t she, Ben boy?”

He took his leer and his bellied-out logo (EXCREMENT OCCURS, it read) away. As I fiddled and fumbled my transactions into the data bank, I felt suspended in space, with my stinging tail, and a touch agoraphobic. I wanted to scuttle out of this cubicled brightness into a friendly dark crevice. More and more, off my own chronically paced property, I feel frightened and disoriented. Boston for forty years was my second home, but now it seemed hostile and featureless, a void beneath my feet.

This was true even of a golf game in Brookline which Red arranged with a member of the Country Club whom he knows. When Red picked me up in his Dodge Caravan, and began to talk on his cellular phone with Durban, South Africa, and then Perth, Australia-what fish there are on the planet are in the Southern Hemisphere, like sparkling snowflakes settling in a glass globe-I felt vaguely kidnapped. Fear raced at the back of my mind like the trickle of cold water that murmurs throughout the whole house when the rubber stopper in a water closet is imperfectly seated. Ken Dixon sat in the back seat, silent, whether from a wish not to interfere with Red’s loud, rambling discussion about evanescent schools of “product,” or because he, too, on my transmission frequency, heard the murmur of fear, of a fatal leak in things that was draining the world of substance. The course-its limar outcroppings of black pudding-stone, its par-fives wandering past cliffs and up sand-bunkered slopes like metaphors of life’s dreamy, anfractuous journey- seemed hollowed out, a shared illusion composed of electrons and protons spinning in a space that was ninety-nine percent vacuum.

Our host was named Les, for Lester Trout, one of Red’s financial catches when he was trawling the Boston financial community for investors, before the war, in an enlarged freezing-and-packing plant. Les was a happy rich man, in shape and fine fettle. Golf had become his life; he attacked the course once a day in order to bring his handicap down from an eight to a seven, and next year a six. He uncoiled into the ball with a wonderful compact force; and after an especially successful shot would flash a predatory smile, inviting you to share his delight in his game.

On the par-three twelfth, I suffered a moment of delusion: I expected to see his nicely drawing nine-iron shot plunge through the elevated green as if through a drum of green paper or the scummy skin of a pond. But no, there was terra firma there, our ancient accretion of sedimented rock. The ball hopped, and stopped. I kept picturing how an orange forgotten at the back of the produce drawer in the refrigerator shrinks to a grayish-green orb that emits puffs of smoke like a pod of pollen.

My sense of unreality, as I moved through the veils of maya, helped me play a little better than usual; I felt indifferent to everything but returning myself to the matrix of my home surroundings-the curving driveway, the white house, the leafy woods, the kids in the woods, the deer, the wife, the flowers-and so swung easily, winning praise I could hardly hear through the murmur of terror leakily running at the back of my brain.

I exaggerate. The dynamics of the match did burn through to me. I was partnered with our host, who with his expensively developed superiority was giving so many strokes to the rest of us that when he faltered-and he was bound to falter often, with a putt that lipped out or a drive that sucked too far left-the burden fell on me. Whenever the pretensions of our low-handicapper were punctured, it became a match of Red and Ken versus Ben. In my betranced state I held up better than when paired with Fred Hanover against these same two buddies. The three of us, equally strangers to this pudding-stone paradise, had a certain furtive solidarity, though I was the evil host’s ally. My distracted golf took on a quality I can only call coziness. The path the ball should follow was marked as if by broad troughs in the air; it was the reverse of that frequent agonizing feeling of a narrow correct path, a kind of razorback ridge which the ball keeps slipping down one side or the other of. Especially on the second side, beginning with pars on the short, blind tenth hole and the long eleventh with its sheer cliff and grassy transverse ditch, did I help my team; we wound up collecting two welders, which Les Trout tucked into his wallet as gleefully as if he had made another million.

I marvel, writing this down, at with what boyish games we waste our brief lives.

Time, I have read, was believed by Pythagoras to be the soul and procreative element of the universe. And it is true, rail against its ravages as we will, that we cannot imagine our human existence without it: nothing would happen-we would be glued flat against space like the schematic drawings with which mathematical gamesters illustrate the odd consequences if our three dimensions were reduced to two. Descartes claimed to believe that time is a series of ever-perishing instants continually renewed by God in split-second acts of deliberate creation. This grotesque idea occurred to me as a child, and perhaps to most children as their brains awkwardly widen into metaphysics. Science begins with keeping track of time. The Mayans had calendars more accurate in arranging leap years than our own. Dwellers in the Andaman Islands keep a calendar based on the odors of seasonal plants as they bloom and die.

Each morning, I observe, the day displays a few more dead leaves on the driveway, a few more yellow patches in the stand of young maples reflected in the pond. Shaving in my bathroom mirror, I glance down and perceive a slightly more reddish tinge than yesterday’s to the top of the burning bush, Euonymus atropurpureus, which grows in the terraced area visible from this window.

Gloria points out that I shave badly, for all the times I have done it. I skip bristles beneath my jaw and just under my nose; I don’t go far enough down my neck, so unsightly long white hairs protrude above my shirt collar. She also claims, observing me through the rivulets in the steamed-up glass door, that I don’t know how to shower-I don’t use enough soap, and I don’t pull back my foreskin and scrub. The wives of uncircumcised men get cancer of the cervix seven times more than women with circumcised husbands, she claims. So, go marry a Jew or be a nun, I think. It wasn’t my decision; it was taken by old Dr. Hardwick and my mother, back at Pittsfield General on a September afternoon in 1953. Maybe they plotted to give my wives cervica cancer. There was some kind of collusion between dark browed, young-old Doc Hardwick and my petite, sandy haired mother; I could feel it in the way they paired up at my bedside when I had the chicken pox or mumps. I could hear it in their chatting over coffee downstairs, my father off at work and house calls already all but a thing of the past. In the more than three score years that I have had to ponder it, I think being uncircumcised perhaps the most valuable thing about me. My sheathed glans imparts a responsive sensitivity to the entire stumpy stalk that embarrassed me now and then in youth but served me well into advanced maturity; I am Homo naturalis, man unscathed, Adam before the covenant; and I am deeply hurt that Gloria levels these criticisms. Perdita never complained of my poor cumbersome body, though her silences, her increasing reserve, her way of grimacing and keeping her own sweet counsel in the end were more devastating than any utterance.

To Gloria I am a kind of garden, where she must weed, clip, tie, deadhead, and poison aphids. She can’t believe that, after all these years, I sometimes set the fork on the right and the knife and spoon on the left; it would affront her no less if I came to the table without trousers on. At the weddings we now and then attend, to see time feed the younger generation into its procreative mill, when she and I dance she tells me to take big steps and to stop jiggling my shoulders. Slurping my soup, picking my nose even in the dark of the movie theatre, putting on a striped tie with a checked jacket-all these harmless self-indulgences excite her to flurries of admonition, and perhaps I am wrong to take offense. She merely wants to train me, like a rose up a trellis. As I age and weaken, I more and more succumb to her tireless instruction. She finds my driving doddery and dangerous, so it seems simplest to let her drive when the two of us are in the car. Docilely, before putting them on, I hand her my pajamas to verify that they are clean enough to wear for one more night; she sniffs the collar, makes a face, hands them back to me, and says, “The hamper.”

Yet I do not fail every sniff test. Sometimes, usually just before dinner, when her biorhythm enters an amorous patch, she presses her nose into my neck and says, “You smell right. You smell mine. It’s like a mother-she knows her baby by the smell. And the baby knows the mother.” These elemental animal facts never lose their charm for her; she is so conversant with the language of scent that I fear she may catch on my face a whiff of Doreen’s crotch, which I have won the right to nuzzle, down in the shack, and, her glossy thighs propped on my shoulders, to stir with my tongue-the scarcely musky, gingerly furred pink folds of it-as the closest approach to penetration that I will allow myself, or that my unstated compact with the boys from Lynn allows me. It is a rare event-they are branching out, taking their moll with them-and I scrub my face afterwards, with soap enough to mask a rotting mummy.

The other amorous peak of Gloria’s biorhythm comes at night, between four and five, when she awakens in a nervous state. She hugs me, kisses my neck, murmurs invitations. Her aristocratic fingers timidly seek my penis; I slap at her hand, trying to preserve my dreaming state. Her nightie has ridden high on her body; she makes me curl my arm around her; her breasts glide into my hands as if leaping; her buttocks push at my slumbering manhood, which dully considers answering the call, weighing the pluses and minuses. “It’s the middle of the night,” I groan.

“I know, I know,” she says pityingly, apologetically.

“Couldn’t you save all this for daylight, darling?”

“I will, I will-good idea,” Gloria says, breathily, meekly yet with a heartbreaking lilt of unquenched hope, as if I might pounce after all. We both know she will not feel this passion in daylight, there is too much to do, the world presses at too many points-gift shop, garden club, newspaper, telephone-and her passion is based in part upon my being asleep, babyishly defenseless and pre-sexual, exciting perverse desire. My brain fumbles at the cozy coverlet of the dream I was having (I was back in Hammond Falls playing pick-up baseball) while wondering if my duty as a man and an American was not to gouge myself awake and serve my needy wife. She whispers, “I’ll go to the other room and read,” and I fall gratefully back asleep. All my old playmates are there in the dream-Poxy Sonnen, Billy Beckett, Fats Weathersby-and the red-brick smokestacks downtown, by the river, are visible beyond left field as it slopes away.

It is not just me that Gloria finds exasperatingly imperfect. The lawn boys have no idea how to mow a lawn, the cleaning ladies leave cobwebs in all the high corners, and the dentist has placed in her mouth a grotesquely mismatching crown-too yellow, too big. Her smile is in fact her foremost charm, brilliant and broad, her teeth apparently perfect. My mother, who was still alive then, regretted my leaving Perdita and the children, but admitted, upon meeting Gloria, “Those teeth are worth investing in.” Her own teeth had given her much trouble, and by her forties were mostly denture.

Since my encounter with Dr. Chafetz in the locker room and its medical follow-ups, my wife has tried to soften her criticisms. She looks me in the face after smelling my neck and abruptly her eyelids redden. I clasp her to me, knowing she is counting the days, the weeks, the years it may be; but the end of her captivity, her espousal to one unmannerly helping of male flesh, is in sight. I hold her, forgiving the unspoken. “You’re so precious, so precious to me,” she murmurs in her dear confusion.

Men are unreasonable in their contradictory demands on women. I blamed Perdita for not providing total care-for allowing me, in the indolent remissions of her own commitment, some freedom, which I misused. And I blame Gloria for smothering me with a care that nevertheless has not protected me from old age and its perils.

As in the spring I had watched for the crocuses to open, and then the forsythia and lilac to yield each day a bit more of their color, so I watch from the bathroom window, as I shave, the leaves of the burning bush taking on, ever wider and more intensely, a reddish-purple tinge.

The biopsy came back positive: tiny sub-surface tumors in the middle left lobe, like rotten spots in a punky old chestnut.

I had a passionate desire to see Jennifer today and, after calling Roberta, drove over to Lynnfield. The baby was up from her nap and seemed pleased to see me-in her mother’s arms, she held out her own little arms to me, wanting me to hold her. I felt desperately flattered. She is ten months old, on the gabbly, tottery edge of talking and walking. But the apparatus of challenge and response is still missing some neural cogwheels in her solemn, silky head. “What does the sheep say?” Roberta asked her, the refrain of a childhood book they read every night.

Jennifer pivoted her head to look at me as if I were the one being asked the question. “B-, b-,” I prompted. She switched her head to look questioningly at her mother. She began to wriggle and get heavy in my arms. I put her down, on the kitchen floor, and for a second she almost stood, before cautiously flopping down onto her diapered bottom and then regaining an upright position by clinging to a kitchen chair. She looked up at the two of us with a guileless puzzlement, the broad bulge of her forehead like that of a pitcher waiting to be filled.

“Baa,” both Roberta and I told her, in a spontaneous father-daughter chorus. “Baa. ”

The infant held on to the chair seat with one hand and put the middle two fingers of the other into her mouth, while staring unblinkingly upward, trying to imagine what we wanted of her. She removed the hand from her mouth and extended that arm as far as it would go and squeezed her spit-wet hand open and shut.

“That’s right” Roberta’s proud voice pronounced. “Bye-bye! Little Jenny say bye-bye!”

Jennifer smiled, pleased to have found our tune, and let the bye-bye gesture slowly die. Then another of her accomplishments surfaced through the mazy channels of her growing brain. She lifted both hands above her head-or, rather, above her ears, since her arms are so short all her gestures have a lovely stubbiness. Roberta instantly understood. “So biiig” she eagerly crooned. “Jennifer is sooo big!”

The child, seeing herself understood, clapped her hands together, nearly missing.

“Patty cake,” her mother obediently chimed. “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man!”

For these seconds, Jennifer, using both hands, had been standing on her own without realizing it; realizing it, she sat down in fright on the floor, and might have begun to cry had not Roberta swooped down and swept her up into a triumphant, overwhelming embrace. Thus women urge seed into seedling, seedling into fibrous plant. Girl babies excite our intensest tenderness because the pain of love and parturition awaits them, just as all their eggs are already stored in their tiny ovaries.

I had one cup of herbal tea and three low-fat ginger cookies and watched shy little Keith build and destroy two edifices of nesting plastic blocks; then Irene arrived with Olympe and étienne, on their way back to west of Boston from visiting Eeva and Torrance and Tyler in Gloucester. My children and their spouses keep up a seethe of visitation and sibling interaction which no longer requires me or Perdita; we are emeritus parents, and perhaps always were somewhat absent. Our children raised themselves, with the help of the neighbors, television, and the international corporations that hoped to sell them something. My two soft-mannered half-African grandchildren endured with ironic smiles the clumsy bumptiousness of their little white cousins, whom they escorted and carried (Olympe lugging Jennifer like a sack, face outward, her stomach elongating so that her navel seemed about to emit a cry) into the yard while my two daughters, somewhat formally, settled to entertain their father. I did not share with them my recent diagnosis, nor they with me the depths of tribal gossip, presumably enriched by Irene’s afternoon with the slant-eyed, bohemian Eeva. It makes me tired to try to recall what we did say- with what rusty banter I tried to revive my paternal role. In fact I was content to sip my second cup of herbal tea and watch the two girls, now women on the near and far side of forty, talk and gesture and demurely titter with the long-boned, self-careless grace of their mother when she was their age or younger. Perdita had been about their age when I had left her, amid scenes of such grievousness as would attend a dying. It was a dying, a killing, and we lacked the assurance: which the last twenty years have brought, that other lives were coming, that we could Uve without one another.

We had married in 1978, toward the end of a decade of license, but we were an old-fashioned couple, really. We spent some weeks that first summer at her parents’ place in remotest Vermont-stingy thin mountain land that reminded me of the Berkshires but which I was seeing from another social angle, as someone not obliged to wring a living from it. I was out of the B.U. B-School by then, and had been taken on by Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise. We would play gin rummy by kerosene light, and push an old reel mower across the bumpy lawn, and swim in an icy brook deep in the woods. Once I sneaked a little Instamatic into our gym bag and took a few photos of her naked, without her knowing, because I thought she was so beautiful. When she saw the prints she was horrified and hid them so that they did not surface until our divorce, when all our possessions were churned up. She had kept them in a linen drawer, under the paper liner. I asked her for them but she told me, blushing, no-they were hers. Her body, never to be so smooth and shapely again, but hers to bestow upon the next man. Like Russian dolls, I contain a freckled boyish ballplayer and Perdita une jeune fille nue comme Diane se baignant.

My daughters and I walked out of the little green tract house in Lynnfield to admire their children, all four filthily absorbed in making a racetrack in the bare dirt by the fence.

Along Route 128 as I drove east, tawny stripes of hay nodded in the lowering sun. Grass wants to die, to grow tall and set seed and die. Keeping it short and green in a lawn is a cruel and unnatural act, pro-Gramineae activists keep reminding us, as they are dragged off and pummelled by representatives of the powerful pro-lawn forces-the mower manufacturers, the great seed-and-fertilizer combines. When I got out of the car in my driveway, an acorn pinged off the car roof and another struck me on the shoulder. The air was still summery and the sky the smooth blue of baked enamel, but the oak trees were letting go. Let go: natural philosophy in a nutshell.

Acorn shapes have been on my mind. My sinister locker-room encounter with Dr. Chafetz was but the lowest rung of a ladder of doctors I am climbing. Beyond the plump damp-handed urologist I have attained to a wiry radiologist, in his grizzled fifties but still exuberant over the wonders of technology, which accumulate even in times of social chaos. “Twenty, thirty years ago,” he tells me, “you would have been a sure-as-shootin’ candidate for prostatectomy-cut out the whole damn thing, and to hell with the surrounding tissue. Barbaric! They would saw away in there, in a sea of blood, and the patients would come out totally impotent and most likely peeing in their drawers for years, if they ever got sphincter control back. Now, with conformal radiotherapy, we shape the beam to the tumor exactly, and never even singe the colon or the bladder on either side. Precision! To the micron! They used to use only X-rays and some gamma rays to do the zapping-we’re getting cleaner, faster results with beams of protons. We’re not just killing these cells, Ben-we’re inducing them to kill themselves, by a process called apoptosis-that’s a-p-o-p-tosis-which the developing fetus uses to destroy embryonic gills, for instance. The body’s discarding and weeding all the time, all the time. Plus there’s all sorts of mop-up tricks you can do with radioactive implants and chemo. Prostate, for example”-the noun “cancer” had been dropped from the phrase-“by the nature of the beast is subject to a hormone therapy that produces an androgen blockade. Not quite a piece of cake, Ben, but close to it. A bagel, let’s say.”

Did I imagine it, or were more people calling me “Ben” since this crack in my health developed?

“Any questions, Ben? You’ve been following me?”

I hadn’t, quite. When I was back in college, and had a big exam coming up, the closer it came the less I could concentrate on the necessary books: they developed an anti-magnetism which repelled my hand when I reached for them. Each of the finite moments until the test seemed infinitely divisible, with always the next particle of time the one in which I would face reality and at last concentrate.

Particles of time are not infinitesimal; they accumulate. I never used to be conscious of any scum on my teeth, any more than I was aware of any body odor or need to bathe. Perdita and I, I believe, always smelled perfectly bland, if not sweet, to one another. Now I want to brush my teeth all the time, even when I have not eaten since the last brushing. And my neck-why is my neck so sweaty when I awake? Pillow, pajamas, collars-an invisible pollutant has settled on them all, moment by moment.

On the walk down to the mailbox, I notice that the stunted pears are showing ruddiness on their warty little cheeks. But the wild blueberries, which I try to persuade Jeremy to skip over with his whirring weed-whacker, are oddly slow, this August, to turn blue. Or else the birds and those deer are eating them as they ripen. Some ferns are turning a reticent shade of brown. The fall is almost here.

I will miss you, sweet pages blank each new day. Here, have not one line but two:

Now-yes, there is still a “now”-the maples hold arcs and crests of orange like bouquets shyly thrust forward by a massive green suitor, and the horse-chestnut leaves are wilting from the edges in, and a faintly winy blush hazes some of the trees I see from Route 128, as Gloria drives me by en route to one of my now-incessant medical appointments.

She has decided to rip up all the cosmos in her garden. With a tentative tenderness she asks me if I want to come outside and-not help, of course-merely watch. Each step I take has an attendant difficulty and pain that makes the world-the green of the lawn, the transparency of space, the resilient solidity of the life-permeated earth-perversely delicious. Everything tastes the way it did in childhood, of newness and effort; each surface presents a puzzling, inviting depth of possibility, of future time without end. The year has made less progress than I had expected in the nearly four weeks that I was off in the hospital, with a view of brick walls and the rusty tops of city sycamores.

I have resolved to spare this journal dedicated to the year’s passing any circumstantial account of the obscene operation that I have momentarily survived. It has left me incontinent for a while and impotent I fear forever. A soreness at the base of my bladder, a rasping burning lodged high in the seat of elimination (the devil’s lair, in old religious lore) remind me of the violence done my unruly flesh. The operation was, as the wiry radiologist predicted, a twenty-first-century miracle of directed radiation-raw protons, aimed to a micron’s tolerance by something called a delayed-focus laser-rather than the cheerful prostatectomic butchery of yore. Still, the negative effects and the factors of uncertainty are not as radically reduced as the celebrants of scientific advance would have you believe. Our bodies, which even in the year 2020 are the sole means by which “we”-we nobodies, so to speak-“live,” retain a mulish atavistic recalcitrance. To be human is still to be humbled by the flesh, to suffer and to die. There are now three of us in the house- Gloria, I, and my impending demise. Gloria’s eyes are bright with it; her utterances and gestures have an actressy crispness born of her awareness of this witnessing third party. Herself as widowed, as mournfully, bravely free, fills her mind much as the image of an idyllically happy married woman gives direction to the fantasies of a pubescent girl. She tries to be kinder, but in her enhanced vitality has more edges, which cut into my heightened sensitivity. Just being in her garish, painfully distinct and articulate presence has become arduous.

Of my hospital stay I chiefly remember the white, syrupy conspiracy of it all, like a ubiquitous, softly luminous ethereal lotion, and the eager complicity with which I entered into the therapeutic rituals, the obligatory indignities, the graciously shared disgrace. What an odd relief it is to shed all the roles and suits and formal pretenses life has asked of us and to become purely a body, whose most ignominious and flagrant detail is openly, coöperatively examined and discussed-cherished, even, as an infant’s toes and burps and turds are loved. Amid the pain and anxiety and helplessness, self-love holds a little orgy for itself. Others, solemn, in white, scurry in and out, vigorously participating in the indecencies, bestowing technical names upon the hitherto unspeakable. Not even the most wanton whore, unhinged like a puppet by her craving for cocaine, forgives you as much as the night nurse who takes away the bedpan. Smilingly she, in that phosphorescent hospital twilight wherein wink the multi-colored lights of multiple sleepless monitors, gazes down into your face and inserts into your mouth, like a technically improved nipple, the digital thermometer with its grainy plastic skin. In these crevices of the nightmare, a deep neediness is put to rest.

I took an innocent pride, in short, in being a good patient-like being a good soldier, a morally dubious exercise in solidarity. I asked for no more pain medication than the authorities decreed, I made appropriate jokes in the intervals of my care, I admired the giant humming machines under whose poisonous focus I was periodically strapped, I was stoical about my hair loss and blistered anus; I minded only the infrequent sieges of nausea and the pathetic shrunken wreck the procedures made of my beloved genitals.

“What didn’t you like about the cosmos?” I asked, with a sickly croak. In my frail sensitivity I imagined I could feel the damp of the lawn creeping up through my shoe soles- baroquely ornate running shoes, purchased to speed my convalescence.

“It didn’t fit,” Gloria stated firmly. “It wanted to take over the entire garden.”

“It wasn’t a good soldier,” I amplified, in this new voice of mine that seems to have a permanent scratch in it.

“Exactly” Shards of earth and vegetation flew. Fistfuls of torn-up flowers stared skyward, lacking the nervous systems to realize that all those chemical transactions called life had been abruptly cancelled.

I felt-eerie, phantasmal sensation!-a trickle of urine warmly glide from my bladder into the plastic catheter, which conveyed it downward into the cumbersome leg bag strapped below my knee. The leg bag was flesh-colored, amusingly-as if I might enter a beauty contest wearing it and it mustn’t show. Sometimes it backed up, and urine already ejected once backed up as high as my flaccid penis spilling down my thighs.

Big belling morning glories had climbed the green fence, and the single dahlia in my absence had grown and proliferated into a small tree crowded with numerous blooms the blushing color of a maiden’s labia. There seemed something rancid and evil about the garden-clumps of nameless livid growths formed caves for slugs and havens for beady-bodied daddy longlegs with ornately evolved venomous mandibles. In fact moles, rats, and woodchucks did burrow and rummage in the soft, much-mulched soil. Woodchucks nibble off the tops of Gloria’s flowers-they are especially partial to poppies-so she heartlessly sets out so-called Havaheart traps for them, low rectangular cages whose doors fall diagonally and lock when the hapless animal treads on a central trigger. In my absence she had caught a creature who had calmly chewed an escape hatch through the 14-gauge galvanized wire. That must mean that she had caught a metallo-bioform, and that they were getting bigger. All the specimens I had ever seen or read about could have slipped out through the half-inch square mesh.

“Ben, as long as you’re just standing there watching me struggle, wouldn’t you like to throw the cosmos into the green cart and pull it down to the mulching pile?”

“Bending over is agony for me.”

“The doctor said the more you exercised the better you’d be.”

“The doctor doesn’t have a reamed prick and a bag of piss strapped to his leg.”

“You don’t have to be rude about it.” Another clump of uprooted cosmos was flung and a spray of dirt speckled the tops of my hitherto pristine running shoes. They were aqua, turquoise, crimson, black, and white, with striped laces. Gloria added, “The cart is in the garage.”

The effort left me feeling I had dragged a load of broken concrete up the side of Mount Greylock. She told me, “While you were in the hospital, I was frightened. I kept hearing noises and voices in the woods.”

A tension of guilt tugged at my wound, my seared and cleansed pockets of cancerous flesh. Though the delayed-focus laser in theory left the intervening tissue unaffected, in truth the flesh knew it had been violated, and why. Flesh knows everything, and forgets nothing.

“Oh?” I said. “I’ve been struck since I was home by how quiet everything is.” I had been listening, in my captivity, for the Lynn boys, my adopted grandsons, to come to the door dutifully inquiring after my health, or for Doreen at night to come and hiss sexily beneath my window. I even scanned the driveway for her cigarette butts. My flesh remembered the scent of her cigarettes in the sweatshop closeness of the shack, and her malty smell, and the glazed hard place between her breasts, shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples. She liked-the only thing she admitted liking-my rapidly flicking them with my tongue. At night I would lie and listen for sounds of human life from the woods but there was only the contralto drone of the cicadas-a thousand brainless voices blended, like an inhuman radio signal from space.

“I know,” Gloria said. Her cheeks as she lowered her eyes to weed bulged with a complacent smile. “I did something about it.”

“What?” I braced for the answer. Any mental disturbance or anxiety tugs at the seat of my pain with its torque.

“Don’t you bother yourself about it,” she said. “But i worked.”

And in my feebleness and maimed self-esteem I assente to her mastery of our arrangements, here on this hill, in on post-war, post-law-and-order twilight; I let it slide over me as one gravitational field, with only the slightest grinding of Stardust, slides over another.

Signs: the cicadas’ monotone at night, and one bright-scarlet leaf on the slowly ruddying euonymus bush that I look down upon as I shakily shave, and white asters, early fall’s signature bloom, everywhere-at the gravel edges of the driveway, and in the shadows beneath the hemlocks, and on into the woods, white asters with their woody stems and rather raggy-looking serrated leaves. How strange it must be, being an autumn flower, waiting while the others-the snowdrops and crocuses, the daisies and loosestrife, the Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod-all have their go at romancing the busy pollinators; and then, as the days shorten and the insect population grows sluggish and terminal, but for a few darting, reconnoitering dragonflies and aimlessly bobbing cabbage butterflies, to unfurl their modest, virginal, starlike attractions. What patience Nature possesses, I thought, as with grotesque caution, my rectum protesting every tensed muscle, I made my way down into the woods, terrified of slipping on a patch of pine needles or some loose dirt that would send me and my hypersensitive wound tumbling.

Gloria is watchfully home most of the days now. Her two associates-the other two-thirds of ownership-have taken up the slack at the gift: shop. Her gossipy get-togethers at the Calpurnia Club, her shopping flings at the Chestnut Hill Mall, her Tuesday book group, her Thursday bridge afternoons over at the Willowbank have all been put on hold as she hovers about me like a cheerful, soigné vulture. She has found a new hairdresser, on Newbury Street, who has achieved a perfect tint, a pale platinum blond with a tinge of copper, which blends with the gray so subtly that her hair does not look dyed at all, just faintly unearthly: a halo, a crest for the emerging widow. Around the house, except when fresh from gardening, she dresses with an ominous formality-shoes rather than sneakers, dresses rather than slacks or jeans. Not quite church clothes, but clothes fit for the gracious reception of an unannounced, distinguished guest, whom I take to be the inanimate version of myself that I am hatching-the solid, peglike, ultimate Russian doll inside a succession of hollow ones.

But today she had to go off for an hour of dental hygiene in Swampscott, and I felt strong enough-barely-to make it out into the woods and down the rocks to the shack by the path. I keep fighting fantasies of falling and the catheter being rammed deep up into my bowels. As I gripped a beech sapling to halt my slithery descent, I saw over the shaggy shoulder of a granite outcropping that the kids’ shack was gone. Not only was it gone, I observed as I drew near, but the ground for thirty feet all around it had been cleared as if by a lawnmower. A furious lawnmower: the old dry limbs and even the plywood and wire screening the boys had stolen for their little haven was shredded into bits, as if chewed and spit out. The ground was coated with fragments the size of my palm-tarpaper, aluminum mesh, laminated wood, corrugated plastic, cloth, rubber, and leather. It took me a minute to realize that these fragments were not from a rag heap but had been torn from bodies, bodies that were-where There was in the air a smell not only of rotting mulch in at autumn woods, or of the boggy creek that seeped through cattails a stone’s throw away, but of sweetly putrefying mam mal. And, now that I knew what to look for, I had no trouble finding, in the evenly spread layer of debris, splinters of bone, withered shreds of skin barely distinguishable from the leaves that were starting to drift across the decaying layers of earlier years’ leaf-fall, and blackened strips of what had been internal organs. I remembered the snake I had wounded. As best I could judge from the state of decomposition, a week or two had gone by; organic scavengers ranging from ants to foxes must have carried off much of the carrion.

How many bodies were here going back to nature (as if they had ever left) I could not estimate. My rectum was screaming, affronted by the effort of getting down the hill, and I still had to climb back up before Gloria returned with radiant, plaque-free teeth and invigorated gums. Not more than two, I guessed. José and Ray doing night duty. Little Manolete I could not bear to include in the slaughter, in my mind’s eye. The metallobioforms had pulverized even the skulls; the tufts of shiny black hair scattered about like rabbit fur could have belonged to any of them but Doreen. I prayed-let’s call it that-that she had not been present at the strike, but as I turned to leave my eye caught a bit of blue cotton with a white band such as might hem bikini panties. Beneath her tomboyish garb she did use to surprise me with dainty pastel underthings. Bleak as our relationship was, I think I was beginning to amuse her, and she would plan for our next tryst. The greenish glint of her eyes, which would deepen when my rough old tongue had worked on her for a while, had gone back to earth.

But such underpants could have been left in the shack in the natural careless course of events. Many of the cloth fragments were stiff with brown dried blood, and there was no blood on the scrap of blue, I saw as I held it, rubbing its fine knit texture between finger and thumb.

As I stood there in the circle of the massacre-as geometrical as if drawn with a giant compass-I realized that the metal vermin might be underfoot, about to bring me down. As nimbly as my catheter and leg bag permitted, I danced to the edge and beyond, where the undergrowth was still unchewed, still messy with fallen sticks and greenbrier and wild woodland asters. Hurting and hobbled as I was, I fairly flew up the hill.

Why had the metallobioforms decided to clear this space? Or did they, in the tangle of fine copper wire which did for their brains, “decide” to do anything? Dampness, the friend of organic forms, was their enemy, and this little knoll was the driest spot in the immediate vicinity. The trinkets were limited in their range by the parasitic nature of their energy; the “spark-eating” pseudozoans had to cluster near electric wires or, in the cities, mass-transit third rails, and the “oil-eaters” required an abundance of spilled petroleum they were likely to find, in a backwater like Haskells Crossing, around the Amoco station. After clearing such a circular patch, they must have had to scuttle or slither out across the railroad tracks (where they could snack on the drippings of diesel fuel and brake lubricant on the ties) into our little downtown,. to replenish their exhausted energies. Many trinkets, like carrier aircraft whose missions took them just beyond the possibility of return, didn’t make it; their junky, rusting bodies-most no bigger than ladybugs, which they resembled in shape, without the playful spots-littered the underbrush. But the species seemed to be extending its range nevertheless, and to be penetrating woodlands when before the war only organic wildlife had been observed.

Even back on my own lawn, I kept nervously checking mi ankles and lifting my feet, imagining the remorseless, stinging bites gathering into a fiery buzz-saw force. Survivors describe, on television, an attack as like having one’s feet and then legs plunged into a meat-grinder. Such must have been the experience of heavy, laconic José and voluble Ray and little inky-eyed Manolete with his droll propensity for jerky, ambitious gestures. They had been the last people on Earth who had hoped to learn something from me. Had I been here to counsel them, they might all still be alive.

A wild wet late September storm outside: trees tossing and tousling in the struggle with air gone mad. Leaves’ pale undersides show in waves in the woods between my windows and the beach, and small fallen branches sodden with greenery litter the driveway at the front of the house, away from the sea, which Gloria calls the back. The oaks around the circle whistle and roar in their afflicted tops so that I expect to see one come crashing down or drop a giant torn limb. But this is no hurricane, just a friendly New England nor’easter; the wind relents just enough, like a disease that declines to kill us, playing with us to pass the time.

My catheter was removed a few days ago: a relief, in that the scaffolding of impedimenta in which I have been enclosed is thus reduced, but also an embarrassment, since it promoted me to diapers-Depends Adult Incontinence Pants. They get wet and heavy within an hour, and Gloria has tactfully set me up in the guest room with a rubber sheet over the mattress. I awake and change myself several times during the night; yet in the morning I am drowsily surprised by the transposition of our bedroom curtains and bookcase to the sparser, bleaker furnishings of the guest room. Its ceiling over in one corner is broken into a set of broad prismatic angles, to accommodate a short flight of steps on the third floor above, and I gaze, half awake, at this architectural disturbance as if it is a thing in itself, a crouching angular high shape sharing my space, malevolent but quiet, in lieu of a wife.

Gloria takes care of me but the house shakes with the irritable clicking and slamming of the partitions she has put up between us. She wants to keep dry. In my impotence I have ceased to be of any use. From her angle our relationship is all sufferance, and a noble non-complaining; she is earning stars in Heaven, as people used to say, and her virtue afflicts me with its hardness and glitter so that I cringe. What I loved about her in comparison with Perdita was this: lovemaking with Perdita mixed us up, the two of us, like a dark batter of flesh and desire, and rarely in the exactly correct proportions, so that one or the other of us felt cheated, and the other guilty, as if our sex should be a merger as precisely fair as the mixture of genes in our children; whereas with Gloria there was no confusion of responsibilities. I would use her, and she me, to achieve two distinct, unapologetic orgasms, sometimes simultaneous and sometimes not. This sexual clarity seemed worth laying down my life for-my respectability, my financial security, my children’s happiness. As it turned out, the price was less than I had feared; life went on, the world continued turning, as it would in the wake of this fierce September blow, broken limbs and all.

I keep getting out of bed to paddle from window to window, seeing the world drenched, feeling my diaper sag toward another changing. In my days of young fatherhood with Perdita we had a diaper service, which would take away each Monday an ammonia-rich, water-laden sack, and give us square bundles of fresh, dry, folded diapers instead. No such service now exists. What I remove now I put in a greer garbage bag that each Wednesday Gloria in the back of her station wagon carts down to the side of the road to take its place in some far-off landfill, for the delectation of future archaeologists. They will see us as faithful newspaper-readers and revellers in absorptive pads.

If I can no longer give her an orgasm with my stiff prick, my only use to Gloria is as a stiff corpse bequeathing to her liquid capital. In our feverish, catch-as-catch-can courtship, I more than once gave her an orgasm with my hand (in the movies) or foot (under a restaurant table) or with my mouth as she kneeled on a bed looking down like a mounded snow-woman with my head held firm between her melting thighs. But I fear that now she would find such resorts impossibly undignified for a woman of over sixty. I myself turned sixty-seven in the hospital, a quantum jump unobserved except by a touching shower of cartoony cards from my ten grandchildren, whose signatures ranged from Kevin’s maturely subdued ballpoint italic to a crayon scribble from Jennifer, her little slobbery hand no doubt bunchily held within Roberta’s.

I read a lot, in my ignominious, tender, doze-prone state, avoiding the emotional stresses of fiction-that clacking, crudely carpentered old roller coaster, every up and down mocked by the triviality, when all is said and done, of human experience, its Sisyphean repetitiveness-and sticking to the alternative lives, in time and space, of history and the National Geographic. This splendid magazine almost alone continued to print right through the Sino-American Conflict, bringing us beautiful photographic spreads, miles removed from the hateful clamor of propaganda, on the picturesque yak-herders in the yurt-dotted sandy backlands of the very empire we were striving to annihilate. Somewhere amid the nuclear blasts they found the ink, the clay-coated stock, and the innocent text to sustain that march of yellow spines continuous from the days of-explorer, writer, statesman-Teddy Roosevelt.

The overlooked corners of the maps and time charts fascinate me-the so-called Dark Ages, for instance, from the fall of Rome to the year 1000. Not only do these centuries contain the unconscious (to its citizens) permutation of Roman institutions into pre-medieval simulacra, and the incongruous sunburst of Irish monasticism while the Saracens and Vikings were squeezing Europe to a terrified sliver, but in humble anonymous farmsteads and workshops technological leaps never dared by the theorizing, slave-bound ancients were at last executed-the crank and the horseshoe, the horse collar and the stirrup all first appear in, of all apparently Godforsaken centuries, the ninth. By the year 1000 the wheeled Saxon plow, wind and water mills, and three-field crop rotation were extending a carpet of tillage the sages of Greece and tyrants of Rome had never imagined. Perhaps now, in the decadent and half-destroyed world that spreads below my hilltop, similar technological seeds are germinating. Decadence, like destruction, has this to be said for it: it frees men up. Men die, but mankind is as tough and resilient as the living wood that groans and sighs outside my window.

A big white truck roars in the driveway, splashing to a stop. Gloria, her clogs swiftly clacking, goes to the door and there is a surprisingly long, even an intimate, exchange. Stiffly pushing out of bed, whose wrinkled, odorous sheets have become my loathsome second skin, I move to the window and look down, in time to see the FedEx man-or woman; the hair is intermediate-turn away and get back into the driver’s seat. He or she is tucking some sepia scrip into a leather billfold, and there is a thick leather triangle belted beneath the dark-blue shirt. I call for Gloria to come upstairs; she finally obliges. Her radiant, intelligent, mature face, framed by cleverly tinted ash-blond hair, is as painful to look at as the sun.

“Was that something for me?” I croak.

“No, dear. For me, believe it or not.”

“What was it?”

“It was a transaction.”

“Obviously. What sort of transaction?”

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you, but FedEx collects a monthly fee now.”

“For what?”

Her already bright face brightened further. “For everything. For the utilities, and road maintenance, and our protection. FedEx is taking over a lot of what the government used to do but can’t. It’s like the Pony Express, taming the West.”

“Or Mussolini making the trains run on time.” The allusion went by her; the last war had made World War II as dim as a post-office mural. I asked, “What about the nice people I used to pay protection to? Spin and Phil, and then the boys from Lynn.”

“A bunch of pathetic thugs, darling. They’ve all gone out of business. FedEx is nationwide; they have a network that can put New England into touch with Chicago and California again. It’s a Godsend, really.”

“You sound like a commercial.”

“When something is an improvement, I’m not afraid to say so, unlike some grumpy old cynics I know. You just concentrate on keeping your diapers changed, and do your exercises.”

Kegel exercises-mental exercises designed to reactivate the traumatized urethral sphincter. It was frustratingly difficult to locate with the mind those clusters of tiny muscles (there are two, one around the rectum and the other around the base of the penis) which we learn to manage not long after we learn to walk and talk, thus obtaining our ticket of admission to respectable human society. Well, I had fallen out of the club. And I had never known that Gloria regarded me as a cynic. In relation to what sunny philosophy of her own? In a marriage, as our flesh matters less, our opinions matter more. But I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t have the strength. I said, “It looked from the window as though he was packing a gun.”

“She. A very nice, competent young woman was driving the truck, Mr. Chauvinist. And yes, they do have to carry guns, with their new responsibilities. They need to defend themselves, and us, against anti-social elements. Those voices I kept hearing in the woods-I told FedEx about them, and sure enough they stopped.”

“They were children’s voices,” I said, her revelation touching some other muscles in me I didn’t know I had.

“They were trespassing voices,” Gloria said, irresistible in her clarity of purpose and conscience.

“Did it ever occur to you,” I asked her, “that I might be an anti-social element?”

“What you are is a very sick man who will get better if you do your exercises.”

“My trouble is,” I confessed, “I don’t even know if I’m doing them. I may be just tightening my stomach muscles.”

“Think prick,” she said. My fall has brought a new frankness to our relationship, a tonic simplicity as in those far off days when we knew upon meeting that, if we had smidgeon of privacy and ten minutes of time, we would fuck, cementing our bond, nailing down our hotly contested stake in each other. Think prick: nothing cynical about that.

The house is cold now in the mornings and evenings, but Gloria won’t let me turn on the furnace. Her father, a rigid, pipe-puffing Connecticut squire, never touched the thermostat until All Saints’ Day, she says. By the same calendar he switched from whiskey-and-soda to gin-and-tonic on Memorial Day, and back again on Labor Day. Seersucker suits and tweeds moved in and out of his closet as systematically as changing the guard at Buckingham Palace, and he never took his Mercedes out of the garage without checking the oil. He was a saint of proper procedures. On the coldest days before All Saints’ Day, he would set a log fire in the Wilton living room, and they would all have tea, little Gloria’s chamomile in a flowered cup, Mommy and Daddy’s smoky Darjeeling poured from the blue-green pot with evil-looking long-tailed birds on it, and little cakes served on a tray by their faithful maid Mary, named after the mother of God. She had a pointed nose red at the tip, from the master’s love of a cold house, perhaps. When Gloria touches me her hands feel icy. I wonder if I am running a permanent fever, my body furious at how it has been invaded.

Opening the kitchen cabinet to get down a mug for my morning tea (common Lipton’s, in a tagged bag), I am blinded by sunlight and fear I might clumsily break something. The slant of sun is different, lower, now. We are past the equinox. The Earth is like a ship that has slightly changed course; we would not notice but that the sun warms the panelled wood of our cabin at a slightly different spot in the grain as we dress for dinner. Last night, getting up to change my diaper, I saw the half-moon tipped halfway onto its back, and I made myself realize, in my drowsy gut, that the moon’s illumined half was turned toward the sun, which had plunged out of sight behind the Kellys’ trees hours ago, but in the slant direction from which the moon was lit. Two balls in the sky, one bright, one reflective: it’s that simple. We live among their orbits like dust mites in the works of a clock.

The storm gone northeast to Newfoundland, the weather is clear and calm. The sea has milky stripes of extra calm in it, and even the lobster boats on the far side of Cat Island look sharp and white and close. Twenty miles away, the shore of Hingham and Hull-where last July I could see fireworks go off, fuzzy and faint as comets-floats a sharp, detailed blue above a mirroring width of what seems sheer air.

Other optical illusions:

1. Shaving the other morning, I saw what seemed a giant bright-amber butterfly flapping frantically at my bathroom window, and only slowly realized that it was my stirred-up shaving water, into which I kept dipping my razor, reflecting electric light back into the window, semi-opaque at that newly shadowy 7:00 a.m. hour.

2. On the first day that I felt I had strength to walk down to the mailbox, I saw, as I shuffled (“One small step for a man…”) through the turn in the driveway, a long dark silhouette of something perched crookedly on the mailbox lid. My first thought was that a great bird, a crane or buzzard or pterodactyl, had alighted there; my next, that a package toe big to fit inside had been attached to the outside catch with rubber bands at a weird angle. Then, as I fearfully advanced I saw the shadow to be a piece of low hemlock limb intervening in my field of out-of-practice vision. It was always there. I had not taken this walk for seven weeks.

The vines in the woods-poison ivy and Virginia creeper- are beginning to redden, and the maples, each in its way. The tall red maple, so called, gradually turns a sober burgundy, while the more impulsive, larger-leaved sugar maple flashes into swathes of orange and a neon pink. The Norway maples planted downtown in the village will yield a clear yellow a bit duller than the hickories’. I saw from the car window as Gloria drove me to the Lahey Clinic in Danvers for some blood tests a splendid tall hickory whose outer leaves, basking in the mellow September sunlight, were still green, while the shaded inner leaves were already golden- a core of gold, a flickering inner life sheathed in seemly decorum; it gave the impression, as we sped by in the Infiniti, of a captive girlish soul, a twirling dryad.

Roberta brought Keith and Jennifer to visit me-my children have become solicitous, fluttering bothersomely, albeit loyally, about the wreck of my progenitive apparatus, whereby they came to be. In their adult, wrinkling faces I still see the plump cheeks and candid trusting gaze of ten-year-olds looking to me for protection and guidance and, most difficult to provide, entertainment. How can I explain that I must be left alone, without any pulling and hauling from loving kin, if I am to heal? That I have had my use of the world and my only salvation lies within, in tending the altar of my wound and waiting for nature or the force beyond it to slide me subtly away from my own disaster, by an invisible series of steps, into another world?

We fed Jennifer lunch. She kept taking the silver porringer, which cost a fistful of scrip at Firestone & Parson, and dumping its contents on the high-chair tray and then deliberately dropping the already much-dented porringer to the floor. The fourth time she did it, with her challenging slate-blue stare directly on me, I exploded. “Stop it,” I said to Jennifer, and to Roberta, whiningly, “Why does she keep doing that?”

The baby, who had recently had her first birthday, was not used to being shouted at; her mouth formed a tiny circlet, with a bubble in it, before her lips downturned and she began to cry, to howl, and then to sob and sniffle.

Roberta comforted her. “Oh, Precious,” she said, “Grampy didn’t mean it; he’s just forgotten what little girls are like.” To me she explained, “Daddy, it’s just her way of getting used to space.”

My daughter’s remark, derived no doubt from some digitized handbook of child development, was helpful: I saw an affinity between the infant and myself, beyond our both being clad in diapers. With gestures and perceptions as fumbling as hers, I was getting used to time.

It is a curious entity. It doesn’t exist, I have read, at the particle level: the basic laws of physics are time-symmetric, but for one tiny exception, the particle called the neutral kaon. Were it not for the neutral kaon, perhaps, buildings would self-assemble as frequently as they collapse, and old men would become young in more than their dreams.

In my dreams, I seem to roam a long harvest table heaped with the past eras of my life. One night, I am back in Hammond Falls High School, swinging down the locker-lined halls in my penny loafers and frayed blue jeans-frayed and torn up to the limit the school dress code allows, for beneath the anti-social pose I am a conscientious student, with a college career and lifelong escape from Hammond Falls my sneaking ambition. I chestily inhale effluvia of hair oil and cheap perfume and hormonal overproduction; I eye the knockout girls in their rounded sweaters and pleated skirts and anticipate a Saturday-night sally into Pittsfield with my pals-dinner at the Dalton Avenue McDonald’s or Teo’s and a movie at the Showplace or the Capitol on North Street, followed by apple pie at Rosa’s or the Popcorn Wagon. City streets, illegal beers, lamplight reflected in black puddles, freedom and sin around the corner. The tender heat and latent violence of high school, its fast crass glamour, are all around me, along with the quaint orderliness of its hourly bells and scheduled migrations from room to room. Killers in our walks, we of the Class of 71 are yet as docile as concentration-camp inmates. Though the “system” is widely mocked and deplored, no better has materialized to rescue us from these locker-lined halls, with their hopeful, rebellious clatter.

Then I wake to my soaked diapers, the patter of squirrels on the roof, and the odd construction, like a crazy-angled coffin, buried in the far corner of the guest-room ceiling. With a deadly lurch in my stomach I realize I will never attend high school again, not unless time reverses. Another night, I am still married to Perdita, in our colonial house on East Main Street in Coverdale; we are vaguely surrounded by children in all sizes, but the real seethe is between us and our peers, the other young couples, all closeted in their homes yet dying to burst out, each marital partner helplessly seeking, as in a beaker of jiggled chemicals, to bond with another. A thrilling, tragic tangle of illicit alliances past and future is spread beneath us like a net beneath the flying bodies of trapeze artists; we are still lithe, though in our thirties. Our houses and gardens are neglected; our children signal for our attention in the corners of our eyes. The melting walls of domesticity, the too-many points of contact-with spouses, lovers, would-be lovers, still-living parents, children daily growing more complicated and knowing, cats and dogs whose sudden deaths underline the terror of it all-engulf my sleeping mind, steeped in its liquorous essence of Turnbull. Perdita, gorgeously and pitiably naked, is sobbing her eyes out in the pantry while a party we are giving is still going on; I am conscious of the social impropriety of her smooth, mythic costume, and awake, dawningly grateful that I need not any more unravel the reason for her grief.

What a prodigy of storage it is that all the stages of my life are coiled in my brain, with their stresses and stimulations. My present abject condition is another dish on the harvest table, a shipboard buffet heaped up backwards between the fluorescent soup of life at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise and the plum pudding of the childhood Christmas when I got my first set of skis-wooden ones, and secondhand, I could see from the nicks of wear. Time in my brain has become a kind of space-areas of coiled cerebrum across which enlivening electricity idly sizzles in my sleep.

And yet the dominant atmosphere of my dreams is one of dread, of atrocity. Where does it come from? Mine has been a happy life, as these things go: war and plague have veered around me. New England was the most lightly bombed sector of the former United States. The Sino-American Conflict as a whole lasted four months, and was mostly a matter of highly trained young men and women in sealed chambers of safety reading 3-D computer graphics and pushing buttons, thus obliterating quantities of civilians who never knew what hit them. Millions more Chinese than Americans died. The poisonous fallout chiefly sickened the world’s dark majority in their ghettos and unsanitary villages. And yet I terrifyingly dreamed, just last night, of a pond surrounded by boys with flexible sticks, like bamboo whips, who flayed the pale broad fish as they came to the surface for air. An earlier dream had been cobwebbed with a grimy wealth of mechanical struts and lattices, infernal machinery of some local or global conspiracy or witchcraft was closing in on me, thickening like digestive juices around a swallowed gnat; I escaped only by awaking. All this terror must be history-der Weltgeist. Nanobolts of cerebral electricity swarm across that part of my brain which stores racial memories, from Neanderthal butcheries on.

The post-equinoctial sunlight comes at me from unexpected angles, as if liberated. It lies, flecked with dirt from the windowpanes, on the page I am polluting with these scribbles, and blinds me as I rinse my cereal bowl at the kitchen sink, so that I nearly drop it, as if slapped. Squirrels frantic with the multitude of acorns needing to be buried scrabble heavily across the roof overhead. Geese in their endearingly imperfect Vs honk very loudly. Everything outdoors is brilliant and ready to topple. The tilted sunlight glitters in the poplars and shines through the leaves; though they are still mainly green, they are thinning, losing substance. The dogwood in the circle reddens. Gloria has set Jeremy to pulling up brown hosta, while I in my infirmity cower indoors. Jeremy never did get to Mexico. We shed our dreams one by one.

A week has gone by. Time in my sense of it is fragmented and thrusts this way and that, like the ice jam around the North Pole. Some of it rushes by; the darkness of morning slips through a choppy, brilliant interval into the darkness of evening; sometimes an hour sticks straight up, unmoving. A number of trees have turned a blatant yellow. The tenderest maples, with small, scarcely indented leaves, approach the sensational salmon pink inside a whelk shell. The Bradford pears downtown, I saw through the car windows as Gloria took me on a ride to the bank and the post office, are as blandly green as in June. There is an odd variousness to it all; here in mid-October one beech is all golden jangle and glitter while its mate nearby hasn’t turned a leaf. The burning bush that began to blush in August is still half green, while its smaller companion has quickly assumed a luminous magenta unreal to see. One of our dogwoods is a subdued brownish burgundy, while the leaves of the other are mottled, no two alike, each individually dipped in a saffron dye that skips dark curdled spots like freckles of rot on a pear’s skin. A scrubby sumac, with flanged stems, that mingles with the wild roses shows an inky red, almost an eggplant color, while its leaves keep a pale mint green on their undersides. And, on their spindly, prickly trees, apples and pears-unbidden, uneaten, gnarled-and berries-white on the big cedar along the drive, black on the stalks of goose-foot maple-add to the visual harvest, along with Gloria’s gallantly persisting roses and her thriving many-branched dahlia. Sunlight takes on a supernal value, reflected back from all this varicolored warmth of tinge; the broad sea blares a blue I would not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter.

I awake at night because of my wet diaper and, changed into a dry one, still cannot get back to sleep. The house creaks around me like a galleon shifting sails; from the third story come distinct bumping sounds, but the steady green lights of our alarm system indicate no corporeal trespasser. Wind whistles outside in the soon-to-be-naked trees. It is time to lower the storm windows. For reasons of thrift and coziness I like to do it early; Gloria, who loves fresh air, puts it off a long as possible, to a day in November so bitter my frozen fingers smart as they manipulate the little corroded catches

I return to the guest bed and wait for morning. The wind counterfeits the sound of the first train. I yearn for the first stir of traffic in the village. Though I will them to close, my ears open wide to drink the new day. The tense black surface of expectancy at last parts and the five-thirty train telescopes its onrush of metal wheels out from the amorphous sighing of the woods: the sound enlarges, arches into a volume that makes the house shudder on its rigid underlay of granite, and then swiftly sinks in pitch and volume as the train slows to a pause at the Haskells Crossing Station. Who can be getting on it? Who can be getting off? There is no going back into sleep; within a half-hour, the car that brings Gloria The New York Times will rush up the driveway and circle by the porch. I listen with every nerve for the sound of its approach, but it comes upon me with an unexpected closeness, suddenly next to the house, filling the silence with its automotive pomp-the wet slur of tires, the crackle of crushed twigs, the creak of the springs as the car swerves toward the porch, a groan of brakes lightly applied, the rapid ticking of the engine in the pause, and then, in one chord, the bump of the folded paper hitting the porch and the car’s dismissive acceleration down the driveway. A cocky, synchronized performance, nicely perfected since the snowy winter mornings when the driver ignominiously parked short of the steep curve beyond the drying yard and walked the rest of the way up. To him, as he sails past, the house must look as oblivious as a white mausoleum in the half-light. Little does he know it has a consciousness: I am awake, a painfully alert ghost. All over the dark Northeast men and women are awake in that stir of mild misery we call life.

From these same windows-“front” I call them, though Gloria says the seaside faces front-I heard in mid-morning, as I lay there, shaved and fully dressed but recuperating from my insomnia with a copy of Scientific American, a truck roar up and Gloria’s pure, bell-like voice, more familiar to me than my own, mingle with a voice also, though less resonantly, familiar. I peeked down and over the edge of the porch roof glimpsed my wife’s bright head nodding in eager conversation with a chunky man in the police-blue FedEx uniform, with its tricolor stripe down the sleeves. Not a package changed hands but a sheaf of scrip, from her hand to his and thence into a worn leather satchel. The squirrels are in a frenzy of gathering and hiding; one of them scampered along the roof above my head and when the FedEx man looked up at the noise I saw his face; it was Phil. He had not been rubbed out, then, when Spin was; like me, he lived on. When the truck had roared down the driveway, I called for Gloria to come upstairs. The tyranny of the sick is luxurious. She came. “Who was that?” I asked.

“The FedEx man, darling. Haven’t you seen him before?”

“Why were you handing him money?”

“I told you, dear. They collect, in exchange for peace and order. It was they who took care of those horrible children who had built a hut in our woods and who were terrorizing the neighbors; the rumor is it was they who burned down Pearl Lubbetts’s expensive beach house! It’s quite wonderful, what they’re doing. FedEx, I mean. The guards they use to protect their shipments are being assigned to cities and towns now. They want to bring back green money, that people could use in any state. There’s even talk, the Times says of their moving the federal government, what there is left of it, to Memphis, where FedEx has its headquarters and all its airplanes. It’s about time somebody took charge, before the Mexicans invade.”

The Mexican repossession of Texas, New Mexico, Ari zona, and lower California had been an item lately in the Globe, along with much else terrible-shootings in Dorchester, rapes in Mattapan-that had merely a literary relationship to me, sequestered in my own microcosmic geography and my seared, chastened body.

“It’s a network, so it can do any thing,” Gloria was going on, with a flash of her beautiful teeth and a toss of her ash-blond hair much like those (the flash, the toss) with which, twenty years ago, she could cap one of her-our, might I say?-triumphant sexual performances. She would coax up an erection through a trouser pocket of my gray suit in the middle of Symphony or, unzipping my fly, while we were driving home from Boston at midnight through the neon carnival of pre-war Route 1. “People say President Smith has already resigned, but there’s no way to tell.”

At times I dream I have an erection, with a mauve head like a rabbit’s heart, so hard and blood-stuffed a one it makes the veins in my throat sympathetically stiffen and swell; but when I awake and peek inside my soaked Depends, my poor prick is as red and flaccid as a rooster’s comb. How could so superfluous an appendage ever have served as the hub of my universe? The foolishness of life hits me, stunningly, as the last plausible shreds of my dream dissolve and the suburban houris conjured by my desire-Grace Wren, sucking; Muriel Kelly, splayed-withdraw their wisps of white flesh, but there is nothing to laugh about.

Still, I burn to see Phil by myself, to ask what happened to Deirdre.

I live on a planet where the vegetation is golden, gold in all its shades from red-brown to platinum-white, but all refulgent, towering, superabundant. Red veins of contrast course through its infinite foliations; sheets of orange twirl and tuck themselves into quilted caverns of rustling shadow; a rain of cast-off leaves twirls and twitters down on the same diagonal as the westering light from our proximate star. Gold on this planet rusts; the atoms of its element are eager to combine with the blue of oxygen, the green of vaporized sulfur. Out of gold’s volatile, ubiquitous substance are hewn and thrashed the beams of our homes, the thatch of our roofs, the bedding for our livestock. “Common as gold” is a phrase, and “gold poor.” Yet we do not despise the element, but bask in its superabundance, which crowds every surface to the verge of the sea, itself golden, imbued as it is with aureate salts. Stalked heaps of gold froth compete with the clouds in their cumulus, and make a ragged join with the sulfurous sky, which the daily floods of local starlight dye a deep, heavenly chartreuse. Theologians make of this an argument for the existence of God: if the vast sky were any color less soothing than green, our lovingly fabricated eyes would be burned blind.

Today Phil was waiting for me at the mailbox, his white FedEx truck parked at the entry to our dirt lane through the woods. The pond was having a jolly time reflecting the blazing wall of maples and birches along its edge. A duo of ducks jostled the reflection with their widening rings every time they took off and relanded, or with comic deftness tipped up their tails to grab a bite underwater.

“How’re ya doin’, Mr. Turnbull?” Phil asked me. The somber blue-gray uniform fitted him better than his brown suits had. “That’s some operation you’ve had, your wife’s been tellin’ me.”

I shagged. “They’ve got it down to a science now. A stream of pure protons, no bigger than a pencil lead, passes through the good cells and slices out the bad.”

“Still, there are lousy aftereffects, she was saying. Your missus and I did a lot of chitchat when you were in the hospital. She’s some swell lady, by the way. She knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to express it: that’s what I like in a dame.”

I had never heard Phil talk so much; in the old days Spin had done most of the talking. “She likes you, too,” I said. “She likes the way FedEx is going to take over and kill off all the anti-social elements and bring back the United States of America.”

“We-ell,” he said judiciously, with what I took to be official FedEx gravity; the corporations among their other roles have become the only teachers of deportment. “FedEx has got its competition.” His eyes were small and close together, but on the other hand they were a light contemplative gray, the color of a machine’s burnished underside, and were framed by unexpectedly long eyelashes. “But we’re getting a handle at least on everything east of the Mississippi. The strategy is to absorb the little carriers first, and let UPS come to us when it’s ready.” He moved closer; a sour male essence wafted from his jowls and armpits. “Between us, they’re working on a way to remote-control the trinkets, with radio signals; the little things’ brains are just a few transistors, after all. Once the kinks are out it’ll be the biggest thing in warfare since the taming of the horse.”

“And the invention of horseshoes and the stirrup,” I said. “Otherwise, warrior herdsmen couldn’t have ridden their horses for invasive distances.”

“You’re losin’ me.” He frowned. “Hey”-his little eyes crinkled in anticipation of the jab to come-“how’d the old dingle-dangle like being knocked out of commish? You were some hot ass-man, to hear Deirdre tell it.”

“Deirdre,” I said. “Exactly. Tell me about Deirdre. What’s happened to her? When Spin got killed, I was afraid-”

“Yeah, Spin,” Phil said. “That was real ugly. The kids did it with rocks. Rocks were all the little suckers had-real crude. But you know,” Phil went on, waxing philosophical, “Spin, great a guy as he was, led with his chin sometimes. Remember how he had to dress like some dandy all the time? That showed insecurity, knowing he was out there operating pretty much on his own. He didn’t have what this outfit”-he touched the insignia on his breast pocket-“has. Esprit de corps. The world like it is, you can’t go it alone. Impossible. They’ll eat you up. That’s what I told Deirdre. But the cunt, she don’t listen.”

The present tense was hopeful. “Where is she?” I asked.

He looked at me still humorously. “What you want with her now? Your dick’s just a memory, the way your missus tells it.”

“Gloria talks about it?”

“You know-in a very refined way. Like I say, she’s a class act. What I really appreciate, she’s got a head on her shoulders. She may not call a spade a spade, but she can dig a hole with the best of ’em, you know what I mean?”

People who have come up in the world become boring very quickly; everything they say is disguised bragging. He wanted to talk about his connection with Gloria, I wanted to talk about Deirdre. “You’re not telling me about Deirdre,” I said. “Did you and she, after she left me, live together?”

I tried to picture this oaf laying his sweaty sack of a body down beside hers with its slender bony back, its silken coating of fine flowing hair, and my anger was all at Deirdre, for allowing it, for giving away so cheaply what I had chosen to regard as precious. “For a while,” he casually admitted. Not only were Phil’s eyes small, but so were his ears-no bigger than teacup handles, and pressed tight into the spongy sides of the skull between the bulge of his shaven blue jowls and the bulge of his curly, springy hair. Between his hairline and his eyebrows there was little space for a forehead. “We palled around, she moved into my digs. But she’s restless, Ben.” When would everybody stop calling me Ben? I was not the world’s friend. “She wants to be”-his gesture took in the flaming pond, the walls of woods, the vast presiding illusion of a blue sky-“out there. She’s a whore, you know? She’ll lay for you, great, but then she’ll lay for the next guy. She doesn’t give a fuck, literally. She’s hooked on dope and this notion she has of freedom. I tried to beat the crap out of her a few times, but it didn’t take. She didn’t learn a thing. She’s like some wild animal, you know?”

I didn’t want to hear this, particularly, but I did like being able to talk about Deirdre openly-to drag with my tongue the sweet secret of her name out from the granular dark of my memory cells. The way she would pantingly negotiate the price for every new twist of lovemaking. Her tight butternut ass, with its white thong shadow, up in the air, the little flesh-knot between the glassy-smooth buttocks visible in moonlight that entered the third-story window at just the right celestial angle. The flat planes of her face harking back to the Egyptian Sphinx or some heavy Aztec head of solid sandstone, only transposed to a smaller, female scale, with modern nihilist nerves. The way her stiffish purple dress with its little white collar rustled beside me in church last Easter as the boyish clergywoman preached of how the risen Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, “Touch me not.” Her searing wish-I felt it now, at last-to be sheltered.

I drew closer to Phil, as if to a squat radiator on a bleak winter day. There is a warmth in the proximity of a man who has fucked the same woman you have. It is as if she took off her clothes as a piece of electric news she wished him to bring to you. He has heard the same soft cries, smelled the same stirred-up scent, felt the same compliant slickness, seen the same moonlit swellings and crevices and tufts-it was all in Phil’s circuitry, if I could but unload it. He was a healthy FedEx man, wearing the attractive uniform of power; he could afford to be casual about his conquests, but I no longer could. My sexual memories had become epics of a lost heroic age, when I was not impotent and could shoot semen into a woman’s wincing face like bullets of milk. Deirdre’s flanks in memory had acquired the golden immensity of temple walls rising to a cloudless sky and warmed by an Egyptian sun. Whore though he thought her, a nimbus of her holy heat clung to Phil-his oily black pubic curls had tangled with hers-and I moved another inch closer to him, as the two ducks on the pond suddenly tussled, with a quacking and thrashing that sent concentric ripples crashing into the reflected red image of the maples.

Phil mistook the reason for my intimacy. He thought working for the expanding FedEx conglomerate was the most important thing about him. He lowered his voice confidentially to tell me, “In a coupla months, we’ll have the circuitry in place so we don’t even have to collect in person; the monthly charge will be automatically deducted from your bank account. Neat, huh?”

“How do I know you won’t deduct too much?”

“It’s a matter of trust, like you always said. Trust us. You won’t feel a thing.”

“With you, did she come?”

“Huh?”

“Deirdre.” I was shameless now, in my decrepitude. In a world of dwindling days, why wait to seek the truth? “Were you able to give her climaxes?”

“Hey, Ben, come on. What does this have to do with the price of cheese?” He glimpsed my need and smilingly despised me for it.

“I want to know,” I pleaded. “I miss her. Deirdre.” Saying her name-did my penis stir? I felt something. “I wish her well.”

“Like I said, she was a whore. Her coming wasn’t the issue.”

“I tried to make it an issue,” I confessed. “I worked at it. But I could never be sure, she was so good at faking it. Her mind was always a little elsewhere, didn’t you think?”

He saw that he mattered to me only as an emanation of our shared cunt, and he felt indignant. He cut me off. “On her next fix is where it was,” he said. “They’re all like that. They hate the tricks they turn, don’t kid yourself, Ben. Hey, you don’t look so good suddenly. Think you can make it back up that hill?”

“My doctors want me to exercise,” I told him. “They want me to drop dead.” As I shuffled my way up the curved asphalt, past the fruit trees with their rotting dropped fruit, the lilacs turning purple leaf by leaf, the sassafras shaped like an upside-down bowl, and the cedar with its frost of tiny berries, I decided that the stir of my penis at the mention of Deirdre’s name had likely been just a leak of warm urine I had happened to notice. I resolved to work harder on my Kegel exercises.

Rain for three days, one of those fall nor’easters that knock the leaves from the trees and paste them to the wet earth, Still, the hickory outside my upstairs window has scarcely turned, but for patches of yellow. Agitated squirrels tousle it, clambering out on its downward-drooping twigs, and then scamper thunderously across the roof above my head.

The gutter at one end was plugged, and the overflow built up a puddle behind the pachysandra that was draining into a basement window. In a burst of vitality that alarmed Gloria, I put on my old foul-weather sailing gear and in the driving rain set up the extension ladder and climbed its slick rungs and, not daring to look down into the steep triangular space beneath my feet, cleared away a plug of twigs and leaves with my hands. There was primitive satisfaction in seeing a vortex appear and the level of water standing in the old wooden gutter go slowly down, obedient to the patient, omnipresent laws of physics. Childhood games: getting the elements back on track. Man as hydraulic traffic cop. Down on the ground I tried with the point of a pick to gouge a runnel through the pachysandra to drain the puddle into the driveway, but gravity was against me. If gravity be against us, what can be for us? I liked being out in the rain, because it made my soaked paper diaper feel natural, a piece of saturated nature.

Inside the house, arranging everything in the laundry room to dry, I was aware of the heat from the radiators, as touched and grateful as if a faithful servant had thought to set out for me a tray of tea and warm scones. The house and its appurtenances of wiring and piping pursue an independent life, like a motherly, stationary megatrinket.

Gloria professed alarm at my exertions but in fact I felt invigorated, my face tingling. It was only in the evening, as I tried to read in bed a popular book about cosmology, that a terrific fatigue hit me-that degree of unforswearable weariness that brushes even the certainty of death aside in its haste to close our eyes.

Alive, I’m alive, I sometimes think now, listening to the rain in the gutters, feeling the extension of my limbs beneath the soft sheets. What bliss life is, imagined from the standpoint of a stone or of a cubic yard of black water in the icy ocean depths. Even there, apparently, conglomerated molecules manage to light a tiny candle of consciousness. The universe hates death, can it be? If God be for us, who can be against us? Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the… Alive. A pitiable but delicious reprieve from timelessness. I think of all the sons of bitches like Gary Gray and Firman Frothingham who would just as soon see me dead and the pleasure of spiting my enemies warms my cooling heart.

The sky this dawn was a pink blotting paper, set above a sea whose blue presented the same misty, fibrous texture. In the foreground the golden trees looked sullen and darker now, curdled and rust-ridden, after the storm. As the leaves thin, the sky lowers again upon our awareness. Making my slow way down the damp asphalt, where flowing water has left drifts and eskers of pine needles, acorns, hickory nuts, dead twigs, and gravel from the edges, I seem to see, in broken arcs beyond the scudding, thinning rain clouds, the heavenly circle, the torus. Has it, in spite of the public indifference that attended its departure, returned, or is it a trick merely of refracted sunlight in a high mist of crystals-a white rainbow?

According to the book that proved such a soporific last night, the torus has a rhythm of appearance and disappearance over the aeons, like one of those comets whose elliptical orbits swing far out into interstellar space and by the old Newtonian laws predictably return to our sky. To generations its presence is evident and the source of omens, miracles, admonitions, and reassurances. People live by its wan light, sing its praises while they work, construe even their humblest bodily functions and pangs of pleasure and contrition as parts of a pattern the torus by its ideality establishes. Then it gradually dims, succumbing to mockery and disproof. The generations grow bored with repeating the pieties of their fathers; a cry for human freedom and self-expression rises against the skyey wedding ring, which has come to seem a shackle, or the lid of an oubliette. The chants, perhaps, drive it away. Since it never touches the planet with more than a sense, in certain transits, of global well-being, it can be ignored so thoroughly as to be practically nonexistent.

The altars are slighted; the temples fall into mossy ruin. And yet an air of irresolution hangs in the emptiness. Public disorder increases. Telephone booths are vandalized; graffiti cover every stone surface consecrated to beauty and visual harmony. Children acquire guns and shoot each other as casually as images are flicked away on television; adults drown their disquiet and despair in alcohol. The world by itself is not enough; there must be another, to give this one meaning. And blood sacrifices are initiated by the tyrants who come to power in the resistless confusions and lassitude: giant drums and smoke pots call out to the red-streaked sky; drugged adolescents, chosen for their physical perfection, have their hearts cut out of their heaving chests by hooded priests wielding sea-green obsidian knives.

Eventually, in its own time, the torus reappears. Personal sanity and public decency are restored, but always with seeds, smaller and darker than mouse turds, of discontent and resentment sealed within the social order. The new cycle has begun. Those cycles occupy far more time than was at first thought: millions of years, rather than thousands Time grinds the ruins of one epoch, its imperishable monuments, into a fine sand that seems an utter desert to the forebears of the next epoch as they emerge, hand in hand, their nakedness clothed in leaves, out of Eden. And always overhead, silently clamorous, imperiously silver and pure, the stars rotate and ever so minutely shift, forming new constellations, new arrangements in the sprawl of eventually dying sparks on the velvet display-cloth of space. The sea through the thinning trees wrinkles in red filaments that threadily reflect the bloated, never-setting sun.

Walking back up the driveway, the Globe in hand, I glance to my left at the sourwood tree that Gloria planted ten years ago and am struck, hard, by its seasonal beauty-long oval leaves, deeply creased like peach-tree leaves, overlaid one upon the other in the lower branches to form a screen of crisscrossing scarlets and browns and freckled yellows and pinks and greens. Gloria has gone, yes, sour on this tree-it grew too eagerly for her taste, between the pears and the lilacs. It quickly towered over them, and heavy snows broke off its overextended branches, which then sprouted an awkward spray of secondary shoots. She even talks of cutting it down, after ten years of trial. The gardeners of the world are unsentimental about correcting mistakes. Perhaps I have for it a certain fellow-feeling. Uncherished, rarely glanced at, the sourwood is humming to itself a complex chorale of autumn colors and at the same time extending outwards, like so many long-boned feathery hands, its flowers, which are spent flowerets a third of an inch high organized into one-sided fanning racemes. It blooms even as it sheds.

Then, around four this afternoon, when the sun was angled just right, I wandered into the seaward guest room- not the one I sleep in, overlooking the driveway circle-and was stunned by a window uniformly loaded, like a fabric pattern, with sunstruck butter-yellow hickory leaves. A window like an upright case of pure unfettered brightness.

I see now too late that I have not paid the world enough attention-not given it enough credit. The radio, between the weather and the stock report, releases a strain from Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke, a melody that keeps repeating, caressing itself in sheer serene joy, and I think of him and Mozart, dying young and yet each pouring out masterpieces to the last, rising higher and higher as their lives fall from them, blessing with their angelic ease the world that has reduced them to misery, to poverty, to the filth and fever and the final bed. My eyes cannot help watering, a sure sign of senility.

Gloria has found herself, through the agency of FedEx and its omnivorous networks, a deerslayer. He comes to the house in a dusty green truck, splotched camouflage-style, and parks in the driveway or else down at the entrance to the dirt road, beyond the mailbox. I shuffled downstairs to meet him. He stood just inside the front door, on the Qum rug. He is a man about my age, a bit smaller and more wiry, but with that same dry flattened gray thinning hair and those same horny splotchy backs to his hands. His hands tremble from a history of drink or the beginning of Parkinson’s. Ht has crowded-together, brownish lower teeth and a lovely gentle voice. There is something holy about him. He talked to me of “signs,” meaning turds, in the woods, and of laying gossamer-thin blue threads across likely trails in the woods He described to me how a deer, once struck by an arrow, with bed down immediately in a nest of brambles and let itself be approached for the kill, since it does not associate the stunning, unhinging thing that has happened to it with human beings; it doesn’t have the circuitry to make the connection. This holy man is of the opinion that animals don’t feel pain at all as we do. They are of another, virtually pain-free order. He hunts them with a bow and arrow because of the sport-he is, like me, retired; more happily, it would seem: he once climbed poles and read electric meters for a living, which may have encouraged habits of stealth and quick observation-and because he and his wife love venison. I had never heard before of a woman liking venison, but, then, in many ways I am still innocent, especially about women. The two of them carve up the carcass and keep it in their freezer for years, like a couple in a fairytale hut. The archery season begins soon, in early November. He will set up a blind, in a likely spot, and stand motionless in it for hours, beginning at 5:00 a.m. What monk in a cold stone cell could do more to punish himself? He is another of Gloria’s saints. Her father was a saint of propriety; this man-named, like her father, John-a nature saint, blending selflessly with the trees, and brush, and rocks.

His existence crowds my universe, diminishes it and me, yet I am curious to see what will forthcome.

Speaking of masculinity, Red and Ken came to visit me, looking sheepish that they have not visited before. But the golf season had been active until a week or so ago, and they filled me in on the results of the Labor Day Weekend Four-Ball, the Fall Mixed Gambol (you had to play with somebody else’s wife, a source of endless titillation), the Senior Men’s Championship (over fifty-five), the Plimpton Super-Seniors (over seventy, named after Ed Plimpton, a Mass. Amateur Championship runner-up who had been a member of the club), the Columbus Day Best-Ball, and a new tournament scored by the Stableford system and named in honor of an assistant pro, Dale MacPhail, who had been killed in the war, obliterated in an Aleutian missile silo.

I sat uneasily in the library with my visitors. Gloria hates it when I leak urine onto the silk-damask-covered seat cushion of my favorite wing chair; she keeps telling me how much the reupholstering will cost. I tried to strike the correct, hostly, jocular note, but Ken, with his silver hair and bristling black eyebrows, kept looking like an airline logo, a kind of human eagle, and falling into a silent stare, just the way on the golf course he will exasperatingly freeze over a putt or short chip. Red had brought his flip phone in his pocket and it kept ringing, so he would withdraw into the hall and murmur about a fish haul in some remote corner of the world-the Seychelles, say. It was hard for me to believe that I had ever experienced ecstasy in the company of these men.

Yet, after they left, I was moved to walk through the kitchen to the back-hall closet, where I keep my golf clubs, and to open the door. The masculine pungence of sweat-impregnated grips and often-worn leather shoes swept out at me; hundreds of hours of my life had left their redolent film on this equipment. I could smell the rubber inside the balls and the tough compressed wood of the tees and the marshy rankness of the wet turf I had trod through, especially the turf of the sixth fairway, where the geese all deposit their tubular green shit and the black-shelled turtles bask on the rocks among which a sliced drive raises a supple splash. I longed to be back inside the body of the robust ogre whc had left behind these smells.

“So, when do you think?” Ken had said to me at last.

“When what?”

“When will you be back on the links?”

“There’s a lotta good golf left in November, Benny boy,” Red contributed.

“December, even, if there’s no snow,” said Ken, his aquiline stare softening to a teddy bear’s at the childish thought of snow.

“Come on, use your heads,” I said. “I can just barely walk. Pee keeps bubbling out of me.”

“You don’t need to walk,” said Ken. “We’ll all rent carts. All you need to do is swing the club. You tended to swing too hard anyway. Too hard, and too quick. Swing slow, like I do.”

“I always said,” I said, “the day I can’t walk the course is the day I give up the game.”

Red snorted impatiently. “You can walk next year. Ride the rest of this. Get off your ass, for Chrissake. You look like a dead mackerel.” His phone rang, or rattled, in his shirt pocket. He went out into the hall.” “Saludos, mi amigo muy caro!” we could hear him shout.

It was hard for me to imagine my playing golf next summer. Another year, all those seasonal gears to turn, those heavy heavenly bodies to push into place. “Who’ve you been playing with?” I asked Ken.

He blinked and stared straight ahead, as if looking for a vision of those other players on the backs of my uniform Winston Churchill. “Oh, we’ve had some nice games with Fred, his pacemaker seems to be getting less loud, and we had Les out for the Columbus Day Best-Ball, he hit the ball real well, he has a new driver with a magnesium head and a glass shaft, would you believe? Also, some of the younger members-Glenn Caniff and his buddies, you should see Glenn powder that pellet these days, and little Mel Spiegel-man, he doesn’t look like he has a muscle in his body, but, wow, when he winds up…”

He trailed off, perhaps noticing the jealousy, the sadness his recital was inflicting upon me. I would be replaced, was being replaced, and would not even have a tournament named after me.

So when they had disappeared down the driveway in Red’s Caravan I paid a memorial visit to my golf closet, and even took out the putter and thought of trying a few strokes on the big blue Tabriz in the living room. But it seemed too much trouble, and to refer to a self I had been quantum-jumped out of, into a new orbit.

When his green truck appears in the driveway-he is scouting the territory, drawing up mental maps-I try to go out and greet the deerslayer. He tells me things about nature I didn’t know. One day he pointed out to me the ugly fungi that grow like monstrous tan brains on the lawn. He said, “Those are called hen-of-the-woods. They grow only in association with oak trees. Very delicious, cut and sliced and sautéed, or put into a spaghetti sauce. Soak it in salt water to get the dirt and insects out. Sometimes you find a salamander or two in there; they don’t do any harm. Here.” And with a black-handled pen-knife, the kind that men used to carry in their overall pockets back in Hammond Falls, John cut a tidy cube of white flesh out of the rumpled brown mass and handed it to me. It was heavier than I had expected, with a pleasant rubbery moisture, like a big art eraser. “Hen-of-the-woods. Not easy to find, and with all these oaks up here you’re surrounded. Tell your missus what I showed you, and she’ll be thrilled, I guarantee.”

Is it my impotent hypersensitivity, or do men keep making overtures to my wife? Am I dead already?

But in truth Gloria was disgusted by the idea, and didn’t even want the pieces I had nicely sliced, washed, and placed in a bowl, covered by Saran Wrap, in the refrigerator. To her, this piece of nature, grown beyond the realm of her garden, was impudent if not poisonous. I tasted a raw piece-it was bland at first, like a firmer tofu or a coconut meat less sweet and crisp, but then the aftertaste had a caustic kick that stayed with me, even after I washed it down with a glass of orange juice. “John says to sauté them in a little butter,” I said, but Gloria forbade it; she didn’t want her kitchen stunk up. Forbidding comes easier and easier to her. It is becoming her métier.

When I venture outside, the sky rushes down at me through the oaks, which have blanketed the lawn and driveway with their leaves. In the woods and along 128, entirely bare trees are appearing: silvery sea-fans-dead or merely asleep, it is not easy to tell. Naked, they reveal their beseeching, striving shapes. The oak trees reach sideways, and the hickories up and down. The ashes are especially tragic in their clustered end-twigs, like snatching, clutching fingers, and the birches in their windswept huddled curves. The leaves were just a cover-up; these colorless warped skeletons are the truth.

In my seaward view, as the sun nears noon, it transforms the sea into a sheet of unalloyed light, cruel to see. The line of the beach is visible through the trees. The autumn’s polychrome sinks toward a brittle rust, broken into a thousand dry facets of reflected sun. My eyes keep going to the charred scar where Mrs. Lubbetts’ beach house had been, like a tongue to a missing tooth. In the other direction, at night, the lights of Haskells Crossing come closer through the stripped trees, like the flashlights of a hunting party. The poor Lynn boys, if the metallobioforms had not shredded them, would have been exposed by this time of year like wood lice when a rotten log is overturned.

On Halloween night, a new intensity of cold has swollen the stars overhead. No child comes to the house. It is too far off the beaten track; the driveway is too forbiddingly long. Gloria and I, faintly disconsolate, make ourselves sick by eating the candy corn and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups we had laid in. Side by side on the green sofa, we watch a television documentary on the Old West. Still photos of vast stony vistas and of impassive bronze faces: Indian chiefs hounded to a humiliating surrender, after creekside massacres and epic marches through Dakota blizzards to a Canadian sanctuary where the distant queen’s providence declines to forestall starvation; they are driven back to a bitter treaty with the bearded Great White Father in Washington and the barren haven of the reservation. A heap of broken promises, and a pyramidal mountain of the skulls of bison spitefully slaughtered to cut the red man’s ground out from under him. Modern descendants of these routed Native Americans are interviewed in living color. With their ethnically correct long black hair and slow professorial voices, they expound their historical grievances expertly but less affectingly than the witness borne by the silent bronze faces which the triumphant republic, in token apology, placed on its coinage and postage stamps. The Sino-American Conflict, it came to me, could be seen as revenge administered by the Mongolian superpower of that Asian continent from which the North American aborigines had crossed the Bering land-bridge.

We went to bed sickeningly awash with candy and guilt. I followed Gloria into the bedroom that was ours and has become hers. Shyly I watched her make her methodical way through the rites of flossing, toothbrushing, mouthwashing, and applying face cream. She inserted the gel-loaded plastic cooth-guards with which she keeps her teeth the valuable white that my mother had once, not insincerely, appraised as worth investing in. These plastic insertions, though transparent, push her lips out and give her a speech impediment that arouses me, the fraction of me that can still be aroused. A desolate helpless love, as for a child, came over me as she tidily inserted herself into the bed, preparing, with the uncapping of a small bottle smelling powerfully of banana, to replace the paint on her nails. All these rites, I see, are her way of trying to freeze and defeat time, as mine is the writing of these scattered sad paragraphs. Futile, both exercises, but only in the long run. “Shall I stay?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Oh, for coziness. Because we both feel bad and embarrassed about the Indians.”

“I do,” she conceded, “but realistically we just couldn’t let them have the entire country to run around in with their bows and arrows.”

“They had learned to use guns. They were trying to learn our ways. Farming, going to church.” I was stalling, saying anything to postpone the moment of our parting.

She had become intent upon her nails. She is her own innermost garden, needing incessant tending. I was intruding upon a precious moment of peaceful concentration; her pale eyebrows were knit in a small frown of unvoiced irritation.

“I need a hug,” I said.

“Ben. I am doing my nails. You’re making me make mistakes.”

“I miss us” I told her.

She knew what I meant, but did not look or speak. The tiny brush of chemical solvent made its way around the oval nail of her lefthand ring finger with its slim gold band. What would an interplanetary voyager understand of our little symbolic shackles and their invisible chains?

“I can’t do the main thing,” I apologized, “but-”

“You’ll get me and the bed all wet,” she said.

Blushing, I finished, “I need to be touched. Somehow that show frightened me. That whole dreadful century, all that imperialism, and now everybody dead-the winners and losers, the cowboys and Indians, North, South, everybody. And no children in costume coming to the house. I was talking to Roberta today; Jennifer was going out trick-or-treating with Keith dressed as a bug, with those caps with bouncy antennae on springs. Irene told me that Olympe and Etienne got the idea of painting their faces white, that was their only disguise. A sort of portent in that, no? A few more years, they’ll hate me. The white grandfather.”

“Nobody hates you,” Gloria said, concentrating downward on her hands. “Everybody knows you can’t help what you are.”

Hands-how I used to love my own hands. At the ages of twelve or thirteen, sexuality just beginning, and narcissism. Lying on my bed in my tiny dormered room in Hammond Falls, with its slant ceiling and Joe Namath poster, I would stare at my hands and flutter my fingers, and slowly twirl them in the dust-spangled air, the creased palms and freckled backs, and dive-bomb with them and soar, flaring one upward like a space rocket flattening into the stratosphere for its toss to the moon. I would ponder their articulation, their involuntary grace, their jointed sensitivity and prehensile strength. My fingerprints, unique in the world, in all those billions living and dying. When I asked-when that imperious voice enthroned at the back of my skull asked- my hands obediently became little dancing men, or firing pistols, or butterflies, or fists. They were always with me, the closest me I could see at will, without a mirror-emissaries my inner monarch would some day send out to grip and mold the world.

“You won’t get wet,” I promised Gloria. “I’ll put on a fresh Depends-they’re quite well designed, actually. I’ve been doing the Kegel exercises, I can feel a difference, and sometime soon-”

“Exactly,” Gloria said. “Sometime soon.” She held her face-shining with unabsorbed grease and protruding around the mouth like that of a beautiful buck-toothed ape-up to be kissed. Her eyes were shut; a little smile of expectancy on her pale lips anticipated my kiss, which descended upon her mouth like a hawk gliding down to take up a songbird or vole in its claws. Her face was a cold lake of grease, smelling medicinal.

“Sometime soon,” she promised, “we’ll do something. It’s good you want to; you’re getting better. But now go to your room, please. Take a pill if you don’t think you can sleep.”

I obeyed. It was pleasant enough in the guest room. The bed sheets were clean and cool, and the odd-angled shape in the far corner of the ceiling had acquired by now a guardian-angel quality, a boxed numen. I fell asleep upon the rumble of the eleven-ten train making the whole house quiver, woke once wet, and woke for good when the Times man swerved around the driveway. Dawn had yet to break, but a plump moon in the west bleached the bare November earth the white of a saint’s bone, a knuckle or splinter of scapula in its reliquary of chased electrum, burnished at the base by the hungry kisses of the worshipful.