Women and Men

BETWEEN HISTORIES: BREATHERS THICK AND FAST

Who was it heard her words? They come down to us to lodge in many small-scale filaments and are heard in turn from such fars and forgots, easts and wests, as are not yet vacant enough for the absent mind. So that the many have got too serious for the interrogator and he is going to press (el) button releasing his ‘lectrically- (from concentrate) squeezed juice and give a body a hit of it in self-defense. (Our body, his self.)

Her words slant down to us along an angle of the desert twilight from her century which soon could turn a century ago. Owl Woman’s words we mean come down to us we already remember from our friend the multiple child who is getting along and was in the next room doing homework when last we looked or better still research—

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling.

Songs sung who by? the correspondent Lincoln, sage in saffron, asks (as we hear the research child call, Not your friend; your daughter/son he-or-she).

Sung who by? Oh, by grownups — or similar folk left behind to act in place of grownups — who heard the prevailing easterlies and told their kids, "Hear the song in the wind." Grownups to hear themselves sing the praises of these songs of the wind so the children, who heard within the music honest noise, while hearing also the real song between the volts of their resident adults’ deafened lipservice to those songs (if you call that music real noise), privately willed that whereas grownups were to be heard, they might be not seen. Which lipservice, like global debt, turns ever toward big-talk/small-talk, that stuff of history, which got our parents through the long nighty-night of marriage ever after, like the weather that that talk precipitates and reports and clouds with light.

Where? When? (Who? What?) — and why did you say things more than once? asked the high-school journalism teacher (No: why did anyone?) she long borne in the future memory of the boy and man Jim Mayn, him whom in 1976-7 our saffron-(dis)robed gal correspondent Lincoln (cross-legged in Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop) daydreams out of thin air though she hasn’t met Jim — daydreams on her back burner while breathing-in an evening of women histories, one by one going round the joyful, awful circle healed with humor of tears of women on Grace’s carpet all bare and unedited: except for the foreign entrant, Clara, Chilean but with quick English accent, less naked than the others, it is her secret along her fine, tender arms and not quite flat stomach, and softly changing breasts, higher, lower, as if sometimes having just breathed along with her and sometimes not, and that like a motion of sway hint inclination faintly outward, flowers of one being — who has such a fund of international lore, and such contained eyes, such remote ordeals in her centered awareness — well, in her manners — that when she tells about life it enriches you in all its variety as the next-to-last word in narrative small talk that describes her life, even relations with husband (Men ought always use condoms, always, she says she sometimes thinks) so you think you know more of her than you know about anyone else on Grace’s carpet, but then you don’t: and yet you haven’t been tricked; for Clara — subtly husbanded, faintly shadowed Clara — makes you feel (Shit, said Grace at least more than once, nobody can make you feel unless you want to) that she’s here in Grace’s Body-Self Workshop not only for some other reason but, possibly to her surprise, the right ones too. Yet maybe the doubt is due to our gal Lincoln’s bein’ in love with a man she imagines she’s never seen except in a letter he wrote her young acquaintance slender, intense daughter Flick, where his "When’s the funding for your Washington job run out?" and "Where’s your brother Andrew spending the summer because he don’t never write his dad" decay quickly into the landscape water table of the continental Southwest as if it, and not the person himself, were the issue — not what cut to the quick his high-school journalism teacher thirty years ago.

Statuesque Miss Myles — Pearl W. Myles — was angry at his absence, and, though strong, she saw unfriendly hierarchy out-towering her and mysterious upheaval threatening underfoot; and she imagined three camps of students, those who were with her all the way in her historic fight to set up a school newspaper independent of the principal, a columnar young figure named Thompson Fulkerand; those who hardly cared; and those who in the great race took the baton from their parents if it was not the other way around and felt there’s neither a need for such a news organ on administratively so small a scale nor much of an excuse for making so much noise, and said so again and again of the woman who herself preached, "Why did you say things more than once? No: why did anyone?"

But if Miss Myles grant he had had a tragedy — Jim — she noticed he had expressed enthusiastic interest in the atom bomb, unique explosives leading up to V-J Day, and seemed unaffected by his mother’s mysterious drowning (read one-way swim, one fellow student called it); more interest in the Indian Ira Lee’s practically white sister (as Miss Myles had gathered from her prospective news editor of the putative school paper), who came around when Ira with the utmost slowness genuflecting, rising, gardened for Jim’s grandmother, than Jim showed in the midst of the rotten, blankly bright, future-catapulting thing his mother had done to as if not even really herself (and yet — and yet) and to him and little Brad his brother and to that poor man his father whose acquaintance Pearl had somehow not made and who could be seen walking home late at night, yet did she not detect — for she was Jim’s teacher, who encouraged what she termed "debate and discussion" but did not appreciate differences if they were petty as when she informed the class that you never underlined for emphasis except when in quoting a source to catch a voice emphasis, whereupon Jim put up his horny young hand to report that his great-grandfather — whom he did not need to identify for Miss Myles as once upon a time editor of the family paper — had issued instructions to his staff of three never under any circumstances to emphasize by underlining— so that Miss Myles sensed in Jim a truculence, maybe just sad tension, and in Jimmy’s unusual cool brown eyes a space falling — falling forward, she felt, but not halfway to meet her his teacher, damn it, and so, on the aforementioned unfateful day when the assigned imaginary news story came due and the tall stone of an unprecedentedly young principal had undercut her again, Miss Myles took it that Jim Mayn was bending his power as fifteen-or-going-on-fifteen-year young scion of the once only newspaper in town for a hundred years (narrow-column weekly) until another had commenced printing at the outset of FDR’s third ("There is no indispensable man") term to undercut her—her, Pearl W. Myles — when in reality Jim’s been glad to hear the answer to those ancient lead questions of the journalist’s song Where and When: but on one of those days, however beautiful and still more beautiful a woman of thirty she was, he had been detained (as we later learned to say at the prompting of our multiple state) by the Indian halfback Ira Lee, who was telling some of the guys about this map that was like the back of some strange thing under glass, this green relief of South America donated to the high school for future study immemorial, a reptile map crawling under one’s eyes as under glass, museum glass. But ignorant of this, she guessed when she stood up and felt across her broad brow and along the backs of her untired thighs that on a day when an imaginary news story following her models was due and that six-foot-six-inch principal Fulkerand, at twenty-nine the youngest male ever to have an eye in the back of his head and hold such a post in New Jersey who happened by a miracle to be exactly half bald from mid-head forward to the brink and down his high if narrow brow, had announced semi-privately that Miss Myles’s initiative was more nourishing than its fulfillment — on this sensitive day of all days, Jim Mayn had chosen to miss class.

Where? when? who? Turn it one iota, that small talk of passing amity or enmity that Jim’s future colleague-friend said history turned on — turn it one iota, said Ted, hunched at the bar centered above where his drink had been last week before he temporarily gave it up, and you’re looking head-on over someone’s shoulder at some further sight. The grandmother Margaret with her narrow, strong, squared shoulders, tartly directed her fifteen-year-old Jimmy to get out of his True Comics and stir his stumps and wash the mixing bowl (the pale-brown mixing bowl), and while you’re at it the pan and the lunch plates, and anything else he might find in the deep white sink. Small talk less narrative than her stories secretly meant years before to make up for his mother’s not telling him any and even not being there in spirit— when now she is evidently gone for good (read suicide; read, if you can find any, poetry, as Margaret told Jim his mother read as a girl — it’s better than reading nothing, we already remember hoping and half recall books that showed us something we’d been unconscious of); and Margaret’s tales could make him feel that while she might have foreknown mystery afflictions of her daughter, Jim’s mom, who definitely never had had the big hole in her head (like the Navajo Prince’s mother) but had been married as distantly as that demon-infected matron of Margaret’s stories and who Jim realized years later he’d felt must have married his father for some pretty good reason even if not out of deep wish or realistic considerations but — but if, later, other matter in his grandma’s stories seemed fact, some parallels with his own mother might make the Navajo Prince’s mother worth reflecting on — yet the tales existed in this kitchen in New Jersey. Into which now came grandfather Alexander —"Not going to rain after all" — bald as a tall old Danish farmer in a Life magazine, and ever arriving from a distance always, such as the next room, which came a little with him no matter how near he approached (that is, the doughnuts—and crullers in this instance — and his wife), and friendly upon the new soles and heels of his cordovans reflecting fine messages of dust, of history itself precipitated between himself and his shop downtown of shelves and tables (that seldom caught anyone in the act of purchase, yet was a business, year upon year), shoes buffed every day, polished every week, nicked and scraped and rained on, so as then to be rubbed to the patina repeated through these periods of time as the single kiss he now gave Margaret was then given on the far cheek she with brief absent-mindedness turned to him. So that — as Alexander added, "We might get an earthquake instead" (a joke, it seemed) — Margaret turned her gray-blue eyes on Jim while hearing his less-loved, though little, brother Brad call from the front porch and shove open the front door that stuck in the upper corner, for she wondered (though wouldn’t say so to Jim, though did before her death, in a letter) if he guessed Brad’s half-brotherhood as little as Brad did, the love-child of Jim’s mother Sarah and sort of fatally the wall-eyed electrician Bob Yard, who had two good cars but went around in a rusted-out pickup truck with one claw missing on the tailgate, who for once in his rampant, epically give-and-take, and childless married life, wept before Margaret’s very eyes, tears all down his five-hour stubble, and told her that just between the two of them he could after all believe in Sarah’s drowning, but God was this because he had loved her too much to run off with her? (through wind and rain, ‘cross land and sea)— poppycock, said Margaret, a word Jim used years later once so his children laughed and laughed. Poppycock, though, in Margaret’s mind, that her own retiring, original daughter Sarah could ever have run away with Bob, who loved his wife over a much longer haul; but then less nice than poppycock that Bob stood there and told Margaret like a gentleman friend that her eyes got bluer, did she know that?

But she retorted, The eyes went bluer, the hair whiter, Bob — as if to dismiss him when she knew that he really had loved that Sarah of hers (who had never been hers though she had known that Sarah would have to do some original thing), absent now invisibly absent now under the wedge of (when you stared at it) sparkling gray granite in the graveyard where Margaret would stand with Jim and recall that Sarah had asked if Owl Woman had been married and came to Margaret once (a unique meeting as far as intimacy went) with Owl Woman’s words from a book Margaret had never heard of (just as Sarah had never, as a girl, been told most of the tales of Margaret’s West — though told something in return for something she one day told Margaret):

In the dark I enter.

I cannot make out what I say—

Not the most trenchant verse Sarah would quote, Margaret told Jim— Jimmy — too smart a boy to let catastrophe show, though who could say what daydreams washed his mother inshore until, when he was all set to see her, the coast was of a different place or held an unmapped gap, unmanned so any foreign matter at all might drift in, and he turned to check where he was and never did see the body: "let catastrophe show"? for what was catastrophe, after all, but (let alone catastrophe theory that journeyman journalist Mayn heard tell of from those who cared more than he to know the going theories and so forth) a dramatic chance to be elsewhere, launched into that supposedly strong detour by the awful pain one nonetheless got credit for bearing the weight of, when maybe one just was somewhere else instead and not in two places at once?

Catastrophe here so unnatural and remote you almost didn’t have to run away from it, whether you can measure a mother, and her grandson’s run was an absorbed sprint down the sidewalk of upper West Main Street from her house to his and further, sometimes clear to the Fire House by the railroad tracks with a football pumping in his arm zig-zagging away across the grass-lawn of the private home of the owner of the American Hotel downtown, zigzagging right behind the gardener-mower one-hundred-year-old Mr. Lester Brown, who ate one bomb of a Bermuda onion and that was his lunch under a tree, and who knew that this dangerous athlete in a time when the Olympics had been suspended was detouring to criss-cross behind him and his hand mower and grass bag — then to zig-zag off the sidewalk into the street between the cars, so that once Mr. Brown saw him do it and feared that if hit he wouldn’t (momentarily) skid and roll like Lilac the pale hairless bull bitch that when the car braked to a stop (partly because of dog) ambled away, first up the street’s very white line (like she was a conquistador in shock), then off onto the sidewalk, and never looked back until she began to run; but Jim never got hit though he caused more than one car to brake, and gave his grandmother pause and gave her inspiration to tell her stories right down to the truth though never at the cemetery, where he and she would go, and she would guess that Jim was too willful to let the catastrophe of his mother’s death draw him into a center where, like little Brad, he would fall apart with a passion that Brad at nine or ten never had betrayed before (had he?) and never would again, in her opinion.

Meanwhile our Wide Load bore eastward — a home, or house on a trailer, winding through the Colorado night, bending the Kansas dawn to make telegraph wires yowl and every seven or eight miles make the monumental grain elevator from its oasis of trees, brief white-frame dwellings ("homes," as is said in America but literally true here), church, and mega-barn complex flow upward the Chilean economist assured his waking but still dreaming wife Clara as if its gusher-shaft guiding the feed of electrons from the unseen sphere of Earth toward the positive ionosphere a short forty miles away were the gusher itself, silent as space-minus-solar sirocco, while our Wide Load (a transport tradition with us here on this map-worn continent) sweeps on toward its various coast. The Wide Load with us stretched on top of it passes through several weathers, a muffled catalyst to be unchanged by them (oh the weather of the heart! exclaims one adult to another ‘gainst a tree, unaware of today’s kid upstairs in the same tree destined soon to feature an open-plan house who closing a good book contemplates loosing a compact goober Bombs ahoy! or stares up through live branches at the actual air of the sky).

Yet so what if these words of Owl Woman come down to us, so what if the multiple child in the next room is researching the eco-system of its neighbors, did it wreak aught that we heard distinctly

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling

and does it wreak aught that the Chilean woman zoologist with lips turned white by months of following the chalk-mouthed javelina ran into botanist Marcus Jones in southwest country in roughly ‘83 and was more interested in just how Owl Woman’s words got conveyed than in what they were. She had a right to wonder, for how else would she explain being distracted from her trail by a curious man-botanist (historical, Jim one day years later found out) who told her he was bicycling the territory in search of all the kinds of locoweed, and she believed him, as he her, when she wondered aloud in his presence there in the solitary but quietly thoughtful desert how Owl Woman’s words which were obviously Owl Woman’s—"I am afraid it will be daylight before I reach the place to see" — came to her, a passing South American zoologist, only after Owl Woman had seemed to disappear: and all this Chilean traveler could see (though not hear) in the twilight was the biggest elf owl not in captivity staring snug from the porthole of a random cactus suddenly handy. The elf is the tiniest owl, just as small as the pigmy owl, and this one was keeping an eye out — like the eye of the cactus itself — though this elf owl saw distant hawk moths, beetles, and insect larvae plus also the occasional mini-vertebrate. All of which convinced Mena the woman-zoologist that the elf owl must have incorporated Owl Woman or been done-that-to by her. Remember the fine depth of her poems and the elusiveness of her person small as a fine horn spoon and as at one with others as the singing corn grinder who passes her fine meal to her neighbor until it is like pollen; a person even comparatively small for those who might want to go up to someone in order to say and mean something instead of grasping that meaning something is not the same as going up to someone, it’s only like it:

an insight in all of us simulcast also in the form of its denial: as Jim about half-knows in his unwillingness to tell the information peddler Spence (as sleazy-acting as if he knew he was your relation) a thing or two, for example that this gramma went on hearing these words of Owl Woman across the half-light, yet in the precipitating dark there’s less and less sign of the Papago seer herself: yet now witness other verses later known to be hers coming across the air to the Chilean zoologist as on some line of communication from the eye of the columnar cactus to the seeming forehead of the woman telling this to Marcus Jones later at rest upon his bike taking a breather. So, as she said, she began to think about the water-bearing interior structure of cacti, so close (for comfort) to animal life (though nowhere near the animal she had been tracking). Surprised at what the margins of the inner desert had brought forth in her, when she’d been shadowing javelinas (read peccaries) up from eastern Argentina, she found the meaning of the name Owl Woman not only in all the lines of that known Indian woman-poet’s making, but between those lines (as sinewy-calved, lonely Marcus Jones in all his botany remembered till his dying day, although those who were with him at the end could say for certain only that he recalled at that final moment how the Chilean zoologist the woman Mena had found her own left life, her own original musical household plus the why of her setting out in search of wild pigs yet of search itself "research"), in all the other words which were also apt but especially in

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling,

which meant, if only to her, that back home the art of war refined and strengthened its texture around her angry, fantastic mother, whose native Chilean operas on serious Anglo-European themes had met with repeated rebuffs from the musical establishment — from even her own London-based (secretly anti-Argentine) dear father governing from a book-ridden house in Chelsea one of the major Chilean liberation lodges, on down to her cheerful, scar-faced husband (the javelina-zoologue’s father) who made (while ever seeking the secret of Stradivarian permanence) violins, and made agreements and claimed friendship with that gifted Bavarian emigre Aquinas Reid, composer of the first opera written in Chile, dead just fourteen years ago in 1869; and to Guillermo Frick, still active—"ser o no ser!" he was fond of saying — at seventy, one more German who had relocated in Chile with much Spanish on his tongue, who found Mena’s mother’s restless masterpiece unfortunately political when it was nothing of the kind — though hardly ahistorical as its leading tenor-pessimist falsely imagined he was — and no more secret(l) (much less Masonic) in architecture than any notoriously unperformed opera loosely drawn from Hamlet if not directly via Shakespeare but from a half-abandoned anti-miso-gynistic Italian score surfacing in manuscript in Civil War America.

Marcus Jones liked the naturalist Mena on sight, perceiving her gradually across the plateau floor as if she were daring the blinding colors of the darkness to reach Marcus before she did, and he thought her unflinchingly an Indian god at a distance, fixing Marcus in some attitude of intense feeling, awe, friendly awe; hence, he confessed having moved hardly a muscle when, upon seeing her in her many-colored cotton summer poncho down even to her hair pants from a distance despite the half-light lowering from the sky and wanting to go to her, he had waited where he was, his hand on his bike, until she should reach him; for do we go to the gods or do they come to us? and are there angels much less angel invaders in us? — and to the six-hundred-year-old Anasazi healer (who predicted not only telephones but the social power principle in the telephone expressed in the words unspoken and on certain occasions spoken, "Who called who?") she at another time recounted that Marcus had come toward her. And he would not get over those lunar lips, for he had never seen a javelina, muzzle to muzzle (which was to become, with its hind-mounted scent glands, sacred to the memory of Mena for years afterward in his mind). Marcus didn’t want to explain Mena’s white lips, only feel the divine wind. Marcus’s Spanish complemented Mena’s English, and before she had reached him where he waited on the plateau, they were conversing, and never saying things more than once. She said she had been coming from the south; but she had in fact already visited the multi-laddered eyrie of an Anasazi medicine man who, by Marcus Jones’s sense of direction, should have been slightly north of this present point of his locoweed-naming spree. Well, her interior map proved as resilient and infectiously blessed as his own navigand was firm and customary; and before she would leave him dumbfoun-dered (his own nautical word) with enough delight to do what he did not actually do — pursue for years more locoweed as yet unnamed — she had told Marcus Owl Woman’s words and the reaction they produced in the ancient Anasazi when she passed them on to that leaf-crisp memory of a man who had reached a phase so exactly fragile that one touch upon his presence and he would detonate into a cloud.

But while she spoke to Marcus of that old luminary-healer to the north who Marcus believed might be south since she could not yet have met him (if she was coming from the lower Arizone where Owl Woman flourished in and out of form), Marcus could believe in her both as a god and as a teller-bearer of likely truth, in particular the effect of the double moon on him. For this had yielded in him through its two shadows doubt as to what Marcus was later told by the Hermit-Inventor of the East in return for informations he gave to the Hermit. Who, to continue, surprised Marcus with the news that the double moon doubly shadowing the Anasazi medicine man, as Mena the javelina zoologist reached the top of her last apparently original Apache scaling ladder en route to the old healer’s eyrie, had come to her and become hers to convey (she said) on the evening when Marcus Jones, one of the most vivid men she had met, had pedaled up to her upon the desert floor and upon dismounting from his great bike cast (perhaps with its wheels) the double moon’s shadow and its light on her, which was then hers to convey until her next human.

Whatever the sequence, Marcus could believe the Anasazi’s reported quandary as if he were himself the pistol that had been suddenly struck by the double moon’s effects — the double moon, we already recall for it was ours to explain — to wit, a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties (as the multiple cum melancholy child-in-residence in next room will corroborate). So that before Mena the zoologist had reared her head and shoulders upon him-and-his, he was telling her, whoe’er she was, that the pistol in question had gathered into itself its alternative sources. It might have come to him some years after "the Mexican business" from a mestizo information peddler with a rare thirteen fingers and one in every wind so that he no longer sported quite the fingers he’d been born with. And this man the night before the battle of Chapultepec had promised a nearly albino Englishman {el Nord) that he would recover his speech if he would risk his interesting Colt revolver in a blind game (both players hooded) known among condemned mestizo prisoners as Magnet but played here with a loaded deck. The information peddler in question had wound up with the young Nord’s pistol, the Nord with his voice back; and the winner (who learned he was taking a chance on condition his voiceless but not uninformed companion took a chance himself) wound up with the information that he must never "unload" the pistol (i.e., divest himself of it) on anyone except a dark-skinned healer at least two centuries old. However, the other possible source for the pistol double-shadowed by the zoologist-assisted presence of the double moon, slanted with a virtual momentum and doubly east and west down the minds whose idea it touched, was, as the Navajo Prince learned when the pistol became his in the early nineties, that a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer, one of that clown elite who used to act out (like static messengers agitating in a storefront window) their lousiest nightmares and their most threatening daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out, had been given the pistol as a deathbed donation to this Thunder Dreamer’s dream art but, too, as an Anglo charm to stall that tragic Indian religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Which in turn seemed to us (as one of our prisoners-of-the-month was heard to tap— upon, in fact, the INside of an endless rusty pipe) information we might tell the interrogator that would be true but would not hurt any of our living-or-dead fellow prisoners about whom the interrogator wished damaging revela- tions. At all events, the aforementioned settler, dying among the wind grasses of a southern Dakota plain, at length offered the pistol to the Thunder Dreamer dancing all the while, as if he felt that if it was not better to give than to get, it was better to quit than be fired, and he was about to die. Mysteriously, however: or so the Indians said who stripped him of his curiously made oaten trousers and leaf-quilt planting jacket: for like his angry warning that the Indians did not know how God meant the land to be used coupled with his soft-cheeked sadness, as he lay looking upward out of the wind grasses as down from a firmament of gray-green rain, that a race he seemed to think himself kin with (and, as his undertakers felt, doubtless in some root way the white race) had had to wage war in order to find victims to sacrifice yet must likewise sacrifice in order to wage war — he seemed as crusty across his strangely divided genitals as an old hand, yet he had the beardless cheek and clear thigh of the youngest, tenderest brave of all and could not say what he had farmed and had no land he could speak of and, passing the pistol to the dream-news-dancing Thunder Dreamer, reputedly spoke of his conception the night before the Battle of Chapultepec as if it explained something, though hardly his willed and causeless death:

oh he wanted to die and passed on to the dancing Thunder Dreamer perhaps a prayer coded in that Hartford-hewn shape of a Colt pistol, but the dying words of the strange old-young settler who gave the pistol (the same pistol? a double of the other?) to the Thunder Dreamer who gave it one day to the Anasazi healer in his cliff far away were more interesting than prophetic, for he was said to have murmured at the end (though already as dead as the grasses sang and breathed) that his father had taken his mother for a boy and never forgot the moment he came upon her in Chapultepec dressed like a young correspondent on a bench in the zocalo surrounded by flowers and the old-fashioned disaster of "the Mexican business" like our backfirings of a later age, and by the less-clear hubbub of an unjust war writing out of a bottle of brown ink memoirs of President Jackson in New York and Washington; and knew that they spoke the same language, though not that this boy-creature was a woman, much less that at the age of whatever she was at the time of the Battle of Chapultepec she had miraculously never menstruated — and was never to.

And so, later, when the six-hundred-year-old medicine man, his personal insight beams divided by the truly double moon conveyed along the rising presence of the Chilean zoologist Mena on her antique Apache scaling ladder, heard her recite Owl Woman’s remedy for an unpregnant woman who had stopped menstruating, he recalled the Thunder Dreamer with the large eye sockets and small, receding eyes leaving the pistol with him to remove from it a curse that made it hold heat as if constantly being fired when in reality it was the tongue of the sun that cut through clouds and clothes to the very breechclout and through time itself, to "fire" that Colt near to melting point. But it did so by a wind of the sun known only to one person beyond the Anasazi healer living in his receding cliff which was the high stage for his audiences while he himself was audience for stages of a longer, greater event. On this he and his counter-seer the Hermit-Inventor of the East didn’t quite agree — that is, beyond knowing that the direction the wind came-from and went-toward proved at some hours of the day to hold the very same force, as if the breathtaking leverage in the swing of the bird’s wings powering the East Far Eastern Princess away from her father the King’s long white-lit mountain ten years later were not only bone-and-ball-joint dynamics but even the very urge behind that mechanics of flying, and to find food that that bird had never known, if dreamed of, and devour it right down to the still-cantering hoof, with gracious abandon savoring that first close whiff of terrified muscle under fleetest Navajo horsehide though not the sight itself — the sight of itself, the descending bird, some fine-nesting hugeness at the moment that it reached the frantic stallion.

That sight belonged to the Hermit-Inventor who, unknown to the crag-high Navajo Prince mounted upon his blue Mexican mare observing only an alien wing (and not its Princess passenger) impinge in the plane of men and animals, had from his own cliff-horizon above the running bulge of that world witnessed proof-possible of his colleague Anasazi’s claim that the wind took an elastic body or that time found sudden chances out here in continental space to spirit itself forth from its own further reaches. Yet the visiting bird, even with a flash of human hand and long, dark hair near the root of its vast wing, resembled a giant king eider, that heavy, short-necked sea duck seen along northern coasts (though here on a scale of its own) if not bred in Other space so it hardly evoked a prior evolutionary stage, though still some "unevolved past," yet thought the Hermit-Inventor, and was pleased with the scientific prospect of a past of cloud coasts that had not met the erosion of winds, or a past of winds that, whether or not velocity mattered, had found no work to do at the times slotted for them and had run on indefinitely loosed like beautiful child-villains without a home: but, like the window of his finest theory, he had seen the flash of other flesh over the huge bird-steed’s bright limb — drake or past-gender, less pied than our diving eider spreading its wings like an underwater plane — and the Hermit wondered if these periodic westward vacations in time that he took from his often meteorological work and meditations in the East were not catching up with him dividing him through some rough-hewn shape beyond power or its prospect — like advice he remembered giving a young girl, say, in the presence of a huge, dismembered statue in, what was it? 1885 or so.

But where, when, who — and also what statue? wakes the interrogator after an unsound nap, his finger never having left his juice button.

The answer comes, but he will have to settle for pure information because the person liable is absent, and the words "Bedloe’s Island, 1885" mean plenty — the late Margaret Mayne hearing at the daughterly age of twelve or thirteen a voice behind her mutter that they would never put this thing — this Statue — together, plus it was facing the wrong way, and "Go west, young girl" — and "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will" — where by "what" we meant the more uncrated parts of the Statue of Liberty standing (Seeing is Believing and/or Belief) (shipped B.O.D.) lying in raw grass between the winds of New York harbor.

Yet purest of all information is your future fact, predicted yet unconfirmed: for instance, soon after the U-2 cover story the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction (and this is a later manifestation of the Hermit whom Grace Kimball and James Mayn separately and half-knowingly encountered one bright day in Manhattan in 1977) that a weatherman on Formosa would at some time in the near future guarantee that a storm with a feminine, often religious, name and eye, would not hit Formosa; moreover, that this Formosan meteorologue would be so wrong that the very next day (so went the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction) upwards of two hundred and fifty people not exclusively Formosans would die by the hand of that hurricano, and between seventy and ninety would (by the Hermit-Inventor’s calculations) end up missing; and that this unwary weatherman with his feet on the ground would stand trial for negligence with years of his life at stake.

But who are we getting at? or to? Was it our parents? (But) we are our parents by now, and in a miracle of memory now see they were angels of ordinariness helping us toward helping ourselves, we trust.

Well, not the child next door, maybe. That child next door multiplies slowly with a fresher, less-obsessed sexuality. And will never become the beautiful diva, who once in the embrace of her Chilean naval intelligencer felt virtually contained by the thought of the weight-loss tapeworm inside her. Opera singers are said to survive revolutions, we have reminded the interrogator more than once. But she was not there when the revolution came off, no? And it isn’t revolution much less fast food that brings her infamous South American amor to New York, but counter-revolution — if not music itself.

We come there from all over, always (as once Grace Kimball) ready to start out. We come there from the perimeters like we were Owl Woman’s words instead of people, words that come by the zoologist-woman Mena and her curiously historical gentlefriend Marcus Jones and the Anasazi healer and the Navajo Prince’s mother with a hole in her head who was said to have tried this very healer. Upon which the Anasazi told the Hermit-Inventor that he on the contrary had consulted her as if she were a healer in need of being healed. This was power and modesty, as Owl Woman, when she was visible and when she was not, exemplified to the Anasazi. Witness her reminder that her songs had been taught her by spirits of the departed in the form of "spirit-tufts of downy white feathers". . "owl feathers." The Princess of the East, parking her great eider-shaped bird — and she at once understood as a bolt from the blue that in this day and age whatever songs intermingled back home, she’s gon’ see the land. The Navajo Prince’s mother whose visiting demons only others (all others) could see junketing in and out, in and out of the capital cavity, took time out to welcome her. The Princess felt this as a fresh start. Yet this thought brought back the face of Harflex, a youngish noble back among her father’s loyal mountains who’s waiting for her hand. Yet on the way there, she had encountered premonition outside herself from high up like a break-in through the atmosphere as if the well-known breaks one in each of every layer of different breath sphering our world had for an instant sync’d together into one deep cleft letting in whatever was to be let in, oh cost and benefit both. But meanwhile it was the light of welcome brimming all over the face of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the East Far Eastern Princess noted, when she came to sense that out here in the West was for her a fresh start. Yet this brought to mind part of the face of Harflex, the bookish, great-footed noble back home to whom she was tacitly ‘trothed. So she didn’t quite see the known demons going in and out of the roof- or smoke-hole of that Navajo lady’s head observed by one and all, by all except the lady herself and the visiting Princess. Fresh start? Yet on the way to the ceremonial sing that honored the demons as much as tried to drive ‘em out, she had encountered from high up like a break in the atmosphere the Hermit-Inventor’s eye. Which conveyed, in addition to "Nice to see you again, we hardly had time to talk when you passed through New York" and "I may have told you I was going to be out here where I often vacation" — also, "You must decide one way or the other."

Or so she imagined he said, and she was right. Men meant what they said, and he meant she couldn’t have it both ways, maybe she was the Princess, but she was also Margaret on leave from home and from the mission her father had sent her on, to wit Chicago’s famed World’s Fair. Not, of course, only the New Jersey exhibition, which Jim generations later told a date was a pretty modest house (how gotten there? wide-loaded by wagon?), New Jersey’s temporary home away from home in 1893—and Margaret had drawn into the orbit of her open-ended trip the pampas of Dakota, the loco weed rocks of Col and a territory of Indians (as one used to measure them, supplying directional axes by vectoring God’s winds to get our aim), while He was essentially Elsewhere, it being a trait of Him to like being away yet always know His people were there back home keeping a place for His manifestations.

It is the late rediscovered ideal of putting something or someone on hold, that is, in order to know they’re there, a form of love if you think too deeply about it. As possibly the interstate computers knew on the night of a "held" Moon launch at least that the system was still there, which included the People, who in their turn, each at his post, knew that others waited there like latter-day angels for their wait to be dissolved and the curtain to go up on a new age in the form of a Saturn rocket until some among these journalists, economists, and seekers could find their own detour around time lost and say hello to the minutes of their being.

Easy to say, hard to manage, said the naked woman on Grace K’s workshop carpet in ‘76-’77 because I have had so many reasons to move fast, to fill a day with a dozen other days to come—

Right on, baby!

Say that again, Clara?

— until you can lose that presence that is yourself helping yourself first to what there is, reaching a place at which you hear each moment pass through you in order then to forget the time and these desperate demands on you— (As if you were being followed, said Grace—) (. . Exactly.)

(and Lincoln the saffron (dis-)robed correspondent added, "Just what I was going to say" — while she registered that Clara’s "Exactly" in response to Grace was held back a second: a curiously long and short second full of apprehension, yet Clara’s "Exactly" seemed full of simple acknowledgment and Lincoln knew that Clara was being followed.)

Which is, for the followee and follower, a similar though not "same-as" form to putting on hold, going on ahead whilst knowing They are situated behind and won’t go away.

So Jim Mayn fell ahead, not exactly not thinking of his imaginary news assignment for Pearl W. Myles who had healthy, chesty breasts like those of the great all-style swimmer at the World’s Fair in New York long before synchronized swimming approached Olympic status while at the moment there was no Olympics at all except what his non-combatant editor-father called target practice going on over there. Yet Jim wasn’t really thinking ‘bout the imaginary news assignment either; and he looked at some ripped-out notebook pages that still had sand in one crease, having made a very quiet research trip to where (clue) there were gulls above and sandpipers below — the beach where his mother had left her departing note — and no one but the driver who had picked him up going and returning knew he had gone — much less to investigate — or so he thought, and all he knew when he came home was that he could not resort to this mystery material for Miss Myles’s assignment— because, he then saw, he had gone only to see — and later it came upon him again when he was putting behind him his little brother Brad and Brad’s own inimitable (as it was called) "falling-apart." "It" confined itself seemingly to one day — a long day yet a day of days as they might say who follow us with further measures meant to yield true weight, as in a territory of Indians, a hold of absences, a smile of tarantulas or javelinas, and a smell of troubles, necessary because of interruptions (as on Brad’s Day) which we really need to see as part of the whole parcel rather than breaks between breathing in and breathing out — I mean. . you know?. .

Because there were minutes end to end when Brad who must have been ten did not breathe and in those wartime days, pre-Now, they didn’t tell you to breathe. Except in the form of an iron lung visible to Jim and his friends in Life magazine — and to Gordon and engineering-minded Bill Bussing after school on the top floor where experimental rubbers were tried on if not out — and so the open-ended Windrow, New Jersey, group that came and went in the music room of the Throckmorton Street house might but obscure the scrawny boy’s sobbing, pat him sometimes, bring him a sandwich that seemed to madden him with its alien and scented caring. Brad’s Day began in the morning exactly a month after the tragedy and a week or two — strangely hard for Jim to recall — after Margaret, impatient at the carver’s delay, had imposed a brief stone upon that otherwise untrammeled point of the family burial place, a grave "empty of all but earth," Alexander had suggested for the inscription but Margaret would not have it.

On this morning of Brad’s first and last "statement" of this endless loss and grief, Margaret did not come down the street to make breakfast for the three widowers Mel, Jim, and Brad because she was in that rare condition of being sorry for herself having fought with her husband Alexander about his venturing downtown on a wet day when he had a bad cold, and then the rain had stopped after he left. She had gone out into the field-like wet of the grass of the backyard, staring at her dark flower beds, no doubt thinking about her daughter (hearing the notes of a strong violin chord or a piano run repeated as Sarah when speaking never did, for she always heard what she had just said), should Margaret phone the boy Ira Lee to tell him not to come this afternoon? She was confused, perhaps. Her son-in-law went early to the newspaper office today, and she pictured two bright cartons of cereal left on the kitchen table for the boys, and the milk left out.

Jim wondered if she would come, and felt it was a beginning, if she did not. And then Brad was first heard fisting the piano in the music room. The same clutch of bombed keys again and again until Jim yelled to his brother to shut up and went downstairs to the music-room door, which held just as many memories as the room, hearing then the moment when it was obviously not going to go on — and Jim stopped in mid-air, he felt, as if he were, well not the music, but like it. Jim knew it all so well it was beyond fact, maybe like those dreams he did not have (but his own mother had said he just did not recall), and surely (no, no, not surely) it was like someone else knowing it — the start of Brad’s awful performance — (so, heck, forget it, someone else will remember it), some elder who didn’t have anything better to do; still it stayed with him, and when he was older he told it three, maybe four times, years later in his life: to his wife, who, so uncannily, had never been told the Indian stories and was kept out of (or free of?) the mere tangle of ideas he guessed he had about his mother (tangled by truly not knowing, by not tracking her down living or dead because you didn’t do that, if she wasn’t there)— throw in his father, too; to Mayga and colleague Ted at a Washington bar; yet also at once to his grandmother who was part of Brad’s Day itself, though coming in late.

No easy thing to tell her, as she became a part.

No small thing Brad. Alone in the house, Jim stood above his brother and did not remember the distance from threshold to piano. Brad was nuts, sick or something. Brad’s back was straight with the most arching-in curve as if he’s being good. What’re you doing? he said to Brad. Little Brad was crying, gasping; he shook his head kind of slowly, half-fake, or helpless. Jim looked down into the scalp of the unknown kid, the flecks of live skin in his very short crew cut entirely different from the boy underneath, who was—

— going to pieces, Mayn told his wife one day. .

— who was a brother in Jim’s mind always, but never before what he was now: a relative who would not move from where he was. Braddie farted silently and Jim didn’t breathe, he had gone up to this brother and had nothing much to say and couldn’t name what it was and would just as soon not live through what was going to happen, which threw everything out the window including himself carrying all the traces — a billion, but only traces — of the ancient fate sprawled in the room’s dumb things.

"What the hell, Brad," he said, and reached behind the bony little insect of a kid and shut the cover over the keys in case Brad was thinking about hitting them some more. The brother instead kept on in a language, a language was what it was, and Brad’s ghost-sort-of was crawling through something, without his body much moving. Jim kept saying words. Such as, "Gramma’s probably comin’ over. You got to go to school. She’s going to tell you you got to." Saying over again, like he hadn’t heard himself say.

They both heard someone coming downstairs, but no one was up there. Then they remembered, without either of them needing to say it. The stairs creaked because that’s what they did. And years later Jim found what he wanted to connect the habit to — the movements or motions you felt overall, in an apartment house, that were less from people doing things than from what was left of them after they went out to work or away on business or vacation, although it might be the elevator or the edifice responding to the wake of a truck passing in the street.

Jim knew at this moment with his brother that his brother was doing something with their mother that Jim wasn’t. Jim thinking of a girl. He’d been on his way, but now he had to stay with this person who left him still no place to stand. But it was Jim’s house. But it wasn’t, and hadn’t been for a while, because his grandmother’s place was up the street and his mother had let him come and go, though he didn’t have to. But maybe he did. He wanted to have Brad look him in the face.

Brad stood up from the piano bench and Jim actually touched his shoulder. Brad went to the dark, inlaid drop-leaf table that a great-grandrelative had made and grasped the violin case and slid it into his arms like he was carrying wood. Pretty morbid, Jim told his wife some twenty years later, and she did not agree, but did not look away from him as his brother had done. It wasn’t as if Brad was Sarah’s only son, except Jim knew at this long, long moment that he had been thinking of himself as her only son. Later he figured it was because he felt really like the only grandson, Margaret’s favorite, although Alexander would have politely objected. "Whatcha doin’ with that violin?" Jim said. "That’s Mom’s violin." Brad went down on his knees and put the violin case out in front of him. He lay down with his face on the floor and put his arms up above his head so his hands were touching the violin case and at that instant the case moved, as Jim told his grandmother seriously when she came in and she said, He must have pushed it with his hand. Yet Jim hadn’t had that impression. Had Brad’s hands been on the case? And Jim thought of every talk he had had with his dead mother. His sense that she thought he was "all right" and thriving. Not especially musical, yet enjoyed singing.

And who would remind Jim, too late, yet not too late, that he had never definitely agreed not to harm or not to protect his brother? Brad had been alive in another room from Jim’s in a house in Windrow, New Jersey; and Jim had joined him; no agreement had been come to on what either boy would do, and nothing could ever be just or unjust. These are words Jim did not say then, though, like your certain type of senile person whose problem is pointing via language when the tongue may have been cast off by its brain hinge (which means, we relations add, in mild pain, directing our explanation to the interrogator, who with his button has been feeling left out, that the linguistic blockage is due to calcium deficiency, upon which the interrogator writes something down, never failing to believe that if history-in-the-making is not made-up, it must be, to those who are alert, not dull).

Jim knew everything, that morning and day, except one thing. That he had stopped caring about that room where his mother had strung her violin and where she had given lessons to kids who came and went and where she had stood above a friendly devoted cellist nodding her viol now to him, now to the pianist who sometimes in the midst of a month-long sonata changed to another person.

The sounds rose again, Brad seemed to be kind of laughing and groaning, his body starting to rock and buck a little there on the floor. It was embarrassing. Did Jim’s mother remember that sometimes her sons hadn’t loved her? though Jim could only speak and think for himself. Excuse him for living, one afternoon when as he entered she held her black-and-red-flowered china cup at her lips as if it was magical and he was still outside.

But now Brad looked for all the world like a fucking tantrum, there on the floor, on the worn Oriental carpet. The skinny arms, weak arms, came around and down to the sides and suddenly the front door came unstuck out in the hall and Jim felt that he and his brother owned this house for the first time — which made little sense, because they didn’t and their mother didn’t either, yet had occupied it.

Footsteps hardly audible there, though granted the music-room door had been shut by Jim when he came in to inspect his weeping brother, his grieving embarrassing brother. Brad’s hand worked itself into a pocket and as the music-room door slowly — Jim knew it was slow — opened behind them, Brad in a terrible condemned way slowly flung his hand out of his pocket and a thing or two from his hand. One was a wild stone — why wild? — which struck the glass front of a bookcase, the moans turned into several screams, Jim could not believe it; the person in the doorway behind, whom neither boy had looked at, spoke, as Brad threw stuff outward blindly out of his other pocket and some of it was shredded paper, pink paper, that’s what Jim told the South American woman Mayga in a Washington bar, who credited so much of what he said. The person behind the boys in the doorway who had not spoken said, He’s coming apart — which didn’t sound right or like it was addressed to Jim. Jim looked at Brad’s body then and he thought it might actually, if only slightly, go to pieces, the way it was shaking. Not imagined it doing it, though. Jim had once daydreamed the Earth slid to a stop in its own slow axial rotation, while Pearl Myles explained what to put in a lead. But here the arms grew longer reaching up for the violin case which stayed silent; a leg kicked up as if to throw off a sneaker; the strange screams rhythmically told something that Jim now turned away from: to see, of all people, his grandfather Alexander, tall and polite, it was he who had opened the front door — not about to clean up vomit or kiss someone but gentle and more understanding than Jim ever saw him again, although ever after this strange morning and day Jim would see Alexander with this distinguished look on his face telling his grandson, That’s all right, fella, and telling the other brother, Jim, as if — as if it didn’t apply to him (which it didn’t), that "it" was "pent up."

Some sound in Brad was getting out. It was like being sick. Yet it was Jim who felt that this all meant that he was the one who would go. Which meant maybe his mother was here. Yes.

Maybe that is what little brother Brad was (suffering and) carrying on about: that she was really here, but you couldn’t reach for her. A dream Brad couldn’t tell any other way.

Jim knew that here in the room were three males. He included his little brother and didn’t probably think the word "males" but it was there. He thought that his mother’s father hadn’t expected her to do what she had done and was at a loss to understand anything about it. Yet Jim didn’t really think that. He thought Alexander knew why it had happened but didn’t think it was worth discussing.

"Did you boys get some breakfast?" Alexander asked. Later Jim heard Granddad Alexander tell Margaret he had phoned her to argue some more with her and had hung up but thought, She’s there, she’s home, so he’d come here to check on the boys himself.

And she was still not here, even after the length of time it had taken him to first stand and think and then look for a thing he could not find as if it were stuck to his forehead, then walk up from his shop downtown, not once stopping to pass the time of day at the firehouse.

Jim looks at his grandfather, and waits, beyond distrust. Alexander steps into the music room of his vanished daughter. He picks a book up, another, another. "Here’s my Densmore book I couldn’t find years ago. ." Dens-more collected Indian poetry. Time marches on. "Now you can have it back," said Brad, without the bitterness of the words and in a break between the heaves of energy that brought them all to this room on this day. "Well, you’re right," said the grandfather to the grandson, and he read some words out of the book, as Brad began again softly to groan, which Jim must have kept in his memory without trying because in the mid-1960s Jim’s wife read him some lines from the end of a book one night and those that Alexander read that day cropped up, you might say, "… my heart will go out. ." something, something… "In the great night my heart will go out." Was Sarah interested in the Indians? You’d never know it.

Jim tried to recall when; but his wife said it wasn’t the "when" that mattered, it was the "What"; and he didn’t mention it to her but even years before in 1945 at the moment when four principal people who mattered to Brad plus a couple three more who were less worried about his interests, hearing there was something going on, visited in sequence this house to witness the boy’s grief that had waited a whole month to put on this show, this noise, Jim had even then been able to wonder when those words had been said in his presence that were now being read by his grandfather Alexander in the music room, this shrine without a body except Braddie’s spread-eagled and groaning and noising his loss or grief on the way to take all who came there past embarrassment. But then the "when" came to Jim, and it had been his grandmother Margaret, the very one who told Jim a scary tale one night when she caught him out in the backyard "sleepwalking" (she almost believed) and he’s over by the asparagus stalks — and as soon as Margaret’s said, What’re you doing out here this time of night? she can’t get him indoors without remembering (like an outdoor bedtime tale with wet toes in the chill grass of the leaf-sweetened dark yard) how the Navajo Prince told the East Far Eastern Princess that when she would leave mattered less than what she’s doing here now and what she would do when she got back to where she was going— which he did not call her home. Because he held, against the elders and his mother — though not the Anasazi or the visiting Hermit-Inventor — that he did not have a home, his home came to him; came constantly where he was, and his mother when she once had wandered upon a dangerous mountain before he was born, and might have been killed by a scared hunter or that tiny snake that could suck you (dry) right into the mountain of flesh or of metals that were like flesh if they could ever be mined, had told those who criticized her for walking in the wilds far from home when she was with child that she had her home with her if they would only keep quiet. The Navajo Prince believed her and said so. Which stamped the Prince, in that bare, sometimes dusty realm as either wrong-headed or a leader, and he was plainly a leader, but in what direction they did not yet know — and even when the Princess appeared in that land didn’t know and everyone but the Princess herself guessed that he would follow her, and even follow her if she did not go home to her country; but she did. Margaret’s midnight story included how the Prince’s mother seemed to die, that is during the Princess’s stay. The girl would kindly talk to the Prince’s mother while the demons circulated like streams of song bees in and out of her head; and she told the lady how in the days before the Princess’s own great transport bird evolved (that ate Navajo ponies upon arrival in this territory) her father, the King of the National Mountains of Choor, had been through a taxing experience. He had personally seen to the dry stacking of no less than five of his children in the family gravehouse and, hearing a cousin priest pray that light like dew must come from the dark cloud of sorrow, had said he was in fact "entertained" by the renewed sight of his family dead, their coffins that is, bunked four to a stack and had felt like a builder there ordering his most recent daughter laid so her head was to her great-grandmother’s (one) foot; and the humor and sadness of the Princess’s kind guest-tale suddenly vacated the demons from the Prince’s mother’s head-font whereby they circulated, and she actually died, demonless, but that was not the end of it.

Yet on that clement midnight when he was staying with her and Alexander, and out walking in his pyjama bottoms — in the garden — and she told him he was sleepwalking and should get back to bed, he answered How ‘bout you? ‘s if she’d asked him what he was doing there and — the Princess found that for the Prince’s people — the People, as they were self-called — there’s a season for every event that comes from God’s hand like a touch from one counter-whorled finger of the five, in its own time; but the history of the People was much more like the steadfast land than it was like a Started and a Finished. The land, that is, at any one time — the red cuts of the great cliffs holding the afternoon sun and turning it toward the eyes of Zuni faces as they came back to the village from a field, a trail, a structure containing work; walking (we say) through the fences hungry.

The Navajo land spread out from the original volcano that contained the ship ever bound spaceward out of time, until one day the magma receded like the wakefulness of a continental tilt until they crowded up against that cooling mountain and would not wash around this obstacle until at last they grudged their way onward scraping it clean of all its stone save that core that had then always been bound toward that place, always a Ship in the mind of the People, as the night that must have spelled to the grandson and his grandmother a snake or two, coiled sleepy-headed in the grass of the backyard, was also itself a snake.

A snake-like beauty was what the night had, Margaret thought — and remembered to write her favorite grandson this in her terminal letter some years later after his mother’s departure. He liked Margaret more even than the information always up her sleeve. The "what" was what the People centered attention on, not the sequence of "whens": witness the difference between whenever the exact moment was versus the fact of the event, that is, when, according to both Hermit-Inventor and Anasazi medicine man, cosms of the Sun ran suddenly down through that rare cleft in the atmosphere occurring when all its layers line up for an instant the single slit or crevi-chink in each of said layers (when God cannot delay his one-shot deal, he must act): for the mountain of grandfather space leans down down upon all the volcan’ mounts of our not-after-all-so-visible topograph, each answering each upon time frames so diff’rent that the People knew that the "when" mattered less.

And so the People did not stress the exact time when the Princess’s fond histories de-demon’d her prospective mother-in-law’s head leaving that lady at last by herself—but dead! They stressed instead the disappearance of life from her coupled with her relations’ inability to touch her to make her ready for the groove of Earth-Sky, there to rest; and stressed as well what so struck the pyjama-bottomed grandson the night the Allies crossed the Channel and, landed upon the French littoral, invaded Europe, namely that the Princess’s huge bird, as neglected at the far edge of the ceremonial community as it had been successful at burying in its own body its urge to eat Navajo ponies, had produced from its own bright, pale feathers a diamond-shaped nest high atop what the Hermit-Inventor identified as a volcanic plug though so perfectly wooded up to a secret tonsure at the top as to seem a true mountain; and had produced a brace of eggs while being in our terms predominantly male, nor had it received species-specific connubial visits; and from far off on a night of the double Moon it had been seen by the Prince’s people to stretch its neck and lift its chin as an old exile Indian who had lived once upon the far north coast identified as the way of some brilliant sea hen when ip the company of her husband and approached by an alter male.

But this time we find an ordinary mountain lion whose scent of its natural prey the western deer, still plentiful then, had been deeply turned and turned upward toward the rough summit of this volcanic plug above the plateau to the odor of the future, as it was later explained.

An odor from the eggs, and so telling that… we already remember the fawn-colored cat five-foot-lean, its small-scale head over its big cub-like paws. . never snarled or spoke as it came out of the last scrub pinon pine, the last starved spruce. . branches wind-grown round harsh little trunks. . root systems grappling down upon the grain of volcanic memory. . and the lion moved so low along the ground that the bird as great as the summit itself and almost without personality, but beyond it, rose upon the downy muscles of its legs and at the last instant rose upon the night air to dive at the lion which by then had found the essence of the eggs’ light already within itself and with one lunge buckled and sucked one egg of its matter and vanished, before the bird — watched by a dozen sentinels miles off in the settlement— could either lurch back to the other egg, stained by the luminous rain of albumen from its counterpart, or swoop elsewhere at the lion that had so literally vanished it might have embarked itself like any other four-legged plant life into the large, still being of a timber wolf paused nearby smelling the lion’s hide with a twinge of turned stomach.

And the bird’s alien fire which to the wolf smelled like a mass of raunchy eyes and gums and oil grasses in the stomach of a fresh-killed pony mixed with winds bearing from the heights of Choor the pigs and rock chucks and lichens that can see with eyes but do not remember they were once lover-snakes and fruit-colored bears. Until, abandoning the trees and scrub for the upper clearing at the instant the Princess’s bird abandoned the diamond nest with its remaining egg splashed with entrails, the enormous wolf found himself whooshed by talon and bill and raised higher and higher, torn part by part, borne then tossed, then tossed again while, with each drop into mid-air, the bird’s bill like a sky made by a giant planet encroaching ate off a rib, a leg, a foot, a glinting gland, a face: till less and less of the still-living wolf fell back down the gravity of the bird’s personal sky, and watchers saw only a demon-stomach, the wolf’s, lying its strings and anchors all in the dark sky — blood-lit warm nerve and goot gut (to cite a German infiltrator’s aside to his fellow Cheyenne Contrary) — swallowed like swan song by the bird as if it promised to become that timber wolf as we would become others by making them us, when instead the bird was leaving the land that night.

As did the Princess in another direction, only to be followed by the Navajo Prince bearing a Colt revolver to protect the beloved who had left him so he forgot how much else she had really left. So that — so that… the Prince’s mother, until now lifeless for a week and a day yet fresh as a sprig of wild bean, found that new-grown eye in the fountain-top of her head uninjured receiving her same demons in new eye-sized forms of incandescent picture: and she came to life calling out that she had been abandoned by the Princess from the East even more than by her son the Prince, yet was very much alive (three little words Margaret wrote to her anxious editor-familias from the Great Salt Lake in the summer of ‘93, for she knew he was deeply concerned about the failure of the National Cordage Company in May and the most extensive troop movements since the Civil War and the drop in the gold reserves that he professed not to understand except it threatened ‘‘paper" and had come on Shakespeare’s birthday or nearabouts)—

still very much alive in sun the like of which, dear father, I had never seen — heading south tomorrow while from the mountains twinkling with dog-tooth violets this City seems embowered in shade. — I tell you it is laid out in squares called blocks, forty rods square, the sidewalks sixteen foot wide, the streets lighted by two hundred gas lamps. Industry here includes slat-fences, mattresses, scroll-sawing, turning, type, and bone-ash, not to mention a vinegar works. The glass works employ seventy-five men — make fruit jars, demijohns, vials, soda water and appolinaris bottles — can turn out 550 dozen bottles a day. Of newspapers, we have (I catch myself speaking like a Salt Laker when I will be long gone by the time you receive this) 3 dailies, 2 semi-weeklies, 5 weeklies, 3 semi-monthlies, and 9 monthlies, and if the Territorial Library boasts 4000 volumes, many scientific, you will like to know that the Masonic claims near twice that number. And so you see, dearest father, I am very much alive, unlike the whales a California party planted here in the Great Salt Lake — never suspecting (because Californians prefer quick magic to slow)—

Margaret hastened to inform her father, whose anxiety conveyed itself to her not only by telegraph but in the caress of her own quill’s brown-welling point across the watermark-graced page ruled only by her oblong green and ink-stained blotter lowered line by line faster and faster down until we lost track and must remember what we didn’t know we knew — never suspecting that, as an English financier and furniture maker whose house up in Brigham Street had a sublime view down upon the city and steeply up behind along the slope of the mountains told Margaret, a man here has found in the desert through an Indian woman named Manuel — who shampoos with it regularly and with it fixed a sore of his that’s virtually inside his body — an oil, or wax, contained by the pods of a hardy bush, such that said oil if one could grow sufficient of said plant will light a lamp as brightly as any whale, while what has happened to th’ willing though transplanted whales is unknown. Yet no man here, where clarity belies distance in the mountains of the land and hence anon on water too, has seen leviathan blow, who may by now be all fish if not thoroughly salted (if not to taste, to travel well — a trip more total not to say saltier than any old ocean can imagine rivers to bleed our rocks salt-free): so, as we already remember, those whales, those rather tragic power-pusses, took a wrong turn and got totaled, if one still says that of whales at this late date.

And so you see, Margaret said, on her way further west, I am very much alive — which was what in the dark of early June half a century later Jim’s grandma called to his granddad, who had called into the night yard through the bedroom screen he’d installed the afternoon before, "Margie?" (as if it might be only her voice) "… you all right?" — not, "Margaret, who’s out there?" when a pickup truck its trademark audible in a tailgate’s loose hinge passed, headed downtown.

But very much alive was what the Navajo Prince’s mother had become, and Jim felt this more curiously and sadly on Brad’s Day (which came more than a year after the June night-yard pyjama-bottom scene, for school had started anew by the time of Brad’s Day and the atomic bombs had got themselves dropped, no connection) — Brad lay on the floor of the music room learning to sink or swim.

"Very much alive" (Margaret called back at the distant second-floor bedroom screen behind which was her concerned husband Alexander, who now began to lightly sneeze as if it were animal dawn, and the boy in pyjama botts and his grandmother with her hair way down le back of her nightgown snickered out there in the night yard; snickered at the sound, until she like a girl took his hand (but he gently escaped) and told him, "Come on," then stopped short and Jim could swear he heard Alexander’s bedsprings depressed — and she informed him that, having perhaps come to life because the two young lovers had flown (first one, then the other), the Navajo Prince’s mother said she heard the bird as the thick cloth of Darkness itself, and knew the foreign princess was not aboard the bird on its way back to the national mountains of Choor. And it was not known there except to the Anasazi healer and two or three others that somehow the lady now alive but with her demons back used the song-like voice of Owl Woman, "In the great night my heart will go out, / Toward me the darkness comes rattling…"

But on Brad’s Day, with Alexander reading out of a book and bending to pat poor Brad on his heaving shoulder blade, but now seating himself at the piano and playing lightly and sketchily "Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet"! when the boys had never seen him even try to play a piano or any other instrument so that Brad rolled onto his side and stared at Alexander’s back with wretched face — Jim tasted that damned egg essence! And he would have sprung upon his shitty little bastard of a brother who was taking up everybody’s time, for crying out loud, except Jim knew that in the dark yard a year and a month and more ago he had slipped his hand out of his grandmother’s as they both heard one more screened sneeze — a last little irritation — Jim had been moved — and went toward the palely glimmering white trim of the back porch quicker than Margaret who suddenly lagged, elderly or measuredly female; and Jim was moved to feel a big something so he nearly ran down the street to his own house — father, brother Brad, mother: moved by the Navajo lady coming back to life alone with her buzzing bonnetful of shifting demons and others.

So that on Brad’s Day while the grandfather played well enough for Brad to tell him to please not touch that piano — then Brad went back face down on the floor sobbing but not moving — Jim would have asked his grandfather if all that Navajo story-stuff predicted the future: for they were now without the mother Sarah, who had told Jim to go away and not be afraid: which was not a fact like what Alexander Big-Shoe Granddad asked Brad, for he got along with little Brad, What was Dizzy Dean’s middle name? and a few years later, What was the name of Bernhardt’s dog? when Brad was in high school.

Jim was no walking encyclopedia but he could ask his grandfather what was Harry Truman’s middle name and have his elder wait for a whole minute with his lips drawn back above his teeth before giving up. Only, a moment later, to ask what general (clue: he’s Mexican) had part of his body buried with full military honors while he was still alive and kicking?

They now heard Margaret taking off her brown raincoat in the hall— brown? intones the interrogator (but in the interest of further information suspends punishment) — America may be second to none in acoustics and/or sound, but what is the sound of brown?

— taking her time before they saw her at the threshold of the music loom surveying her husband become musician (who had introduced Jim once to the words "She’s always been a giver, not a taker"). Alexander turned round toward her on the piano stool as if he had been practicing; and Brad was on the floor snuffling and groaning, making noise in his sleep almost(!) or might have been about to receive a kick from Jimmy. Who was ready to kick him when he was down where he belonged, wriggling and heaving there on the shallow lake of his mother’s music-room floor, shades of a Sarasate tune they used in the movies to make you pity a sad scene (though no one can make you feel anything, it’s what you want to feel. .). "The sun’s getting ready to come out," she said; "how’re you feeling?" she asked Alexander and she knelt beside Brad who did not stop sobbing or moaning. She laid her hand on his moving shoulder blade. She listened not for his pulse but, Jim was clear, for what she herself thought.

"Water’s still warm over t’ Lake Rompanemus," said Alexander.

"Welcome to it," said Margaret; "the wind is not warm."

Brad was set apart; he had done it himself, it didn’t matter why, and he maybe didn’t know; and Jim wanted no more to do with his grandmother’s histories because they now made him question what had become of his mother.

(This had gone far enough, asserts the interrogator, we know next to nothing of the suicide’s intentions: we suspect she was about to be found out as having yielded birth some years before to a natural child, but we know that she was not for long if ever moved by the father of Brad Mayn and we detected in her a purpose at the beach looking out past Jim so that he could not look both at her and at what attracted her attention if anything, that is, beyond the perhaps lonely horizon, a purpose that turned in her some calculated aim beyond death, no more a rendezvous with a Jersey Coast blower whale than with an enemy sub canvassing postwar coves from America to America, Liberty Island to Penguin Paradise — and at that very seaside point we have thrust upon our attention the fact that that current manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York appears with Bob Yard and walks down the beach and back with his old friend Margaret who in the person of a Princess once found sanctuary through him upon wending her way back to the East: yet you betrayed the fact that to give her in the form of the Princess sanctuary he turned her (you can’t turn anybody without their consent) into a thing (You said it, chimes a voice with a bare body in the Body-Self Workshop circle, a thing), but wait, says the smiling interrogator (who discovers he too can have charm), a "thing" (says he) accessible only to meteorologists: from which she could be returned to her original form only by the same knowledge, and come to think of it we have on our staff government meteorologists who — but no, forget I said that — and our interrogator seems some piece of us, or his relations, albeit tortured in the next room in order to be not all wrong any more than he has been all bad, a’torturing though he sometime be.)

Yet had Margaret’s histories (otherwise free of any news of whales, which she admitted she had never read a word about) foretold the future? For wasn’t that what you learned from reading the history books? His own father said so, and when he got time (which he officially never did, because of his editorial devotions to the family that he had married into without his bride having to "change her name"), he read Ulysses S. Grant: on the subject of winners and losers, however firmly the South, like Mexico after Chapultepec, claimed there was other loss in battle besides the battle itself.

Jim’s father said this to a visitor on the front porch one day, many months before Brad’s Day. Jim lay hidden in the cool earthen space under the porch, latticed by the light that came through the diamond openings of the diagonally cross-hatched lattice slats, himself and the damp-scented cavern. The visitor’s reply stuck for years in Jim’s memory but he did not summon it later, and so perhaps could not, from the shades cast by the light of freedom and loss, while the visitor, whose heavy shoes creaked and tapped their toe tips directly above Jim’s eyes, listened to Jim’s father observe some dull thing about bias and the reading of history and the newspaper business, and replied that his host had always worked hard at toleration: which precipitated a rare guffaw from Jim’s father and thence from the helpless son supine below the battlements a cough really due to the visitor’s convergent (porch-high) fart during his host’s laugh plus the farter’s murmured "Did you hear something?" Which words coincided with Jim’s cough yet accidentally foretold it, though it was less cough than laugh, less laugh than a body’s custody of some surprise held though not quite grasped.

And before the host could think to answer the guest’s casual suspicion, he was adding what, as he said, the guest knew little if anything about, to illustrate the business carried on between bias and impartiality, for whereas the family paper — the Democrat—had come into being well over a century before to put the county if not New Jersey squarely behind Jackson and against the Central Bank and its sovereign favors to the big guns, to property as Hamilton stitched it into our founding chapters (honorable and succinct as a Swiss ledger) and it multiplied into paper you couldn’t pay my taxes with, we have to give to Lincoln in the early 1840s if not total agreement at least space to duel in his own way with James Shields, the Illinois state auditor, who told the tax collectors to take the notes of the tottering Illinois State Bank at only their real value (you know this story?), which was forty-four cents on the dollar, which Lincoln—

— dueled in his own way? came the unexpectedly knowing retort — (and the sub-rosal or sub-cathetral auditor stirred upon the dark earth, smelling through porch boards the noble gas against natural law descending from the afore-related wind, as from treated seaweed, or from a fresh, soundless second, only to hear, then:) you sure you didn’t hear something? as if the tapping of the boot tip on the porch above the boy answered the frequency of his own sound yielded by who can tell what motive beyond accident or, to travel on ahead to a Washington bar in ‘62 and a friend Ted, that key to history known as small talk and so small it might be the space past or yet to come of the tapeworm’s expansible tunnel—

— second wind? says the interrogator turning our trial to his own personal uses — isn’t that what you people call the reserve breath that runners reach only at un certain deeper hollow of fatigue? better be sure it’s not the oxygen-depletion stage of running on fat cells which we know are not the greatest back-up.

— Lincoln’s own way was to choose cavalry swords against James Shields, went on Jim’s father — who was so nearly right above Jim that pomposity closed in on love that was surprised alone, not grasped — the jumbo size, a plank on edge between, and an eight-foot limit behind for each. For Lincoln had much longer arms than Shields (and, we add, arms which were to be one day the longest arms of any American President in history though not matter of profound wonder to their beleaguered owner).

— But — and the visitor rose, transferring his weight — but that was a sure thing, Mel; are you sure you got the facts right? I mean I know you always do, but I thought Lincoln was a fearless—

— That’s why he wanted to avoid the duel though he’d brought it on in

the first place: he wrote these letters to a paper showing Shields at a fair using

state paper to pay off the town’s women who came to his window let down

‘cause he couldn’t marry them all" "so handsome and so interesting"—

Shields was Irish and Lincoln wrote the letter as a certain Aunt Rebecca—

"Well," said the visitor’s creaking porch and shoes, "I’m sure I heard something."

"Shields you know caught a bullet in the lung in the Mexican War but he lived to be outmaneuvered by Stonewall Jackson fifteen years later in the Shenandoah rain while the bossman General McClellan was building bridges like a politician, soon after Grant beat Johnston at Shiloh — and when the Governor of Pennsylvania said Grant had been drunk and lost thirteen thousand men, Lincoln said, ‘He fights.’ "

"Once got drunk and mislaid my toolbox," said the other.

"Lincoln was a fighter if there ever was one. Hardest kind of fighting."

"He didn’t eat good I seem to recall," said the voice, "but wasn’t he married to an impossible lady?"

Jim moved his foot and rang a trowel against the upended teeth of a dark rake, whose earthy rust he now knew was what he had been smelling.

After a second, "I wouldn’t want to say for the record," said his father, and for a moment the men might have looked at each other so that nothing could keep up appearances: but the diversion of the boy’s presence was not the only fact between the two men who were not willing to hate each other, nor (deep down) willing to spend time at the beach with their wives and children though the visitor and his wife — loudly difficult to a point of throwing a muffin tin at him fresh full from the oven — had no children for all that went on between them.

And on Brad’s Day, scarcely a month after a woman whose whereabouts in her New Jersey town had been unknown for several hours was discovered or inferred in certain of her effects (including a large black towel) well above high water at Mantoloking, with incidental vague apologies written to a neighbor, whose gray dory, with those sweeping proud lines that, of all months, in August needed a coat of paint on its bottom, was reported found on a spit in Barnegat Sound with one oar gone and a damply darkened paper bag rolled tight as a toothpaste tube yet with one lengthwise half of a dill pickle inside it wrapped in white store paper not waxed, the discussant men above on that porch were two of the four principal folk to "look in" on young Brad’s bereavement, though at least two others also came during the day.

Brad turned his head up away from the piano, and, his profile toward where his grandmother Margaret knelt with her hand no longer touching him, he knew his brother Jim was still there. Jim respected the little bastard, who still was telling Jim nothing more than the day at the beach when Jim got suddenly stuck above him in the sand towering murderous but hearkening to the threatening call of their mother from her black towel blinded by the sun. And meanwhile Brad on the floor of the music room wasn’t going to school. It’s embarrassing having your mother kill herself. And no more point in Jim telling him than forcing dry cornflakes scratch by scratch down his throat. Yet Jim didn’t go to school all that day himself. There were other people in this life of theirs who could come to the house. And on this day probably for the first time Jim thought about the look of the house. The dark-brown shingles of the porch roof led you up to the roof angles and facing of the second and third stories. The dormers and the other sections of roof spread in what seemed a lot of directions when you weren’t actually looking at the house. He couldn’t draw, he thought, but he drew the house, doodled its thick white pillars from the low, thigh-high wall that ran around the porch to the porch ceiling, the day after Brad’s Day, when he was sitting in History and couldn’t think, and out it came onto his notebook, but the angles of dark shingled roof section varied less than the mountainous watercourses he found he had with some instinct drawn, but he’d never thought of what the house looked like till Brad’s Day.

But here was the music room which he absorbed for the first time, as if it had been a shifting article of furniture turning up here, there, like good and bad sounds, wet or dry sounds, night sounds heard in day — and he’s here with just this person, all ‘long, Dad gone to the office of the newspaper, Dad gone to work with his worried look which he might not have had on the wedding day of that friend of his when he mounted a roadster’s running board to sail to the reception expressly to meet Jim’s mother Sarah, but had worried ever since — whatever you could say he was worrying about; and here’s the little brat brother who, Jim realized, knew that Jim was here with him in the music room, so that together they grasped the meaning of Brad’s gaspingly interrupted "You going to. . school?" and Jim looked into the eyes of his grandparent and as a prime resident of this house, not the one so often visited down the street, said to his brother he guessed he wasn’t going to school, and told him it was O.K. while bracing himself for a more tedious display to come. For. . {for?) their mother had said to Jim (whatever she had said to his more protected brother), had said to Jim on the occasion of his taking a summer farm job and not "going to work" at the paper (which was more for his father than for the family which his father, though with the same name, had married into), "You will go away where you belong, and live…"

— that’s what he remembered—

— yet she had been the one to go away if we’re getting technical, even if she was merely dead, which wasn’t much of a going away.

Jim thought, You have to go to school. But he wouldn’t make Brad; didn’t want to shake his leg or talk to him, make him do anything; didn’t want to talk to him (like Saturday night finding Brad turning Jim’s papers in his room and when he got caught by Jim he said, This place needs sweeping, there’s dust or sand or somethin’ on the rug and the floor). Nor groan, cry, sob like him, much less hit those same keys out of which, minutes later, the grandfather had made some surprising music.

Yet Jim just didn’t want to be apart from Brad. God! That little shit? Just be with him, the brother so different and, not so secretly, despised: for not being a fast runner; and for recounting to others things Jim did, though not to tell on him.

Just be here in order to know what had happened. In order to leave, one day; to fall forward.

What had happened. Regardless of what the future would tell about the mother who sent them away though they had the idea — yes, they—Jim knew, and some future we—it was the two of them knew, that they had the sinking feeling that she was the one who had gone away.

Implausible, this, said the interrogator, forgetting to give us the business; a rather artistic mother, one has forgotten in the decay of the middle-class liberal family with its aspirations toward Eurodollars, may be not the head of the home on account of she is the home.

Of Sarah’s grandmother it might have been said she had the vapors many multiplied mornings chilled by her night’s rest.

But Sarah was not her grandmother, and not her mother Margaret — not one to stroll the raw sidewalks of Salt Lake City when her father had edited her trip to the Chicago World’s Fair in advance, he thought; and not one to make up stories to tell her sons when—

— Did you tell the Princess-and-the-Navajo stories to Mom? he asked in the near-stillness of the room measured by the sounds of the boy Brad on the floor — surprised to hear himself.

— What stories? sighed or gasped the central griever on the floor near the kneeling grandmother’s hand.

I hardly knew those stories till after you were born, Jim, she said.

Where’d you get them? Did the Princess’s bird have Paiute blood to eat horses?

Oh most of them are true enough, said Alexander, Jim’s one-time Paiute "source," who rose from the piano, stood looking at his grandson Brad’s faintly rising and falling form before ushering himself from the room saying a word or two under his breath that included "wheelbarrow" and "leaves," and after he shut the music-room door, a word or two in the hall.

How could you not know these stories till then?

Your mother was in the hospital with you for two weeks and they were talking about an operation, and one day I went to the cemetery to see if Eukie Yard had died because he hadn’t bought a pint of applejack in ten days according to your father who had heard it at the store when he bought a bottle of rum and a bottle of sherry to celebrate your arrival with us — and when I got to the graveyard looking for our notorious caretaker and heard the pounding of the trotters down at the track like game birds, I forgot about Eukie Yard and maybe I was thinking I might tell my grandson a thing or two more than

Jonathan Jo

Has a mouth like an "O"

And a wheelbarrow full of surprises.

And while I was looking at the green grass between my dark father’s long life and my poor blond brother’s short one, I remembered the Navajo Prince’s mother’s hole in the head that wasn’t big enough for the giant bird of Choor to do more than fly over, leaving the landing to the spirits who buzzed in and out without asking.

Demons was what they were.

Demons, you’re right.

The front door was heard to open during the ensuing silence. Brad breathed normally. His carrying-on only seemed to be ending. But as the glinting brass door handle spun loud and hard against itself and the door swung in, Jim knew his grandfather was out carting leaves, and, as if to ignore the unfortunate man who stood half-noticed in the doorway of his wife’s music room and sanctum, Jim said, "Gramma, was that before or after the Navajo Prince left to follow that stupid Princess of the East? because—"

"Both," came the word.

"— because if it was after…"

But the man, more like an uninvited guest than a father, asked what was going on here. But not as if the boy on the Persian rug was in the wrong: Mel Mayn’s readiness was in his arms and hands; and his square, absent face had been waiting fourteen years and more for his giftedly ironic wife to ask something possible of it. Now she was dead—"his late espoused saint," Byron Kennett her music friend had put it, though who was "his"? — and the open palm of Mel’s extended hand, moving across the room and down to the boy on the floor, seemed to leave the sphere of his face to give it room to be alone and find all its dumbness of feelings.

(What’s that? asks the interrogator, whose machine didn’t pick up such vagueness except as danger.)

But Mel reached halfway across this mildly contemptuous space where his wife had succeeded in being alone when she wished and he had felt about the room all the cruel force of hoping mistakenly to love what one does not understand.

Or care to understand, muses the interrogator, who hardly knows what he does, when caressing the fresh-juice button momentarily liquefying our ever-serviceable bone system, ‘cause he’s got his living to hack and his cash flow to keep massaged — but he’s lately so alive to the fineries of feeling that these rooms discriminate that he doesn’t know what to do except receive the ensuing information that held its warmth — yet the wind (as this woman Margaret testily answered her husband as if prophesying) was cold, and the third adult to enter, coming as he did from a nerve center of the town, reported that a sudden cooling of the air in motion off the Jersey shore had created a dangerous pressure belt and there was a chance of that rare phenomenon a hurricane that originates along the mid-Atlantic coast — air, he said, touching Brad on the back of the head and speaking softly, travels like that — from high to low pressure areas and when it does that, it—

"Mel, for heaven sake!" said Margaret.

But Jim recalled his father’s very face noting once that a giant thunderhead had funneled a waterspout down the day of Sarah’s departure; so "it" came to Jim that not only had things happened to Margaret like the stories he’d about outgrown; the stories had; and if the giant bird’s fly-over was "after," then the Indian son’s leaving (albeit in pursuit of his white girlfriend) could have brought his Indian mother back to life.

Oh crap, and more crap, then oh memory, then mere memory, his voice changed, though to itself for years and later years when he came to make his living arriving at facts. Yet at that moment of Brad’s Day, the task of refiguring some of those pieces of stories was too great; that is, at the moment when the father who had been at the newspaper office in which Jim had declined a summer job in favor of the Quirks’ farm, which was mostly horse corn and where he stayed the night when he could go riding after supper, or when two skinny, sassy girls he knew came to dances at the Grange (which Margaret would ask about) when, that is, the father knelt near Margaret with the boy between them and Jim immobile after an hour or more near the door, and when the father sort of ducked his head round toward his son Jim and shook his head and began to speak to Brad even before turning back to him to contemplate the boy’s head and neck, and his dark blue T-shirt, and his arm in the sleeping position (so Jim thought, painfully, Has that little shit-ass gone to sleep?).

But no — for, in answer to Mel’s reassuring words "She’s not coming back, boy, she’s gone," "Yes," said the boy; and the man said, "But we’re not, we’re not gone, you and me and Jimmy." And Brad, with a veteran huskiness from tears and a hysteria of breathing that had become its own measure, answered the man who’d been a father to him, "/ know that."

Mel put his hand on the small of Brad’s back, one of the few if any opportunities we who are relations have taken to say Mel touched other humans — and all Jim saw was that hand, till Margaret stood up and went out of the room to the kitchen. "I know it too," said the man.

"So do. .," said Brad, sobbing again, . "so do. . I," heaving his lung half through his shoulders, but not with the soft screams or noises Jim had heard half an hour ago, noises Jim had never heard before from his little brat brother.

And so it went. Margaret brought thick sandwiches in. This time they didn’t move to the sandwiches as on the day a month ago of the memorial, from living room to dining room, and she surprised even Jim by putting the plate of cake-rich home-baked crusty white-bread sandwiches beside Brad and Mel on the floor—

— who were related only by marriage, breaks in the daydreaming interrogator, if we have got the facts right—

Some are liverwurst, some are egg salad, and some are American cheese, Margaret said and—

— was there time to hardboil the eggs?—

— and stood up and looked at the boy on the floor, and was gone again to the kitchen.

Mel actually stroked Brad’s back — and said (but really to Jim, as if Brad were elsewhere, staring into the Earth, say), "It was something missing in the equation—/ knew it — she had her music and she had Jeanette Many who was fine as long as she was playing the viola, and she had Byron and Byron had Sarah when his mother didn’t have her dancing shoes on, and she had the others she talked to who appreciated her. Sometimes she had her way of narrowing her eyes at you as if she couldn’t see right, and running her hand down the side of her face like she was looking for a bite. And besides the friends, she had this town which she might have left at the time she and I met, and she had nothing much from me except she knew I’d always be here, be here longer than the Democrat—which wasn’t enough for her but what did she ever do about it?"

The results are before us, murmurs the interrogator idiomatically.

"It’s all right, Dad," said Jim.

"Is it?" said the father.

Margaret sang briefly in the kitchen as a drawer opened and slid shut and the refrigerator door made a noise. The front door came open, with voices, and here were Alexander, having transferred a pile of leaves from one place to another, and Bob Yard, who didn’t know what to do except say, "Havin’ a rest, Braddie?" And Brad raised up as if for air, or thinking about Bob’s voice. And the violin case lay shrined at the head of this ceremonial length, which had gotten longer, yes Brad had gotten almost longer, imperceptibly stretched by a motion contained in him. "Yeah, guess so," the boy whispered.

Mel said, "Any more news about the storm? It’s the pressure belt." "Yes, that’s so," said Alexander memorably; "air travels out of your high pressure area into a low pressure area, they say" — or words to that effect, and years later Jim told his colleague Ted so it came out funnier. Brad was groaning again, he rolled abruptly onto his back — God, first time in all these two hours — and cried in a creepy, embarrassing, slow cadence as if he were seeing something, and Jim heard the old stairs — which could have been Margaret, but she sang again in the kitchen and Jim knew she would be bringing in a black-and-gold wooden tray of chocolate milk in the tall tumblers of cloudy-blue, rough-rippled glass his poetry-quoting mother would make iced tea in. (What poetry? He didn’t really know; he had never asked. She would not ever tell stories about when she was young; she flipped it all away with her hand.) Jim listened to his grandmother bring in the chocolate milk — he loved her thoughts but did not understand her storytelling any more, for now he thought the stories had been true, though certainly some weren’t. But some were.

the finger tips of the Navajo Prince made a sound that the Princess taught to the Prince, but the sound flashed waves of danger through the hills and brought the gigantic bird-thing to hover hopefully above the moving bodies of the tribe until the cries of the Prince’s mother had their effect. His grandmother read him The Last of the Mohicans, which was this side of the continent north of here with woods and rivers for canoes, not the dry land of the Navajo Prince and his mother and brother and family and People that the East Far Eastern Princess visited by chance, until the piteous cries of the mother roused the lazing demons who got out of her cavity and molded themselves round the elder seers who claimed that the music of the interracial fingerprints fitting so subtly during dawn song and noon song were the real reason for the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head, the two sets went together into audible whorls, never mind that the Prince’s mother had had the hole in her head for years before the Anglo girl arrived, and these elders spoke of the famous long afternoon when the sun did not go down past the mountains of the sky but held firm at ten paces above the horizon and the specks of spirit awash around the famous matron’s head were briefly her ancestors telling us that the white Princess was related to the Prince so long as she did not return to her father’s nation of Choor but stayed here where three old Spanish ewes who had long forgotten the lambs birthed in the silent blizzards prospered in the Princess’s presence as she learned to weave but so slowly (with three spindles of lightning and one of rain) regaling the women with tales of swimming — so that they were reminded of the slower ways of weaving and the hard-won desert dyes they had once used and in the East Far Eastern Princess’s slow, clumsy learning relearned their own old slower ways before trading with strangers had pushed them to work faster:

until the Hermit-Inventor of the East, returning from further south, gave her not even the time of day but let her know, in the long-range glint cut by his eye, that he would meet her where her bird nested, she had better be there:

and the Prince’s mother with the demons still sucked terribly upward and downward complained that the alien girl had so befriended the ewes that they had not been butchered in their natural time, and the alien girl must stop writing her language-messages upon paper every morning and evening and must not wear her quillwork-decorated antelope shirt from the Cheyenne Germans if she expected the demons to vacate "her mother’s" head — for so the Navajo Prince’s mother related herself to the young girl for the first time— mother—so that the Princess, seeing the teeth and tongue of her adoptive Indian mother, recalled with a shock her own mother sitting up straight in a black-and-gold sulky-bare carriage breezing to church with her cousin the highly pleased banker-tenor who possessed a trotter as glossy and eager in its motion as any the race track would see — and sang in the Methodist choir—

— but this wasn’t the queen mother of the rational mountains of Choor, broke in the interrogator, sounding ye faint self-echo as if he hadn’t been tuned for a while. In New Jersey eider dey allow horses into the Methodist choir or dey breed singing horses!—

— until, having completed her day’s apprentice weaving too fast with her whorl-ended spindles three of zigzag, flash, and sheet lightning, one of rain streamer whirled with white shell and hearing the maidens whisking stone-ground corn flour, singing to their unborn children, she walked away like the visiting Princess she was, to her pony, and rode away to meet the Hermit-Inventor, who told her she was in danger, a hollow statue could hide her if she could reach it in time and let herself be changed to another form but it was a long journey but today was a once-in-six-hundred-years Window, open like a reverse volcana (as the hermit always pronounced it) from the sky if she might only be conscious of it: and though he, not the first nor the last of the Hermit-Inventors to be dismissed for unwarranted observations, gave credit to the Anasazi healer for supplementing his information with Owl Woman’s remembered songs and serving to confirm the Hermit-Inventor’s pilot construct of several layers of atmosphere — exactly two-sevenths as many years ahead of Teisserene de Bort, the discoverer of the stratosphere, as the man who claimed to have discovered jojoba was ahead of his time prior to being killed in early Salt Lake City.

And on this day under the enormous breathing of the bird, he told the Princess in the Anasazi’s language rather than his own more technoloon that she must act upon the future that afternoon:

Meanwhile, Jim felt on Brad’s Day that it was only like yesterday that his grandmother had told him how the Navajo Prince’s mother had died brimming with demons who had become more numerous and flowed together like crowds in future until those knowing elders staring down into the hole in her head saw less hole and more surface of teeming flume and a surface they would incredulously check by darting their heads around to see her face, for the fluid surface where had been the reverse fountain of her head top and where Owl Woman’s namesake the woman Manuel had applied oil of the jojoba bean to encourage reseeding of hair came to resemble the kindly storms that were her eyes’ insight and the large, nicely shameless cheeks like muscles to welcome you and reflect all you knew you could do. Which encompassed even marriage to a girl as alien to the Navajo mother as Harflex, that young noble of faraway eastern Choor, seemed far and familiar to the still not homesick Princess; until, while the demons talked louder and louder and the lady herself said nothing but wept, the impending union of the foreign, much-traveled girl and the Navajo son seemed to herald her thoroughly convincing death at the hands of demons who carried out their impulses suing for her energy more than her. Which they grasped no more than the medicine women who would not touch her or share out the clothes she wasn’t wearing during her curious period of death. And then her dying ended like a season when the noisy winds go away and the birds, if any, wing back reincarnating these same winds:

But the night the Princess left, thinking herself the cause of the Prince’s mother’s death, and the Prince left in pursuit, the demons returned to the wonderfully preserved head of the lady, and once more she suffered, lived, and, upon ceremonial occasions, including one remembering her son, whose much-sung trek around the core of Earth never came full circle, she made long noises unmistakably music to Indians and authentic to a Mexican spy openly out of work and a dark-spectacled German gun-and-honey importer from Chile who smiled as if it were his show and who, though tone-deaf, knew by heart her country’s eminence in music and by sight a Chilean lady whose daughter had become a zoologist and run away.

Why did Margaret’s account of this feel like it had been given only yesterday, when this was months ago in a dark night’s backyard? Doubtless because Jim put it in its place with the long afternoon when the sun did not go down because the rough lip of the Earth didn’t let it, as because, too, rifts in all these once speculative layers lined up by convergent pang of all or most of the gods flexing, for a second, one universe, to remind themselves of time.

— Did you have a mother-in-law like that?

— The Princess almost did.

— What about you?

— Not quite.

— What about your mother? (whose uncle in earlier New Jersey made. her a table every other year and her friend the banker designed a slick racing sulky double-size well a sort of little open carriage to show her off in).

— I was my own mother then, Jimmy.

Out West? The favored grandson, remembering on Brad’s Day, the day when the sun did not go down on time, and thinking what he’s missing today at school because this is only the second week and he hates to ask for even some beautiful girl’s history notes, finds in himself a thought as deep as two parallel thoughts — one, that he never did more than hear and appreciate Margaret’s "fish stories" yet knew they demanded questions, and from him, that he never asked; and two, that Brad, without knowing, has taught him they are brothers — no matter that here they all come, Alexander Granddad (eyes alive and taking aim on what needs to be done) and Margaret rubbing her damp hands on her apron, and Pearl W. Myles of all people, the high school teacher, a stranger, who, when she phoned the Democrat for advice and support, heard from Mrs. Many that the younger boy was having a fit on the rug and who had come at once, though a stranger.

What were the parallel thoughts? The interrogator, who has more than enough to do with his button, is thinking no less cheerfully, "Enough of this, it is of course deeply affecting."

He meant (for everyone has perhaps had a brother), do you mean "breather" asks the interrogator — Jim feeling brother to Brad for once: he could look right at him, anyway, without vomiting or wanting to liven up his pallid bony puss (mayhap seen snoring, of a night, when Jim, scorning the stairwell where no one was likely to be found to catch him, took to the roof, toeing the balsa-light slant of each personally known shingle as slow as but fast as one jump from window to grass).

(. . to Earthward, murmurs incorrectly the interrogator, moved, his hand dreaming of that putative U-boat conning postwar haven from the Jersey shore 252-foot-length by 252-foot-length clear around to the long nation-coast of Chile, dreaming the more because he’s convinced it was created not to wait for the woman who owned a black towel who vanished into the sea, its surface, its clefts, its cells, its temperature, so that the interrogator’s hand slides relaxed over a button (don’t you know) momentarily juicing the grime off a suspect in the next room. .)

(we infiltrate like angels trying to change and are broken in on by a young voice down the hall from a 1977 apartment in some articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and the voice is talking to the basso profundo but not about the //amto-opera warehouse gig thrust upon him, who gives off a delighted rumble now at the words "This weekend we’re going to play leapfrog in the asparagus bed, Popsy" accomplished by a clink which as Larry does not guess is a large jar of the basso’s down the hall in his apartment, his latest discovery, Clamato Juice!)—

Until there is nowhere to go except understanding: however, the division of sadness which was Brad’s way of shouldering brotherhood—"and crawls on his belly like a reptile," sounds the barker’s cry in the voice of more than one fourteen-year-old including Jim — left a less-known job of grief or action to the superior brother Jim, the study of which he found one day in his still teenage grandma’s Democrat "piece" on Mars, done when interest was at a height (August 18, 1892—"apogee," darts in the interrogator), but Jim’s interest betrayed itself in a quite foreign detail, it improved Jim’s study of his side of the grief responsibility (awkward words, but) also of how the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the Anasazi healer’s theory of the cleft by which the layers enveloping our neat fragment of the brother Sun, brother to others yet not to us who are a mere breakage become anxiously clear (through convergence of semi-explosive clays) and bent on becoming more, came periodically into line; and on that day, the Sun would not go down until those drawn by convergence of the many gods’ periodic effort to think one thought in common had had the chance to be found by cosms of this tearing or breakage of the Sun which, like ceremony, recalled that signal tearing one of many tearings or great breathings of this brother Sun when at the peak of breath or inhaled explosions of possibility that drop of fire blood split off, in love with, or expelled by, its own hunger for the void or to find what rein of force waited like a relative string arcing some bond unknown even to the cactus with its nesting eye and the birds that the winter wind becomes when it leaves: and the person who is struck by such reminiscent cosms of the Sun’s inhaled breath would find such purpose, at last, that she would start her life over as if either she had aimed inward to the center where the hells and rock-skinned saurs and river-rhines and the rock-skinned rhinogog and also the rich kettles of change tipped gimbaling this way and that upon the magma of a magnet that was not there, or her starts had been launched as secretly outward as her inexplicit "hello" to other worldlings in her 1892 Democrat piece when Mars, in opposition to Earth every twenty-six months, reached its regular fifteen-year extreme of opposed closeness—"hello":

amidst speculation engendering in the mind a wild longing to know whether people like ourselves live there and enjoy the hills and valleys and rocks and all the waterways of the universe, the rivers, waterfalls, even yes canals, and the eternal sunsets — they surely have enough moonlight! we would want to know if they were anything like ourselves and slept, eat and drank to live; and whether they knew anything of electricity and gunpowder or would like to know; and if they were going to have a World’s Fair

(the giveaway) — she would make a start "out of" no less than her future, or, in awesome fact, marriage to Harflex, the suitor, who awaited her presence,’ her go-ahead back along the shores of Choor: while the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the effect of these cosms of the Sun winging all instantly through this long window comprising in one long "point" all the single clefts in layers of breath embracing our own known world, the bodily senses of one’s given future: but Jim found later he had on Brad’s Day begun extending this material, having gotten mad at his grandmother — and maybe from the moment when Pearl W. Myles, his statuesque journalism teacher, appeared in the bereaved Throckmorton Street house, dark red paisley draped across the Chickering grand, a dust of English biscuits hovering round their sweet tin in a curtained dining room where a fortnight’s supply of Newark and Asbury Park and New York papers stared neatly stacked on a pulled-out chair, soap (Pear’s mild), upstairs flowers (fresh from Margaret’s garden which Sarah always accepted, while calling them "dead"), a nutmeg left to roll around the kitchen table (it might have been a brown Mexican jumping bean Bob Yard’s wife gave Jim after a trip to New York where she said it was the Italians who imported Mexican jumping beans) as cold as a dead turtle: the East Far Eastern Princess listened, and as she did so, the Sun began to tip into the horizon line of irregular mountains warped up toward the Sun as if (to allow the Hermit-Inventor his way of accounting for this strange afternoon) the axis had tilted so that this southwestern corner of the Earth became a pole. This explanation was no better than the Princess’s twin dreams the night of the long afternoon, nor the large turtle mouth painted upon the face of dancers in the snowy dawn of the year according to an outcast cousin from another people who carried water to the Anasazi twice a week though he was by now barely more than an occasional if intelligent fume given off by time’s inching root, which the Anasazi’s own thin mouth fresher than all the rest of him put together could be heard to tell, though with a softness audible only to those at a certain distance from him, not those as close as the Chilean javelina specialist Mena emerging before him upon the last in a series of ladders, her mouth painted white only by some love in her mind’s quest for the white-lipped javelina, not by ceremonial pigment, nor to the Navajo Prince when, long before Princess came along or giant bird, he knelt next to the Anasazi healer and took from him a Colt pistol, having at a distance of half a mile heard, moments before, the breath of the ancient healer telling how he had let his medicines take him for decades at a time away from his faithful and humorous wife and doting children only to find that one day they were gone across the space of one unending sunset which begot a double moon inside the Princess’s mind that night whereby she saw the Moon singly with each eye and dreamt that she was agreeing with a council led by the Prince’s brother that she would cost that young horseman "her" Prince his life.

And the trails he left, when she departed three nights later toward Zuni country (with its afternoon-long ramparts and nests of red cliffs), were not of cornmeal nor of crusts from her wooded memories of Choor but were only in her lover’s mind grown there by the thought of her womb hair and the embrace of her pale breasts, all such parts lost along the cells of his hand’s brain, bold as decision, humble as seeming-fact that’s beyond what idiots call sacrifice; and so he followed her.

We are such mingled growths, which the interrogator incorrectly remembers as Owl Woman’s words "I am running far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling," who has yielded his button (though to no one) for the moment and says "We" to us and sees our no doubt human matter here as a far cry from some center of information and political identification.

Well he may, for the Anasazi medicine man claimed that not he but his many hundred years younger colleague Owl Woman had sent the Princess the dream she came to him with on the morning after the Hermit’s interview with her near the eyrie of the giant bird: to wit, that having run hard all night to get to where she was to see what was vital to her precisely at dawn, the Princess was stricken by the dawn rays too soon, as if life won’t wait for you to find it.

When the Hermit, asked by her to prove the news about cosms bolting briefly through a vastly thin window in all our spheres, ran away to check again with the Anasazi, she knew she was being left alone. Above her, through the spruce and juniper pinon sat the giant Choor bird lessening in scale as if the great eggs, previously hidden, grew and the song or noise out of this still, animal peak atop what the Hermit named a volcanic neck came from the eggs as much as from the bird’s hunger.

"It’s all right," come the words from our own next room personalized by the presence of a multiple child fuguing some rock-folk against the polyfunk of old reliable homework—"It’s all right—It’s all right — It’s awwlll right" becomes a bright-eyed, quick quiet "All right!" so the interrogator who had almost forgotten himself asks if our multiple child has any Negro blood in it. We have at once answered, "If you have to ask, you can’t afford one," but the interrogator won’t smile this one off as an adroit addition to his command of our idioms. . not even interrogative smiles… we have put off his return to business for a time that is coming to an end.

So Jim, turning to nod to the major physical presence of Pearl W. Myles, who said, "I am so sorry, Jim; is there anything I can do?", did not ask her what she thought she was doing here — nor who was "we" which he’d half-heard instead of "I" — he wanted to ask her some good question since she was there. But Margaret reappeared and for a second looked like she would give the unknown Pearl Myles a social kiss.

So it happened (and he knew his grandmother knew) that the Hermit-Inventor of New York (who as we now say "lost a day or at any rate a sunset in there somewhere"), when he was still a mile horizontally away and, of course, sixty to seventy feet vertically down from the cliff apartment, heard the breath of the old Anasazi healer from further away than was logistically credible, and he knew he had heard before the thought expressed in words he hesitated to believe he was now hearing, particularly in the Irish accent — or Eiro-German — that he was in fact never able to prove came from him or from the late Anasazi healer.

Toward me the darkness comes rattling,

In the great night my heart will go out.

For the old man, on this afternoon that was a day later than the Hermit-Inventor reckoned it should have been, seemed dead on the Hermit’s arrival; and upon examination of all that was left by the Hermit-Inventor’s improvised standard of the state of tissues softly in the windless air waving where the old healer’s fine-worn neck had been, he had been dead a while, no question: the point was not what had happened to the body from the neck down (it had powdered at last and risen to a low cloud which Mena, the javelina authority, insisted took the form of the lowest noctilucent cloud ever seen, when those bright-banded phenomena had been observed at heights well above the stratosphere for centuries, indeed above the stratopause, mesophere, and mesopause — fifty miles — all of these officially undiscovered in Indian summer J893) — but the real question was how the last words of the Anasazi, born the year before one of the earliest described occurrences of his own pet cosmic window, had reached the Hermit-Inventor come to meet him in the absence of their utterer; indeed after the soft, successful exhalation of death.

But in their friendly way those last words had come bearing a memory the Hermit didn’t know was in him: the actual moment when a later incarnation of the Hermit suspected a magnetic break in the thin, precious, dangerous ozonosphere, the effects of which doubtless normally mutational yet the results not (for Margaret) death or sudden aging but an absorption of future: and at the margins of this swift vein of gold, blue, purple, violet, gray, and green seeming to incinerate the profile of ridge and crevasse, each peak and hollow reflected sometimes by a sunny sea of levitation, came a brainstorm — yes, providing with light financially unprofitable farms or whole hamlets at night by injecting some chemical, that in 1893 he could not name nitrogen oxide, into the appropriate layer (if you can find it in our junked atmo) round Earth’s sphere, a colossal halo to be sure, but a help to poor and insomniac peasants who might keep busy when they couldn’t sleep.

Yet Margaret, as she told Jim who never forgot but also seldom quite remembered how he reenacted her habit, stayed busy when asleep: witness the long afternoon, for the Princess dreamed a second simultaneous dream to go with the dream of the council led by her lover’s brother, and in this companion dream she saw into a grave but had no words, no mouth! for the valuable thing that waited for her and in the dream she went on to wake up and go through green trees and wooded water to find that same grave on a richly tilled hill and there was the grave which opened itself to her thought and she reached down to find a gun and an egg but not a bone or hair of that grave’s undoubted tenant and she was surrounded by the dustiest of desert Indians in this rich place who edged her closer to the grave telling her in unison (but she was the dusty one, not the Indians) what was no threat at all — that clearly she had lived the life of this dead person and now was this person reincarnate; but all she could feel, apart from relief that they meant no harm to her, was that these people from the southwestern desert were speaking beliefs other than their own, for they had no more belief in reincarnation than they had acquaintance with the cool, damp air of this hill with its eastern leaf forest, and when she gained courage to tell them this, they answered that she was the one who had told them about reincarnation; and when she felt awful and said, "You’re right, of course; what was I thinking of?" they swayed as one and, before she could reach for the egg or the gun, these people had resolved themselves into a fluid as thick as the blood of a worm and as sweet as the bean of a new world and had coursed into the grave which was then no more than the hillside—

— Revegetated? asks an environmentalist, setting up obstacles where none exist to a reasonable settlement.

That’s a promise, politicks the trained interrogator "brought in from Outside" who likes it so much he thinks he gon’ come back ever’ year with his growing family so long as there are at least the traditional mirages of water to support the summer swimming rites so common to his people.

A promise? That’s what you say to all your people prior to torturing them with doubts.

— re vegetated for sure over the long haul, avers the interrogator speaking English with a vengeance: but first we need to know what the journalist Mayn thought he was doing that February day in northern New Mexico, first trying to get a helicopter to fly him o’er Ship Rock and the Four Corners Power Plant, later rendezvou’ing at the Roc’ with one Raymond Vigil, an Indian known to regard Mayn as a useful publicist, even powerful, and a radical environmentalist-woman Dina with whom Mayn abruptly departed leaving his rented car to be returned to the agency in Farmington by the portly young energy-conscious Vigil while Mayn himself vanished south in the direction of Albuquerque, the voice of Vigil pursuing him like a back-seat driver.

The question is hard to believe; it asks so much and gives so little. .

… but it is not done with: for the daughter of Mayn not many months later arrived at Utah International’s doorstep asking similar questions about strip mining the Indians, re vegetating the injured sky, and ascending the treacherously softish rock of the thirty-mile-adjacent ship to find out if, from there, one could see the ground-level lovers’ plate marking the intersection of four states, or so the unexpected postcard to the dusty correspondent-woman Lincoln, enrolled in one of Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops, revealed — though to someone who herself was of more interest to the multiple interrogator than Mayn’s daughter’s friendly acquaintance with the poignant woman Lincoln could ever be.

Like Mayn, whom he resembles at some angles though possessed of a killer talent which Mayn never acquired perhaps because he has had a will to no power during the formative years, unlike Grace Kimball, who had the will to power ("originally from," and envisioning Manhattan from, much further away than New Jersey), but never any interest in killing her fellow man, the interrogator has lately had to rely on the dreams of others, which if he can’t get them to vouchsafe to the next room’s acoustics, he has obtained a scan of, through surprisingly old surplus equipment captured from authentic media geniuses of earlier basal-research ilk whose mind-and-heart sensors got shunted off into projects for handicapped (which viewers of the century in question became anyway), shelved just like those secretly launched odd-lot orbital platforms, for the duration.

And it doesn’t check out.

Yet while we, the interrogator’s momentarily stoned trusties, have checked it out, the whole Wide Load kept moving, accompanied by its monster night; it won’t pull over just while we take time to reflect upon the obstacle it is until too soon it’s gone, damn damn damn. Yet we already remember, in whatever order, the things animate and admineral and postvegetal in that Wide Load passing in-and-with its own privately operated night, that is there’s a real unit being hauled and at least someone in it going through the motions.

The interrogator has his uses. He notes lies extracted by, well, pain. Like that the Princess had two dreams consequent upon the afternoon of the sunset-on-hold (the dream in which the council said she was to cause the Prince’s death yet migration soul-wise and the dream about the grave) when a third also was betrayed, the one she told the Anasazi healer and he ascribed to his radically younger colleague Owl Woman just before his death with its aural aftermath, in which she’s hastening to get to the place where she is to see something at dawn but dawn comes too soon, and her wad is shot. The interrogator also comes up with insights in the field of the comparatively social: such that we have found in countries with coasts an extreme reluctance on the part of the populace to accept the death of family members, much less their disappearance.

Yet Jim did not cry and carry on. And Brad had his "Day." Yet that is not what we mean. Brad did cry and carry on, and inconsolably, but, as the interrogator missed, Brad and Mel Mayn both accepted the death of Sarah: she wasn’t coming back; she had followed the strains of her violin conceivably, if you call that music waves.

Whereas the Anasazi medicine man left his thing behind him (if you call those words ‘bout "darkness rattling" thing) when he went on in largely powder form, or, more precisely, honest particle form, having, as the interrogator quickly and emptily notes, been for the longest time beyond life or death.

But on a day when Jim was just standing at the edge of the goddamn music room watching Brad cry and groan and swim and wound the air having saved up all this shit for a month during which Jim would wake early in his own room and stand up still asleep and look out the window then go at once to Brad’s room (which had the dormer let into it and, by the bed, a part of the ceiling came slanted down low) and wake him by touching his shoulder at the same moment as he spoke his name (he wore red-and-white pyjamas, Jim a T-shirt and jockeys), Jim was as able as the interrogator to pick up inconsistencies. But he had reached a time in his friendship with his grandmother when he wasn’t sure any more; and what happened to the Navajo mother when the Prince and Princess separately left, he after her, looked like some weird balancing-out that was like See what the future brings.

But his mother had been the one to say Go away where you belong, etcetera — hadn’t she said that? (yes, in the extreme quiet of her bedroom he had heard it) — yet she was the one who wasn’t here. He was falling, he knew, but he could not hit the floor like Brad. He fell forward, and maybe as much for both of them as Brad did this tragic bit for both of them when Jim couldn’t cry — why would he? — but this wasn’t all he couldn’t do.

He couldn’t ask Margaret any more stuff like what about that other egg, the shell splashed with the rainbow albumen of the first egg the lion ate before turning into the wolf whose entrails flared upon the sky. Anyway, Margaret was mad, because when Alexander said Lake Rompanemus was probably still warm and she said the wind was not, and Alexander agreed with her to keep her happy, she replied, And it’ll be hailing by sunset.

One thing: the Princess had felt the future that day: takes a while to digest, like Ira Lee the Indian halfback said in the huddle, she swallowed a pin when she was only nine but didn’t feel the prick till she was nineteen—

the day the Sun wouldn’t set and she knew she would leave: that was fact, to be believed; and so was the Prince’s mother coming back to life three days later and scaring the other, more administrative son half to death, on top of his brother having left pursuant of the foreign Princess who was traveling on her gift horse, not the at times unreal giant bird that ate horses and had left for Choor in the middle of the night.

But there’s an egg unaccounted for, except in that dream’s grave where the People, against the everlasting cannon, in the trench, in the trees, in the sky that is itself orbiting, express their sympathetic solidarity by resolving into a fluid neither cold nor warm pouring in, pouring in — sing it — which they wouldn’t do for Andrew Jackson in their Seminole forms in the Florida caper, getting shot, getting shot like the "red sticks" Andrew Jackson called them (and they were) and as ignorant of civilized football as were the skulls which Jim and Brad’s cereal box during summer, ‘45, said Indians kicked around inventing soccer. Until Jim, one day long after he had gone into facts with a vengeance delicate enough to be kept by him from himself though it’s just a job as the fact-oriented interrogator once slyly, ruefully said, dividing his chaired, nay tabled interrogatee-like data extracted from it into dead ends or rock bottom and further possibility, found the egg one day, did Jim, and didn’t know who’d made it up, him or Margaret. Except he did know that, before the afternoon of Brad’s Day ended upon the continuing cadence of Brad’s grieving breath, Bob Yard sounded off at last, after being subdued for an hour and a half, his shifty eyes moving soberly under the dark-chalked blazons of his eyebrows (but Hold it, offers the interrogator: Sarah, the mother in absentia, was possibly about to be found out, nicht wahr? and so—)

No! No! howls a voice in the next room, there were those who knew about Brad and where he came from, and didn’t talk, and most others didn’t know including the brothers themselves, though Jim guessed. Not, however, that day at the beach when he wanted to throttle his brother but didn’t know why (read how).

Yes, cool and subdued for a long time as if the presence of death they were in was Brad’s, who nonetheless moved — Bob Yard at last angrily entered a dispute. Alexander had returned to report that the hurricane was not developing after all, although the window in one of the upstairs bedrooms rattled as if the whole house were being moved; and Pearl W. Myles, who had sat long-legged on a straight chair looking from person to person until Margaret, having cleared away and washed up, returned to inquire what was happening to Pearl’s classes at the high school today, said factually that she had felt the low pressure in this vicinity since early morning when she was having orange juice. Alexander said there were whole belts of pressure and Margaret, who was still peeved with him, said she didn’t believe a word of it, and Bob Yard in that abruptly deep, grating voice said, "That’s why air travels horizontal."

In the silence that followed this sound, Brad turned over and sat up and stared at Bob, who was his father but didn’t act it and the boy didn’t know. "You know what she said to me?" said Bob, with that brief power of news from beyond the grave: "She said the wind would just go straight ahead, straight out in a line, except the world is always turning, that’s what she said to me, and that’s why," said Bob—

— but Jim as suddenly (hearing Mel ask "Where’d she ever say a thing like that?") left the room and shut the door hearing Bob’s reaction to him and knowing that his own face was full and he wanted to stand alone in the hall, though Pearl W. Myles, with unimaginable presumption, at once followed him into the front hall and, in what order he didn’t know, put her hand on his arm or spoke or picked up the huge paperweight of heavy glass with newsprint embedded in it that wasn’t ever doing anything on the mahogany hall table with the mirror above it which she looked in because Jim caught her eyes widening at herself, then him — and at once he told her he didn’t know what she’s doing here and he went back in the music room in time to hear Bob say to Mel, Margaret, Brad, and posterity: "But I said to her ‘What a lot of stuff—they ain’t curved.’ "

And ever afterward Jim recalled, like the recovery of the Navajo matron with the demon-hole in her head, the blank breathless look of hate in Brad’s eyes that could not quite turn away, that is from the man he didn’t know was his father. And worth remembering, because Margaret left as suddenly as Jim had, and the front door blew closed behind her so one expected to hear her black shoes pounding the lawn, the walk, and a while later when Mel Mayn who seemed to care for Brad was sitting alone with him at the kitchen table having a drink, having let the paper take care of itself all day—most of the day — jim rode his bicycle up into West Main Street past the tall brown Presbyterian Church and out to the intersection with the highway leading in one direction to the shore and in the other past the race track to the gray capital city of Trenton and when he had continued pedaling freely south a mile, he turned in on the gravel of the cemetery where it was a challenge to ride and he would not cross the grass. And it wasn’t long before he saw his grandmother, as if the sound of his balloon tires on the loose stones had found her out, but if she looked sad, here in the place where she had put in place almost with her own hands a granite marker for the lost body of her strange daughter, she was engaged in such conversation with Eukie Yard, who had inherited the caretaker’s position from his cousin all too long ago, that Jim pretended to ignore them and passed among the neighborhoods of this place to the Mayn plot and his mother’s stone whose gray brightness said she was not quite there and whose newness needed the weather to fade it back into the realness of the other stones.

He was not sure what he smelled. It wasn’t cooking but it seemed like some simple food. He did not know what kept him from behaving like Brad. He could not believe what his mother had done. And also she had left her violin. Not to mention (he smiled to himself, literally smiled out loud) the kid insect all wiry and like a pampered kid when he never had been, lying on his stomach today with the violin on the rug beyond his head. God! There wasn’t any good reason Jim could see for her to have done this silent thing.

The marker showed she was either forty or thirty-nine; he was giving her for her birthday a necklace made of pale blue beads and little hollow silver bells, that Ira Lee’s large-eyed, tall, round-shouldered, lip-licking, single-minded, and unconsciously beautiful sister had made, because she had a book that showed different crafts and she was Indian and had visited a reservation in New York, and one in Pennsylvania where Margaret was interested in the women; Jim hadn’t paid for the necklace but he was going to get it anyhow. The breeze had blown away the rain which was on his wet knees, because he was kneeling with nothing to say.

He knew his mother shouldn’t have done what she did, but he couldn’t do any more than put his head on the wet grass and have nothing to say— not even Shit. It was hers, not his, the deed. He was going to miss varsity practice; he was J.V. age but heavy enough and he had run right through Feingold the senior guard whose father was a lawyer who commuted to Newark and who was (that is the son) supposed to make All-State this year if he kept his grades up. Feingold had a flat, splayed nose, not a Jewish nose (according to George the old man soda jerk), and liked bad weather; he really dug in and Jim had almost without thinking what he was doing run right through Feingold yesterday and a moment afterward didn’t know what he had been doing, except going for some point beyond the opposing backfield; and he was missing scrimmage today, wet helmets and somebody’s elbow numbing your lip — but thinking, always thinking; blowing on his fingers before a play to let Feingold think this was a surprise pass when Ira Lee was the regular passer.

Jim didn’t know how sick his mother’d been, and he knew other husbands and wives like the Bob Yards who yelled at each other. She had written a poem to President Truman about the atomic bombs but she showed it to Alexander who gave it to Mel without telling Sarah, and Mel was going to run it in the paper, print it as a surprise. But Brad told Sarah and she went downtown. Jim heard she ran all the way — and took it off Mrs. Many’s desk and left without a word to Mel who was at the far end of the shop keeping calm beside a press probably, and maybe nothing was said about it.

"Would you like a cup of—" tea, you’d think it was, but he had a blank, and in the blank rose and spread a substance beyond words— "and some cinnamon toast?" she asked him one afternoon when he had come into the shady house, heard nothing, and passed to the kitchen, sat down at the kitchen table. He heard his mother moving slowly like an old person or a naturally quiet person, woman maybe, slightly methodical, knowing though that Jim was where he was: and when she stood there in the kitchen doorway, selfish but not bad; dark, her eyebrows beautiful, soft warm curves — and sharp about the mouth as if she was keeping words inside, he realized that those words she did say weren’t words she got much chance to because he was out on his bike or at his grandmother’s. — "Eating grass or washing your face?" Margaret’s voice came out of the sky practically and he didn’t care if he was getting his khakis damp and rubbing his nose in the cemetery sod, he wasn’t crying (she knew that) and he wasn’t carrying on like his Brad today, and his grandmother, who had evidently finished her animated, probably administrative, conversation with the little fat man with the crew cut, Eukie Yard the caretaker, wasn’t talking to Jim like Mel did to Brad: and Jim stood up with rain from the grass on his face knowing she had been crude and sadly harsh, and he said: "I keep thinking maybe she’s here, but she’s not."

"You can be sure of that."

He wanted to say something awful, like "If they find her, this is where they’ll put her," or dumb, like "Least there’s a stone waiting for her." He said. "But it’s like there’s somebody here. You know?"

She seemed to. She knew he wasn’t one of the Sunday types.

Who could tell what he was feeling — that is, how far — which is — O.K. (he thought, and knew she thought) — just what’s the matter with all this pedestrian provincial background. But, observes the interrogator, who cares to guess at feelings? they are like dreams of surplus equipment. No, we answer, they’re thoughts that pretend to be stronger than the words we try them in.

"We"? we ask.

Who cares, the interrogator unquestioningly goes on, when we have proof of certain facts: "certain" not in the dubious American sense of an unspecified "some" but in the sense of particular certainties (he flicks his whole head toward the next room, but not as if there’s only one, and when we look back he looks like he would like to pick that nose of his but that’s our prejudice against political terrorism and its quiet linguistic routines) — facts (he goes on) such as that the Indian mother came back to life after her son the Navajo Prince departed armed for self-defense and magic but to give away when the time came with the very gun that the late Anasazi medicine man came into possession of through a spy who the night before the key battle of Chapultepec had won it by dubious play in a game of chance off a young Englishman who thereby regained his speech that had been lost when he had been questioned shortly before about an elusive German traveler’s map or abstract by Marion Hugo Mayne whose western diaries years later came into a distant nephew Alexander’s careful hands; not to mention, continues the interrogator exactly half obsessed by a new role he’s had thrust upon him (yet from him as certain as a shadow), a second fact that this Alexander is the still extant though now for many years widower grandfather of a man who, if it is the same James Mayn, on a bright day near the harbor when he lunched (where he often lunched) with two red-bearded, hungry, and distinguished economists, introduced a friend he happened to meet, a Wall Street oil analyst, to another accidentally encountered friend, a physician who was "in town" to discuss his accidentally deceased wife’s affairs with their lawyer, an intro which led like a suddenly slowed or detoured ray of light to a therapeutic contract between the oil analyst and the Westchester medicine man, who one day told a tale, guilty in its brevity, of a gambler who wagered in her absence his widowed, red-haired sister-in-law as if she were his wife and not his brother’s, and in the event won a powerboat in that card game which he then unloaded in a hurry in order to give up the tables and marry the lady; not to mention, continues the interrogator (being very slightly charming pacing simultaneously this and the next room which has ne’er been done before — with the rolling gait of a sailor), fact number three: it was only after her father had departed the Four Corners area that his daughter Flick entered it to extend her energy inquiries beyond that perfect Asia poison (Vietnam-related) dioxin in Michigan on a river that connects with Minnesota’s Mille Lacs where at an elevation of i,249 feet above sea level another New York doctor’s Ojibway guide practices his tradition of apprehending tapeworms in order to fly them in the bodies of walleyed pike to opera singers who desire a dramatic weight loss, to the New Mexico power plant and Navajo Mine (so-called) featuring low-sulfur coal stripped from the nonetheless now not appreciably paler landscape to be turned into natural gas; and it was only after he had visited that Four Corners region — complete with as-yet-unexplained rendezvous with two very-differ-ent-as-to-sex-and-color /n-staters — that the correspondent-woman Lincoln grew interested in Mayn, and only after she grew interested in him that she joined an energy workshop also called Body-Self where by chance or design she encountered in the nude a woman who flatly asserted all men should always wear condoms yet herself gave only the illusion of being open with the other women about her husband — a husband whose sanctuarial foundation is set up to fund future finds in geothermal research, weather control without prejudice as to purpose, and many other areas such as Navajo and other Indian water-and territory-conservation legal strategy that doesn’t exclude inter-American (read even Castroist) advisory assistance.

How far need we bother going? asks the interrogator (meaning not "I" but "we," yet not only because he speaks in a higher voice having been replaced by his relief) — how far with feelings such as the boy’s or the grandmother’s or the bibulous grave tender Eukie Yard’s, when we have these other assembled facts already.

But Jim didn’t accept — i.e., live with — his mother’s suicide, while knowing that, on his knees or on his feet looking past Margaret at the glint of Eukie’s pint of applejack, he didn’t think her absenting herself right or wrong. She’d been sick with something, infections and fatigue, and she had never much talked to his father. Which Jim had sort of always accepted.

"I think there’s something here, you know," he said to his grandmother, resisting tears primed not by rain on his face from the grass but by traces of panic and relief in him that responded to the ground. And resisted "ending it all" by hugging her: her brown silk blouse, the black skirt, the medium-low-heeled black shoes (he can specify years later through memory that did not need to function then)—

— hugging her shoes, murmurs the interrogator in a now deeper voice whose sotto murmur is as from some partitioned distance which, by the ancient and modern modulus for translating terms of one problem into terms of another, accidentally rediscovered by Larry Shearson in (from his view) his hotel-like apartment house, sounds pretty intense because you don’t ask even the wonderful Amy to walk all over you (assumin’ she’ll even come near) nor even if you’re biking among a flood of pedestri- (read pederastri-, no paparasby-) terian traders horse-sucking you bike ‘n all like your own built-in vacuum, that feels (but only feels) irresistible, like the Mayn-to-Lar’-over-’n-out-por-trayed moonless Lake Rompanemus at night, off a familiar, rough-planked dock your feet alone see, or the next room’s door that wasn’t suppose to be open tonight)—

"There is something here," she said, her feet then so truly on the ground that Jim knew she didn’t go in for God while to be sure singling gods out of her memories and humor but never the whole ballgame as if youse gon’ make one sense of it all including—

— Let us say, adds our soft-soprano- (no, sobrani-) voiced interrogator, that a mother drowning herself on a windy day because she lacks the socialized sinew to remain useful to those who need her, who commits self-destruction through over-emphasis on happiness or sexual frustration or guilt, through a willingness to entertain rather than encounter the void of human—

"What do you mean, Gramma?" demanded Jim, "spooks?" — just as we, we, slow on the intake, say the same to the interrogator minus "spooks" and plus "Cuba infiltrating certain American Indian reservations through Anglo sympathizers intellectually bent upon not just understanding the Indian but keeping their culture pure (pronounced in the endemic Spanish, pooro), for do not Castroist advisers in desert powerboats have to be preceded by advance persons who are at least native American and know the "terrain"?

He looked at her across the specific blank, wet grass where his mother’s small ledge of headstone was. Margaret’s eyes grayer and grayer, and the light behind her like the sound of the announcer bringing the trotters up to the starting mark took her away from him but he couldn’t follow, and, to boot, she turned to look somewhere as if she heard the approach of what would finish here and everywhere a privacy she and he had always had. Though this was nonsense, for they could always laugh — for years afterward they could laugh — the Prince and Princess junk was behind ‘em; or they could laugh for a few years anyhow. And she said, Funny how Brad and your father accept it.

And then, so Jim dented the earth with the side of his hand, the sides of his hammer fists, he didn’t know what to call out or how; he hammered on the Earth hammering himself or someone else who might as well have been inside him back in or into shape and never said a word, while stupidly feeling that some drumming came up out of the earth at his summons and traced its smoke through him, employing him, ignoring him, maybe proving through this material experiment to have been so insubstantial that there’s nothing holding his mind back, falling forward then over the grave only to find that like a sprinter or a lineman he was leaning too far forward but the ball wasn’t snapped, the gun didn’t go off — but he didn’t fall forward except in mind.

"Yes there’s something here," said Margaret in that intelligent mellow voice after a moment; "it’s not your mother—"

"—/ know," said Jim rather quickly without feeling.

"— and it’s real, my dear, it’s real—"

"Yeah, yeah—" tired after Brad’s Day.

"My heart lies buried there," he thought she said, and it was hard to credit, so he did — tired after Brad’s Day — which in some bumping or winding in his ears he knew wasn’t yet over, like the spaces of silent, silent fact between him and what his mother had wryly specified, which he knew then and later he would have gone on to anyway "Go away where you belong" — yet instead of just doing it, departing Windrow like others leaving home and state, he’d been told to and by a mother who had then given him and his halfway brother the impression that she was the one who’d — and for that moment as his (yes!) apologetic (!) grandma spoke again, Jim the slicing halfback who had run through muscle-bound (actually nice-guy) Feingold like mere matter was in his mother’s shoes, no, well, his mother’s body or her soul at any rate, and he would just believe that she had done this even if he did not accept her — her death (because if he had, he would have felt her last breath clouding his way with or without words which were too easy to say and write down, which was what he wished to say to Miss Myles, fine wide mouth and geometric tits, for he would stick to facts, not make up news). And he got up off his knees and didn’t know what came out of his mouth until there it was: "Gramma, I’m glad Braddie cried and all. He had to. I didn’t feel like the door was closed on that room. He was a kid, I mean any kid; you know what I mean, Gramma? And I thought, he’s my brother and I don’t have to be crazy about him, he’s Brad."

And then, ‘75 he my brother, Gramma?" and Jim grinned at what had come out because of some story-like relief that got onto her whole face.

"Brad?" she said. "Brad is your half-brother. You guessed it, I’m sure. But your mother never actually told me till that day at the beach — the morning after that day. You probably didn’t need as much as Brad did, you know." Her face got the way it had been before, so what she’d said seemed to leave her with something else or the same old thing, though the fact itself of this blockbuster that had just come out (coupled with Jim not asking, Who was the father?) was easy to take; it was just there — surprising, ^surprising (y’know).

Said she was her own mother. Funny thing ever after for better, for worse, for still better: Jim hit Feingold too hard next day but did not pass through him, the attitude was wrong. He didn’t ask his grandmother (who had said, "Look who’s here" — though they were only approaching this part of the cemetery in their vehicles), Was Sarah then her own mother? His mom would laugh at that but you often didn’t know why, and in the cemetery with the rinsed grass all around and by the same token stuck to his hands so he would rub it together in his palms, he missed his mother, he loved her, she was off by herself but he was the one who didn’t go hunt her up — well, he did sometimes, but anyway, she was there and he came and went and knew her humor ‘thout paying much attention to it (life go on quat slowly — he had treated his grandparents’ house like home at eight, ten, twelve. . Why? Oh, because it took you back to your childhood, was his mother’s joke, it reminded you of your little aproned mother hanging up underwear in the backyard breeze. At eight, to be reminded of your childhood?). She joked as no one else.

He certainly had been a kid — had played, disappeared all day; ran away once overnight ‘n applied for a job in Englishtown at a dairy; and his grandma wasn’t exactly a little aproned person. His mother, though, was not quite so tall, which was surprising because of Alexander too, and she was a little fuller, squarer, though not strong-feeling, that is, to look at, and, if you could catch her, see her, she conveyed this in the curve of her slow sweep through the rooms of the house, where, like Margaret, to do a day’s work in two days she paid the shiny-black little indestructible girl from "collard-ville" literally on the far side of the Jersey Central tracks whose name was also Margaret; but Sarah never worked along with her and never checked up on her, though Margaret did — and in Sarah’s house. Why I thought you’d gone home, Margaret, said Sarah, which made little Margaret laugh and laugh, sucking without many teeth on a cherry pit from the backyard.

Leona Stormer who had married an older man who had made her pregnant, a doctor who had known how to — and she’d gone away to Illinois where he practiced — came back and Sarah came face to face with her after years and years, in the cool-tile-floored drugstore on a day as hot as uptown downtown. Sarah had burst into tears, Leona had smiled. Just then Jim appeared, whom Leona had never set eyes on even when he was a baby. Sarah started laughing and crying. Jim found two things out. One was that his mother as he’d suspected really did say odd things: she said to Leona, It isn’t that I feel much for you, you take me back that’s all you do but— Thanks! said Leona, pretending to be a bit irritated, which she was— But, said Sarah, that’s a lot to make me do. Thanks, said Leona, and didn’t cry, though Jim’s impression was that she wouldn’t have, or as he thought back on it years later. But the other thing Jim found — was it accident that he had run into his mother downtown? and he imagined that at eleven or twelve he had been married and working to support his family and had happened to run into his mother (Oh hi, Mom, how are you doing?) — but yes, the other thing Jim found was that he wasn’t embarrassed by her, by what she said to Leona that time in the drugstore. He had observed this woman Sarah who happened to be his mother, a surprising woman, interesting, warm to the touch and would even hug him though he never saw her really touch his father, or was it the other way around?

But Jim and Sarah left each other kind of alone, that is in the good sense, but then the day came and he thought of all the times he had missed, that is, you know, the chances: to do what, to ask her things, like Dick, who used to ask his father, Why get married? or, Did fish suffer? and whose father died in the middle of the night when Dick was out camping with the Boy Scouts (smoking his first cigarette). But not to just ask her things — no, to be in the same understanding room together.

(What crap!) And what was he doing there that day in the drugstore when she ran into her old school acquaintance Leona? Well, while we’re all here, might’s well ask what was he doing under the porch that other day? "What doing, Jim?" tiny tot Brad would ask arriving softly in Jim’s room and Jim didn’t speak to him but didn’t tell him to go away: oilin’ my mitt; readin’ a comic; seein’ which cards I’m gonna swap (baseball cards — the stars in the flesh, square-jawed, at ease). Oh, said tiny tot Brad clearly, softly.

He would be allowed to stay if he didn’t mess around with the cards. Jim gave him one to look at, a duplicate, and Brad put it down on the floor carefully, but he watched Jim instead. Well, don’t look at me, Jim didn’t say.

Till one day, Brad’s Day, Jim looked at Brad, and looked and looked at him on the floor in his short pants, his legs lengthening, till he’s glad not to look any more; where do you go from there? your bike, your bike with balloon tires mashing the gravel so Margaret across the cemetery saw him before he saw her and Eukie looking (Jim had been told) like Winston Churchill. And where’d you go from your grandma’s fact called forth by your crazy question Is he my brother, Gramma?

"Well, look who’s here," she said matter-of-factly.

The vehicles parted wildly as they entered the gravel patterns of the cemetery drives. The Mayn Pontiac contained Mel, who embraced the wheel, his head close to the windshield as if to see better, and Brad, who sat back with his tough insect’s elbow out the open passenger window. The noisy-bodied Ford pickup truck had followed until they all got past the stone posts of the gateway, then it veered along another gravel way so Jim, who was at once on the move himself across the grass, could just about hear Bob Yard talking and Pearl Myles laughing and exclaiming, but the two vehicles got to the golf course side of the cemetery almost simultaneously, and Jim, who was walking away toward the caretaker, Eukie Yard, and later remembered a dog barking out on the road, heard Miss Myles, on removing herself from Bob’s truck, tell Mel she was shocked to hear (which Jim knew meant the projected termination of the newspaper but he didn’t hear the end of her suddenly respectful sentence). Eukie stood off against the lintel post of the Vandevere mausoleum wearing one of his — maybe his only — large and voluminous garment like what Churchill always wore. Jim went over there and right up to Eukie with his dirty old crew cut, red cheeks, gray chin, and asked quiet like if Eukie would give him a slug of that applejack (CT never had ‘ny apple, is it strong?").

Eukie bobbed his bald, crusty head in assent or turning his eyes somehow down into the places of his great olive-green garment and the bottle was in Jim’s hand before Jim could ask what Margaret and Eukie had been in conversation about. He could just punch Bob Yard for upsetting Brad, back home, but why did he think this? — for Bob hadn’t upset Brad. In a moment Jim was both more with his "host" and way beyond him, the effect of the fluid was a burn at first, then a worm coiling gently over his bodily structure outlining his skull-mask which there in the cemetery he saw he had looked forward to.

"We’ll piddle along with the job printing, but we’ll get a good price for the Democrat," he heard his father saying far away. So the paper was being sold to someone, Jim thought idly; yet it was not going to come out every week any more. "Your wife," a respectful voice was heard muffled by the length of the day, by the grass, by the cushioned distance of this stinking pleasant place, where an impromptu thing was going on, secret each from each of the persons there "your wife was sick…"

No connection: it’s been in the works for a year and more; her death had nothing to do. .

"Damn," said Bob Yard; "damn it to hell." But Bob himself, he had been affected by Jim’s mother’s death. You might not know it, because he just went on with business, and him and his wife went to the Harness for dinner out on the Matawan road twice a week and drank a snootful and laughed all through the movies, no matter what, or went to sleep in the back row. Margaret didn’t move, as if she’s waiting for a word to set her going, or a funeral that might come from the four persons clustered near the headstone. Jim, off by the Vandevere mausoleum, took another drink. Eukie breathing heavily said nothing, while Brad, whose Day it had turned out to be, stood at the undug grave and his mother’s stone. He said, "What do you mean ‘Damn’?" and Bob, who was not nice but was good company, said threateningly, "Listen, Brad—" who retorted, "Well, my mother was probably right for all you’d know. I bet the wind does curve—"

"Listen, kiddo—"

"Bob" said the unknown foster father.

"Listen, little Brad, you’ve been the center of attention," said Bob, "but you ain’t the only one."

"Bob, you simmer down, the boy’s got a point—"

"How’s it sitting?" came the murmur in Jim’s ear as if nobody was next to him where he stood at a distance from the cluster by his mother’s memorial. "You better step in ‘n defend your dad." It was, of course, Eukie the caretaker speaking, but he didn’t ask for his pint back, and Jim just knew there was another in that giant suit.

"Of course the wind curves," said Pearl Myles like a speech or song, and if the latter then ‘twas no bird ever seen in that landscaped acreage; "you’re all of you right: the wind bends round the curve of the Earth, the Earth’s gravity draws the wind — isn’t that it?"

But who is remembering all this? stabs the interrogator, himself again; or, better said, what use are the family facts to the abiding subject of the grown journalist James Mayn’s activities? both in the seventies and in relation to folk drawn into the interior or the meaningful margins of Grace Kimball’s workshop carried on naked, with visual aids, "glass, rubber, plastic" (a modern variant of an old game played with hands), and in a living unit rented as residential within the articulate structure we have gradually seen built up by partial pictures, accommodating (on faith, perhaps) a multiplicity of small-scale units, when in reality Kimball takes money from her workshoppers and is even now planning not only Eros, a nationwide system of women’s health "houses" which will serve fresh foods subject to selective boycott and which will aim at further rearranging man and woman in terms of checks and balances by supposedly establishing healthier and more permanent separation between the sexes, but Kimball is also contemplating workshops for men—which will require a compulsory minimum nudity about the genitals hopefully spreading to other areas of the body including the feet, which contain wonderful tangled and stalled powers, and the teeth, the cleansing of which she proposes to instruct by means of an imported servo-oscillator, if the assembled members will ever stop betraying themselves with talk called input taped raw into Kimball’s abundance bank where it is always retrievable though you might have to skim off the crust to get to the cream which in turn includes the lengthy conviction lubricated by repetition as by any good commercial shortening (yet far far from her home, her adolescence, some solace she is coming from that no one will find in her famous fuck-your-audience auditorium a purgatory to tell how she saw through guilt, manipulation, universal addiction) that the asshole, sensitive zone that it is, should be upgraded as not only the easy out that it has traditionally been but as a joyful entry as well, which can be neat to a degree that the person is a really neat person without respect to age or shape or size or color (of genitals, that is, at this early stage when they are all that are exposed of the person who is brave enough to commit himself to the achievement of "personoia").

"That wasn’t it," said Jim’s newly discovered half-brother Brad to Miss Myles, whose handsome scale fitted that of the stonework in the Windrow cemetery, though it might have been lost on Brad, who pondered the mere stone marking his mother’s undug grave; "she said—"

"— well I was the one that heard it," said Bob, staring across the gravestones and spruce bushes at Cousin Eukie and at Jim, who could seemingly hear what he could see an actual face and mouth say, no matter how far, maybe, except when a vehicle came along the highway which was about a football field away from where he stood.

"But you didn’t believe her," said little Brad, "and even if I hear what she said from you, I believe her, and—" he raised his finger profoundly and shook it at Pearl Myles, who taught high school—"Mom meant — I know what she meant — the Earth turns and it pulls the wind sideways."

"Well, I don’t see it," said Margaret; "the wind winds up at a different latitude because the Earth turned while the wind was moving; I heard of a person who could actually see latitudes but couldn’t quite see the wind. What happened to Alexander? Did he go back downtown?" (Not that the gathering here was a regular month-and-a-day observance, it had just happened; and she turned to see Jim take some steps toward them. A hand touched him and dropped off; he was drunk.)

Miss Myles said, "You’re convinced—?" and there was an authority in the in that rose and fell in half an instant that sounded like she wasn’t thinking about wind any more.

The hand dropped off? inquires the Interrogator with a humor of new pride in his sense of the idiom of our history.

Jim called to Bob Yard, who hulked with subtly gentle animus with his hands in his overalls, that he should leave his brother Brad alone — what was everybody on a day like today doing getting mad over nothing?

Brad said (the little shit), "What day?"

Henceforth, though never again observed, "Brad’s Day" was what Jim plainly meant. Bob asked who needed a lift, Jim turned from the beseeching eyes of his grandmother who was for once in their lives at a loss; and Jim saw what he had declined to ask Margaret: who was the father of Brad? And like a visit to the future he saw that the feeling the drink gave him was just sustaining in order later (when it wore off) to enable him to belie the feeling that had moved him to ask Eukie for a drink, yet now turn to him and ask, "What was my grandmother out here for? what was she telling you here all alone?" Only to hear Eukie, whom he couldn’t hit any more ‘n he could slam — though, mind you, not scared to slam — Bob’s face, say, "You got something on her?"

Facts come in their time, reminds the interrogator in a minor mood; if not now, then in time to come (he smiles at his English and as if caused by this lieutenant smile a shriek appears in the next room, of discovery or of pain yet maybe out of both sides of the mouth), and most curiously facts are the future of their absence where that precise absence is in questions here and now. You hear that call—

— read shriek, we urge, not call, as if he were not one of us, this Interrogator—

— O.K., shriek, he concedes — but there was and will be again a sage in southeast Asia, in the southwest of the United Conditions of America (or States, literally) or among the current urban Boston Unitarians, who say (a la Tao), "E’en though one’s held as a slave, one need not let the external imprisonment bond the free mind within; O.K.? Therefore, feign insanity— but hold to one’s true sentiments."

The shriek came again, like fact. The shriek was not a person. It was in lieu of a person, in lieu of a silence faultily designed to extend the putative person’s inability to answer the question put to her, if it is a she, by the interrogation process: Did songs by her carry coded advice to kill their recipients upon receipt? did the code tell which Cuban refugees were to be contacted as having been in fact sent by Fidel, the Cuban king? The singer-composer, having answered with silence, has next tried to sing her answer, which is her own song but out comes that horrendous shriek (more to come). But that was a woman, what do you expect? they are more strong than men, hence make mas noise (read news) like Jews disagreeing yet we have in support of the regime agreeable Jews too, whole families we are glad to report.

Whereas to answer Eukie’s question, we had a boy, fifteen years old about, and strong-legged if a manly young drunk thickened by the real turf of his home cemetery; and we already remember that where do you go when hit by death? a hard act to follow, where do you go from that fact, if it is a fact? and where do ye go from the fact thrust like a bodily part to play, to wit the fact that Brad is your half-brother, which isn’t so bad, not so bad at all, because it isn’t as if you were adopted, which Dick discovered on the day of his father’s funeral from one of his fellow scouts (who had come to the church in step as a unit, as the patrol they in fact were) and a moment later in a stupor of what felt like embarrassment asked a fellow scout what he thought it felt like to be just ash though still living—

— No; Brad’s half-brotherhood, I could handle that, the newsman was heard to say — and I guess Brad didn’t completely fall apart that day, it was an amazing piece of behavior, that’s all, and then it was over. .

Funny, said senior journalist-colleague Ted in the sixth decade of the century in question, a blockbuster like that, it’s almost easier to handle than. .

— than what? asked the Chilean woman Mayga, stepping down from her stool and putting a hand on her red pocketbook, and smiling at Jim and Ted with such affection and neutrality Jim wanted to give her a present as if that would complete the event, like the last fact.

— than being told by your grandmother, said Jim (feeling some palpable unlosable sleaze spread slowly in their direction down the long bar from that character Spence who was listening as openly as he was not looking), that you didn’t need the kind of attention that your brother did—

— or a fight that you’re not sure you want, said Ted, who knew Jim but had never heard the future that Jim had confided to Mayga who in turn had told Ted, but hadn’t told, or had chance to tell, Jim, her special friend (though they met in all only half a dozen times in ‘62-’63), that she had a sinking sense returning home to help her husband as if giving up her job here in Washington were the start of some long fall.

And Jim wasn’t sure what he wanted, with applejack of which he suspected there was yet another pint in Eukie’s voluminous suit heating Jim’s thighs and chest and wildly thickening the hair in his eyebrows, and a wish to get clear of that place and even, for the moment, of his grandmother’s look that went through him to be met behind by Eukie’s words which were an inflated shadow of what world there was.

"So what if I have?" said Jim, not knowing what he meant except if he "had" something on Margaret it was the age and experience he had reached that could turn away from her stories and still want to know what she was doing with them beyond for years holding the attention of her favored grandson whose mother apparently didn’t tell stories. But Eukie’s question — well, it sort of smelled: because you don’t have something on your grandmother; you don’t. And he didn’t say, My mother’s another story — for Eukie wasn’t entitled to hear that from Jim, ‘cause who the hell’s Eukie? as Jim walked slowly toward the group composed of his father, who had his hands in his old seersucker trouser pockets and stared at the plot of grass as undisturbed as his wife’s permanent absence, and of his brother Brad, who said to Bob Yard he was sorry, it was just that (and Bob raised a hand gently and smugly and said, Sure), and Pearl Myles, who took a tiny pad from her pocketbook and made a note, bent slightly from her statuesque height — Jim, as he moved, not knowing what he’d do but standing toward the dumb future as he walked, until he reached Margaret; and to her he said, "You said there’s something here. I believe you, but it’s not my mother and it isn’t any spook." He wished he could turn some answers into questions — answers off there in what the cosms of the hanging sun did to the Princess, but he settled for Bob Yard having a crappy attitude, and he went to Bob then, his father Mel shaking his large, square head again and again the way one might cry, but Jim couldn’t walk through his mother’s — for Jim just knew—one-time secret amour (as which this after all not unduly hairy or unwarrantably swarthy person was, horribly incredibly but had they kissed?). So afterward Jim thought he had gone around him. But no; Bob had given way. Jim had told him, "You don’t insult my family." Bob had stepped back (he didn’t do that ever) — and to the side; and, dividing the unknown with young Jim, Bob grinned and then cut off the grin, though not because he knew what Jim was about to do. Which surprised everyone and with, for Jim, a surprise within the surprise which covered the larger asininity of what he did.

Which still was fact, and people saw it happen, saw him seated "running" away when he had not known how to drive, he had only seen others do it.

He loved his grandmother more than his mother. But no he didn’t. And shit, if it was true in these stories that delayed and delayed, that the fingertips of the East Far Eastern Princess when they were met almost exactly by those of her beloved, inquiring Navajo Prince printed a sound so beautiful to her she had to show it to him but it spun slicingly upon the membranes of his sick mother’s mind so she yelled and hurt so badly the elders declared the music of the original source of the painfully uncomfortable hole in her head was a punishment for wandering into the mountain when she was with child — why then Jim would one day find out for a fact that the Princess, whose father, like an early gubernor of New Neitherland personally known to an earlier manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York, claimed that his people had taken scalps (because smaller and easier to handle than skulls) for ages before the Indians got the idea: which they must have borrowed, shall we say, from Choor — the Princess, to continue, had whorls on her fingertips while the Prince had a high percentage of arches which when joined to hers created cascades of sweetest friction — so the breathing Hermit-Inventor would have written down the tones had he not been most agreeably disputing with the fast-fading old Anasazi healer the relation of breath to wind and flesh to cloud, taken so much further on his own by the otherwise skeptical newsman James Mayn, who could not trust but could not abandon Margaret’s "histories," that once upon a time reporting these histories in a future world which encompassed his own timely children, boy and girl, at one warp and, at another, a libration-point space town free of weather and conveniently reached from Earth by Matter-Frequency Modulus doubling up two persons into one, Mayn could not tell if the tribal medical society specializing in removing bullets were Zuni, in the Zuni region where the Princess, with the Prince pursuing her, passed to the south soon after they left the Navajo outcrops and dry sheep grasses and bands of horses. Later the pursuit placed its hopes in some known river such as the Susquehanna or Juniata, above which (unprecedentedly low in the sky) one night early in 1894 the Navajo Prince, the Colt revolver he would give away when the time came loaded but no protection against his having lost again the trail of the woman he followed and whose dreams he had shared up to but not including her last three before leaving the site of the Long Afternoon, saw, smelt, and even, like his brother’s grandson Michael whom he never knew who in 1943 carried coded on his person in the words of his own curiously exact Navajo tongue an American radio message which saved a thousand lives, heard the sough and song and veritable humor of a low night-cloud the Prince identified at once as having been the Anasazi medicine man or a goodly part of him, knowing then, too, if only for a riddling instant, that, whether he was a giver or taker, if he did not turn and pass back across the land to his own people he would be childless like a woman.

But it was Brad who proved childless, though only in the Interrogator’s genetic sense, for Brad and his wife his high school beloved who was possessed of the faintest dark down in a curve of the small of her back, adopted three children before they were through, and were at once adopted by them. Brad, who on the day he was revealed to Jim as only his half-brother and grieved from nine in the morning to nearly three that afternoon for the mother whose death he accepted, jumped through this strangely overdone act of grief in Jim’s mind from subhuman occupant of same-home space to full-brothered divider of such commemorative labor between the two as had never been spelled out and never was again, except in James’s very life.

As not even he much knew except in flashes of past connection meaningless as that between the Navajo Prince’s sudden departure and his mother’s miraculously coming back to life, unless it was the young Princess’s clandestine prior flight that did the trick.

Did Jim grudge his newfound brother Brad nothing after that? He would surprisingly pitch in unasked and help Brad build a backdrop for a school Shakespeare play when Brad fell behind and his friends Bernard and Mark forgot and didn’t show up; Jim — while Brad frowned like a bloodhound puppy — would help him with math before Brad had a chance to speak to 4 ‘their father," who was going to invest sixty-some thousand dollars in General Electric after the sale of the paper whenever that came true, and lived, indeed day to day, to see value enhanced; and Jim, transcending fact, would tell Brad how on Brad’s Day he had taught himself almost without thinking to drive along the weedy shoulder of the blacktop playing it by ear and only once funnybone-jamming the indestructible transmission of Bob Yard’s surprised pickup truck which felt like a very wide bed behind you as you swung and rambled rattling down the road that passed the garden of the dead where he sometimes imagined his mother’s ashes, in lieu of her moldering body — ashes in a cylinder he had heard, and in his daydream inserted at night so the grass sod hardly blinked — till one day he saw the standard container, and it was a regular oblong box not any golf-hole-type cylinder or whatever the time capsule was that they buried at the World’s Fair with a picture or was it a lock of hair of Ann Sheridan, the Oomph Girl with a beautiful smile and a fast answer.

It was a fact that, the year after Mayn’s friend Mayga, back home in Chile, lost her life (whether or not taken by one of her two male companions along a cliff path above Valparaiso harbor, but almost certainly not given by Mayga), a minor State Department functionary named Karl wore an automatic pistol under his jacket during the emergency "Hot Line" discussions in Geneva; and a fact that an annex to the agreement called for two duplex circuits, one a tele-wire telegraph, the other a radio telegraph, plus two terminal points with telegraph teleprinter — though Mayn’s daughter Flick who heard about Karl many times but never met him doubted that he would have gotten into that room in Geneva armed.

Mayn was not brilliant and was perhaps barely average in math (which had less than nothing to do with his encouraging his wife to do the income tax with AP pencils he brought home); but he found himself nonetheless or all the more fascinated by such mysteries of ballistic deflection as the path of a shell fired nine thousand yards by a capital ship in World War Two that missed by a hundred yards to the right, even after all the obvious allowances had been made. He did (over a drink) plot the curved course of a projectile to be fired out of a totally collapsible and degradably exportable little ‘‘ system" from a roof in a tree-lined residential street of northwest Washington, D.C., where he shared an apartment for a time on Kalorama Road, to a target area on the White House lawn, and wondered why it had not been tried.

He was less fascinated than fond of that nuclear incident in which one weapon, through blast or radiation or heat or what have you, is "totaled" (we were later to say) or neutralized by another weapon belonging to the same country. (Ted and Jim were having a good laugh at the Defense Department name "Fratricide" for this type of incident one night at dinner when they received almost simultaneously long-distance calls, Mayn from his wife five hundred and more miles north who was moved by a luminous sunset across a lake and had brought the phone out to the screen porch to prolong what she saw and share it with Jim — Ted, a call from his former wife to tell him his two daughters had driven the car into an urban ravine the night before — the night before! might as well say "last month" — and one of them had lost her little finger—"Fratricide" was the official name they were laughing about and playing variations upon when first the waiter came to inform Jim, then the owner of the restaurant came and said Ted had a call.

I need to be alone, abruptly retorts the interrogator (read aborts) glad his "interlocutor" (electrical jargon) is wired to the chair in the next room, not this; you can (his retort continues) lose touch with your feelings, engorged with fact like a mosquito or a penis con came (that is, with blood, in Spanish, he adds, instinctively testing us to see if we’ll admit we know that came means not blood but flesh as in "fleshed out."

. . boring, as boring as family life yet not so moving, not so rich; for the current events of fam-life are richer than a lump of uranium; interesting because boring, which is not a paradox to wake the Interrogator, such as, that the reasonings which are our history’s twin valve for keeping abreast of itself concluded at the pointed end of the ABM decade that anti-ballistic missile systems for defense of city and family would step up the arms race, whereas ABM for defense of military strategic bases wouldn’t at all escalate us.

Wake? did we say — as if a part of us woke up, or didn’t. A part of us that if it were not there would have to be encountered. Gibberish, softly calls the Interrogator from sleep, but dreams two pistols with one source not one with two. He is being watched by many in his and their sleep. A singer, for one, who has to think off of both sides of her tongue and knows she has been seduced yet maybe to be a new Judith to this mufti warrior finely furnishing her king-sized bed; he is half-covered, up just to his knee, and she passes her mind’s hand over that knee and becomes that knee so that unknown to this sometime interrogating lover of hers who is a fellow national (though strictly she carries a Swiss passport), she looks back at herself from that knee and can’t believe what her ribs and fingers and mouth and blood have done, she sees her life all summed up in one damned minute (but which one?) and, back in herself again, leaving the knee where it is, she sees through the skin of this Chilean naval intelligence, and though she hears us of whom she is a part whisper Holofemes, hollow furnishing, hollow furnace, she knows he is quite real and is possessed of myriad tissues too fine each in itself to allow space for hollowness.

And while he sleeps on, her father is surely awake under house arrest thousands of miles from here controlled by the system this lover represents here in New York where he has asked her more questions than she wants to answer yet has given her more attention than would her potential executioner, and she believes he loves her and does not think her a traitor (but is he right?), and she wonders if she could interrupt this life of his as he apparently might interrupt the life of a friend of hers though exactly why may remain unclear except that the friend, an economist who was in the previous government and was living very quietly here with his wife who is still more a friend of hers, never stopped analyzing the fascist regime, or being the man he is has not stopped thinking. Has she stopped thinking, a famous singer highly visible?

Singing can seem an alternative to everything else, to thinking and to consuming life; and an alternative to (in the guise of) love. And yet to have been your lover’s knee for a brief breath of time recalls what we, even we, can’t quite bring ourselves to think upon while inertly we too move among self-righting, self-wronging systems, themselves often non-inertial.

"Interrupt? Interrupt?" murmurs the Interrogator, from his inertial sleep system. "Do not think our old-fashioned electricity couldn’t, if we told it to, attack both sides of our mouth that you speak out of: your words interrupt a life might mean break into—into a house or other sealed container or broadcast — or mean stop, as in thief or time, or heart-beat breath-flow (as we say in strategic forces training). So what is it going to be?"

It looked like the dumbest joyride there in the cemetery to take Bob Yard’s pickup truck and interrupt Brad’s Falling-Apart, or interrupt its conclusion (which was Brad-Together-Again, at graveside); but Jim turned right at the stone gate to his surprise, and heard the motor whine upward to be shifted and at that instant he nearly ran down someone’s collie itself spinning round and round at the edge of the road ready to race him, and by the time he was past the dog he found he had stepped on the worn-through metal of the clutch pedal and shifted gears.

And a mile down past the golf course and a brown field of strewn corn stalks and a two-horse trailer all by itself and a couple of narrow frame houses, he decided without warning and without checking behind him to turn around, and he needed to shift down after he stepped on the brake but, upon swinging grandly round from shoulder to shoulder so he felt in his buttocks just that first shadow of tipping, he found in his mirror if not in some new weight that a boy about his age had jumped out of nowhere into the back, a stocky boy without a shirt or (Jim later thought) shoes who’d been working in the sun all summer and had a prickle of stubble around his chin and on his upper lip, maybe the son of some indigent piners back in the woods around the lake (that the Democrat ran a piece on "the problem of" about once a year); and as Jim skidded his rear wheels completing the U-turn so he’s headed back toward the cemetery, he found he had shifted down without thinking.

And when the stocky kid, his hands braced upon the side of the truckbed where he sat, looked comfortably back down the road at their dust like he didn’t care where they were going, Jim without thinking leaned the wheel to turn again, reaching the brink of the ditch this time so he scraped gravel and dirt into it from the shoulder and this time thought about shifting down but didn’t kick the clutch pedal quick enough and the transmission screamed; but by then he was turning again and by the time he was ready to shift up, he looked in the mirror and the kid wasn’t in back any more, Jim had shifted O.K., but a little too soon. The kid wasn’t in the road or anywhere to be seen.

Jim braked. He looked back through the cab’s rear window while opening his door with the stuck handle. He stood on the running board surveying the ditches and fields and the woods a half mile beyond: but the kid was gone as if Jim’s violent maneuvers had thrown him away into the air.

But he slowly turned the truck again to head it back the way he had come, toward the cemetery, toward town, his first driving ever and never taught, and then he did see his fugitive passenger. He was striking across a field behind a little yellow frame house and Jim waited to watch him go through the fence at the far end and enter the woods without once looking back. He wore dungarees with side pockets down the leg, and his shoulders surged as he went along. Sure he would have taken a ride to town but, swung off the truck’s turning circle, he found himself aimed toward the woods, which was O.K. also. Jim tasted applejack in his throat. An old school bus passed him, shading the white line, four or five kids inside, farm kids. Jim wondered how his grandmother had gotten out to the cemetery. They were all waiting when he carefully shifted down like he’d been driving for years and turned left, in through the gate, and rode the clutch to the exact spot where Bob had parked parallel to a low curb half-obscured by grass. They were crazy, standing there as if they would always be there.

And when his beloved grandmother said from her distance, "Jim! What’s the meaning of this? What did you think you were doing? You could have—" he found words come out of him that he enjoyed more later than now because he could not believe he had said them. . "Sorry, I forgot the body."

You can hardly, says the now-ruminant Interrogator, expect belief in a tale like that about Jim driving not so much licenseless as without any practice — unless we had here a heroic episode? — have you an epic in New Jersey, all worthwhile states yield at least one, and Jersey is no exception.

But later, when Bob Yard came round to Throckmorton Street to see about another matter, Bob told him he had understood just how he felt and for a moment laughed when Jim went looking for the kid the following Sunday; he wanted to find out if he really had taken the two screwdrivers Bob had left in the pickup truck, and settle the matter with him. "You just went down the road and came back, eh?" said Bob, but listening as he must have been he might have heard Jim stop the truck even without turning off the ignition.

He went around the lake one spring afternoon with his friend Sam, and a woman was screaming and groaning in a shack. This was before they had much in the way of trailers for settled living. She was crying out at intervals and a tiny child opened the door above the two steps and peeked around. Screams got as fast as breathing. Jim said they should get a doctor. Sam said she didn’t need one, she was probably having a baby and they better get out of there.

Jim went to Bob about it, not his own father. Did they have rooms in those shacks?

Bob said, Just one, but they didn’t have to pay anything, but sooner or later the town would clear them out.

Margaret got in touch with Pearl Myles and got angry when Miss Myles said she shared Margaret’s sorrow for her daughter Sarah. Jim felt drunk again when he got out of the pickup truck at the cemetery. He never, to his knowledge, asked Margaret how the cosms of the sun gave the East Far Eastern Princess her future, during that afternoon the sun didn’t go down and didn’t, and didn’t, but if that wasn’t prophecy, what was? And somewhere along the line he figured, yes, Margaret did have powers, though maybe it was to keep stuff to herself, though he was pretty much past all that: certainly she didn’t volunteer more story stuff though she knew many facts and often told him about the actual places and how the Navajos, with originally twenty-four thousand acres of land (which multiplied astronomically) were lucky they had no gold or silver near the surface and smart enough to turn their timber into board and not sell it just as logs, but this was long after Margaret was there. Young Margaret lived with them, did some weaving and rode a horse, learned some Spanish and was never taught Navajo. For years Jim hardly read a line of those old dispatches she sent on ahead of her (or, at first, behind her) to the Democrat and the pieces she wrote when she got home — some at breakneck speed, she hardly knew how; some, she said, slowly and painfully, one about a time when, in the dead of winter, she had swapped a lesson in herb healing and a public talk at the Browning Club on the Navajo ceremonial "Blessing Way" which helped to keep wind and lightning and so forth in harmony with other forces, in return for train fare from Cincinnati, but she wound up in Massillon interviewing over tea a self-made populist businessman who had literally dreamt up a solution to the Municipal Improvement Problem, to wit non-interest-bearing bonds to the extent of half the assessed value of the property within the municipal limits — bonds (all of this in a dream!) then to be deposited with the Department of the Treasury (significantly including since i860 the Secret Service) as security for a loan of legal-tender notes — the man none other than Jacob Coxey, whose sandstone quarry supplied steel and glass works, who bred blooded racehorses in Kentucky, whose daughter was christened Legal Tender, and who, a few weeks later, set off with an army of unemployed to march on Washington.

The Democrat was hardly a well-known newspaper. In the 1870s but-tonmakers plundered Indian burial grounds. Margaret saw a locomotive literally stalled by the squashed corpses of locusts. You could feel it. Hundreds of jackrabbits like giant unwinged bugs racing each other out of town ahead of a dust storm. Mayn had to ask a lot of questions in his line of work if you could call it that. Maybe a third at least of our known reserves of uranium are in Indian lands in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico. Navajos emphasize what happened more than when, but do not kid yourself, they know the sequence where it counts. Which came first, the well or the sewer? The day the world ends will be the day the Navajo lose their land, or is it the other way around? It’s the other way around. There are plants in the desert, in New Mexico and Africa, that get nibbled all year long; so they grow spines and brew poison juice. "The new policy is self-determination without termination." "Say that again?" requests the girl on the beach. "President Nixon to Congress. The policy was to terminate tribal control over resources and phase out federal protection of Indian control of Indian resources." "Say that again?"

"Nixon said it the other day. The new policy that’s supposed to reverse termination. I wonder what it’s like to belong to a terminated tribe." "Nixon wants to de-terminate, is that it?"

Actually Nixon was probably trying. But with one part of his mind-body. The other parts could smile upon the fact that "we" were lucky "we" don’t get much rain out in Navajo country ‘cause the radioactive waste tailings left at nine mouths and hillslopes by the big uranium companies when they went on to higher-grade ore deeper underground in Utah and in Africa didn’t get washed down the ravines into the rivers, or not right away — it’s one of those unexpected dividends that you can’t calculate with the fifteen- to twenty-percent normal return on equity.

He changed the subject. Information was all that there was. The meaning of it was either sickening or inscrutable. The young woman on the beach didn’t agree. He mentioned the Mirage bomber, and she might have been reluctant to change the subject, but went along with him. "How did you hear six years ago?" Mayn had been contemplating having a drink in the hotel bar if not upstairs in the room, and had mentioned the Mirage bomber that disappeared in the Bay of Biscay only to go unreported in the news. Oh, he had been with a UPI friend at a meeting of editors in San Francisco when Secretary McNamara "unveiled," as we say, "the Chinese-oriented nationwide Sentinel ABM system." "Aimed toward China," she said, staring at the gentle sea. "That summer the People’s Republic had set off a big one." "Why was a little Mirage kept quiet?"

Mayn knew only what he was told. "We had our New Jersey summit at last. Glassboro, New Jersey. The Soviet Prime Minister was unimpressed by the need to start arms-limitation talks. We had more ABMs, and the Russian Galosh had encountered some bugs and was not yet operational." She said to Mayn that he was funny; how had he gotten this way. They laughed and got up and made their way off the beach. Much later — as a passage in a warm, though sexist, novel on a multiple bed table in one of a multiplicity of small-scale units which a certain articulated structure which we are and which we have not yet made operational from the inside out, picks up gently, if breathlessly — Mayn answered the woman: he had once entered a kitchen and seen a father weeping and holding the hand of a son who was not his son but real enough to be and Jim standing in the doorway had been able at that moment of reentry to think only of the feel of the gear-shift knob with nothing out the windshield ahead of him, and the fact that he had driven, even if under the heat of four mouthfuls of mausoleum-blessed local applejack and without a license and with a passenger he didn’t mention but later recognized Bob might ha’ been liable for injury to; and in that late-afternoon kitchen doorway that’s now altered by Brad’s Day, which in turn alters whatever it was happened a month and a day ago, Jim (that Mayn of many turns) looked away from his bike lying on the grass to his father in order to know forever the touch of that now-seated father’s hand jarring his face bone when his father slapped him as he stood beside Bob Yard’s pickup truck that he felt was partly his now (and that didn’t require a kickstand), but that kid—

Did you ever see that boy again?

Who knows?

But the screwdrivers however casually left near a tool box and near probably some rags and usually a gasoline can with a neck on it not where Bob had left them were really gone: so the kid—

You expect us to believe you never told your wife?

Scout’s honor.

Did you belong to the Boy Scouts?

Well. .

You brought it up.

Officially, yes.

So your word is worth only the paper it is written on.

He could live with that; sure.

Jim looked at his father’s bowed head and his half-brother eating a sandwich and as if through the munching of Brad, the mouth work and prospect of digesting, Jim smelled peanut butter, so it wasn’t one of Margaret’s sandwiches. He saw why people got drunk. He had looked out Bob’s windshield and his breath was taken away and when he looked back into the truck bed the kid was gone. As he had been to begin with.

Well, why hadn’t he told about it? Not even Sam, his friend, whose long face would look like a bloodhound’s in twenty years, Jim saw it exactly. Sam, with his leather boots on a hot September Sunday, who was always ready to go someplace but you had to give him the idea first, and then he would take over and see the sky through the trees, a beaver dam along a junky old stream, faint depressions across pine needles, tracks of an unknown creature coming out of nowhere, and suddenly remember hearing beavers smacking their tails on the flat water at night.

And then Jim thought he had seen that same piner kid of the truck ride a month before at the movies. You really knew it when you got near a piner kid in an enclosed space, not that they had the money for a ticket to the movie, even though they probably watered their bodies in the lake from time to time. Didn’t that kid go to school? Jim had seen a woman with hair flat on her narrow head washing clothes, and there was a little shoreline of foam like Mantoloking seafoam — but with mud and roots. But it probably wasn’t the screwdriver kid, that day in the movies so soon after Sarah’s death. After Brad’s Day Jim saw the kid’s face and the back of his head several times, but it wasn’t him. It was in Sam’s long backyard where they played touch football that was practically tackle and Jim left the game and ran up past the beautiful old red brick house to the picket fence but it wasn’t the kid slowly hiking a bit surly along the sidewalk; or it was coming out of the soda fountain and looking across the street at the window full of overalls and there was the kid with a dirty sailor cap but after getting practically hit in the middle of the street by two cars passing each other, Jim saw it wasn’t the same kid, this one was taller, without the rangy shoulders; or it was the jungle in Guadalcanal, hand to hand, get him before he even has a chance to pick his weapon up, his father and Alexander had been reading a book about Guadalcanal, man to man, you didn’t have time to ask questions, you’d heaved your last grenade back on the other island, Iwo Jima, Guam, one of them, launched it with all you had, which was your discus arm if it didn’t get sucked away by the same grenade it was propelling by the slinging mode — so that that hand without time to ask questions felt like the future but the War was just over, and Bob Yard didn’t talk much about it any more, his brother-in-law came home intact, his niece elected to stay in the WAVES for three more years having become an expert typist with a better chance to travel now than during the War, and Jim’s father who seemed to be developing a bulbous chin dragged out the deal to unload the paper until one night in Jim’s senior year Mel asked Jim if he himself would have considered hanging on to the paper, all other things being equal, and Jim said he wanted no part of it (which alas was only part of what he had had or had meant to say) and his father shrugged and said what he maybe hadn’t meant to say but might well have felt, since he had already been left once, to wit that that’s a big reason he decided to sell out. To which Jim quickly said, "Oh thanks, Mel, thanks, that puts me in my place, I had that coming, sure I did." (The first time he had called his dad Mel.)

No newspapers for him, not that the Democrat (whatever they said about Jackson and the bank) was a real newspaper; it had social notes on relatives who came to spend a week or a friend from New York or Reading, Pennsylvania, though not Margaret’s funny-looking old tramp of a man whom Jim first saw on the beach at Mantoloking the day Bob Yard had come and had that unsuccessful conversation with Jim’s mother more or less one-way where, on that black towel of hers, she lay irritated and still, but the old guy would talk and talk in the car and stayed with Margaret and Alexander a couple of days at least but Alexander kicked him out because he upset Margaret after Mel wanted to run a note in the paper but Margaret preferred not to and the man was known to Jim as that Inventor from New York though Jim never asked him his real name, and he wasn’t quite the same as the Hermit-Inventor from 1893-4, but was his decrepit nephew carrying on the good work, Margaret said, because you had to, and Jim asked him what he did: It remained to be seen, he said; it was partly just living, but it was unpredictable — he had invented a smallish machine that randomly invented new shapes there was motion for, but no formula yet, and he had carried on his forebears’ work which was beginning to look like learning not just to control the weather but in a new way to live with it, partly through seeing its relation to the interior activity of the land, even mountains far away, and so he was moving toward maybe a new weather, which made him practically unemployable but he had a small "competence" descended to him from an "ancestor’s" patent royalty which enabled him to maintain the "family railroad flat" in a city that — but Jim sometimes, when he bothered to think about it, wasn’t sure what he recalled and what inferred — so that the piner kid was maybe one-quarter made-up, and had forced him to share the pickup truck he had, briefly stolen the afternoon of Brad’s Day; and he was pretty sure he recalled the Hermit-Inventor of New York saying he had been given what equipment and training — mostly self-education — he needed so if he lost the struggle he could only blame himself — the very words, almost, that Mel said, the day of the final and crucial football game when Windrow was definitely the underdog as Jim pointed out to Brad, whereupon Mel said all that about having enough training and equipment so if they lost the game it was their own fault ("equipment" a crazy word), the already semi-retired father saying the sentence like words he had been given and was bound to say, so that at the time of another war in which Jim did not participate he knew he would hear those words if only because automatic packaged phrases are future phrases, a thought that Mayn passed on to his unlucky and largely unknown though loved friend Mayga, the Chilean woman — passed it on and passed it off as no thought at all but she asked him please not to dismiss it as a thought, but he could count on her to take seriously a lot of what he found to tell that he would only very occasionally get soused about — that is, drunk and loud, though not fighting mad, for if you tear someone limb from limb you might hurt that someone, he said, and although once during his married years he did in fact go for the jugular (‘‘after the jug?" said Ted, who was readier to believe Jim than some layer of his brain gook could accept). Well, to the late Mayga, and perhaps once to his journalist-colleague Ted, who was with UPI for years and knew everything (which was what he said about Jim), he explained that this type of evening’s undertaking (that is, to get thoroughly drunk) marked an effort to prove that some of these other thoughts which would persist actually then more strongly though less coherently were dependent on an inebriated state of mind and were dumb and a delusion.

But he couldn’t have told Ted as he did Mayga about his position in the future, because he liked Ted, knew Ted knew he wasn’t the type to go on like that; wouldn’t believe him, or worse would think something permanently (not odd but) wrong with him. Which future are you going to worry about anyhow? — the upcoming election or the state of the dollar four or five years from now? You control the immediate future by reducing unemployment by not slapping controls on.

The recently bereaved boy Jim Mayn took to dropping in on two old (in fact late middle-aged) ladies who stopped being surprised when this boy who had mowed their lawn until he lost the job when he went to work on a farm the preceding summer came in and sat with them. They had hardly known his mother. Their piano was out of tune; he tried a chord and was asked to play and couldn’t; they talked horses, they would argue whether a gigantic trotter named Native Hanover who’s with all the other champions on the wall outside the bar of the hotel downtown had done in fact all the things they each thought they recalled, or were they remembering two or three horses; they knew times fantastically, and once Jim asked how long they had been living together, he’d forgotten for a second they were sisters, but he might have asked that dumb question because he had felt that they wanted him to go — their bathroom had a crocheted-or-something thick pink cover over the toilet seat and smelled perfumed. He visited — always unannounced — a doctor who lived over by the military school, who played the organ at the Baptist Church accompanying himself in a heady tenor when he didn’t, he said, even believe in God most Sundays; a couple of times when Jim showed up he had a feeling that he had interrupted the doctor and his wife and their daughter who was a year younger than Jim — the son was away at boarding school in Pennsylvania: "Let the Quakers see if they can do anything with Hank" — in the midst of discussing perhaps some rotten thing they had all done or the doctor had (because his family seemed so nice, though Jim liked him)—and he got up and went out of the room saying he needed a drink. He was the first grownup to ever offer Jim a beer, when he was still fifteen. And Jim took to dropping in also on the Bob Yards, and she would ask little questions about his grandmother going in to New York to look at material at Schumacher’s and had they gotten tired of Brad’s cooking yet? She was better arguing with Bob and laughing at his exaggerated stories from downtown: there was a dimmer switch on the market like the lights in the movie house and someday you would go away for a wild weekend in the city and your house would light up in the evening and turn all but one of its lights out at, say, midnight, and look like it was being lived in, even project two moving figures up next to the window ("Doin’ what?"), while you were dancing the night away or attending the horse show. Bob was practically the first to have a television set in Windrow and Jim thought the Notre Dame-Army football players looked like squat dolls or soldiers but you knew it was real, and it was a fascinating trick that had been put over on that whole scene that you felt could — or should — only be told about by the announcer. Nobody asked Jim something he couldn’t spell out himself.

Now that, wakes the interrogator, is so empty a statement it is downright bracing; what is the humidity outside our chambers?

Jim fell forward, sent away. But by whom? For it was his (only somewhat sickly) mother who had "passed away" (as Pearl Myles put it of her own mother’s death, discussing what, where, and when matter-of-factly for the class; her mother having passed away less than four years previous or, as Jim with a sour smile hidden in his heart swiftly calculated, not long after Pearl Harbor!); fell forward, as not even he could quite know, borrowing Bob Yard’s pickup truck (this time legitimately) one afternoon of his senior year, but we, who were always potentially part of him, knew and would claim credit for saving his life that afternoon if it were not some section of our own, not to mention that of a farm kid in a baseball cap driving a bare bodiless chassis the wrong way out of the street behind the Courthouse as Jim, with the right of way and Ann-Marie Vandevere braced beside him in the same seat that Anna Maria Pietrangeli had occupied with proud arms crossed over her breast the week before, floored the pedal only afterward to be in a position (thanks to Bob Yard’s brakes in the days before inspection) to know that at that instant his errand had been less to kill that vehicle in front of him and its exposed operator than to pass through it with an angry (not "irate") vision that if he’d been given what his force for a moment demanded would have propelled him and the severe and passionate blonde girl with him through that thing — that "thing" he’s driving, that dink, that fuckhead — by way of a mere rearrangement of the matter making up said unwary obstacle without altering it in any way but the experience of these molecules that made secret space for him and the girl and Bob’s vehicle to pass through yet paralleled by a memory felt in Jim’s shoulders and knuckles and calves that this was no way to get out of town. The kid’s life was spared. The so-called Hokey-Pokey Man, who peddled his homemade vanilla ice cream by a little horsedrawn wagon at dusk, told him his mother had been one of the nicest persons he had ever known; a lot to live up to, he said — an Armenian, but not quite the only one in town, said grandfather Alexander — some Armenians are gypsies (some gypsies are Hungarians), but the Hokey-Pokey Man has that fine head of white hair and a square head like Mel’s, only smaller — he’s no gypsy—

— We knew that anyway, said Margaret.

Jim reported to his father what the Hokey-Pokey Man had said, who incidentally must have recalled how much Sarah loved vanilla ice cream as deep a vanilla taste as heart of nutmeg; and Jim’s father said how most Armenians were Catholics. Jim didn’t get it, but wasn’t in the habit of asking his father things; but when he reported his father’s odd remark, Margaret, whom he never talked with any more about her old hole-in-the-sky stories, told him Catholics considered suicide a sin. Jim just said, "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," and Margaret retorted, "No second chance there." And Jim added, "Maybe there’s no heaven." "Maybe there isn’t," said Margaret. Margaret laughed and went to give him a hug, which he more or less went along with. But it made him hopeless — how could that be? — and he said what seemed to come between them: "Well, they never found her." Not that anyone was really looking now, or raking the briny floor for a person he felt like he knew somewhat less now, though Brad for God’s sake recalled stuff about her from before he was born — maybe the little bastard really was more her son — such as that she didn’t want any more kids but after Brad came along she was glad; and that she had been a great surf swimmer in the old days, fearless and stubborn, until later she hardly ever went in. And she laid out her writing pens and ye olde music-copying implements on the drop-leaf desk in the musick womb — the next room, a room full of possible and future music, and Jim fell forward (it felt like forward) through furniture, people, walls, power lines, hilly roads — and, and—

Is she clear to you? asks the interrogator, faked into a second career as listener — and who, he adds, are you? — it’s suddenly not qua-t clear; in the modern city they have just adopted one of our own venerable methods of causing pain in order to elicit information; yes, a youth approached a park bench containing a couple who were either of different sex or same, and shot them through the leg with one shot, and (which was his original "touch") only then inquired what money they had.

— and Sarah wrote little letters to Alexander her father though he was just downtown and if he replied it may have been by word of mouth. "This is a great-grandfather desk," Jim heard her say to little Brad and she smiled at Jim who appeared at her doorway and she went on speaking to the baby of the family: "that’s a grandfather clock because it’s tall and old and it’s been telling time for a long time" (she reached to release the arm of her metronome and let it swing back and forth, then stopped it — Jim in recollection couldn’t quite see her principal audience, which was Brad — where was he? he was standing by her desk); "but this is a great-grandfather desk because that’s who made it, and over at Margaret and Alexander’s house there’s a grandfather pistol" while she smiled at Jimmy now and then and would say, "Oh Mel, you are so goddamn polite," like she was against him; or she would kid with her "baby," Brad: "Now what was your name? I forget, was it Benjamin?" (‘Wo," cried the child)—"Was it Jackie? was it Sammy?" ("No," cried the child and developed hiccups from giggling and couldn’t say his name)—"Oh /know: it was Emily, that’s your name" — ("No," but he’s too young to say, That’s a girl’s name)—"Oh I remember, you’re Brad" was said at last, like sheer invention at the last burnt-out moment when we’d run out of potentially erroneous facts.

There were ladies in silk blouses with dark chiffon scarves inside their instrument cases and such; but, never forgetting her sister in Mass. who didn’t get along with Margaret and Alexander and rarely (though with some considerable annualized ceremony) visited, Sarah came more to life with the male musical contingent whether or not they actually made the music or sustained it. Here were Barcalow Brandy wine, a would-be singer with a natural performer’s name whose family owned extensive orchards and other properties in the county and who wore sport coats you’d never see in any store and a scarf around his neck like an actor, Jim thought; and Byron Kennett, who wore silkier sport clothes and, one secret shocking week, went to state prison for a while, where his mother’s dancing shoes could not penetrate, and who could play the cello and did so out of it seemed love for Jim’s mother, not for the cello which in a way didn’t even belong to him though against his will it had been left to him by a maiden great-uncle who had desired to exert some strong influence upon this only child whose father had left his wife and son otherwise fairly well fixed. The truth was that Jim didn’t much want to go near that room with its sudden empty or shouting or laughing halts in the music when someone had missed a note ("Probably turned to the wrong page," said Mel one evening when Brad reported that the music group had had a bad argument over a few missing notes, etcetera, "pages stuck"); yet Jim would not have wished those late afternoons or Saturday mornings to end; because — he didn’t just know why — because his mother didn’t turn toward or away from him but was in that room sealed by an agreement arrived at — aha! — between Jim and the intermittent music itself: but not an agreement not to enter; for he could, though didn’t because the music (chamber music cat’s-cradling and/or sawing up and down and around) gave the house a comfortable good sense, whatever that might mean. And when a fellow named James Mayn came, years later, to tell his wife Joy (to try to tell her, though then with oddly little strain) what he hadn’t known he knew, that his tone-deaf father Mel had to keep replacing a thermostat with a mind of its own (though Joy didn’t want to hear the make of thermostat it was and a detail or two Jim couldn’t have helped recalling), all part of a conflict between Mel and Sarah, who claimed that her catgut tightened up unpredictably so that during the cooler months she couldn’t keep her violin or her big viola tuned (at which the Interrogator’s knee jerks picking up a poignant sexual slant as when a condemned, in, after all, industrial process of being electric-chaired, sends back upstream through the cables his own unequal but distinct charge that changes the warden’s hand if not his being for some rest of his life e’en though he knows it not): meanwhile the brink-like brevity of Mel’s news item that Sarah had "passed away," together with such elements of her life as time and names might sum up, capped the event so Jim later felt he had not known where the event was and while respecting his father’s not unloving conciseness, he looked for news to fill the gap and found it in the future inside him, even to some nothing fantasy that he was in the future with everything Go and under control, looking back — throw in a space settlement and balanced atmosphere brick by factual brick, etcetera — but. .

But in the weeks and months ("mouths," in possible misprint) succeeding Brad’s Day, Jim held to his friendship with Margaret. Was she "all he had"? Maybe not. He had his new angle on his father Mel, and this now heavy-laden, really fat-jawed Mel a special father to Brad, and a person who forgot to touch others on the hands and arms and shoulders and back and body (but stood around with his fingers locked behind his back and his shoulders forward), a person who once suffered enough to slug Jim in the cemetery when he brought Bob’s pickup truck back after an untraced joy ride, these were real things that years later he was thankful for, as if they were themselves the thanks.

Yet Margaret was Margaret and Jim was Jim. Newly confused about her tales, their exact date of inspiration, their pretty weird anatomy, their topography that changed like the weather, their hinted nature of foretelling, yes, foretelling for the Navajo mother with the hole in her head had come back to life when local Prince departed in pursuit of visiting East Far Eastern Princess, otherwise unknown as the Alien Beloved, and, as if part of the same crap, the mother of Jim and Brad had said that they must go away, or anyway Jim should, while for his part he was pretty sure that she had been the one to go away — well, she warn’t here, so where was that lady? — among the Navajo? on Second Mesa among the Hopi? the long-gone Anasazi? was she sweating in an underground chamber? working "with" the poor? — give me a poor person any day! — swimming toward water, toward China, toward Choor? (to the strains of a liner’s band playing "Let’s Take the Long Way Home" what Jim had swayed in the dark to the music of, with Anna Maria, her proud, very powerful arms around him instead of crossed over her tits).

A joke: "He was pretty sure she had been the one to go away" — well with a fact you don’t always know: and facts in combination, next thing you know you’re explaining the last World War or some President’s raid on the icebox.

But still pals with his grandmother Margaret. When she went to New York to (annually) buy material at Schumacher’s and stay at the Hotel Seymour near Times Square which excited or intrigued Jim in absentia, for he had never stayed in a hotel and refrained from asking Margaret if they had dance music under the chandeliers and gambling kings and movie stars and rich, kind criminals all visiting each other in their white satin suites — Margaret would see a few people, a cousin who did something important in a museum. Jim did not like her being away (well, of course — what with no Sarah any more, etcetera). ‘Specially when the secretly joint owner of the Brad’s Day pickup truck, namely Bob Yard, added, Boy she really had to get away — (what did he mean?) — as if he knew more and less than that — more and less yes, come to think, as when some years later Bob recalled Jim’s mom Sarah talking funny to him, making a decimal point (she said) in the dust with (she said) her parasol, when she didn’t have a parasol: yet Jim felt Bob knowing something more than his stated ignorance—"said we met in passing, that’s what she said more than once but we were somewhat better friends than that," said Bob, who a bit overwarmly recalled the day he first saw Mel upon a running board sweeping to his destiny downtown from church to hotel-reception the day he best-manned a local friend’s nuptials, leg out like a skater (who on earth had the camera to catch him? maybe his inner immobility conquered his outer) — grim gay smile exactly as fixed as that of a man (to wit, him) who squeezed as much a record amount of concisely edited news into the paper of the family he later realized he had known he was about to start marrying into five minutes later, while smiling not so fixedly that he could not be a shade long-winded and w/tsmiling upon meeting an unexpected feminine obstacle en route to the hotel punch bowl who was so taken aback by his fixed best man’s grin that Mel momentarily introduced himself — they had the same last name. Maybe remote cousins? she asked; from Jackson’s time? she tilted a head. He thought it through and doubted it: a branch of the Mayns’ from right around Harrisburg-Carlisle way (Pennsylvania’s beautiful, she said) — until his post-introductory at-a-loss-for-words near-solemnity in her presence now made her laugh and tell him he should always wear those trousers and a cutaway and the gray top hat, while he abruptly explained that he was second in command of a small-town weekly over there to the west, that was getting more into wire service and statewide news which was what he had been working for, these many long months; and meanwhile he said he liked Caruso, and she could only reply, You don’t say, not knowing what she felt, nor recognizing by speaking voice a tone-deaf man — though she laughed (never knowing he would be tone-deaf nor that if he could not conquer tone-deafness he could still rise to one side of it); and so they walked away into the room together and he dropped his topper, which landed right side up, and he picked it up and left it on the punch table, falling in love but not with love, as the music had it at that very moment, she had told Bob Yard, never guessing (she told her father one day indirectly in a letter downtown) that Mel Mayn (without the e) would never again drop a flustered gray top hat and snatch it up and drop it and pick it up as if it were soaking and leave it on a punch-bowl table; never again, because he managed it just that once — having power, but not for Sarah, who married him on a whim because he wasn’t afraid to tell her as he stood up with his hat that he’s tone-deaf, yet because Margaret had kept her on the strictest rein yet had bent her ear for years about women in the home and at the polls. Which Jim and we — changing track less and less angelically to its summary moment the night of the day that Margaret died, a few years later, so swiftly that we hear Alexander (implicitly paralleling deaths of daughter and wife), in the midst of more grief (which he’d call "trouble") than he will ever have time to grasp, apply the word "Ow" but to his daughter’s marriage, that old trothful plight Sarah would write him little "humor-me" "gists" about—’ ‘What more could you say but Ow later Ouch to sum up fifteen years or so of marriage to Mel with a point like that one, Jim: Ou. . ch."

— which Jim and we unconsciously fast-track (O.K.) inward, past a not quite totally unloving remark by Sarah that Mel was the only man she could conceive waterproofing his carpet slippers; inward to Dr. Range’s ex post acto word that Sarah at the time of her vanishing into our coastal waters hadn’t had anything incapacitating or incurable, just anemia plus periodic blues which he for one (with a gentle shrug) could not track down but did associate somewhat with the fluctuation of her musical activity, for things might take a downturn right after a chamber recital at the church, for instance, but there was — or had been—little organically the matter (in those days when antibiotics had not yet priced house calls out of the market)

— inward to little Brad’s dream — no nightmare — of Sarah standing in his room making her own dark moonlight waving her pale fingers through the air like the conductor of the Philharmonic in New York and told him she would wait for him till he came back but where she was he could not remember, though she had less burn than tan for once and the black towel draped over her until she swung it off her to reveal grandly, like terribly peeled areas, skin that did not have the beautiful tan, and he wanted to give her some clothes — woke up (for a dream of Sarah would never be long-winded) and went back to sleep but told the dream at breakfast, and started crying, and when Mel said she was in heaven, Jim reached and touched his half-brother’s shoulder: "You thought she was cold and needed her clothes; she’s O.K., Brad, no kidding, she’s O.K."

— so swiftly inward to that time "done" under the porch, inward through the dull clank of a trowel against the upended iron teeth of a dark rake under a front porch (the dark side of the porch), and Mel’s unwillingness to say, "for the record," whether his visitor was right that Lincoln was married to an impossible woman; upon which the other voice, which was Bob Yard’s, swiftly and softly observed, "Lost the battle, but won the war," only to hear Mel react with a violently amplified scraping on the porch boards above: " What war?" and moments afterward he came after the boy who, just happening to be there in the course of a day, seemed to be eavesdropping upward from underneath

— so swiftly inward through cloud and clear, through moons that stretched from a dismembered Statue of Liberty past reflections in Pennsylvania’s Juniata River where the Navajo Prince camped on his way east, to great plains and basins not even an Eiffel could cantilever out to view beyond, and through dawning hailstorms to the wake of a very large bird, too large to have gotten clean away inward so swiftly through such fact as that when Margaret was in New York a couple months after Sarah embarked upon her ultimately boatless voyage Eukie Yard told Jim a phone call had come to the cemetery inquiring if interment had taken place, and when Eukie, with the receiver up against his ear on that day, four or five days at least after "your mom was drowned," wanted to know who he was talking to, the fellow in New York instead said he knew the mother and had seen the daughter Sarah but once, and when Eukie said the lady had drowned off the Jersey shore and they had not recovered her so of course there hadn’t been no interment, the loud voice at the far end of the phone line said, Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, and hung up "‘z if he’d told me something I didn’t know"

— inward swiftly and (like orbits th’t git smaller but faster) with a speed capable of accommodating inversely a multiplicity of small-scale units kept in mind by the wind whose convenient passive/cheap fuel though we don’t actually see it we’re glad to use as a means to an end though bypassing the question that — as he lived his own life in years to come — Jim couldn’t have cared less about namely our need of him, his largely unacknowledged use of us to whom he has certainly been a good and loyal part, like Grace Kimball but also countless others who’ll always be less here than she, whether in that multiple dwelling in New York or moved-out—

— inward in short so fast Jim conks out cum schlafing off the d’effects of a (neither war nor battle) heartfelt marriage that he abandoned (since institutions can take rejection easier than folk — or federal agencies) to leave us, actually in his vicinity, within the controlled weather of the tapeworm track which sans loop takes We to pauses where we have always been before: to hear a woman help a man hear what he heard before but didn’t know; to have a woman being helped recall love by hearing but despite hearing her lover joke about having shared freely her labor, her agony, her joy (almost for free); to hear a wife with the education of a specialist guess or mind-read what happened at a distance to her husband for whatever it was worth; to listen while two women, one still very young though, paired, of convergent ages, review men as if it’s all for one and talk so intimately in a large window as to transcend the chances of female friendship as if some male Fate sets us back three decades to early post-War rent control before vacancy became by law the lode the landlord waited patiently to strike, while the tapeworm track literally lets us hear a fashionable physician originally from Boston now secretly in therapy remind his famous childless patient (who varies her delightful English foreignly and with elan) that "using" a tapeworm to effect dramatic weight loss might shift the. . onus, and be a form of avoidance — through which no doubt she would learn, but. . but learn what? she asks in sync exactly with her medic’s same thought sensing the tapeworm track still there a semi-permanent trail or scar through the very thought of American peanut butter, while she half-knows she doesn’t need to lose weight no matter what a friend of an acquaintance has done to herself through some old or new regime, there’s so many ways by 1977 that if you don’t feel you’re in the worming tape tunnel ‘stead of it in you, you got to feel that it opens outward like a lip growing and rolling from every moist glim of its circum, and you are it and might’s well look back down the narrowing wind-tunnel as when you could — we all could — indulge in the uncontrolled controllability of nostalgia’s splicing and slimming of events to recombine or reconstitute them, as in "constitution" at some later libration point which Jim, addressing gentle Mayga in a Washington bar early in the 1960s describes as a balance point of pulls, hence a good spot to settle down or out ‘tween Earth and her-or-its primary Moon, that is for an in-space settlement, so they contemplate each other with affection giving diplomatic recognition to that great area of gap between their socially stooled thighs, which is a gap of experience, if we will but let it in: and the diva Luisa years later finds in her a track left by some grace of the divine, like experience to be traveled, again if she will, and again she can’t tell her loving physician of hands upon her thigh (two hands belonging to the same person) or of how she let herself learn to love him even in the dark of night in her duplex balconied kitchen for hearing her lover’s bare foot near the threshold, she had resumed her phone recital in the English in case he may not know that the poetry’s Neruda but at least prior to her covering explanation when she hangs up (which his surveillance has decided her against lest it seem guilty), he can kiss her skin, on his knees on the linoleum, one of those thigh listeners but listening with his lips for any clue from the subtle anatomy of her experience — a clue to whoo shee’s talkin’ to — at a moment when, for very love as well as ultimate hygiene, she considers flushing him out of her "life" and off the planet as simply as some gently acting bacteria suggested by your family G.P. much less our intrahemispheric tapeworm and teach the ecstasy of middle-class hunger excruciatingly prolonged for a future of weight loss and healing — until Luisa, hearing from Clara how surprising and warm(yes)-hearted are the Kimball workshops, Luisa now beyond danger which is fear abruptly concludes "Momo, it’s late" into the phone to her friend Clara, who, knowing whose nickname "Momo" is, intuits by the magic of near-disaster who Luisa’s with ("Momo" being Ford North, basso profundo and gourmand silly genius with stammer in his wings), "Momo, for the last time please I would love to oblige you but—" (she has to pause to hear Clara’s own real conclusion as if Clara on her own imagines Luisa’s lover padding back to the bedroom extension phone to hear no basso but the voice of the well-known Allende economist’s wife)—"Momo, that warehouse isn’t the—" (she breaks off as if Momo at the other end has interrupted her)—"isn’t the place for either of us, and I am no Bernhardt and anyway she wouldn’t have doubled as Horatio, and there has never been a good Hamlet opera or we would have heard of it (I don’t care if there have been two dozen), the only chance was Verdi and he abandoned—"

— but Clara is talking some more and telling her she could use a Kimball workshop but where are her loyalties and who is she planning to get herself killed by or risking her neck for

(how’s the weather down there? we hear ourselves ask, having long since given up the idea we’re single)—

— and Clara’s not so friendly now and hangs up on that name again, that man’s name again with Luisa speaking it stupidly into the receiver (why? why? — so her lover can hear the name?)—

— oh we said it close to her neck, her thigh, her volcanic eyes, though to our erstwhile Interrogator, who knew it at once — the name Mayn. .

— while the diva, alone with her great self and her undeniable lover kneeling on maroon and white diamonds of linoleum that are black and white in the dark (ready naked for any type of attention) knows she never thought seriously of killing this man: how was it done? (Yet, easily, she sees!) She’s hurt by how Clara rang off. But it’s her own fault for phoning like this with this one lover, but a man who may have done nothing but pass through naval school. To murder him now — that asks too much of him! The soul goes elsewhere, the body stays. She would like him here with what she cannot swallow left out. But that is asking so much of him that he will have to die, but how has she gone this far, to fuck with a man who whatever he is in that regime knows too well what’s happened with her father — responsible as she for her career—

"I came in here, I couldn’t sleep, and—" she’s explaining too much. .

"I was thinking of Momo and this Hamlet musical, opera, whatever it is and like mind reading the phone goes and I caught it in mid-ring so you wouldn’t wake up—"

And as she moves reluctantly her thigh from his lips thinking she better get to the John — but wondering then what she would destroy him with—pour bleach down his ear, his nose — all one — the thought whets her for a simple kiss in bed. She hears him rise from the linoleum, asking if Momo sings any Spanish roles: to which she answers swiftly, too swiftly, that the city is bilingual: everyone knows some Spanish even if Ford North never rides the subway in his double-breasted camel’s-hair and his basso’s bowler — it’s more than she can handle — yet she will handle it and whether she kills him curtained behind a shower bath of blood or swallows him with a brand-new tapeworm, she cannot but be ready when, behind her, he wonders why that basso is getting Neruda from her in the middle of the night in English and Spanish when she said he only called to persuade her to participate in his degenerate send-up of a great though decadent work of Shakespeare: to which she rises in angry acceleration, turns upon the naked person who she can’t help knowing is about to love her even more: "Neruda was why — why I cannot get mixed up in that claptrap Hamlet, whatever it is — Neruda, ‘the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines’ " — " ‘petrels,’ " her bilingual companion continues, " ‘petrels and eagles,’ " comes back his voice equally in English, while—" ‘meadows and foam,’ " she says, and". . Tu me pre-guntas donde estoy?’ " (remembering the lines Clara has given her) and her naval officer with relentless complexity or culture replies, " ‘Te contare’— ‘I will tell you,’ ‘ but stops short of the next line he has heard Luisa quote to the friend she phoned — which is: "giving only (solo detalles) information useful to the authorities" — stops short, and she wouldn’t know why except maybe he’d rather not give away any threats; so many people she never met and never had to since she’s who she is, a dutiful daughter only in anxiety, in mind — while, fixed as he is, her dead or alive father (no longer with the telephone he so used, the many rooms of people he sat and talked with through the everlasting political moment, les urgences an ambulance entry sign reads upon a dark building near the Seine) would still have paper to type with, though type what? a man in history no less arrested in a house she has never seen—

— but she can’t control her thought which goes to the man who was sitting right there in one of Clara’s orchestra seats—

— and left her (though he stayed at "home") before she left him, which matters only if she turns toward it, which she will do if she turns back to her lover; yet doing so now means only the male bone and blood he turns into, over her shoulder, and more important is get to the John, save a friendship, find out why Clara feels her husband is in curious peril apart from his allegiance or his voice (though in his businesslike scholarly way he never was a speaker, a sound, like her father), as if his antagonists were making up their collective mind whether he knew about a certain thing or not, besides all the other things he knows; and she hears her now treasured friend Clara with her unfailing large dark blue eyes, wide pale mouth, deep heart waiting out all the trouble of grown children in danger beyond precise reach, husband in danger, nation beyond reach, a West Side apartment where she won’t let herself miss her interhemispherically abandoned belongings (while he with silent humor jogs thrice around the neighborhood) — an apartment where she and he still move each other — hears, Luisa hears, her treasured friend laugh and tell what these women in the workshop, these American women say to each other such as that wars and houses are made by men and understood by women. The women expecting Luisa’s life story. Free with the cost of the workshop. Complete with revelations as if the women there were from the newspapers. Turning the corner into her bedroom she wants a boy, a little son against her, and on the current of her own feet on the carpet can hear him in pyjamas someplace and can hear him, hear the fridge — watchfully watch him take his chances, just her and him, and the name on which Clara rang off abruptly comes back, with nothing now in front of Luisa and with a man behind: to whom she turns but not to him, he isn’t there, or she’s lookin’ through him in the dark; and by the way she looks good, too, and when the check came at her Mexican restaurant her fascist escort stared down at the total and murmured, "Una jovena al izquierda de mi y on your starboard quarter has been contemplating you for the last half hour" — aficionada doubtless; alone and small, with a box of foreign cigarettes beside her glass, big thin gold circles hanging down out of her hair on either side, no rings on her hands — who seemed to have eaten alone often.

— till, as cramped as her own personal tapeworm that flew in from the Minnesota territory and descended toward her gravitational center, and was flushed out of its own coils and crannies by a loving physician’s recommended dose of atabrine, she lets herself forget murder, forget the threatened bond with Clara, in order to know — as she knows when in her morning tub (so still) she lets a dream forget itself — that she hit upon that woman-in-the-restaurant’s profession for one second — but now what was it; what was it? (her very certainty had lost it): and with that, she sings a phrase with intervals so slight they are primitive, a cry, a thought — that still gets an echo far off in her apartment, for he is not behind her phrase. It takes her, while her twin sense that some half-conscious community rhymed this proposition to her lets her rest both with her abrupt decision (to sing two roles, the second Horatio, the ultimate friend) and her wish (which even Judith might have entertained could they have run a power line to Holofernes’ tent) to watch bedroom TV with her lover whose hand (yes) palms her belly pregnant (yes) and with shared peperoni pizza sent out for, and meanwhile she is reading in his mind places elsewhere where he thinks of her — yes, he thinks of her — even to the point of telling someone, a stranger to her, how much he likes her (it’s a man friend he’s having lunch with) yet she can’t get off the — the unavoidable phone call from her compatriot Clara that tells her in the guise of possible friendship that (whatever you call it, the chilly bowel below the Swiss bank vault or the prisons of acoustical foul-up suddenly offstage) this is it: she wants Clara’s friendship despite what her loneliness also hears in the long words of her father (thou shalt love, well, thy father) — she could hear the breakers like dreams of mountains stagger distantly down her father’s known words until, hearing her lover en route somewhere between here and the kitchen, she hears as if for the first time her father defending Karl Marx, a man real as her own father — lest we forget that the shortcomings in his thought are the shortcomings in our own — his history ours (she recalls) — and she, who gives pleasure and pleasure that begets pleasure to those who pay to come to Lincoln Center and to those who do not pay because she has given them free tickets whether they use them or not, would say this about "Marx" who comes back to her like her father as "The Moor," the dark-faced, the naked shape now rejoining her in (after all) her dark bedroom, she listens while her lover lubricates with the essence of her refrigerated Deaf Smith peanut butter du pays the softest of predictions — that’s "unknown," he grants, but "forced" upon him by what he cannot but infer — that in the near future she may forget what stage she is at home on and find herself before a small but far more risky audience: upon which she does not bridle (after all, she warms to him, if, granted, now with some cute irritant of fear, some additive that does not yet subtract though it could strike in the midst of anything, of love, like a woken tapeworm track), and handling the back of his neck, "Do you know Shakespeare?" she asks, "do you know Hamlet, do you know his loyal friend Horatio who is around at the end, isn’t he? to pick up the pieces? What’s it matter what small closet stage downtown, what auspices? — Momo is my friend and—" drawing her lover to her so that, of their four hands, only the fingers of her left upon the back of his neck come into play, breast to breast, leg to leg, she hears his breath intervene, "It was not Momo—"

"— you were thinking of?" she finishes, knowing, though, that he meant calling (phoning) not thinking, so who but his mouth inquires finely of the skin of hers, smiling she is certain, neither asking nor telling her, "Oh Ford North is not your friend in that sense, I think": so that both of them are in control, shared (less than two but for the moment more than one); and she’s for a second French, then for a second a grain of history, as Sayao’s emerging equal in Boheme (she won’t do Boheme, she prefers to avoid lingering coughs) or a gifted girl from a legendary hemisphere who heard the great American Iago in Buenos Aires and upon speaking to him later in Europe got invited to visit him and his wife in Greenwich, Connecticut, at his "South American house," paid for by tours through Rio and B. A. up until Evita banned American singers, from Iago on up or down: no, Luisa is Clara’s and yes definitely Clara’s husband’s friend, what would she give up for this? but she is being thought of at this instant, nor would she believe in living through others’ thoughts of her, yet has done it, she has been that priestess mother murderer, she could not otherwise have raised her acting hands so rarely through three hours of onstage carrying-on (she’ll look at hands always, she knows the hands of four heads of state, always looks); uses her own onstage so sparingly it has been noted in the press — could not have stood before her audience and on occasion turned her back to them all, stood so still in the flesh of that living "house," the mass, the masses who (of customers, that is) alone matter if they take her away with them so there can be still more value of her and more, multiplied, spread everywhere — so there, Father, and yet she will be to Clara, woman to woman, in this way more resonant, a friend even should she become so active a compatriot she’ll risk her skin, even her still clean Swiss passport, a risk worth being not less than a friend with Clara and her aloof husband who once recently had rather hear the opera at home, and Luisa here in her home, a vastish unused apartment with a duplex kitchen where you can get a balcony’d view of an egg frying, knows, too, that all this sea of rapture, this air winding out from her passion, her art, also gets shut off the minute the show stops and the curtain call smiles its (one) way into the eyes of a thousand people now standing to go elsewhere with or without her.

"You exist," comes the soft voice touched off by her fingers on the back of his neck, "in the hearts of so many people; have you ever thought about that?" and she laughs loud a simple laugh from her sex, from which then comes "Where are they now?" so she in her words can just think what it might be to be him, not so much with a slight (pretty unimaginable) erection in the dark — puce? prepuce? she must see! — as with his wide, taut chest about to meet hers, yes — and no notion amid the small sweep of his male but threatening propaganda that she has, through some new dependency (that’s banana-peeled between present and future), left him in this scented and odored bedroom (made larger not smaller by the bed) if not escaped him into an event, discovered her same old self in an event she didn’t order curtains for, for where would they hang? hence an event she couldn’t escape—

— oh she’s more real? ‘z that it? oh she’s reckoning a political or national conscience into the cost of her tax-relieved Alpine passport? (while hearing her father once call nationalism just another brand of competition which is death next to cooperation)—

— oh let no one call her more real now than when vicariously singing, singing all these years, but—

— is she then recklessly involving herself in the for-the-moment gratuitously naval intelligence officer’s pursuit of happiness, being authentic, plus some knowledge or intelligence of her apparent friend Clara’s exile-economist husband whom Luisa might in some womanly (or theatrical) way unveil to her lover: because there isn’t enough drama in her life — or in lieu of having a child? (her medicine man speaks within her like the trace of the expelled worm)—

— let no one call her less than friend to Clara now after how many months of the New York sojourn of Clara and her husband (who is or is not imperiled, for a lot of people seem not to know, yet): yet suddenly it’s would-bt friend, for Clara may hate her if she knows who she’s been sleeping weeth, or Clara might not want to understand what’s between Luisa and this man whose national employers’ planned violence has over it like a blinking sign the alternating hence moving words both of save Chilean business and Chile’s old families, yet words, too, of her own father’s house-arrested position which now she feels but also because she ought to feel it and in varying words which may be not how many thousand persons the conjurers in power like population controllers cause to disappear behind the very wall those about to vanish stood against a moment past, but how many millions the persons in power represent; and all the time there (for is she growing by necessity more intelligent?) alternately appears like a sign the mere fleshly face of a father who brought her and a brother and others, always others, sometimes quite silently along solemn (damn serious) mountain paths, casual precipices in her little hook-and-thong boots so she wondered if at the height of the hike they would find again a coterie of serious men smoking in a room talking hushed or angry (though the amount of smoke held constant) led, inspired, moderated by the man her father who expected possibly nothing of her, a mystery, she couldn’t tell, she’d seen him close those eyes of his listening to her sing at the age of seventeen, seen him close his eyes and frown as at some idea, while also he sent her a telegram here and there, or once upon a time and then again, like a bouquet of local flowers, Milan, Los Angeles (where she really ate), London, Vienna, "take it back to the birds and the bees and the Viennese" Momo’s pouf sang upon Momo’s piano one night in Momo’s apartment building which God help us is just where Clara goes to the women’s workshop, which couldn’t be any less helpful (at least, if one were thinking of taking it) than a very, very tall young American woman poet who did not know that she was pretty — from cheekbone to upper knee and all, she was secretly pretty (and her adored daddy had called her "giraffe" until the day he died! animals first, then habitat, for she’s) secretly pretty instructing Luisa that Luisa’s country equaled some (no doubt American-made) shadow: O.K., Chile is a long shadow, O.K., good (and why is she listening moist-eyed to this girl in a noisy, aromatic room? she knows all the ways to get away politely, and all the other ways), yet (And do you come from a line of poets?) she with a Swiss passport gotta wait for this long shadow spoken more from the secretly bruised eyelids, melancholy and self-swelled, than from the wonderfully wide (not wide open but wide-long) eyes of the young woman — a shadow (she’ll swear) "cast" (maybe out of one of her own poems) "by the lapping sea which is the overlapping silence of the world breaking upon the hemisphere, a ghost coast like a mapmaker’s lost lore" — Luisa’s homeland, Luisa’s country down there a million miles under New York, "a planet," the girl goes on, "a planet in essence long" (and does this description of Chile make the American poeta political? — heavens no! only nostalgic for a nation she has not yet visited for Christ’s sake): let that poeta help herself, O.K.?. . "what is in others…" (but these words… do they ask, do they interrogate? or do they tell you? or are they part of words to come?). . You asked if I came from a line of poets, senora? oh God no! — did you ever hear of a financier named Jay Gould and did you ever hear of the blizzard of 1881?—(she had heard of the blizzard, actually) — O.K. you heard of the blizzard, well it blew down the telegraph lines and Jay Gould had to keep sending his rapid-fire orders to his broker in the stock market — (was the poet descended, then, from Jay Gould?) — and his broker was doing O.K., too, you can be sure — (was the poet descended from Mr. Gould’s broker?) — No, senora, so Gould sent a messenger through the snow with his buy and sell orders, the fastest he could find and, well, the boy was kidnapped — (ah, you are descended from the messenger boy) — let me finish, senora, and Gould’s rivals put another boy who looked just like the kidnapped boy in his place who would tell them day to day what Gould was selling and what he was buying — (ah, you are descended from the lookalike) — No, from the boy who was kidnapped: he survived. .

Are these words that ask, that interrogate, are they part of words to come?… as in this same noisy room one man, two men, three men, all (though she’ll guess their occupations) unknown to Luisa who is so gloriously known to them at this reception on a Sunday before the new production, a different magic lantern in each set of season-subscribing eyes, all with attentive mouths (and noses!) each with raw carrot stick and glass of urine-tinted wine, approaching made the literary girl in the midst of further utterance perhaps fade proudly away into the rest of the room with a chandelier, two chandeliers more heavy with glass than light, and a large bell on a leather-and-mahogany bar that the Australian consul will pick up and ring in a moment — fade proudly away and toward no one special when she could have been talking to Luisa the diva, the opera singeuse (joke, we get gladly from her and she throws back to us half knowin’ we’z there only as {qua) need for change as we’z individuals being we’z race and we didn’t get wise to this overnight and haven’t even yet, which is why we’z currently angel-human alternant, you mayba gon’ not like this — halva takah chances — truth be maybe not so true as ye made up) so that to adapt to Manon’s or Piaf ‘s language (not Bidu’s or Luisa’s) Luisa’s own adoptable New York accent (turnoffable, turnonable depending you pay the bill) in order to double or treble or make her ever-various self even more many in the also still singular (if pidgin) French of singeuse, which does not in French exist, gave her a kick, hence some precious sense of entertaining herself, a solitary pay for those who are incorporated and much in demand, and, not wanting these three men whose lives might be waiting to become hers, nor anyone she can think of except Clara maybe, nor quite wanting the twenty-two (odd)-year-old poeta (who’d understand Luisa probably much better than Chile) to come back to confirm from just what collaboration there has come to Luisa’s brain through her ears — or (!) vice versa! — the words What is in others yet has others in it? and she is having help, she knows it, to hear those words and to know that it doesn’t matter if these people, the "others," are part of a statement or of an interrogative, she’s having help from somewhere, inspiration from the foothills (thank you), or from a dreaming person possibly whom she has never listened to, a mother in her (say) that she wished to be to her own father — the poeta would understand this of all things — when in 1950 or so he opened the great door to look at her standing fifty feet away beside a grand piano that was an intelligence in itself, with a tall window bright with a sky like sea beyond her singing voice upon which he shut that door again as if to say, You are here and I am elsewhere — he was then himself moving someplace: while she, with whatever back-straightening and shoulder-yearning, stayed where she was unless interrupted by herself or her teacher or the thought that her father had poked his nose through that door to look beyond her to the sea view out that nineteenth-century window: while the heavens knew we’z content to be foothills or her own mother herself, since we in never staying still might, since the sea becomes us, shrug seaward albeit thus yielding Easter or other half-known isles, or fault our half-known funking ways upward to Andes we may have felt we had to try being for ourselves however many (granted, temporarily) missing per-sonae would tell us convincingly what it was (you know) like to be ye Andes when not even her former resident tapeworm could tell (apart from living the — take it day by day — reality of) what it was like to be her or at least a parceled part of her team: but relation as we but are of her we found it not easy to swing away from her of late, since her vicarious habits kinda worked both directions, so, in process of getting suddenly real, she was living us, and only the sternest kind of asshole talk was going to keep her from going kind of crazy upon the creation of the distance necessary to move on, which us had to do constantly anyhow, being ourself as essentially relations as the coast of that ghost country is that country so long as its length is long: yet even then, our semi-amorphous, multicellular shrug-forth that draws along from behind our lengthening, contracting proposition, which will seem at times a century in question, at other places a curve of something like land, and at others a conclusion we drew that then drew us: and so, to get that distance from her, we were all (be quiet, be quiet) hearing us say, quote, "She is, but now we see always was, in a dependency structured to cope better than it knew with a multiplicity of small-scale" yow-knows, say ongoing kinship not to be either totaled (qua dependency) or—

But Luisa holds on to those words What is in others yet has others in it: which later she’s not sure belonged only to the bend of the tall poet-girl’s retreat, but stayed in Luisa’s mind (in her, she-sees-now, doomed, though naked, lover’s presence coming to her which might surprise her or pass her by, acoustically adorned with his "You exist in the hearts of so many people" — that is, Don’t get mixed up in the troubles of exile-economists; think of the life you make for yourself though no one’s saying singers are dumb, "we" know how well you’ve personally managed your household finances long distance to Zurich where the portfolio info if not the buck stops; but also the way this gifted scholar-compatriot of yours, the husband of your friend, trots in the park, he is drawing some attention to himself and did you happen to know — which comes through as his quietly interrogating Do you happen to know—)

"What is in others," she breaks her lover’s silence (hearing again Clara’s last insinuating word "Mayn," a name, Luisa is sure, interrupting barely her lover’s silence), his approach, his amazing gravity flavored with her refrigerated peanut butter and as male as it is more hooded than blind, more blind than false — so her breath becomes "What is in others" (her breasts softened each upon his chest then gently filling at the rub of fur — as she continues "yet has others in it?"—

— for we, with her in us, stand ready if always on the move like her father even when he’s (as now, if not defunct by someone else’s game plan) under house arrest, stand ready, being but relations in the vale we genuinely rent though it gets smaller contrarily the closer we get to it—constipado we try out with the o ending, for the universe is now allowed to be too-badly male, and the female principle is considering having nothing to do with this pustulated uniwurst before it disappears into its own core-needs—

— meanwhile, Luisa’s real; she’s no longer the vehicle for tapeworm tracks to get us from there to here in or out of the persons of a diamond-squint Ojibway medicine man operating just a stone’s throw from the Great Lakes system, or his New York contact in this inter-worm arrangement the sometime fisher-friend guidee the Park Avenue doctor who swears by wood fires and reads by them to drive off winter spirits while thinking often of beloved Luisa, now still more real: her that does not — in her lover’s mind, say — quite add up. . this just plain naked lover adds to all else he is half half-feeling, for he thinks pretty well without clothes on, though never has been obliged to as it were kill naked, and wonders if we had here (in others, others in it) some mere fresh citation from Hamlet—could be Horatio herself speaking — until it crosses his mind bound elsewhere unto the unknown that naked he might be obliged to undergo death, and cannot tell where that thought came from or comes to, for he is not given to whim—

— or totally to any one (the fur upon his buttocks might tell that to someone too late for it to matter), while not so knowingly for he is not by himself a poet he ships daily on the ship of state without questioning you know the Chicago-school anti-inflation economics his captains import to run the ship which lately has expanded its range though no less tightly compart-mented against local breach from ghost coasts it cruises multilaterally by theoretically lethal instruments only occasionally looking out a porthole into a life where this mufti officer himself will see here and there a wood fire, or its tiny glint from cabin embedded in a childhood mountain so that if we have, though not knowing him well, told him, we did not need to tell him, he’d suddenly like a wood fire right here in Luisa’s bedroom with its marble hearth (and could almost go looking for wood, send out for anything in this city) and at a moment when he finds he loves her, he does, and so won’t say (for now) the name he heard her (intelligently) say into a stage phone in her kitchen with its cold linoleum some minutes ago, he can puzzle that conundrum, puzzle and puzzle it with a lover’s fanaticism while not hearing in his arms Luisa’s mind say again the name from the phone — but now her lips themselves breathe the name, and he won’t seize whatever lead it gives, the name from the phone — and she runs her middle fingers hard down his spine, and he is quite taken if unprepared for the bumpy impress that is one track, one touch, and answers breath with breath, "There is a future in those fingertips—" "In America it is known as foreplay," she breathes back with an extra exhalation of smile—"Preparation," he breathes, and she, ‘7 feel it too," and part-withdraws part-draws him with her by the small of his back when he murmurs like a sleepwalker, "The motive of our preparations," as they move together, where are they exactly? the bed gives off light through her hair, and he knows for certain that she knows Mayn only as a name, a word, no doubt through her friend on the phone, yet knows that she has decided something about this unknown "Mayn": Absent, intimate, sitting on the edge of her bed, "I know," she says, "that that little woman you said watched me is a journalist; don’t ask me how; I know," but where her absentness is now he doesn’t know, but feels her friendly hand on his buttock, and his toe, firmly in the carpet, feels waited on; and "Good," he firmly answers, "good," while, being almost in the ship of kind, he is not enough there to know what would happen were he to find his sea to be land and if so if he would crash and crumble and kindle, or would pass simply into another life.

For we exact but what we are: we are relations. And if not always so perfectly where, yet we will loyally to ourself ever exact what. Between kin and kind, between blunder and art, between the first words of the saying the diva distinctly heard from the ponderous, shy, likable young American poeta and the second half of them, which seemed to come to us from other distances if not from no distance at all. And turning from the poeta (who was in turn turning from her) Luisa found in the three hyper-dressed men less matter for speculating what, say, they did than lumps taking up room unless one were to remove them by coup, by blender, by dribbling one’s salt on them so they dissolve on the rock threshold of one’s private house imagined beside the strong leg and ribs and shoulder of one’s father giving a nature lesson on a mountain rock that for small Luisa became a doorstep of a crazy cottage in the trees, far from all else save father and brother, and where question fades into question along with their interlinks: oh such as the one hundred percent inflation through the first nine months of ‘72 and how much of Chile vanished into Bethlehem’s pocket through iron from 1913 to the fifties, and what sign hangs over the sale in ‘23 of Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine, to Anaconda by the multinationally musical Guggenheims and who had told her lover she’s bought and sold and bought some shares of Voest Alpine for he so so so carelessly mentioned it as they stood together operatically approaching the monumental dirty green of the Statue in the harbor only the other day (who got herself together, walked out across the waters of New York, and took up her stand in the last century Luisa supposes it was and hasn’t moved since) — while her father’s prominent nose so large and beautiful and, in those childhood days, straight (not the nose of a frequently interrogated subject nor ever the nose of a drinker) and, in the days of her adolescent music training, without those hard-to-appreciate (you know) dark hairs creeping out at the nostril, is recalled withdrawing, almost funny like a Walt Disney cartoon she saw where creatures come and go and those Marxists aren’t yet explaining that in Disney the only workers are lumpen thugs or noblesses sauvages and you will no ever see them makin’ steel to make trusses to make a bridge to carry coal over and/or be in slow motion blown sky into wind high: no, you might see that culminating reality but never the industrial process.

Did you mean (?), asks our (now old) friend the shifting interrogator not wishing to be indelicate on the score of sexual version, that, well, the lady in the harbor otherwise known as a one-hundred-fifty-odd-foot copper envelope without portfolio had in the course of this American greening we used to hear about acquired a warped relation to the one-time Guggenheim gig deep in Chuquicamata (a vintage Chilean wine) on which we have run a time-and-motion CAT-type scan turning up no link with Voest Alpine or Bethlehem (iron, that is), which does however sell on the Zurich exchange—

— for the interrogator, part of us as we him, can use wind as we while not quite ‘‘getting" as we do the concept of passive energy to process us inward while more and more as if with interpurse generosity accommodating the multiplicity of small-scale relations, as that ironmolder whose father had been inspired two generations earlier by editor Heighton of the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia and who met Alexander in Pennsylvania in early March and met a thousand striking/striking ironmolders of Coxey’s Army with

The seed ye sow, another reaps

The wealth ye find, another keeps

: not that Jim young or older would know or care for Luisa’s doctor’s haunts — such sayings haunting him as "When me they fly, I am the wings," though that devoted one-shot-and-only-one-shot tapeworm importer, who got from Boston to New York years before the flying shuttle or even pre-shuttle flight scene yet stays young, has those words in common with Jim’s mother Sarah, as few would know nowadays besides Brad, back in Windrow, N.J., who might not know he knows, nor if it is a "quote" or a bone-deep gene of his long-gone mother: but in the midst of such outlandish matter at graveside as what Sarah who ridiculed weather conversation said once about wind curving, Jim easily retained a mystery he had already worked out for himself— that according to Sarah, speaking to him when he told her he’s going to work on the farm this coming summer not in the office of the newspaper, he would go away: "passed" away, Miss Myles even in a model obit could say — which, O.K., also retained mystery, if you want, and as with Jim and his mystery, or was it his mother’s, the mystery didn’t get solved and shelved or even lost, but got said: yet really just remembered:

: we already remember what had been going on, the whirlwind ride in Bob’s first pickup, the unknown piner boy who got on and off but appeared only to be first there and then not there, in the bed of the pickup, though visible at a distance that didn’t add up and apparently not carrying the later missing evidence of thievery that was all Jim would report to Bob, who at first had said if Jim had wanted the gasoline can he would have given it to him, then shook his head and agreed that the piner kid had taken it, what’d you expect of them? (—but what did that mean? Jim abruptly asked—Mean? why that those kids are survivors; that’s what Bob meant):

: we already remember, despite the red herring interrupting us as to confuse what’s the margin, what’s the leverage, what’s the center, what’s the fulcrum (to compound the possible confusion if not the possibilities, for the interrogator had tried to cut in, perhaps just to show he knew what’s gon’ on to ask, Do you mean that the diva’s giving her lover head while contemplating murdering him on one of the unwholesome nights during the degenerate run of the gay Hamlet opera-ette? and who, by the way, is doing the script?).

Already remember what’s so soon not here any more; remember at last what’s been here with us so long we had more’n enough time to see but now would seem to have been waiting to remember.

Oh that’s crap, all that regret crap, say James Mayn and Grace Kimball in unison at a distance so that curiously they hear each other but don’t know it, a distance that could be stereo if Jim chose to say it as loud and long as Grace; but less noise betokens often superior conviction, where here, Jim, in a Washington hotel bar, having described the mourning of Mel for Sarah, heard dry colleague Ted "agree" you don’t know what you had till it’s over, and described the love of a woman he had experienced only to find out upon her departure for Hawaii on a bird-study vacation that he had felt stifled by her attention, though granted it wasn’t yet quite over but her absence was like it being over, and only then did Ted see what he had been living inside of; and Mayga, quietly or, rather, patiently and strategically there with them at the bar waiting till she knew what she would say and had the right moment, seemed then to say we have the time to see but we rather let it go, you know? and then remember it, remember with rue, let the marriage go, then lament that, let the life go—

— but crap, the fact of the matter, broke in Jim, his hand belyingly gentle upon Mayga’s sleeve, and as near to the White House fence as a trip to a window would evince, and he’s albeit freshly shaved and facing the crystal cone of a martini that particular very late afternoon or earliest evening (recalling a daiquiri his mother sipped all by herself in the music room before Sunday lunch once) the fact of the matter (having been, he feels, succinct all day, he repeats the words but hears himself gabbing, hears himself from an interior angle, which maybe is just the bullshit-radar often birdlike or snakelike sweeping the area, so he starts to say) "Wind does curve," but only gets out the first two words and will improvise, "Wind does know which way it’s blowing," and while Ted does his theatrically hilarious coughing at this, Mayga holds on to the spirit of the word "crap" and Jim suddenly sees she meant slantingly what she said and doesn’t believe you have to look forward only to figuring things out after all the damage is done, and he wants to embrace her there and then, and then somewhat untogether he does embrace her, but it isn’t just because he sees what she meant, and later that night, oh yes it’s about time (quips the interrogator) that this relation was owned up to, Mayga persuades Jim that the real indirection was his own, oh I know you you see, I know you, I am proud to, you understand, but I do know you, it’s you on the contrary trying to tell yourself what you don’t much credit—

— and here I am letting my marriage go? he asked — which made her unhappy but not unintelligent because she will be at peace with him lying down or sitting at a bar or in a restaurant booth — with her going home to South America and "going home" with him tonight each has said to the other that this is the first time unfaithful to spouse:

: which Mel never could have been, and that’s all there is to it: and while his fidelity to Sarah, who hadn’t loved him, survived her presence in his everyday life, though he became capable of passion expressed (in volubility) to Margaret ("I could have made her like me—" "She did like you, Mel, she certainly did—" "At least I could have made her love me, there was something about the shape of my feet, the front end of them, she couldn’t take, it wasn’t my lack of music and she didn’t mind John Charles Thomas, at least I said what I liked, no, it was me, it was that I was on the ground trying to take off but knowing my limits, and she was in the air, trying to find the ground—" "She was not," said Jim to his grandmother, when told, "she was not up in the air," and Margaret to each of these males, the husband, the son, said the same thing, "It didn’t gel, so I guess it couldn’t"), Mel fell in love with Brad for a while, they comforted each other, Mel told him please not to feel he ought to work at the newspaper office, and got into the longest talks at the kitchen table with Brad so they took the consequent years of Brad’s growing-up, it seemed, and when Jim got back from a date, or, once, from the most terrible scare involving Bob’s pickup truck, and once got back from the whole summer away bartending at the shore, there they still were at the table and the only thing Mel wouldn’t discuss was Brad’s (to Jim, dumb) nightmare of her, of Sarah, coming close to him, drawing bow across string, marking time with a conductress’s finger, reaching for Brad in the most loving way whereupon, his fault, his fault, he awoke, fighting himself free of the sheets to find her not reaching for him any more, or the reach was there but not his mom — but still Brad had his Day (as Margaret said to Jim one day at the cemetery), and Mel insisted Brad take more piano, with Barcalow Bran-dywine’s sister-in-law who jabbed the keys as if to position them, smiling, and, when she served as accompanist, could keep up the pounding and still look away from the keys and up at Barcalow in his orange-and-maroon horse-blanket sport coat that excited him almost like college colors on felt pennants or football jerseys, he got taken to the Princeton-Harvard game by the bibulous doctor who was Dr. Range’s main competitor in town and whose house Jim had taken to visiting unannounced not hesitating to go on in and sit down even when often the doctor and wife and sometimes daughter looked interrupted in the middle of something not too good, and the wife and daughter shivered on their stone seats in Palmer Stadium and glanced but didn’t want to look at the program, while the doctor hollered somewhat embarrassingly to particular guys on the Harvard team, because he had gone to Harvard, to get cracking, which was a little like Barcalow Brandywine arriving at a gathering and beginning a little too soon to lead some singing and standing up with a glass in his hand to announce that he was still enamored of his wife after seventeen, eighteen years, nineteen wasn’t it? years of married love (which was the title of a book Jim got hold of from one of his friends who actually had gotten it off a girl in the eleventh grade) — and once, to Jim’s amusement and Mel’s discomfiture, the doctor got unwound enough in the midst of the singing (for he — and his wife at least — did attend more than once, though why was not clear in memory), so the doctor told Barcalow Brandywine he had never liked him, and now he was thinking that he still didn’t like him (he burst out laughing) and never could understand that family of his either. But then there was Brad, right there, saying hotly — aged eleven or more—"Then you’re not welcome here because my mother was Barcalow’s friend and played for him," upon which all laughed except Jim who could have brained or throttled Brad whichever was surer (forget "faster"), and Barcalow genially told Brad it wasn’t his house but his grandma’s.

But Sarah could do strange things all right, like in the drugstore insult her old long-unseen acquaintance Leona Stormer revisiting town who lived in Chicago (which she said was nothing like New Jersey), and Jim at the insult his mother spoke didn’t get embarrassed, did he? and she did things posthumously for if Brad’s Day a month or so after Sarah’s very own drowning — a Sarah special — had been Brad’s coming out into the open and grieving like an African, like an Italian, like a Jew, like a non-crazy old Indian speaking to the winds that cornered the world maybe, there still Sarah was, talking through Bob her one-time quite secret lover’s mouth and creating the swift, breathless hate of Brad when Bob put into his own mouth his own recollected remark re: winds, "What a lot of stuff—" he had told Sarah—"they ain’t curved."

Unless you were talking about a hurricane spiral, Jim observed out of the blue to Bob, who didn’t know Jim had been sitting here in Bob’s basement thinking, but now said, "We had a false alarm that day your brother carried on," as so they had, for no less a member of Brad’s Day than Mel had arrived in that strangely focused living room like a "living" wake with the info on his lips.

And so Jim found and soon afterward must have left it there unsummoned where it belonged in what rapidly developed into — hell! — the past (shrug), that he could collect if he concentrated (sun heat, uneven Earth shape, airflow cells, pressure belts, horizontal current) — all there was to it, you had to concentrate — not be confounded with "Get centered," from Grace Kimball which three whole decades later nonetheless comes out as unison to our ears, relations though we only are, the skeleton of that Brad’s Day talk about the weather. (You’d make a good newsman, joked Ted in their Washington bar not twenty years later and got a wrinkled forehead from his hunched, heavy set friend and a snicker from none other than Spence, whom they often had at the end of the bar pigeonholed but too sleazed-out and too silly for Jim to ever contemplate picking on him — under layers of slightly ugly comings and goings.) — and the skeleton was attached to people: for it was grandfather Alexander who had claimed that air travels from your high-pressure areas to your low, because to begin with, as Mel had pointed out, you get your pressure belts because air heats and cools and when it expands and contracts to put it ass-backwards (though isn’t that where the ass was, the last time we didn’t look?) and your pressure belts move because, to begin with, like stays with like, so you get cells of wind despite the warm always moving if not spending itself toward cold — which it becomes — for to begin with, whatever is true of the water which Alexander predicted would be on the warm side should anyone sample it this afternoon, the air moving at speed over an erratic Earth’s land of mountains and valleys, beauties or pockmarks, is not warm, as Margaret said with something like faraway anger, but not because water is slow to lose the sun’s heat, land fast (which is why the far, far more than cozy warmth of the sun’s radiation journeys so many million miles earthward while Earth in its ball of damp vapor is always moving but cannot ‘scape this given life, though by what or whom given the shouting tenor of the doctor-organist Sundays when Jim for a time, then, at (what?) fifteen attended service, could not say).

But Bob, why did Bob, eyebrows and all, dispute what Sarah supposedly had said? Well, Bob himself was the source: ‘course wind curved, Jim thought, yet when Jim did think about it one Sunday in church beside Anne-Marie Vandevere, who set no more store in church than Jim and did not find the doctor-organist much to applaud as a person perhaps because his daughter Cornelia wasn’t in her group, Cornelia could hear the horses whinnying for their corn in the stalls at the military school down their street (Do they feed them corn? Jim asked), Jim had to wonder if Bob all in all wasn’t right because what could nudge a wind off course except another wind and yet his father said there was no question about it, winds do curve: until one day that like other days in that year of his mother’s suicide might have been easy to forget he kept Anne-Marie waiting in Bob’s pickup discreetly (because illegally) down the street a couple of blocks clear of school because he had been thinking analytically and nonetheless passionately about dropkicking in a wind and whether his father would come to see him play since his father really didn’t have the time (But yes he did, intervened Mayga, swapping her stronger old-fashioned for Jim’s while Ted looked on)— As it happened, he did, said Jim, for Jim had been discussing basketball with Ted, the enclosed court, the trick of taking up position so it was (you hoped) clearly, stably yours then by law, and preferred not to find his father in the discussion, though then Mayga’s kind interruption had turned the talk to that afternoon of the pickup truck parked two blocks or three from school, Anne-Marie still sitting upright in the cab (as it happened, the driver’s seat) of Bob’s vehicle while Jim was somewhere (he had to admit it) thinking — if "thinking" didn’t make it more than it really was — why yes, leaning on the glass above that great old green-gray-brown relief map of South America somebody’d donated to the high school: thinking that if the fucking wind (which might curve around buildings like New York City or mountains) was in cells like individuals, well, how about a football? it got going its way up above the ground, but the land wasn’t promising to be there where it was when the ball came down. Ted and Mayga and Mayn all laughed at that expurgated evocation of what he did not for a minute know was a well-known effect that got named eventually after a Frenchman far more recent than it and that at some time had inspired Mayn to go get stuck in some difference between inertial and non-inertial systems, which explained why science had no satisfactory way to acknowledge this Coriolis effect; but there was Jim leaning on the glass above South America, as a familiar commanding voice called at him, "Get off the glass," and he removed his arms, transferring the support of his extended weight to his stomach and back muscles (no doubt), exactly at the instant he had seen that distant continent move beneath him and understood with a shiver, hearing scary words from his otherwise friendly coach, not just that it depended whether you were here on Earth or beyond it; and if you were out beyond it the wind down here crossing at right angles to the kick that he’d aimed downfield goal-postward, was straight as a die, even if Earth wasn’t; but if you were on Earth the wind with indubitable deflection warped — wait, I thought the football was yer wind, said Ted (and Yeah, echoed the wise little bastard free-lance photographer and news "dealer" — if the deal wheeled to his sleazy satisfaction — at bar’s end) — but coach John Rocker was asking if Jim had heard what them two girls in tenth grade had done, and at that moment like another discovery even more confounded unless you just stated it and let the fucking flickering mystery be — like the would-be dream that kept Jim "busy" (as Margaret said dreams kept her when asleep), the would-be dream Jim had-and-lost the very next dark, dark morning when he saw he wouldn’t have the chance to understand it except he did hear singing in the next room and it wasn’t his brother’s (room, that is) — which was in one sense the only next room next to Jim’s— but the music room downstairs and his mother was singing interrupted bits of a song teaching it to apparently Brad who was there with her and the word "world" and the word "morning" that came through the emptied, dark air were all Jim knew or was let know and what was between — well, yes, what was between, except the usual nothing — and yet hearing John Rocker’s hairy, husky voice discovering what it was saying just as its own words croaked out happily, "Why they damn near killed themselves in that pickup truck of Bob Yard’s I heard — hey, don’t you go with the Vandevere girl? what’s she doing driving a pickup truck when she can’t drive, the Pietrangeli girl was with her and I heard the right door was open when Anne-Marie swung the truck around in the middle of Manalapan Avenue so it almost tipped and the other one fell or jumped out and a car hit the right front headlight but they’re O.K.": so it wasn’t clear whether this was something two girls or one had done: but, leaving the glass counter covering the crocodilean relief map of South America and angry and reluctant but expressing only surprise and concern to John Rocker to whom he told the factual truth at once and John certainly did help out in the next couple of hours, he found pockets of relief in the middle of his anger and chaos — because his mother was dead and he was expected to, he was expected to, he didn’t know at all what? but pockets in the anger that were independent minds self-protected where the understanding had come along with South America moving beneath the glass (maybe you needed glasses, said Ted) — which marked the limit of what Jim could confess to this good friend whom he would go on joking with and detailing packages of fresh information to year by year over a drink or at a ballgame, baseball that became football that became basketball Washington, New York, Washington, home ‘n home, two decades upwards of — while to Mayga—

— Did he not broach these remembrances with his wife, asks the interrogator whose empty face has grown tender eyebrows and sprouts smallest tufts from shadow-erased nostrils, maybe he don’t got a nose—

— no mo’ (sang Barcalow Brandywine, upstaging the doctor in a warm, boisterous room at grandmother’s house)—

— I mean, adds interrogator, you have such friendships really in American Marriage or so our informants report—

— to Mayga, while she was available, Jim brought out the subtle blanks between the lines, explaining that the insight of South America moving beneath the glass above which he had been watching (thinking about, perhaps, wind and Earth) had been not utterly blown away by Coach Rocker calling the disgusting news of that girl apparently making a botch of the afternoon, the two of them too — but the insight had held to Jim, that is, without his havin’ to do anything, and it was that Bob, who had heard actually Sarah say that owlish junk ‘bout wind and all at the beach (—at the beach? asked Mel at the kitchen table and both Brad and Mel looked in wonder at this intruder Jim Mayn standing in the doorway, come home — When were they at the beach? — but Brad said, The day that old man came to see Gramma at the beach)—

— it was that Bob had needed to be part of Brad’s Day, well he’s a nelectrician ‘n has a pickup truck ‘n a dark red Ford sedan simonized like grandfather Alexander’s shoes, and a load of friends who say, Good old Bob, you have to watch him because only he knows where all them wires and cables are going — and he hardly belonged with the Mayns in Throckmorton Street or even in Sarah’s awful story but was in it no less and knew he would provoke by introducing that staggering fact of Sarah’s expressed opinion re: wind curves and re-provoke by citing his dismissal of her late view but it was where he was — where, Flick Mayn years later able to bring herself to say, where he was coming from, he wanted to be part of it and so—

— and yet as Jim raced through the uncaring halls of the high school, damn it, to the no doubt real location of that bashed-up pickup truck that was his responsibility when he had only a picture of it in his head, a blonde girl with lipstick (judge’s granddaughter) embracing the wheel of an endlessly rocking vehicle, a dark-haired girl without lipstick spilled, Catholic thigh by Catholic thigh, out of Bob’s stupid truck with her history notes bound in a notebook but adrift, Jim knew more, knew more than he knew, so he was minutes and minutes getting clear of that high school and a picture of a blackboard full of fond chalky shapes abandoned by human hand, but the very obstacles—

— read ob. (we recollect already)—

— very obstacles that kept him forever from getting out of this high school and down the street to stupidly hunt for the girls and the truck without asking directions though it was his hometown, wasn’t it? the very obstacles that seemed to make his run down those halls endless wonderfully let him see, let him see—

— not a principal and a journalism teacher in passionate dispute or a male math teacher with some solid on the board and his head on a desk evidently too tired to even think "n’est-ce pas" at the end of one of those loud challenging non-questions of his — but that something in Bob Yard had loved Jim’s mother, and Jim, who didn’t care for either man too much, might be a hair closer to Bob than to his own father Mel, but that was crap like everything else, and beside the point and one more obstacle while the world seemed to be rattling yer cage, you had two systems no matter what the truth and so on about Sarah turned out to be, and it was more than that, oh shit, she was right ‘bout wind and Earth, and Bob (yer uncle!)’s right too even if he didn’t honestly and truly say it to her, except Bob’s the one on Earth, where winds what with Earth’s easterly rotation do look like they curve, whereas he’s takin’ the view from out beyond the Earth that ought to be Sarah’s. They had their problems all right, that clung to them like this sight that came to Jim and stayed after Coach Rocker launched Jim outward with his scary words, and he felt denied by those goddamn girls the chance to hang on to the two systems but they held on to him and went on knowin’ him even when he left them, seemed like, to rush away to handle one of those well-isolated—

— incidents, the interrogator fills in, proud of idiom—

— incidents to be handled, dealt with, coped with, covered, etcetera, as if this up-to-now continuous world, one by one—

— taking it a day at a time, adds the interrogator—

— oh, were you divorced too we chime in? did you have your limb cut off and then regret it? did you lose a loved one by unforeseen overdrift and have a really hard row to hoe because of it coming out of left field where there was no warning track to tell you the guys off there on the firing line rattling the fences wasn’t just taking batting praptice (as Sammy pronounced 4’practice")?

— we do not have divorce any more, the interrogator intones, we sent all potential (joke) divorcers via matter-energy dome-trans (a mere pleasant buzzing in the temples is all they feel) so that—

— they arrive in Locus Libration translated, each couple, into one?—

— into one? but surely you have not the technology yet to do dat, have you? asks the interrogator in a new voice coming through him from elsewhere—

— never mind, we have enough trouble launching our new cars, we reply, feeling more American which may feel like an isolated incident—

— sensibly handled as such (of the two-girl accident in Bob Yard’s pickup borrowed semi-illegally by an underaged borrower of the first part who was absent mulling over South America under glass), concurred Ted, one’s fellow newspaperman (you couldn’t say "fellow colleague," ‘twould sound redundant ‘stead of the succinct that Mel espoused ad nauseam, favorite theme, witness Sarah’s obit written by the proud widower himself—

— and if it was a mystery why Brad went to pieces that day, Brad’s Day as it came to be called, never mind all its wrinkles, its whys and whys and various crap you can’t know, maybe he discovered jerking off the night or afternoon before but was too young surely; and who in the hell cares, comes a foghorn-strong voice both far and close, hard to tell, we almost miss the later James Mayn expressing good-(more-or-less)humored disdain for something or other, maybe family history:

and you come up to the present with a lot of interesting enough memories, no doubt about it, hearing your mother’s fugitive brief lover (who loved her but would never have called her "nice") tell of an argument they had about a piano being out of tune and he heard it, a foreign vibration, a separate if not isolated sound, and she didn’t: sharp-edged memories often become surrounded by a nothingness of what lay around them I mean the idea of all these never-to-be-known people who knew your folks and arrived with horse-drawn (in Windrow, horses could draw, you see) vanilla ice cream at twilight saying but once, You have a lot to live up to — she was the nicest woman. . and you hear them in the woodwork, then never more, such as the vanished voice that called the cemetery four, five days after Sarah disappeared and got Eukie Yard mad in his voluminous one-piecer to ask if interment had taken place and when Eukie retorted that the drowned lady hadn’t been recovered, the voice from New York re-retorted Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, which Eukie said he knew already, he thought; and somewhere before a trowel clanked under a porch but not before Lincoln’s wife was identified as an impossible woman, a voice with shoes on said to another heavily shod voice that Alexander had said the second voice ("you") had told him it ("you") had gotten opera tickets for a special road opera performance in Trenton, because it ("you") was afraid Sarah’s going crazy or something, and the other voice said, Yes it was Vurdee’s Ba[w]llo in Mascara (like a brilliant woman designer of revolutionary new men’s shoes with whom Mayn discussed South America all too briefly who insisted on pronouncing as Bore-guess a known Argentine storyteller and poet whom Mayn had never read and possibly never heard of) and what had been said to Alexander (who once observed that some Armenians are gypsies) who thought for Pete’s sake he’s going to start bawling on me, was that the lady in question might go crazy living with him, Mel—

— close down some of these systems, a voice says firmly at a semicircular meeting of Grace Kimball’s workshop, close ‘em down, don’t go back for more, ol’ Freud’ll have you sniffing around day and night till you got a snootful and it’s like booze, one snootful paralyzes you as good as another, close down some of those systems, you’ve seen ‘em, they work, he do act like that some of the time? you know it’s most of the time, which might as well be all the time, so don’t go back for more — so that we might have substituted the verbal sound "voice" for "workshop" and dispatched to the heart of what’s just been said—

— hear those voices with their boots on comin’ down through the woodwork and you’re under the porch but outside if you want to be — and the memory is worth not maintaining major space for, so store it dehydrated it’ll keep next to Brad’s brief vision he recalled and recalled and recalled of Sarah with skin peeled raw when the draped black towel came off which meant the waters tore her clothing, she left no garment in the boat, and she had gone away on her trip—

— oh please don’t, said Mel — without enough clothes, y’know — but after Dad Mel said she was in heaven, big brother Jim said, touching his half-brother’s shoulder (though Mel could touch Brad, too), No, Braddie, she’s O.K.

— no need for her to go on floating downward in your ill head, she had the water to float on, in, under, within, through, out through, so long as you got the basic info into your who where when lead—

— What? asks a now-long-unheard-from voice, a childlike interrogator who have overheard stuff not comprehensible or not especially desired— "What?" asks a kid watching TV — multiple kid dune homework with the sound off for a new wrinkle—

— No, she’s O.K., Braddie, she’s O.K.

Well’s far’s I’m concerned, said Dr. Herman, when Jim told him of Mel’s asseveration that most Armenians were Catholics, all Cartiolics are Armenians—have you ever had a real drink, Jimmy? and he bent to deftly lift from back of some other bottles ein quart applejack before Jim could start to describe Brad’s Day finishing off at the cemetery with a couple of snorts from Eukie’s small but somewhat inexhaustible bottle emerging from his voluminous coverall—"sirensuit" as it was called by Margaret (a great Chur-chillian sometimes though then she would see he was only history) and when Jim asked why "siren," Alexander said Churchill attracted all the ladies with that suit and looked like a baby in point of fact, and Margaret said Nonsense, the fact was that the siren was the air-raid warning and Churchill was always out among the people at those times and always wore that one-piece semi-military-fatigue coverall outfit — and Jim said, "Thanks, Gramma," and she said, "You’re welcome," he still visualized the Prince leaving in quest of the Princess, and the giant bird still adrift in that formidable western sky that at some margin, or set, of the light, became East, and the curious recovery of the Navajo Queen — curiouser and curiouser if you thought about it but he could stop thinking and he did stop asking:

And seldom asking his father, Mel, who didn’t relinquish the weekly newspaper for quite a time, questions he really wanted answers to and often thinking up questions about Windrow goings-on that Mel would have incorporated succinctly into the Democrat: a piner woman and her infant were found dead at the edge of the swamp west of Lake Rompanemus: in fact, the woman’s foot was in the water. Back in the woods the apparently sleeping body of a piner man, in fact dead, was found braced in the limbs of a tree near a burned cabin. (His clothes, Mel observed upon being asked by Jim what about him, were still damp, but there was no sign of foul play or water in the lung though no autopsies were held on three unknown piners.) Jim asked Sam, who for some reason had not told Jim that Sam’s uncle at the firehouse had heard about it at the Elks’ from Dr. Herman, who had been called by the police and had taken Cornelia with him and Cornelia who was in Miss Myles’s journalism class had turned in the brief article to Mel at the Democrat, which became briefer in the Democrat, though Miss Myles, who got this information out of Jim, could never persuade Cornelia to expand it into a feature piece. Jim saw waterflies playing on the murk near the dead woman and child, saw one waterfly carry some sultry irritation to the baby so it revived and opened its mouth but was capable only of silence. (The woman had shown signs of malnutrition and her hair was bedraggled. There were no plans to drag the swamp.) When confronted with such interesting news items strangely brief, Jim tended not to ask his father. If he got into talk with him it was maybe to tell him things like what would happen if the Earth slowed down rotating and stopped rotating when inertial momentum had been enough reduced so no one had been hurled off Earth’s surface—’cepting that this event occurred in a dream (though a daydream) Jim had which therefore he would never have told Mel and possibly would not have broached to his mother were she there still, or were she to appear on the roof in the middle of the night or in his framed picture of Sequoya, brave Cherokee linguist, gift from Alexander like the picture next to it of Andrew Jackson in a black coat looking pretty mad — the pictures done in the same year of 1821, according to Alexander; or Jim would tell his father there was "some crap" showing through the ceiling, a discoloration on the slanting, low, roof-squeezed ceiling above Brad’s bed — some rotten shingles out on the roof at that point and it would get worse — and Mel asked Jim (a rare asking, a rarely personal species of asking though father and son and densely aware, more than that, of each other) if Jim recalled how upset Sarah’d been when they came home from her group’s chamber recital at the Presbyterian church and the snow firm underfoot and the winter stars out and even with his tone deafness he’d told Sarah it was one of the memorable evenings of his life and she said Byron Kennett’s mother had come up after the quintet and told Sarah Sarah was making By fall in love with her, did Sarah know that? and she could see it in his eyes during the Mozart, she could see it in his eyes, and all Sarah could say was wasn’t Betty glad Byron was falling in love with someone safe— with a laugh! — but Betty got mad and said some fairly surprisingly final words and went away, and though Sarah, though bitchy, was enough in the right all right, she couldn’t get over it and got cold late in the evening and her fingers got blue, did Jimmy remember? not really except Mel had wanted to call the doctor—"my musical anemia," Sarah said, "my incurable blues" and she looked so young then, said Mel, like a little girl, younger than when I first knew her, but deathly pale though we knew what a toughie she was, climbing out on the roof to look at the shingles one spring and when Mel, whose slippers were always dark red leather, the best, and made of leather only (not the carpet-material-type slippers Alexander wore out onto the porch to go half-sideways like a sea captain or a sailor down the steps to retrieve the newspaper in the morning with the dew still icing the front lawn the deepest damp green), said if they didn’t reroof the house he’d have to waterproof his slippers, Sarah picked it up as lightly as one of her letters downtown to her father came up off the floor into his hand, and when Dr. Range in his yellow slicker came by when Brad had influenza and they were all there, Sarah said (and Mel said that’s the second time you got that wrong) that they were probably a leak-proof and dry house but Mel was the only man she could imagine waterproofing his carpet slippers, which got a laugh but not from Mel, who essentially clapped his hands and offered a sherry to the doctor who said he would love to but it was against his religion this early in the day whereupon Mel plucked the doctor’s yellow oil-slicker rainhat from the hall table where it hatched a massive paperweight with newsprint from the first, heavily Jacksonian issue of the Democrat sunk into it, and handed the slicker hat deftly to Dr. Range, whose services were not for very much longer sought by the Mayn family though Margaret and Alexander Mayne (with the e) went on with him nominally their physician for years, though Margaret, who was congenitally well and believed that there’s an awful lot of things in this world that’s your business and nobody else’s, couldn’t stand doctors doctoring — much less hospitals mined with bedpans, buzzing with thermometers that got shoved hither and yon, granted, by nurses that for all their hellish officiousness knew more than the doctors up to but not including slicing you open, which Margaret would never permit done on her, though she had had Sarah’s and Sarah’s sister’s tonsils out (well how many actual tonsils does that make?) — and it comes to us as if it were moving outward to our fingertips or had been on the tip of the tongue, a notorious nearness better located at the susceptibility threshold of the tastebuds — when ‘twas through Jim unbeknownst to him that we relations extracted clean clear and isolate Sarah’s "Well done," when Mel hadn’t flown the hat to Dr. Range’s head or done anything special, only wished it a bit fast perhaps from the mahogany table to the doctor’s living fingers, which is no sin.

No sin for Range to say Sarah might get out among people more than she did, for if anemia was anemia, blues didn’t help anemia, and though no longer called in after Sarah’s death, Range did offer to grandfather Alexander the morning after charges had not been preferred against Jim, against Bob, or against Anne-Marie Vandevere (the remarkably impassive one of the lot) the confidential opinion that Jim would land on his feet, the doctor had liked him ever since Jim had in his opinion quite possibly saved the young German girl who had been out of sight down in the meadow between the cemetery and the race track when she had been struck in the temple by the good doctor’s unseen golf ball that had sliced and sailed — took off and seemed to travel further than would a good shot, although there’s an illusion — through trees and into downhill sky, and all Jim saw was one girl in one meadow fall, drop, drop sideways, almost as if cleverly pouncing on something unknown there in the grasses: Jim had run to her, found her gagging, sensed her whole struggle, gone into her mouth with his fingers; had gotten her tongue forward, had started raising her hips, pressed some life into her (she seemed in a concussive shock) so that when the doctor, in search of his ball, came in view looking down to the right of the golf course and beyond this far end of the cemetery, the intent motion of the boy straddling the girl and the swift, sturdy approach through the field of that Ira Lee, the Indian kid (part-Indian? full-blooded halfbreed!) lacked any visible response from the girl lying in the field who was then, as if in death, the cause of Ira striking Jim across the side of the head for Jim went on trying, that is to revive the girl, and in fact never stopped although the doctor’s shout and Ira’s second thought saved Jim from a second blow; but judging from the examination at the hospital, she could have been in trouble if not found soon — she was a refugee, but not a German Jew — and Ira’s presence there never got explained any more than Jim’s, who came out the rescuer, but he never said how he came there, a fairly boring place to be, and this was long before his mother died — all in all, an impressive performance, the doctor emphasized to Alexander; that boy’s all right—

— an isolated incident of irresponsibility giving Anne-Marie the key to Bob’s pickup so she could get inside and wait, where presently Italo-American emotion found Dutch-settler property enclosed beautifully in the cab but not locked in, which inevitably if not fatally caused that scene to beget and to overflow into and to slide sideways curving into (out of nowhere) a next:

while Jim, from obstacle through obstacle rushing through his high school building at twin speeds too fast, too slow outward, unsure what’s wayside and what’s way, how much to love his mother gone, how deeply to give his father thought, how much weight the motion he had experienced above the smudged Windrow, New Jersey, lens guarding the earth-colored corrugations of a continent of South America donated by — he forgot — how much to blame his grandmother Margaret for being the East Far Eastern Princess who in her turn couldn’t tell him quite where she was Margaret or how she was her own mother or what was so and what wasn’t and so he had thought, hell, he didn’t want any more of that story stuff, he’d close that out and about time: and there in one place was coach telling him to get off the glass, then finding stuff coming out of his mouth about it being Jim’s girl (but only the one he knew about) that he hadn’t first thought about, re: Jim; and there in another was an absolutely pooped Mr. Quirk (Jim’s summer employer’s brother) who had only three in his Solid class and had been ordered to remove the otherwise much-laughed-at sign over his door "let no one ignorant of geometry enter here"; and there in another place whizzing by was the tall young legislative principal Thompson Fulkerand, columnar, firm as stone, exactly half-bald, and the equally tall, majestically material Pearl W. Myles, and they ain’t talking about the weather but it’s bad whatever it is, there’s the eye in the back of Fulkerand’s head for half an instant jolting Jim as he bounds by so fast only the word "criminal" in no doubt "Well I’m not a criminal, Miss Myles" or "It’s criminal what’s done to gain favor with the student body" gets into the strong, fast, angry boy’s head; there’s the occasional, laughable seventh sense in Jim that at least for the time being he, or the world-altering episode he’s in, is insane; there’s Mel’s all-too-brief obit for his wife, black-edged oblong on the second page a stone’s throw from the masthead, that Jim was not asked about but, after the fact, when asked by Alexander (in Mel’s presence, for Alexander did that) if Mel’s piece seemed O.K. with him, Jim called it "short and sweet" and never spoke of it again — locked it in; and there’s the order in which people came to Brad’s Day: there’s Alexander, his shined shoe-toes sticking out while he peruses a book about Indian music and smells very faintly of peanut butter he keeps in his shop; there’s Brad, so set apart by his own hand, his own act, of legs, neck, head, stomach, voice, playing hookey some might say; elsewhere, though same room, there’s Mel reporting a chance today of a hurricane originating astoundingly along the mid-Atlantic coast, and Margaret, shocked she said at Mel, then ovaling her mouth, though she didn’t ring true, while that weather reporter’s hand made a rare trip to the small of Brad’s or anyone’s back; and then, blink, there’s the sound heard at a distance but not a close-up, an illustration of which Pearl Myles from on gentle high asked for as part of her tall kindness to Jim and the family; and always there, central and invisible, is Brad sometimes swimming, the way any swimmer will use the floor for training and support, though not much on breathing, though ‘twas heavy:

For as we breathe, so shall we move, but upon moving, we go on of force breathing—

— on the move? the interrogator tries out idiomatically echoing in warped unison Mel’s "on the move?" at the bedroom doorway and Jim had abruptly quarter-turned to catch his father in the corner of his eye, then continued laying out every bit of his clothing on the bed beside a suitcase and a largest-size old khaki scout knapsack, he had three pairs of narrow khakis, he had five white T-shirts, he had four pairs of colored boxer shorts and two white jockey, he had three pairs of washed denim jeans, one of them Army-Navy store bell-bottoms, he had a maroon V-neck sweater raveled at one wrist, a yellow cashmere sweater (you said sweater) his aunt sent him from Boston that he never wore, and a tight-fitting scratchy, very warm blue-black turtleneck Navy sweater that Margaret had just last week brought him from the City; he had a washable seersucker jacket that he could wear certain evenings this coming summer if he had to, and for shirts he had a fine-red-white-and-blue-checked button-down, a blue Oxford button-down, a white tab-collar shirt with a light-brown stripe, and a regular white button-down; he looked at the closet and around at his open bureau drawers and answered his father: "Yeah, seeing what I got." His father had had a (his "warm weather") haircut, which enlarged his square head and broad-chinned face. Behind Mel, or around him, the sound of frying was audible, for Brad was a capable cook and, flicking the pan butter with a (with "his") spatula up over the yolk and unsettled white, would fry himself an egg in the afternoon and sandwich it between two slices of Tip Top bread, the egg of which Jim now smelt, and saying Brad made him hungry and was there any peanut butter left which he knew there was, he stepped around his father who sort of got out of the doorway. In the morning there’s Brad looking at Jim when Jim comes in for a fast glass of milk, Brad slowly chewing a mouthful of cereal in the quiet of the sunny kitchen so sounds like Braddie’s got nuts in his cereal or bones — whole animals, for God’s sake — while looking, looking, looking, munch, munch at his big brother (How ya doin’, Brad, you glutton!) and less fugitive and meaningless and exactly not to be turned away from, the dark red wool skirt (her mom did weaving as a hobby) of Anne-Marie Vandevere sitting on his right in the pickup truck (how did he drive it so many times right in town?), the cloth tight across her thighs and knees and lap you could tap like a drum but there must be a tunnel underneath right up because of the cloth not hanging down the way it sometimes did, he’s not sure how much he’s going to get this afternoon? why no practice that afternoon? — either it’s very late or it’s Sunday — and he’s eating an apple or something sweeter, he can’t quite recall, not what Anne-Marie thought or said about his mother’s drowning though he didn’t go out with her till just after, and not worth recalling, obstacle upon obstacle, but it’s his life, he feels years later, and there it was in all its minor trivia as vivid as fact in suspension ("Suspense," said Ted, "but did Anne-Marie ever say anything?" — and both men, aware of the Chilean journalista between them who smiled at her drink, knew the difference between saying that about an adult and, here, of Anne-Marie—"Oh she often spoke, and she’d have thought it out and she’d begin by saying, ‘You know. .’ and you listened.").

It was later like he’d turned to these facts, all scattered and all the more exact and kind of meaningless, yet horrendous, funny — he’d imagine the entire life of the Stormer woman (going far away from her home and feeling occasionally guilty, and bearing a child and then another child conceived in marriage while perhaps her doctor-husband watched, watched her being a good doctor’s wife or falling out of love with him without knowing if it was him as a man or as a medicine man), the woman who married the hairy, intensely hard-working doctor ("workaholic" we always say now in the mid-eighth decade of a century that threatens to see life itself as a drug), in Chicago they lived, and Leona who on a visit to Windrow parents ran into Sarah and seemed not to be insulted by her one day in the old, still drugstore that was also a soda fountain and afterward Jim asked his mom if he could have a Clark bar and she paid for it with the tears in her eyes and then needed a bite of it, raising her lipsticked lip a shade above the upper teeth looking along her nose at it. Jim aimed the balled wrapper at the trash can and it missed and landed on the white tiles that weren’t as much like bathroom tiles as was the facing in the barbershop from linoleum floor up to the counter.

Yet Flick Mayn, the daughter of Jim, once wrote for herself to give to her dad ridding she hoped some need from not just her system, why was it insulting to say to Leona Stormer, "It isn’t that I feel much for you; you take me back, that’s all you do—" but it’s honest—and your mother cried—

— which she never did, said Mayn, and granted she did say "that’s a hell of a lot to make me do," I think she said that—

— damn right she said that, said the daughter never flinching from (well) someone else’s life, but she meant "taking her back": that was the "hell of a lot" she meant, and I think you knew that, Dad.

No. . no — which was how Mel habitually responded to someone’s opinion, even on special occasions a cluster of facts reported to him, such as that Sarah when she played the piano, which wasn’t her first instrument, was able to see places she had never been to, markets full of red beets in a Polish village, the Chicago wind from the north raking the lake into white flesh, grouped skeletons down a mine, and when Brad looked at Mel saying gently, No… no… his brother Jim fighting mad, said back at Mel, Yes. Yes. Yes, to which Mel answered Jim, What do you mean? How do you know? Whereupon Jim seemed to surprise Mel by saying, I was there when she said it, she said it to me and Brad — upon which Mel was just able to smile, Well if she thought so. .

You can just about take an insult from an adult who will at least not decorroborate what you have testified when he, or his relief, inquired who’s doing the script for the opera-ette we’d cited entitled Hamlet?

But Alexander, whom Flick came to know in his ninety-second and ninety-third years (concluding postscript years, not twilit so much as noisier, que brujo, what din, as he lost his sight and turned the radio up and up and discovered music all over again — Alexander no more meant to insult Brad by removing the Densmore book he had loaned to Sarah a decade before than to dishonor Brad’s Day (quite the reverse) by bearing upon his person a simple smell of peanut butter from his supply downtown, which was neither here nor there:

The Indians of course lacked peanut butter, or the demand for it, to begin with, though the jojoba bean, a very buffalo among vegetables, not in that they used all of it which wasn’t the feat that totaling a buffalo was, but in that the jojoba got them through many a weekly problem, from shampoo to the generally unknown desert fish fry, when these deep-underground travelers found their way or it found them up into the warmed waters of the high cacti, raised the level and brinked the pressure of these standing reserves and ceremonially leapt from cactus "eyes" we name them, openings sometime occupied by owlbirds, one at a time unless we include the biggest-ever elf owl that Mena the itinerant zoologist had seen, plugging that particular hole clearly, yet, in the dusk, darkly when contrasted to the visible but illusory wash of moon-stark dawn-lumen literally coating the cactus trunk as the real light otherwise diminished: for that elf owl would not have budged for a pressure of fish risen inside that cactus except to fly at the eye of some night camper Anglo or Indian glinting in the flash of jojoba oil awaiting that desert fish fry so unknown even Mena had not witnessed it (hence the importance of judging comparative descriptions), and the Hermit-Inventor of the East said he had not witnessed it but Marcus Jones was more to be believed, a plainer, less potent figure so that when little Flick ran off outside to see what her younger brother was doing around or under that house where Alexander still lived though now with supervision, the name of that west-renowned botanist who found, and found names for, even unknown growths of locoweed so that his feats of broken-ground bicycling south of Salt Lake City and, monumentally, still south, are overlooked, brought from old Alexander, who was just turning the radio volume dial up again a generous exclamation, Oh Marcus Jones! (as if to say with distant softness, My old friend!) he was real, you know, that was him, with his field work in Colorado, you only see that book in French, (slowly) last day of April, the air perfumed you know, the sunny white flowers and the silver stems of the poisonous loco, and the Spanish bayonets, reaching an eminence, lights across a mesa—

— he remembered that? the thirty-odd-year-old grandson inquired.

But only that, came the reply, all else is gone, like your daughter just now, and the volume dial turned delicately while the man in carpet slippers who had been bald through four decades "quoted" a mass of dark rocks. . gigantic walls half ruined, some ancient cathedral. . good stuff, lifting sadly in the wind its proud debris notched and made jagged or something by the puissant hand of time — Ute Pass by horse, and so forth, and I have no reason to suppose your grandmother didn’t really know him, he was out there in the late seventies and the eighties and he’s up at the Sperry Glacier in Montana twenty, thirty years later — but in the late seventies he changed to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at Kansas City… is it possible that Colorado is more beautiful than Iowa? he asks, and you don’t have to go there to say with him you bet your life.

Upon the sinking of Sarah’s teeth into the outer-skinned chocolate of the Clark bar on into the honey-colored brown-sugar-crumble inside you would not build a broken marriage, or a self-destroy scenario either. Yet you won’t go so far as to say you’d have ruled out Sarah’s leaving her husband one way or another. Taking the boys with her? Hard to imagine her taking Jim; in the end he would not go. Why is another question. Not loyalty to Mel. Nor to the town, for what is loyalty to a town? get out your hose and have a speed contest outside the fire station once a year against fire companies in English-town, Toms River, Holmdel. Grease a pole and set the duck or flag at the top. Loyalty to a place and time: Jim would have been able amidst the madness to say I’m not goin’. And in his heart would be, Not yet. But then she had gone, she had gone. He couldn’t have foreseen it, could he? Not in the drugstore the Leona Stormer day of the enforced sharing of the Clark bar. He just saw Willy and Wally pass by the bright drugstore doorway in the downtown direction running in step and he knew where they were running and he didn’t recall what it was all about: years later, fallen forth into other lives, he lighted Mayga’s cigarette, an American cigarette for a change, and he said to Mayga that he could see his mother’s mouth, teeth, infinitesimally nose-crossed eyes watery still, but no fingers. Mayga told him he’s so precise on what’s not there, while she waves away her smoke and not into but away from his face. Oh, you see, I was feeding her, that’s how I recall it. Nonsense, said Mayga.

Oh Christ, you’re right, he said. Let’s, she said, get back to the libration-space future you’ve already had. Let’s get, he asked, back?

But if these sole things were there to turn to instead of the something identified as real that Margaret a trifle throatily (especially for her) said existed there in the cemetery where they had stood on Brad’s Day before the others moved Brad’s Day to the cemetery, there surely were people to turn to if he wanted; but he couldn’t. He couldn’t want. And not just Byron Kennett, who put his sensitive arm like water around Jim’s broad, strong shoulders and said, If Jimmy ever needed to talk. . well By was comfortable like a fly winging softly in a calm room.

Do you mean, demands the duty interrogator, that the effeminate Byron man was like a fly, was comfortable, was a room in himself?

We can’t answer — for we changing from angel into Jim sometimes find or hear only the moment and the words of its impulse, we’re not explaining.

But there were others. He made a one-quarter turn and it was Brad staring at him from a nest of garden hose a-coil beside the house: "You goin’ somewhere, Jimmy?"

(Why naturally.) "We’re havin’ pork chops tonight."

(Kid brother; no mean chef; acting like a mom, but nothing like theirs, who knew freedom and wouldn’t ask where you goin’ and Jim would never catch her sweeping his bedroom floor.)

And there’s Margaret: he made a half-turn in the leaf-windowed silence of chewing down a kitchen doughnut, and she broke her mood and whanged a n’innocent fly off the white icebox (real icebox on porch, pale-brown unfinished wood with inset panels and two big sections, upper and lower, what timeless comfort that icebox with butter and apples and he didn’t know what in the lower, and a great cake of ice mysteriously and ceremonially alive, a treasure that never needed to blink its eye) — well, this was a summer later and he had a job down ‘t the shore swizzling Tom Collinses at a hotel with a long, long sanctuary porch of rockers where the older ladies sat in their white unbuttoned sweaters, he liked the people on that porch and he came out with his tray and walked to them and they enjoyed especially receiving their drinks watching the wind ruffle the American flag on the pole, he knew that was partly it, while the sun settled lower off to the extreme right, around the bay.

And there was Bob Yard, with whom he did talk, and a lot, and some about Sarah. But then how can you? You just do. Except in Bob his mother came out quirky, and not even… he did not have the word in those days, and sexy wasn’t the word. . "sensual," he said to Mayga later, realizing as he did so that Mayga was "sensual" less mysteriously than his maddeningly gentle wife, Mayga was "there" — he let her be — and he would go to bed with her if he suddenly asked and she wanted to but he never stressed it, and then they did go once, and then it was valedictory, which is very very risky, like looking for special large last words on your deathbed and not settling for what you already know, but no, it turned out to be friendly and miraculous, no doubt the Grace Kimball that Mayn later heard about and came closer and closer to would have said Exciting one-night stand for crying out loud: but it wasn’t anything like that: it was love: and he loved his wife, too: and it was another form of. . well Sarah came out exciting, behind Bob’s memories told frankly sometimes to Jim, the son of Bob’s illicit paramour, my God! are they talking? — well, why not? — quirky and exciting and, yes, magical: and Bob did not know about when she went to France for a few months in 1925 in a carefully supervised program for music studies at Fontainebleau checked out by Margaret so that little but the music was left to chance, and that time evidently meant a lot to Sarah though Boulanger and other mysterious teachers were what Jim recalled her talking about when he didn’t know much about music or care, at least about the violin — he came, eventually, to care about cabaret piano, the super-involved departures and the root simplicities of it all such as the first, perfectly scale-like six-syllable progression of "She dances overhead" (followed by "on the ceiling near my bed"), "Dancing on the Ceiling," a very sexy song half-clothed in the airs and imminences of romantic touch: and one day in Paris Jim woke up knowing that Sarah’s feeling, hardly communicated to him, about Fontainebleau in 1925 or so, was unchecked in him at that moment in a large bed under a comforter in the vicinity of those very few articles of rather heavy dark hotel-room furniture and the sound of cars revving that could not touch him because he was looking at the curtain veiling the ironwork of the narrow balcony you could hardly step out on, and he was due at the airport in the late afternoon and thought today, yes, he would go further out and take a look at Fontainebleau — it was on the way to places that he picked up, according to Joy, his wife, what he really had to report — or left it (he retorted, because wasn’t she putting down his profession such as it was?), and the French journalist he was supposed to be meeting at the airport who wanted to ask him what would happen to top-priority French plans for ballistic-missile submarines if the Russians were to wangle out of Washington an agreement to reduce general western strategic strength changed his schedule and went with Jim to Fontainebleau and during that visit asked many things, had Mayn ever opened Henry Adams? ever been down to the Maginot Line to have a look? try Brittany in January, see Mont Saint Michel and eat very well — but never mentioned a submarine till they were on their way to Orly after a fish lunch that left Jim liking France and still wondering exactly where his mother had lived, he could have checked, it was a school: Jim had never, he realized, thought about his mother fondled by a man or sinking her teeth into a (Clark bar) neck or shoulder, Jim had only his own experience to go on at fifteen, but it was pretty good, he thought about it in a lot of pictures that didn’t easily go away but also didn’t think about it at all, was in casual shock, it was pretty good, better than he grinningly let on to Sammy, who chose himself a girl nobody thereafter would have dared call a pig (which she wasn’t), but she certainly was plain (as the older generation would say it) a very plain girl who also said kissing his way was unsanitary but Sam loved dancing with her slowly with his right hand firm at the downward limit of the small of her back just where the flesh flared beneath clothing, though, as Sammy reported, nothing much was happening — he liked Margaret, that was her name and she had thick, raspy red hair and got brown not burnt-pink at the beach like her brother, who played tennis and got razzed by the guys behind the fence of the town court for playing a fruity game, spring being bad enough but fall too. Jim had never seen his mother undressed and whatever he pictured out of Braddie’s dream he himself didn’t see his mother bloated, salted, or wafted deeply and coldly by the Atlantic Ocean out and back, out and back, though he half-saw her in her panties a few times, hips a little larger than he had expected, shoulders defenseless (—It is true of women, says the interrogator; Crap, we say to him, in your country all people are defenseless).

(On the contrary, the currency is at last defended, thanks to your remarkably durable republic — with panties on, but turned away): only in his mind if he was honest, her back to him and he didn’t see Bob Yard in the daydream and knew him to be somewhere where he would never see Bob’s face, Didn’t remember the first days at school after Sarah’s suicide; felt he could—but didn’t want to, possibly. He did miss his mother’s. . privacy: what a thing to miss! he had his own, and plenty of it; and one day twenty years later he wondered what his daughter’s ever sharp view would be of her father’s mother doing that.

So he didn’t turn to others, the ones that seemed logical to. But Sammy was the only one he remembered like a daydream in retrospect coming up to him and saying, I’m sorry. And he shook Jim’s hand and there were tears right under his old eyes but none in ‘em. Jim and his mother never cried. Well, obviously Jim — that is, didn’t. And this was something the grandmother stated, one time, and it was true enough. Three girls wrote notes to Jim that went out of his head though he recalled the notepaper, one with rabbits on it in the margins, the others with little pink and (/or?) yellow flowers. Anne-Marie didn’t write him a condolence (he learned the word) message, but came to the house the second day when there was still some awful expectancy, and she walked into the living room where Alexander sat and Margaret was in the kitchen and Mel and Brad were there (long before Brad’s Day — a month to be approximate) and Jeanette Many was teary and Byron Kennett and his mother were alternating on the theme of who could have predicted it, and Anne-Marie coming forward reached and hugged Jim and then she kissed him three kisses on the mouth, each one longer, which could not create anything but silence, hence acceptance — jokes would have been out of place; then Anne-Marie took Jim’s hands with a happy smile that brought courage for the unknown, not sadness — dole — for tragedy, and she said softly, "I don’t want to stay here, but I did want to give you a big kiss. If you want to take a walk, come over. You know what I mean," which was all she meant. He was part of her life, she part of his, but no real sweat at all: maybe it meant she wasn’t going to get tied up with any fellow for a long time; Jim never did find out if there was an answer like that with Anne-Marie, they just weren’t together later on: but now they were, yet with a happy knowledge he took so for granted it forgot itself, like the inequality of his not giving a damn when he found Brad going through some papers and stuff he’d brought back from the shore — until later (in Anne-Marie’s case, twenty years later, and then he tried to understand how they had been so warm and cool at the same time; it was sex (going all the way), respect, a slight subtlety on each side; but in Brad’s, the unequal, case, maybe a couple of days later) he found some joint of his mind wham! remembering for him:

In the daydream of retrospect — to continue, to continue, to continue, to get anyway to this end at the risk of being less and less (than) succinct — his mother’s bare back was to him as we have known him to say to Mayga and to his much-loved wife, and he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find his mother’s — oh yeah he couldn’t find Bob Yard in this, the daydream, who was so vivid, so living, as opposed to the bare back and elsewhere directed shoulders and hips that were full of oh full of—

— you cannot easily say, said Mayga, for who could?

— something, said Mayn quickly, that’s it, thanks, kid, expectancy, full of some expectancy that—

— this is your mother? did I say "expectancy"?

— sure, sure, and I’ve got the words now, but—

— You had the experience then, said Mayga, never rushing him but giving him or taking from him a lessening of time, as if she would look at her watch, ah her watch, her watch—

Oh he wasn’t remembering stuff he hadn’t remembered, for he had always had his mind inside this time of his life; that "true" daydream had come, there wasn’t much to know about it.

They all laughed at a thing he said, bartender, Mayga, Spence at the end of the bar that always seemed underground or optically curious; a bearded man with a newspaper; and another bearded man just entering from the hotel lobby, who laughed for no more reason than to join in or lest the joke be on him if he didn’t, or out of good spirits, though when he sat up beside the other bearded man and they at once began conversing in tight order it wouldn’t have been good spirits, no, upon which Ted appeared from the lobby with, for a change, a real grown woman at his side, not one of his gals who always made such a rotten impression at first and eased into their natural grain later in the evening when it might be too late — but what did Jim say to make them laugh?

— full of expectancy, the room the day Anne-Marie Vandevere kissed him "in public," for Sarah might still be found, and full of expectancy, that strange bare back, in the daydream somehow, missing Bob Yard, a daydream as still as if the dreamer were she and in motion, opening the front door with the upper reaches of the house as empty-feeling as the front hall, familiar with its mahogany table, mirror, carpet with Persian prayer rug on top of it, his new raincoat hanging outside beside the mirror where he’d left it forty-eight hours ago after returning discreetly from the shore, and the paperweight as blunt and uninstrumental and as ugly and second-hand-looking and never really old as ever — a hall (nothing underlined) the same as it had been a month ago when Sarah had departed in her own direction, he looked at the pictures on the hall walls seeing them more than when her mother Margaret was there; and, electing to go (to bound but not to bound) upstairs, instead of to the kitchen, he took two stairs, then one, then paused like a back-diver adjusting his balance, and knew that the absence of Bob Yard from the daydream detail of the lady in panties only and with her back to him, his mother’s shoulders he was quite sure, and dark hair, was hard to get out of his head and he had been entertaining alternative explanations as the source of the daydream forty-eight or so hours ago — what the hell might as well play detective to the hilt: (entering house, starting to throw off coat off both shoulders at once is hit in face and midsection arms pinned) — sheer story!

He felt he had been preceded, and often thereafter. Someone had been there ahead of him. Well, he had been delayed getting there. Pearl Myles ("Pearl," as the class called her offstage) had asked for an imaginary news story (evidently nothing happening in town), what a contradictory assignment, said Mel (his father), to whom Jim could not say that with all his own practical physical confidence he left that classroom and stopped, bumped by a couple of guys, and stood nauseatingly alone for a moment losing everything to something, but what? and then he knew it was embarrassment, mortifying, over his mother: and not that it was suicide (recalling Alexander crying in the kitchen very, very briefly, with the words "How can those boys stand it? — why, I can’t accept it, I can’t accept it ever, Margaret, not ever") — but no, it was embarrassment at her being not present any more—

Letting the family down, responds some former interrogator, and rubs his chin and glances "out" into a closed-circuit screen where those "presently" contained in the local stadium that can "seat" a hundred thousand (and stand more) are playing soccer, but he gets no confirmation nor does he himself need any that he is correct in his judgment of this woman whose name temporarily escapes him.

A woman also in a raincoat who when Jim thanked her for stopping asked if he was wet and when he said he wasn’t sure if it was raining, she stopped her wipers and together in the front seat as they accelerated they watched a mist grow on the windshield which was "rain all right," Jim said. She sat pressed back against the seat, keeping the wheel at arm’s length well almost. She asked where he lived, whether he’d had a good summer, wasn’t it good we’d had the atom bomb, that is, to use — and what was his favorite subject, or was it too soon to tell, or was it always the same subject. Something had to happen, which was why Jim had decided to revisit Sarah’s point of departure. Something. Anything. For nothing was happening at home, except Brad came into his room and asked about this, that, and the other like touching things.

Jim got a hard-on but his new raincoat covered it. She never asked what he was doing hitching down to the shore on a rainy September day, or what his name was, but they laughed at a billboard and five Burma Shave signs that made up a sentence, and his hard-on had gone down all by itself as warm, though, now as before, and a boy and girl happily huddled in the jouncy back of a pickup truck they passed; the woman drove Jim an extra eleven and four-tenths miles and though she wasn’t old her nose looked tired, like some stuff or material or other, while her cheek was soft and tan; and when she shook hands with him when he got out he liked her tits filling her yellow silk blouse and after she made her U-turn they waved. No one need ever know he’d come to Mantoloking, and then he got mad, being alone, and wondered if he could get in a few good jabs at least at Bob if they had it out. You could call it hate, and he cut off around and through to the small road, and up through to the beach that was bright without the light of brightness. Jim wanted to swing at somebody (maybe just play catch). Then he saw that it was the future, this decision to investigate the place where he suspected there was nothing, nothing to be found. A man was fishing. He knew the man. The woman would not have waved had she thought Jim was a detective. The cottages back on the bay side were many of them still not boarded up. The man turned about, with his eye on the end of his rod like it’s alive, and came suddenly through but slowly and methodically hurling his line far out, beyond the second swell back of the first breaker—"comber," Mel his father had called it, and somehow Jim always remembered remembering his father who did not swim calling it that (though he could, undoubtedly, swim).

You might have an accident if you lived alone and you’d rot in your room and you became luminous. The man was a brother-in-law of the man who owned the gray dory that needed a bottom coat in August and probably still did. Jim knew this so well. Jim didn’t know the man to speak to and figured the man didn’t know him and had no reason to change his judgment in this regard. The man was built like Jim, or like Jim was going to be — that is, broad, stocky though not less than more or less medium height. Jim had not wished to listen to the subject of their eventually finding Sarah much less go and ask Lester Coombes, the jowly, long-legged chief of police down at the Courthouse. His mother was here in the sand.

She was on a towel in the sun and he saw her fingers, her hand thrashing as she threatened him with his name as if she would actually do anything if he fell upon Brad, and, moving toward the man who now cast again as rain again fell, but the man passed the least additional second aware of the other person approaching, though from the direction a mile from here of the bend and the breakwater and the pier down came two, three walkers slowly as if they might never get here — Jim passed over the exact place where he had stuck like a pole at an angle in the sand though he would never have hurt or anyway murdered his little brother, who would have his day beyond all this feeling after Sarah’s going, a feeling that could well be the crap about eternity the minister "put into words" (as Barcalow Brandy wine in a black suit with this time a tie like one of his horse- or Indian-blanket sport jackets, done in a Windsor knot—"He surely put it into words") — so it must have been there and might be "Still out there?" he said to the man in boots and olive-green slicker reeling his line. "All winter if you got the circulation for it," the man said and at his voice some dumb gulls yelled against the breeze, and an image of his mother went away, but he’d been getting this foreign one with panties and bare back and Bob Yard went away with her — where? over to get clams or ice cream at Mantoloking pier? clear down the coast hugging it as far’s you could go? but he thought they had never done that kind of thing together, at least she played badminton a few times with Mel who moved well and had a wicked wrist. Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, look out, you’d get in there and go so deep you’d never stop falling, long’s your rate of descent was controlled. A swarthy man walked near them out of nowhere, dark, "darkened by some centuries-old desert," Jim one day recalled the scene for Mayga, who was made uncomfortable by this particular (circa-VJ-Day) slice of the small-town Mayns, and he knew it and later felt that he had guessed why fifteen (sixteen, seventeen) years before knowing Mayga whose conversation, occasional as these drinks together actually were, might get him feeling unfaithful, and her discomfort made him secretly mad this time quite a while after the U-2 but Spence was at the end of the bar, one of the few actual times Spence was there, when Mayn said what the boy (a smaller shape of him, or was he, the grownup, the smaller? they were in each other for good and sure and goddamn sure) said to the man fishing, who each time Jim looked at his face seemed to look back at Jim though he didn’t, "Did you ever know anyone who drowned out at sea?" — "And never washed ashore?" said the man, and bobbed his rod and kept reeling. Yes, had the man ever known anyone that that happened to? but he said, No, not known, though he thought it wasn’t as bad as many deaths, and, as if changing the subject, the man said, "Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that." And Jim, abandoning private detection though glad of his raincoat because of the wind even rainless, asked if a body would sink and later rise, or what, and if the man had seen bodies come ashore, and the man half turned to speak, then turned to look at Jim (or like a silent version of when Mel was saying to Jeanette Many, "It was a mistake" — "A terrible one," added Jeanette so quiet you had only faith that you’d heard her—"She didn’t die, she didn’t die, Jeanette, she didn’t do that" (Jeanette’s long and amazingly narrow hand on his wrist) when Margaret entered and said gently, "You mean maybe she didn’t know what she was doing; but remember, she did it, not you," so that Mel looked up in surprise, the editor of the Democrat, crying again, and said, "Do what?" — that is, the brother-in-law of "the boat" Sarah had in some fashion used was saying, by not saying, You’ll live with whatever it is; and you can.

So that after passing back down the bay-bungalow road up to the pier and breakwater and asking nonchalantly if the police had ever questionedpeople about the woman who committed suicide and the man had laughed, a commercial fisherman, and said there was things that matter more and wasn’t the boat found a ways down Barnegat from here? owner was lucky it wound up on that spit — police found a note in an airmail envelope (man laughed but) — people are people, the boy flared back and the man in sudden defense of what he probably did not know stepped forward, and Jim thought of stepping back, but the man said, "What’s the matter kid, eh?" and although Jim did not know a good answer he knew what to do, without knowing.

"You bastard," Jim shoved the man in the chest so he moved, and Jim ran, he didn’t recall even turning to run. I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people it seems. The man had boots on. In motion, it was no contest, except much depended on the man’s unwillingness to go beyond a boundary that was in Jim’s mind, and it was a measure of the man’s rock-bottom interest in the event. But Jim felt the same even when the man gave up and Jim wasn’t hearing the great whishing silences between when one boot hit the ground stride for stride and when the next. But Jim ran like the halfback he was, because detectives didn’t run, they stepped behind something. (Ted: He ran like a Seminole through the woods with Andy Jackson whooping after him. Mayga: He ran because he wanted to get somewhere else! Spence, end of bar: Ran like your little brother trying to keep from getting beat up. What’s it to you, Spence? Oh, man tells me his story. Other people’s families, you know. Stick to your own. Wish I knew where they were. Breaking my heart, Spence. You ain’t got a heart, Mayn.)

Someone says (and it’s a multiple child that is growing up staggered): The boy meant not only that his mother mattered but so did the man in front of him. He shoved him, which is like pointing except the thing you mean is too close up but it’s better than having to wait till you know his name.

Well, what’d he do? asked Sam the next afternoon. Stopped running: he musta got a hernia in those boots, he was just standin’ around fartin’ enjoyin’ life, but he was a bastard.

Yeah, he musta been.

So you went down t’ the shore.

Yeah.

I’d agone with you.

That airmail envelope, Jesus, said Jim.

The guy laughing, you mean.

Yeah.

He’s a bastard, yeah, said Sam, who knew about Jim all Jim had to tell and that was a lot, though not Margaret’s Indian crap.

Jim came off the pier running easy, and passed up along the bay cottages. After a minute he walked and cut through to the beach again. He always recalled the horizon the hot day his mother stared at it irritated and alone upon her familiar black towel and he had to look away from her to see what she was looking at. But now the gray receding sight threw at his eyes a wake of sharp wind, and he knew that the man on the pier wouldn’t have talked like that if he’d known who he’s talking to. But is that the way it is? But here on the beach with the wind asking nothing but hitting the eye like a chemical not quite healthy given off at great speed by the horizon, Jim knew there’s two systems, and the man on the pier would have been O.K. if he’d been switched onto the other, which his grandmother surely knew ‘bout ‘cause she blinkety-blinked around between the East Far Eastern Princess and the Margaret who got more freedom running off from Chicago in ‘93, and then onward largely alone to the meat packers of Omaha and the loco weeds of the stony West, than Sarah ever got when she came of age because Margaret was a suffragette but not notably at home; but if his grandma knew the two systems she must have known she must have known, she must have known — have to get to the point, said Mel, when Brad to whom Jim had spoken of the odd brevity of the little "box" about the dead piners asked Mel what Jim could not ask— have to be concise, succinct, compact, terse, pared-down, compressed, succinct, short, concise—

— she must have known (as Jim found the other man, the fisherman brother-in-law, gone, and felt that this trip to the pier and back was coming around in cold, dumb circle ‘cept more a doubled half-circle round to the pier and back again that could have been a full and single circle only by sea, by having a sea half), she must have recognized the other possibility (and Jim looked quickly around him, we already remember, for he in us and we in him have needed help who are relations but relations that sometimes we have yet to have or that loom away in the offing, which must be a sea term we almost remember — help seeing in the absence of the other man a sign that this might not be just where the fisherman had stood) that, as the Navajo Prince learned upon acquiring that pistol shadowed by the double moon, a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer had been given it on the deathbed of a white man who gave it as an evil charm while lying that it was donation to the T.D.’s clown art of acting out awfully their worst nightmares and daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out all except the fingertips whose whorl prints showed the path of the winds at the time of creation — and if she didn’t recognize that secret possibility, well Jim was all by himself anyway, in his raincoat that he liked the deep pockets and crisp fabric of, and was turning away from the scene not of the crime because there had been only the starting here, though a leaving of the note in the unstamped airmail envelope for someone she hardly knew who hadn’t kept an eye on her taking the boat out through the low surf, or how had she done it? well she did it—

She had help, came a voice from bar’s end—

— She left the suicide note to the owner of the boat, for crying out loud?

— But you didn’t stay angry at your grandmother Margaret. . (for Mayga didn’t ask why he’d been angry)

Oh no, said Jim, shaking his head humorously, we were pals, and I was going far to see the land, as Owl Woman, remember her? said, while back in my house (what was it? — no takers even from bar’s end) the songs are intermingling (he laughed open-heartedly), and Margaret pointed out how I was doing some of the intermingling, I remember because later before she died we had a similar reckoning up — I can hear her on Brad’s Day walking all the way back with me from the cemetery saying I never told you anything about a second origin of that pistol, the first one was perfectly satisfactory, or you found it so when you were a little boy — for Jim had asked if it was true that the Princess’s prospective mother-in-law got better when the Prince and Princess cleared out, and the resurrection led back to the Prince’s pistol which really belonged to a lot of people for even Harflex of Choor had had it in his hand and after saying cruelly and angrily, Why did she have to go telling him all that stuff? he added the Thunder Dreamer’s connection with the pistol and Margaret said with equal irritation, I never told you that—

And it would have gone further but, shaking his fifteen-year-old fists out to sea, and roaring and screaming, hurting his throat, he never remembered what into the wind or winds that blew some damp self into his dry eyes, his mother gone, leaving not a crumb of ice-cream cone, that nice woman, and taking nothing with her not even that half a humid pickle in its paper on the thwart of an everlastingly damned dory which should have arched its gunwales and told her No, don’t do this, don’t do this, lady — a man’s voice from behind Jim called and he turned to see the brother-in-law fisherman beckoning and he went sheepishly but when he got to the red-slatted sand-drift fence in front of that beach house, the man said, Aren’t you the Mayn boy? asking a fact that Jim wrote down in his notebook verbatim that night. Aren’t you the Mayn boy? (as we ghosted him prolixly, to be in the very difficulty of what it is to be) but giving what Jim ever after knew was almost love, from a stranger, a stranger with no hole in his head and no double moon in his brown eye and cheek stubble, inquiring if Jim would join him in a cup of canned Manhattan clam chowder, but who asked Jim what he knew he’d been asking to be asked — so that it wasn’t until he got into the front hall at home in Windrow two days later, and stared at his new raincoat that had been hanging there since he got home from the beach almost two days before, that his daydream of a near-naked mother (never turning around yet turning and turning and turning in the sea like just a body) returned together with, again, the absence of Bob Yard and the emptiness of this house especially where he went, seeing the panties, the spinal line, the shoulder not now bent to the ear as when she played the violin, the fiddle, but straight and lost, waiting, waiting, while Jim took the stairs and slowed waiting to hear something was waiting up there so it’s too little to think about coupled with too much, like twenty lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snowbound he had to memorize by next week (not only memorize but remember!) when he didn’t like poetry period: So that when he heard a rustling upstairs so that he might tell the fine drift of its air, a window open, an opening when all the layers of the atmosphere lined up each its slit, crevice, or chink which explained that cleft Margaret had told him of, when cosms of the sun (and apparently the Hermit-Inventor of New York and the Anasazi ancient agreed on this) ran instantly down but what they did had not been clear, or not as clear as in retrospect the next day the news of the Normandy landings had been clear in words and on the map in the Newark paper and then the New York Times with headlines and paper and ink all as authoritative and packed and soft as a Christmas present, the map Jim had (on the page it was printed on) snatched from under the nose of Brad who wasn’t touching it with any part of his body (You ain’t readin’ that): yet was the rare atmospheric cleft (now successfully explained as Jim went softly up the stairs of his home some two days after his detective round-trip to Man-toloking) an opening for the cosms to draw up the life of the Navajo matron with the hole-in-her-head? or to prepare for that night of the day when the sun itself would not and would not go down until at last in darkness the double moon came to reveal the Princess’s sometime bird rising and hovering, as only the Hermit-Inventor of the East witnessed and told later to Margaret, to attack the lion drawn by the future’s odor in the eggs of the bird’s strictly diamond-shaped nest but lost both its quarry the mountain lion and the lion’s prey the egg or the matter inside it sucked by that speechless cat at the long instant when it knew its own inner essence to be that of the egg—

— What’s "essence," Gramma?

— only, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York, to vanish with a speed given it by the egg or more plausibly taken from a process of relation or transformation the Hermit-Inventor’s friend the Anasazi could explain if he would, that turned that mountain lion looking for deer but introduced to more curious food into the very wolf, the giant wolf with immense, slick, independently breathing internal organs that the bird then taloned, dismembered, and/or gorged as a one-for-the-road farewell since evidently the Princess and the Prince after her were bound elsewhere if not together—

— and the remaining egg, the remaining egg, atop that volcanic plug? asks the interrogator—

— I never said anything about a volcanic plug, said Margaret some years later upon what would have been her deathbed if she hadn’t "gotten up to die" on her own terms—

You’re trying to make us ask how she died, but we will not fall for it, the born-again interrogator recently christened Gatorix nags.

— Jim in one silent swoop was at his bedroom doorway witnessing what here he was not too late for: his brother Brad reading note pages of Jim’s held off the desk and now returning Jim’s look of blank hate with fear and the sudden inspiration "Your floor needs sweeping, what’s all this grit?" — until moving toward Brad with a hand like a paperweight downstairs, he hit him on the side of the head and Brad said, "She was crying, I remember, she said Gramma had told her a sad story about the Indians." Jim went away downstairs getting the point of that picture that was missing Bob Yard at last, that he and Bob Yard were occupying the same body in that scene and that’s where the missing Bob was. But Jim couldn’t think of anything probably then but what sad story about Indians? — nor did he hear Brad make a sound upstairs, who now knew where Jim had gone two days ago and had a nerve going into Jim’s stuff and had a jaw or cheek or whatever Jim had swatted that was hardly a living thing for Jim he didn’t give a shit and didn’t even feel like calling up Anne-Marie but here today had come home forgetting forgetting forgetting—

— Hey Jimmy, didn’t you have varsity practice today? came the voice of the chin, the cheek, and he wheeled at Brad, who said he was sorry, he was sorry, he didn’t really see anything, a few words underlined, nothing honestly, and he would of liked to go to Mantoloking with Jim Saturday—

— Well now you know, so it’s just as if you did go, you fucking little snoop, and if (or words to this effect) you don’t like beach sand in the house why don’t you sweep it out—

Tough little insect with a life of his own all right.

People just taking up space. Taking up matter.

Was it cold? asks a firm voice that wants to know.

How’d you get down there, Jim? asks the same voice.

Did you see Missy?

You didn’t go in the water.

Did you go barefoot?

Hey Jim . .? asks the same voice, dwindling. Nothing much more to ask.

The insect might turn into a person one of these days.

I don’t know why I wrote all that down, but I left it there because it’s my room.

It was an assignment, didn’t you say? Vm sorry, Jim.

Just don’t do it. Don’t be sorry.

Is that what you’re handing in?

No.

Good.

What do you mean, good? I couldn’t hand that crap in.

That was good about ramming that guy, Jim.

And, Brad, what story about Indians? Gramma never told those stories to anyone but me.

Mom said it was a swap. She told Gramma some things, and then Gramma told her some story about an Indian who died.

Jim was looking long in the refrigerator and when he turned Brad was not there. There’s things probably can’t be said about relations with your family. Margaret told him "the man with the pencil" was an Indian word for "white man."

Well, had he wished to be at the shore alone or had he wished to find people there? Can’t have it both ways. Isolated incident.

What’s a. . volcanic plug? asks Ted (who supposedly knew everything) with some readiness in his voice so Jim heard the joke coming a mile away, or the elements of it, and laughed at once but didn’t stop his friend, nor go on to tell the places where the additions had been his own to his grandmother’s souvenirs, and earlier instructive additions by Jim very young, such as the crevi-chink and the Thunder Dreamer alternative provenance of the Colt pistol, and — source of somewhere both inside and outside him like us because it is us becoming human, a piece of him, or a piece if they came even in pieces (like those Brad "went to" on the following day) of these relations that go from him as he from them — the gigantic timber wolf’s swan song out of lion into the departing bird’s bright-eyed ferocity below the double moon and above the elf owls in their cacti and the People watching both the sky and a clear radiance off the body of the Prince’s apparently dead mother, a working glow — so that when, weeks later, recalling its curious positioning in the detective document that Pearl Myles never saw (but never needed to see), Brad the little insect asked, Hey Jim, what’s the lion’s egg mean? and Jim considered clouting him again but pointed out that it was the lion that ate the egg and there were two eggs — which then reminded Jim—and Brad said, Gramma says she never said anything about a lion turning into a wolf and being torn up by the bird, Jim felt less betrayed by an unfaithful beloved than in possession of some other adder than his own dumb calculus of daydream that he discounted as being not him, begun then, long before he found himself living and half-returned from the future that in the early sixties the interesting Chilean journalist-woman Mayga accepted (as she perhaps in sympathy could not accept the painful thing Jim’s mother had done for reasons easily invented). So it was "See I didn’t make that stuff up, Braddie" (he heard the voice, his own, and recalled Pearl Myles preaching Synonyms, Synonyms, Synonyms for an increased vocabulary and Success): whereas he would "claim credit" (in the code of later political violence) for additions, hell, to tell his children if not himself — many arising some time after Margaret’s characteristic death: to wit, the vast visitor-bird’s sneaking kinship to our heavy, short-necked sea duck the king eider of northern coasts (now thought, by a curious "lifer" ornithologist doing time within thinking if not striking distance of the Hudson River, to possess a tracking-resolution grid in the predatory wing of its brain enabling it to process both incoming weather and the crabbed configuration of the coastline it patrolled); to wit, too, the fact of the pistol’s having been given the Thunder Dreamer as a dying white Anglo attempt (by, likely, one of that brother-band of dueling Germans in the mid-century American West) to put the whammy on our Plains Indian protest religion of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Yet additions occurred also prior to Margaret’s death: unpro-duced operas by a Chilean woman of the mid- to late-nineteenth century that were part folk, part Italianate — but virtually Verdi! — and part (in the strange case of the Valparaiso Hamletin, according to Mayga, the journalist) late Beethoven chamber music (i.e., in the "This was your husband," cum picture, aria echoed in Ophelia’s Valentine morrow song): addenda also including matter on German settlers in Chile who might design a railway system then retire to keep bees; plus matter such as the desert jackrabbit, his eyes a-watch low and for’ard in their moist head-holes, and other data the authenticity of which James and Margaret very occasionally bickered over and might have even on her deathbed if she had had one. But the Hermit-Sojourner, who to the Anasazi healer’s mind had about invented New York, with its plans for wind-saving mid-air canals above the projected skyscrapers of the city along which would run pneumatic shuttles like the communication capsules future department stores hoped would rattle and whistle their efficiency music up pillar and across ceiling, proved to be a person (Oh stop it, Jim, the ill old lady laughed suddenly, not so old was she yet plummeting into her real age unreally ‘z if she’d been radiated in some fascinating zone), a figure anyhow, whom the grandson was not specially pleased to reinvent: for the Hermit was among other things multiple, appearing first on Bedloe’s Island in 1885 as the nephew (though this wasn’t known to the twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Margaret) of yet another Hermit-Inventor who had known the Anasazi before Margaret knew the West, and who a generation before had detoured lengthily en route to Anasazi country via that Alabama farm later named (and truly) Whalesville where slaves had turned up the amazing skeleton architecture of that fallen angel (so they thought) which their betters at once christened the reptile Basilosaurus — while at least one new manifestation of this character-scientist seemed to come up in later allusions, all used, both to build to a fine phantom of a continent spanning Margaret’s girlhood and her grandson Jim’s latterly irritable imagination, for the Hermit-Inventor came to visit the Statue of Liberty in pieces the same day Margaret and her father, her daddy, came to cover the event for the Windrow Democrat (a dubious organ — oh stop it, Jim — founded once upon a decade to get behind a President who was haunted not only by the sinister lunacy of a central bank of the United States that might foster adventurers like the American Wheelwright whom Alexander’s grand-cousin shipped to Chile with to build a railway that had been accidentally designed on a restaurant tablecloth, but even more by the possibility that he Andy J. himself, dyspepsia, desire and all, might be inhabited by one or even two of those Red Sticks he had striven to extirpate and scalp from the woods and marshes or send west in one of Our early solutions to the mass transport problem and to that of economizing on Mass itself) — yet a similar figure rises to crags and other lookouts in the western appearances of our Princess of the East Far East who is sometimes Margaret eager, intractable, palpable learner and sometimes an earnest tale told by a place about the Navajo Prince’s mother’s dream songs: until as the references pile ahead powered by the latest cow-catcher-engine fueled by a locoweed even Marcus Jones could not name before we let it die out through inattention as a viable energy source when if used it would have gone on living even after being picked and while being burned (wait, though, wait, wait a ramute! remember the northern bison’s tongue, delicacy amid wasted carcasses, yet) as versatile as the jojoba pod, as thoughtful as the nature gas in Casco Bay Indian seaweed, versatile as winter steam in northern Maine or as that visible relation in certain of the territories between air and earth, and altogether as active as particles of melted, smelted, Indian and Anglo flesh which in rituals in northwestern New York (where the printer Morgan threatened Masonic secrets) and in central Oklahoma (where a curious sect of non-evangelical lay Christians, the "Protestant Franciscans," loved and knew the exile Cherokee without ever laying their religion on them) sometimes mingled in purely symbolic communion whorl upon whorl — and as by definition so much of this current knowledge (read knowhow) keeps clear of James Mayn’s eyes and the working heart he turns upon his work and hours and his humoring pessimism re: the senses history does not much make, and runs only in memories he rides pestered by a past that for cripe’s sake is over and done with until he charmingly lets slip to a friend or two at most that he’s in and is "coming from" the future, the libration-point space settlements, and can describe them and will oblige when that spirit comes upon him maybe get drunk, sozzled, mildly mackereled, pickelooned in (please add also) good company to a point of preferring to believe his future existence is an inebriation best succincted or, failing that paternal tradition of economy, shunted into a nutty past that kids him ‘s much ‘s he it, until occasionally he meets a man or woman he’ll tell things to, a wife, a colleague, maybe a person he knows is primarily overhearing him, but to be so believed as he was by the lady Mayga bugs him so he’ll drop right into someone else’s life which is neither the future relation of strip mining to the deep-steam taps, nor the truncated lunacies of his own (he thinks substantially banal) fambley where you go so far and then shrug your way forward into adult life and he never needed a somewhat wonderful and historically elusive mother (who, well, had the good taste not to get found, having gone too far, too deep) to say to him You will go away where you belong, because cripes he was goin’ anyway — door’s open: yet these private lives that greet him between, on one hand, the relation of chemical warfare (agreements) and the ease of keeping C.W. development secret, to the genuinely civil uses of controlled poisons to seed the atmosphere at many levels with efficiency that’s odorless but almost painterly if you can catch it just before or as dawn arrives, and, on the other hand, the relation between the Prince’s mother getting better when he left (which Margaret claimed she had never told Jim!) or Harflex of Choor waiting patiently but far from passively in the old familiar coastal plain while the Princess eluded the pursuant Prince by being spirited in the shape of a swaying mist into a Statue braced like a tree against the high winds of the harbor it’s a-guarding to the question why Sarah, a mother, for whom people mattered quite a little and who was a good and practicing musician should have turned away into one day’s horizon like some meaningless wind that’s as equal to the matter a descending body becomes as one obstacle yields to another and story to story — yes, the aforesaid private lives that greet him and themselves between all these above relations became nicely complete, modestly revealing — he told someone named Norma about teaching his son to ride a bicycle so he was the one taught, not Andrew, because Norma had told him about a separated woman she knew who was living with another woman and they took the first woman’s twelve-year-old son to an experimental video showing at a small loft theater downtown and in the middle of it a man got up out of his seat with a pistol naming a woman nobody knew who he’s going to kill and people began to get the point and were scared, and Norma’s friend’s son suddenly said out loud to the man with the pistol, "She’s not here and it’s lucky for you she isn’t," and the man collapsed weeping on his folding chair—"She’s not here, she’s not here, she’s not here!" — and the gun dropped to the floor and that was more or less that (someone kicked it away from him, he was as they say overpowered or something similar to that happened): and many of these shared lives are chambered where Jim wouldn’t even get at them, knowing that in their disconnected self-containment they make sense like a day’s work let it go at that, like a past that you could get pestered by to the point of having pursued Margaret right to her deathbed — not over a thing like 4 7 never mentioned any eight-thousand-volume Masonic library in Salt Lake City," but over some embarrassing little gap in her life as if it would tell why her daughter Sarah (think of her with white hair, garrulous) permanently absented herself from the town whose name we have been given to use and understand was made up by our grandmother and our grandson between them like founders.

He even told his Chilean journalist-lobbyist friend Mayga once what he never had told his wife, which is the uncrowned infidelity if you want to explore the continent-size tilt of the well-known guilt-ride where you ride it and it rides you, told Mayga, told Mayga, told Mayga (before she herself disappeared at a point when she might have told him something — disappearing like the apparent converse of an obstacle heaving up again and again) that the day he saw South America move beneath the glass he was leaning on (ah yes, no practice that afternoon because they were excavating the south half of the field laying a pipe, looking for a pipe, it’s no longer clear. Fascinating, Jaime, fascinating. Sure, sure. Don’t lose any sleep over it, as you say — if you could dream, you could economize).

— he had seen above the glass above that map that if he didn’t move, life would — but no, that wasn’t quite it (another bourbon, Leo. . Mayga? no? Early flight to Boston tomorrow, New Hampshire)—

— no, it was that the brother-in-law man sharing with Jimmy a can of tomato clam chowder which Jim discovered at that moment was not his favorite kind, he liked the white New England milk kind, you tasted the clams, tomato roons everything oh it’s the oxalic acid no it’s the red shit, the brother-in-law man on a dull September day at the Jersey shore had said point-blank, "Your mother hasn’t been found" — those words alone — and leaning over his soup Jim said nothing, one of many times he said nothing — nothing until the silence and the soup-spooning changed the subject:

But that wasn’t it: Mel, who’d written with one of his many soft-lead pencils this stony-brief obituary for his wife, had said, apropos of the "hokey-pokey" ice-cream man who’d praised Sarah, and after (no matter "when") Alexander said some Armenians were gypsies but that most Armenians were Catholics, and Margaret said later that for Catholics suicide was the worst mortal sin, so Jim said (thinking suicide certainly makes you mortal), "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," without knowing how near a joke his remarkable inference was — but surely he meant, Because the hokey-pokey man had said she was a lot to live up to—

It’s certainly mortal, said Mayga.

No second chance, Margaret had said.

The day after Brad’s Day, Brad asked what happened to the other lion’s egg. Brad wanted Margaret to buy him a new raincoat too, and Mel said he would buy him one, and Jim said it had been for the funeral, but Brad knew just what he wanted and it didn’t have the epaulettes—

— but, said Mayga, who had to go — and the following week left for good — you were thinking all the while that—

— that (it’s wrong, it’s in absolute error) that when I was away at the Quirk farm working that summer or until shortly before V-J Day and all of this — my mother was home, she was there — and I came home for two days, I forget why, and that was when—

— You mean you had something to do with it? (You might have left your imaginary news notes out, but—)

— Of course not but you know you remember the Prince going away and his mother reviving—

— Almost entertaining, all that scattering of half-tales.

— It was thought up to be almost entertaining.

— But you came up with this detail.

— But the Prince… did his mother die when he eventually. . what did happen to him? (did the Navajo have princes?) did he come home? or become assimilated and become a guide or a mass weaver or a sporting-goods tycoon? — surely not the first American Indian tycoonic or a doctor, a doctor (but Mayga wasn’t flippant, wasn’t good at it, but wasn’t being it here)

— The Prince? Oh he was tragically wounded by Harflex of Choor, as I recall.

— A wound need not be tragic.

— Even a mortal one need not be tragic.

— I don’t agree, but his was mortal.

— Of course.

His heart was opening and closing to Mayga, as she got off the bar stool and looked at her watch because she didn’t want to go, though she already knew what time it was. She had something else to say to him. But instead, "And Pearl Myles?" They both laughed.

Funny you mention her. She wound up on a paper in Minneapolis.

She didn’t.

It’s the truth.

Trouble-shooter? said Mayga.

They don’t got no trouble in Minnesota — only in New Jersey.

So they have to shoot a long distance.

How far is Chee-lay from Peru?

Chile’s distance, said Mayga, is from the U.S.

Anyhow you’ve had your share of stability there.

Give us time, said Mayga.

Time is money.

I have it! — give us money!

What did McNamara say before the Lima coup last year?

Ted now came back from a pay phone somewhere, a bit holy in his walk. Jim could not believe some of the stuff Mayga had listened to from him, though she talked, too.

This was almost the last that Mayn saw of Mayga, though they met later that night, the first and last and only such meeting decided on by sudden phone call from Jim though it seemed mutual, like strange friends who have only corresponded or have not seen each other in twenty years — and after that (though it might have been after the 6 p.m. cocktail earlier) he really never saw the lady again. At close on seven, she had gotten off the bar stool, not a drinker, not a lady-drinker, a lady with a way of looking down her shoulder at you or at something vaguely poignant at the far end of the room maybe; wore dark, warm-styled clothes with a dash always of ancient brightness, a yellow sash Mayn remembered, or a bright blue hat the color of a French workingman’s jacket, or one time orange shoes that showed off her legs which in the manner of European and perhaps South American women she knew without knowing. She said, after kissing him on the cheek (then, after an instant’s thought, on the other cheek), "Dinner with three difficult and powerful people — my husband’s newspaper business — which becomes regrettably mine though I never as you know need to take notes which makes me much more attractive company yet there’ll hardly be room at the table for me if General Clay comes, but he will not wish to interrupt these large gentlemen talking about his commission although they knew that even when John Kennedy came back from Vienna high on foreign aid after sitting on a couch with Khrushchev, the investment money would come through Washington, not from it. And Jim, as for your Defense Secretary the Computer McNamara, urging a beeg welcome for Latin American military trainees here, his words to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on this ‘the greatest return on our military assistance investment’ were, T need not dwell upon the value of having in positions of leadership men who have first-hand knowledge of how Americans do things and how they think.’ "

Ted asked, a year and a day later, if Jim recalled those words verbatim, but he had to admit, he said that the lady on occasion would talk like that and it was a pity she had not lived to be President of Chile.

They were, of course, briefly joined by the little laugh like the shadow of a nod or like a loud breath or two from bar’s end of the free-lance photographer and information dealer Spence, always an isolated incident on the move, and with the mist that settled or rose in Mayn’s eyes came some blind gap of crap or fight that would blot that presence whatever it was at the end of the bar — the business they were in? minus some nice woman they used to have a drink with once in a while? or some business that was in Mayn, protected by him like a host for all the world the way those clothes kept Spence just the way he was for well over a decade, the often fringed buckskin jacket and string tie or some other decor up there around the neck, the beat-up shined always expensive (Mayn thought) boots and the whipcord jeans (or denim or slept-in colorless velvet jeans) and the lank hair just as light as that little set-shot artist back-court guard on the Toms River basketball team who you could never stop from eddying away from you, Polish, whereas Spence (whom Ted hardly noted except to ask why Jim disliked him — Jim shrugged as if to say he pretty much ignored the "Spence factor" — Oh, said Ted, Spence would have had to be invented if he didn’t exist already—"Concockted," laughed Jim—"What’s he got on you? — have another?" — "Probably enough to know I wouldn’t care if he found I’d over-expensed a business trip or was seen examining a Colt revolver in a Manhattan gunshop" — "You’re clean," said Ted) — Spence, yes, might have borrowed origins temporarily the way he could rent or loan news — now how the devil did you loan news? what happened to it when the information was paid back? was it a swap for other items? but you couldn’t loan news, it stopped being news: while Spence seemed unchanged for over a decade during which you would seldom catch him at a press conference yet typically he knew of the plane crash of a rich executive relation of Mayn’s two-time boss the Argentine who owned a string of papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania seemingly before it happened while to Mayn’s friend Ted who saw and was curiously stopped by Spence at an Easter conference of Third World economists who were largely complaining (as Ted reported back to Jim) that America wasn’t drinking more tin or doing more bananas, Spence professed astonishment at the story (news to Ted) that was going around, that the presumed-incinerated rich Argentine cousin was not dead but playing clean-shaven golf under an assumed name beside a green-bean plantation in the Cameroons. The "loan," Jim tried to explain to Ted, was in a slight lack of indelibility to be found in the item, but Ted said no matter how good your memory was, the news often had this quality of, well, history — he sounded like he was joking and Mayn only said that Ted told with special verve those stories he felt little more than amusement about: whereas (Jim did not audibly add) years before — and a year and a day after Mayga’s last drink at the hotel bar — Ted felt much more about their first woman "President of Chile" (Jim knew) while saying almost nothing more than "What a waste," which meant nothing very specific about what Mayga, "that newspaper publisher’s wife" (Spence once with sidelong or was it smiling confidentiality inquired of Mayn about), might have wanted out of life but Ted seemed to express a sadness at the circumstances in which Mayga (as no newspaper would so wordily, if truly, put it) "met her death" plunging from a cliff during (or to be precise, at the conclusion of) a walk near Valparaiso harbor only a few days after Jim had seen her, though Ted had run into her the morning she had left for home and she had given him a book (She gave you a book? — Sure, she’d finished it. It’s Henry Adams, you know, the Adams family — you want it? I’m not sure Adams ever finished it either. — Who? — Henry Adams). And who was it that in some isolated incident had told Mayn to read that same author? The Mayga death would not leave him; or anyway it did not. No doubt because they had wanted to make love that last night in Washington suddenly after months of friendship curtailed just shy of comradeship (yes, that was it); and there was a friendly completeness about the night and that was that, but a month later it began to feel as if it had been some completion foreknown.

Well, if so, then in her mind; for not in his.

Perfectly understandable, then, that hearing Ted with his firm view of history as commerce cloaked in the small talk of sporting drama and moral health and divided mostly between the Ordinary, who gave the power, and the Worst, who took the power by being also dumb but so colossally so that their complements and client audience the Ordinary just watched them bestride the Earth like statuary bridges of fine, fixed networks of public utility when actually such busy, blood-like action coursed through these structures that the Earth risked explosion and worse still leakages that would permanently stain — oh hearing Ted go on about the Third World wishing we’d sprinkle more bauxite on our breakfast in the morning ‘stead of home-spawned plastic snowies, and more natural zinc, wood, and diamonds in our brain resectioning ‘stead of the new orluminums and solid-state love-informations, Jim was put in mind albeit contemplatively of that isolated incident "Spence" looking for and finding somewheres to happen, since it had been right here (not only in the Easter conference in question but) in this hotel bar snickering like a breath of impedance at the tribute to Mayga as Woman President of Chile, and then with an impudence so incredible Mayn could just about disbelieve its content, "She said you left your notebook out on purpose" — when it was such a distance from the warmth between Jim and Mayga one day he told her about Brad’s Day and environs down to the end of the bar that he never thought Spence was listening.

Today, this very late afternoon, perhaps in honor of the dead lady Mayga, they were in many places in that conversation and Jim Mayn said it was a mistake to go to people for what they couldn’t possibly provide, produce, or give you. Ted’s father, for example, had an excellent sense of humor but little kindness in him. Jim’s had little humor, from what one could divine after upwards of a hundred years, though how many Mels there were was no doubt someone’s guess — probably one Mel. Right you are, responded Ted, right you are; except any person has one thing to give and you’ve been given it if you don’t know it.

It was time to call a halt to these festivities, such as they were, and Jim observed that the one thing Ted came up with agayn and agayn was interesting news items re: Third World.

And who was it who in some isolated incident had told Jim to read Adams, Henry Adams? The rear of his brain just above and independent from the balance part has a sluice let into it out of which and in pour and are dumped things (definitely things) and maybe nothing is lost, as Alexander used to think with a book in his hand, oft recalling some fact from Margaret’s own early "travails" — so that she, rehashing that old time, would sweep it away with her hand and an exhaling, whispering sound of dismissal — who cares now? — about a homeless quite presentable Mohave woman who with her Ojibway "wife" (that’s right) had almost got them both killed by the Utes they stopped briefly with and had wound up among these Navajo, and this Mohave woman wore men’s pants and wasn’t allowed to sing ceremonials but had amazing veterinary skills with sore horses and anemic sheep and understood the wild pigs, she said, and was accepted as "the husband" though not permitted to do what hunting that community of Navajo went in for though did spend time among the men yet never, as in another Indian people, discussed her "wife" intimately with the men. (The weaving, said Margaret, was extremely well done, tight and flat, though for my money the Navajo patterns weren’t a patch on the drawings, horse and haunted landscape drawings, done by a part-Sioux part-Cheyenne holy fellow with these pale gray eyes almost white eyes over and over from one single sight seen in a dream when he was twelve, pretty sad chap in the early nineties of course.) (But, said Alexander, the weaving and the pictures were two quite different products — yet for Jim’s grandfather history was not only a catalogue but, maybe somewhere in his snoring sleep just before he woke up hearing Jimmy being taught by his grandmother off in her room in her bed to whistle or in relations never to be flushed from their coils and crannies coins and flex of feeling, a romance, and Alexander had in the winter of ‘93-’94 met at a campfire by a Pennsylvania river a band of itinerant unemployed who told him of Coxey’s Army of the poor that would set out on Easter Day to march on Washington though Alexander was back home by then — where was the romance?)

Jim thought you never knew how much got left out of Mel his father’s obituary for Sarah and how much in the very niggardly nucleus of that black-framed box on page 2 actually crept in. Like time of death, when no one after all could tell: so "knowledge" in the absence of evidence, what was that? You never knew what Jim himself felt because he told Anne-Marie he wasn’t all there when he had the copy of the New York Times in his hands, for three lines of information appeared there, three mornings after — after what? the drowning? — and he wasn’t all there when, the next afternoon, without touching it he leaned on his grandparents’ dining-room table, one hand on either side of the weekly issue Margaret had folded to page 2—("Well I could have told you that," said Anne-Marie, with married humor while stirring chocolate into two tall, cold glasses of milk)—

Jim told Marie that his mother had no middle name. Marie said that girls didn’t. Jim said without thinking that his mother hadn’t been exactly a girl. Anne-Marie did have a middle name but she said she didn’t want it, it was "Maureen" — from a famous sharp-tongued horticulturist great-aunt on her mother’s side — her father liked "Marie Maureen." Jim had a middle name which was Charles, but boys always did.

But his mother didn’t. She had been strolling past the monumental brown-stone Presbyterian church one afternoon, one of the few times Jim recalled taking a walk with her. (One of the few? said "Marie" (he tried out the name), Well, maybe one of the two or three, said Jim.) In fact, he had only happened to meet her and he was on his bike, so he swooped up a little steep driveway ramp, cut along the sidewalk, and slowed down to "a walk" beside her where she was whistling softly some music. She looked at him in a darkly friendly way without saying anything and asked him if he liked his middle name Charles (which she said as if he might have forgotten it) and before he could answer she said that his father’s middle name was Honesty (which the way she said it he almost believed) and she told him she had been scheduled, before birth, to have a middle name but "your grandmother" dropped it, and she had tried using it as her given name the spring and early summer she was studying in France and in French it sounded really like her—Marthe, Marthe, Marthe. But she ran into a violin student from the Middle West whom she really liked in the middle of the night in the pitch dark in this dormitory she lived in outside of Paris and when she heard his voice asking who it was (and she knew this was Robaire, Robaire, Robaire) she said her real name, "Sarah," without thinking. And she particularly recalled this because he had been at a recital of Saint-Saens and had met an American violinist named Spalding who was going to be famous, and when "Robaire" had said to him that he himself thought you made your own luck, Mr. Spalding had said to look him up in New York, though he wouldn’t be there for a few months.

Where did you and your mother go? asked Anne-Marie (Maureen).

Jim and his mother had gone on a little further, and she had asked how fast he could ride back to the church and return to where she was, but when he raced back to the church he got yelled at by three of the guys who were walking along the sidewalk with their baseball mitts, and he stopped for what he later thought was only a moment but when he recollected his projected round-trip and wheeled away back up Winderhoff Avenue seeing only — he didn’t know what, porches, tree trunks, a man far up the street fixing a flat — he pedaled on and on but no mother. He had lost track of time.

— Jim thought you never would know what got left out because I’m not about to ask Dad how responsible he felt, and what he thought about the fact that she left only the note to the boat owner saying she was "kind of sorry." He couldn’t ask Anne-Marie about Mel’s responsibility, and then, a month later when he knew more, he couldn’t ask her or Mel how many people knew about us, that is, the number of boys Mel was in fact the father of; or why Mel never got into a fight with Bob, although the shoes on the porch above Jim’s head (upon his head) got amplified in our view to a threatening weight, and he couldn’t at the long, days-long moment of his mother’s death, if there was one, believe in a time ahead when these things could be talked of apart from the Sunday wonder and stunned fluency of euphemism in a room where the absence of the dead parent gave Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl and the clothes and hands of others the same independent molecular substance as the whole-wheat sandwiches on the silver plates that Mel told Margaret he hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but the thing was, as Jim confidentially pointed out to her, his hand on her shoulder, that she had sliced off the crusts which she never did because she used to say, Eat ‘em and they’ll give you gold teeth!—

— so at least he asked someone something during those days, and took that Windrow Democrat obituary standing up, that weather-report brevity edited into being by fifteen or so years of wedlock: so that if Jim (whom his grandmother called on her last day "good people" — "you’re good people, Jim") had ever been a scientist instead of a journeyman, he might have found a formula for that extremity of briefness that so much reduces it releases its very soul which had become already the void about it; and so for years, whatever Brad felt after scissoring out the black frame and the words of the kind man who had been and was becoming his father, and whatever Brad felt a month later after reading in his brother’s scrupulous quotation from the brother-in-law man "Aren’t you the Mayn boy?" adjacent to the words "How did he know me? I didn’t ask," Jim had to ask himself how much of that obit so easily memorable it wouldn’t stop repeating in his head was ignorance, and how much as unspeakable as the solitude on a breezy September beach when, having run one fisherman into the ground, he no more knew that the other was watching him than knew what he meant in his terrible words spoken against the wind but never ever written down for a brother-half-brother to spy among all those horizons of a lined notebook page, "I don’t want them to find her."

Margaret had let herself be appointed, because of her Democratic party connections, to the state prison commission during the War and had revived her New Deal interest in unemployment, what it costs to make jobs in peacetime or not to. But, though she set foot in church only on special occasions, whichever the church need be, she said the Devil found work for idle minds. She meant Mel, when he got rid of the paper at last; and she did not mean he played the market (with some success) and the local harness races (with some happiness and just barely in the black), though she regarded the first as living vicariously through numbers, not real making of usable products: what she did mean was that Mel suffered even more over Sarah’s "tragedy" because he stopped working and had less to do; and into one gap came another, if that is possible, and we, who are relations meteorolong, whorled, human ward, and possible as well as relations that people have actually had, believe it is, and were there, like an equal and opposite reaction, to receive through Mayn’s at the time only incipient voiding-sluice (incidentally creating us at need) his moving picture clandestinely witnessed through glimmering back-porch screens in order to be put soon out of mind, of Margaret turning on the porch light, opening the kitchen door to come out and open the wide old icebox while Alexander came and stood on the kitchen threshold continuing a conversation and asking her now not why she was crying (which she clearly was) — for of course their younger daughter was gone and there were problems of life itself — but, rather, what on earth she meant that Mel was dying vicariously (Alexander really didn’t understand that) — was it that we didn’t know exactly where Sarah "was"? But Alexander, who was subtler than anyone else told him, got out of the way when Margaret went back into the kitchen and the sticky yellow door slammed and the back-porch light went out upon the odd sobbing noises of the loved voice and upon the possibly inaudible stress in the devoted husband’s words didn’t and Sarah (as if, well, he and Margie did know the final whereabouts of someone else), and upon the curious boy who sometimes roamed the early evening and mastered into middle life a healthy shrug because he knew how to shut the door too.

So what if the double Moon expected as its due two explanations if not more? — ranging those twi-set nights those twi-set times between the story of the day and the story of the night to the shadow Marcus Jones the man-botanist cast on the woman-zoologue Mena as he got off his bike in that narrowing desert, for Mena claimed that before Marcus went away that night he had cast upon her the double shadow "hers to convey" until she met her next human—

— the ancient Anasazi?

— right you are, who because of her appearance at the top of the last ladder upward to his cell had caused that lifted pistol in his feather-light hand to throw two shadows according to the precise Mena, which was the only way he had seen the double Moon.

But so what, so what, shrugs the humor of the boy-man with such casual cogence his very shrug grows him up a year, two years, five years, who could now have spoken a bit of Spanish with Mena had she existed still, six years, seven, eight ("You will go away where you belong, my darling" — but we did not pick up "my darling," with all our audio resources did we? — sho did! — did not—)

Until the "so what" ‘s subtly prevail, even when to a child and, in fact, the children of Joy Mayn and Jim Mayn are voiced the weathers which the Hermit-Inventor of New York divided with his mortal colleague the Anasazi medicine man, the weather of presence and the weather of absence, which do not quite parallel the division between the weather from earth and the weather from beyond, the weather from the body, the weather from almost nowhere, weather of going and weather of arriving, and so on perhaps into a future where Mayn found himself returned to the city and to an apartment he had inhabited with a family, and the family had been his own, and the family had rented the apartment at that particular time, and now, taking possession of the apartment with misgivings not because he now owned it, but because of love he found he really had given, and naturally the love he had not given, he compiled for professional use a history of rent control and related matters in the city of New York which struck him as the classification of the constituents of a chaos, or so it was suggested to him in similar or congruent words by a new acquaintance, a fellow tenant of the building where, within the inertial system he partly tried to take a view of, he did much of the compiling, oft interrupted by "so what?" from voices known and unknown, sometimes his own, breathing in and out such weather as was ludicrously true and profanely painful, recalling the "so what?" shrugged silently from the boy’s own early telex looking on at a grandparental scene complete with lights on and lights out. Meanwhile—

It could be established exactly where the intent botanist and geo(il)logical bicyclist Marcus Jones was employed when one morning in 1892, a year before Margaret entered that world, Marcus listened with curiosity to a young visitor from the South tell of having seen in company with Navajo friends along the dusty bank of a "wash" near Ship Rock, New Mexico, the brightest and tallest showy loco imaginable in height twelve to sixteen inches with up to fifteen whorls along each main stalk all tufted with nearly luminous white hairs among the spikes of deep pink and live lavender so well known among the Oxytropis. Marcus could hear the locoweed report with one ear, while with the other pick up an unabashed chat between two silver-mine operators who were contemplating backing Bryan over in Nebraska for reelection to Congress this time from the boondocks.

Likewise, Jones’s learned whereabouts could be established in 1896 when Alexander Mayne attended the presidential convention with his young wife Margaret who at twenty-two going on twenty-three shared with Bryan only his liking for Charles Dickens and his more public sympathy for farmers, and who had had a soothing, in fact down-right medicinal cup of tea with Jacob Coxey in ‘94 a short time before he led his march of the unemployed on Washington, D.C., and in her fine, though paternally edited piece for the Democrat had something to say about the silver-lined inflation whose formulae Bryan ignored in favor of the truism that a dollar "approaches honesty as its purchasing power approaches stability": this was as "far from the authentic Jacksonian support for the forgotten working man everywhere" (never an appeal, as Nicholas Biddle fumed, to mobs like those martialed to anarchy by Marat or Robespierre in the Faubourg St. Antoine) as were the locofoco "workies" striking the new friction matches of the 1830s to footlight with candles the "platform" of their protest against financial privilege and solidarity with such maverick journeymen as John Windt and George Evans and the Hudson (N. Y.) cordwainers plus the renegade printer William Morgan of upper New York State and Philadelphia, "more unlike the western interests of that day which were as indifferent to anti-bankism as a well-to-do Mexican lady fandangoing all night in Santa Fe was to the low class of a barefoot peon partner showing his smalls." Alexander had his doubts: Jackson was very middle-class and would never have gone along with striking ironmolders sixty years later reciting, "The robes ye weave, another wears."

Why anything might turn into anything or itself, war into weather into war and back again in i960, given the right imagination, the right overflight, the right reception of light, the rightly modulated night, the right day for a nothing of a brother to play hookey and turn into a noise of grief, then into a half-brother as separate from the real Mayn son as Brad was for Jim and real enough to help Jim go away—not from a snake’s nest of garden hv whence Brad promised pork chops for dinner, but from acting for Jim in a way better not worked out, given that "I don’t want them to find her" really meant, "I don’t want her to come back." For any words might turn into the right gap of passion in which to model some genius of Sarah the way Mel did for years, or, more exactly, into the Alexandrian mellowing of Margaret as a giver not a taker (who took the West for herself but monitored Sarah’s minute sojourn in France years later).

Jim never let himself quite know this in the atmosphere at Windrow, which bent his efforts elsewhere until years later he felt himself filtered as through Windrow itself one late morning near Fontainebleau within striking distance of Paris, in the information that with his rambling left hand Thomas Jefferson wrote the meteorologist Le Roy regarding Le Roy’s reports on how dew point varies with wind direction, the northwest mistrao and the northeast grec being not so dry as the north wind (nor, of course, said Mayn, so sane as the north wind, at least if we are talking about your mistrao and similar winds)—

ah, his journalist companion for his part added, of ill repute—

of ill ions, went briefly on Jim Mayn, such positively charged particles as put people into a funk in Egypt when the south wind comes in off the desert, the khamsin wind "of fifty days" or the German Fohn whose relation to the history of the thirties and the forties could never excuse the Third Reich: so that (continued his French companion), as Le Roy had provoked Jefferson to ponder, dry and moist are relative in air, so dry summer air at the seaside or not may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But Mayn could not tell his correspondent confrere what a filter of Windrow and its everlasting though twenty-odd-miles-distant shore these quite charmed informations veered through, no more than that on the road to Fontainebleau he was listening for transitions to submarines, which presumably were much on the Gallic newshawk’s specialist mind; but when Jim said he thought for a second that he had seen the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the man laughed and said even if it was possible at fifty kilometers, Jim was looking the wrong way (Easier that way, rechuckled the American pragmatist) — and when the man very thoughtfully expounded the stress moments in Eiffel’s adaptation from his bridges to this tower, Jim thought they were getting into U-boat waters at last, pressure, distribution, range, cost-benefit breakdowns, formulae rendering congruent a stable peace and an authoritative news supplement if not scoop (in French, un scoop) that happened actually to be beyond Mayn’s knowledge: but it all came then to the delightful and hardly alarming "when and how" fact that behind the Tour Eiffel in principle of wind-bracing practice stood an earlier work of Eiffel’s—

— the moving hospital-submarine!

No, the moving hospital, not to be confused with the Wide Load which at times gets as big as (not just) home or house but apartment house capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and only thus an articulated structure — the moving hospital was a spin-off of the Civil War as the moving missile emplacement was a spin-off of the Cold like breathtakingly advanced weather observation—

— which was a spin-off of the balloon-observation surveillances that were a spin-off of the Civil War, like concentrated food—

— but no, we do not think so—

— because the balloon observation was of military movements but not of the inertial wind — and other systems to which it was subject, mais no, the earlier work of Eiffel’s was the internal steel frame of the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi’s visible outer sculpture like permanent news — solid and fundamental as lives of unknown people Mayn sometimes briefly knew — or saw, without knowing, and was seen as by a larger knowledge he joined and sensed his power in, until one day he heard a story of a detective whose client knew more about him than he of the client, a story also of love and freedom told by a fellow elevator passenger so briefly from the floor where he got on to the ground floor, where he and she and her friend, the two leaving Grace Kimball’s workshop, vanished that he knew that very story, had lived it, even if only in advance like sentiments of reincarnality—

— which proved nothing except that Sarah, whose mother told a story of a Princess spirited or sublimated we now say in the guise of a mist into the Statue to foil an Indian transcontinental^ pursuing her, must doubtless that day at Mantoloking within the visible woman sitting like a statue on a black towel or lying down have been secretly standing within that seated or prone person, before, during, and after the moments when Jim saw her looking out to sea and when Jim found himself founded like a gnomon sundial in the sand above his vulnerably irritating brother; for was she not in fact watching for a German submarine to break the horizon and bear her off to South America or, failing that, Manhattan!

: a possibility we, of their relations, would not rule out, since, as the angry savant had it, "some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first":

: which takes character beyond courage to be sure, though Mayn would leave the formulae and what power went with them to someone else (for he was only taking up a sort of residency in a New York apartment where he had once lived happily and not happily but also happily (lived and not lived) with his wife and children who had moved on:

which Mayn too did, in circles no doubt, until a day came, or he to it waiting, soon after the aforementioned renewed trial residency, when a nice, sometimes worried woman in the apartment house in question, whom he let befriend him without insisting on her husband materializing, told him of a person named Grace Kimball he thought he’d heard of, who said she had withdrawn from this world only to return with new powers, her own, her own extraordinary powers nonetheless very simple, you know, Mayn smiled sharply like a laugh.

Norma added that the withdrawal at least of Grace had been in marriage (in marriage, said Mayn, checking) (yes: in) while the powers found partly in stories told in Norma’s group of women seemed real — the people, the women and men that had become "family" to nonetheless send on their way at some point — forget the night gapped like Pentothal with all the interchangeable braceros translated into and out of the planetary labor force wide-loaded in convoys of super-semis cross-continent: two women technologists sit sipping mixed fresh-crushed juice, getting acquainted, that kind of thing, discussing they imagine two men when, by some small-world economy scrambling whatever used to be the matter, it’s in fact one guy they’re talking ‘bout for the longest time, the unknown medium through which they get acquainted: not to mention (for to Norma Mayn didn’t) the couple in Phalanx, New Jersey, a marriage that did and still may play (with revised dialogue) who ritually hitch him up like old Dobbin complete with the old vegetable man’s fedora with earholes (that is, for the horse) to a real imported rickshaw (brought it back themselves never thinking what they would do with it, just part of tax-write-off basic research) so he can pull her down the garden path with the blue ribbon on it and we’ll hitch old, yes, Dobbin to the shay: not to mention, but he does, to Norma and then independently to Norma’s husband, a couple of heavy-handed economists Gordon proves also to know even better, one from Metz in Alsace-Lorraine which is in France at the moment, the other an Irishman from Los Angeles, "old L.A. people," one (actually employed) cousin marched with Coxey’s Army of unemployed protesters in ‘94—well, took the train as far as Chicago, then walked to Washington — and both economists have red hair and beard (if you looked back and forth they could do with only one set of looks), and once when Mayn and they had a lunch that was a bit awkward at first, then too full of talk, Mayn had said he had thought of getting to know some more economics as a substitute for economists but economics seemed too hard (which made the red-haired economists laugh and say in unison, You and Max Planck), then later when the waiter got into an argument over the arithmetic of the tab with a man about Mayn’s build whom he’d been introduced to at the bar because the man, who was missing one little finger (though Mayn didn’t recall feeling it) and wore a well-cut blue pinstripe and a red pointed handkerchief and a dark-blue, tiny-red-emblemed club tie, was lunching with a doctor-friend of Mayn’s whose boat he’d been on, now just sold to the Xerox people in Stamford, Mayn had said to his tablemates that on the other hand economics was really too easy, which made the russet ecologues blush in concert and in concert choke on final swallows of their first Manhattans and say in hilarious unison, You and Bertrand Russell! upon which Mayn, who had the impression that he mumbled a lot but realized that this was internal and that his speech was normal, caused further hilarity by adding that he would stick to what he could see, like whether people listened when we talked, and seemed to say only what they knew, and whether they used their hands and what they looked like (—Their hands? the economists asked, but this time kept the joke private, as if it would be one too many):

they were way ahead of him, he told them, like Rogers and Rockefeller when they bought Anaconda Copper with a rubber check they covered by loan collateraled with fresh-printed stock in a non-company that existed to buy Anaconda, leaving them with, after they sold the fresh stock, a real copper company and thirty-six million dollars profit: the economists were eating their lunch through this transaction, they did not know those facts — maybe they weren’t the facts, said Mayn — seemed impossible, yet so easy; and, as usual, a bunch of people got stung — the economists nodded with mouths too full for what formulae formed higher in each head — the argument nearby with the waiter was over — and the man in the blue pinstripe was grinning at what the elder gent the doctor had said, who was (Mayn knew) "drinking a little" since his wife’s death but who was an easy chap, Mayn had played squash with him a few years back, a man who didn’t believe in making difficulties for himself, so that while, true, he had become a shrink, which is, hour after hour (facts supplanting facts), dealing with folk who make difficulties for themselves, and are made by them — and mostly, though you had matriculated and paid your dues, done training, etcetera, you might just tell them, Take some time for yourself, you know (—A breather? — ) That’s the ticket; and for him himself it was after thirty years of medicine and in order to retire into (at his wife’s suggestion) seraZ-retirement:

But breathers aren’t what they—or we — used to be: once marginal, the breather came to take up major space like a friend in need whom you have to listen to for weeks of personal crisis: once space, a breather has become a person like turning into yourself; witness even those doubtless workshop-trained adepts who hold their (if it is really only their) breath and have it too, and, within that body-hold, keep so deep self’s other intake/out-go that coming upon the phenomenon of breathless breathing less like the old tab-less tab men’s collar than the cordless unisexual (little) shaver, we children of the phenomenon may grasp only its idea yet feel its matrix quite absent, while we would drown in our own fresh-squeezed still pulpable information with built-in gaps as if it were the breath of life — not Jim, contemplating reported reincarnation of the noted Grace Kimball from one change stage to the next, from the Great Mother-Sun of forbidden Splinter-Inca lore along the Peru-Chile frontier, and from the Goddess who was Greek yet then a sister renegade who occupied the oracle Tree-Lith on a Mediterranean crag perilous yet organic in the lower Peloponnesian wilds of Mani, until she (still Grace) became the lorn Prince — what just would not blow Jim’s mind because "almost nothing surprises me" (he remarked to Norma and Gordon) — the reported lorn Prince (that Norma reported was of Nava-Choor in Kimball’s version) derived like revelation from a detailed account given Grace by a newsperson friend of a Prince or high-born brave who (news though ‘twas to Mayn on his own doorstep and beneath the lintel of his long past or at least as presently adjacent as Little Wind teaches the Hero Twins to throw their breath — for immortality purposes), (this Prince) on being destroyed by some "Princess" type he thought he adored surprised himself by self-resurrecting secretly as two people in the visible form of one, was it man and woman now? — according to all that’s recently been voiced — and not half one, half the other, but both — and since the evening when the news of him had passed from Lincoln (significantly, Grace thought, robed in saffron) to Grace, Grace had, she told Norma, who took some of this with a grain of salt, joked but with some secret rest-reserve of truth that she was this Prince reincarnate but that the extreme light like a tiny planet far back in each of the newsperson’s eyes which she did not know were one light told what she also did not know, that the reincarnation Grace had obviously been "ready for" was a new brand and—

— three interruptions converge on poor Norma — first, as is only proper, from her husband Gordon ("Well Grace would like to think that every man wants to get himself up in black lace pants and a garter belt"); second, from Jim, politely entering only as if in part to divide the husband’s roughshod wedge (Puts me in mind of the Krakatoa easterlies above and the Berson westerlies below: they were supposed to be parts of a single zonal current— How do you show a thing like that? asked Gordon — with an unusually mean cycle of twenty-six months — hey Norma, who was that newshen-person-lady-woman, and who was her source?) (Gordon, like a lost voice, "They don’t know that man as in chairman comes from German Man, i.e., "one, nonsexual" — "Unisex," retorts Norma, surprising Gordon into softness: "Not unisex at all," he says too quietly); third, we, whom proposition for proposition Grace knows less well than she ever will how she uses us, for we—as she and such trammeled husbands as Gordon say as if it will all go away if said or, humid lights of breath thrown outward or away, compound with quick noises of sense the atmosphere they mean like walking newspapers when they say, "It’s in the air," — we are each a change in life too personal not to be grouped, too shared to be all shared; while Grace, who for Woman would become a man as mortal as that general He who called the "true security problem. . man against war," on behalf of one woman that she is has found, in her one-sixteenth Pawnee root (and touched with her fingers whose prints are arches becoming whorls and back again?) a faith that man the hunter brought back with him not just the fiber and juice of meat but guilt for killing time away from home as real as the opiate receptor molecules (Grace heard of from a delegate to a rolfing conference who had become an inch longer yet now said next to nothing) that are one part our history and future waiting only to be activated for romance, dependence, twilight aperitif, any key habit deepening into those that like the key melted into the short-circuited ignition Mayn knows of as facts isolated by the million kept by us addicts as close as out of sight within the tumblers they’ll always make fall into place: which Mayn half-hearing interrupts — what also will not be interrupted like the ongoing time of his computer-wristwatch timing turnovers at a basketball game with Larry and Amy, the same Amy with whom he occupied opera seats in which the Chilean diva expected to see an endangered economist and his wife Clara, who was herself present when the correspondent-woman told the Na-vachoor Prince’s fate and the first and last name of her source, a daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter named Flick, though Clara was unable to connect this with a journalist named Mayn she feared.

"Prince? Prince? would that be the Nava/0 (not — choor) Prince who one night along a river dolloped into his lungs a festoon of glowing cloud above him? that rarest of radiances a pseudonoctilucent which looks like your true noctilucent cloud fifty and more miles above Earth that in summer twilights in the better latitudes may become visible with the stars—"

— "You’re — what are you?" interjected Gordon. "You never—"

"Oh sure," said Mayn, "and that pseudonoctilucent in question was really a late-departed medicine man, old story, got it from my grandmother, passed it on to my daughter Flick who’s an honest half-breed like the rest of us and wouldn’t swallow it and as I recall embroidered upon it — and my estranged son Andrew, who seemed to believe the stuff but always went to sleep."

"— but when you all interrupted me," said Norma, "I wanted to finish that Grace perceived what she says this woman Lincoln didn’t understand: that this is a new type of reincarnation, sort of parallel—"

"What egocentric garbage," said Gordon.

"She heard it from someone who heard it from someone else," said Norma looking into Mayn’s face intensely curious.

"It’s more likely than the usual kind of reincarnation," he hears himself saying, thinking he likes these people because they have children; knowing as if he were in Norma’s mind that she’s thinking, "You speak of these others, your daughter and son, but what about your wife? — What is her name? is she a former wife?"

— and he gets away with answering Norma in the same way — in his head and here, "I love her more now than ever" (picking her out among the corps of undivorced but separated wives or is she, illegally speaking, divorced yet wttseparated?)—

— wondering if Flick can believe such returning history (Well why didn’t you do something about it?) who cares for both her father and current history, whichever is obstacle for the other (as Mayn wonders if this kid Larry with his split family and his Obstacle Geometry system he claim him got from Jim of all people knows, who goes in for fact not formulas, that’s Jim, and, when not on the job, scenes of fact, which make a hell of a family history not to be told easily — the scientist whose baby died while she was at work in her lab {the lab); the black model studying to be an actress taking her son to the park and telling him go on and ride that bike if he’s going to learn; these people he instantly knows as other people are known to their locksmiths, supers, former and future girlfriends and boyfriends, and he wonders now, against the presence of Norma’s loving voice still in his head after she and her husband exit at last, who the long-despised man Spence is—who he is— aside from a deal about transcontinental trucking here, a deal for information regarding the future of obscure federal-agency handling of the trucking of transcontinental waste, a sequence of surely expensive, unauthorized, and uncredited stills of a multilingually intelligent young chief-of-state who’s cleaned up most of the foreign-run casinos where he lives dealing Russian roulette click by click to a political opponent — how come you got it in for Spence? he never got caught, did he? — a presence, Spence, attentive and sleazy in a bar as far back as Mayga, and as recently and malleably close as some history in his grandfather Alexander’s inner ear or fiction this new friend-son Larry makes into an irritating geometry—who Spence is, to have phoned a new friend of Flick’s to ask out of nowhere if she knew that James Mayn’s daughter, her friend, had lived in the very apartment house where Flick’s friend (who’s calling her, having been called by this Spence) had been attending a woman’s workshop attended also by (oh gee) a (whew) woman momentarily involved in springing from a New York State prison a supposed anti-Castro nationalist who, it is planned, will find sanctuary in a narrow but lengthy nation run on an economy imported from the shores of a Great Lake of which school of economics much actual knowledge in that Hispanic nationalist inspires not love but its tactical facsimile to cloak his real mission to kill a high officer and abduct a charismatic old Masonic socialist now under house arrest.

It is already too late, a terminally optimistic sometime-interrogee offers, to speak of women and men; for aren’t they at the barricades working out together, watching together (between amplified aerobics) the old organic plume mushroom? So from weekly formula to current form one’s last name turns to ash in the heat of some race to inflate currency by finding the unsplittable seam to make it from? — while Larry’s Modulus will get one from here to there if one wants it to, and the new marriage contracts just out and not to be confused with the earlier, mutual dowers of the very beginning of the decade seem already a thing of the quantum, though some casualties of that Open Marriage cruelly less easy than its Masonic abbreviation O.M. in wanton rooms of rising rent and energy levels devise new home weddings and new faiths painfully reviewed.

Yet no power from the next century’s L5 libration settlements to imagine into life the mid-twentieth (hardly the first to see itself the last) can deny to Jim

who knows at times himself to be in that awful two-to-one population-limited civilization where nothing too much has changed to be honest except the swimming pools where you dive upward into water as well as outward into margins of sufficient wetness, and the wide loads and looseness of structure that from the outset failed to be designed and accommodated into the secure torus whose doughnut shape no more shows itself to our everyday attention than the whole porch of the weatherless sky with its spectrum of sound now only visible in the deep screens we have internalized two to each hopefully stereoid customer-soul, do not bobsled their way through, and marriages account for new peace as being paired of pairs, since each partner came out to L5 transmuted from an original two half-suspecting the emigration wasn’t only on the up and up but locused of willingness contained by, yet containing too, some thrust of inner wilderness

a lost dream such as Jim’s one rainy night when he woke and exited from bed sweating to open his door and saw his mother in her nightgown of course heading downstairs so slowly she seemed sleepwalking until she turned to look back up at him, her hair across one side of her face and he saw she was "readwalking" — a book in her hand, no common word of "It’s late" in her eyes that seemed protective for a change but he didn’t know of what — and he asked her what it was, and didn’t mean to though the act produced an effect, which was that as she told him he forgot his lost nightmare: "The Marble Faun," she said, "and I’ve almost put my eyes out staying up reading — and what have you been up to, my darling?"

He didn’t know, and could only say, "What are you doing?" to which she softly replied as if her heart were in it, turning away and proceeding downstairs, "Just reading." But he remembered going back to bed and later starting up awake convinced he was plunged into a future where people had been at once combined and sent away to settle another world.

Larry didn’t ask Jim to elaborate on that combining of people. Did he know it without asking? He said that a succession of obstacles had been reciprocally substituted for the vision and he advanced his system which Jim passed on to Gordon once in a moment when he could think of nothing to say yet was disagreeably surprised to be able to report Larry’s recently hatched system which Larry we know ascribed to Mayn’s inspiring.

What need had Mayn of formulae? Larry was passing through a difficult time. How could Mayn live in his old, now quietly owned apartment. (Owned secretly.) Weren’t old scenes moving in and out — oh, the children of his former wife! Each time he felt it coming, he had substitutes? Why was he in this apartment? Wasn’t he really someplace else? He was no speculator waiting to jump when they discovered which way gravity was really moving, that is, in general. Mayga took away to her death that alarming willingness not to doubt his delusion that he was in the future specifically traveling to and from a libration settlement between here and the Moon imagining what was else the only apparently actual present time—

— if you’ll buy that—

(—she didn’t have to, she’d been given it: and had she, then, taken it away with her to or from that ledge near Valparaiso bay from which she had vanished into death which was a kind of ignorance?)

— he wouldn’t try it on Larry, lest Larry believe it, too, and now Mayn had to admit delusion in 1977, he had the firm scenes of the many people he had met in crisis, their own minor dangers and opportunities, their awful "we" voice on occasion exploding about him like the one that is the sum of two; and he didn’t need Larry’s Obstacle Geometry formulae to get from one chamber of tensions and human warmth to another, though he would grant Larry’s Modulus a humoring power to get you from one isolated incident to another without undue connection—

What was the point we missed about the Moon?—

until the coincidences between what he had witnessed of women and men at home and in the park and in their mutual media coming with such self-containing accuracy from Norma who reported to Jim what Gordon could not listen to of the women’s stories many told to Norma not in Grace’s workshop but in pretty private midnight raps with Grace alone, caused Jim regularly in the world who would always hold the door for a woman but a bit too semi-retired from combat to seem (he thought) male supremacist (having been, it seemed to him, caught carrying the membership card of every targeted power minority of the past twenty years — white, male, middle-aged, lapsed agnostic, middle-class routinely-married-then-sleazily-single newsman-oid) to want so much (on a gray day when Red Smith’s column had failed to appear in the sport pages) to tell Mayga his fresh suspicions that he nearly phoned (as he sometimes did at times of sentimental panic, or even horror at his life, or love for her) his quondam wife, but instead found his young friend Larry, Larry in a sad mood, his mother largely unmentioned gone to live "temporarily" with a "chum" (not a word of Larry’s generation but he was able to do that) but not launching a stratosphere of theory as he often did with Jim but complaining about his neighbor that Jim had dimly known of, having seen him, yet understood that the fairly famous singer-man was moving house — yet more notable than Larry’s news of strife in the hallway

between the singer North who was wringing his hands like he was singing a scene and the two in truth costumed creatures (male or female, who knew?) whom the older man tried madly to separate (oh shit, they were guys I guess) whom he was fantastically upset about just at the instant when the elevator flung open and this woman Larry didn’t know in a large white fur coat burst out and started bitching Ford North the opera singer (I know who he is, said Mayn) who was wringing his hands like he was on stage and she sweeps him angrily into his apartment leaving the flower boys to work each other over in the hall at which point they disappeared. .

was his unsurprised acceptance of Jim’s theory so mildly slipped into talk that Jim thought maybe Larry hadn’t understood, except Larry did say with equal gentleness almost inaudibly a thing remarkable enough to show he had heard — that these little life stories Jim was hearing through Norma from the Paying World of Grace Kimball, mainly Grace herself, were quite congruent with only the slightest blurring at the borders with scenes Mayn knew of, that Mayn joked that he’d decided while playing squash no less, in that white theater-in-the-round of the boxed-in ultimate barrage-escape or court, that this Grace Kimball person and he were some same person perhaps in life right now as an ant community he’d heard was one organism in effect but he and she probably not larger than the sum of themselves and since both right now alive to tenant some same articulate structure that accommodates a multiplicity of small-scale units (Larry nodding rapidly recalling the lingo of "your" red-haired economist whom Mayn had listened to in an auditorium press conference) why Mayn conceives (perhaps through Larry) of reincarnation that’s somehow all here and now, with no past (recalling also someone asking him in the midst of a four-way rap what was the point we had missed about the Moon).

‘The haunting of America," said casually the younger sage though troubled in a yellow sweater purchased for him by his father, "reincarnation that is simultaneous, the haunting of the world maybe since there is where America came from, all the uglypipedreams tradewinded over here from Europe at the founding that later they pretended they didn’t want back.

Having said the syllables — Simultaneous Reincarnation — Mayn found them generally applicable like a lot of fairly equal units in an articulate structure and — on his way to dinner with his old friend Ted who, full circle, though not looking well, was with AP again though glad not to be packing one of their computerettes to file his stories into, whence at twelve hundred words a minute one of the new high-speeds prints "out" far and wide your likely less than twelve hundred words, hence less than minute waltz — Mayn had no one but his same old self (if entertained) to tell that at the thought plus the thought that Larry’s Modulus was maybe bigger than the both of them and getting Jim now if not to the Century, where Ted kept his dues up because he admired the famed Drew (but-twice-perhaps-a-year-encountered) Middleton even beyond his gifts as a raconteur — getting Jim at least from this alarming Simultaneous Reincarnation with Grace to those more innocent heartfelt ancient times with Mayga barside, when Brad became Jim’s brother by losing half his brotherhood to a scandalous secret, and the wind his poor mother carved, damn her, damn damn damn her, curved by whim of some swerved splinter in the groove of her unwed brain, took him no less straight away from home as she had either ordered or predicted — a home so real it got nicknamed secretly by Jim and his grandmother — yes, and Margaret at that moving moment of Brad’s Day became, if temporarily, only his grandmother by losing her credibility as a historian "reporting in" with odds and ends coming terribly maybe true within the old tales, for what about that Navajo Prince’s mother coming out of death to life when the son left her? — and had he ever returned home? (for we did not absolutely leave him camped by a river ‘neath the threatening protection of that unprecedented cloud), the stories didn’t get finished by Margaret (Jimmy, if not Margaret, cut them off in ‘45), nor by him, Mayn, in later days with his drab and other modern amendments such as trying to figure what the "plant growth" was that Margaret once said Marcus Jones thought he had to use (we mean, botanical process) to explain the development of (pistol-related) Mena’s unprecedented moon-white mouth — but losing something of her credibility at the cemetery and on the porch, for she’d said, "My heart" — my heart—when she would never speak of her daughter like that, would she? — she wasn’t tender with her, though with Jim’s aunt in Boston she wasn’t either, yet was she tender with Alexander? — for she had him, and she had, to confess the truth, Jim (did Indians really say "How"?) — but the porch, the porch, a muddled not quite nice riddle came across those kid stories for a time, for what was Margaret crying about on the porch that night? — ’cause she didn’t ever cry, and hadn’t there often been "a mumbling of the eyes" (as Mena that other night on the desert floor with Marcus translated a fugitive insight of Sequoya’s), a looking unclearly each at each between Jim’s grandmother Margaret and her daughter Sarah? but you might have thought that that night when Jim secretly observed Margaret and Alexander on the back porch Sarah was still dying, strangling in waters so deep and cold they preserved you (also you, from ever putting her out of mind, though by the direct route from Windrow or the circuitous, no doubt, inertially sideways-slipping flight route round the world that you must have pretty well taken a few times on business you never stood again on that beach, that sand, from where those older green deeps of water were harder to believe in than a black, icy plummet from the brink of a mountain quarry in the Berkshires) — and not only the night porch but the cemetery: what had that meant? He had sometimes made conversation with his father whom he had to admit he felt sheltered by, and while We many of us seldom in later years felt moved to visit Mel, once when with the children Flick and Andrew Jim let his father take them down to the shore while he Jim looked up his Indian classmate backfield rival Ira Lee, who no doubt like other Indians worked at the Fire Department; and once upon a time asked the author of that obituary so brief it flirted with the unspeakable, all that amazing grief was Brad’s own, so Jim could better fall forward into the obstacle of all space round Windrow leaving that full-blood behind him in that house mingling with time while Jim the other brother who’d been told to go away where he belonged presently did so — well, that is, upon graduation and after helping his half-brother carpenter a high-school Shakespeare set of different levels and a couple of trapdoors, and other formalities such as announcing he would stay clear of the newspaper racket (Wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole? added Alexander and wondered where the expression had come from) — as far as — as far as— oh think of something — as far as your old Navajo Prince from (he joked). . but didn’t finish, for his grandmother didn’t appreciate his distaste for what had been a family concern even though her daughter, Jim’s mother, Sarah, would never have scribbled for the paper had Heifetz played in Windrow or Einstein at the ‘39-’40 World’s Fair or had she had a mother who in 1920 would have let her go gallivanting off—

— yet because in later years he would rather report business, industry, new Coast Guard meteorology functions, the specifics of a Sprint missile’s hard core even if, like an Edsel car, such facts shortly "obsolesced," or such human data as how an apartment house set up its own energy mill on its city roof, nuts and bolts reality, no more, he was peculiarly angry at the Spences of his business surviving on exorbitant "tips," inflated little payments for putting one source in connection with another source in the covert interest of gaining information that was to be sure news for coverage but for money-like leverage, too; but he was above starting something with Spence when Spence with stubble like sooty earth on his cheek, and chin like sand, chimed in with a question from bar’s end sparked by information he surely had never heard firsthand here, and one year or the next was heard to say, "You mean you had a cemetery with a race track on one side and a golf links on the other?" (Chuckling derision it was not, but allusive, invasive, pervasively collusive, so Thassright, Spence, thassright, thass what I said. Or, Spence was heard to say, "You mean your grandmother was honest-to-God pursued by that Indian eastward? How far, then? how far?" (Doubt it, Spence, doubt it.) Or, "You mean your mother left a note only for the owner of the boat? — and she said she was sorry this was all a terrible accident, that his boat was there and he was away?" (Forget it, Spence, you didn’t hear a thing; forget it.)

And so when he saw this very Spence — as trashy after fifteen years of off and on being within Mayn’s sights, as sleazily unaltered as some crum who was probably loved by someone, but who? a love child! there, that was it! a love child, as Margaret had once called Mayn’s counter-brother (half-) Brad — Spence in close convjersation at the Press Site we hardly remember with the South American gentleman Mayn was interested in, so he felt his very body inclining to blot Spence from that night view of the white poised vehicle NASA’s vertically movable bridge three Florida miles off, but it came to him, the subject having been fatally on his mind (and he checked it out with his colleague Ted), that Spence was Lincoln reincarnate doing all the damned things that Lincoln could not let himself try doing, until Mayn laughed and asked what had ever happened to the President-elect’s dog, left with a neighbor in Springfield to be walked in the invigorating February chill, smelling near and far— Why that’s who Lincoln became, said Ted.

Mayn, we already remember, took his time and was not an interrupter, and Larry liked this when he told Mayn about the "Pseudosphere" and drew it like a personal horn for him—

like a little old-fashioned solid picture of other possible space but here a la high-school geometry but then Larry fell silent stunned that he’d confined himself to studying the pseudosphere as a graph showing the extent to which a surface bends, a graph of bending moments (!), when this garden-variety old Euclid-type image of other, far out geometries of space linked up (like capsules) in his mind with a backward-photographed relation between the growth of the nuclear mushroom and the wild gravity of that somehow highly personal obstacle the black hole. Well, Larry seemed slightly freaked. So Mayn mentioned the Russian laser whizzes who figured out a way to fire a ruby laser beam through a smearing lens and into methane gas or it could be one of the other so-called non-linear mediums that are optically affected by light, like crystals and aerosols, and with this "phase"-something-or-other mirroring process get the light beam to come back like a time-reversed image with the distortions gone — which, fired and retrieved through atmospheric turbulence, could help us plot storms, and had uses in satellite weapon systems Mayn preferred not to think about. Mentioning these things, Mayn did not ask Larry why he accepted tacitly the Simultaneous Reincarnation label for maybe being in Two Places, voiced off the top of his head by Mayn himself, while for weeks he had never alluded to the future he might well have come from to judge from his onetime friend Mayga’s willingness to go along with it. But Mayn did ask, What do you mean "they disappeared," the two faggots in the hallway? to which Larry replied that he meant that they disappeared. Meaning? Mayn asked. Well, that Lar’s been accepting these urban phenomena lately. Maybe the space of the elevator reached out and took them (Larry grinned with one side of his face). Mayn was quite fond of him. He missed his own son. Larry let go some tears out of his eyes, his face was screwed up. Mayn had a vision and Larry put one hand across his eyes and got out some words of what he was feeling: "I wouldn’t rather live with her; I wouldn’t. I thought they got along pretty good, you know? I mean it’s O.K. with my father. Oh I don’t want her to come back. Oh…! No, I don’t mean that, I’m too old to say that; forget I said that. Maybe it’s who she’s with, another woman, like a mother — is that it? I want her to come back. But I don’t. That’s all. But I think she will." Larry is slowly, softly almost laughing, like not quite trying to throw up, and Mayn finds history right here.

Time to call a halt to falling forward, we know the voices have not stopped, back home in that place that, like founders, his grandma and he called Windrow, their name for the growing town; nor stopped in the Hermit-Inventor’s New York, nor the Harrisburg near where the Navajo Prince, increasingly real as he came eastward, encamped canopied by a cloud imbued with the lumens of a Moon barely there that night but implicit in the dawnlike fineness of ash comprising in fact the Anasazi healer’s humorous airborne remains, long before our current software’s hardware but not before our perennial software itself.

Mayn should not take Larry into his confidence. It might be dangerous. Larry did not need, moreover, to hear a middle-aged man confirming his own words from a past that could seem a future to the boy, though boy was not enough to call him. Nor should Mayn be father to the boy. He already had one, who could help him simplify his economics homework and take him to see Shakespeare Off Broadway and they’d discuss it on the way home— "Let’s walk; O.K., Dad?"

I didn’t want her to come back, was what Mayn the boy said to the spooky porch that absorbed two, three Margaret tears; and, once asked by his wife what his (apparently not very narrative) mother Sarah thought of all the grandmother stories, reported Sarah saying, Good God! I never knew any Indians.

But if he said, I don’t want her to come back, he also said: I don’t want them to find her.

He conceived of her standing right there on the beach that September day (when she was in fact long gone), awaiting a fugitive sub but herself turned invisible, yes by one magic that the Germans had at the last second salvaged from the lost War (for they did things, and proved that things had causes and then switched around and began with a cause and made a thing), salvaged through a woman leading a cadre of men and finalized a device for becoming invisible, say by an internalized meteorological focus of concentration kin to the destructive yearning of the continent to contain all the anger and hope of its tribes even if from New Mexico to Maine this yielded a mount of waste here and there that would need moving by a new geology.

Naturally it passed through Mayn’s mind — alternating current, direct, forget which is which — that his mother might have passed into another life and by some established route not died at all. Oh he never went back to that beach. Christ save us from the sentimental beachware of nostalgia, thank you. Yet wait a moment, fuck you, yes He will if we want save us. She wasn’t there, for why should she be? But neither had she been there on Jim’s secret September day in ‘45 when no one knew he was down at the shore; Jim’s no kook, no private eye, no mystic, none of the above or below; and no mother was there in spirit or intent, any more than on the day of her disappearance a few weeks previous when her family had not been there to say goodbye she had embarked by acknowledging only the owner of the boat she would always need in Jim’s mind, a boat exactly as present as the owner was not. But Jim knew it didn’t make the best sense, the sense which breathes from the soundest family histories. He knew. And knew, as well as he would ever know the statistics of what the corporations in question vowed they would only do to that giant foreign southwestern landscape of the Four Corners through flaying its cloak of (if you call that) vegetation — and knew as well as he would know that the dark-blonde woman Dina West, who "needed" him, she said, to help add to the evidence exposing the power companies’ surgery of the land (so exposed already under the vast, flat New Mexico sky we don’t just right off the bat think of their operational Enterprise as Private), did not need in the same way her husband and his radio station in Albuquerque for an instant of history coinciding with the appearance above it hanging still together of the plume from the Four Corners plant, a sign that the waste of parts may yield coherence of the whole; yet she was not coming on to Mayn when she let him take her (in her car, driven by her) past the turnoff for her Paseo and along the Sandia Mountain highway to a bedroom suburb you might call it if the land were not always taking over and surrounding us with distance and those distances of the sky’s horizon that you stop thinking about and without much ado join but a permanent change of mind if you could only lay your hand on it circling back to find it not quite there now (so you look up, you look down), and, within that pretty elegant trading post the bedroom suburb, an artists’ joint that Mayn had eaten green chili and soft, mellow chalupas in once and never forgotten when there was nothing to remember there where he thought you could drink a meal every other night if you were that caliber of artist until, in this conversation that was supposed to be about wasting environment, he just couldn’t see what the blonde was adding to the specifics he was already in possession of except, of course, within their vivid margins of number and compound one more brief life (hers) implicit in the reality and threatening to be like other stories, long before he heard from a new friend named Norma some of the same stories, more or less, fed back if not shunted via that central agency of information-sharing power Grace Kimball, which collected him more than he them, until, sipping her second straight-up margarita in sync with "your" waitress in a pearly shirt approaching from yet another corner of the woody place to try and take their order, his blonde environmentalist dinner partner with the husband with his radio station asked if Mayn was married — a question whose sense was the words he had said already to himself yet with the meaning What’re you doing here, guy? — until he heard the bottom line in her say with quiet exactness that Ray Vigil’s idea Indians’11 get into commercial geothermal (given the right rock somewhere — and not meaning the Indians working on the hot rock experiment at Los Alamos) was nuts because water was what they wanted, not money or innovations; and Mayn heard her say that she and her husband after twelve years had a good, good friendship and he had said any time she wants to go to Washington as lobbyist or, indeed, work on Interior Department people, he has connections for example with the cement industry, though probably she has plenty through the Bureau (of Indian Affairs) and the Council (Indian Youth)—

— and in some rush of faith so that she tapped her candlelit fingers on his wrist (the waitress tilted her head cheerfully at them and they decided on flan for the lady), he told her about a red convertible automobile equipped to negotiate a New Hampshire lake, and a tiny sailboat with Mayn’s two children sliding around this in fact man-made body of water slashing in close to the piny shore, sliding out toward a point where a whole lot of Indians got trapped by some other Indians and incinerated like a fortress guarded by a meaningless moat—

— and you and your wife?

— they had loved and admired each other—

— ah; well people don’t get divorced only because of that—

— but he had left her.

Often? she asked.

Yes, he smiled.

For what?

He didn’t say, Business. . or To prove we’re like other people (though the blonde lady said, Ouch, in the pause).

But we’ll probably. .

Get back together again?

Now that you mention it, no; she is there year round now. We used to rent.

Mayn and the woman laughed with warmth and tension, in the knowledge neither was content to agree the reasons for separation were "usual" reasons, we all knew what they were (if you call separation without catastrophe real separation!), but in the evening of a day a year and more later, after he had elected not to take Larry into his confidence even in the quite other matter of a displaced, semi-incognito Chilean economist formerly of Dr. Allende’s full-employment, long-rooted, short-lived regime, he heard the woman’s voice in his phone receiver in the middle of the night and struggled off the peak edge of Ship Rock where he would have dreamt then (if he ever dreamt, but he did not) that he was, if her cheerful voice that brought him to that edge had not also woken him in the sharp, rainy light of a New York apartment he had once lived in and rented (and now clandestinely owned), she was in New York and in trouble, she thought, because of a man named Spence who had phoned to call himself an acquaintance of Mayn’s and to ask if she had spoken yet to Mayn’s daughter because their mutual involvement in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something called national technical means capability for verifying placements of missiles, could conceivably put them in jeopardy, and it was likely that Spence would ring her again.

But what was doing in New York?

Whether or not, with the insulting barside queries of that nosy Spence in memory mushrooming like an inspiration to recall everything else until Mayn became that southerner who near the moment of Lincoln’s election observed that if a Yankee pointed a pistol at him he would ask him how much he would take for it—"You mean your grandmother was pursued eastward to her very doorstep by that Indian what was his name?" — "You mean your mother left a note only for the owner of the boat?" — he Mayn still felt that that history of his mother’s getaway—"I am going far to see the land," she had recited, plus other lines — or more anciently his grandmother-to-be staring up at flowers growing down out of a haunted ceiling above her bed in an 1893 Omaha boarding house and her father’s contradictory instructions to "Go west as the man said" (the man who ran that paper in the city? — Greeley?! No the crackpot who stood behind her in 1885 at the historic pre-ruin of the uncrated Statue arrived prepaid on Bedloe’s Island), yet her father (who hoped she would carry on the paper someday because as he said to her beau, Alexander, she was a reformer even more than a writer) said at the same time, "You’re to be with your Cousin Florence the entire time you are in Chicago and that includes when you are back in your hotel writing copy" — all that stuff, although he kept circling back to it only to find it wasn’t quite there any more, made no less sense than the twenty-five-year span promised (like interest) for regrowing the vegetation shield stripped by the geniuses who’d rented the mine from the Indians (and called it on their signs the "Indian" mine for Interest does not lie) to feed the coal-into-"natural"-gas-"if "ication project by the Lurgi method which Mayn learned in five minutes and consigned to one plain young sentence declining to contemplate the perfectly good principle that what’s true of (yea, good for) the part may not be true of the whole— until with a start that was not all him, Mayn felt the ache of wings in his back (a shade more credibly than any conclusions he and his distant loved son had reached at breakfast time as to why dreamers thought their dreams conveyed the future), Mayn we say felt a long, halyard-vector (call it) slung from far off bugging him with its maybe hundreds of thousands of miles of calm meaninglessness so that he understood again not only that his position in the future could be real but that he had been assuming without evidence but not with faith that nothing dreadful would happen to Larry, this troubled young (be O.K., though) fellow Larry: but then as if he were responsible yet could not be responsible for the boy, there came to Jim a fresh free dose of void— though without any of those gross little margins of witticism history’s humor — a prevision that Larry was doomed, and soon.

Naturally, it passed through Mayn’s mind that his mother might have passed into another life, not died at all — a second, a third, or yet another life. He did not discuss this with Margaret, who, in so many words, had said that she just could not accept it, the fact, the fact of Sarah’s doing this. Meanwhile the boy lay awake with the shape or symptom of the repeated fantasy lost within him saying to himself, "She said to go away, but she went. So her advice now means, ‘Go away from home like me’—more than it means ‘Go away from me.’ "

Jim was not deranged and so he was able to be amused even at fifteen at the thought that he had made her go away. It wasn’t a true thought, and he would have it from time to time. That is, he was aware enough of life to know he would have it from time to time.