Women and Men

THE HERMIT-INVENTOR OF NEW YORK, THE ANASAZI HEALER, AND THE UNKNOWN ABORTER

The grandson, who had refrained from asking if a certain skinny geezer that came and went one summer day was the man or weird character in question, would recall his grandmother’s remark — history, prediction, regret, relief — that there were things about the Hermit-Inventor not even she knew; for the grandson said, and at once recalled saying, that there was maybe stuff the Hermit-Investor didn’t know about the Anasazi healefs discoveries.

Oh that must be so, the grandmother averred, with a pensiveness not humorous this time, yet embracing but never equal to a knowledge they both had that the grandson would know things about these her fabled history and lands that she herself did not. Wasn’t this because she had always been so near to him, he to her? — yes: down the street of a New Jersey town’s seasons from the late-spring morning when light shared itself with him, shored from the tiers and banks and steep slopes of foliage seen from his own third-floor room when he would stay with his grandparents, or seen from his grandmother’s own second-floor bedroom (where once he had learned to whistle), prime green-sea mass of waves of maple-bough leaves that crowded the porch as if the trees were mysteriously withheld, all but their leaves, which so surrounded the dining-room windows of his grandparents’ house that lawn and dirt-ground and driveway and the raised sidewalks of Throckmorton Street where it crossed West Main all just flickered as if through the fine wings of butterflies known by name or as if precipitating the broken motions and real flow of these sidewalks’ own brown and slate lozenges, on, on to autumn’s first intuition that winter had been in its mind all along (we mean chill) when the boy, who was like a man and felt somewhat that way, left his own house for school; left always later than his kid brother always in haste yet with the leisure of those young years no matter what the weather (while the kid brother curiously hated and could burst with rage at the lunatic winds that visited the street during just six or seven January days, unlike the tougher elder brother), who came out of their now motherless house a hundred yards down the street from their grandparents’—and, on instinct that morning as he was turning at the end of the flagstone walk toward downtown, he glanced back in the direction of his grandmother’s house to find her there — a watchman or, in the midst of everything, a live eye — there diagonally up the street on the far side as if something in his head way in advance had been seeing her there but she hadn’t gotten the message until now, a figure who waved like a mother seeing him off to school, where he was a regular person and a husky, friendly guy, etcetera, nothing odd about him, he’d leave that to others in and out of his family: yet now seeing his grandmother standing by a pillar of her porch, her hands clasped, he registered some rift in the scheme as an extension of it, economy of scale long before he knew those words (which years later like many others seemed to have been waiting for him inside him) — only that that grandmother woman, whom he had fallen out with after recently doubting for the first time her old but secretly always mounting stories, doubting because they began to flicker as more than stories and to bear queerly upon his life so that he had to think that if an event then that was so like here and now wound up like that, things here will too — ugh ugh ugh and shoot and shit but it sounds silly! — was waving him ("downstreet," as you said in that town like "downwind") off to school from that home of hers that he loved and sometimes lived in, and not this other home of his own at the other end of this flagged walk less than a regulation championship pool’s length behind him his father’s house, his departed mother’s undervalued house, and his own (an early real-estate insight belonging to him as freshly and clearly as in later years the house never seemed to), from which he had just emerged (for yes he did feel the exposure), with a gray-with-white-trim porch one step lower than the porch of his grandparents’ white house, "his grandmother’s," up the street: yet his own porch had dark, earth-damp, min-erally aromatic room under it to store two or three (in fact two and a half) rakes and some crates and a litter of forgettable junk and an occasional eavesdropping boy and a lawnmower that you made into a congenial machine between your force and the sweet sluggish-grown growth of the grass that didn’t feel very grassy green when you were pushing through it: a house with, above that porch, a ruffled tangle of dry, dark, indestructible ivy running up and around the porch posts sticking by some adhesive, some type of time, and pretty only at a distance, but a porch not with the everlasting paint smell in one specific corner of his grandparents’ porch, the corner behind the all-weather wicker-white chair (with kind of webbed legs, roostery-furred legs, if you know what we meant at the wordless time this was thought) in which his grandfather sometimes but not in this weather or at this hour of the day sat with a tome of the Century Dictopedia (as he said it, open under a pearl-handled magnifier which he fingered and looked less through than at, murmuring that this way you could see double:) while this school morning, whether because alone and watched, or from a mental wind from her, to her, a very grandmother-wind if you will, the opposite of that supposed ill wind (yay) Danny Kaye sang of in one of those nutty movie numbers as the identical-twin celebrity-extrovert — or in fact mistral (of the largely unknown boy-man’s later years when we lived to Change or talk non-judgmentally of Change late into the night show and mistral became miztral); but did this grandmother-wind, like nor’easter or sou’wester (also a rain gear in the overall weather machine’s sluice-drive continuum), come from? or did it "go to?" (as Shakespeare in high school said, while Jim and friends snickered, "Go to" — "How now, Gratiano?" — "How now, my lord, wilt hear this piece of work?" — "Come hither, sit by me" — "Go to, thou varlet") — for this wind, grandmother or ill or other — or mother — moved this morning across his broadening shoulders from left to right pushing him to turn squads-right upon achieving the main sidewalk which he was going to do anyway toward school which is beyond the other, far end of town, and he thereupon turned against this momentum, only to find, up the street, his grandmother on her own porch waving, as his mother sometimes more slowly would from her window if she was awake and in position to and had she now still been among the living if in all probability suicidal:

Cut, said the man who played the director in a picture about Hollywood that was showing one weekend in Windrow, New Jersey; but you kept watching; the movie went on, the screen didn’t go blank on you with consequent whistling and stamping as if the audience were trying to get out: Cut yourself in on what someone else is doing, a woman coming home, saying hello, waving goodbye or was it good morning, or just good, practically speaking, off there, until you can’t tell if her scale is inside or all around her, like your own according to the powerful woman Mayn visited in the Bronx years later not because he wanted his own auras read but to get information on someone else, and there the locally famous woman, who was unexpectedly pregnant, leaning back thoughtful on one arm of her armchair, told him she do him but not gonna talk about someone else, some lady he said come to see her: Cut, to the grandmother waving slowly, not at all trying to be his mother (it came to him), but being herself, which didn’t rule out being at his house when he and his little brother got home from school, Brad earlier, Jim at dusk, a tall, surprisingly soft woman, although quiet somewhere inside her, for he understood one day that they had this understanding not to pry — let some feelings, some of the past, go unknown although wasn’t it true that it would always come out? and he waved back to this grandmother of his who’s way up the street there on the opposite side — she’s got her life thank you — as if this morning salute happened always or, looking ahead to when another event that felt sort of laid out, used to happen oh twenty years later in the century, and his own wife marveled that he accepted this odd event, namely, meeting just like that on a city street a very specific person from years past and on the spur of the moment taking for granted that here came this person he hadn’t seen in several years, but — well, walking down a street in New York’s Greenwich Village past a bike shop all metal, glass, and color and with a quarter ton of maroon newness in it, perhaps because of a great cold red English bike frame that, as he had not noticed knowingly before, is a plane figure in space, a near parallelogram stronger with sides and an angle or two gone on to a kiltered inertia of vector-time elegant and ready that always waited for it, a bike frame detached from all wheels applicable in future and hanging near a soft-blue French Motobecane completely assembled so the blue warmed the shining saddle as much as did the sunlight, he reflected upon a harshly curious interview he had just smiled, factored, and chatted his way through with a maverick meteorologist, only now to get run down by two small laughing kids escaping their mother who’s at the door of a brick-faced bank just as he met a russet-bearded man (economist) not knowingly seen by him in seven years, and (here’s the point) said directly, "Hi, Cliff," as if years were days, and nodded with a smile and passed on down the street for another seven, ten, twelve years — as if (did we say?) it had been laid out—

— laid out? asks a voice threatening to get comic that instantly acquires the body of the all-purpose interrogator who has probably picked up "all-day sucker" in his crash research for potential enemies’ childhood laid out with a jawbreaker roundhouse right — but no: not laid out on the carpet with one punch, laid out like a ground plan in motion—

— so later he knew that that morning that his always beloved grandmother had been off there waving away the distance between them like thin air, he had put away into a dump of his brain some sketch or letter in the seldom-emptied wastebasket in his own room two doors down from his father’s bedroom (pyjama’d forty-five-year-old bulk dead to the world in sky-blue cotton issued him for his July birthday till that father would come awake jerking up onto one elbow and shielding himself with the other against the room’s deep shadow so Jim could quote his father’s old "He’s a good boy when he’s asleep" remembering many not apparently unhappy bedtimes when this got said in his mother’s company but when company was present so the smaller Jim would grin dumbly, he saw himself, but no one in this dark bedroom to say it to now, and so much surrounding the now bigger, older Jim inside that it’s worth putting also out of mind), a diagram (close to) a coach’s blackboard play-pattern remembered (doodled) with an exactness honoring maybe not the scale or content but the method of the October History class he was sitting in; or during Geometry; or during Journalism (which, oddly, his father with all that practicality sweating toward acumen if not quite to it, didn’t think he should waste time taking when there’s a newspaper in the family:

: so the lines of two homes got linked by a street paralleling them by means of sidewalks the length of the town, and got connected by him and corrected by his heartbeat so that, shifting through at least one inequality, they became like the lines of one T-formation halfback going in motion to the left side until the ball was snapped, and the quarterback faked a quick pass shallow to the left but he handed off instead to his stellar fullback (me) who went three steps to the right, leaned toward scrimmage — toward tackle, where a void had been cleared by "Tornado" Tim Ivins, thus attracting doubly a new flow of enemy defenders — leaned the other way to cock his right shoulder and heave a surprise pass as unexpected as it was diagonally risky to the far left sideline where the very halfback who’d been in brotherly motion and to whom the quarterback had just faked a pass was now all on his lonesome, while drawing during History your circled Xs and your broken lines and the blocking assignments, he was aware of growing a rollicking hard-on receiving beside him his girl’s faint halo (just before lunch) of gentle sweat and a seasoning he knew one night some weeks later was gardenia. He had brought her one, having never knowingly smelled one, in a shiny white carton, shoebox size, he had to carry like a coffin offering with something live or afloat inside, gingerly anyhow, and dared to greet her with a kiss upon her cheek but long enough (was it one kiss, or two or three) so he felt her smile but with precious quakes along the dimple which are now and forever tender plus amused, so that (in any event) the play pattern of the quarterback’s faked pass and the fullback’s faked run displaced the teacher’s words — which were about words — and well this was the way the diagram of the two homes acted like a play pattern and that early morning that he felt was brought to some wonderfully imperceptible point upon the raw air by his grandmother’s being there,

he displaced or slipped into a fold of some soft luggage for the journey (Great day in the morning! his granddad could say, happily astoni’ed) which fold might have been itself something slipped away—dis (we continue) placed the atmosphere of seeing his grandmother waving, in the time it took him to go from porch down own front walk to sidewalk, his own home behind him had obviously swung round (but don’t tell anyone, they’ll say you’re nuts or, worse, that you’re not serious, don’t tell even yourself, for, shit, the truth’s gon’ come out anyway) — sailing before those prevailing easterlies you heard about {prevailing westerlies, a man interjects at seaside Mantoloking cripes anybody ‘n everybody knew what west wind meant!). But was it blew from or to the west? because Jim asked and forgot — to think about it, that is — and asked again {and wasn’t told!) for they didn’t even know all about clouds and you could see clouds but couldn’t see wind (said some voice in him) and this was there in him and yet wasn’t him at all because he was on the march to school: he blew up at his girl (though laughing all the way) Whadda ya mean I’m spoiled? — just ‘cause you say you got homework so you can’t come out to the movies? — and he squirted—

— quite unexpected words at her: "What if you got pregnant?" (he would say anything to her at fifteen, he could do that and she didn’t get shocked) but he was thinking horrified a second, What if this queenly girl has already (not gotten, but) been! — and never told me! — because some girls must be like that, ‘stead of putting the screws to you in which case you followed Owl Woman’s example, "I am going far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling." But if it is not an irreverent interruption, How did owls get a reputation for knowing so much? — shit, Owl Woman, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who heard it from several people including both Margaret and the East Far Eastern Princess, was just always turning into an owl and her getting the name (they took all the good names — Red Cloud, Left Hand, Reared Underground, Tall Salt) Owl Woman might not mean a thing about wise owl shit and mean only that she disappeared into an owl when she wanted to and maybe flew around at night looking for bright eyes to aim at until — cut — she was back again Owl Woman, singing songs she didn’t claim responsibility for since they came to her in dreams or when she was an owl but who was to say if the owl was in her or she was in the owl, or basically was owl? she was known to have had children, so maybe she wasn’t an owl; but what happened if you turned into an owl in the middle of giving birth or in the middle of—

— squirting water he had virtually sucked (so distant was it) at the old low-pressure drinking fountain outside the noisy school cafeteria at his friend Sam’s big brother who wore glasses lensed thick as whirlpools and was fat enough to sit on you but when fighting threw these fiendish longitudinal jabs that looked fast but no more than fast until they went through you as evil as an electric shock and permanently greened a muscle in your arm y’know, and on the march to school (for, after the million shocks flesh is heir to, it’s still only the late apple-breeze of the fall of 1945 with the dust still setting on those immortal Japanese recreations one beginning Hiro t’other ending saki that through their layers of sifted, screened, pastel’d tumuli-cumuli foretell that with American aid the Japs can imitate anything, up to and including an obliterated polis) it’s his grandmother just beginning the day sweeping the porch a bit early, not this daydream of his own front walk maybe twenty or twenty-five yards behind him turning into that other and only apparently much greater distance from him of her house so when he waved back far down the street and held her gaze a second as casual as if she was there every morning, the distances to either home with him at the center were, well, equal — her large gray eyes his body swung to, as close as his mother’s eyes sometimes at the window behind him of his own house that’s turned by this arc of mind or swing of wind to his grandmother’s: This afternoon in his mind anyhow he would be fighting the halfbreed (who most of the time had no smell) for the halfback spot that in the new formations was basically left halfback when everyone knew that he should and would stay where he was, he was broader and right for fullback where the coach was playing him for sure-footed solidity and while his grandmother, who often employed that halfbreed classmate of her grandson’s for yard work, asked of the "endless hole," as grandfather put it so slowly filling up with doughnuts or crullers, how football was going, or Sam’s father’s huge greenhouse for commercial roses, or how Geometry was going, she would listen so truly to what was said that she might have been drawing out of him those shelved daydreams where the halfback’s positioning and speed went apart from his person, in fact so perfectly separated from the halfbreed’s braggart person that you acquired your own signal back at you that, on a morning porch not obscured now by the bough leaves of other months and from the center where you yourself were just equal in radius (that warmed and vanished into his hand’s question now Which was more sensitive — the upper slope of his girl’s breast or the lower plum-jut and did one breast get aroused by the other’s being aroused?) — just equal in radius to his distance from his home porch, because that porch of hers was home to him, and never forget that if he himself had lost his one mother (by sea; one if by sea), the grandmother-woman had lost a daughter (which word he could apply to his mother only with the difficulty he had of thinking she was not dead), and if he couldn’t think of his grandma generally and of his girl’s breast in the same head, nor with the real regular stuff on his mind and at the same time that dopy radius that belonged in someone else’s mind not his daydreaming its swing around behind him and in front of him plotting out some future, and then around and back between the obviously near house his father now alone owned and the grandparents’ place obviously six, eight times as far away (leave the surveying to us, to George Washington and his sister city Thomas Jefferson), why the radius from being impossibly the same to both houses to being plausibly and clearly the same now became a radius just a shade more than you needed or wanted: but for what? for some godforsaken reason that forgot itself in the doings of his day till he paused at the threshold of a class early in the darkening afternoon and got shoved with initiative by some class799

mate just as he saw rain hitting the silver panes like light, and his teacher, a statuesque woman capable of movement, turned from the board with wet around her eyes und cheeks, so that, elbowing the friend who shoved him, he could put all of it and none of it together for a second to embrace an elusive burial of fact, that it must be many mornings his grandmother had been on that porch of hers up the street watching the motherless brothers go to school in succession, and he had known it with some corner of both his eyes so not shifting their light upon her who watched over him was just this vacancy about the thing that had befallen him — not a death, though someone else’s, but a thing — fallen right through him to leave him nowhere to be found apart from the wave that had fallen through him, so there’s this feeling that’s unsure embarrassment (he told his girl Anne-Marie after they had lain on the night ground fifty yards from Bob Yard’s parked pickup truck, and she understood how you could feel embarrassed at being so) over what his mother had done or "arranged to have done," he kept hearing and hearing, though this he did not report to Anne-Marie, layin’ on her elbow once in a while noticeably blinking with the coolest and most loving concentration so that he finally cried one time there on the ground and said he didn’t know shittin’ why except he was now more than embarrassed (she said, I know), he shoved her in the shoulderbone, scented flesh, matter! — and she shoved back harder and he almost asked her to marry him by which he would have meant go away now at the age of fifteen and a half, which she would not have done and partly because she did love him, but he didn’t say the words and felt better for holding those words in, while sensing the Tightness of feeling, yes, embarrassment (it didn’t matter if anyone else in the world felt it for this type of event—he did) embarrassment at the departure of his mother, his grandmother’s daughter; at the same time he was not going to go out of his way during that autumn to tell his grandmother he couldn’t trust her old Princess and Indian stories to be stories any more because she was obviously often the East Far Eastern Princess and had done at least some of the things that some of the time some of her old kid stories said, an Indian chief’s son’s mother who was nuts or at least with a hole in her head all the time filling with demons really did die and really did come back to life when her son left in pursuit of that paleface Princess now immortally bronzed by the western sun (though bronze was an alloy of Bolivian tin and Chilean copper, though come to think of it, how did you alloy? did you melt the metals and stir ‘em up in a bowl made of earth?) and somewhere in his mind populated by football smells of cleat-rubber, fresh (green) football shirts, hide, choking earth, and the tense, constant future of play patterns and populated by his now only one girlfriend’s wonderful proof that flowers might perspire with dew that other scientists could imagine came down from above and from the outside but really came from the interior of the soul even on Sunday to the straw-creak of slightly shifting cushion stuffing in the church pew (that seemed the least Godly place of the week and in some pleasant threat one of the more exclusively sexed-up of times in the fairly steadily sacred week, feelings he years later knew that he had accepted as wordless and unlosable), he recalled and recalled that his mother had told him he should go away and would go, but then had gone herself: so he woke up into his mother’s oceangoing hallucination for which there was no word, not even the one they gave it beginning with s (for selfish, for sea, for simoom, for suing in absentia), too confused to do any but the next thing, suspecting that his grandmother’s west-easterly histories shed upon him some shadow if he let them (which he did not do) imagining through the successive fall and winter clarities of his mother’s absence that no force acted on him, oh he was freer (oi, he was freer — oi, they would say, because one of their friends was Jewish and both his parents were, too, in that New Jersey town and this kid’s father had bought out the hardware store and enlarged it just at the time another newspaper got started that commanded the outlying agricultural advertising and audience, oi), freer than free, which equaled but an illusion of manhood he even then guessed.

So he chose to be friends with his grandmother — but friends instead of relations or something else unknown to him — having never told her he wasn’t friends with her. Which maybe he never had not been. It wasn’t her fault his mother had taken herself away; and his grandma had been there all along regardless of any view of his; and he even fell thoughtfully in love with his grandmother again, but was more aware of time now, so in knowing his feeling like a man was O.K. but a little early and tough though it didn’t feel tough, he did all over again feel a man. And the day dreamt radius of one school morning faded into his life countersinking there some power he wouldn’t take, particularly because it went on thinking itself into the future unless he reined it back a little like beeg thoughts that if shortened find their true area, as closely real as it is troublesome — that is, to survey such facts without taking the speed, juice, and directed path out of such moving bodies the better to see them.

So he found his grandmother again and they were talking about the weather. They went that much back into her old yarns, when people cared to know why weather happened as it did. The two weathers of the Anasazi Medicine Man and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, who in one of his successive incarnations, just one year before meeting an editor’s daughter on an island that belonged to Bedloe among the littered limbs and deep-mined uncratings of a Statue he called a French gift for comic art, had witnessed a tornado so symmetrical it sustained itself for two hours, while the Anasazi Healer, who said if you reject the Yuma preventive of an ounce of mesquite wood ashes and purest brook water and must choose the pound of cure as my old friend the Hermit-Inventor of the East has taught me, go ahead and beat your belly with rocks (knock knock), but if the wind turns to hail or even rain you may wind up having the baby anyway — thus the alte Anasazi who would ever be six hundred and more years of age but whose death without-reincar-nation was real and important, having precipitated an eastbound cloud un-precedentedly noctilucent and low that was to be contemplated as weather and not for its long, slow trip in the lee of a young Indian man (the boy flickeringly, and the man less and less, recalled) tracking during 1894 (a hundred years or so before the end of the world) a young Anglo woman one day to be herself turned into a mist and temporarily secreted if not inhaled by a statue large as a giant rising from the waters of an aging harbor.

The two weathers of downcoming and upgoing were not quite the same as observed ("just seen") and created ("suddenly made, y’know"), or the weathers of presence ("there") and absence ("not there") in turn not the same as the two weathers of leaving and arriving; nor were these pairs to be parceled or paralleled equally between the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor. For the Indian and the Anglo agreed as well as disagreed regardless of their relative distances from each other; they were near each other sometimes even to the point of meeting, and yet they were oftener far remote, while the Hermit in his Net-Space-Traversed seemed less a hermit than the Anasazi who dwelt in a high rock cell but in order perhaps to be visited by those wishing to be away from where they were and get a glimpse of the more than old man; and he was visited by images, winds, and creatures of everlasting hues and waters including his friend the Hermit and the alleged Mena (woman-zoologist, Chilean, specialist in the javelina and its hind-mounted scent glands, also in horse-bone meal) and the troubled young Navajo Prince, who for the love of a strange girl visitor had abandoned his principal pursuits, his studies of the northern bison tongue’s energy potential, the improvement of corn crops, the messages of Earth told in the apparent motions of storm mass and dry cloud from mountain to mountain or the transparency of an aborted fetus.

The grandmother’s grandson thought a minute, as if like an avalanche of warm air the events during that awful summer, which was always the year of his father’s age, had not happened; he said he didn’t remember if the East Far Eastern Princess had ever gone to see the Anasazi Medicine Man; then he caught himself — It doesn’t matter, Gramma.

Doesn’t it? she asked, piqued, at odds with him and ruffled but not flummoxed; No, she supposed it didn’t.

For what would she have gone to the Anasazi Healer for? He wasn’t your general practitioner, nor much interested in disease (his own people having all died out hundreds of years ago), though you don’t always go to a medicine man to get rid of some old Eurasiatic disease, and the lady in question, bearing upon her person an aura as real as the turbulence a person may conveniently release from his or her heart system in order to externalize it so others may enjoy it, may have trusted the phenomenal specialist she consulted who was himself so old he was about ready to become a more or less fragrant crumble of herb fossils to be read on the concave floor of his retreat, if she knew how to read such herbs, for she knew next to nothing of the lore, only that the fern leaf of the reddish-lavender-bloomed redstem storksbill showing in early spring in open areas where the soil has been disturbed may cause upheavals in the womb that are heard as if from afar until they come closer like a dream and may be woken from but whose releasing magic may be overvalued by some women who imagine they seek swift solutions when in truth they seek knowledge—until, with his gentle wisdom, unaccompanied by what went without saying (that he would respect her privacy), her aged host the Anasazi Medicine Man said that in a few days she would know what to do and then the how would follow naturally; and she went away feeling at once that she had arrived and was all of a piece, which when she told her future husband many weeks later at the other end of the world he took to mean "all in one piece," which he echoed gratefully. But by then the intermission in her life was over, and he was a good man and it didn’t matter what he said—

— because the two weathers of leaving and arriving went on regardless, observed the grandson (and we who were his Choor relations often so far from the country he inhabited as to be beyond body though bound in many bodies saw that her smile at being told this seemed pensive and neutral, not an elder being told a bedtime fancy by a child though charmed by how he said "regardless" at the age of fifteen and even sadly dubious at the soft corners of her infinitesimally downturned mouth, though she was the one who had thought up a long time ago leaving and arriving, to express what she recalled).

Where did he recall a tornado? — I’m getting old, Gramma, losing my memory. Let’s see, she said, fifteen is only the first prime you’ve passed. But he did recall a tornado, and there’d been a division of opinion. The Hermit-Inventor of New York looking upward described it according to his lights and claimed to have seen the whole flotsam-jetsam the tornado snapped up and took away to its grand crocodile nest (the Hermit humorist), and chewed up, bag and baggage, animals, people, some possibly both, and some so ruined as to turn into each other, all in the rotational storm that toured the area like an early Geiger-sucker and that went away across a mesa and could be heard but in the uproar not seen, then suddenly came back (But but but but, didn’t he see?)—because (he said) the only thing it had done was leave, after having been in the Earth there to begin with and would never in any sense have arrived—for it had only left.

The Hermit knew with his own eyes, however, that the winter wind when it leaves New York precipitates the arrival from an equal and other area of spring air: and this must be exactly as real as those consequently materializing birds which the Anasazi on the other hand knew had in fact never left as birds or anything else, but became the winds, whose many-voiced, potentially screaming speeds were but streaming cloaks for their absolutely unchanging spirits: and he, on this other hand, from his acquaintance with the steeps of Taos’s holy Blue Lake where the ponderosas hold the upwind and keep it from getting away, and from his acquaintance with the heated, standing-still breezes of the desert to west and to south, knew that wind only appears to move in or move on, but really waits at rest in invisible skins of breath and when the sky speeds up, to come even with the Earth it hardly knew was as entranced by it—say, a slippage or molding shrug or searching readjustment by the sky frictioning the Earth possibly in memory-for-future of those rare times when all the layers of light hiding us from death but each with its cleft may shift into line leaving one great wheeling spoke-like, aisle-like cleft — those invisible skins of breath at rest in all the places of the country are stirred to make their breath blow outward from their fierce stores of force so that few of the People if any know certainly that a wind blowing from Nevada land or from northwest isn’t a wind blowing in truth to New Texas or to southeast, or "aimed," as the Anasazi understood the habit of the breath winds when let out of the skins — or cells, said the Hermit, because according to the grandmother he was always remembering the cells that hermits of other times lived in in Yay (or Yea, Ti, or Ye) which was a dry but not thirsty site that Choor never annexed. (Guess they was both of them windbags, said Mayn years later to his son asleep and his daughter awake, but his daughter didn’t say anything, while his wife from another room called "were.") And when he said he was reminded of old General now new President Harrison’s Inaugural Address in 1841 whose deathless prose when subjected to spoken time went on over an hour and a half in the March air even after Daniel Webster had spent days pruning it and old Harrison had refused adamantly to wear his overcoat, caught his death, and departed almost at once after his arrival, the listening daughter said quietly, Get back to the night-shining cloud made of the Medicine Man’s remains that followed the Navajo Prince across the continent following the Princess east. Well, the father said, kissing her and then his son, there’s a lot of gaps in the record. Fill it in, said his daughter, how about it, Dad?

Come to think of it, that young Indian must have been in Pennsylvania right about the time young Alexander was, because that was his one stint for the family newspaper the Democrat, the early preparations for Jacob Coxey’s Easter march on Washington (Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, But Death to Interest on Bonds!) and he met Chris Columbus Jones near Rockville who believed in some recompounding of the soul’s chemicals, called it reincarnation (industrial reincarnation!) and believed in Coxey’s road bill and his non-interest-bearing-bond bills for municipal improvement loans that came in a dream to this self-made sandstone-quarry tycoon who did not believe in prayer but in action but against the deep-laid plan of monopolists to plough the poor under, crush them to the Earth, whose sin was not the begetting of children whom Parson Malthus declines to economically christen but only that they have come to the dinner table after others have already fallen to. Coxey’s child was named Legal Tender, and that was Massillon, Ohio, and somewhere in there Margaret had had tea with Coxey on her trip home from the West.

How about it, Dad? Fill it in. But Mayn had finished with so much of that at age fifteen when he took up with his grandmother again, who could help him with French, that he would ask how high it snowed out there and hear his grandmother regret she had not seen excessive amounts of snow while among the Indians, but… but.. (but what? he thought, imagining that she didn’t want to talk about the trip back) while he himself had this sight that didn’t leave him as if it saw him of the Statue of Liberty being drifted with snow higher and higher — no kidding, with snow from the West — cripes, some kind of record, that’s for sure, or when the old stuff hit him later in life he would check out for instance that avalanche of warm air he knew she had said rushed down a mountain slope for a week before one awful night of lightning and hailstones, hailstones like trees made of luminous bole-ring timber that wrecked a horse and practically annihilated a woman, and wonder if, well, you could honestly get that type of weather after a sort of maddening Washoe Zephyr running down mountain or in the Urals the wind White Russians (or so told an interrogand) call the Ilya that jams luckless landsmen with restless ions running down Urals as down the grandmotherly eminences of the West or what she described with a good deal of invention inevitably — which all wasn’t what his daughter wanted to hear but she was young and even at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen would not, like her father before her, ask Gramma how the Indians had broken their horses, or if there had been any fighting against white people she’d told him about who were also poor — all this rather than complete any more that dubious record arising from his grandmother’s strange sources and occasionally supplemented by the boy’s young inventions such as (inspired by listening to a dog that had just survived being "snow-ploughed" by a car at a moment when a child in the car unaware of the skidding dog looked out the closed window of the back seat and silently with eyes closed sneezed and the dog had trotted away putting the experience behind him though first sounding that high metallic wheeze that’s as nearly beyond our hearing as our Kultur’s sound vibes that will pain a dog) that the Hermit-Inventor, who knew his friend had never written a word, not a colon, not a comma, not a Sequoya point, heard the Anasazi healer’s last-breathed words over an incredible distance not just of space (one mile horizontal, sixty-five feet vertical) but of the real time (estimated by the Hermit on arrival as "a while") that brother Anasazi had been dead, heard said sounds (said last words of the already-awhile-dead hence now-ageless Anasazi) by means of a slow-carrier pre-sound like what the boy many years previous had made with pursed lips to his grandmother when in bed together in the early morning, auditing the generalized soft snores of the grandfather in the adjoining room, because his grandmother had been showing him how to whistle, "learning" him because you can be taught only what you know already. And if at sixteen when this was all about over, but earlier at fifteen when his mother had vanished from life — yet in prior years as well — he went on feeling something like his very self-like body literally beyond his wish to get hold of it or drop it, something he had to be or do — a thing as real as a thing — he left it to those growing relations inside him and the world to store leaving and arriving along with hints of dawning hailstorms sifting the wake of a great bird (that had a not so great disposition) whose terminal activities might have no more navigational bearing on a story-book tornado around 1894 than the muscle of a frantic horse reflected the mind of the tense eastbound rider or some risk blowing its shadow over that rider’s shoulder. Yet if the conjunction of the Navajo Prince’s instinctive (while doomed) departure in pursuit of a person he thought he loved with the precipitate recovery of his demon-tenanted mother to actual life brought the boy to the hour when the Hermit-Sojourner (sensitive to an overall convergence flow-pattern) tore the East Far Eastern Princess from the company of the local maidens who sang of their as yet unborn children while grinding and whisking the corn flour as she their precocious visitor wove at the measurable Anglo speed of beginner’s luck upon spindles three of forked, sheet, and streak lightning according to the old saw, and one spindle the white-shelled rain-streamer, but she had just that moment finished and could go calmly, whatever the alarmed inner voice of her would-be guardian who told her when she came to where he was that she must leave at once and ride eastward, her bird was not going in her right direction, she must let it go its way back to her childhood haunts in the foothills of Choor: but, arriving at this moment, the boy, having to speak, asked questions other than what moved him to break in — hadn’t it been flash lightning before? and the Hermit-Inventor of New York had not done any tearing of the Princess, for she had left her work as if nothing was the matter and walked simply to her pony (a gift she’s going to take home with huh) and ridden someplace to rendezvous with her hermit who advised her that if she could let herself be altered to a mist and spirited into the Statue assembled that had been only semi-uncrated pieces when they’d met in ‘85 ("the year after that skinny old geezer," interjected the boy, "saw the two-hour-long tornado according to him") then the Navajo Prince’s mother would live again—

I never, you know, said that, said his grandmother, I couldn’t have— but she did ride east or southeast (fast and quite carefree, considering) to the dry orange valley of the Zuni who were learning beautiful silverwork and turquoise then (not centuries before, in case you wondered, it was an employment project — late nineteenth century) and when she came to a house a woman was piling clothes and a pipe and what looked like a naturally grown toothbrush outside her door and the East Far Eastern Princess (—come on, Gramma!) — the Princess asked a man the way who loitered outside and he said he would go with her to show her and when, alive to the niceties of reciprocation, she said, But don’t you live here, he said, Up until five minutes ago. And he picked up the pile of ejected belongings on the doorstep — but anyway, who ever wove with lightning? it’s too hard to handle, said the boy—

What is lightning anyway? said his own daughter Flick years later, and by then he knew, or anyway could say) — couldn’t you, said the boy, carry lightning around in you and when you opened your mouth—

— No, said the man years later, you don’t hold the charge; naturally you get burned, etcetera, but you don’t hold the charge—

— so what brought the boy to that moment setting in motion the Princess’s departure, hence the Navajo Prince’s, hence, foreign to all we are supposed to know, his mother’s recovery to life and legend right there without moving an inch and where she had been dead, although the demons did come back although they found her Indian head healed of its hole, and could but canter about among the follicles of her supple scalp for the first time getting to know each other ‘stead of being all business—

— and it was not until another time that he and his grandmother went into the matter of downcoming and upgoing weather, when they seemed to reach an intolerable moment when he had to speak of his mother to her and almost did not—

because he heard his mother’s voice saying what he had, however, heard her say once already: "I am waiting for it to come to me. I know it’s going to. It’s inside me." Oh she was smart, that’s why she got herself into these spots to get out in one piece: he heard that, too, like some thought she had had when he was inside her but we don’t believe any of that crap, it’s in the same league as reincarnation. She was asked if she hoped it was a girl this time around — oh God I just hope it can walk as soon as possible! — well it’s not a horse (a foal) feeling for its stirrup out in the darkness of the unknown world! — until, knowing the awful word because Sam’s mother had known somebody who had one, he asked his father, Did she really want to have Brad? (the little spoiled bastard) and his father for once in a lifetime backhanded him across the bridge of the nose, a point hard but sensitive to pressure, only then to ask him what he thought he was saying. And the boy who felt like a man but enough to honor his father’s stupid pain and not strike back, replied, Just did she want to go through with it? — so his father stumbled out of the room and the boy knew the man didn’t know how to say I’m sorry I hit you, and the boy thought correctly that he would despise the man for many a year.

Yet forget though we may that long ago in terms of American continental space-time the Indians had horses that were midnight blue from Mexico — the hoofbeats go on along the parallel tracks that cross at will in memory as if they were underground upside down by our angle and we were in the ground not they — we already remember a beeg difference between the levity that itself can be seen visibly coming out of the collected mouths of those concerned, and the real wounds appearing on the surface of the long-mentioned and long-suffering victims’ form as he or she is bent to her task of recalling what the interrogator has or had asked, including how the Hermit was entitled to the title "Inventor." We, as his and others’ relations have spoken for Mayn, who havee power but dinna want ooze same, and in speaking for him suggested that while subject may be encouraged, nay gladly prodded, to find in recollection a future of sorts, and truly the past recollected the person in such a way as to concoct a future, a parallel to turn to or on, parallels meet, which they do on these new spherical drawing boards plus in the horse latitudes though strictly speaking it’s horses there who meet.

When the Hermit-Inventor in need of a breather and fresh from his New York exploits though unable to sell the real world of commercial architecture on his theory of wind shadows told the Anasazi ancient that the horse latitudes were so cold because horses were thrown overboard in those oceans, the Anasazi explained that this in turn was because sea and land were joined like earth and sky and once ships had been able to sail right through the land and horses galloped the waters, but horses had forgotten all this and it was cruel to just throw them into the sea. We didn’t hear them any more. But after all these tapeworm tracks and evolution of self to new limited senses of the worm, the not-hearing of those horses kept up till we had to admit in the absence of interrogation that we saw the horses we had heard, there’s a number of us, so a number of them, while admitting as well that a man James Mayn (not always to be identified with the boy who looked out of his grandmother’s house into massed leaves mysteriously withholding their trees or with the fratri-being who left the other house, his own, second every morning for school) saw them (horses) like a (dreamlike?) recollection (reported wifeward, who herself would always say, in the days when she was near enough by to be heard, Oh you always have them, you don’t remember them) the horses were racing, two dark brownies left to right, two paler incompleties below the first two but racing (or, better said, frisking, left to right) yet from the right came two others going the other way like a market or the optical illusion a wagerer has that the horses he has bet are running in the wrong direction and will reach the finish line too soon; but, Mayn finds in the (day?) dream some horse that grew long mountain horns and a one-line body no less abstract than the two mere lines of long horns (long arcs) and two that are identical but legs, directed downward in case gravity evolved in the body drawing it toward where gravity go; except that to his wife in the morning as one day in the future to another who isn’t his wife but some of the same things get said like was, horse, you, antler, laughing, water, new, though it can’t all be reincarnate-new until he said, oh of course it was that postcard — which postcard? asks the lady from beside him, and with fatal charm adds, I don’t know anything about any postcard. .!

— Postcard a fellow sent me, French guy, we talked about Polaris subs in a cab going to the airport, or was it the other way around? the card was the famous caves with the drawings twenty, thirty thousand years ago, better than I could do.

— Let’s go see them, she says, but what did you mean the other way around?

— Oh it may just have been Polaris cabs we were talking about in a sub going to the airport.

— Airports are on dry land.

— Anyway only five people can see the caves at a time.

— There’s just the two of us.

— But it’s the humidity, the chemistry; open the cave and the humidity erases all the drawings. You have to be a scientist, a scholar.

— Scientists don’t hold their humidity?

— That’s more or less the idea.

— Oh Christ what time is it?

— Too early. Am I being interrogated again?

— No, just haunted. Well, I wasn’t asking you. You’re not here.

— Thank goodness I’m not. I don’t have to listen to you nag.

— I take full responsibility.

— You would.

— Look, there’s a river running in the middle of the air between the halves of canyon, I mean it’s just optical, but—

— It’s not the sort of thing that happens in Europe. We ought to be in the American desert.

He heard horses’ hooves from the cemetery, which we some of us recall lay between the golf course and the race track, each of these tracts farmland more recently than this other field where bodies planted in time might yield lettered stone and eminent urns of granite flowers. Facts arose that you could arrive at in later years for a living, arose from the cemetery moment when he decided to close down his grandmother’s stories. Yet arose is not just arose — and didn’t he call a halt to those tales upon surmising that the stories were not so much like what had really happened to the East Far Eastern Princess as (uh oh) really were what had happened? At the intolerable moment between grandson and grandmother when they were discussing downcoming and up-going weather and he had to — had to — speak to her of his mother departed, what was to be asked? asks an interrogator so internalized it could be I or they across that sexually shared ocean. Was she perhaps sick and tired? Why did a woman glimpsed in one of Margaret’s tales pound her belly with stones and eat ground-up horses’ bones for a late-afternoon snack? It wasn’t the common cold she had, or the measles, or what Indians hither and yon were likewise curiously unimmune to, to wit Eurasiatic tuberculosis, which the Anasazi healer may have had for two hundred years or more since he wheezed like that three-hundred-pound old bullet-riddled General Winfield Scott so President Lincoln could hear him coming in the next room. On the other hand, the Anasazi grew widely bald down his center part-line — and baldness is more rare than gray hair among Indians. How do you remember all that? When did that happen Gramma? Who was the woman pounding her belly? — It was a woman called Tall Salt, a widow, and she did the asking of the person who had interrupted her. Jim felt very much like a man at fifteen. So what? So plenty, even allowing for silly dialect jokes he and Sam told — Jewish, Negro, foreigner, farmer’s daughter. Felt then like a man why? Was it because he looked in at his widower father pyjama’d amidst more surplus man-hours of sleep than Jim needed? Was it that in sotto voce discussion with his friend Sam at the drugstore soda fountain about to order a second chocolate Coke, he answered Sam’s "It ain’t exactly a hole" with "It’s an opening; but it’s not quite open… it’s.. " Was it because with less parent to go around Jim was victim to what, later in the dying century, came one inclement year to be called "parentifuckation"? Or was it that he had early experienced as vicarious future that mode of murder called by the same (Latin family) as that given and ahead-thrown generation later, to the effect on an arriving missile of the thermonuclear explosion set off by the preceding target-happy missile so that he felt he had foreseen such usage of the term in question, "fratricide." This was more like it, for if he seldom or never felt his strange presence in the future as his responsibility to himself, he did early think (ahead), "I’m getting out of this," unlike his brother, who sat around the kitchen table with Mel, who’s supposed to be their father, and planned never to leave that town and was reassured by Mel and in turn reassured him that the lady of the house was not returning from the dead or from whatever matter she was with them and their mad memories — or the matter.

But whose horse was it if not a communal or common horse that paid with its hence ground-up life for being in the ongoing plane of the exit path of the giant bird that had already gobbled its one-for-the-road wolf, that moonlit bite of Navajo horse? How the extended grandson at fifteen felt a lot like a man without seeming to have passed through normal induction or initiation processing turns to further questions, to wit his sage if fugitive or half-sane njt-picking foresight that two or more questions had better have one same answer because he’s so harried from behind by one of them while dealing with another that, hell’s bells, he plans to get him gone from this town soon’s he decently can. Paired questions such as (a) What were his grandmother’s tears made of the night not so long after his mother’s disappearance into the sea when he accidentally found his grandmother under his surveillance from the backyard? — and, on the other hand (b) By what process was the Navajo Prince’s mother returned to life, assuming this really did occur and occurred almost as soon as her son departed in pursuit of the alien beloved?; or another pair, (a) Was the rotational storm tornadoing its great business that night of the double moon in fact the wake of or the very presence of the Princess’s former bird that, when the Princess departed that Navajo settlement, itself departed in its own Choorish direction? and (b) the question on the other hand, Why had it been at the juncture of downcoming and upgoing weathers or their vouchsafing by the grandmother (who was helping him with his French) and subsequent exploration in subsequent talk about these weathers that he had reached a moment not only when he had to ask about his mother (but what? pirce-quoia?) but a moment intolerable because he couldn’t — that is, ask why his Gramma had been crying that night he’d spied on her, was it straight grief? and what she had seemed to say one day at the cemetery actually was there underground where everybody knew that his drowned mother was not—at the same time asking again if the great day when all the atmospheric clefts lined up and one light-year-long slot or slit parted for cosms of the sun to suck up the life of the Navajo Prince’s mother’s head, had been made up by the Hermit-Inventor or brought on by the Anasazi healer’s sense that something should happen to get them all off the hook including the mad mother herself who that very night, upon the sliding forth of the double Moon and the departure of her son hotly abandoning his studies of the power still untouched in the northern bison’s tongue (that can be dried and reused up to twenty months later), had come back to life and limb, which left a faithful imprint ever afterward upon each downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts even though in later days the Anasazi healer had passed into high-flying noctilucent cloudhood doubtless turning to use some of those cosms that (themselves infinitesimal power parcels holding immense unused energies) would have sucked the lady’s life away on a permanent basis.

Until one day, wondering if he himself was cloud-and-rain, mist-and-snow, temperature-and-wind expert hermited within himself re fleshing that skinny old geezer who (Jim had been privately told by his grandfather Alexander) was sick but still breathing loudly somewhere in New York

Jim happened to say to his grandfather on the porch one idle hour of a subtly sad weekend this dumb-ass thing about wishing at least two or three questions that came at you all at once had one same answer, it would make life easier, ‘stead of keeping it all up — and Alexander guffawed in his own white-wicker world only to break off almost tearing a seriousness from his eruption to say, "Jimmy, that’s what the great ones understand they have to do. History is a knacker’s yard and the trick is to specialize in one use for all your ground-up bones. It’s why Grant told Sheridan to remove General Warren who foresaw every damn danger except the delay occasioned in acting to forestall every damn danger." (What’s a knacker, Granddad?) "It’s the secret of scientific genius and of any great military strategist, although it is not why Grant declined to join Lincoln at Ford’s Theater the night of April 14th but took the New York train instead, wishing to see his children in Philadelphia."

Then grandfather Alexander guffawed again with a touch of unease. Jim nodded sagely. Alexander confided in his grandson as they rocked and gazed out over Throckmorton Street at two highish, narrow white Victorian houses out of which then came Leonardo Hugo, the blond, parchment-tanned oculist, from his and his mother’s, and Miss Amyabel Larsen, the pleasant over-the-counter clerk in the post office who had surprisingly large breasts when they were looked at, from her and her mother’s house, "Why that crazy friend of your grandmother’s, interesting old bum that he is — and was! — told me about a tornado he saw in ‘84, the year before his ill-fated meeting with Margaret at Bedloe’s Island that was absolutely symmetrical, straight up and no bulges in the wrong places to speak of, a cylinder of sorts which went on in one spot like a dervish for two hours." "Oh yeah, you told me, Granddad," said Jim who thereupon recalled that when he had told Margaret that she had told him about this tornado and she had said she certainly had not and he had thought how had he known? — and at the same time remembered his late mother saying there were things he had in him now that he would know later, and he had not put two and two together because he was suspicious of that method yet recalled her telling him to go away where he belonged whereas she had gone, at least for the time being, so he had concluded that he was in the future therefore like someone shocked by a terrible event into a sleep — got it? — yet now could see that he had heard Alexander say it.

But that fine, broad, ever-bald, ever-well-shod gentleman grandfather quickly within the regular tempo of his rocking said, No no, he had never passed on to anybody that little tidbit, and went on muttering and rocking while Jim was busy knowing both that he would like to touch if possible Marie Vandevere’s longish neck with his fingertips and follow each softened point of her arching strong spine downward because she liked it, and (knowing) that he would someday be in a position to recall this important talk with his grandfather as if many streams had made their way toward each other steaming over heavy, jagged rocks but as in a hill-and-valley rural model of Washington, D.C., where he had twice been, where streets meet sometimes like spokes or these streams were a liquefied city he had daydreamt of where parallel avenues and such would melt into one another and meet while being preserved parallel by the dreamer’s will itself: and magic of a loving kind seemed then added to the importantness of this talk with his grandfather because as both rocked and watched the single pair across the street turn away from each other in opposite directions, Leonardo toward town, Amyabel the other way toward what we might today term the cemetery-golf-course-race-track complex, though as anyone could predict she would call for a girlfriend en route and they would vkit the unprecedented greenhouse on the highway to study how the vast new rose operation was run, Jim tried to frame a question for Alexander, which was about what Margaret’s tears had been made of that night and how (or by what process) the Navajo Prince’s mother had returned to life as a result of her son’s having run off after his alien girlfriend: but Alexander had arrived at a point of being audible to his grandson, who now heard him say, 44Oh she’s responsible, she’s a very responsible person and sometimes takes her responsibilities too far — some events just happen, you know — and even at this moment she thinks she might have saved. . well you of all people, Jim. .it’s like thinking that you might be back there a few weeks ago the way it was, but having more foresight, you know what I’m saying — I mean Margaret knew your mother was generally unhappy, and worse."

Which didn’t have a thing to do with the weather (or for that matter with the way Jim thought others saw him — sensitive and observant? a knower of things? was that him?) but one day years later while factually extending for the benefit of his own children how the Navajo Prince could be interested both in energy buzzing potentially in the soft valve-needles of the often overvalued tongue of the often largely wasted northern bison and in messages from mountain to mountain as moist air rises to cloud itself into waves and accumulating towers or a warm column stops rising at the top as if to come down spreading out in a stable deck or layer mushroom-like, Jim recalled that when he heard his grandfather Alexander speak thus of his grandmother Margaret feeling responsible for everything and then, yes, got kinda funny, he found he could answer (who knew? forever) his own question in this instance re: that odd rotational storm of (the Princess’s getaway) ‘93 or ‘84 (the symmetrical tornado) — two sides of the same whirl that, he took now for granted, was both bird and wake; and that cloud-aborted, downcoming funnel that whirled in to suck then upward like a later-model industrial vacuum all substances available, liquid, illiquid, and all objects even those that had not been objects a moment before, was Jim’s plain responsibility to take fact away from antifact, the second unaccounted-for egg in question from the former and Choor-bound bird, and distinguish the Hermit-Sojourner of New York (sometimes Inventor), who helped Margaret get away, from the lion that turned — tornado — into a wolf at his moment of dismembered truth; the ground-up horse bones, on one concretely remedial hand, from the my thy maw that, airborne, had its own air aboard; the downcoming and upgoing weathers later understood in such staircase documentation as the compression-warming-drying-evaporation descent cum the expansion-cooling-humidification-condensation-precipitation ascent, versus, on the other hand, in the midst of discussing downcoming and upgoing weathers the Anasazi healer’s view (reviewed by Margaret for her grandson Jim) that mountains drew heat upward from deep below Earth’s rock, hence the heating of air along the slopes, this literally a mountain way of thinking—a mountain capability — since thinking was "Aimed Being" versus the Hermit-Inventor’s view that if there was any of this subterranean thinking going on it was more dreaming. But the less restlessly scientific Anasazi didn’t believe mountains dreamt, while the Hermit-Inventor held to the notion (the "motion," said the intuitive Anasazi lightly at a distance of many miles nonetheless audible) that western gravity created some heaping of friction in the molecular cascades of slopes, a turbulence heat form although it might conversely feel skin-cold. This stuck zone-wise in Jim’s mind so he never thought it prevision till he arrived years later (and ludicrously) at a visual formula for wind flow, he no scientist, while traveling in a small plane that lost its "lift" during a slow descent and then the pilot lost control a moment later coming in in the wake of an airliner’s takeoff. Jim did not or could not ask his partner Grandma in the aforementioned discussion of two weathers (and a new batch of toasty crullers) what on earth she meant implying that even in the actual absence of Jim’s mother’s body something was there underground in the cemetery locus of the Mayn family area — perhaps because he felt responsible for having spied on his grandmother when she wept (but she never wept!) one night on the back porch, Jim in the dark out there, loose and free, upon the damp, dark lawn of the yard where his part-Creek rival the (behind-his-back called) /za//breed halfback, was sometimes employed by Margaret to weed or to trim hedges at fifty cents an hour, who had a mother who probably cried from time to time.

So, while it was with "I am responsible" derived from Alexander’s characterization of Margaret that Jim had solved (oh for God’s sake let’s get out onto the field) questions re: (a) wake and bird, and (b) why at a certain juncture of discussion he could not ask Margaret something about his recently departed mother, he had a lingering doubt, for after all he had answered his own question and perhaps had his own way or had in the parlance of later times no feedback, cruller’d or disturbing. Yet Margaret did disturb him when she retorted that she had said nothing about this or that — nor had she ever known anything about a symmetrical tornado, he could have made that up, although she granted that the East Far Eastern Princess had in fact been turned into a mist to facilitate her being spirited into the great Statue (that had floated dismembered into that aging harbor of the East one day to be there recomposed and to stand up strong and centered) during the last throes of the Princess’s return home — so that years later, when the man Mayn found himself desultorily absorbing a concept of convergence-flow in the theory of storms, he recognized not only that back then in the fall of ‘45 he had felt he would one day know what such inklings meant, he felt even that then (and then later) he had been in some angle or isle of the future already: this he had rather not be thinking about, for there was so much else, yet why could he not ask Margaret what he did ask Alexander, Was that skinny old geezer and the Hermit-Inventor of New York one and the same? — to which Alexander replied that there had been two or three of them, very bright, sleazy chaps, taking long vacations for generations in the western lands, apparently experimenting in the control of the atmosphere but entering at times too easily into the lives of impressionable young people though he thought Jim might not agree. But it was not satisfying the single solution for the paired questions, it was like when they all sat around after his mother’s suicide (he did not like the word, it was awful, it was as embarrassing as something he might never know), the family friend Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl had the same look, same protoplasm or something, as the sandwiches, whole-wheat, and as the hands of others there, like they were shrugging off their differences and yielding their one common substance, so their equality had to be fought against or it would be your death too, or fought for so you’d come into possession of what you had anyway. And years later he felt that unbeknownst to him he had been some scientist in those fearsomely exciting bereaved days but when he found how at fifteen he had been in future e’en to understanding those shear zones along wind boundaries where friction increases dangerously he later had not your true scientist’s interests in such, though still a law or two or three from the old days such as 4’Answer the question that has been asked, not some other question, O.K.?" from which extended a corollary (pronounced by the depressed geometry instructor at Jim’s high school with the stress on the secundo syllable), namely, when possessed of an answer (especially when it has become conscious within self) make sure not to marry it (as they say aboard ship of line and cable) to the wrong question, that is, find the question that has asked this answer. Later answers increased so crazily that their content mattered less than their spirit, if that is possible; meanwhile, he, part-distracted by that dynamic virgin his grandmother in her earlier incarnations, revealed another answer to himself which was that responsibility or "I am responsible" wasn’t the only answer to the second pair. For, still unsatisfied, he saw that past equaling present would do equally well for the tornado’s wake being the bird as for the discussion of downcoming and upgoing weathers coinciding with the question he could not ask Margaret about his mother, since in so many ways the silly old humdrum weather was his future, or what he later surprisingly turned his hand to, events in that sphere of vapor, so that in that original juncture, the present equaled the future, which was another way of saying past equaled present, though only his nerves did these equations, he didn’t shed no blood for them, from day to day.

But what if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the answer to the first pairing? He reached that point one Saturday afternoon when his brother Brad paused at bathroom’s threshold to watch a drop of blood pass from Jim’s face into the basin as the elder shaved. Then the same occurred to Jim that night in the front seat of a borrowed pickup truck when for the third time he found Marie — Anne-Marie Vandevere — her neck, her bared feet, the whirlpoolings of her ears, her way (it was a way) of not wearing a bra, carrying him beyond the quiet laughter of their happiness into a winglike breathing that was alive in what it was missing, which was a — call it a full-length naked realistic halo (read hello/)—he didn’t know then but years later found some capacity in him to maybe recall it, though its being a "visual" half-blocked, half-revealed a fact of life he succeeded in not thinking about by concentrating on Marie— anyhoo some aura that nonetheless warn’t about her for she was realer so maybe ‘twas someplace else if you had to go look fer it but if you didn’t, why then Marie was here, at least for the time being till graduation do us part (and she never mooned over him though she would have gone with him when he left Windrow, yet worth noting is that she did not get pregnant, not at first, and then not later, when they took to consciously talking about it, and he never asked her if she had used some foam or something to begin with, but many years later when a colleague from South America named Mayga (he never saw her name written) passed out of his life, he wanted to put in a phone call to Marie in whatever later life she had made for herself to check if he was right recalling that she listened with marked care and only a smile or two but with some sensuality of paying attention to what he said as if she believed its truth more than he and wanted to convey this to him, to wit about the Margaret-Princess-Hermit-Anasazi scene shifts and shelvings across the inverted floors of a still recognizable continent, a wider load than would feasibly in terms of profit margin pass all those highways that brought the Wide Load itself into being and motion unless we invented a system, you see, if it could only develop from those fingers in his fifteen-year-old head that were Marie stroking him while he murmured nice jokes to them both and she had no concern about dislodging her aura because she didn’t have any, leastways not for him and possibly not for her father either, which was due partly to her, a very clear upstanding person even supine—’cept maybe way inside her there’s an aura taken for granted, though her fingers, having proceeded right into his head, frankly said, There are other women, and among these others seeded faithfully in him were some disappearing acts (spelled ax) wind-driven as the vessel of his own damned mother’s unburiable suicide where excessive drama and words sometimes met in embarrassed agony; and if you could be embarrassed (at school, for instance — as if his mom had left his dad — and at college where he rarely spoke of it except to a woman now and then in a moment of lusty sentiment, and still later, when it had become history without ever having been understood and he could tell a colleague with a hoarse laugh named Ted and a friendly woman named Mayga also a colleague though as professionally elusive as she was personally solid and right there during some early, early evenings in the bar of a Washington hotel hearing him say that if you could be embarrassed about a terrible, paining, destroying, living thing like that. .) maybe that meant his mother (God bless and damn her for the medium she chose, namely solitude and seawater) was not dead: for that’s what he couldn’t explain to himself very well, much less Alexander, his well-shod grandfather, who anyway was saying a thing or two that rocked Jim back (no joke—only back, not forth, only back, like our undiscovered energy window warping out of age and time, we once believed) — that if Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the one unifying answer to the first of those increasingly distant pairs of questions that years later surprised him as if from behind though standing obstacle-like and sensual under his nose, his tongue, his hand, his foot, his eye which is one window of your windows that can tell us things without even being operated on — how did he use, then, at fifteen, such syllables as "substance" and "process," they were little more to him than the battlement-gray scenery he helped his little half-ass brother Brad tack up for a school play that required a trapdoor so a ghost had somewhere to come from and call from, sing from (almost, the way that spook sounded when the play was actually put on instead of being there potential and silently exciting on the shadowy daylight stage of the auditorium with sets gathering paint and nails as if the voices working were keeping the story of the play from leaping up out of nowhere which you had to put off till it could leap out from somewhere or just walk out) then Margaret’s "I am responsible" was the single answer to the plural questions, What were Margaret’s tears made of, that night on the bright-dark back porch when she thought she wept only for her own and for her husband’s eyes (and ears)? and How did the Navajo matron regain life the night her son madly departed in pursuit of the Princess who was in turn leaving because it was time to and though she loved the Navajo Prince the Hermit-Inventor had all but impelled her to go: yet then, as buriable as Jim and Brad’s seaward mother was not or at least not yet, came a next space of thought which reasoned its drugged conclusion downward into some sleep of Jim’s growing body and so as it got clearer got deeper from the acoustic air where it could have been said, and Best thing was to go on, as Jim’s friend Sam’s petite mother in a large, dark straw hat said quietly to Margaret at a gathering soon after Sarah’s suicide to which Margaret bluntly and as always with no blur of conscience or guilt replied, Oh that’s what we all say and next thing you’ll be telling me that time heals all wounds

reels all moons, congeals all ruins, steals all sounds — for divorce!) — the conclusion too thought to be true, surely, that Margaret was at once responsible in the substance of her most rare tears for her daughter’s untimely evacuation and in her storied narrative of the East Far Eastern Princess’s roughly eastward exit responsible for the also departing Navajo Prince’s mother’s recovery: because if the tales she had been telling her favorite grandson who ran like the wind and could gallop a middle-sized black pony bareback around the edges of the Quirks’ horse-corn fields at age twelve (and at age fifteen in the middle of the night in the general direction of the Grange and a house near it where two girls might have gone to bed by now) were in some godawful way true, didn’t that mean that Sarah Mayn, whole mother of Brad and Jim, half-wife (as they say precisely in one ancient scientific marriage-culture) of Mel, and sister of Marian who now distantly makes her home in a suburb of Boston, and daughter of Margaret and of Alexander, . "lives on," said Warren Winecoop (as if listing the coming week’s events) from the pulpit of a church not much frequented by Margaret or Alexander, "in the memories of those who loved her": so that, quite apart — apart — apart from the atomic question of whether he could or did love his singular mother after an action so unforgettable, he was confused enough to be derailed from responsibility, Margaret’s or for that matter his mother’s (for maybe she had acted responsibly), and was much taken by his grandfather’s remark, that latter-day porchside qum friendship, that the Hermit-Inventor of New York, as, strangely, Jim’s uncomplimentary grandfather went on calling the skinny old geezer’s 1945 manifestation — whatever it was he had invented — had confided in him things he had never told Margaret though adding, to Alexander, that he was another man entirely from that sensible, methodical guy who told Margaret to go west in 1885 on Bedloe’s Island amid the pre-ruin of the Statue of Liberty: yet, Alexander went on, he sure as hell had the look (though sick, now) of the man he had briefly seen when Margaret returned home from the West in ‘94, same weird bone-ridged forehead so you expected to see through it, same crappy clothes and scuffed shoes, no, he had sneakers now, same irritable and confidential manner, told Alexander of all things that the Anasazi, who knew more about the weather than he was saying, had been the only man then known — i.e., in that century or apparently in that area in earlier centuries — who for certain had never been reincarnated but been only himself, his long self, and who upon dying had been bound to be but a memory, which was fine by the Anasazi, as he always had said though never guaranteeing the truth of this fact about him gleaned first from the spiny-sinewed bicycling botanist Marcus Jones who had it from Mena the Chilean zoologist specializing in javelina-peccaries, their possibilities, their hind-mounted scent glands and luminous lips the hue of moon-drenched cactus flesh peeled by the eyes of an elf owl that on certain nights shares its being with a female seer much as the cactus shares its with the owl or at the least the owl’s eye: yet key here (though key to what was not yet sure) was what Marcus Jones on the locoweed-naming jaunt told the Hermit-Inventor (who upon meeting him under a red crag near where thermonuclear devices were even then latent and to be unearthed had expatiated and complained how New York had so changed just in the four or five months he’d been gone): to wit, that a certain aged Indian healer had told Marcus’s friend the woman-naturalist Mena upon her one visit to his eyrie that we create our weathers partly then to observe them, that is, so that there will be something in front of us: we make them by entering into the four-cornered creation which when we do so by conceiving it as four corners meeting back to back not as four corners facing one another at a distance we live through again the one son becoming two, namely Destroyer and Born of Water, thence multiplied to four sons, namely Reared Underground, or the Double, and Changing Grandchild, which, because he had been able while still in the womb to see the future, the Anasazi had singularly always been, that is Changing Grandchild, which was why he stayed young or, if not young, alive, and in his singularity never could gain or want reincarnation as another kind of man or as a woman, say, though he had strange interior memories, like a happy worm moving round inside him, of a time when men and women were first created and did not fuck but the woman masturbated with a quill or a sour cactus or a stone if you could find it, that in its fleshiness bore hard future knowledge that one day it would be a stone used by a woman to beat her belly with and induce an abortion.

Mena, at all events, was a remarkable person who had told Marcus this and more that he passed on to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who, unbeknownst to Marcus, recognized at once the Indian he was talking about, and Marcus in his happenstance encounters with Mena on the great nocturnal plateau from time to time found support for a view that came to him more than he to it as when one day near a river leaning against the bright, birchlike shadow of an aspen trunk musing upon the snow that would fall here in three months he had been accosted by a man who with his young son who presently arrived set about persuading Marcus by commercial means, later the violent means then commercially available, to divulge what was not Marcus’s to divulge, to wit some doubtless mythical mode he for one had not heard of of dry-steaming the flesh of the sometimes almost animally attentive saguaro cactus while it was still alive high above the desert floor, betimes adding a seasoning of one of the northern Navajo locoweeds Marcus was supposed to have named for the benefit of the New World, the end result a winter mash marketable for horses (that could be dried, stored, and shipped East) as well as a porridge to attract passing Indian refugees who because of their ovally-whorled tastebuds would never recognize the ingredients, perhaps also because of their kinship to the vegetable world. But the treacherous habit of the saguaro plus the mystery of which locoweed to use had led the exploiter and son to seek out Marcus Jones and, as he reported to the Hermit, thus inspired Marcus at the cost of "but one joint of the right little finger of a left-handed botanist" (he would grin) to reflect again on such mobile kinships between animal and vegetable as had tempted his contented mind upon seeing and touching Mena’s lips that had acquired a petal-patina silver-white in sympathy with the javelinas she had tracked so long observing their hind-situated scent glands — but still more from hearing Mena report Owl Woman’s retreat, like a fugitive hallucination, into a cactus in order that the cactus grow an owl or owl eye: so that Marcus blamed his renown for the violent brush with the saguaro exploiter not to mention the minor amputation (to prove a humorous if not evolutionary bereavement) but had found in the self-created obstacle of his professional reputation and his unwillingness to make up some story to get rid of the saguaro exploiter a none too costly spark of inspiration he then understood he had often dreamed in the form of ships sailing the desert stirring eddies as if the ships were wind, and humans exploiting their animal or vegetable souls at need so some pains could not reach us, like pistol shot or lonely lust, until the renewed use of our coupled natures might lead to some similar union of our male and female selves.

Now the Hermit-Inventor of the East at once recognized in the prior words about created and observed weathers and the direction in which the world’s corners were envisioned his colleague the many-hundred-year-old Anasazi plus the old healer’s strict habit of never peddling the same conversational tidbits twice, for the Hermit was hearing these "created" versus 4 ‘observed" weathers for the first time though at once remembering the Anasazi healer’s suggestion to him that he not always see opposites as being necessarily "versus" or opposed. The Hermit told Marcus what he never had told a soul — that a girl he had seen but once at that time and told to go west, had in herself shown him why he had been drawn to the West for decades.

She was a fine girl, beyond subtlety at that moment in 1885, her hands at rest at her sides, her dress full of lilac flowers and the minute fire of red loco, and upon being spoken to by the Hermit she advanced to one limb of the dismembered Statue of Liberty and ran her hand along the molded metal and tasted it: and both her fresh directing of interest, which was a humble appetite for what lay ahead, and her actual ingestion of some far-flung grain of the copper sheets recalled to the man how when he had first known the Anasazi among the high caves of those western zones touched more and more by the perilous magic of Anglo law, the old mediciner would give him a pod to chew as being for the side teeth, the pulverizing teeth (not the front ones), and this then-nameless pod or bean would dissolve ultimately in his mouth but soon reappear in spirit, a whole minute vessel passing everywhere inside him until, accepting it, he found he could use it, and, using it, found it curiously navigational like a lode that lives in what of our active selves we let rest, until, decades after, as he in fresh form (his own) saw the girl, who could not have yet seen more than thirteen or fourteen summers, turn away from a grand haunch eyeing him and smiling as if the pale flush of her neck (for she had just been bending warily over that piece of statue) betokened a wise smile the whole of her young body gave to the irritable, disheveled, impatiently alert man who had said thoughtlessly Go west, and she said Oh she planned to do all that by hook or crook before she settled down to marriage and a family and she would pay her way, what’s more, and was meanwhile happy to be here in New York where she didn’t visit often. To which the Hermit-Inventor dumbfounded could only blurt out a dumb fact that hardly began to tell how he felt, to wit that according to his geography she wasn’t in New York right now, but in New Jersey.

Which was how Jim often felt in Windrow when he needed to go away both on his own hook or because his late mother (now departed herself) had told him to and yet how he felt in New York itself whose immigrant men and women in their transparently individualized transporter capsules seemed often more understandable than such minor mysteries as the Navajo Prince’s mother’s revival and how it left an imprint upon downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts, ‘mselves so blue and constant of sky that the Navajo Prince’s envious brother in mild shock (because he was still envious now even in the absence of his envy’s cause) the morning after the Prince left couldn’t see why the Hermit-Inventor bothered to explain the blue, especially when he said it was really black but dissolved to blue by the Sky’s incompetence to use, yea wake, its full force — a most funny (Anglo) wrinkling of the Obvious (the Navajo brother who was skilled at dressing buckskin and making whips and hobbles could feel with a neutral, silent wisdom of contemplation displacing for several minutes his inveterate envy of his more gifted brother), yet, as this remaining brother did not suspect, a needed detour for the scientific New-Yorkono round possible interrogations that the Hermit-Inventor found risky since, by a rich defect of language in that world, to describe, say, the buildings of his native city of the East as being anvil-shaped like clouds was the same as having invented those buildings, likewise his city’s streets tall as the treacherous Cleft Pass between the Anasazi’s remembered border and the cliff pastures of the Indian sea isles when Ship Rock was scarcely a thought — to describe meant to have invented: which meant that the Hermit’s actual inventions such as a rooftop gauge to predict differences between light and heavy air masses (possibly inspired by his thoughts on pistol design during the Mexican War) or an underground railway (which was never to be built perhaps because it had been conceived as soundless and to be cooperatively maintained) might suffer unforeseen unimportance, but mainly that he might be credited with the Prince and Princess’s elopement were he to describe it, if only the atmospheric phenomena that attended it (doubtless recalling, said the grandfather Alexander on a spacious white-painted porch in Windrow, New Jersey, in late ‘45, that expiring French wolf who remarks at the end, "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, / Only silence is strong, — all the rest is but lies").

But he had lost the boy or the boy him, for Jim had heard his grandmother and she was on the tall-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock, and he had had to wonder, on that day-night in ‘93 or ‘94 when the sun would not and would not go down and all the slits in the onion layers of atmosphere clear up to the spheres of most and least change lined up and cosms of the sun descended more suddenly than two eyes together could have seen, to deform or translate, depending on how you saw them, if the quick-winded timber wolf into which the egg-sucking mountain lion turned just as the Princess’s giant bird stopped to snap had been there perhaps already, and did the lion vanish into the underbrush atop that volcanic neck rather than turning into an alternative choice on the bird’s farewell menu? — so that he heard and didn’t hear like classroom code words "kinetic" equals "motion," got it? "K" equals "M," some words of his grandfather’s to do with "fool" and "wise" and one day fifteen or more years later, when his own age had doubled, recalled some weird consolation of reversal in that word "fool" and in his grandmother’s news that three small babies had been found abandoned near a piner cottage at Lake Rompanemus but strangely or like sacred aliens nestled up in two old trees as if to keep the babes safe from flood (though they woke drenched in themselves), which saved Jim from being asked how he’d done on his French test, she had been tutoring him mainly by famous sayings, famous to her, like "Keep quiet, people will think you’re smart," or words to that effect which sometimes took effect later, as when he learned the French for a thought he had already heard his grandfather casually say without laboring the fact or even acknowledging that it was a French thought. In the middle of such tutoring as Jim and Margaret indulged in the following Friday, namely some dumb verbs (about seventy or a hundred!) in a special tense of the past he never got straight, he got her into downcoming and upgoing weathers and knew definitely that she was telling the truth though, albeit amidst science, he’d let her get back into these rotten old stories or margins thereof he vowed after {post mortem!) his mother’s death he was through with: the Anasazi healer held (and apparently had demonstrated) that thunder was the upgoing burst of undreamt dream mined in a flash from mountains by downcoming knives of lightning—"But the Anasazi believed mountains didn’t dream, Gramma" — True enough, but they arose from dreams slanted out of the Earth (its quality of being layered) and because of this origin never after were able much to dream though they thought and thought and were admirable if left alone and alive which incidentally proved to the Anasazi that true feeling must follow thought, even at a slant, not the other way round, because mountains did not feel in that human way. Yet they had all this stuff and bone and drama of dreams that never came to view and like some horsepower that didn’t know what to do with itself could get blown up by the right lightning coming down the right line at the right time—’ ‘that would heat the air and make rain, right?" the boy added— Right you are! whereas the Hermit-Inventor who remembered late humid-dark afternoons in early August in New Yorkono as it had once been called differed with the medicine man in that the so-called upgoing of the thunder was really ongoing, like a flooding of the banks or later much as the Heaven of Space-Thought grew to be an owf-concept more than an up-. But Jim, this being the weekend before another French test, swept all this away like love and all but stunned his grandmother telling her that Bob Yard had told him that thunder was gas expanding within the channel made by the lightning short-circuit and Bob had added that was it, that’s absolutely all he knew: but when Margaret retorted, "What do you expect of a man like Bob?" (who was an electrician), Jim, who with Bob’s illegal permission had borrowed Bob’s pickup truck the weekend before on condition that he and Anne-Marie ("Marie") stay clear of town, could reach inside himself for words but only so far as a ball of raging love to hurt his grandmother so that, for a silence that was large enough only for him to know that the French she had just recited to him thrice very slowly of a poet named Alfred he didn’t know was the very thing her husband grandfather Alexander had said in English on the porch a few days ago and for him to recall Alexander’s words and knew he could at once give a smooth translation, he could not bring out this intolerable question until he gave up trying and then heard all the voices inside him, his mother’s included, audibly then voice the question: "Gramma, why did she do it?" (the "she" at once felt as a lapse in his possession of his mother and of sonship, for he ought to have said "my mother"), the "Gramma" at the last gram of moment thrown in to tell her all he supposed his cool interrogation in its clipped outrage did not tell her: which at once let go in his own head, like a thought which, with Margaret beside him trying to recall for him things Sarah had said, could not contain a parallel question so hard to control that it became "Who does she think she is, to commit suicide" (as they with such natural syllables say com-mit-su-i-cide) "when she’s got a husband and two sons?" (hey, and a mother and a father and a sister in Massachusetts); a thought that became a year later offensive inquiries into the full circumstances of Sarah’s sandy, watery leavetaking by Jim’s statuesque journalism-English teacher Pearl W. Myles who had by then lost her job yet she had at least imprinted the basic interrogatives upon the majority of her pupils such as Where? Who? When? Why? (or was Why? not one?) for Margaret, whose one-time self (if she was the same person) bending to taste a limb of imported copper, had refreshed in the Hermit why he had gone back to the West again and again — to wit, the seed pod given him by the Anasazi to chew on for the good of his grinders — could say to Jim, "That much we will probably never know."

And the grandson snapped shut his French book and ran off the porch at a bound hearing his angry grandmother call to him, "They don’t know for sure how lightning comes!" thinking nothing but these irrelevant thoughts out of his energies that not even his girlfriend Marie (really a friend) could contain (with or without precautions): Where, When, Who, What, How— wasn’t How contained in Where, When, and Who? but go easy on the Why because maybe we don’ gong know that ever — and flung him outward past impediment after impediment he was no doubt responsible for providing himself with so’s he’s have somethink in front of us as the Anasazi’s "created-weather" watch had concluded into a larger life of fact that wouldn’t go away even when you couldn’t prove post partem gloom might, in the humid late August of a young woman’s mind, be literally feeding on the most freshly electric of charges, those mythic ions, a weather inside out and as violent as an opera in which people stand for walls, or a lonely crime whose victims (who are victims only of the life that’s left them) do not know after all what the crime of this departed’s departure was, although they feel endlessly how it works in them, a person who was one of them now gone into a gap each survivor would fill if he could with stuff of himself or even, God help us, from others.

Yet, years later, when his own wife said she had a totally real picture of his grandmother Margaret from only the little he had said and so she didn’t fit this tale stuff he only alluded to into the picture of Margaret, he knew his grandmother had of course talked also facts. Facts about the Prince’s aunt, named Tall Salt, a promising widow who made the visiting East Far Eastern Princess laugh and inquired with a discretion that was even more intimate than its opposite about her state of health, as if she were blood kin to Margaret who, one early-winter day to interest her fifteen-year-old widower-grandson, told Jim that Tall Salt had expected her to marry into the clan—"And stay forever, Gramma?" — and had rope-burn welts where her own uncle a generation before had practically lynched T.S. as she rode rudely through his cornfield — he’d run wildly after her to lasso her and her horse rebelled at her familiar heel and started going round and round in little elegant circles she had taught him but not for emergency getaways, but her uncle he gave her two sheep one day when she had herded his flock for a year. She herself taught Margaret how to coil and weave baskets in the shape of bottles and stick them all over with pitch so they held water, and she never would say her sister the Prince’s mother was crazy or possessed or even a witch when to not quite everyone’s amusement that Navajo matron slung a coyote pelt on her back and ran away on all fours for a day or two followed by her horse and then came back and got up on the hogan and blew magic pollen down the smoke hole until it rained, but Tall Salt explained to Margaret that the nail parings and the small portion of dry shit her sister kept about her were her own, not from someone else who was thus to be bewitched and made sick as when a witch shoots a shard of mica into a person; and Tall Salt, who was very fond of the Hermit-Inventor’s ways, always cited her sister’s predictions such as that basketmaking was on the way out because the proper grasses were harder and harder to find.

Tall Salt also took part — rare for a woman — in the Night Sing aimed at ridding the Prince’s mother’s head of certain all-too-familiar demons her hospitality toward whom did not interfere with her (well) actually Christian hospitality toward Margaret whom her son obviously loved and to whom she gave an amulet asking the by-now-not-so-pale-faced visiting Eastern Princess if she would come into the isolation ti-pi "and bring the bird with you" — the giant bird in fact larger than five or six hogans dovetailed securely together by the best woodworkers — though a bird with proportionally small eyes oddly diamond-within-diamond-shaped, the type of eye the Anasazi medicine man should have had, to represent wisdom and watchfulness, though while he had the first he could not bother to have the second, for he left watchfulness to others which, even without diamond eyes (squinting or not — whereas he had normal gray-gold liquid eyes), was a mark of the reincarnality their beings secretly yearned to get over with in order then to watch out during a succeeding lifetime for the next life after that — though, as the Anasazi believed with a smile from his slow-beating, all but immortally slow, heart, one did not know this was what one watched for: and when Jim, like his daughter (though not his sleeping son), told grandmother Margaret he didn’t believe any of that reincarnation stuff (and found himself momentarily off guard to hear her cheerfully concur, "No more do I"), he wanted her to add something else and he heard the long-at-large memory find her in a catch of her breath: "But do you know," she said, "he told the Navajo Prince once toward the end that a young person would someday find a new form of reincarnation like a unique green butterfly — seen luminous-night-herring-fashion from the shores of both oceans uniting them for it was the same perfectly sane butterfly in two separate places and there would come, in the future, a way to verify the fact by instant communication over that full distance — this a prophecy without question for when the Anasazi, himself close to death and (not, of course, reincarnation but) that cloudhood that proved to be his own lofty noctilucent burial, saw the aforementioned new mode of communication in future as possibly a kind of ear whorled inward to a tiny pool of air dense as the cactus juice, strong as a rattlesnake’s jaw, clever as the percussion cap of a firearm from the East (tested or not in Mexico) that might receive at will messages from so far away only oceans could express this distance, he obviously knew nothing of the telephones from the mid-seventies of his own century that already connected fort to fort, Fort Keogh to Fort Bowie, to some deep bank of Black Hill treasure plundered without interest, to the sacred lava lake where Kiowas exited to the Pacific Coast told their Modoc hosts of grandparents killed at Fort Defiance and of Anglo warmen listening with their bare ear to the rail to hear seventeen miles off, say, or exactly eleven and a quarter, the iron blackbird of fortune grinding closer and closer bearing unconscious in its mineral genes the coming concept of Wide Load cross-continental haulage, but the Anasazi’s prophecy of death for the young person who found this new species of reincarnation was not less true than it was unnecessarily harsh.

Now Jacob Coxey, who marched an army of unemployed on Washington in 1894 and who had tea with Margaret who interviewed him in Ohio on her way home from the West, believed in his cohort-populist-financial-theological windbag Carl Browne’s theory of reincarnation. At death the soul returned to a reservoir like a caldron which contained all previous souls and this reservoir was where you got your soul and its special mix when you were born (as, from the Earth, your bodily chemicals), and Christ’s soul was in that caldron too, and therefore, in the fractional reincarnation which soulhood was, you had some Christ in you, but Browne discovered he and Jacob Coxey had an exceptionally large ration of Christ’s soul (presumably not embezzled in those panic months of defalcations by the dozen) which explained why the two men had been brought together for good works and for the march on Washington commencing at Easter of ‘94 (by which time Margaret and Alexander were reunited in New Jersey and making their own plans) and Browne called Coxey the cerebrum of Christ and himself the cerebellum. But the Hermit-Inventor had nothing to do with religious or social questions.

But. . but. . (the boy who at fifteen felt like a man asked his grandfather Alexander, who raised his palm in the peace gesture and laughed, Don’t ask me, don’t ask me), but didn’t the Hermit-Inventor of New York say the Navajo Prince’s mother would come back to life if the East Far Eastern Princess let herself be turned into a mist and spirited into the great Statue in the aging harbor? — Don’t ask me, laughed the grandfather, I thought you were through with all that stuff, so that Jim saw Alexander with meaty hands and bloody festoons reflected in his eyeglasses, because the awesomely pale-faced butcher with his Panama hat downtown had a sign behind him saying, DON’T ASK ME. I DON’T KNOW AND I DON’T WANT TO KNOW. But did that mean the Hermit knew the Prince’s mother would recover? But how long was it before she actually did come back to life? Wasn’t it that very night that they left? Or did the Princess’s promise to let herself be turned into a mist later on make the mother well again? Did the Hermit actually make it happen or only know that it would?

Oh, said Alexander, I think most of their ceremonials are against disease (can’t blame ‘em) whereas down among the Zuhis most of the palaver and singing is aimed at making rain, I think — your musical mother wasn’t the slightest bit interested in all that — but don’t ask me, ask your grandmother: Think what stems from not asking a given question ("given"? who gave it?). Think what would have happened if Jackson had asked the Indians what they wanted. The Civil War might have been averted and U. S. Grant would never have had the chance as President to fill the Indian Agency with Quakers who often actually did find out what the Indians wanted. (How could the Civil War have been averted? the boy started to ask, but his elder was perhaps way ahead of him.) For one thing, Indians westward might not have been so bad off and Margaret might not have been so curious to see what we had done to the Indians, and how — because you know she met a nasty little chap, part-Sioux I guess, at the Chicago Fair who told her the Indians deserved the Long March and had a perfect right to their poverty with their dumb ways of farming and if the magic was so all-fired powerful why did they not make rain? A man named Wentzel or Hintz or Lenz, the name doesn’t matter — and that’s why she got mad and disobeyed her father whom she was sending news dispatches back to, and went on out to Indian territory, still sent her dispatches mind you, wore her hat clear to Colorado, courageous girl, Margaret, but. . but. .

What? asked the grandson, who had once asked Margaret how she had gotten back to New Jersey from the West and she said she had had enough money to get to St. Louis where a collateral, thoroughly disreputable cousin of the Eads family whom she had met months before at the New Jersey exposition at the Chicago Fair helped her out — he drank too much and had been a friend of Gustave ("Le Tour") Eiffel in the French countryside where they had studied trees and computed bridges — and this man had gotten Margaret onto a train east, he was owed a favor by a railroad man, a German immigrant who had supplemented the meager pay of two Democratic coun-cilmen but made more money faster across the river in the East St. Louis mule market just before the famed windy flood of ‘85, and both men were now obsessed with putting together a World’s Fair for St. Louis within ten years to top Chicago’s, one already writing a book about it; but Margaret fell out with the conductor of the train somewhere past Cincinnati and made the rest of the trip under her own steam.

Ran out of money in the dead of winter, wound up in Massillon, Ohio, taken into his home in nearby village of Millport for the night by Jacob Coxey who was then planning his Easter march of the unemployed on Washington and whom she liked up to but not including his adopted theory of reincarnation; and much later at home in Jersey she wrote two humorous accounts of the Great Unknown:

the day before Palm Sunday a mysterious stranger appeared near Massillon to participate in Coxey’s "Commonweal" march, one "Louis Smith," a big well-dressed man who seemed the best-informed man there. He disciplined the "Commonweal" marchers and taught them to drill and salute officers. A Secret Service man on the march was also unable to find out who the Great Unknown was.

When Coxey’s March reached East Palestine, Pennsylvania, it received a chilly welcome. But it was at East Palestine that the Unknown proposed a system of publicly owned farms on which the unemployed might work under military discipline for the benefit of the State.

At Columbiana, a boy recognized the Great Unknown (or, Unknown Smith) as the ringmaster of a circus that had visited the town three years before.

Jim asked what Margaret recalled his mother saying and she said, "Oh, some severe thing about Chopin being better than Schumann, though she loved his wife." But his grandfather, who never went anyplace, had always until now seemed a source of certain knowledge. This day on the porch, the boy thought: They’re married. And it was not the marriage of his own, now halved, parents.

Anyway, Alexander went on, it was an accident that she went out there to start with, and if she hadn’t gone out there, she wouldn’t have had to come back. (He chuckled.)

Was Gramma in love with someone out there? asked Jim, who was a man already and a romantic who could take at some moments of softened and recompounded time a year stroking Anne-Marie Vandevere’s fingers in the treed darkness of the cemetery driveway at one in the morning (in the borrowed pickup truck, of course) and never wonder that she let him—

Oh it was back here too, said Alexander abruptly. And after a minute or two he retired from the porch, half as if for the bathroom, half as if for the "radio room," and Jim wondered if it was true what he had heard Alexander once say to Jim’s mother, that all too often one knew a woman through a man, through her husband or her brother or her father; for he now heard Margaret on the long-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock at news about — as he had already heard downtown — three piner babes living or dead out by Lake Rompanemus swamps. (Oh, the Indians took all the best names before we got here, she had told him. Well, they was here first, the boy had heard himself say.)

All things being equal, it was up to him, to Jim, to decide about things, about people. So that, responsible as he mysteriously was for anything or everything — including his exit as soon as possible after high school graduation from this town which contained these stories but not him — he would find an outside sanction to go away in the command of his mother whose own example he was swollen with and yet could set apart, that is of leaving him first: which were, whatever their dark or convergent, (or non-) connection, undeniable facts that would not go away, though he would rather make his getaway without seeking information, rather take a sea voyage — yay, sea voyage! — even a Coast Guard weather patrol, the ship was not at all the mere tinder bomb that war films Saturday afternoons and Saturday nights made you think ships basically were, where explosives all this time were what he knew he should study, namely the explosives that science was coming up with along with a glassless beer bottle. Yet this glassless beer bottle might be explained several ways and absorb all the explanations — might be an electric field, or a plastic substitute, or an inventive description of a bottle served without a glass. The last inspired by the presence some very late afternoons in the early sixties of a sleazily momentum’d collaterally professional slew-handed, sometime information dealer who sat at the end of the bar of a Washington hotel like a western visitor hoping to be mistaken for something — as if to overhear what Jim Mayn and a colleague (say friend) or two might be discussing. And once there he was, taking an interest not in some fact of Mayn’s past that was small-talk till it entered this perpetual one of Nature’s eavesdroppers’ ears to glint then left-handedly in his sickeningly interested eyes, but in a curious left-handed discovery, through near-disaster, of Jim Mayn as accidental scientist — not that his formula, framed at a moment when the pilot of his light charter plane making a descent for a landing lost "lift" and stalled them into the briefest of dives, would change the history of wind, and the formula had in any event already been arrived at independently of Mayn.

Nor was it much of a formula — kinetic power of wind equals (but here he didn’t know how he had arrived at) mass (which he had seldom understood) times windspeed squared, except that the turbulence layer their small-businessman’s Cessna hit was so like a landing strip undergoing an earthquake and thick enough to immerse the plane, disintegrating the smooth flow of air the plane’s elevator surfaces were plotted to play and be played by, grasp and be grasped, that this frictional boundary with a life of its own (though made provenly real by the presence of this light aircraft) seemed to multiply wind by wind, like some airs don’t mix, to make the energy splashed in among the controls some personal spirit he had been waiting for to make of him a conclusion; but the rollercoaster leveled and the pilot called back to him, Are you still there? laughing as they got down to fifty feet above the tarmac when the wings went — no, God they fluttered vividly, and the plane, in a scale of motion so slow they had all week to watch, flipped one "arm" half-over so that Mayn, within the body of the plane whose wing this was, bruised his rib cage, daring the vehicle to go right over upside down to prove (extra-vehic-ularly) the difference between flying and landing. But their descent to touchdown jibed exactly with the roll-back into level so that the Earth, which was after all, Mayn saw for the first time, always one prime boundary to winds, seemed to draw them toward its magnet against the double whirl-wake that had been crazily waiting two or three minutes for them in the absence of the airliner that had started them spinning and departed; and he knew he had a grinning formula for this too — what the pilot not so casually stammered was turbulence tunnels caused by wing-tip vortices that kept whirling sometimes for several minutes—"Can you believe it?" the pilot called—"Sure, now that I’ve had my frontal lobotomy!" his occasionally suicidal passenger said unwarily and so enjoyed his remark that he let himself for the hundredth time fall short of the Anasazi’s high standards of non-repetitive conversation and possibly silence (the line between which one might be moved by yet never understand): lost, however, on Spence in his leather fringes at the curving end of the monumentally lengthy bar but who upon hearing the name of airline correctly identified the time of Mayn’s landing (was Spence lookin’ out the back window?) as being that of his own departure from the same surface on that very commercial carrier whose turbulent wake spinning air off its wingtips had doubled and redoubled the hazard for Mayn’s small plane returning from a business powwow with three sewage-disposal companies in Delaware on a day marked by a band of clouds with some embedded showers and thunderstorms.

Spence then fell so silent he was actually a moment later not there, no doubt calling long-distance from all the lobby pay phones at once; but he returned with his beer to inquire if Mayn was still interested in NASA’s "overt weather operations" (joke). Mayn’s nod was not curt cordiality. How do you nod to a worm? (Now a snake… a cobra that can carry a tune und reise to an occasion!)

"Ah was on thet plane," Spence mimicked; "ah was on mah way ta Arizone."

The men didn’t give a hoot; Mayn heard Spence murmur names of other western states—"made a fire out of mesquite roots middle of nowhere forty-eight hours ago, small business conference, might’s well a been blindfolded, in the middle of some desert, man named Santee Sioux — ever been on a forty-eight-hour pass, Mayn?" — which sounded like "Ever know a man named. .?"

"You know damn well I’ve been on a forty-eight-hour pass!" but Mayn had never told Spence such a thing, and Mayn’s words told both of them that Spence had an interest in Mayn but it was probably no news because some years previous — the eve of the U-2 press conference when we learned how we had sown the atmosphere known as Russia’s airspace and they in turn had seeded our seeding so that a pilot named Powers was precipitated from the issue of whose weather it was that NASA was examining — Mayn had been restrained by his friend Ted, the skinny, obnoxious Spence would defend himself with a weapon you felt sure.

Why—spor-quoia—did it stick in his head or his grandmother’s (who would get to the point at once if he demanded it but showed her care for him by making him, like his living life, wait for the upshot of a tale maybe somewhat like his brain, maybe a tale that proved always to get into tangles that emerged as having started earlier though he hadn’t seen it, so he knew she had loved having him in the palm of her hand. This wasn’t at all like teaching him to whistle while they lay in bed when he was six years old, and you do it or you don’t, you summon the exact wind and supple crevice for it and then of all things forget what you’re doing in order to do it, but—)

Why did what stick? Why, this long-lived, half-dead couple of guys: do we mean. .? Yes; the Anasazi (semi-retired) medicine man (who was uniquely invulnerable to reincarnation) and the Hermit-Inventor who seems to have existed in three manifestations at least (the great great uncle three decades before the meeting with the girl Margaret in ‘85 "at" the Statue of Liberty (if you call those scattered large-scale units one statue) and then much later in the mid-twentieth of centuries an unfrocked weather thinker who lived almost as remotely in his own drab Greenwich Village street as he did in the lost feelings of a man called Mayn who would inexplicably imagine not primarily what this old specialist geezer had gone through but the galaxies of people who had known him and looked at him — to which we have to add the immediate, more amused and optimistic, yet shorter feelings of a woman on the street named Grace Kimball, star-quality possessor of a bicycle, great giver of instructions and sympathy to other women — who saw the most recent manifestation of (unbeknownst to her) the Hermit across the street one day escorting an old lady both beautiful and baffled, entertained and confused (in this loosely articulated Manhattan capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale lives) but if confused, also beyond transition.

Now, the Anasazi medicine man lived high up in a honeycombed cliff because his ancient people, of whom he was the ultimate survivor by centuries, had traditionally inhabited such apartment structures or multiple dwellings; but his real reason was that, given the name of Changing Grandchild after one of the four mythic or directional sons, he had been unable himself to "change" for a good part of his life, sitting in his desert basement as a distinguished adolescent thinker, maintaining for over a century an alarming reputation as a healer of seductive tranquilizing powers (who could have foreseen but, by self-definition, not reincarnate in a Presque Isle, Maine, obstetrician long after to whom many-times-miscarried woman traveled hundreds of miles to receive his magic) and when the Anasazi had changed his life during his second century, he chose to live high-celled and inaccessible in the canyon wall. He betrayed strange likenesses: between his noctilucent teeth and gums and the specialist Mena’s javelina-like lips; also between (a) his capacity to recreate outside him, from their origins in his bodily organs and circulatory precipitations and heart-light, such weather phenomena as warm sleet (whence?) or the fan of shadow-rays across the pre-sunrise sky, and (b) the capacity in his friend the Hermit of New York to take such phenomena from outside inside—to "internalize" them, we already remember saying in a later language — and explain them in the poetry of science; also, the penetrating humor in the Anasazi’s stark, light, truth-reflecting or — inventing voice seemed a less dense otherwise identical imprint of the Navajo Prince’s, for instance on the day when the Anasazi yielded him the pistol which had belonged to the Thunder Dreamer (the very day when the Prince’s mother refused to consult the Anasazi about the aperture in her head which a voice on the winds of a storm seeming to be the voice of the healer himself had ascribed to weather of foreign origin falling into a mountain in the vicinity precipitating forces like weather then falling "out" of the mountain to target selected human receptors). The likenesses aforementioned hinted to Margaret and her grandson that the Anasazi’s future non-reincarnality had been made up for by some simultaneous dispersion of his being among his contemporaries. Jim did not think it through at fifteen, though always knew that he was not scheduled for reincarnation. Enough could happen in this life. Enough for what? for whom? But when, years later, at the end of a night on a Bermuda beach with his wife, Jim saw shadow-rays over the ocean knowing they were not really fanned out but parallel and they shot out from an irregular horizon profile of tradewind cumulus, this he remembered was pretty much what Margaret had said the vacationing colleague from the East had told the Anasazi, who had seen the phenomenon though never the ocean except the ocean of the desert, and the Anasazi had been glad for once to agree because what had emanated from him via the back of the eyeball observing the confluence of seas, mountains, irrigation ditches, and the crepuscular cactuses that while you’re not looking fly away (in exactly as threatening a manner as the prehistoric Texas pterodactyls with thirty-five-foot wingspread flew at their prey), had reappeared in the Hermit-Inventor’s science refreshed in its turn by each summer’s breather westward.

Could weather precipitate from the ground upward? The two colleagues agreed it could—"At least once in a Double Moon," chafed the gaunt New-yorkondo. But the semi-retired medicine man, whose way of seeing things the Anglo did not pretend to see as an insider, and who looked too fragile to smile, much less shake his head, blew a polite negative upon the rosy sand map on the cell floor before him. Double Moon was Double Moon. Ground-upward clouds were something else; likewise, hail growing in the great planted fields like the old black-and-white "bullet" melons, then to be sucked upward by passing "chimneys" of thunder so the Anglos could have harnessed this downside-up hail against one another. The Hermit-Inventor of New York asked if the Double Moon that had fallen upon the pistol Mena had brought to this cell had turned it into two pistols or only roused rumors of two origins for one. The Anasazi recommended he stick to the subject. The Hermit said that his great-great uncle, the only short man of all that singular line, had once in London stood upon a sunny hill Christmas morning to see hundreds of feet of ground-upward weather. He had taken a photograph upon a large oblong of card treated with a layer of fresh bodies of the tiny marine carnivore the comb jelly plus a film of glassy "shite" from the French marbled newt. It showed a sulfur-gray gulf of ground-cloud packing the city with an effluent known a century earlier to put a fur and crust upon silver plate. But the Anasazi and his eastern visitor saw weather-from-the-ground-up differently. The old one had never seen a city but could imagine it sunk two hundred feet deep in its own poisonous fog; and he knew that the sole source, the earth itself, had turned the temperature upside down so that ground-level stays cold even after sun-up and the sun cannot lure the ground-level airs upward. The Hermit felt this upcoming weather derived from circulations within the Earth that upon reaching the cool pre-dawn surface mixed with airs already too well breathed by men and women and chemically redestined by the feelings and leftover dreams their bodies impregnated those airs with. The Anasazi blew upon the sand-patterns and simultaneously laughed: he saw no real difference between these views, unless he and his guest should wish to have a wrestling bout over it.

Jim’s grandmother was avidly reading a love-story book about a whaler one day he came back from football practice. She hadn’t seen him in a week, and he asked why she had never returned to the West. "I had responsibilities here," she said. She went on reading but stopped, and she looked right at him in her way. But he left her and went over to Marie’s house where for some reason she was neither peeling carrots and turnips for her mother nor reading Sinclair Lewis upstairs, she was sitting on the porch staring ahead irritated, and some absence of halo round her up there on the porch where he joined her made him think upon a strange potential fact, and this was hard so he thought instead of her breathing body and the friendly scent of her under her sweater like a whole air even more than a smell and coming from her when she breathed in as well. He sat down next to her and was glad to think a thing or two through, which was the last time on this score, which might have seemed unsettled between him and his grandma, while he now made a discovery. But when, in the midst of it, the familiar girl in her plaid skirt and short-sleeved angora and bobby sox testily rocking said, "Looks like rain," he knew it wasn’t really him she was mad at, if him at all. Anyway he had seen that between the steamily upgoing weathers and the resolute downcoming weathers, between that observed and that created, between the weathers of presence and of absence, and of leaving and arriving and most strangely of inside and outside, and all these always divided up so you could practically see them out of that time when people really cared why a luminous night cloud came widely low to the continent in subtle motion each day as if the continent were turning westward and the cloud hung waiting for places to come under it, the grandmother had always been out to entertain him at a fairly high level but had been led into history she herself cared to keep if not create; likewise she had told some pretty fair horse and cactus tales to pass their time as if there would have been nothing otherwise, but in doing so she had covered up things that had happened so the coverings became queer to the eye approaching, say, that mother with a hole in the head or a tornado that rumbled off like the made-up pterodactyl bird it really was, that is when Margaret turned into a Princess, which was really another person in her that he didn’t ask about, but she was two persons, both the young woman who saw slaughterhouses in Nebraska and dry farming among the Indians—

— what’s dry farming?

— It’s get-right-out-there-while-you-can farming just during the brief period of the rains—

— who read the 1892 commissioner’s report and knew that medicine men were adjudged to be barbarous conjurers and got ten to thirty days in jail for a first offense; she had studied provisions for "field matrons" who would help Indian women learn hygiene, crafts, and in the "Lend a Hand" clubs proper observance of the Sabbath, and she had looked forward to visiting the Indian exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair which was confined for lack of funds to an industrial boarding school, thus demonstrating Washington’s commitment to educational progress for the Indians who were not to be called Red Men but the People, not Injuns but the Five Civilized Tribes — Cherokee, Seminoles, Creeks — we’ve got a couple of Creeks right here, your teammate Ira’s half Creek—

— he’s crazy, Gramma—

— which Indians was she referring to? — the industrial Indians, the boarding Indians—

— they would go home for the weekend testing themselves with often a round trip on foot of eight hundred miles between Friday night and Sunday night—

— the Five Civilized Tribes recognized by treaties of 1866 and later—

— and on the other hand, the Princess who sought nothing by experience and felt in her wrists and heart, amidst the smoke of the Night Chants which her host the Prince demanded she be allowed to watch, the high juggling of live objects by ritual clowns who ran so exactly out of step that they were simultaneous reincarnate priests branding the night with its own outlines shifted into question — but when she grew sick she could go on sitting on the floor of a still unbewitched hogan in a beam of light from the hole in the roof, upon a beautiful blanket whose design she knew had no more urgent meaning than the designs on other blankets (or the way the light from above siphoned her into some space of the future in which she would remain here forever) and be glad that the practicing medicine men would not come to heal her — for she did not miss doctors, the doctors of Choor, the more gentle island healers hidden among the lakes of the Long White Mountain.

Grandfather Alexander, whom the boy talked to more since his mother had died, and who must have been one of those responsibilities that had kept Margaret from returning to the West, said Margaret was going to Muskogee for the Sequoyan Convention in 1905 but she had a couple of small children by then. The boy asked what that was, and Alexander told him they had had the idea of a state of the union drawn from the Indian territories and organized by the Five Civilized Tribes. Quite a big thing at the time. Creeks, Cherokees, forget the others; became Christians, owned slaves, real civilized. Made a dictionary, started a newspaper; built regular houses — not those six-sided hogans of the Navajos or underground houses like the Salish out near the Pacific (because it don’t get very cold below ground level).

Only one state? said Jim, and his grandfather laughed, which put into the boy’s secure memory his own remark.

That was what got him into the newspaper business, a reasonable memory for and a respect for fact, y’know — plus a way of removing some facts from his head to an ink imprint on paper, and it came to cupric sulfide and pen-taerythritol, supercooled cloud-seeding agents that proved to be much less convenient than lead iodide or dry ice (though Nature wasn’t to be sniffed at even when it evaporates a cauliflower cumulus and disappoints a farmer): how to remove intact from his mind a fact so that it might never lose its authoritative meaninglessness, even (he bet) for chemists who nodded with matter-of-fact intensity at names of yet other cloud-seeding agents phloroglucinol and me-taldehyde: and throw in the more earthly meteorologist contacts Jim ran into, who had a trick of telling you how the gas law explains a good half of weather — that is, that a gas adjusts its state moving from one environment to another — and in a trim surveillance craft gliding not at all silently (because of the density of conversation) just below a growing cumulus at its flat, football-field-long base, where the cooling air turns rainy, he could be shown one afternoon how the base’s center was higher than the surrounding edges; yet confronted with a restless atmosphere — the air rising; the pressure on it hence decreasing so that the air answers by expanding, which in turn takes effort on the part of our "only human" air which as a result must spend some of its energy which is measured (we are reminded by a child or young person in the next room) in temperature (check it out) the air gets cooler ten degrees Centigrade for each kilometer upward — Mayn’s contacts (friendly as relations he phoned once a year) could also speak to him of this rate as the "dry adiabatic lapse rate" (it will never desert you and in a pinch will tell you how high or low a cloud will form). And these clouds were what you put into them too, it came to him years after he had committed to some memory morgue the sometimes furiously, yes, furiously made-up spiral winds, whose attempt to return only to their source in the breathing of certain vegetarian reptiles and the needle-shooting cactus those reptiles woke up once a month to feed on, the Hermit-Inventor would explain to the Anasazi as an effect of a shearing or squall line between the reptile’s moist breath moving to meet its nutriment and the cactus’s oppositely targeted dry—thus stirring at widespread joint-feed times spiral breaths that on rare days joined energies and went away, uniquely dustless but of a discernible green hue due, the Hermit said, not only to the cactal skin but to the fall sun’s blueness elusive to the naked eye mixed with yellow, bile-like blood which these vegetarian reptiles tried to purify each day from their prior carnal form of the minute Pressure Snake of the South that preyed on mountaineers who one moment would see a sky-blue worm accost a boot toe and the next would be sucked all but their bones into this (we almost felt "human") compacter, which, to those few who had lived to see it, then proved to have rooted itself to the mountain and while maintaining its wormful size digested what it needed of the object-human whose flesh it had separated all but instantly from the bone cage, and shot the rest into the mountain. This caused a general tremor since the mountain understood that the flesh so dazzlingly compacted into that blue snake could hold, in some riddle of energy, this reduction only for a moment, which buttressed the Hermit’s theory that mountains dreamt. But the Anasazi would not be drawn back into this issue; he explained spiral winds his way.

With his breath he drew upon the sands of his rock floor. These early weather maps coiled shape inside shape, the abiding forms present in the weather places at rest and restless and always ready to open out so that we saw a wind had been potentially a bird, a bending tree some moment clothing a wind; a flash flood rivering down the sky ocean high above it had once in the desert’s territorial memory been a reverse waterspout. The sands in which these maps were drawn were rose and green and blue sands, sands orange and nearly black, sand sand-colored (as the Anasazi’s colleague from New York put in); and more unusual was the live violet of that western chinook wind the Anasazi once had seen from far above it in this specialist eyrie of his, a wind that warms and dries and avalanches down a mountain so not even the desperate trees could detain it, speeding to eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour across the flatlands to remove, incidentally, moisture from the ground so swiftly some of it was never seen except in unexpected memories; long, shallow islands of volcanic dew; salt arms of some departed sea become rivers without issue or source that stood almost unnoticeable, dead as the dense Anglo rivers of the later East that have learned to store even the most bright-veined wastes against a time when we will know how to use them. So all the above colors dropped from the Anasazi’s ceiling as if dye-separated from the sands subtly crumbling thence down in order then to remix with them: but no, said the uniquely non-reincarnable elder to his much younger hermit-co-thinker who advanced this theory of separation and reunion; no, the colors could not have left the sand even as they filtered through the ceiling, because in that event they could never come back; so they must have created, in the precipitation from ceiling to floor, a shade in the color skins of our snake-like eyes, an obstacle or message that had the appearance of an illusion, so we saw only sand falling (and when it all caves in someday there will be no cave!).

But no, said the Hermit in his turn, when the ceiling falls in — and the Hermit had acquaintance with different ceilings where he came from and had invented some to fill a need — we will get the landlord to repair it! — and while they laughed, and the Anasazi muttered absently who is this Landlord of the East? they both admired what the four winds, or the four generally heroic brothers the name of one of whom the Anasazi bore, had created on the floor — a scheme of avenues and parallelograms and squares and anvil shapes, outer ovals and apparent cols and crags within, in turn hexagonally windowed by forthright trenches tempting a marriage of lights just as the irrigation ditch reaches out to the water if people let it. For like the weather patterns windblown into the map — that is, by breath not solely owned by the breather— the colors in the sand came from ages of high-handed flow especially at sundown or sunup when the blood of the mountains stirs about toward the thoughts of its own horizon light and this red passing to and from the Sun through that upper land of filaments and nation-sized curls and rippled sand ("Mackerel," put in the eastern Hermit, always inclined to give the precise, if eastern, term) becomes all the halo colors, all auras mapped on this floor cooled by one of the silver moons that come near, and in the night told the Anasazi again that these maps radiant as a musk thistle or serious as a city were not the four-cornered history of his early adulthood when his devotion to healings so curious they got to be ends in themselves took him away from his children whom he loved more painfully from a distance and his sometime loved wife from whom distance had too seldom been possible until one day he found that they had contrived distance between them and were lost to each other. And he would see her face looking up to him from a mountain he would pass when death had turned him into, as he predicted, an unprecedented cloud, or looking up to him from the shaken grass-grains of an earthen winnowing tray or straight into his eyes once when she told him she would not use the age-old wooden pillow for the head of their new baby in her cradle board. Until with, thus, the moon’s cool help, he saw again these weather maps for what they were, a history and prediction weatherwise as sure as that when you stand with your back to the wind stream you will feel its absence in your left shoulder and intensified presence in your right inviting you to turn, though when you do and find you have risen slightly onto your accepting toes, you find not the same pressure of hands upon you, for in the circles are always motions upward or away and thus we would feel deserted by these spirals of wind if we did not sense through the twining spirals originating inside us in our internalized four corners and always breathed outward if we only recall how from endless sources in us that it is always the same wind. It is always a different wind, groused the Hermit-Philosopher but saw in the sometimes angular neighborhoods in the map, which became another map before his hugely color-sensitive eyes, that winds did not follow only the curves of valleys and the ovals of bird flight but turned sharp enough and often enough to frame the very territories about which he and the Anasazi once quarreled.

This was not to be compared to the long-distance, sight-unseen, though ear-to-ear exchange of opinion between the Anasazi and Marcus Jones who heard upon an angle of the counter-twilight breeze, though they had never met, the (to him unmistakable) voice of the old healer identify the musk thistle as radiant, and Marcus found himself on instinct responding out of his ear, of all likely responders among his bodily parts, that the musk thistle’s flower-head system was in fact without rays, and while the Anasazi might have replied that the color over the haired and convex reddish-lavender head was radiant, he contented himself, and Marcus Jones, with praise of Jones’s love of the coyote thistle as witness his discovery that in look it obviously was some distant pineapple though he knew pineapples only in the descriptions of his visitor the Hermit-Inventor of New York.

Yet the Anasazi was stunned, as he told the Hermit upon his next visit, to hear the botanist Jones’s real point: that animal and plant were more than kin, blood and juice, animal and fruit, hide and leaf — for example, the immigrant giraffe of Choor and the wild swamp tubes of New Jersey that would stem-suck those swamps dry for one swift, illusory day each year were morph-ically one organism. To tell the truth, this thought had visited the Anasazi some centuries before upon loving his wife and sensing that they lived off each other’s breath for hours at a time and fed one another like cooperative animals and grew ripe and large and silent and close and even mutually shadow-rooted so that there was no telling which they were, plant or animal.

But the Hermit-Inventor, who was to love one woman from the time she was a thirteen-year-old girl throughout her later life’s general absence from him, shrugged sadly (perhaps because it was, that month, time for him to return to the invention of his eastern city, which equaled often the invention of ideas to explain or utilize what the city’s spirit had already brought into being), and grumbled that it or they would be all "one" a century from now, he was not sure how fast it was all flowing together, one gross anthill of coincidence, but it surely was. To which the Anasazi, who had not practiced medicine in many a generation, added: Like female and male, returning to the one they used to be. The Hermit said No, he drew the line there — though community might have much to gain from such a transformation, to judge from imminent mingling of the races and also to recall that, even with future increased vertical building, a part-time economist he had met in the forests of Massachusetts, or visited conceived of a mile as the right distance for neighbors, for they could if need be at that distance see each other. There was neighborhood in silence, concurred the Anasazi, as witness his own adept ear for what Marcus Jones had forgotten to be amazed by at the time, that in fact the Anasazi had picked up on the subject area of the coyote thistle only Marcus’s unvoiced thinking, for Marcus had said not one audible word out of his ear or any other of his functioning organs.

But the Anasazi, nearing term, was glad the power did not extend to his eyes and ofttimes painful touch. Yet when the Hermit, his annual sojourn done, said Keep in touch, the aged savant had to wonder if he had powers he didn’t know about, if so he must learn them lest before the right time they accidentally de-leave the woods of the East or dry-freeze an adjacent volcano in full cry. He used such words as "adjacent" and "Keep in touch" to show his feeling for the Hermit-Sojourner, and in their anger over the question of shared and territorial weathers he showed words and ideas that convinced the Hermit the Anasazi was so far ahead of his time as to be — not crazy but so bony of mind, so humorous about a violent future, that the Hermit all but asked if it was weather he ought to been discussing or some other — what? — obstacle?

It must have been at this point in his later skeptical discussions with his grandmother, the winter and early spring after his mother’s permanent vacation from this world, that the grandson apparently forgot or deposited at a distance from his life a pile of rather rich data. His grandfather reminded him of these at thirty-five, as if for the grandfather, who was on his last legs then, recalling territorial versus shared weather was the most natural thing. "Oh, you got mad as hops didn’t you just. Because she told me you did. And it was some dadblamed stuff about a mountain of flesh and tainted hailstones—"

— when the Hermit took the East Far Eastern Princess away from—

— For God’s sake, Gramma, it wasn’t you, was it?

Well, sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t (for Margaret had decided not to put up with his anger all the time, only some of the time)—

— when the Hermit took her away from the maiden weavers to urge her to get out of there fast, he conveyed to her such a condensed mountain of information (for he had his troubles too) that one might spend a life digesting it all, so that that afternoon of the interminable sunset resembled a year of such light, and later when she galloped not at all like the wind away from village and mountain and the hauntingly local, turning storm she had been thrown outward by the beginnings of, the Hermit’s anxiety seemed to her to have precious little to do with his talk of upcoming or rising weather, which would be territorial, and downgoing weather, which would be shared. If this debate with the Anasazi coupled with regret, anger, prophecy, and (she felt) his curious relief to be talking to her at all had taken up the space they seemed to need, why she would have been listening all night, for a year of nights, and not have escaped that night and might never have left—

— but why not? — she could have left later—

Escape is always possible even if you think you are free, according to the Anasazi, who so maddened the Hermit with impatience and inspiration that he vowed he would never again tell him anything. This after the Hermit described those purely mythical three- or four-foot-high towers of frozen froth called in the East-North-East "foam volcanoes" which of course no one including the Hermit had ever seen — only to have his fanciful instance of upgoing weather, which stayed rooted to the place it rose from, taken so seriously by the Anasazi that the Hermit was moved by his friend’s explanation of the so-called Ship Rock as being no ship at all but a piece of the very seas on which the supposed ship had come to this ancient terrain, which had been in process of turning from seawater into dry land, a process more than completed upon the arrival of this "Ship Rock" tower: moved, then, to anger was the Hermit, for the Anasazi had already taken the Hermit’s vision of a future of vertical building as a promise of destruction not only from people of the East dropping dangerous objects from such heights but employing a new, visible air to make the tallest possible bubbles which would be in the midst of their unthinkably hot creation in imitation of the Sun, frozen dry and hard with the people of the future embedded here and there like windows, doors, or sculpture or fading away or going to pieces as in Tall Salt’s pictorial rugs, while the Hermit (who had seen in Ship Rock’s bare steep lift off the desert floor an assurance that mountains thought but did not dream) would stop his ancient friend with "But those foam volcanoes I told you about, they’re not true, I never saw one of them in my life; you’re saying they rise up from bubbles in the wintertime—"

"—the late winter in the north of Choor," laughed the Anasazi, who had spoken at a distance reportedly to the Princess’s giant bird to ask if it missed the moisture of its faraway climate and had heard the bird’s retreating words curving down into distance even as the bird flew higher so that in the decoded words of the bird identifying the frequency of thawing days and frosty nights, the Anasazi had both a verbal equivalent of an unknown music and a weather report from another territory, though not then a resolution of the Hermit’s painful differences from him: for while the two agreed that some weathers actually belonged to the people living in the given territory such as the hailstorms of the western summer, and that other weathers were no one section’s right but shared — even sea-to-sea, such as the thunder-without-light-ning that came with the dampness of a late-summer gibbous moon observed by the Navajo Prince two hundred miles from here, while he was studying the compacted potentialities of the bison tongue, and verified by the Anasazi and subsequently by others as having taken place elsewhere at roughly the same time — still the Hermit maintained that the hailstones of northern New Mexico were both downcoming and upgoing weather since the stones fell and rose several times before hitting the ground, for one heard them whistle different scales, whereas the Anasazi, who doubted this, was convinced on close but necessarily swift inspection that hailstones were in reality trees, leastways their trunks, compacted violently to spheres showing those internal rings to mark the spiral layering by those always present winds which the Hermit contended were either arriving or leaving, while the Anasazi, who, on nights of Double Moon, could project onto his floor or wall photograms cross-sectioning practically anything, even the four winds (which especially interested the Hermit) though not the extraterrestrial voids charted like wide rather than long tunes inside the Prince’s mother’s head that, for the many holes that the one large seemed to explode into, might be a young singer’s wild ceiling of as yet unreached high notes, yet here in the Prince’s mother a head charted if at all by her terrestrial demons who sometimes knew when they were licked yet sometimes were themselves possessed of a versatility due to the several possible causes of their presence not least the rare wind joining substances of some far northern landscape with local mountains reputed to have human flesh (or being) in their actual circulation, yet also not least the sometimes visible breath of her husband the Prince’s father when he speculated as to these causes but never consulted the Anasazi, so old he didn’t know the difference between Anglo and Indian, white man and red man, hermits of the East and seers of the People, and was known to have hardly troubled to argue, in his longstanding discussions with the Hermit, that there was (in the matter of winds) only leaving — if that — never arriving: for that which is already present need not arrive. The Anasazi found delightfully funny the Hermit-Inventor’s generous vision that terrestrial weathers might become shared weathers but not the other way around. The Anasazi, who would express his love for the Hermit through ridicule such as "We are going to have war between us even if we don’t have to fight for it," argued that the winged water wheels of five hundred years back had passed from the world of the Indians into the concave sky, and to call these gray illusions from which came a century of real irrigation water for Indian peoples "shared" when they had passed away was like claiming that Marcus Jones’s silver-bristled pussytoes was a western July twin of those clustered tresses of hair-frost the Hermit claimed on hearsay grew in Choor from wet soil in months of gloomiest cold. Possibly more than a twin, the Anasazi observed, since at that distance there was no way to check (except by his own rare powers of hearing, which would not help) whether or not the hair-frost somehow translated itself westward to be, for a time, the pussytoes in bloom.

Which should have been the moment, roughly in 1889 or ‘90, when the Anasazi knew he was going to disperse and (through a method only he then knew, though as Margaret guessed her grandson might hit upon it himself sometime) recompound his ancient veins, vacancies, and breath in cloudform, glad not to speak any more but await some inevitable precipitation. Yet when his death and chemical promotion coincided with the poor Navajo Prince’s exit in pursuit of his beloved, the Anasazi never thought his own new (un-precedentedly low-altitude) nimbic noctilucence would last so long eastward to be consummated in a trip to the Northeast to seek those foam volcanoes despite the Hermit’s guarantees that he would not find any. The Hermit had by then named certain cumulus sky-chains "cloud streets" and was on the way to the fulfillment of his personal frustrations on two fronts, one of them the "front" itself, which in their quiet way a team of Norwegian meteorologists would claim as their contribution near the end of the First World War. The fact was that the Hermit had put two separate pictures together from the work decades earlier of his own Hermit-Uncle who possessed an unmatched sense of smell: one was the picture of vast shelves of underground rock sliding laterally to push other, weaker shelves of underground rock angularly upward—or vice versa, the upper flowing across the lower — this giant motion resulting from the ingrained shadow of the sea’s memory within those ancient solids waking them to periodic waves not unlike the circulatory dreams in the lower levels of mountains; the second was the picture of his tall, sinewy uncle-manifestation on a field trip to the extreme and odd Northeast straddling a branch of the highest oak upon a mountain covered with holly bush and sniffing from the West an odor he knew from but one place on the continent, the cell of an aged Anasazi med’ciner, the faintly acrid oxide sear splashed on the barrel of a revolver lying beside an earthenware winnowing tray brought to the Anasazi once weekly by his long-time regular maiden with his ration of legume and cereals — upon which the high-perched uncle, oblivious till later of a clan or club of Abnaki Indians encamped on the slope beneath him on their way to try vainly to volunteer on the Union side, conceived of an east-bound wind in the form of minute parcels of experience — here, a point in the West, possibly not the ultimate origin of the wind itself particularly if, as all the Hermit-Inventors of New York have concluded independently, winds may be global belts or sashes that have no actual beginning as true as their ongoing motion. All of which led the Hermit-nephew to see, through additionally observing differences both between his moods on inclement days and those of children or midgets at a lower level, and between his own intensified sense of smell in warm weather and that of the neighborhood dogs responding to many of the same odors in his native city in winter, that if temperature affects what is carried by wind, it must affect the progress of wind, and so when the seared-pistol scent came coolly through the branches of his eyrie oak, the Hermit saw a particle-tinted wall of warmth nearing his oak perch only to veer off upward above him as if it had always been a rampart of another system, then fork to either side of him while two other events occurred: one, he realized that the odor from the west southwest, mixed of metal-sear and of the nutriments maiden-conveyed to the famed medicine man had just kept coming as if the source of the odor were unending — a stream thousands of miles long from a source but a few inches in size; two, as he told his nephew deliriously on his deathbed, the land of the sky (to use the term of their friend the Anasazi) was an inverted presence of the Earth, and the animal man that lived in both but walked on but one must find the way to defact ("defract"?) and parsipate ("precipitate"?) in both. But the Hermit-nephew, putting all this together in the late eighties, very early nineties, concluded that, though he did not know the word "baroclinity" (which the Anasazi, who could not have cared less, could have predicted would not cover all cases), one mass of parcels had met another and, discovering their different temperatures, hence densities, neither obstacle had penetrated the other but made a wedge or "front" of agitated, void-jumping weather locally discontinuous, but that quite apart from the old Indian healer’s marine geology of desert Earth, the crucial, maybe confluent odor from the West (which made the perched uncle thirty-odd years ago sweat so that the Abnaki group camped on the slope below got wind of him and took him captive as a Confederate spy scouting Indian volunteer movements in the Northeast) proved to be unconscious word from the Anasazi med’ciner that these quests to the heart of atmosphere, even if cyclonic rotation be a fuller emblem of it than rivers of the sky that meandered and overcame their banks and even paused and halted to test the patience of sailboat crews and rafters while all in all striping that Earthen world like latitudes, were arrived at through what seemed mutual interruption and blockage that were really a promise not just that some work would come of it but that work had.

At which, when the Hermit tried to voice all this to the Anasazi at their next summer meetings in traditional meteorological language, the Anasazi who never owned up to any faults laughed more humbly than ever — and then answered in suitably weatherly words that when airs heated from human breath seek higher coalescence ("Ko-an I ci-quoia") they get bigger till, rising, they get let into the upper landscape his very friend the Hermit was talking about but too smart—’cause it was not an inverted landscape rehashing our own though it was asking us to be in it as if it were our own and protect ("protract"?) it as it protected ours — unless, however, this now very expanded hot air can’t gain entry into the smoke hole of the Sky’s grand hogan and is returned as sheaves of storm blade and sleet lightnings or fiery rain gods that have forgotten they are one, that would wipe out all the cacti except those in process of turning into birds or transhumans or vice versa, except that over Navajo country this deluge’s downcoming often gets halted as an awful ceiling of smoke for which there is no explanation except that horses sniff it and hark back to when the land was ocean and they swam and flew.

The grandmother’s grandson dimly recalled territorial versus shared weathers, and colored weathers which were beautiful but in the mind felt threatening; and that the earlier Hermit had smelled the Anasazi’s pistol two kilo-miles away, and much else. But in i960 or 1965 Jim had to believe his fragile, clear-voiced, steady-talking, uninflectedly slow-talking granddad Alexander, whose ankles, as always raised from time to time of recrossed knees, were now like pretzels in their blood-red socks snap-gartered and silver-clocked above the perennial cordovans, and though he might forget the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia Alexander did recall Margaret’s heartfelt arguments over of all things weather in ‘45 and ‘46 with her grandson because often she would tell them to her husband who calmed her—"down," as the phrase still has it, not as in "put" (though why the grandson even in later years let himself find in outlying parts of another’s body functions of thinking perhaps, or perception, or half-assed recall, we almost do not know, though hands and forearms and tongues seem more plausible than ankles if we are faithful to the grammar above, not to mention knees and necks).

"Well, it was a tradition longer than Margaret knew, of those two chaps that when they met they talked about weather or did until the old Indian died about the time Margie came back home through all that unemployment agitation. And during the bad period after your mother passed away and you had differences with Margie — which were beyond me, for I never saw her like that before or after (though the death of the older Hermit, her particular friend, threw her for a loop) — and in the middle of that protracted wrangle she said to me one night, ‘And I taught that boy to whistle and told him all the stories he knows,’ but whatever she was talking about when she said you were scaring her with your strange disagreements over what were after all just her tales as if you knew things in all this stuff that she didn’t, you’ll agree grandmothers have their uses. And your dad, who was one for detail as the newspaper demonstrated and so did his somewhat limited conversation though not his obit for your mother, would phone us at six and say Braddie had baked some macaroni and cheese in that big old glass casserole your grandmother would insist on steelwooling the burnt crust off of at least twice a year, and there was likely to be strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for dessert (‘likely to be’ was your dad’s humor), and where were you? your grandmother would say she didn’t know — better try that girl’s house — Vandevere. But after Christmas you came back to her, I think, and you would get her to talk about the western adventures and how she broke her back harvesting dry country corn, but now you were bickering over half of what she told you, until she berated me her best friend one night as if it was my fault and I recall she said sometimes you made bad jokes about your mother being picked up by a fugitive German submarine cruising the Jersey shore and going to Argentina or Chile instead of dying like a respectable tragedy — and you didn’t talk that way! and I told her once I didn’t believe you did talk that way and she said, ‘Ask him, he told me he gets transmissions because of that eardrum of his that was infected once from swimming and he isn’t sure if the transmissions are from himself or from south of the border or both but they say go away where you belong’ (‘He persecutes me,’ she said)" (and Mayn: "/ was like that?") " — but nutty things like as if you took your grandmother too literally and took it from there until I guess it all stopped and by the next summer you two were both sort of grown-up again, I mean the way you normally always were, and friendly and a little sharp with each other, that sort of thing, Jim":

Oh remember the "pre-sound" of the Anasazi’s last words posthumously conveyed a mile or more to the Hermit direct by breath from the heart of the Anasazi’s materially dissolving mind which slowly peeled and delayered, in fragilest fossil-like blades or leaflets?

But do you remember adding that the Anasazi and the Hermit might have been in another life one person not two (because except for the Indian’s laughing at him and the Hermit’s getting friendly-mad, they often mingled their sciences of shared and territorial? Mind you, if a cloud stops over your country and sheds water that gets all the way to the mouth of the ground (for this had come to the boy-man descending the stairs hearing his mother suddenly break off her piano playing) — you have it, it’s on your territory unless you’ve gotten to be a state ({he grandmother laughed at her grandson’s historic wit), but so what, it might help the corn, especially right after it was planted, you don’t give that cloud away; and point number two, if a tornado comes along with a lot of people’s horses and houses and someone’s gun and a couple of half-busted chairs from another territory, who the heck wants to share a tornado? — which ain’t the same as between weather that just happens and weather that is caused, or between colored weather and black and white — or the Hermit looking into a box he had for measuring, and the Anasazi turning ninety degrees, then turning again, and so on.

Margaret was upset in the spring of ‘46. The Hermit her old friend was very ill, though she never saw him much — some friends you don’t need to see — and the day before she was going to New York to see him after he had told her not to, and he got mad and had his phone disconnected and when he hung up his lung collapsed; he died, and a nephew of his sprang out of nowhere talking fast on a pay telephone, and she went in to the city and she came back two days later—

— don’t remember that—

— well she fretted over him; we do make people into things, and she actually would rather not see that old scamp who never had a decent pair of shoes in his lifetime—

— not even in the West?—

— I bet he wore his moccasins all the way out and all the way back—

— who invented a thing around the turn of the century. .

— yessirree, it predicted weather according to the exact configuration of coastline but they needed machines they didn’t have then in order to utilize this thing, today it’s called. .

— a baroclinometer, comes back to Mayn in ‘60 or ‘65 in the presence of Alexander, but he doesn’t know from how far back, not far, did Margaret use such language? it was ahead of its time, it could predict fronts and pressure zones from the way the coastline was cut and from densities of people and flora correlations between color and rate of C02 discharge—

— sounds like a tall order—

Well, it isn’t the way a modern baroclinometer works — I don’t know where that coastline stuff came from.

Somewhere.

Perhaps. But the words were different when Margaret told it—

So sometimes Jimmy, according to his grandfather, added to what he was told (which is sometimes necessary to make sense, though Alexander opined that a doctor might need to subtract from what he was told as when women working with felt went crazy and to get to the heart of the matter which was mercury you had to discount various answers that seemed likelier) as to the Anasazi’s distinction between night clouds that are young and, near the moon, show colored rings, blue yellow red, etcetera, and night clouds that are old and have less brightly colored haloes because their old gray blood is thinner if it hasn’t in fact become air, for they take their transformations more lightly and with less fuss, Jim pointed out that the Hermit had said the same thing in another way, the color all depended on the pulverized rock out of which the water was made that produced the droplets that the light was bent into shape by, that in turn became the given cloud — and since she had never actually met the Anasazi—

— but the Princess met him one day when she rode alone away from the Navajo Prince and had a bellyache which we call stomach ague-qua and he told her to find some wwpulverized rock and stare at it until it—

— what would she want with rock?

Well, stones.

Oh.

He must have been a very gentle type of healer, the grandmother suggested, as if the boy-man might know what she did not.

You mean because he didn’t tell her to pound the stones into her?

It came back some nights when he told humorously a rather technical-type story to a daughter and a son — and didn’t know who had invented what, or why (no, how) for years he had all but forgotten this stuff especially the "hard" weather of that period apparently ‘45~’46, probably he was in shock from his mother’s suicide though why didn’t he feel so?

His friend Sam came running up to the house and, first greeting Margaret — being more polite than his older brother, the fat one who didn’t look more than flabby but drove like a racing driver and could fist you paralyzing muscle shots deep inside your arm whether you were defending or not — told Jim that Anne-Marie’s brother had probably broken his back and was stuck in the lower level of a tree in the Vandevere backyard where he’d fallen from an upper perch, and Jim jumped up and without thinking said his own mother had just plain left, hadn’t she! — and she’d told him to go away where he belonged and it was amazing what there was in people and what they were able to do, he had just said to Margaret while Sam stood surprised: upon which Margaret, feeling the boys move to go, retorted that there was no connection between his mother and the old talk about weather as given Jim in these stories because the stories started after Jim was born, and Jim, in turn not knowing what was in him, though feeling that some stories had to be started and started and started again and again, said for Sam’s benefit, Was she pregnant? like the night at the ballfield when Sam called to his father, "Out tomcatting around again, Dad?" when his father didn’t do things "like" that and absolutely wouldn’t — but something got across, some possibility? some true force expressible only against the father? and his father docked Sam two weeks’ allowance at a crucial period when there were three birthdays including one birthday party — but never "laid" a hand on his son. "What’s that got to do with the weather or the price of eggs?" retorted Margaret, but Jim said, "All that weather stuff is crazy" (taking the four porch steps at one weightless fall) only to hear his beloved grandmother say so clearly she might never have uttered the words except in his own being, "Why the Anasazi medicine man went on with it just to give that lonely Hermit some friendship, who didn’t know how to talk to him standing on that ladder high up against the cliff peering into the dark cell or for that matter sitting in there with him, sucking corn."

What a great friendship! (scornfully tossed over the shoulder running away with Sam to the stranded brother of Anne-Marie whose own neck flowered in the dark to the sounds of their breathing and palms upon cloth and all morning with gentle languorous tension within the steel frame of a borrowed pickup truck unwilling still to forget). The spectacle of the Hermit-Inventor of New York come for a summer sojourn to the West-Southwest calling at once on the narrow ancient of whose shadows in this cell he was the original shadow of watchfulness, smiling with tolerance as the Hermit’s head appeared like a greeting which then took word form: "We were talking about the weather of presence and of absence when I left: now what in your view has that to do with spiral winds?" "Possibly nothing," replied the voice from the grain-scented dark, "yet that would be strange. For presence and absence — the long sky of morning or the thunderhead of late summer afternoon — unite in containing the change that weather always is, and the tiny Pressure Snake that sucks a man’s flesh into that mountain that may someday begin to move eastward once was a creature that worked with the cactus to make spiral winds which in turn can be of use, and that snake could return to that prior shape, for what is prior? but the mountain moving toward the coasts you study might fill up the sea or make it rise." "Something must be done," said the Hermit; "there must be prayers one can perform." The Anasazi caught his breath, and the Hermit knew someone was outside looking up at the cell in the cliff. It was a white man in a sombrero. "He is studying the Anasazi," the old man whispered. "And have you proved yet that those frozen foam volcanoes back home do not exist?"

Not to the Hermit’s knowledge, but the "snowdevils" he had once doubted had now been seen in the north of New York State, he replied, tracks skimmed off a field of snow by a whirlwind much like the whirlwinds out in these territories but at the base of its vortex stirring cold crystals (while, as a matter of fact, New Jersey and New York are states still seeking to be territories but they may be disappointed).

And for the two days Jim later could not remember his Gramma being away, he reflected coolly on that poor jerk of a hermit being tolerated, politely and humorously, by the Anasazi who would have discussed much else or nothing, but for the Hermit’s endless queries, oratings, floatings upon weather so that some might have found the subject an obstacle that just got in the way of closeness and the boy did not much know what was happening except he was so in love that he must have said to Marie in the moonlit golf course alongside the cemetery that they could wait for sunrise and if it was cold enough see a real sun pillar which the sky used to rest on until it figured out that the pillar dissolved in daytime and the sky would still stand (because it basically knew the pillar was made largely of ice crystals and it knew the shape and size of them). But he knew that she did what she never had done before because it had been in both their minds and had again driven out a strange potential fact he nearly could not think about — but he had been reluctant to ask her though he tried to make her see it in his horny mind, and then afterward she rose up like a tender power in front of him blocking the windshield on the passenger side where he was glad to be, when he was not driving, and then blocking his face, then the windshield:

until an hour later, it seemed, they began to kiss every other second and in the very far right corner of his eye on the cemetery side he found a bright bob of light which he knew was not just him, and turning his cheek to Marie ("Anne-Marie’s") bare sweaterless shoulder he knew the light was approaching from exactly — no, come on, roughly—where his family’s burial place should have been and he remembered not some other things from the last two days but knew and would always remember knowing that it was his grandmother in the cemetery walking toward the town electrician’s borrowed-with-his-actually-illegal-permission pickup truck and Marie read his heart if not the abstruse information behind the skin of his forehead and so much took what he had been offering that he felt at that moment of crying a plume of returning heat root his very spine-hole hilariously in the sky, both ends up (whatever that meant), as the Moon came out from back of some old cloud so he saw the living pattern of four moles on her left shoulder or at least knew they were there and said to his grandmother, "Was she pregnant, is that why?" and felt the rush to weep but gasped Marie’s smells instead and chuckled at their love as the light got closer and he was glad he hadn’t said those words out loud nor pursued the shivery potential of such facts as that Sarah might have wanted Mel to think he was the father-to-be and would then have had to prepare his belief, which in turn gave him a picture of his mother riding a man’s torso in the breakers of the sea and loving it and calling out to the private darkness— but Marie used foam, which he didn’t ask about but saw the tube in her empty Pennsylvania tennis-ball can one afternoon which made her sit on her bed to smile a long time like laughing so if he had asked her she certainly would have explained how it was all done.

But the Moon found another cloud, if not, by some shift, the same one, and the windshield darkened the way a storm will slow a driver down, and his happiness with Marie, who murmured that she had laid an egg as she rose off him and he slid halfway left and toward the gear shift to give her room in this compact bed which reminded him for the future that the bed of the truck was the place — but where, too, that eerie piner kid who seemed so alien and knowing and stole Bob Yard’s property had opened Jim up wide so he didn’t give a damn — and now, later, with Marie, must have brought almost too near the truck the bearer of the light who stopped by a tree across the low wall of stones dividing the golf course from the cemetery, and the flashlight found his grandmother’s face large-eyed with the white hair pale in the night two miles from home doubtless recognizing the truck but he could swear not him and Marie. But then she did not turn away but got on the wall and swung herself around and over and bravely approached Bob Yard’s pickup truck; well, Jim’s mother, drowned amazingly in the so mysterious sea of her troubles so that mystery might attract the cleverness of hearts otherwise hammered to sleep in a corner, had said, Who the devil cared what who felt when and where ten years ago?—O.K., she’d been sick for a year with anemia the doctor sometimes called it, and she didn’t get along with Jim’s father (though never left him) and, though it was not generally known around town (or was it?), her second son was not her husband’s though closer to him now than his own — and she went to a concert or opera in Manhattan once in a blue moon or to an old brick house in a street in Brooklyn called Garden Place where chamber music was played on a late Sunday afternoon Jim heard from his little brother Brad while boys and girls played stickball under the trees outside, interrupted by the tallest boy in the world rollerskating through the game like a man solitary on ice — while also once in a blue moon, though not the same moon, she visited a doctor who was also interested in the music of the last century, and once to Jim’s knowledge asked a singer from Panama to dinner — a very loud-voiced would-be opera singer she reported who did not come and phoned during the excellent, vividly colored dinner Jim’s mother (this time herself) devised, which they began to taste tentatively stopping to listen to what was mostly silence at Sarah’s end of the line in the hall ended by her saying, "Well, damn you" and hanging up to return grinning (as if incredulously) and shaking her head, more intimate with him and his father, if not with Braddie, than ever, it seemed, to say, "Well, we will all take turns singing after dinner and the best man even if he can’t carry a tune might win the extra strawberry rum parfait" (striped in its tall glass) — no failure there, unless the event were committed to memory mistaking memory for the past—

— but all Jim "knew" on the night which was their third or second out here but this time not in the cemetery but on the other side of the wall in the then nine-hole golf course next to it along the fairway pointing toward the ninth green (so he had recognized the sound of a very deep, thick graveled drive his grandmother had crossed all alone) was that his grandmother came close to the cab and before she could say one thing and think another he had said not only Who was she looking for, but something about the West that went away into the night into his memory together with her response which years later when he had his own kids he phoned Anne-Marie in California to ask about one night on a restaurant pier in New York from a pay phone exposed beside the men’s room and his grandmother he always remembered greeted Marie (Anne-Marie) cheerfully, inquired if they had seen any grave robbers, was asked by Marie what she was doing all alone out here, told the two of them in the truck that she had thought it was Bob Yard’s truck but honestly had come out because she had heard a rumor that her grandson came to the cemetery with his girlfriend and she wanted to see if it was true — that was "all" — and could "they" give her a lift home? — and of course (?) Bob Yard knew Jimmy was using his pickup truck? (no mention of the license he did not possess) — Yes, Gramma—

— wondering, with the two females in the right-side seat conversing about the night air and the Moon and the clouds, if Margaret smelt or felt the juice of their whole love in this cab, until with a shock that made him take his right hand off the wheel out of the night or no place, Sam’s brother’s legal Ford jalopy (in those days before inspection) came screaming across the intersection of Throckmorton and Brinkerhoff on an arc that aspired to be a ninety-degree corner and whose abandoned wake was a wheeling, faintly glittering hub cap sprung loose by the laughing, crowded car—

Why Bob Yard had been Jim’s own mother’s (he wondered if open) secret — he did not quite know the word "lover" (that is, to use) and he did not say or think "fuck" though in the next week he could use it in thinking about his girl though never in speech to his friend Sam — and only in the past few months had Jim known him to be the father of his own brother, which had made Bob, in turn, to Jim the lender of transportation in which Margaret might feel Jim would kill himself and Jim might feel he would power his way through the dilemma of whether to kill Bob or not (what a laugh!) (for what if Bob knew where Jim’s mother "was"?) and in which Margaret, his real grandmother and the mother of his own unfaithful mother, was riding home at this moment before he dropped her at her front walk which had been his front walk now turned into intimate, guilty mere nostalgia by going all the way with Marie, but only for the moment while Margaret strode away straight-backed toward the porch light blistering the ivy at one-thirty in the morning when, whatever she thought about the truck’s owner, she was exhausted (and said so, and mentioned that she had had two hard days in the city — where was her husband?), and had, incidentally, not told Jim and Marie they shouldn’t be out there. So the way she fit right into their sex life took him away from the circumstance of her two-day sojourn in New York, he almost persuaded Marie to let him spend the rest of that night in her bedroom with her entire family at home (but her father still up) which would have lost whatever had been given or gained this night — after which that strong girl remarked that she guessed they were not going to see the sunrise sun pillars he had mentioned which he then told her was "just" something his gramma had told him, while he wondered if his mother had made love with Mel so he would think if need be that he was Brad’s father—

— but years later Marie when he phoned her ("up") in California told him Margaret had seemed polite and alone, saying they had "picked a good night" and when she got out at her house (and granddad standing silhouetted at the window, the light haloing his bald head) telling Jim the weather was a perfectly good subject for friendship and in any case to discuss even if you were with people you cared about:

: but when Jim’s daughter had asked if "it was in the atmosphere or in people" and elicited from Jim "Holy hell what there is in people!" — his own lost words on an afternoon when falling within a large tree Marie’s brother had only bruised his lower back (where skin would never after grow) but not fractured a bone — restored for what it was worth to him now at his advanced age the Anasazi’s prophecy (readforecast!) that a young person would someday find ("found") a new reincarnation, and with it restored not only his addiction to fact but the fact of this curious sequence detached within that time when the War was ending as if there could never be another one, we would be too busy, and the boys, Jim, Sam, others, were realizing they were but two years away from landing craft and Basic Training sergeants’ yells and the grand threat of all that enormity of specifics and its promise to remove this town for a time from their lives, and maybe months from getting into maybe the Marines (Boot Camp) who grabbed up, well, sixteen-year-olds if you kept it quiet and looked hairy and tough, and Sam et al. told and retold the story of the fourteen-year-old Eskimo who (against the anger of his people whose economy needed the exact amount of hunting he could provide) went and volunteered, got sent to the Pacific Theater, and won a citation and then a name that got him sent home too young to fight anymore which was a unique retirement and wound up hustling older men in San Francisco’s famed Bay Area, until Sam’s fat elder brother who could punch you so it went inside the bone said to shut up because that was a sad story. .

When Jim Mayn in the sixties, who knew himself pretty well (knew but wouldn’t risk his well-after-all-dubious luck by saying out loud) and had learned somewhere at the start that when he needed to know things in his memory they would probably be there so don’t sweat it anymore’n you sweat intellect and being Walter Lippmann and history meanwhile even if history provokes us to recall in order to disguise its own possible if perhaps only future non-existence, told his children and his colleague Ted or the colleague-woman Mayga anything at all, he felt that he was remembering what he needed, so long as no one zeroed in and like the scamp Spence, point-blanked their way into ancient conversation demanding — imagine demanding! — to know which day it was that Granddad Alexander and he discussed Margaret’s hermit while they hardly noticed Amyabel Larsen with the large but delicate and slightly moving breasts and Leonardo Hugo the oculist with a hundred neckties go opposite ways at the start of the porch conversation and, with rain threatening in Alexander’s pore roots later, return together (hey!) for the first time as if two directions had been added together to make one new whatsis — dream, maybe, to judge from the immobile pose of trance each seemed obviously to hang their clothes on out there on the sidewalk — only then to continue as a couple and not into Amyabel’s but into Leonardo’s almost identical house (where maybe his mother had died that very afternoon, sounded the joke or joker somewhere well above the ground Jim knew his grandparents’ porch was built on).

But what was the importance of this Hermit-Inventor? asks an interrogating voice that once might have been Jim’s own if he had not refrained from those blunt inquiries close to home that are the mark of the family historian or the truth-chewer who has either lived through and just to the edge of the pain or is crazy amidst it and shouts to those who are supposed to know more than he or she, whereas Jim declined to go crazy and instead got on with a life, left Windrow, assembled facts every day, was unaware till i960 that near War’s end American bomber squadrons nosing into Jap air space were meeting (and irritably meeting if there be such a thing as technological irritation) "jet stream" headwinds often equal to the planes’ maxi-speeds — but he did not leave the messages he carried with him which he imagined he was happy with as is — and was collected really as he had always pretty well seemed even to his wife and to new friends slightly more than old friends so that, more plural than, say, one single account of what had transpired, these statements or messages stood as snapshots of the past into the (thank God) grownup present: for example, "My mother in ‘45 absented herself from my life by rowing into the Jersey sea without a permanent boat"; "Holy hell what there is in people"; "We’re ordinary people"; "Was who pregnant where when and by whooom when they made their egg-zit?"; "You don’t talk long hours for thirty years even just about the weather without having some friendship or other"; or "All of the above."

What was the importance of the Hermit-Inventor? Was it that his friend Margaret, Jim’s mother’s mother-to-be, had failed to persuade a heavy-drinking but collateral and intelligent promoter who’d once studied wind with the one and only Eiffel, to feature at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 a balloon ascent seeking to demonstrate high-speed westerlies at high altitudes hinted by a track of recent cirrus clouds insanely swift?

No, his importance was elsewhere among the timeless isobars of his increasing labyrinth of coasts within coasts within coasts of constant pressure which because they tell us pressure tell us where air will move, thus discovering to us the vertical distribution of air—

No — the Hermit-Inventor got you out of there.

The horse helped.

The Mexican blue mare. No, that’s the Prince’s. Do the Navajos have princes?

It was a horse as far as Zuni, to the south; and then I got a stage, and then I got a horse (that’s what one of those kids yelled at us the other night at the intersection when they nearly hit us: "get a horse").

I didn’t feel I was in their car with them at all.

Why would you, Jimmy?

That was the day grandson and grandmother had things out, almost. Not why was she in the cemetery at that hour when she had just gotten home from New York: but

Why, why had he spoken to her as he did the day Marie’s brother got stuck in the tree?

Stuck! (sticking up for his generation, even though he didn’t like his girl’s brother, against the older generation even its most beloved representative)

— and Sammy came to get him (she went on), and he really was most rude to her (she insisted).

"Well what did I say — cripes sake."

"You know what you said," retorted Margaret, "and in front of Sam."

"What was it?" (though he more or less knew).

" ‘What a great friendship!’ you said" (oh, she was emphasizing that remark), "as if those two surprising men didn’t care about each other."

"But you were the one — you said the Anasazi put up with a hundred years of talk about the weather from that zany Hermit (when the Anasazi was more the hermit) to humor him, that’s what you said" (knowing, as he spoke, that she had in her mind harder blows or queries that had glanced hither and yon).

"Not one hundred, for heaven sake" (she started to — oh God, she’s crying).

"Well, thirty, then!" (knowing that other words of his he didn’t care to recall were in their heads blocking and breathing). "I mean, you don’t have to talk to me about the weather, Gramma—"

"Oh" (she laughed and cried, like laughing tears but instead musical as a feeling may be word-free) "oh you’re the Hermit and I’m the Anasazi six hundred years old!"

"No," he said, thoughtfully, though to himself granting her truth, "you re my mother" — which threw them both down into silence.

"She is neither here nor there," Margaret stupidly quipped, and the boy-man drifted off toward the future where he’d been told he belonged.

"She wasn’t in the cemetery last time I looked," he always remembered saying, badly, while some opposite barred him, with its words, from taking the following step.

"Why would you look?" asked Margaret as clearly as if she forgot his words about his mother from the other day still delayed; he answered himself, not his grandmother: "How could Sarah do a thing like that?" he said his mother’s name.

"We don’t know," said Margaret.

"Holy hell," said the boy-man quietly quoting his father.

"It was in her to do."

"Holy hell what there is in people."

"We’re ordinary people," said his grandmother.

"Well, it isn’t in her now," said Jim and remembered at once, as if the thing he said covered so much it might cover it up if taken seriously.

It was all held somewhere, a load of what we’re capable of, some plural "we we we we" voicing now and then its slide into action. He couldn’t believe this vague thought but it was in him, the sense that somewhere he was in it, a dump, a general dump of what you’re all capable of, a messy cemetery messy because most of the folk weren’t always dead — oh shit.

"You thought I said some terrible thing, didn’t you?" he persisted, and in later years knew only that she had gently backed off.

"She had such life in her but she couldn’t give it up much," said Margaret. "Sometimes I thought it was my doing, but how could it be?"

"What did she say? I can’t remember."

"She said Chopin was great but as for Schumann, his inspiration seems to come between two sobs. I remember her saying that, because I laughed and she said it sounded better in the French where she’d read it."

He didn’t understand couldn’t give it up much and so couldn’t get it out of his head. One thing: he would get away and hear more than these few special emptinesses. His grandmother put her hand on his shoulder. Two facts: his grandmother had a husband; and she had lost a daughter. (If you ever had a person to lose.)

"Your mother had wonderfully bad manners when she chose."

He wanted to say, Stop.

"The day she met your father at his friend’s wedding she told him he came from one of the dull branches of the family remote enough, though, so that she could marry him without producing Mongols, and she told him, ‘If only you could keep up that dashing appearance you had on the running board leaving the church to come to the reception!’ I was standing at the punch table when she said it and he dropped his hat onto the floor, I don’t recall what it was doing in the room."

Wait a sec, there was a connection—

A connection?

— between spiral winds and present and absent weathers.

Oh! — some strained surprise between grandmotherly wonder, laughter, irritation. "Between" what and what? his father Mel in the newspaper office said to someone, anyone, himself, an orderly thinker who was fond (if "fond" could ever state the difficulty with which he paced himself through life) of saying, to someone who had spoken confusingly or with just too many words, "Say that again."

O.K. he answered her: one morning he had come out of the now motherless house and stopped at the end of the walk and found the wind, which he liked, pressing him but on the right side of his back, not his left, aiming right into the wing of his right shoulder yet practically non-existent on his left side; and he turned with the wind, not toward downtown and school beyond downtown, but turned leftward (in the direction of the intersection at the other end of town where the highway ran one way toward Trenton alongside the race track and the other way toward the shore), only suddenly to see Margaret up the street more vivid than distance should have allowed, on her porch just waving to him: the wind had turned him but it wasn’t spiral, you know — it was only strong and a bit curved, the way winds of the Earth will be, but he felt a bit spun, and he believed in mere coincidence so he didn’t think the wind came from his grandmother (anyway it was sort of blowing toward her, "leading" like a forward pass) — but the thing was, you could think what you wanted, and Braddie was known to get so angry when the winter wind was ramming him that he had a fit almost and once went back inside the house and was late for school, instead of running quick downtown like the three hundred jackrabbits Margaret saw all together several jumps ahead of a Kansas dust storm, but the thing was you could think it was hands on your back pushing you, or one hand there and the other not there or not much there— present, absent — but, true or not, you could learn from nature, and so you had to let it do what it did—

(Oh my yes, his grandmother murmured; life is right.)

— and the hands, right hand pushing, left hand not pushing, or for somebody in another town maybe the other way around, could be just your mistake, your imagination, some other hands of yours inside you pushing out: not that you had to believe that, but if you get turned by the wind and the wind doesn’t have real hands so the hands are inside you or something, you can keep on turning ‘cause you’re started and the wind you sort of give in to is inside you maybe as a spiral — even if, outside, it isn’t—

Oh he wanted to have it both ways! his grandmother laughed.

And probably when winds meet, they not only join each other and flow together, but they might spin each other or they might—

"Why, this is our Anasazi medicine man talking all over again, Jim, don’t you remember?"

"But, Gramma, it was the Hermit who talked about the frontier where the breath of the reptile met the breath of the food needles the cactus was tossing out."

"But the inside wind being part of the outside wind, twining spiral and all that, if you recall, that’s our old Anasazi, who by the way had one big lung instead of our two; an earlier lung."

"But he said the spirals got set off in the four corners or something inside us, the four corners facing outward from one another."

"Well, maybe you’ve started a new weather on your own."

But Jim didn’t know.

She said, "Not upcoming or downgoing, but ongoing."

He shrugged slightly and thought of getting away, remembering guiltily how he had needed her. O.K. Gramma, O.K. maybe I’m the Anasazi. He beat reincarnation, and I don’t believe in reincarnation.

Exactly my sentiments.

Right after his mother’s suicide he had to hate his grandmother. How else could he have worked toward this spring victory? He was sort of riding out of town swung toward the future as his mother had once quirkily decreed for him. He would rather be the Anasazi, he told his own daughter years of bedtimes later — because the Anasazi managed for himself a post-mortem cruise in the form of a cloud in order to check if there were foam volcanoes in the eastern states. (And Jim was able some nights to tell his beloved daughter after his equally beloved son had risen above them by formula to the ceiling of the room in sleep, things he knew there was no danger of her believing, and in any case she was more interested in the pistol, what happened to the pistol the Navajo Prince had on him when he pursued the Princess (than in how it had come into the Anasazi’s hands), and interested in what ground-up horse bones etcetera were used for internally — the father didn’t tell her.)

"You can be both Anasazi and Hermit," Margaret told him; for he had gotten up and was going, and all that had been said, like some power that would be there if it were not here, had left unsaid what had upset Margaret to call him rude, rude! as if to have the power you had to take it from somebody else the way the mestizo spy who had wanted to unload the (later) Mayn family pistol nonetheless used it as a mid-journey deterrent somewhere in the Sonora desert between the Mexican War and the Gold Rush when an unknown but someday-to-be-legendary Alsatian mathematician threatened to withhold specie from his pocket together with a large folded sheet of foolscap evidently valuable, upon which when the mestizo took it from the footsore foreigner he found a numbered design with curved lines radiating outward of varying length dotted or broken, yet with identical maths and figures that all came down one way or another to the number 5—11.125 (she recalled) minus either 3.125 and 3 (successively) or 6.125 equaling, along all these lines of varying length, the number 5 she thought — but here in early 1946, Take the power, Jim, from who? But he knew, he knew — he did, he did — a clamor dividing in him and dividing (when some song his Gramma sang said, "I have nothing to divide"); and he delegated the knowledge, just as he kept a new irritating presence to himself in politely asking, "Did that really happen, with the mountain lion becoming a wolf and the great bird flying away?"

"I had left by then," said Margaret, her hands in her lap.

"Had the Princess?"

"I can’t quite tell," his grandmother said and laughed with a slight wit of unease — she was witty, snooty, democratic; tall, loving, crazy punster, very smart; self-depreciating re: her family having settled the town even before Washington hospitalized his wounded in a church out by the railroad tracks, and she also until after she got sick "went" to the bathroom with magical speed, he could never see how she could do it that fast, so the water was flushing almost as the door was being locked. "Yes," said Margaret; "she, too."

"Did you love the Navajo Prince?" he remembered asking, with Anne-Marie on his mind, in his body.

"Yes I did. A prince only to the princess. They wouldn’t use such words. They use ‘princess’ among the Seattle Indians, I seem to recall."

"Did my mother know?" came the question more indelible than any answer to it.

"Very little. She felt I talked too much and was a busybody at the Historical Association and raising money for those poor old Split Wood Del-awares in upper New York State, and the Indian women in Pennsylvania with their family problems and good sense."

"What did you and the Prince talk about?" (while "Why don’t I ask you things?" his own weirdly memorable words, unvoiced, probed outward like a worm whose blindness was the unlikely staying power in his recollection of what he did not understand, such as Why "Split Wood"?).

"Not the weather. Difference between us, their whole extra family of aunts and cousins, for example; everyone moderately in touch with everyone else; using each other. Only one stargazer, and I let him know the pictures I saw at night, the constellations, when we sometimes lay full-length on our horses — but he tolerated me only as a nice visitor, which I was."

"What language did you speak."

"My own, though I learned some of his in secret so I could say in their tongue to myself what they said to me in English — like ‘Walk in beauty,’ which was quite a thing for them to say of me."

"You are beautiful, Gramma."

"They meant all living — living with the land and its animals and plants, as the land lived with the air and the heavens. They dry-farmed in the plateau and they did irrigated farming in the canyon. Peaches and grapes in the canyon when they were lucky."

But the mestizo spy?

He gave the piece of stolen foolscap to the Anasazi with the pistol and was later turned inside out by two Thunder Dreamers and left to dry on a saguaro cactus.

But years later when Jim Mayn’s daughter’s words had evoked "Holy hell what there is in people" and she had fallen asleep where she was in her quilted bunk — not like her little brother afloat near a ceiling lamp fixture snoring more subtly than a grandfather’s nasal short-circuit potent as the memory of it — he made his wife quietly mad by calling Anne-Marie Vandevere in California who, after sixteen average years of silence, informed him at once that that time in the cemetery-golf-course "complex" (she’d been funny sixteen years ago, too) his grandmother had been in New York for two days because an old friend had died and his apartment had been taken over at once by-

— oh was it that time!

— a nephew who looked just like him and understood all the charts on the chipped plaster walls and had brought his own and wouldn’t discuss things with Jim’s grandmother, he told her he wouldn’t want to risk giving her the wrong scoop and said little if anything and she came back to hear that Jim had had as Jim must remember a horrible fight with that three-quarter breed Creek-Sakonnet Indian Ira Lee (your rival on the football team) in Grandma’s flower bed, didn’t he recall? because the day after Anne-Marie’s brother was detached with Jim’s powerful help from the tree in which he had fallen, Ira, the half-Creek left halfback, had called to Jim, who was on the screen porch, that he understood Jim’s grandmother had gone off to New York to see her boyfriend.

But what had gotten into Jim in advance across the backyard’s spongy turf of late winter asking what Ira had said, what had he said — and before Alexander could hurl unmagical words through the screen of the porch past the grand-girthed maple’s trunk to a point fifty feet beyond it, Jim had raked Ira’s dark cheek red and they were rolling on the earth and Ira had stuffed some of it down Jim’s mouth so that all Alexander heard was Jim’s original repetition "What about my grandmother’s boyfriend?" — but "You broke that Indian’s ear, you know," Anne-Marie refreshed him and behind her Jim heard a man’s voice and a child’s as if entering her house out of nowhere, "split the cartilage right back" — and heard himself strangling Ira who didn’t have to rely on Jim’s bein’ a Christian to save "his neck" for he got so mad at being called "Isty Semole" that he kneed Jim sideways in the balls so it felt like fifty balls or more like only one.

But when Jim hung up and his wife Joy narrowed her eyes half-sleepy, half-upset-about-nothing sitting back in a warmly lighted low, soft easy chair in the cushiony light of a reading lamp, and he laughed and shrugged off her reaction which was based on no prior information about Anne-Marie, not even high-school sweetheart, he needed to call Alexander but he was actually by now dead — but recalled then his dumb challenge to Margaret in front of Sam: Was she pregnant? — more a challenge to himself, but to do what? — to simultaneously pass it over to Margaret who’d about given up the long trek or its tale by the spring of ‘46 but came back with New York and Windrow on her mind — did a woman kill herself because she was pregnant? ("Sure, sure!" comes a breezy, angry, warm voice, "if you’re gonna do it, you’ll find any handy excuse, honey," a voice of later years compounded of friends, orators, scenes seen with objective intimacy displacing the worded facts of his job); would a woman in ‘46 so avoid an abortion as to double the deed? ("That’s abstract bullshit, baby, ‘double the deed’ my ass, if she’s that high on being low, sure she’ll do it, sure she will, she’s got other problems inside her besides a gray pink white work that’s still like coming from nowhere"); but what if she wasnt pregnant? we don’t know, you know—and once more, What if she really and truly was?

Holy hell, what is in people?

Margaret hadn’t mentioned the fight with Ira when she got into the pickup truck, but a day or two or three later she half-unmeaningly got into Jim what she had perhaps thought to get out of him, that Ira’s mother’s uncle (a supposed full-blooded Creek with a lonely background all the more curious) had known of the old scamp, windbag, and geezer in New York from the turn of the century and before and he it was, an "Isty Semole," who had identified Margaret’s deceased ally as her "boyfriend," more devoted than boyfriend, more friend than I still can quite be sure (her face pallid and afraid—afraid!).

But Jim did not tell Margaret that Ira, black crewcut bristling with brain and some bad day of his own, had already mentioned this about his Uncle Willy informally prior to going underground as if seeking some derelict winter bulbs with nose and teeth and had suffered a split lip in addition to a broken-ear and slit-cheek ceremony in a face which for the moment (except for the black eyes) was much like Jim’s own earth-colored face, that would ever afterward respect Ira and refrain from. . well, it wasn’t him but Uncle Willy, drinking gallon jars of ice water all day on his rickety porch, who’d been tagged an "Isty Semole" ("wild men" hunters who didn’t "agricult" and were regarded as runaways from the Creeks), hence Seminoles, which Willy and Ira declared they were not and would never become.

And when the rain came powering down into the backyard like a simoom bringing its torrential horizon in with it, Margaret blamed the boys for not leaving the flower bed as they’d found it after their fight. The irrigation souped and dissolved and ponded the flower beds so that giant dogs could be seen to have rooted deep—

— for what, Gramma?

Oh I don’t know (she was upset) — dogbane roots, ground horse bones.

For what?

The leaves of yarrow, Indian women made a special tea out of it.

What was special about it?

Oh you’re the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor of New York all rolled up into one: you tell me.

So he thought he should know if he could find, inside this-at-least-double "him," the information — maybe future predictions! he thought, and got faintly depressed — that is, faintly only in his knowing — that is, what was going on in him.

Holy hell what had been in his mother. Well, he had once been. And his little bastard brother Brad had been, although the town’s normality caused this to seem ever incredible. He didn’t probably resent Brad’s having been in his mother, because it made Braddie her son O.K., although in later years an earth-colored brown old uncircumcised prick came soaring into his mind— what did that old nose look like hard? — and it was a later understanding or it was his real rage and interest seeing Bob Yard, a year and a day after Jim’s mother’s suicide, strip himself at Lake Rompanemus at midnight and Jim, who was not especially watchful strip with him for a comradely swim after bowling at the Best People on Earth alley and drinking two bottles of beer each, there, and one more apiece in the pickup truck going out of town with Bob of course as present owner doing the driving — and telling Jim how he wouldn’t know what to do without his wife.

Jim worked it out and then forgot till one time he told his daughter that the Anasazi—

— and we all know that that’s you, Daddy—

— had said that a young person would someday find a new form of reincarnation.

That lets you out, Daddy.

Lucky for me because that young person was supposed to be doomed, as I recall: but I’m not the Anasazi; I couldn’t be, because neither of us reincarnates.

But he recalled on the day of the ludicrous U-2 briefing that, yes, he had been inspired (how didn’t matter) to figure out how the Anasazi at his moment of mortal dispersal could become (at will) a distinct cloud and it had happened during Pearly Myles’s Journalism Circle. (This was a real advanced elective in a Jersey high school in ‘46, though she soon got herself removed from the school by Principal Fulkerand ostensibly for objecting to the course’s removal as an non-essential course.) He is sick of his grandmother this afternoon, sitting in class, though exactly why he doesn’t know: it is in him and can’t get out, his back and arms are going ahead on their own, he sees it all making decisions to go ahead, to raise a little finger to go out of sight and dig in an ear and he is inclined to see, in the midst of a circle with pointers of varying length drawn on a blackboard at the start of the hour by an oddly tearful Miss Myles, geometries and quick and sundry switches of rain rivers falling at the longest possible earthward angles (years later conceived as minimum condensation altitude; years later, when his new though routine weather interest came out of the U-2 fiasco so he thought) so the rain was over one territory but irrigating another, or the fires from the Hermit’s theoretical lightning sprang far and wide from their sky source yet, since shared, ran back to the territory over which those neon-shorted swastika javelins were bent across the sliding sky, and the problem of how to settle what’s shared and what not, like causing someone else’s death-by-forest-fire through weathers caused by poisoned and unnaturally heated breath departures from adjacent people who in the end might not care what they did to their neighbors. And, with these shifts and smoky cloakings and uncloakings, he saw the indescribable non-reincarnal recomposing of the six-hundred-and-(now)-one-year-oldster for a moment gray or faint gold or (sickly?) greenish, then visible no more and found himself with only words to describe, yes, how the Anasazi retired medicine man "did it"(!): one thing was sure, the Anasazi knew cloud formation; he had been seer, shepherd, farmer, hermit, husband, father, and all these things doubled by vicarious interview with others possessed of these problems; the elder had had much experience and had long ago forgotten quite how to worry about it: the Anasazi had known that his body was but a flaky weightless compost so crumbly the air in his cell might decide his end for him except the breath inside him was still just as human as when his body was in better shape: so that on the day when he decided to come to an end, he saw what he had known always but not bothered to tell, that his breath was what kept him in his familiar shape, it was his flesh and his blood-essence and he had always wanted to see his friend’s East before he died, so that, having given a real medical consultation the day before for the first time in generations and feeling therefore pleased with himself to be of use to the eloquent visiting Princess born in a place called Choor where they made many statues and confused them through making them in parts, who might be on the point of betrothing herself to the Navajo Prince who had already given himself in love to her, the Anasazi thought he would not leave the decision of his death only to the harmonies without, and, in an act that was its own thought he slowly breathed all his breath out from within its veil, and as he saw leaving at that moment every thought, he listened for the crumblings of his body which to him waxed noisy as a mountain coming to life so that, emptying, he saw that through the volcanic air he had lived on for centuries in this area his flesh was part volcanic — and, hearing these sounds, he inhaled for the last time his own and other mingled breath so that though Margaret (whose voice he heard calling, "Jim, Jim") had claimed that the brain flakes had settled onto the floor as a last cover for the most recent weather map in colored sands, Jim knew that every flake and feather of that old body had been breathed back in at just the moment when it was turning to its atoms and motes — so that it could have disappeared into its own last gasp filling the still quite moist lung at the moment that said lung dissolved in a manner that so pressed upon its crumbling contents (a man breathing his whole person in) that a bubble (shaped from that smile that was the anchor for the final words already kited out to the Hermit and others in the area if they would but hear) rose forward like a message and, narrowly making the cell door, sucked after it the wild-flower-colored sands of the healer’s last weather map like a wake too valued to be left like other wakes behind, no matter how wonderful the world in which it happened, no matter if, there, a bird became a wind or a drowning human found enough oxygen in the sea to make the transition to a new form possible: while some voice of the future in the boy-man said realistically that we were gonna run out of reservoirs before we ran out of mines to ruin ‘em.

But that was work for others, for brains that cared, and for science— even if, being called on by Pearl Myles’s full-throated plum-hoarse feet-on-the-ground-of-the-classroom voice, he left that explanation of the Anasazi’s cloud formation to others to play with yet felt he ought to gasp his own way to the surface even if what was going on was nothing more than itself, his mother gone, his brotherhood with Brad exposed as something you couldn’t just say simply and briefly and his grandmother now this very week subtly bereaved by the oddball in New York who had once upon a time helped her come back from the West — instead of staying(!) (were she really the East Far Eastern Princess nee of Choor): but was his laziness in the way of something else? for if he lazily let his mind roam into how the Anasazi became a night cloud not to be confused with a reincarnation, didn’t this "how" amount to something too? (perhaps a "what"?) — even if at this moment Pearl Myles, who was losing her job, had called on him for doubtless some What-Where-How answer — mayhap Where he was, or sarcastically How (he was) or (what was left?) When, Who, What—was it like at a boring moment in math envisioning so sexually Anne-Marie’s elbow spectral above him in the pickup truck and dark cemetery that he forgot she was sitting next to him in the classroom taking good notes? — though when he came out of his daydream-of-night she was not taking notes but fluttering her eyelids toward some dark windowed place secretly beyond the nerve-racked man in shirt sleeves erasing one sandwiched unknown with a long finger instead of using the edge of the eraser (which was at rest along the ledge of the blackboard for use as a projectile at certain moments of release in the course of the month), so Jim remembered with a quickened smile like a jolt that having visited her wordless vagina to find how well all came true with her, he had next morning woken in the trough of his own bed’s mattress and lazily considered jerking off but, absent as she was, she felt inside him — oh, some long rest given him that was awake and asleep with him, a power certainly his that took its humor into where he didn’t need to be in a couple places at once; and so far, if he couldn’t when he tried put it into words to Sam who knew so well how to listen without being ‘fraid to snicker here and there, he had found some place that could stay easy and untended in him, in the knowledge that it was there to be let out or touched off endlessly at need, though he wasn’t going to talk this bullshit, except to Sam, not even when he told Anne-Marie (in her permanent clarity audible even then through a phone line thousands of miles and many years away) that he loved her: because a voice he knew (but because of it itself did not tell himself) had materialized for good into the very rest that Anne-Marie’s presence in him could not equal but seemed to have discovered already there, and it said stuff like what he much later learned the code of (which was like an energy of) If this rest or place which is neither real rest nor a place of rest is, according to you, to be touched off endlessly at need (which is by the way not your way of saying things) then quiere decir (does it mean) an endless need or a being touched off endlessly? A plural voice. Not at all "voices," though a man he once had a brief pushing fight with in Briggs Stadium at a Tigers-Yankees game who later told him the story of burning his own house down with seven years’ work in it told him "voices" of that schizophrenic species while they drove him nuts (which he already was) gave him this friendly sense of his mind being endlessly settled by colonists who changed their career goals and departed, then moved back vociferously: but for Jim as boy-man and later man-boy, a plural voice he felt wasn’t only his (and wasn’t always within his own earshot), though he felt he would never care (enough) to decide if he was in it or it got into him; though one would gladly have held him responsible for not being open about it if the game had been worth the candle and the interrogation of the dangerous hadn’t sometimes dispensed with the exposure of such clandestine operations as ‘‘least said, soonest mended," though who "one" is in those preceding formulae may yet be settled by "we."

Yet responsible he knew he was for something or other: and if it wasn’t his mother’s disappearance into the sea, it also wasn’t in later years a cyclone in Sri Lanka apparently "triggered," as NASA said, by monsoons whose flow got diverted there by running into the Sumatra highlands, for he recalled the shared versus territorial weathers from yakking to his children and not from the fact that the winter monsoon (unlike its summer sister that makes or breaks India’s agriculture annually like a natural mistake that corrects itself only sometimes) may precipitate twenty inches of rain in Singapore but next to no rain anyplace else, having originated far away in Russia/China sweeping up en route extra heat and moisture from the South China Sea.

Responsible for what, then? The Rest that could get touched off or not and lay untended in him that Anne-Marie’s bare shoulders erect between him and the windshield or her fine-bared tits, clear-tuned tits (that they were, God! discovering together!) and covered shoulders or, one Thursday night (never forget which night of that energy-rich week it was, call it miscellaneous information, call it what you will or we), at the extreme race-track frontier of the (again) cemetery, her whole, God! person curved open to him on a quilt under a dim midnight sky when he sat back on his bare heels, his hands spread behind him, and waited for the longest time gathering her into his heart until she smiled a little differently and made a light blind-like pass in the air covering with its current his cock that had been dreaming its very own angle for a week of minutes there between them on what seemed also a Saturday night when they waited for the first time as if she were in him and he in her.

But he never thought what it was like to be her, or not then, and wouldn’t have known if he had thought, and he thought dimly only that you didn’t imagine yourself as a girl though he wondered if the little nibbles he felt in her were her doing or were doing themselves to her or were just a doing: yet he felt she knew him, and one day long long after — and it was a whole day — he found he had knowingly held, amid all that Rest that she could certainly not alone give him, a sinking feeling that she could not marry him nor he go so far as to ask her, and she knew it truly and he knew it carelessly in one of the voids in him between the Hermit-Inventor and the Anasazi, or between Margaret and Alexander, or between his ineptly painfully widowed father Mel (with his professionally compacted obit for his wife) and the brother Brad whom Mel loved very much (and even for his fair piano playing) and who stayed in Windrow — period — and who got angry enough as a child at the buffets of the winter northwesterly some January school mornings to go and find a bag to catch that son-of-a-bitching wind once and for all even if he had to first find the whole cloth with which to make it and before that settle the future questions of whether or not to use synthetic fiber, whether to boycott slave cotton, or get his older brother to help when (if, granted, he hadn’t lifted a finger when Braddie was learning to ride his new Schwinn bicycle) Jim had already given him a hand on scenery for a high school play though suddenly they had to wait while, to Alexander and Margaret’s delight, Principal Ful-kerand refused to "sit on" Miss Larsen no matter how original she was and defended her against Mr. Victor, the math teacher, who objected to the intromission of a thunderstorm just before and just after Act V Scene i as a mad misconstruing of the atmosphere (and Jim’s grandparents agreed) at that point of the play that would only overshadow the "golden couplets" left us by Shakespeare’s endless patience, to which Fulkerand protectively retorted he had no idea what Mr. Victor (who often said n’est-ce pas to his class) meant, but he did not have to read the play in question in order to know where his loyalty stood, whilst the director herself retorted that the play was not written in "couplets." But Jim had in his possession a larger copy he had drawn of a drawing Margaret had made him from memory, an anvil-topped Navajo thunderstorm, and he let Braddie see it in his room but not hold it and when Miss Larsen came to him in the cafeteria and asked to see it, he amazed her by replying he would rather keep it to himself though she told Alexander she did understand and Alexander who from time to time told Jim what he might profit from reading, sent her a token wedding present the next summer of an ancient copy of Hamlet—ancient? bound in leopard skin — as old as the Greeks and the Romans combined, though when was Shakespeare? — and then she did not get married after all. All of which could seem to fit between Mel and Brad — or between the Hermit and the Anasazi (to stay close to home) the former now suddenly dead in New York in the spring of ‘46, the man who helped Margaret get back from the West having spurred her to go, until the new thought hit Jim and vanished within him, a pollution of gossip not to be contemplated much less peddled and he was happy to joke with Margaret about being himself the Hermit somewhere in himself whom she gave some things to think about at a rough time and whom she inspired to a new weather (well, that’s putting it strongly if freshly) to get in the way even of the old which seemed in turn at times in the way of the new, which made him also (to humor her) the Anasazi medicine man (perhaps in their shared mortality), who "saw" the Princess professionally while Jim, sinking the thoughts slowly into this Rest he had grown within him, gave up, one night alone in his bed as he heard his father breathe and dream, trying to reckon how he could with scary certainty know (we already remember) exactly how the Anasazi pulled off his own death, when this Anasazi who (in Margaret’s fantasy, joke, affection, and fact) he was supposed to be had not been reincarnated, whatever one made of the late Hermit’s replacement the nephew now in residence in that weathered lab or railroad flat where death would have been enough maybe to upset Margaret but Jim still couldn’t see what she was doing coming out to the cemetery at night unless Alexander’s news of the fight in the flower bed coupled with Jim’s irresponsible rudeness re: Sarah’s possible pregnancy had drawn Margaret graveward or to Jim’s known recent haunts at the risk of interrupting him and Anne-Marie in the middle of a kiss. But the Anasazi was a healer and that was why the Princess had gone to him and while Jim could never be a doctor (with all that Chem) any more than go into the family newspaper which was soon folding anyhow, or any newspaper — healing was satisfying if you knew the other person real well. Understanding other people — well sometimes you did or you didn’t! Found a person years later you knew you knew already — forget the past life bunk — Mayga, the Chilean journalist; Ted, his old friend in whose very hands Mayn could sometimes feel a glass or the air moving when Ted got exercised; his own father, pyjama’d and tossed by his stormy bed to make his very bones sick of his failure as a husband; and more which Jim did not identify except to see he could be someone in the future who wasn’t him — well, what was that? and especially if you were somebody else who’s living at the same time — let it sink into the hopper, the tank, the reservoir, the sunken destroyer he had read about off the Jersey coast and imagined airtight that wasn’t where it should have been when they dived for it.

He went down the green street to his grandmother’s house one early June evening and she was not where he expected to find her, reading the Trenton Times or Newark Star-Ledger or poetry on the front porch waiting for the American ice-cream man with his wagon and his horse; Jim pushed in the front door, the figures of the brass handle firm-printed against his hand and the slight sticking of the wood against the jamb, and did not find his grandfather in the radio room smoking a cigar; he passed beyond the Oriental (which his grandmother said wasn’t really Oriental) rug’d mahogany dining room, the corner window thick with leaves, and found only the odor of chicken in the kitchen, the glistening skin traced in the surface of the pan-gravy on the stove, and a mouth-watering rhubarb smell containing like the gas refrigerator he almost pulled open gobs of dark-specked vanilla ice cream but went to the porch where the top deck of the old wooden icebox was open, and through the silk evening of the screen he saw his grandparents inaudibly talking off by the flower bed where he and Ira had fought.

Margaret not so tall next to Alexander, kept gently raking the earth pushing away along the surface lightly pulling the iron back, continuing because she was having a talk with Alexander who stood so timelessly beside her in a way Jim had often seen the two of them here or in the kitchen: she talked low and Jim felt repetition in her shoulders till Alexander said, "Stop it," and she turned directly to him as if to show her profile to her grandson behind the porch screen and she said quite low, "Don’t you tell me" and Alexander said something Jim didn’t hear and Margaret hooted and went back to raking; then she looked around her, everywhere but where Jim was, at the two cherry trees he climbed in and at the hedges, and she turned abruptly to Alexander saying something Jim didn’t hear except the name "Ira," the sound then suddenly receding as her mouth pivoted and without looking at Alexander patted him on the back several times until he turned this into a hug, each looking over the other’s shoulder.

Jim’s mother and father seemed far away, then. And he knew he could get away from here when he wanted, and as he felt this he felt a breeze entering subtly through the screen called not by what he felt but felt because of what he felt, for it had been touching him already. Then Alexander lightly patted Jim’s grandmother on her backside. Jim, she had said, had the same gray eyes gold-flecked that the Anasazi seemed to have.

Well even that old pilgrim cloud he became for his post-mortem tour of the continent watching over the itinerant Navajo Prince, some said seeing America, others said aiming for some stream in New England where he might at long last see those delicate if frozen foam volcanoes that the Hermit-Inventor thought only mythical, though the Anasazi had understood that in the East summer was winter and so he was doomed to go looking for the foam voles at the wrong season or in the wrong direction, South America being a better bet at that time of year. Less man- than machine-made are those contrails of hot, instantly-cool-condensed plane exhausts we already remember having mistaken for a growing cover of cirrus stripes multiplying with each jet passage across mid-American air-space until post-War Illinois observes a steady decrease in the number of rain-generating thunderstorms and a narrowing of the temperature range. Yet on the other hand Mayn quotes a university climatol-ogist qualifying the bad news with good: "A blanket of high clouds could seed a layer of lower clouds with ice crystals and cause precipitation."

His son looked up at him on a subway platform one Sunday a month or so before they lost each other in a subway crowd on the same platform and Andrew boarded a train just ahead of the prematurely closing door to find a door becoming a window through which he saw his distraught father suddenly moving with the entire platform of people, and asked how that old Indian turned into a cloud. Mayn remembered. And this was a thing the Hermit-Inventor wouldn’t have known about the Anasazi’s death — the How. Unless the Anasazi med’einer had described it in advance to the Hermit, who, well, Jimmy also was: yet this was so important as to be discoverable only in its own doing, and while you can’t always try it to know it, though Jim could have "killed" that worm Spence in later years who treated investigative reporting as a proof that other people’s lives were as sleazy as his own — killed him at a bar in Washington and at a launch in Florida — the murderer’s existential knowledge was still more overrated than seeing a murderer executed in the flesh, seeing him walked into the chamber and sat down — like having a haircut, said a UPI colleague fresh from the state capital, that’s all there is to it — to learn that a spark, a precious spark? may jump from one foot(-gear) to t’other, oh ignorance is sometimes knowledge, as knowledge is often only ignorance with between the twain the chance that the spark was basic speech between two discrete incarnalities of the condemned. But Mayn was usually a lazy guy on the surface where it counted, so one day when he heard an eighteen-year-old kid who was living with his father in Mayn’s building spell out a theory of Obstacle Geometry and recalled how his own dad, Mel, always misunderstood the effect he had when he told someone, "Why hell that’s what I’ve been thinking and saying for donkey’s years," Jim recognized the hu-manness of the shape (whatever sex) left buried in his vague daydream (he did not have night dreams by and large) and heard talking back to him now and then and reversed the process unwittingly and tossed Larry’s way the clinker that while there was no reincarnation except if you were a gene, there was something else. And Larry looked long into Mayn’s eyes as if he made sure Mayn was the bearer of a message he had been looking for, and Mayn was happy to oblige the kid, he was a nice kid and he would take him to a basketball game, and he was very bright, and freaked out about his parents’ split: he had some ideas, all right, and Mayn was happy to give him for his own use whatever he had in the way of disassembled information, name drops, and oh stories like the man who had remarried and named his daughter the same name as that of his other daughter by his first marriage because he had forgotten that was her name or maybe wanted to flatter his new wife who wanted nothing to do with his prior life — until Larry responded unexpectedly one evening, it was the evening, and a young woman was present named Amy who worked at a foundation as assistant to an exile-economist, and Mayn recounted how a Nez Perce Indian known to Mayn’s grandmother had traveled from Idaho across the plains to St. Louis in the 1830s with returning fur traders to get missionaries to come out because the Indians believed the white man had contracted curiously profitable relations with the supernatural—

— But this was true! said Amy, irritated, look how well the Quakers did!—

— But wait a minute, said Larry, the Quakers are anti-war, look at them in Vietnam — but (he interrupted himself on the threshold of a documentary discourse Mayn’s certain) — it’s like contaminated money — I mean can money itself be polluted? — I mean, my mother took her money out of Chase because it was male-operated/war-oriented — I mean she says she can actually feel what it’s like to be the man at the bank who told her friend she was not to eat like raw garlic any more if she expected to keep her job there—

— And who knows where your money comes from? Mayn said to Amy, meaning the outfit where Amy’s an assistant research coordinator with, in fact, part-time, the Allende economist, studying some of the time how the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) which aimed at a national proletariat got lost in the male-run AFL–CIO.

It doesn’t matter, she said, at a distance from both boy and man, we’re free to find what we want — like the woman whose husband wouldn’t ride the subway with her because she’s got a job and taking classes and she got robbed coming home.

Mayn remarked that sixty years ago his grandmother spent days and weeks lobbying against the wages-and-hours argument that women were more prone to disease than men, and he thought there had been considerable hilarity at a collateral meeting on her own home ground of Windrow-town when she described the wrist-drop disease of house painters vulnerable to lead but primarily to demonstrate how the labor market’s alleged weaker sex in fact had called attention to all the occupational diseases, whereupon on being taunted by of all people an Indian carpenter whom people were afraid of, she fell into a faint — shock, we would call it — with all the symptoms of an unusual poisoning reported in an Italian woman who was a skilled brancher and buncher of artificial yellow muslin roses.

But Larry, who was deeply interested in Amy and could not but show it, wanted to know how Margaret had gotten out to the Indians all alone — if she had — and more about her friendship at a key juncture in her life in ‘94 with a St. Louis woman and Catholic convert who was the niece of the beautiful Narcissa Whitman who with her star-struck, long-traveling husband Marcus had taken Presbyterian Christianity to the Pierced Nose people who seldom if ever gave the United States any trouble until the 1877 rebellion of Chief Joseph who, when he surrendered his rifle near the Canadian border and with it his campaign to salvage the lost Indian culture, said to the generals, "My people ask me for food… It is cold, and we have no blankets. . Where is my little daughter? I do not know…" having flummoxed the vastly superior white army for months in the Rocky Mountains, in order then to be betrayed by the conquerors first into exile in malaria country where six of Joseph’s children died and thereafter to what would, but a few short wars later, be known as survival training, here permission to walk fifteen hundred miles in winter without provisions.

Provisions? ask Larry and Amy.

To a reservation way up in northern Washington.

At least they had a reservation, says Larry, who’s half with Mayn, half with Amy, half elsewhere.

So that only primitive witchcraft saved them, smiles Mayn, reaching for a cigarette and not finding one — that is, they were seen leaving the malarial bottomlands and not again till they materialized at their new reservation, their numbers magically reduced by two to one, ‘case anyone was seeking history’s convective links.

(Mayn and Larry were now standing, just the two of them, outside Larry’s apartment but his father was not home, and Mayn would meet him another time, angry almost, though not at Larry, at the hooting and singing in the apartment down the hall of this floor, the door half opening upon approaching voices apparently fighting some silly battle between song and talk—"It’s the opera singer still moving out," says Larry — neither talk nor song particularly inspired)… of the Columbia River "Dreamers," Smohalla, who learned religion from missionaries, had a bloody one-on-one by a river with the rival Indian miracle maker "Moses," died and disappeared only to be provisionally resurrected downstream by a white farmer, vanished on foot only to materialize much later: he had talked during his death so clearly with the Great Spirit that when he found his true mission and preached the native Indian religion with its four joined, outward-facing coigns, against the White Man’s faith, his listeners followed him even to the ends of a cosmos composed of trance fragments as equal in their order as his history made peoples here emigrating from the Creator’s hand unequal since ranked according to their arrival time, Indians, French, priests, Americans, and Negroes, in that order, which meant the Earth belonged to those first Indians — who if asked to cut grass, make hay, and sell to be rich like whites, answer, "How dare I cut my mother’s hair?"

But did Mayn have to know how reincarnation worked in order to believe in it, Larry asked from a midtown pay booth. Mayn laughed: no, not in either case. Either case? Yes: regular and special reincarnation. Oh, "special" is the "something else" you mentioned the other day. Right, Mayn laughed and Larry didn’t, and Mayn said Larry might take him too seriously. "Did anyone ever tell you that?" Mayn was asked and said, Well, yes — once upon a time his grandmother. "Well," said Larry, "some people feel a lot older than they are, maybe hundreds of years older." Both men found this amusing and upon checking each other out found that getting out of shape had occurred to both of them, Larry thinking of his father who complained about not having time to work out, Mayn of himself, and Larry of Mayn, who was in hard if heavyish shape if he didn’t ponder or talk about it overly, and worked out. Mayn heard himself say: "I guess I had to first believe in an old medicine man’s turning into a cloud when his time came, in order to then figure out how he did it." "He had a reason you said — he wanted to make that trip." "That post-mortem junket," said Mayn, shaking his head. "So what age was the cloud he turned into?" asked Larry, as if the answer might yield data for further steps. "Have to figure it was a newly formed cloud," said Mayn, reckoning not uncomfortably that he was out of his depth, but remembering, then, with a wrench (or a rake and a half! or a shot of sheer void — the waste and pomp of the thank God unvoiced inside-the-mind travel!), a fact he then had only the shape of: "so travel keeps you young, kid." "But," said Larry, "he changed before he went away on his trip."

Which gave them both pause, and Mayn heard the doorbell go and said he had to hang up — but Oh one other thing, Larry — but was it from Anasazi or from Hermit or straight from Margaret, through whom the others came down to him? and pondering this irrelevancy, he lost the thing about light again, but it was about light. . "had it and lost it, Larry — got a visitor ringing the doorbell." "From outer space," said Lar’ like he believed it in theory, and laughed somehow convincingly, and Mayn knew he worried about the boy, about Larry; and at that instant he felt he was saying the words that Larry said to him, "I’ll tell you about special reincarnation someday, Jim." "Thanks, kid — what I couldn’t quite recall was about light being associated with weather masses just as much as temperature which we all know causes things to get moving." "But Jim I always think you know more than you’re saying." "Thanks," said Mayn, "that’s a power I have no control over; I often had that feeling about the Anasazi medicine man." "But he’s dead, I gather." "That’s what I liked about him — none of that regular reincarnation business for him." Mayn told Larry to take care of himself. Larry thanked him as the dime ran out into a recorded voice like the average of mortality itself and Mayn thought that he loved Larry — as a son, a friend, and some further way that brought to mind a separation between the astronaut and his traveling salesman’s life-support overnight case. He thought of Dickens — he had once read David Copperfield and remembering the sea in that book with all the light that must have gone into it lidded away from our eyes at some point of death in the book — who died? — and almost immediately upon opening his front door commenced talking about it.

Well, he Jim unlike the Anasazi Healer warn’t especially wise — let a goodish marriage go — were a but-average dad and left his own son on subway one Sunday who turned up identical and eirdly unworried on platform of next station — yet like the Anasazi, Jim wasn’t specially watchful for here’s a limit even among the most official of vigilantes to how much contrail (read control, too) you can lay on the falling sphere of the world, yours, ours. Yet one hour later, by some token (read totem, too) falling controlled downward to ground zero of multiple dwelling (read dwelling-quoia) with wonderful scientist girl movie fanatic who holds her humidity and dryness in seductive suspension when they have to interrupt a quick, passionate discussion of two-week-Europe-package-for-two, for they enter elevator already occupied by two western-rawboned ladies powerfully enthused having come from a group session elsewhere-san in building ("She gives you hope" — "She lets you give it to yourself’ ‘—"I’m not sure about the masturbation; I mean" — "What it does to your expectations—" "No, it’s really pretty boring, isn’t it? But she’s very funny" — "How we look for subjugation—" "But are carbohydrates really the same as romantic love?" — "She didn’t say they were" "She’s so alive, she probably gets mad but when she does she puts her hand on your wrist, I mean Maureen got her mad once I think and she turned to her and put her hand on her wrist, body contact, eye contact, and said whatever

she said without putting her down, but Grace is so alive that the last time after I left I sort of couldn’t imagine what it was like with her, you know what I mean?" — "Yeah, you’re saying a lot of things fast, you know. The South American woman really doesn’t dig Lincoln" — "Lincoln’s sweet" — " No no" — "Shit, man!" — "I mean, it’s a real honest-to-God workshop! We work!" "Sue, did you say’God’? It’s 1977!"), . he was made to remember that watchfulness according to the Anasazi healer was a mark of reincarnality or its yearning at any rate, which was ultra-slow-beating to tease the mortality that set him apart (and by centuries) from his people who had all gone on to other things depending, Mayn guessed, on what they watched most watchfully until a luminous javelina behind replete with scent-gland system or, say, a jojoba bush beaned with commercial possibilities ranging from shampoo through fry oil and engine softener to a standing reserve of fuel which that little hustler Spence had doubtless heard might do in sinisterly minute platelets for a future generation of renewable missiles — or a hundred other living identities — would imprint their current essences on some supple mid-grid of opiate-receptor molecules that were the immortal genes’ message bearers, as, that zoometeo-rological night the Navajo Prince took off in pursuit of his beloved, his mad mother’s return to life and lung matrixed ever afterward on each downcoming and upgoing weather in that part of the world (Larry’d tell us how that phenomenon was managed!), and one watcher might return as a javelina’s behind, another as a jojoba bean with a solid-missile future, another as a function of some old wind demon if you’d been watching for it as it breezed in and out of town, or some poor gal’s head at childbirth when, say, her unhappy marriage doesn’t quite leave her thoughts even during labor (though you could be a kid in the next room doing its ancient-Mesopotamia homework where when the gods disappeared upstairs to have at each other or just rest — or maybe economized by becoming Us), the weather was caused by demons and omens and dreams of void-like absences which are early unidentified forms of low-pressure zone, though if James Mayn, his once-heavy life delegated, along with such weathers as leaving and arriving, to those growing relations in and out of him busily at rest and medium cool ‘bout the "we" of it or the "they" so long’s the plural obtains and don’t for the time being bother Jim or James how far these relational structures (articulate and/or blessedly non-so) are something he’s in, since evidently they are as well in him, if James Mayn (we say) had done the regular reincarnation trip he’d have gone for someone he knew so little about that there would be plenty of room for initiative as with the Navajo Prince who suspended his studies of God knows what all to chase after—

— the new friend Larry, as Mayn looked ahead to their next discussion, concerned Mayn, he definitely concerned him; for they had got each other into troubles best left to dream, especially if like Mayn you didn’t ever "have" dreams to the best of your—

— while Mayn, impatiently waiting for the next talk with Larry though not getting in touch with Larry, felt that a century had passed between now and the time when he had known more than he knew and had consigned it to some curving-away-from-him (might’s-well-be-movin’) track in the sky of his private fall away from hometown and from the muted melodrama back there, or six centuries he smiles, hearing some old beginner’s logic of yarrow leaves with now in year ‘77 of his own century in question the forty-nine yarrow stalks introduced to him at a sunset swim-party (at a blue, skylighted pool on the thousandth floor of some quick(-lime)-rise multiple dwelling serving tequila sunsets and cucumber prods) by a seventy-five-year-old real-estate executive as the right and traditional way to "drop" an I Ching: for what he heard was himself, on a day in April or May of ‘46 soon after the Hermit-Inventor supposedly died to be supposedly supplanted by his nephew, knowing without ever having been taught what a tea steeped in yarrow leaves was drunk for by Indian women: and Margaret, or for that matter the East Far Eastern Princess, had been the pregnant one, not Jim’s mother: and that was why she had to get away from the Navajo Prince or she would never get away: and, with spiral weathers, or some genuine obstacle to all this void in the form of a preciously durable friendship with his grandmother, Jim had put away for the future’s rainy week which in the controlled environs rotated for gravity’s sake between Moon and Earth was never to come unless the controlled population voted rain, a marvelous if broken train of thought, if not in a class with the special reincarnation that he knew in his bones (the rest of him stored in that radiant, rumored mountain fed by the minute Pressure Snake of the South) that Larry had or was about to eerily come up with — whereby, O.K., if Margaret was pregnant when she departed her Navajo community in ‘94, then Jim’s mother by some law of non-coincidence was not the pregnant one when she invited the New Jersey sea to take her away from it all in ‘45; but Sarah, it had been firmly speculated, would never have killed herself pregnant. Therefore?

Answer: at least half a generation of falling forward toward the horizon — leaving town as his mother told him to, though then it was she who did the leaving, if only first. (And are the first to leave like the first to arrive?) He heard his little brother play a sad thing on the piano haltingly and realized he hated his mother for good reason, while loving her unknown thinking yes, in a piece she played of. . "Schumann" (Braddie called, looking up and down from his music to the keys and back as if one or other would get away from him if they didn’t stay close), Braddie her love child played it with beginner’s skills — in an always somewhat energy-inefficient sound-escaping home, out of which Jim was often coming, often starting, hearing things, well little more than basic equipment sliding/shifting/rattling around in him, voices as unreal as Miss Myles’s "You’re a brave person, Jim; this has made you grow up fast; tragedy does that; we can’t always pick the pace at which". . or words to some effect when Jim wasn’t being brave at all, but dwelling upon Anne-Marie’s breasts which he had just the day before touched in daylight and for a time thinking there really had been a Hermit-Inventor, that is in the Anasazi sense, and so there had been an Anasazi healer give or take a few prescriptions immortal enough not to have expired after several centuries, though smart ideas can get passed on for a long time and still apply, even if saying the thing in French compelled the mother, then, to say to Braddie in Jim’s hearing that the piano was to the orchestra what the individual was to the mass except the orchestra was better than the mass. But, asks the interrogator so long quiet as to have been legally absent (though always in the wings, his own, and more than in the wings, indeed in the feelings of all these relations circulating like money but also like Grace Kimball so clear about history being written yea razored on the male’s ever-’vailable tabula the female doormat that her power has been to be known and used changing in the imitable warmth of her own that multiplies in lives of women and men where she might be as invisible and inaudible as a spirit that reduces surplus though vulnerable always if not quite ready — for she’s a monologuist — to the blunt male word working at its insidious, non-leaderly worst, in interrogation’s interrogatory, But) were you, about your maternal parent’s embarcation into the unknown not at least as curious as Pearl ("statuesque" but only "-esque") Myles who may have lost her job through inquiries about the abandoned rowboat and the lack of a traditional-type suicide note, i.e., about the How of Sarah’s exit? Or did you clandestinely check on the time-distance odds of her meeting the lofty waterspout reported nosing the ocean near the Barnegat seafront between Mantoloking and Point Pleasant that afternoon appearing so unusually free of its normal thundercloud source a mere-mile-high cumulo-nimbus from which it funneled down to vacuum the bright-foaming salt scallops of whitehorse whitecaps the afternoon she "went"? (Answer at once not only for yourself in the usual rousingly dubious way but up front for all of you — and oh yes are we as history-buffers expected to swallow as mere coincidence a modest interest in weather work in later life and those earlier self-embedding weather trips of the boy-man’s extended clan interracial, continental, ranging upwards and downwards thirteen decades or more?)

"You are pretty hard on that little shit," said Ted of Spence one evening in 1965 (probably), "and you don’t know much about him," Ted added, pushing some cigarette change toward the barkeep.

Mayn would grant this, but not that Spence carried especial violence or energy around with him except as an alertness for profit. What Mayn (and, to the amusement pretty much of both of them, Ted) did know about the worm Spence was at least three things: that through alerting the relevant parents— one pair split and remarried, though not to each other — Spence had sold to a New Hampshire newspaper for $4,300 a photo of two evidently male Americans blindfolded with bandannas and wearing major-university T-shirts facing very close-up an allegedly Cuban all-male firing squad (cheeks crushed against rifle stocks, berets tilted except for one potentially-female member wearing an identifiably Pittsburgh Pirates cap); second, that Spence had sold for a greater sum an underwater photo of a free-lance salvage diver on vacation embracing two luminously dark and universal daughters of a Bolivian general against priceless ceramic tiles of (at the diving-board end) the deepest privately owned swimming pool in our hemisphere; and for a bargain-low barely-five-figures unloaded a dossier (he had first ingeniously "rented" overnight to a foreign "buyer") documenting a blackmail-and-(party-)favors network extending through uranium options on Indian lands, embezzlement of tribal funds, sexual action by civil-rights coordinators ("red" and "black") with pictures involving entrapped foreign acting students and a safely incredible pilot "map" (read project enterprise) to recycle mystery wastes on scales of such "load" and "breadth" and "profit" that its susceptibility to seeming in general "good for America" plus its emergence less than six months after (and thus in competition with) the killing of a President (on the birthday of Spence!) not to mention a tragic twin-miscarriage suffered by a prominent microbiologist right in her lab, caused the whole dossier both with and without its powerful abstractions to fall back into a regularized dump of history to be of a significance as uncertain as were the views of this moral orphan Ray Spence sometimes confusable at will with a part-Sioux part-Ojibway entrepreneur whose name after it was given him by accident he deliberately adopted under stress as noted by clients who may never have bothered to find out about each other, assuming such basics, nonetheless, as that they had been mothered and fathered and come from real places, demonstrable places, whereas Mayn (who amused a woman friend who pointed out that, his humor notwithstanding, she personally had nothing to go on except his testimony) had inferred Spence’s origins as "something else," a message not certainly aimed at eventual re-constitution in human language (read terms).

But if this was all Mayn troubled to actually know about the despised Spence, the rest of it could seem to know Mayn, or be borne by him unknowingly recalled like things he hadn’t understood but recalled and recalled, the dreamlike late night when he opened his mother’s music-room door till he could see her and he had a message for her sort of dumb-in-the-head ‘cause it could be gotten by her not given by him.

But what was this "something else" Spence was coming from? the long silently present young woman Jean (or to her parents Barbara-]tan) asks— who once four years ago in her half sleep heard her motel-mate Jim Mayn mention Ray Spence, a Chilean economist, some "choor" or other until she was awake and he, this mid-life athlete next to her, was the one half asleep — counts down through Spence, Chile, Choor (born into it?), and a long, white mountain that had thoughts if unable, at the drop of a fracture zone or the pivot of a scissor fault, to turn thought into dream: so maybe marry the two, yet she could have sworn they were born into each other.

Now it’s four years later. She doesn’t — he knows — know what their relation is, it’s as deep as friends for sure.

He backed off sheepishly: "Have to think Spence was a snake in a previous life and didn’t make it so they demoted him to a human snake— except there’s no ‘they,’ is there? I’ll say one thing for him: he has the stick-to-it-iveness of a good journalist: he listens and he goes looking."

"For what?"

He knew she didn’t get it, but in his own behalf he could at least claim not to have read the book though he’d had its meager theory digested for him by his friend Ted; but they went into the movie theater they had been slowly approaching, as it them, with its potential images at rest in the money in their pockets, then in the tickets rolled out onto metal by the box-office attendant, images including one at the start that made you think was it mist or was it fog the East Far Eastern Princess got turned to by her friend and adorer the Hermit-Inventor of New York? For mist — whatever its uses in the vigilance of precise umbrellists or poets or measurers in Oregon and Scotland who name it, as a hundred winds are named, for their place — is essentially distinct droplets; and fog is a cloud of condensed moisture as close to the ground as the Great Spirit’s Four-Cornered Ear, oft free enough of wind to hang, yet if wind-moved enough, apt to gather more air to be cooled by the cold, cold ground as if the Earth were the sea.

Spence persisted from talk he had heard, through hearsay he had not, as if infected by the future of jojoba as a fantastically superior dry-land reincarnation of the vanishing sperm whale’s oil, yielding from that plant’s durable bush such motor coolants, human foods, shampoos, commercial hopes for endless other transformations as might explain why (per quoit) an English furniture maker whom Margaret Mayne met on the slopes of Salt Lake City could excite her so with tales of the Japanese-speaking American inventor whose interior wound had been healed in the desert with jojoba balm only so that he might be murdered for having seen the connection between that bush bean’s pod-oil and the (in fact) mw-sperm whales with which a group of Californians tried to stock the Great Salt Lake: and altogether did explain why Spence’s nose for profit led beyond the venerable jojoba bush and its lucrative basic-research future of remedying the particular acne if not spleen damage or excess gravity in the lower limbs and spinoffs of the chemical from which is derived dioxin of Vietnam fame to the woman Manuel who had healed the ill-fated Japanese-speaking Mason in Utah, had herself shampooed with the jojoba oil for years, and had so applied it to the riven scalp of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the lovely sounds that came from her small cranial crater as well as her demon-hassled voice’s mouth foretold if they did not cause that legendary comeback from death usually attributed to her son’s hasty departure. Spence had heard some of this firsthand through Mayn, but some of what Mayn heard from at least two people, whom Spence now in 1977 insinuatingly contacted, seemed almost as far from Mayn as it had unquestionably not been overheard spoken by Mayn in a Washington bar in the old days in or not in the presence of Mayga, the beloved South American woman-friend, at Cape Kennedy before and soon after the liquidation of Dr. Allende’s government in Chile or at one or two other times when their professional paths crossed, Mayn’s and Spence’s. Yet indisputable it was that the Navajo matron upon revival had spoken in the voice of Owl Woman and Owl Woman’s name had been Manuel; indisputable that Spence had heard through Mayn of Marcus Jones, and anyone but Spence would have settled for this — not reached, instead, his fifty-foot extensible arm-hand out of the wiry plastique of his western-wear-clothed body to ferret out the fact that the American printing magnate Morgen, who had been strolling with Mayga when she fell to her death, no one else’s (the ultimate breather), from the breezy cliffs of Valparaiso harbor, was brother to a left-wing job-printer Morgen in Philadelphia — all intensely suggestive to Spence, who though Mayn figured Spence cared not even a fuck for the journalist Mayga noted that in the late fifties/early sixties her husband had helped run the national airline and that Mayga’s work in the States was covering copper mostly and talking up Frei’s next run for the Presidency of Chile — work just ended by her departure for home summoned by husband, now ended with her life.

Mayn had told this Spence years ago to shut up, which Spence did with such a lingering smile that he might in every other respect have been elsewhere.

Mayga was dead, and that was all that had mattered then in 1963, not the tilt at which we received the sun and the rain, nor any historic small talk that was all of it bigger than the death of Mayga — and welcome to its bigness. Yet recalling and recalling how friend Ted had told Jim the news not imagining it would upset him for he had met her maybe half a dozen times in ‘62-’63, he could get to another fact of Spence by the trivialest gnomon yet congenial because he and Ted had tossed this all-purpose gnomon back and forth, the L of the sundial or anything that tells time by the shadow it casts (though what does it tell time?); for one day at the beach Jim had stuck himself strangely into the earth of the Mantoloking sand just on the leaning point of pretty well murdering his little brother Brad:

and that "fact of Spence," conveyed on a gray day in New York in 1977 of the perishable century that aspires to be our civilization’s hour, he heard in the voice of a nice woman he had had steak and enchiladas with (or what did they have?) in a bedroom suburb of Albuquerque hard by Sandia Mount, calling to say she’s in New York, has to talk to him, she was supposed to be joined by Ray Vigil (remember?), she had to see Mayn, not talk on the phone — look it wasn’t possible to put down (put up?) a mountain overnight, was it? whose mineral "bank" could make anyone near it think it had always been there, and listen, a man who disturbed her but maybe wasn’t crazy had told her that Jim Mayn’s mother had disappeared into the ocean but his grandmother had stood at the memorial marker in the family cemetery plot and said there was something real there and a person had phoned the cemetery from New York to ask if burial had taken place, and the woman from Albuquerque her voice quiet with chill not privacy thought it all might mean nothing against this Spence’s allegation that she and Mayn’s daughter whom she did not know, if not Mayn himself, could be involved in coercing a western power company through the leverage of something she heard Spence call National Technical Means Capability for verifying placements of missiles — but… she had come to New York to talk to Jim about partly this mountain perhaps though she had not heard about it till she got here and of course didn’t believe it but also a strange thing she had heard in Farmington, a west-east nightmare for environmentalists, this mountain minerally capable of making people believe it. They would talk tomorrow, she said, as if it wouldn’t be now. Her firmness brought them full circle but it wasn’t the same spot, and looking over the edge of the phone or the circle, recalling her curly, dark-blond hair and a quick smile in the midst of fact and dedication still hoping she could save part of a landscape from being darkly stripped by some epic modulus but to store that landscape no more than the windmill prior to the giant electronic pylons of Wyoming stored wind for current elsewhere, he remembers her given name Dina like it meant something and despite her having just said her surname he can’t hold it in his mind until he thinks of once itemizing for his daughter a bleached beer can next to a candy wrapper in the desert brush at his feet when he stood contemplating Ship Rock while the Four Corners plume and gasification of cheap surface coal escape him, and thinks of another person a bearded son of two opera stars who changed his name to West which amused his bearded sometime-earringed father and upset and haunted his mother, she told Mayn. Dina West. Dina West. Spence had phoned her. Which meant he had known she was here, and where. Which meant he knew o/her. Which in itself proved for some minutes of this year of 1977 to be so tiresomely credible that Mayn could go back and bury himself in some New Mexico town with one broad street, a desert’s exit and entrance, and drive a new pickup truck and wear dark glasses and pump gas obscurely for the rest of his life. Dina West.

He had told a couple of things to a nice neighbor named Norma one night shortly before Spence’s name entered her ear, touched (and probably lowered) her consciousness (itself less "raised" by the woman Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshops than reassured by the stories of other women and the gentleness that let the heart speak for variety more than bitterness, at least to Norma, who made Mayn think maybe his own wife could have been helped in workshops like these though he still did not understand why they had relinquished each other); and Norma conveyed to him some of this gentleness, and while deep rainless thunder-pockets cracked the long clefts of Manhattan (which would have been the name for New York if Mayn had had a say) he told Norma that the woman who had been neither Mom nor Mama, yet Mother, and his, had told him to go away, to become himself, and then she was the one to go, and that way of putting it was the mystery, not what’d happened. Norma did not dispute this. The advice, she pointed out, was still good. But, she heard Jim (this nice, only moderately articulate-seeming, modestly macho man) muse humorously, his mother had taken her own advice, which people didn’t always do. But what was the trouble? asked Norma — that Sarah was s’posed to let him go ahead first and do what she after all had said he was s’posed to do? Norma liked Jim more than a little, and whatever it was was gladly unspoken. He tells her that clouds heal the air. She likes that, but she wants to ask him what he’s feeling.

"You know where I heard that?" he said, and then, "Why I think I said that myself, that clouds heal the air. Almost unprintable."

Norma said Grace Kimball for all the enmity she laughingly bore men would say maybe Mayn’s mother listened to the good advice she was giving her son — a man — and one day decided to—

"— She wasn’t well," he said.

She waited.

"Go on and say it. It’s O.K."

"Decided to take some of it for herself."

"You don’t know," he said, unable to tell her, but feeling passion staggering stagy through his heart, the self-pity of cloaked melodrama.

He knew Norma wanted to ask, What happened with her? To leave a husband, two boys, a home, her things! He waited, for a time, to speak, and knew in his shadowy sense of immediate future time that he would have the chance, and saw for the first time that this sense meant he cared about her. He wanted to know, Did Norma ever have people she’d been getting ready all her life to see?

"Well, you.’9

He didn’t mean himself!

"You mean you look forward to knowing them?"

He guessed he meant that.

"No you didn’t," she said. But she didn’t press him. She said she didn’t buy all of Grace Kimball, her best traits were warmth and intuition that gave her listening a power of itself — though she was supposed to have had enormous influence on dozens of women breaking up relationships — no, that was putting it clumsily, but… the workshop did get heavy, you know dogmatic — inner-clean, clean-break, get rid of all that furniture, honey — but Grace you know was still in the place she had lived with her husband in, though so what? but the workshop’s too supportive, so much womanness you sometimes aren’t sure it’s old-time female, but Grace she liked, she had such a lot of bounce in her, she put her hand on your wrist rather than put you down — a beggar on the street with a brown paper bag over his head with eyes, a crazy old lady Grace told her of, some bum she’ll stop as if she’s barefoot too, give him a buck, tell him about A.A., she sees things so simply but what she says about men and history gives her all this preachy power and influence but when she uses it in all the talking she does (which includes putting down words, words!) it’s humor and a little-girl ("little-w^m^m"?!) changeableness breaking habit patterns (being constantly her funny, bumptious self. .) that is left with you like some good medicine that hasn’t anything to do with power and living-room politics, well Jim knew what she meant, didn’t he? Norma asked— Grace always meeting the most ungodly people, you know what I mean—

— have to get around to meeting this woman, there’s a Lucille in her group of friends, isn’t there? who sounds like someone I knew—

— the strangest people, this red-bearded Canadian economist who O.D.’s on pastries and attends—

— Which one? Mayn asked; I know two of those.

Do they attend swings?

Do you? asked Mayn — wait, what’s a swing?… oh yeah.

With tea and apricots. Maybe these other street weirdos "came" to Grace or something.

(Are there never any women bums? Mayn murmured, and then answered his own question, Of course, of course: they’re sleeping in the doorways with their bundles — as if he had to find out all over again what he didn’t know he knew.)

— like an old, irritable man shepherding a demented and beautiful old lady, Grace is looking them up again, she liked them. The man’s a wonderful grouch, very serious, the old woman spoke of his laboratory but obviously didn’t know what she was talking about.

Don’t be too sure, Mayn said.

Then one night Norma received a call which was like a call from Spence. A woman in Norma’s Body-Self Workshop, who evidently did not know that Mayn lived in the building, had been concerned by a phone call from a certain Spence who asked if she knew that her friend Flick Mayn had once lived in the multiple dwelling where her workshop met, attended significantly by a woman suspected by a visiting south-of-the-border counter-intelligence ‘‘enforcer" of collaborating to set up a major act of leftist bloodshed plus the abduction of a venerable Masonic socialist who’s father to this woman’s friend who’s herself more famous than her father and recently seen with a distinguished young naval officer known to be diplomatically trouble-shooting for the regime now in power in her country which may be Chile in her heart and soul and body but not on her passport. "Yeah, sure, the opera singer," Mayn answers promptly, "and I think I know the other woman you’re talking about; but bloodshed?"

But the new friend of Mayn’s who has phoned him this data, Norma, residing in his building and with whom he had talked only two days before deeply about his life yet leaving out one huge space of Fact, now asked him if it was true, as Spence said, that his mother had committed suicide — the one huge fact — and that he had investigated it; and he said very calmly, that there’d been nothing to investigate, nothing to look into, there was a note, a boat, perhaps a motive. She did not ask why he hadn’t told her before, and he was privately impressed because he should have told her — because they had talked about Sarah’s leaving as the thing she had originally told Jim he should do — which, granted, was just a parent telling a kid to make his way in the world, though advice inspired by disappointment.

Mayn remembered Spence being in the bar years ago because he had responded typically to hearing Jim tell Ted about — yes — the day (was Mayga there, too?) when he as a boy in a raincoat had questioned a man surf-casting who had sensed something terrible in the questions and had changed the subject—"Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that" — but when Jim asked if he had seen bodies come in or if a body might sink for good for sure, the man looked back at the high, windy breakers (oh yes, that’s the name of a fine old firetrap hotel, The Breakers) on the Jersey shore, and later when he asked another man down at the pier about the incident, the boat, etcetera, why the man laughed and said there were things that mattered more — gratuitous remark that Mayn recalled ever afterward as being revealing of the quality of, well here come deep waters, "so much" (as very serious folk are wont to say) "so much" that is our life right up to but not including what we call history but do not ever grasp, "un. . photograph. . able," but is this a view of history even in its absence? as Ted used to say to Jim, Ted now has a hard knot of cells in his neck on the right side "arrested but merely resting" (Ted jokes very precisely and Jim knows the cancer is memory but can’t take the thought anywhere, potential force resting up inside you that you can’t tap for yourself except, in its time, to launch you out of here). Ted goes on working out of Washington, and now during these curiously pressing days somewhere going round in Jim he found Spence out making a buck, a nickel, again, and recalled he had agreed with Ted he had been hard on Spence, this this this. . words had refused him like angels flapping humorously at the dim margins of his eyesight, words that were actually there already put, already remembered — this little bastard (simpering scavenger, looking, looking, sniffing, listening). . but wondering now, a decade and more after that chat with Ted, if Spence had acquired data Mayn knew nothing of, he phoned Washington to find that old Ted had just left for San Antonio, and in the gap of this phoned also in Washington his own daughter, who was not home; phoned the Albuquerque woman here in New York to get Spence’s number if any and she had left her hotel; phoned Norma for the other woman’s number but hung up in order to phone Amy to ask if her distinguished Chilean economist, who Mayn had never stopped knowing was there at the foundation, had acquired the opera tickets Mayn and Amy had used from the diva Luisa in person, only to hear Larry answer (hey, hooray for Lar’) in a voice very grown-up through a storm, a virtual apparatus, of systematic static Jim-jamming by load factor divided by search-intensity quotient, divided and divided by his journeyman self falling forward in lieu of looking, looking, looking for it might have been Spence sotto voce reporting-in with information in the form of a question — or turn that inside out, a mountain of a dream Margaret thought up for him that supposedly the East Far Eastern Princess dreamt: a grave she saw into but had no mouth for words, words, words, it was too full — of words? of something solid? — and she dreamt she woke and was wet all over with tears of every feeling you might feel, and she went through maple trees, their leaves’ undersides blowing up palely in the wind, and passed an old swimming hole and got to a pretty field and found the grave of her dream which was so deep that all it had in it was the egg the lion left, not a hair nary a finger of that grave’s tenant who kept at best a low if not departed profile until, surrounded by dirt-tired Indians not dressed for our weather, she felt them edge her toward the grave only to get her attention to tell her she had lived the life of this dead person and now was this person and ready to go on as such, and, relieved, she told them they had no such belief in reincarnation, to which they replied in a unison all the softer because they all spoke, that she was the one who had told them: and when she felt awful about this, they lowered gently into one fluid thicker than blood and as live and glinting as the tongue of the whole world and before she could reach for that egg down there, they simply flowed into the grave, which became the hillside:

: inspired by Spence, who was nonetheless real and if (give him credit) turned down by the U.S. Marines nonetheless semperfidelis to know what he would not report himself but package for even Mayn to bear:

: who in turn is uninspired himself no doubt, a journeyman who among the violence of an indelible child’s bike devoid of training wheels falling on a small, caged leg, and the violence of an unknown husband’s head that, with all its holes, would not pass, by terminal magic, through the grid chamber of gut pressure he himself has had strung into his wife’s racket frame so she can kill him, and the violence of an anonymous wife’s love for her husband precisely when he (having spent an evening having Hemingway prove that it’s people that are the matter) is telling her her women’s workshop puts down men, and the violence of a teenage child whose anguished anger normal for her age multiplied by (and perpendicular to) the parents’ separation after years of uncertain vibes (read frequency, read in-frequency) divides and divides until the simple knowledge is too large to quite see, to wit that when you get to the age when you want to kick your parents around it’s easier if they’re living together, two still one — among all these violences which were not a newsman’s reportable Delaware Water Gap development or income-tax reform or wind energy used right in the backyard (read roof) of a Lower East Side apartment building — Mayn could see Pearl Myles on her ambiguous exit from Windrow High School, urging her Journalism Circle swansong fashion to remember that anything might be news but it must be something, something, and while you were wondering remember that in the City was where you found — and some snickered, including Jim—"human nature posing in the nude."

Good material for Spence blown adrift in the vitals of a divided history. Looking through Mayn’s daughter’s keyhole in Washington? Or her address book while she’s down at Tradewinds, having a beer, talking to a boyfriend about another apartment, being possessive or being low-key (well, her father himself would like to know, but not through keyholes), or thinking about conflicted parents but about important stuff like her life? Good material for Spence, who come to think of it liked cappuccino and pistachio or vanilla ice cream like a regular person who, disreputable skew-handed trash-purse that he was, had had at least a father or a mother (grant him that!) maybe the bad bean of a good marriage (for that could happen, like wondrous spinoff of a supposedly bad marriage), didn’t seem to need to go to press briefings to find out, for instance, as Ted, who ran into him "retailed" to Mayn, that the unthinkably rich relation of the low-profile Argentine silver magnate who ran the string of eastern papers Mayn worked for for a time had not gone up in smoke with his plane but was redesigning a private golf links surrounding a green-bean plantation once owned by the Presbyterians of Cameroon.

Spence was the problem. He was no less than making a living. Mayn joked with Norma, the night Lincoln had called her: "If he gave you all the news—" " — not me."

‘ The, uh, storied botanist-explorer Marcus Jones used to object to having to explain himself, why, for instance, he loved the blanched lips of a lady scientific colleague he used to run into in the desert—" "Someone your grandmother knew? I think you mentioned the bicycle before, and. . and…" "Spence did, probably." "But Spence called Lincoln, not me. You never mentioned the botanist to me, just that your grandmother traveled to the West in the nineties." After they hung up, Norma came downstairs and rang his bell and she seemed apologetic, as if she’d ask was it true Brad had needed more attention. They didn’t talk about any of this. Mayn was concerned about Lincoln. He felt he had already talked to her — as if Spence, crawling about in some lightless bloodstream of phone lines, shaped time and Mayn knew what was coming up. Mayn didn’t want to talk to Norma and got her gently out of his apartment. He really liked her. She didn’t understand. Probably thought he was feeling a little seduced.

He had to cut off this period, the arc-second segment of these few days. Just say where this unchecked inquiry and publicity stopped. But Spence was making a living.

Yet, like having the power to know and look hard but being convinced that history was a costly drug that played at being a secret that would not be there when you needed it, while he knew he was waiting for Larry Shearson to get back to him, that third woman-phone-call detonated by the creeping Spence made Mayn start again asking himself about Spence if not about such historical convergence as Spence sought or preyed upon the shadows of.

And listening to this woman he’d never met but who’d met him (!) (who had just become "a carpenter," God love her, "it’s like a revelation — used to be in your business") — he could not tell if Spence had or had not heard him one time speak of the Brad’s Day wrangle re: bent winds, so far forgotten by i960 that Mayn’s "discovery" of the fictitious Coriolis deflection of winds when he boned up fast to check NASA’s U-2 cover story did not at once bring to his mind his mother’s words or that dubious giant of a debate that never stopped growing between the Indian and the Anglo of Margaret’s private dispatches to her grandson, and Mayn imagined first that Spence had made up independently any number of events signal in Mayn’s abortive or largely unreportable family such as (though he had no evidence that Spence did know) that the cousin diarist from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Marion Hugo Mayne had recorded from an adjacent table a potentially erotic meeting in New York in the 1830s between a young woman whose lover was in trouble and an anonymous but most powerful statesman-dyspeptic friendly to M. F. Mayne because of the Mayne family’s New Jersey newspaper founded to promote that statesman’s political career; then a moment later Jim Mayn was thinking that Spence just plain knew about him what Mayn did not know except in this windy code of scavenged surplus connections that had a dollar sign haunting it, hence for Spence a credibility value.

But this woman with the rather large, husky, yet naked voice, Lincoln, who asked like Mayga years ago, Who is he? (and unlike Mayga would bleed words into Mayn’s ear for a moment) had not only been interrogated and apprised by Spence, she had been stood up by him maybe because she had told him what she looked like but have to learn to take rejection but that wasn’t the point of the meeting she had thought, and she’s actually very nice-looking especially now that she’s been cleaned up—

"I know what Spence looks like," the voice came back to her and she added, "And I know what you look like and your daughter read me one of your letters."

He did not stoop to the bait if that’s what it was. In his eyes, in some one of the liquid, lucid filters his eyes maintained as memory chips not worth circuiting into the brain, he did feel someone looking at him in a restaurant, and so what?

… but this Spence had called to ask if Lincoln knew that James Mayn’s daughter had lived in the apartment house where her own whadda-ya-call-it consciousness-raising (—it’s not conscious-ness raising, if you don’t mind, she’d told Spence, or not what you think that means, if anything) workshop, where the workshop met, where there was another woman—

"I know all this, Lincoln, I’ve had it from another source a’ready, and your Spence could probably be in two places at once, he’s something else again, stay away from him, he’s down a burrow half the time breathing his own carbon dioxide economizing on being human while he makes these phone calls on someone’s charge card."

So she went on to more painful Spence as it turned out—"I feel I know you, Jim," she said, "please call me ‘Lincoln,’ O.K.?" — (well Christ maybe Spence was a lunatic, whether or not that was his voice so deep dark inside the still athletic James Mayn it could be where the tawny cirrhosis crouched, budded, unbuilt and rebuilt so process supplanted its normally maintained result preferring to the degenerate future-liver a richly compacted coffee-black hole Indian tandouri, one thousand pork chops, twenty-three hundred New York steaks, eggs rancheros, soft corny chicken enchiladas suizas, and enough veal Parmigian to melt down the James River clear to an Italy where Jim had been but once and once was not enough)

— at each point on this skewed circumference someone stopped him inside himself and he looked across an edge into a dark he had always taken for granted, no use surveying there, do the next thing, etcetera:

Spence — Spence had interrogated, apprised, mingled the two modes: for as a talker he had a voice that could almost sing, high-frank, working, eager to help; and she had answered him, she couldn’t tell why, could-be it was that she’s a carpenter now! and he in turn asked if she knew this man who had followed the Chilean economist’s wife and Lincoln said, Only his daughter Flick, who’s a wonderful girl; and he asked if she knew a "chick" named Amy who got free opera tickets from the Chilean whose wife (her workshop acquaintance) was friends with a singer whose father belonged to a venerable logia lauterina which the regime like emperor and pope before them would smash if they could as if the freemasons were still stoneworkers and their liberal (here, liberation) lodges were made of masonry or for that matter secrets, and Lincoln, alarmed, said, No she didn’t know any Amy; and Spence asked did she know any journalists working in or out of Minnesota because his instinct told him she did, and she suddenly didn’t know but had asked what he wanted and he said, To enjoy a meeting with her (—enjoy? it was like experience, she imagined) if she (Spence went on) had any related information for sale or barter; to which she retorted she had no information for sale; but he: Ma’am you’ve already contradicted that; and she: Don’t call me ma’am — yes she did know someone in Minneapolis, and Spence replied, By name Pearl W. Myles around sixty years of age? who lost a job because she did some hot-shot legwork all written down but never printed to do with a person who disappeared off the Jersey coast right when a maverick U-boat had been seen in the camouflaged vicinity and linked with a German composer (read perhaps compositor—no time — copy both) who had bought all 250 eel-steel feet of it for delivery in Chile where he was going or already was? — does that ring a bell? Never knew so much talk about curved wind, by the way. But Lincoln loathed Spence. (Like a relation? Mayn asked, and she laughed.) She had tried kidding Spence did he know Mayn had visited Medicine Bow at least twice to see the giant windmills where her own workshop leader Grace Kimball’s non-smoking Buddhist brother Walter hailing also from the southeast territory of Kansas used to be a trouble-shooter for the Department of the Interior — and when Spence after a pause called this sheer coincidence (while Mayn asked if it had been she or Spence that had "never known so much talk about curved wind" — Spence, she said; Spence, Spence, but I don’t know if I told him about what your daughter said about him or he me).

So Spence became formal and polite, different, as if asking her out— and she saw a buggy all painted shiny and black and gold with a Central Park horse distinguished by a large bunch of flowers between the ears, yet no future in that buggy or a dangerous future like a waterfall he for me or maybe me him — for all the world as if Spence was forgetting he’d already asked her to meet him: Had Mayn’s daughter (he wanted to know) spoken of a certain Mayga? — Mayga? — A South American woman with a round and not-at-all-bad-looking face who lost her life soon after being associated with James Mayn, who’s married, isn’t he?

Mayn hung up on her, hearing only the word "not—" then had to call back, didn’t have the number, last name, any sense of her except information he didn’t care about.

Lincoln, he laughed within himself. Oh nothing need happen. He had fallen forward into life beyond Windrow. The house phone buzzed and he did not go to speak into it, for Spence was at work in him; the layers of dirty cloud passing the Empire State tower that looked like it was falling was the atmo healing itself getting ready to "wet-clean" the air in a city where the sun’s light is easier to look right at because of — what? — he had never gotten the cause of the seasons straight in General Science although he recalled it was to do with tilting — maximum scattering of light in the line between looker and light source, you get your man-made brown haze but not your natural gray haze so the faraway ridge is made to seem less different from its sky, easier to understand than the seasons, the salt microns, the soil invisibly infinitesimally tilling the sky’s presence so if you could only see it you’re in a desert dust storm, but give me your poor man’s filter the blue haze, but you have to go to it, to Grand Canyon if Australia’s out, not even an electron micro-eye for auras can bring the blue haze to you, where the milky sky-within-a-sky draws viewpoint through semi-precious distance, opaled, to tell the truth, by billions of turps! yea turpentine, but organic natural, not combustible like the human brain’s troposphere of endless economixes.

The house phone buzzed again and the phone rang — something abstract in us won’t go away — and, seeing that in the absence of knowing what had gone on between his parents he had looked into other lives — a world of workshops helping themselves to the apple pie of change — he took the telephone on the way to the house phone and was saying, "Who is it?" while hearing the puzzled urgency of the woman Lincoln apologizing, then again apologizing ‘cause her house phone just went and she doesn’t know who it is, and he sympathetically allowed as how the doorman in his building was half the time in the deli across the street though they did not employ a doorman in the deli, the illogic of which she seemed to understand and told him she was sorry she hadn’t told him. . that in the workshop she had passed on a story she had heard from his daughter about the Navachoor Prince and his fate that Flick had figured out — she said Jim didn’t sound like his letters, though "Your daughter in this long thing you’ve probably seen doesn’t read like she talks, of course."

Cut to where he was a week ago and will be a week hence, as if he waits for what Larry comes up with. (Isn’t there at least another person all this years of stuff has been about? Margaret? Sarah? Grace Kimball!) Cut through a movie years ago containing a scene of a movie being made, with director in breeches and a second pair of breeches enclosing one of the actresses, and Jim’s friend Sam opening a crackly-wrapped Clark bar in the dark one week after Jim’s mother. . "went" (as Jeanette Many, her musicale friend, who actually believed not just in God but Jesus, said, who years later wrote Jim at an address she said she didn’t understand because it was not his wife’s to ask what was "going on" in his life, she "just" needed to know so she’d know what to pray for (read pry; just read on to the "Fondly" at letter’s end)) — cut to the Bronx Puerto Rican woman wonderfully at rest who looks at your aura which is what you said you came for, recommended (you say) by the lady Clara, who is deeply troubled but it’s only partly events in Chile (you add, as if you’re a friend), but the broad-shouldered, heavily rouged queen of a vision sees what you said you paid to ask about even if she’s declining to discuss that other client Clara whose husband is mixed up in an intrigue at the prison with the man whom Foley knows less about than his words are able to say, yes Hortensa, here beside the thunderous traffic of the Grand Concourse in a furnished but uncarpeted parlor with the freshest sunlight everywhere so you must be sharp to see an aura, tells Mayn his aura gets denser, like breath that as it speeds up finds more and more energy instead of less, but it has a limit though that limit hasn’t been reached and not only isn’t dependent on who else is reacting to him, it depends on his not being touched by that — but he has been in the future (she says) too long yielding only a shadow here and now, and his aura is of great force waiting, waiting, the light around the torso give waves no less, a person trying to get back into you, she’s claiming—

Cut, past her name, which is coincidentally also that of a guy in prison Foley knew; past Spence; but, though snubbed at bar’s end, it was Spence who did the leaving, if only for a few minutes to ring up a (Kontac: new Russian, poss. borrowed fr. Amer. Eng.); cut fast to a light plane, but not Mayn’s that landed in Spence’s wake and yielded a wingtip vortex-turbulence formula in the form of a dumb grin, passenger-to-pilot, instead the plane the boy-man Jim nev6r saw nor could have looked for except its toy remains: the one that came in like an exchange for Sarah almost to the day, in August ‘45, driven by mind, by wind, some sea-to-land meteorologic reconnaissance? air-to-earth purpose (do not read porpoise-quoia)—and the man who was surf-casting saw it out there in front of his arched rod, saw it bank sharply, come round, turn ninety degrees plus, and aim at the land on a course that seemed to fix on a house it wanted, not an empty house that time of year but under renovation, the occupants doing most of the work — and at the last segundo the small aircraft aborted the house mission and lowered its sights, reeled in by could-be the God whose "Divine Wind" means Kamikaze, and hit the beach at around six a.m., the dawn coming down this time and not like thunder and hardly burning. It was the day after Sarah "went," and Pearl Myles asked Jim if his family knew the man, a breakfast-food heir and sportsman-diabetic who had a medical degree but had never practiced. Jim didn’t know the man, but his father asked him what Miss Myles had wanted to know; at school, Sam’s fat brother, always on the move within some larger laziness of nonchalance or rest, casually reported that "Pearl" had bothered the owner of "the" suicide boat and that that was why she was quitting — she was being fired because she was asking questions, according to Fulkerand, about a deceased citizen of the town of Windrow. But Jim never knew. But why didn’t he ask {per quoit pran-quaia)? Too much else going on? But what?

We’d say, today, Heavy. Ever lose your mother in mid-o’bit? Jeanette Many volunteered that it was just her view but she for one would not talk about the Miss Myles matter; Mr. Winekoop, who underneath it all including his excellent, sporty clothes, didn’t "shiv a git," told Brad and Jim that Pearl Myles had had a run-in with the after all very-peculiar-looking principal over a range of activities that had a generally extracurricular tone and had kept answering, People matter, people matter. Jim got stuck. Never told a soul. Stayed in his head ready-formulated. (What? An idea? Himself?)

Who was Spence to think that bent winds were code for what happened to Sarah and that Pearl Myles a colleague distant in time and many leagues west of Mayn’s New York apartment was still on the scene which would not go away because it was connected or waged in the tactics of an action Mayn kept thinking was really all over, and his own interest, as he had tried to tell Jean, who was more understanding of his motive than Jim was, turned not toward such grand machinations as a prison break packaged to hide a violent political purpose but to some coincidental wisdoms that Mayn had been reluctant to ask for right out because from the start the figure of Spence, at Kennedy Space Center and later, had interposed itself making some deal with the Chilean economist who was evidently in some danger perhaps because he was not really incognito yet acted like it, so he was in some fashion parallel to himself.

Ted was away and Mayga dead long years. When had Spence been there to hear, and of what informations was Spence as ignorant as of tact? (Mayn felt language change in him, Hortensa’s auras, or Foley’s prison-bound astral projection threatened to come true.) Yet second-hand and third-hand information for Spence was just as good for whatever uses Spence planned. Mayn could get Spence’s phone number somehow, but talking was out. He phoned Flick and saw her face in profile turned half away from him, a dash of blue-pink across the cheekbone, hurt or made-up he didn’t know, and for the first time an answering machine gave him her voice, in which he heard the accent of his son Andrew, whom he schooled himself not to grieve over, or anyway not wallow in paternal sin. He wondered if it was true he never had dreams. He had felt drawn to ring Grace Kimball’s bell, they had acquaintances in common — but to ask her about non-dreaming. He walked around the dimensions of this apartment now his own by under-the-table purchase from the landlord, it would go for a load of money next year, he never cooked and he believed in hot food three times daily — anyhow he found that the resident roaches had deserted — and he realized that like some saint who had gotten zen’d out, he hadn’t thought of his son in weeks, why here’s the little room that had become Flick’s when she would not sleep in with Andrew any more, family is next rooms, oh the shapes of the rooms with little or no furniture "at the moment" (as Mayn said to Norma) held neither free space Norma said Grace K. was creating by shifting furniture right out of her life, nor a multidimensional movie he couldn’t stop, nor his reasonable body as strong almost as ever, falling through the births of children, the love of flesh and furnishings of habit, orange-juice glasses evened out one rushed morning, a deserted toilet unflushed, a cobweb he watched grow behind a sink for years, hot tears from a peeling onion, cold sweat down the forehead from fear and love when he saw not other wives in those gapped descriptions of final half hours in the delivery room but his own wife, his "girl," howling just once amidst all those steady, working groans on her back suddenly laughing in pain in labor to actually show or was it get rid of the child she had grown almost all by herself out of one of her eggs of which she had already the exact number of all she was going to have — his wife suffering in labor with his cold sweat to show for it — yet equal as fluid to all else he fell casually through, the trivia histories of the degenerating daiquiri which, as he falls unstinting through the strawberry d. or banana d. into the tequila sunrise away from his family as if he had something more important to do, meets, for example (but an example of nothing), a free-lance diver with a taste for Bach convinced after his young girlfriend left him that he was being irradiated by inaudible sound that was taking him apart because it doppler’d back to him having originated nowhere else — and a whole lot of people who could double-up and triple-up on names (be much simpler and no sacrifice) like the man Larry’s father knew who wrote his daughter he happened also to know not really well but somehow for such irritated immediacy and interest and even respect for drive, which the man said he got from his late mother that he felt like one of the two reported women in that man’s life past and present who met each other and talked about him thinking each had her own "Bill" when it was the same guy named, incidentally, for one of the famous millionaires in American industry, friend of the family, that man himself nearly superstitious about one market indicator he would not identify to anyone, not even the boy who was named Bill for him — until Mayn on this evening wished he could name this living room and in some uncertain solitude which obviously he had asked for in reinhabiting the apartment he knew this living room was no more about to tilt or collapse or do anything deranged than those temperate settlements locus’d by gravitational balance out ‘tween Earth and Moon would be successfully reweathered — thundered, hailed, flooded except with the speed of light, while he wished that the multi-d film (not as great as art) of his own life with his wife and his kids would yield to the coming attractions except it worked the other way around. He punched two spider webs — one, two. He wanted to rip out the phones but he need only unplug them. He didn’t find anything at all between the information of his work, which came down to measurement gadgets, and the living life of the people populating his emptiness; between his instinct, once, about the distinguished exile-economist and the purported facts threatening like Spence to cluster round the man’s head.

Nobody was on the other end of Mayn’s house phone. Or maybe there had been a click-off, he wasn’t so sure. Wrong apartment. Did Lincoln neglect to answer hers? He thought so. People were dead whom he could ask; he would as soon exterminate Spence, whose power hovered near, convinced by his need profitably to parlay a history or two that he had acquired in a country where he didn’t speak the language but was ignorant of this fact.

Mayn wrote abbreviations absent-mindedly all down a page, Larry’s initials, Flick’s, some Larry-concepts (S.R., O.G., O.M., D.M.), with crossword junctions accommodating M. H. Mayne and, out of the void, Pearl Myles (ha!).

Mayn wrote his daughter, this night, a letter in his reasonable hand which was the visible presence of a tiny, terrifying, reassuring teacher in fifth grade whose surprisingly full-lipped smile descended over his shoulder as he learned fast; and in the letter to Flick he said he didn’t like her answering machine but knew how helpful it was to be in more than one place nowadays; he wrote that he had talked to a "Lincoln" lady who claimed acquaintance through Flick, and being of "sound mind dwelling upon this and that tonight" — (and, pen poised for thought, such as a lady-colleague he had known socially in Washington who had gone out of his life and of her own at a moment when, he now felt, that woman was about to tell him — what? — something to do with external copper interests opposed to the election of Eduardo Frei whose individual career making another run for the Presidency of Chile she promoted by selective reporting; or tell Mayn something about his own humdrum life, for she’s like that, yet also not prying: she didn’t tell you about yourself any more than she took notes on you down in her little notebook — yet come to think of it, she did take a note or two when he told her the strictly outlandish things — civilized South American hacienda-class, Mayn mused, pen poised above a page destined for his not-at-all-old-world daughter to whom he now resumed)—"but coming round to the belief that a system" he was part of was not sound, he urged Flick to have no dealings with one Ray Spence, who might involve her in harm yet had perversely turned Mayn’s own thoughts to such regrets as he could swear like a trooper concerning (if he weren’t afraid of being taken for an Episcopalian!) thinking maybe he and Flick and Andrew’s mother might have kept the marriage going if he for one had known that he was falling forward, casting shadows backward, anyhow known himself better for starters, though that might have kept them from getting married, which had, as he said, turned his clock back past the Indian Thunder Dreamers he had retailed to Flick and (when he could stay awake) Andrew, from their great-grandmother Margaret who had adopted if not changed them herself as had evidently Flick, but he was very sure the meddler Spence had never heard tell of the Alsatian mathematician that Mayn like their last-century diarist-relative M. H. Mayne (with an e) had (as in responsibility) delegated (to whoo? to wit, to air), but now along an inconvenient wishbone of a path with an old dear foreign colleague haunting the way, better say "person" these days (smile — to a daughter who shrugs tolerantly), just thinking, you know, that your great-grandfather Alexander, who predicted the weather from his elbow-tendon’s infinitesimal contractions or his cordovan-coated instep-tarsal better than his wife ever did with her Anasazi and Anglo or than Mel did with his Bureau bulletin (always itself a few hours late), got so exercised one day when Margaret had gone to the city for a funeral and he was alone on the porch perusing those old (as it turned out) foxed and brittle leaves of Marion Hugo Mayne’s diary that he didn’t hear us come up the walk — it began to rain— until Sam called out, "Hello there, Mister Mayn," and Granddad jumped up from his white wicker chair and clapped a hand to his throat saying "Ouch" and clapping the other hand to his elbow that had somehow gotten banged on the way up and we thought he would die on the spot, unmoving, like a horse asleep, and he wanted to speak but couldn’t, but whether from sickness or some kindred problem we never thought because it passed and he smiled and asked us in for some chocolate milk mixing the Coco-malt darkly to a paste in the bottom of each tumbler then carefully adding milk to get a matchless homogeneity of mix — then looked long at me, while Sam gulped his chocolate milk and looked out the window, and my grandfather said he had been astonished to see in those diary pages he knew as well as he knew the back of his hand a mention of something that may well be what is pictured in casual sketch at the back end of the other volume of these diaries, most astonishing — but grandfather Alexander was cooling down now, sipping his chocolate milk — and Sam had to go — the rain had stopped — and Alexander then told Jim but in a manner of someone dizzy still that the half-erased picture was — he stopped but seemed to feel he must go on and lowered his voice— the picture was just a small circle with corners, what looked like pointers, with angles spreading beyond it, lines running out at different lengths — but when you looked very hard at the parts you saw that two lines looked like a carpenter’s square, and one double diameter had dim curves above as below marking a sort of oval eye in the middle which looked like a carpenter’s level—,vhy did Jim not ask to see the picture? — and an odd dotted arc connected the angles with two other lines to make them a draftsman’s compass or either line into a plumb swaying a little before it found its true vertical— and these were (he didn’t really mind telling me this hush-hush old stuff) devices so important to the Society of Masons they kept them secret. But something was missing. I didn’t say politely, So what, Granddad? But he had something to do and the Indian kid whose job I should have had showed up for work and went on out to the garden where presently he and I had words which upset Alexander and incidentally we had a fight, Ira and I, a pretty bad one, and later Alexander gave me a Band-Aid but you should have seen Ira — and my grandfather asked me if I thought Ira would ever steal if he was this violent, and it was the only time I ever got angry and really angry, I remember, and disappointed in Alexander but he removed the pistol from the mantelpiece but told me he had done so and said not to tell Margaret, but one day I did: and the point of all this was that an Alsatian mathematician Morgan wandering around our West who incidentally once saw a mythical pistol you know of in the hand of a mestizo spy (for proliferation of arms seems inevitable) was a namesake forebear of the printing magnate Morgen (with an e) that presumed friend of Mayga with whom she and her husband were perilously strolling the day she fell off one of the scenic heights round Valparaiso harbor; but, more, the printing magnate has a brother Morgen who is a left-wing job printer — ring a bell? — as was the romantic lover Morgan (with an a) who threatened to divulge Masonic secrets and fled an upper New York State village jail and was joined by his girlfriend, a lawyer’s daughter, who met with Andrew Jackson in New York City because he loved her and she wanted to bargain for her reddish-golden-haired lover’s security, or Jackson wanted to hear how much Mason lore Morgan knew, or Jackson had been prevailed on to come, by another admirer of hers, Marion Hugo Mayne, who had suffered partial paralysis of his vocal cords (he says), represented an unusually righteous New Jersey newspaper whose support Jackson had had and still desired, and was (unbeknownst to the others) aware that the brave master-printer Morgan, exiled from an upper New York village to Philadelphia where he had taken up with such trade unionists as the newspaper publisher Heighton, had ensconced himself at a table in a far dark corner of the tavern. It is coincidence that our relative-diarist-historian M. H. Mayne (who records what anxiety Jackson’s adopted son caused by his note-of-hand debts — he in fact even "charged" a young female slave, according to Alexander, the only person in the family who actually read the diaries — though Jim felt them in his hands unopened tightening that sequence of undone duty, newspaper, father, hometown, and the further knowing of his mother’s recoverable personality and biography; and M. H. Mayne, because of his connections) was thus secret custodian of the incognito Morgan who, if he is not related to the Alsatian mathematician who en route from Mexican War to California Gold Rush was nearly murdered in the desert by the mestizo bearer of what came to be the Mayne family pistol, must be such collateral to the Alsatian as to compel other parallels, ours, Margaret’s, Spence’s, straight or warped if not worse for wear and non-wear, to forks as curious as that given us by our alternative Thunder Dreamer who we think also brought the New York Hermit’s Anasazi weather friend a Colt pistol that had found its way not absolutely curse-proof from the upshot of the Mexican War at Chapultepec where the father of that dying white settler whom the Thunder Dreamer said spoke a bit like one of the Germans of the Plains had begotten his son unexpectedly and darkling upon a Saxon-blond war correspondent so subtly male, or so beautifully so, as to reveal her female center to the blind passion of the in-fact-doomed man only in the strange retrospect of the next day when as a Winfield Scott volunteer he realized at the moment of dust and staccato voices when he was hit by a Mexican ball that the nape of his exquisitely frightened lover’s neck the night before had been a girl’s. And so as the wound and the knowledge that seemed to come with it turned him inside out, the glaze of his eyes might reflect or absorb that the hand snatching respectfully the Colt pistol he had dropped belonged to the future mother of his child, the white settler-to-be. And so the pistol or pistols trace back both to the Thunder Dreamer’s white settler’s blonde mother, an Anglo-feminist war correspondent who, when embraced, had been writing personal memoirs of Jackson, when even the angels happen to know that Marion Hugo Mayne enjoyed a convincing English accent for many years, or trace to an unequivocally male correspondent even more English and a compassionate Quaker as well, who had never been seen with a pistol until the night after he had been interrogated by none other than Marion Hugo Mayne, and then he succeeded in losing the pistol at cards to the very mestizo spy and far-sighted horse fancier who very nearly insisted on trading one of his mustangs to Marcus Jones when Jones on his adjustably corruga-cogged bicycle wheels happened upon the mestizo in the American desert just after the latter, having breakfasted indigestibly on some desert shrimp grown instantly from century-old eggs he had pickaxed out of a dry mudflat and watered with rain stored in a random cactus — had relieved the Alsatian mathematician Morgan of a foolscap paper containing a design and calculations that might prove valuable when in fact Morgan had it in his head and was interested only in finding an exit from the desert and preserving his life from the pistol that continued to stare him in the face even after his accoster who would nevei have fired that weapon with some curse on it had it back in his coat pocket preparatory to finding out how old the person pedaling toward them might be — Marcus Jones.

Mayn’s phone rang and he discovered brilliant tears of laughter sticking to his face and thought how Flick asked him about his work for God’s sake, but that was what she wanted to talk about at present, certainly in lieu of her mother, so let her, though she got flip. He hadn’t made to Flick in this astonishing letter some address he felt in the back of his demonstrably shallow brain pan, and as the phone stopped, he reached and dialed her again in Washington, and reached again the machine, to which he said, "I’m writing you a letter that’s cracking me up except I think some things in it are true; also I need reading glasses." She preferred the telephone to writing.

He felt at his elbow the typewriter, unused tonight, and at rest, ready for overdue copy on the Second Women’s Bank of Connecticut and Pennsylvania. At hand his pen, mightier than phone or machine à écrire or the liquor closet which was just four or five bottles standing on the old painted counter in the kitchen, an appropriate destination for a sentimentalist: yet this material spurred now by its own noxious threatener Spence came out so unsentimental that Mayn could get depressed, came out of the wrong orifice which must be a future designed to handle medium or low not high temperatures out between Earth and Moon in controlled environments colonized by individuals who had once each been two.

Not even supposed to be here in New York tonight, he told the Albuquerque woman; supposed to be someplace else. The Women’s Bank waits patiently for him. Had to tell his boss he’s going after all to World Meteorological Orgy’s spring congress, more talks about global weather network, what to do about drought in the Sahel, go to a new weather make clean break, flood-warning coordination, regional aqua pollution tied in with NASA’s long Johnson Space Center project in conjunction with federal agencies to get automated (i.e., "no human intervention") water-qual monit-system with sensors sensing bacteria and one gas chromatograph thanks to NASA Ames Research (as always) Center (let’s get potable!) while EPA’s dreaming total waste use for pilot apartment complex (or small city), will recycle people glass/metal, turn paper waste to hot water, so let’s economize as if people— let’s economize on our matter — while Mayn in person’s pouring a small four-D "mirror" exactly a third full of bourbon, draining the unfrozen water from under the surface ice of two trays of apparently permanently semi-defrosting fridge (fix-it? second-hand? new?): and sip-launching his body back to the large, humbly furnished living room whose floors could be scraped and twice polyurethaned, thinking, turning, turning, falling forward forward with sufficient inertia to carry an atmo or two with him, sharing information (witness the white 8/2 by 11 paper long-handed daughter-bound under the lamp beside the old black portable), divorced and all, yet summoned, summoned, and from this apartment that was "theirs" and’s now "his" — "his" and "theirs," a room full of so much tiempo it compacts into an empty obstacle to get through.

He drank off his bourbon, one and only one tonight or he’d get corned enough to mail this angelfood shit to his daughter who by instead not receiving it will achieve equality with her brother, his son, whom he knows only in imagination constantly split by Andrew’s blinding-binding disappointment at his dad’s calling it a day, he did not want to look at his son’s face. He buzzed the lobby, did not speak Spanish, learned that a man had asked for Mayn and rung the apartment and hung up saying nobody home and Manuel told him he’s surprised, but — What’d he look like? — Good-looking suit, good boots, dark blue pinstripe with red flower in buttonhole — you get the picture.

"But I was here. I picked up."

"Said he catch you the next time. He sound Spanish."

"Thanks, Manuel."

Mayn dialed the Albuquerque woman’s hotel and dropped the handwritten pages into the wicker wastebasket where they came together as a unit, and when asked if he had left a message before, he said, "Yes. . Spence."

"Oh yes."

"I want her to meet me for breakfast, I forget what I said the first time."

"You said. . you recall, I’m sure, sir."

"And did a well-dressed gentleman, blue pinstripe, slight Spanish accent, leave a message at the desk for her?"

"No, she had another phone call but he didn’t leave a message; we’re really not supposed to tell you that."

We’re not s’posed to tell you what we already told you. A memory misfires during orbit, o fires as i, i as o, a "bit-flip." Jot it down, then you can forget. But what if it don’t forget you? Mayn will turn into a phoneman like Spence, funds transferred by electric diaphragm — puts the receiver back down where it belongs. But dialed Amy’s number, eyes fired, with a faintly loaded sense in his hands of someone possibly dialing him direct to potential clot in bloodstream. But got a busy: but then, in the innovation-operative midst of busy signal, got Larry, but not to say Hello or to give what Mayn remembers he has half been waiting for from the founder of Obstacle Geometry, expounder of the Modulus, and determined non-victim of Open Marriage or the hoots and hollers of the opera basso’s weeks’ delayed departure and ("Off-off-4Center’ ") Hamletin negotiations down Larry’s hall of this multiple dwelling from which Larry is this evening absent — for he is at Amy’s of course in order to report that while briefly out purchasing (as Mayn thinks, the most rudimentary obstacle for them to get through) a pizza for the two of them, Larry suffered her loss; for upon reentering her unlocked home (after all even at her and his age), he found her trenchcoat gone from the kitchen, her wallet from the bedroom, her address book from the upright piano, her beret from a bowl molded into the back section and rear feathers of a large china goose leaving there her doubtless second set of housekeys glittering, valuable, seeming to invite Larry to leave. He was not too upset by thinking he had been forcing the pepperoni and sausage pizza baked by this Korean pizzeria at the corner upon Amy, to add that he was through chasing an older female when it was probably Mayn or her boss that she — no, no, Larry corrected himself, no, Jim, it’s jtist that I’ve had it, my dad now hates my mother, she’s really not coming back and she let us think she was (didn’t she?), and she phoned me from the Island to say she wanted me to live with her and her heavy-duty friend and hated herself for leaving for God’s sake.

Does the front door lock automatically or do you have to lock it yourself?

It locks automatically.

"It" was not the time to find out what Lar’ had come up with.

Nor was there time to find time — or, more, not to find time — to locate the simplest answer why "all this now," the answer that answers the most starts, or Why we — who often have to not understand Who, What, When, we are — are slowed coming to the illumination that should giddy us up. Because these many starts ain’t mysteriously endless; there comes a day (as we optimistically say when we must mean "an afternoon" when all clefts align to open our danger and opportunity e’en if but to a zen golfer conceived by a lone green golf course visited by the speed of sun’s light, yet we better mean a borrowed hour, a minute borrowed from a theory we might have heard had we been deaf to the violin or piano whose solo ye theory proved concerto to, for we found when we tested the Earth earlier that we grow abstract in inverse ratio to some relative loss of power we had not decided we wanted or not upon last acquaintance with our best selves, for we were so busy knowing the truth of a new, more limited theory of reincarnation, say, that nonetheless answered the most questions of all the competing theories, that we many of us missed the quiet power we were experiencing being thus reincarnate) so there comes a day when we’z done with starts and R been found by what we thought to find, which Mn’t all bad, for as one used to say re: Moon exploring, You find it, you got it: whereas in later days of the Locus 5, many of these privileged settlers who’ve been compacted each one out of two original Earth persons (in most cases acquainted to start with) reported an unsettled sense of lasting content on arrival, later thought by the thinkers of those plexi-axial sun-tuned torus-states to have been due to the mythically rich feeling due in turn to the indubitable source of each individual in this and other space-positive settlements of nothing but individuals, i.e., originally a pair of persons, mostly female-male, often female-female, occasionally male-male, depending on long-term needs though all (literally) united by a Locus T platform plate celled by a milliard electro-magmatic chip-templates jointed to form an ovaline elevator-like capsule so clear that as the templates throng two expecting bodies (but we already remember learning this but without remembering that if you describe what happens, you are responsible for it) as the Hermit learned, describing these and more usual atmospheric, if violent, lumen phenomena that signaled the Princess to take her leave, as they did the girl’s nesting bird-vehicle that rose to the challenge of a mountain-jawed cat when neither cat nor giant bird knew bait from hunter and the cat ate one egg and either disappeared into the future which was the egg’s scent picked up hours later by the hind-gland of a javelina thrown off its eating routine by a between-meals snack given it by the botanist Jones, or disappeared into the form of a sudden timber wolf so great in the shoulder, muzzle, and loins it transcended Pueblo lore that called it devil and was taken to be a real wolf, after all butchered in mid-air by the bird, an event for which the Hermit the day of these departures in his responsibility as Describer of the How and Reporter of the What was punished, but only with exile from that territory. But he returned as his own nephew years later to describe experimentally to the Navajo a gauge on the roof of a multiple urban dwelling to predict, through coastline configuration differences between light and heavy air masses as well as to describe to the underemployed Navajo a future Two-for-One process — in those days a pilot project — whereby the two expecting bodies who are presently to be one elsewhere are thronged with more radiance than their God-given cells know what to do with in all their glaring boundaries like graphed skin straining to see a future, while an old-style woman or man now and then sent out like Mayn to report feels extra mortal next to these colons compacted by an economy so simple it’s more question than solution, such as what should be the minimum daily allowances of negotiated or unnegotiated love-merger for these new beings who are the tacit annunciation of what they’ve been compacted to and are experiment they are making with their lives and for which they may be said to be answerable in the sense that a "respons-" is an "answer" and if the Two-for-One origin holds vivid its internalized dialectic should comprehend both question and answer (e.g., in issues of the reality of property out there, or the legal obligation to repay capital borrowed from Earth when, for example, the Moon ore from which so much of the torus’s oxygen is farmed does not create a "debt situation" though it comes from an organic Earth satellite, and the near-panic demand for the soccer-ball-scale tomatoes grown rapidly in high humidity in the frothy soil whipped from lunar earth revalues the interspatial basic-barter objects) in these great wheel settlements with their gravity-inducing rotations that make at some hours and angles the giant spokes seem to turn backwards or bend their shimmering into fixity like the outer radiation-shield rim which seems to rotate with us we already recall and keeps down stresses on its light, vast structure paved with Moon mineral which communicates by reflected light as below through the ingested beans of its new soil a sense of secrets waiting in the otherwise open-and-shut "Given": so that as the boy Joseph Smith consuming and consumed by a pre-Mormon fungi-mold strangely empowering the rye loaves his mother baked him one harsh winter in the New York frontier village of Palmyra near Seneca Falls a stone’s throw from Lake Ontario conceived of secret documents and later hallucinated where to find them (though he was not responsible for their being gold or for plural-marriage doctrines implicit in the tablets), so did some Two-into-One econocolons eat beans and know in their hearts there had been built into the torus structure, like a color and promise of which the artist is but half aware, a point of cleft-potential at which the torus may be enlarged and enlarged again, boosting lengthward acreage for sorghum, potatoes, tomatoes, and, yes, the very beans that yield the secret of the growth point so that production will far exceed the mean projection of Earth planners.

Which doesn’t begin to explain why James Mayn would go so far as to really feel his periodic conviction so uncharacteristically broached to the woman Mayga that he is in the future, the largely humdrum if optically violent future, and presents himself to the less economical present like a shade cast back upon a past not yet distinct, though give the man credit he is at one with the diva Luisa quoted in Celebrity Aura as wanting to change her shadow, quiero mudar de sombra, minus her footnote that the words are not hers.

There is, we admit, one discrete break in that shadow of Mayn’s, a gap shaped sometimes like a gnomon parallelogram, ofttimes like a cleft that later Mayn might wonder if the Hermit-Inventor had ever tried to explain in responsible scientific terms; a gap, though, in this shadow as if light or some body of it cast its counter- or non-shadow across the shadow’s effort of warning or survival or understanding emanating we thought from Mayn but possibly a vision he a mere one among others gladly enters into. But that gap is for one thing our amazement at how we could get here without grasping the concrete sources in our collective childhood as if we had had to forget them to get ahead — in order, say, to figure how to inject weather into a "weath-erless" place without ruining everything, balance of payments, bonfires in our souls, constant climate. The Hermit-Inventor could not always believe that lava from a volcano to the west was fundamentally blood of the great giant killed by the Hero Twins a very long time ago. But the inference he had made between volcanic ash up-ploded into cloud layers and cloud piles and high-altitude half-invisible colloids and, on the far hand, wind transport gave him pause on his way home, exiled upon the Prince’s disastrous seduction by the Princess away from his people, which coincided with the Anasazi’s death, which had very little impact on the Navajo — not because of ancient resentments against the people they had displaced or even wronged by the inevitable momenta of progress or accident of irrigational habits, but because of the Anasazi’s low, low profile so low that when Mena the Fuegian zoologist had doubled the Moon upon the pistol that Alexander took off the mantel that spring of ‘46 when Margaret was in New York for the death of the Hermit her friend (not because Alexander expected Ira Lee to avenge his "massacre" in the flower bed by simple theft but because he had derived from the two distinct diary volumes one new idea of where the pistol had been before Chapultepec) Mena who brushed her southern teeth with juniper at first experienced nothing peering into the ancient healer’s high cell sixty to a hundred feet up a laddered cliff (her forehead bound with yucca thongs) except a smell of feathers and untreated ammonia and Sonora bread sculpture, the goodness of the ancient baked dough sealed in with shellac so that shapes of weather goddess or of mandala, of painted house or animal seem to hold the hand-ground grain of the bread’s potential.

A profile as low as Mayn’s, who might long since have found himself far-sightedly gunning a hired late-model along the early, smokier stretch of the Jersey Turnpike rushing to unearth Marion Hugo’s diaries to put together some phenomenon in volume one with a known design drawn into the end of volume two, if he hadn’t had better grist for his attention whether it was his work or his unestranged but combative daughter, her welfare, her work, her voice now often machined from the nation’s capital yet in talk with her father taken more seriously than he let her know when, in the middle of reporting her and her boyfriend’s dioxin trace from Florida through Minnesota’s flumes into a west she entered after her father left, she demanded why he so coolly reported destructive strip mining and in a letter painted the great galleon of Ship Rock into the picture, including relations between women and men throwing in the Gemini astronauts and a taint of archaeology, when a few miles beyond the Rock on the other side Indian miners used by the government to mine uranium wheeze out their half life with lung fibrosis caused by radioactive particles which like asbestos in New Jersey and statistics which strive to outdo themselves will live on after their human sacrifices to the Great Spirit are gone.

Irrelevant to the Four Corners, the father said bluntly.

But, without time to check out Where and How that voice comes his way only What it says, O.K. if you describe a thing you are also responsible for it according to Indian common law by which the Hermit-Inventor was personally exiled from the site of the Navajo Prince’s departure, whereas now Mayn-pere learns you are responsible for it if you don’t describe it. Which is of course good Anglo law in the case of headless bicyclists (left their helmet at home with built-in head) or unidentified vehicle upside down on sidewalk (wheels won’t stop turning so you can’t get close), i.e., accidents you pass by or over and do not report. But the Four Corners energy problem (read project, read diverge, read dig, read Lurgi transformation, read matter, read people) is One Thing, New Mexico, while the expenditure of Indian miners at Red Rock is Another Horse, Arizona, and you take the making of history one buck at a time.

And he feels Spence’s long, intimate voice printing some irreversible code on his daughter’s remote voice though she would not give him the time of day or on her answering tape ask for it: until Mayn has found growing relations someone else likely has cached inside him overflowing from him or into him he may never put into words sticking with the trouble he’s already got while toying with what it would feel like to be his daughter Flick, who when he left the marriage said extreme words he shrugged off until Norma quoted them back to him from a woman in her workshop who asked her parents while they were arguing at dinner, "Why did you bother to have me?" whereupon the husband exclaimed, "We didnt ‘bother’ ": Mayn felt more securely what it would be like to be getting over a concussion diagnosed a couple of days late but updated from the ripped self of an Indian halfback ploughed under Margaret’s topsoil to the skull of a modestly intelligent average-hard-working newsman who once vowed to his departing Pearl Myles he would never go into journalism it was too much in the family, and can now thirty years later feel the bones of his head after a rough night of running around from the Chilean’s foundation to Dina’s hotel to a couple of operatic apartments to a street corner near Penn Station connected by pay phone to a Puerto Rican corner far uptown coincidentally near the Museum of the American Indian dreaming through the City’s rebuff of larger quarters at the other end of the Island of Hills looking out at the harbor and its fixed and moving lights — coming together headache-wise so he suddenly dunno if his caring for his daughter and his son (but it’s Flick who’s been connected by the correspondent-carpenter Lincoln, whose voice he now knows he has heard before and on a machine, to Spence) totally shrouds three figureheads, the Mayga, the Sarah, and the Navajo Prince fixing on each other’s relative motion approaching each other if not him on rough-shod courses of disappearance, for the Navajo Prince still armed with the Colt revolver acquired from the late healer was last seen running up and down inside the great Statue in the aging harbor having seen him pass as he rose up the winding metal stairway only a sweet mist, a smoke of summer humidity escaped from the city, smelling though of those blue berries he had studied the uses of, for which he was also known by the Navajo name of the ceremonial plant they grow on, the Ironwood, or, in Navajo, the Ma’iidaa’ Prince — so Mayn dunno any more, because one thing’s sure: that sonofagun Spence doesn’t work on spec but if Mayn can be threatened into seeing how these three disappearances are relations of each other and report it, then by the old, well-kept wisdom, he’s responsible for their connection which might not be worth the collateral price of being himself responsible for each individually, though those responsibilities would range so wide you would need a solution happier than Spence and simpler than that counter-Masonic rite of mingled flesh among Indians and Anglos in northern New York and central Oklahoma investigated by a President who, upon finding that actual flesh was taken from the paired participants and joined in an aromatic fire, could not believe the reports of greater and greater regeneration, and so he did not participate, although he was not well, though well enough to trace through a man of many turns, an itinerant chronicler, another man accused of having given more and more of himself to these thermal rites, first an arm, then an arm and a leg, then the fingers he had once merely joined whorl to arch with his Indian counterpart neophyte but now for the ritual moment gave up thus risking his trade of master printer — then at last entrails and, it is said, brain or parts thereof, always to be joined with kindred sections of an Indian co-celebrant, each time regenerating at a lightning speed seemingly at odds with loving intricacies of regrowth and cellular resilience instituted in shortcut form by Grace Kimball at a special session promising rebirth without pain, which was less than it gave, which was help in the form of such ordinary tales as a young black aspiring actress’s, picked up in the park by an older man teaching his granddaughter to ride a bike, or, as Norma passed on to Mayn because she could not get very far with Gordon, her own husband, Grace’s own long story of a short marriage, once-a-month pocket billiards at a tavern, the booze softening the game until at a late stage anger and despair settled them down to shots they couldn’t believe they’d made in the morning (or remember); the jerking off under the covers after he was asleep; the creeping friendship possible in a brother-sister deal that rediscovers incest in order to taboo it, till suddenly it was At Last — alone at last, she hears the addict’s words to the romance of his bride but now adapted to being single in order to double and triple and multiply herself forever, alone at last for at last she left him, but in that curious modern manner of kicking him out so he seemed to have been the one to leave, someone was waiting for him some ten month-miles away, a tough, sexy mother not just for him but for his unborn children, who will get help themselves someday — not quite Grace’s help, that night of the bland, adapted, "quick" form of the old Anglo-Indian flesh merger rite, in the much better form late in the session of the interminable good stories with which Norma repays Mayn for his — his what? his guessed-at stories, but his plants, his attention, his face, his very male, gentleman freedom from (not violence but) bad language, dirty jokes which she couldn’t imagine him remembering even at the club (like Gordon’s how do you tell if your lover is gay? answer: his cock tastes like —), but Norma’s story that sounds so close to her it might be hers, of the man who found in Open Marriage (as opposed to Closed Marriage!) a sanction for outer sex but unlike his wife, who knew the difference between feeling and above-average sex, fell in love and, in addition to concealing night after night from a small beloved child what was going down, kept from himself the right to leave the marriage like the house until… as Norma said, Mayn’s eyes seemed to have dried up into a stare so full of knowledge she found Y&rself crying, until Mayn said, "And one day the kid found out," and Norma, "Worse; the other woman became friends with the kid — it gets worse still," and Mayn, "I know," as if he were responsible — until Norma, knowing at the moment of loving him that she wasn’t going to have any affair and wasn’t going in for Open Marriage and not only because it wasn’t open while she simultaneously did not know if the "long-term" relation (read — ship) with Gordon was good enough, found words for what she felt before she knew the feeling, "You have that quality, Jim, of knowing, I mean without having to give advice and tell about yourself, and it’s strength and helpful strength, too, and don’t ever think it isn’t."

He had not known that he ever "thought it wasn’t" — and he was grateful to hear — in a way about power. And felt Norma had something more to say.

What had Mayga had to say at the end (this end)? Something he had felt almost not withheld. Her few notes about the future in a notebook in front of her on the bar. Random material last seen there, always with a surfacing capability, the mortal matter miscellaneous of Jim Mayn’s extended family so near-flung we could take responsibility for Larry and not go far wrong.

He was about to say to Norma, "You find yourself in other people," but it sounded stupid in advance though he knew Norma would have appreciated it. He said, "I gather my grandmother’s old yarns got into your workshop."

"I wasn’t there that time," said Norma; "but Grace said Clara, the wife you know of that exiled Chilean economist, came out of herself a little and got pissed off."

"What about? — the medicine man that dies and becomes a cloud for a time?"

"You must have been talking to Lincoln. No; calling a Navajo chief’s son a prince and having him follow a white girl like that and lose his pistol."

"They had quite original weather in those days," said Mayn.

During these few days of 1977 when all that had been started threatened to slide into action, Mayn did not ask his daughter her reported version of how the Navajo Prince had ended. (And were there princes among the Navajo? He had never been one of your know-it-all newspapermen.) Yet — perhaps because he hadn’t worked out lately on the Nautilus machines sitting back straining into the mirrored distance, strapped in next to a well-known left-fielder who visited the city in the off-season to buy art — Mayn felt in his actual bones a gap between invented events he was familiar with and some sterner presence shadowing him: a gap between on the one hand such acts once issuing from the Statue in the aging harbor as that unconvincing metamorphosis of the Navajo Prince into the easternmost Thunder Dreamer ever seen, though Thunder Dreamer in but one or two respects, at his critical juncture with the Princess’s faithful admirer Harflex, a metamorphosis due to the Prince’s having ingested a collossal dollop of the uniquely low noctilucent cloud somewhere between Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Ford (or Fjord) of Choor, and on the other hand, some deflected intelligence that, possibly his own once, became now some sterner presence or surveillance — his daughter, who he had suddenly heard from his son had for all she said about operating by telephone, set out to be a writer; his wife, who he’d heard from Flick was getting married to the New Hampshire gent with the permanent tan; Mayn’s own girlfriend Jean, who (one) overnight switched from science journalism to science itself — nutritional biochemistry and global agriculture, a huge career decision at twenty-nine, that she said (and he couldn’t see it) had come to her four years ago in a motel near Cape Kennedy because of Jim, she laughed that it was while they were lying in bed digesting three dozen local oysters consumed at Captain Billy’s, a preparation for a disappointing press conference and a wonderful walk on the beach where there had been no shells but many stars; and beyond Flick, Joy, and Jean, and underneath every stone, that family less Spence, who, on the night Albuquerque’s Dina West called from a New York hotel, and the Chilean economist’s research aide Amy was absent without keys from her apartment, and Larry who had forgotten to press his button entering the elevator found on emerging at his floor at two in the morning that well-known opera singer famously dressed up like a Mexican and her auburn hair built upwards like a hunk of furniture kissing a tall dark man in a blue pinstripe suit and very expensive real-silver-tooled black western boots, goaded Mayn to get somewhere before Spence did: for Spence all activities so long as the dollar flag was up, or, if the mind is a taxi, down, were as equal as distances our bent head unleashes or compacts squaring change with the obstacles to grasping it: so Mayn, who thought he had never dreamed and had been told by Mayga that if he could only, well, recall his dreams, he would not have to lose any sleep over his life, seemed to find his way from his mother’s indispositions in the forties when she was steadily departing yet never seen to do more than be absent in another form: to Grace Kimball’s 1977 apartment at a time she convened the growing Body-Self: to 1965, when a frail, failing grandfather reported how mad Margie used to get at Jimmy and how they became friends again and Jim was the one who came up with the idea that because of shifting collaborations on, for example, territorial and shared weathers, the Hermit of New York and the six-hundred-year-old retired Anasazi healer might have been one and the same (but no): to 1950, when Margaret could not visit him in Pennsylvania where he was in college because she was sick, she had these lumps in her intestines or something, so he came to see her on an impulse on a weekday, she didn’t look so good, puffy along the cheekbone like his Boston aunt who drank only during the day, and Margaret was also a little weary in the focus of her eyes’ color, but able to love Jim and be irritated by him, both of them arrested and at rest, he, half-proud of stupidly jamming and badly spraining his wrist boxing, needed a day off ("What do you mean you needed a day off, for heaven sake?" his grandmother snorted) and so had cut a class where he’d just gotten a B-plus on the midterm, and angry and anxious at having left without telling his girlfriend, who had quite a temper, to put it mildly, as he told Margaret grimly, and he’d like to throttle her. His grandmother listened to him for a moment, so alone and established in her sunny bedroom that the rest of the house felt entirely contained in Jim’s grandfather, who had gone to the post office and come back and was downstairs somewhere, not here where the sun’s light polished the brass of the walnut highboy, and boughs with secret early buds on them swayed in the wind coasting a roof of dark shingles, and though she said she was tired having written a dozen letters in the last three, four days Margaret did not mention his not having written her a card in the hospital though it was a month ago now, the hated hospital, and she had never been in one as a patient before and felt that the purpose of New York was to go to Schumacher’s to buy material or to Rockefeller Center to sit in the ice-side restaurant and have clam chowder and grilled-cheese sandwiches and a glass of dry sherry, and so Jim had had to find out from his grandfather, whom he didn’t have to ask when Alexander phoned to say he wasn’t going to let Margie travel, that her operation had been exploratory, what they called "stretching," and he was more upset than she that she had to go back and have a second, because she absolutely wouldn’t.

"If she has a temper, enjoy it now while you can," said Margaret. "Don’t put it off," she said, and then shaking her head went into hoots of laughter like the "Hoo-hoo" with which she and her cousin but never Jim’s mother entered a friendly house without ringing the bell—"No; my gracious, don’t put it off," as if to say, I’m sure you never do—"but it wasn’t just that one class you cut today and don’t you have class Friday?"

And while they discussed such things that had all been discussed at Christmastime as President Truman, who would never fill Mr. Roosevelt’s shoes but wasn’t trying to, thank goodness, though Jim’s girl’s father thought Harry couldn’t help being an improvement — and Margaret said she had to like a man who bellyached in public about having to be two people, President and an ordinary human being, man, husband, and father, and she and Jim discussed whether the Washington music critic Hume would need a new nose ‘f he ever met Margaret Truman’s dad, who had promised he would, and whether the war in Korea would be done with by the time Jim graduated because at least we had a man with experience in General MacArthur running things, although his mother had run him, and Margaret questioned the dark glasses, but would Truman actually give MacArthur the atomic bomb to use as he had said he would? — no, he would loan it to him — while Jim’s Poly Sci professor got half the class mad for saying the aim of a political party is to get elected. .

Jim’s grandmother was marginally pensive there in the sunny room, a scent of soap, her oval translucent soap, coming from the bathroom; thoughtful, he sensed — though she was so curiously remembered by him in ‘77 that he was startled to see he couldn’t fully feel any more the time or its span then in 1950 back to his mother’s sudden absence in ‘45, though was able to recall not knowing the terrible wonder that took place the afternoon after he had seen Margaret in ‘50 (while a section of his mind was disloyally stuck back in his college town, gymnasium at the head of the street, movie theater, bookstore, soda fountain, package store) — thoughtful, he could recall her in ‘77 through that sprightly conversation which turned then into what she seemed to be really thinking: anyway he remembered no special sequence — only, at some center of their talk, "Better get it now because you don’t get it after you’re gone": which was, yes, reincarnation, that mortally old friend they joked about that used to come up in the old Indian powwows they had had when they both agreed when you died you died: while when-you-died-you-died didn’t mean that your buried flesh or ashes or even the miles of compact intestines and liver and all the little sacs your personal undertaker (Margaret had a good gruesome side) flushed down the drain didn’t enrich the crops and the seas, too, and the hereditary upgoing and downcoming atmosphere, so what had been an invisible particle of a "you" wound up in the blood of an angry Indian with high blood pressure or in the womb of a terror-stricken adolescent in a suburb of perhaps Rome scared to tell her father or in the tip of an elephant’s tongue (they would laugh, the two of them, even hearing the grandson’s father calling from the porch) or the hind-mounted scent-gland of a nightmare-white-mouthed javelina during threatening weather trying to smell its way home to Mineral del Monte or a Mexico City alley or some impossibly southern pampa it retained only the faith of in its shins and eyelids that in turn reach the garnish of a fat, filmy king’s Egyptian table when the pastrami from New York didn’t fly in on time, but we were not meaning reincarnation by the book, from moral escalation (you white in you next life) or inclination upwards or downwards if there even was a ranking, and witness Owl Woman all in this life abstracting her angelic Body-Self into a hole in a saguaro cactus in time to sing to herself as if from far away and to other auditors from any angle and the illusion of many distances

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling

which for a second gives pause to the exploiters of saguaro potential interrogating the unthreatenable botanist Marcus Jones preoccupied more with how in desert plants the green stem may take over the job of photosynthesis than with danger to himself, who will regrow a lost finger no more than a crocodile tooth sows the desert with the pitless prune, and all stop to listen to the cactus song, and the tortured but cheerful botanist is sure the plant is bearing animal fruit to yield peace on earth if not carried too far: while Alexander brings three cups of tea he says he steeped too long, three slices of lemon on a silver butter plate, six store-bought lemon-flavored cookies on another plate, and "No pills," observes Margaret ("only make you feel better," retorts the husband): until he leaves the old chums alone so they rejoin some dispersed twists of their old reincarnation agreement which seems to include a quite other agreement not to discuss Sarah: until (. . something. .) just before he left her to go (only downstairs, Gramma) to help Alexander peel the potatoes ("But you go downstreet and let your father know you’re alive" — "You mean, let him know I’m here?" for Alexander hadn’t answered the door before and Mel had gone away doubtless thinking his mother-in-law was sleeping), she told Jim her visit among the Indians had been dry and difficult, beautiful but hard-working, white man came by with a beard, and a child whom she sometimes cared for thought it was wool, and on being asked by him who her father was, the child said, "My father is unknown," and the man peeled off a couple of chili peppers for them to eat with bread, and the hot didn’t faze the child while when the man asked Margaret what she thought she was doing there among the Indians and she said, "Just living," the brave young man who was the chief’s son and who was her particular friend but was afraid of lightning and she wasn’t, came up and answered for her and never lost his temper; another time she was alone with the women weaving, and she got up and went wandering and heard singing from a hogan and was invited in, incredibly, and there was corn pollen everywhere and the people sang late and when she asked her gentleman friend’s aunt, Tall Salt, what it meant, Tall Salt didn’t joke with her as usual but said there was "a lot of story" in it she didn’t need to know but someday she would — and then was when Margaret reckoned they expected her to stay; and another time Margaret discovered she was thought to be a healer, they had seen this in her, and she had not known, but when Small Canyon Wind got terribly sick in his eightieth year and legs swole up so his bones got smaller and smaller like to burst, she was told by a voice she didn’t identify (for Navajos don’t go around telling each other what to do) to go to the old man and pray outside his hogan, a white Anglo girl darkly tanned in cotton skirt dyed red, and she went and prayed whatever of the People’s prayers she found she knew. They came to her and closed her eyes, these prayers, and she held out her hands and their trembling got uncontrollable, and she heard a man say, Yes, yes, and she held out her hands further and further, feeling a lightning or very white sun come down out of the heavens as if balancing things out that had been unbalanced, and her hands trembled with some force she then knew had always been there at rest and shown now only in the smallest quantity so she was afraid, and she found she was reaching out to one of the singers standing there outside the sick man’s house and he was being pointed out diagnostically by the hand trembling, and so this man went right inside having been picked by Margaret to sing and he did and the sick old man through faith or luck or magic or caring was genuinely healed that night, which prepared him for death the following week; and Margaret even helped the chief’s son’s mother who at her age still had a fontanel that suppurated like a saint’s wounds or from some possibly external sinister mysterious cause and didn’t heal when oiled with a secret vegetable and "actually bubbled with its own pulse which either drove her mad or was the sign of a distemper she had independently arrived at" (subtle differences quickly stated, for Margaret had a very good brain): and she had reached a "personality" there with those people where she was another person, she couldn’t describe it except as temporary, but got to believing what Tall Salt assured her, that like the lightning above them that she had an understanding with, a sacred life inside her guided her arm when she let it and made it longer at times and moved her arm-hand with a—"well, call it sympathy, Jim, I don’t believe I have it now, though if I did then, let it rest." Did she say that? Her voice came equally from all those distances, 1950, 1965, now from a nearby 1977 apartment Mayn hadn’t set foot in, lighting the way back to her love and personality, and equally back to 1893 and the epic easterly trek of ‘94, and the forties of his mother and his growing up; so that when he had become interested in Ernie Pyle’s war reporting long after the fact, he had run into an Indian bridge builder in Canada who laughed about the Navajo language, its fabled difficulty, and told Mayn what Mayn (quin-repente-quoian) instantly recognized, but from where? from the newspapers during the War (though he didn’t follow the War like Norma’s Gordon) or from a movie? till this night in 1977 he recalled circuitously the day in 1950 and, turned through the corner of his unchanging eye which was doubtless as empty as his repossessed apartment, heard Margaret: "They didn’t make up their minds if they wanted me to really know their language. It’s so hard they used pairs of Navajos as radiomen in the Pacific Theater, because who knows Navajo?"

No, they didn’t believe in reincarnation, neither Navajo nor grandson and grandmother. Those fellows running the unemployed march in 1894 believed in reincarnation, but Margaret preferred the Great Unknown. . big handsome gent who proposed military-style farms for the unemployed and who kept his identity secret until one day he seemed to turn into another person just by being identified at last as, not after all Captain Livingstone of the British Army encountered by a traveling man in a hotel during the Chicago Fair, nor one of Uncle Sam’s shrewdest Secret Service men, but as A. P. B. Bozarro (or Pizarro), a manufacturer of blood medicine at South Peoria.

No doubt there occurred isolated cases of reincarnation, Margaret observed, staring so deeply into Jim’s eyes he thought it wasn’t all funny. Special reincarnation? he said. She sighed. Why did people want to complicate things by coming back twenty years later for a second or third chance? Oh, he disagreed there, he thought people deserved a second chance. Oh, they deserve it all right, his grandmother murmured, and seemed to laugh quietly but for some reason he hadn’t been sure she was laughing. He thought she said, It’s still in me. But his uncertainty now in 1977 slung him along a curve of silly will back to the last century, thence forward to this moment in 1950, for he hadn’t been sure if he had heard her, and it made him the same person as now in ‘77, same immortally dumb body shouldering his attachment to her so it made him dizzy or lumpy of mind, pulled him out of shape, doubtless more formed by her than by his regular uptown-downtown father or the gap of his mother, so he had to get away, out of the room, downstairs; but she was drowsy anyhow, the frown deepening as her eyelids got heavy, and he saw the thing that had been in the corner of his eye as he got up to go peel potatoes. It was a medium-size gray envelope with a stamp on it and Jeanette Many’s name and address, and under it another envelope with only the place visible, which was a town in Pennsylvania, with trees the shape of girls if he had had night dreams, the town he had come from that very day, and he wondered if it was a check, he hadn’t been sending his laundry home lately in the big cardboard suitcase Margaret had given him, a check and the laundry no connection none whatever, but personal mail is personal mail, and who else did she know in that town, certainly not his girlfriend except by reputation, intuition, generalization, and old wit.

His grandfather when they curled the potato skins carefully away from the cool, pear-like moistness of the white did not speak of Margaret: he asked what Jim was going to do; Jim said, Maybe law; definitely not business, maybe a field geologist for an oil company, maybe professional sports management — he didn’t remember what he said except his grandfather was irked, and Jim thought, Touchy, probably having to nurse Margaret.

Jim said, Maybe marry money and live abroad for a while, some similar gag he didn’t much recall later but then was answered by what he did recall, in so many words: "Society’s immoral and immortal," said his grandfather; "it can do anything it wants, any crazy thing, but you can’t kill it." And something also about fragments that survive, laughing at you after you’re gone — that sort of thing.

She was asleep at suppertime, woke up like a drugged child, drank half a glass of sherry, swallowed just one bite of "shark" (the ham steak Alexander had broiled with numerous bendings over to look into the oven), and half a banana, and dozed in her chair. Upstairs again in her bedroom she came very much awake, frowning. He asked who she had written to. People she owed, she said. He could hear her voice in her letters. In 1977 he thought how close his mother’s death had been to both of them then in 1950. (A Russian Five-Year Plan!) And on the wings of such trivia as Spence, who seemed, on the morning after Amy left her apartment and apparently did not return, part and parcel, pocket and contents, of a life lived between old questions unasked or boring to ask, and a mass of fact unneeded, Mayn phoned his neighbor Norma to tell her of the difference Margaret had made between him and his little brother Brad. But first thing in the morning Norma and the two girls and Gordon (who answered) were all maneuvering around the apartment, which was slightly smaller than Mayn’s, breakfasting, playing the radio, dressing, doubtless undressing and dressing again, someone asking what it was like out, everything up to the higher levels of spirit where he could smell each toasting particle of toast, honey gasketing the thread of the jar — and Mayn flashed on Norma trudging humorously into the lobby after a hard day, her legs, her charity — and after insisting on speaking to her over Gordon’s faint anger, he could then only ask if she knew if the woman Clara had been in touch with Grace Kimball and if Norma knew whether Clara and her husband were in town, he needed to know — but Norma, who said, No, she didn’t know, asked, Are you all right? What is it? So he remembered being married and an old raincoat of his that didn’t repel the rain but he went on wearing it, and, saying goodbye to the dear woman, who said, You and Kimball ought to meet, he felt a concrete thing in the corner of his sleepless eye like something that should be moving but wasn’t, or wasn’t there but had been: he could only tell himself how he had accepted his grandmother’s words that evening — he was probably thinking of his girl angry or his father wanting to see him, though to talk about what? — yet Jim had brought his mother up: Do you think about her, Gramma? Oh yes. It wasn’t really us she was leaving. No, but there’s no way of knowing, without asking her. It brought Brad and my father together. Well, they were alike. That’s true. You took it well, Jim, you let it rest. I don’t know, Gramma. No, you knew a lot in your heart, so did your girlfriend — what’s happened to Anne-Marie? — but your little brother was another story.

Was she that bad off, Gramma?

Sarah? Well, we were all raised to get married and stay married, and she was ill with anemia though maybe that didn’t count, maybe it was that trip to France to the conservatory when she was only a girl.

But you went exploring when you were nineteen.

I almost went too far.

You spent three nights in jail for that woman who axed the painting.

Not when I was nineteen.

What was its name?

The Rokeby Venus, in London. There were demonstrations here.

Braddie accepted it, he knew she wasn’t coming back, he knew she was dead!

But he was so little, Jimmy, and so close to her; I told him all I could, he kept asking and I told him I held myself responsible for being too strict when she was in her teens and even afterward and she went abroad all right to study music but we didn’t let her stay a whole year — we kept an eye on girls in those days.

Did Brad want to know a whole lot?

Oh we got quite close the last year or so.

And you told him a lot?

Oh it’s all things you figured out for yourself, and, gracious, Brad’s just a little bit too nice, sensitive and all, but we don’t laugh much; we had serious talks about how people got to be very unhappy in their home life, and he sent me the most funereal flowers in the hospital.

He kissed her goodnight, he heard Alexander in the next room, he saw that Margaret did not expect him to stay or necessarily to pay her a visit the following morning, which was Friday, he never felt he had to explain himself with her, but wasn’t there then in ‘50 and now in ‘77 this gap a part of you was always passing through? Memory kept things from being over.

Go away and come back light-months later and you’re the same person, pulse back to normal, etcetera; nothing’s happened, where’ve you been? Alive there, alive here. But if dead here, get out fast. But he had been mad at her for talking about his mother in that way to Brad. All times were equal and the spaces between if you wanted.

He phoned Washington, early as it was, and realized he was thinking of poor old reliable business-as-usual Ted in a far-off time zone of California, but Flick wasn’t home. A friend had phoned a few days ago to say his wife and son — for he was legally separated — had had their apartment broken into and the super was threatened with a knife, and the thieves, like bad movers, had cracked a mirror; the man’s son had called his dad collect, secretly — the man was upset and Mayn had been too busy to talk and hadn’t called back but would. A film maker had phoned to ask him to play mixed doubles and to inquire how far they were into the lightning-mapping project and were they going to use U-25? Mayn had business in Connecticut and he had been up all night. Amy was not home or at her foundation where Mayn and Larry had talked to the watchman; and the Chilean economist didn’t answer his home phone at two a.m. And Mayn needed reading glasses, his eyes were tired, and the thing persistently existing in the corner of his eye would turn into Spence if he didn’t get some sleep but he didn’t have time, or into a mountain of mind-bending mineral slag Dina West had evoked with the merest of references: and all Mayn could think was that death leads us to reincarnation, and he had a glass of orange juice to prove his reality, and whereas normally he would have to have someone to talk to to think old things over, it was the reverse now, with Norma anyway, and he heard himself saying in answer to Ted’s "You’re pretty hard on that little so-and-so," "Yeah, we all have a little Spence in us" for Ted to carry on, in Mayn’s affectionate imagination, "Spence has more than most."

Where did he come from? Mayn didn’t even know. But maybe he would have to see. The phone rang and he reached it before the second ring to hear his daughter’s low-pitched, expectant voice identifying him.

"Just the person I wanted to talk to."

"Well, this guy Spence phoned me—"

"Long distance?"

"Here in New York. Who’s he with?"

"Himself, Flick. Stay clear."

1 ‘Well, I didn’t think it was a Senate subcommittee but I think he bothered you once or twice before."

"How come he knew where to phone you in New York? That’s more than I know."

Flick gave her father a number and said it was her friend Lincoln’s, the woman who had called him after being called by the obnoxious Spence. "But he must be on to something, Daddy."

The corner of his eye was full again. He saw the wastebasket by the desk before he’d half turned to find it empty. The hand-written pages of his letter to his daughter weren’t there. They’d disappeared during the night. He had been out for three or four hours.

"I wrote you last night, m’dear."

"O.K., that’s a good coincidence, but… Daddy — you know everything — when your grandmother committed suicide—"

"What!"

"— you told me you were away camping with your girlfriend and having a fight the whole weekend and you didn’t hear until late Sunday night—"

"What has this to do with Spence?" Mayn intoned, but didn’t want to hear.

"Did an old teacher of yours come all the way from Minneapolis and show up at the cemetery and upset Alexander?" Mayn saw the children playing in the backyard in Windrow, their great-grandfather in a broad-brimmed straw hat about to let go of his lemonade glass when the girl with long, light-brown hair races over, giggling at her brother, and takes the glass as it slips from the fingers, which wakes the old man up, who insists on taking the glass from Flick. "Did she come all the way from Minnesota?"

It was drizzling and his bus didn’t get in till after the burial, and his grandfather was uncommunicative and Jim felt horrible at getting to the house when a crowd of people were eating deviled eggs and slicing turkey and a big glazed ham and he felt he still wasn’t there yet. He told his daughter this, and her voice coming back sounded flat, like after he had left his family and would phone Joy and the children and only Flick would talk to him but with a special unwillingness in representing the other two: "And did she meet someone in the group at the cemetery whose uncle had adored your grandmother and said he would have been proud of her decision?" His grandfather took him aside and told Jim that that woman Myles had been "bothering us" again, and Alexander had finally asked her very quietly did she want him to tell her what the gas smelled like and show her the identical messages all over the living room and the back porch saying don’t light matches? And Jim had been aware of listening indelibly to what was being said but in order to get it so firm that he could consign it right away from him, but it did not all get consigned, because he remembered, but did not tell his daughter, "This time…" (said Miss Myles)—"What?" his grandfather said—"there’s no doubt. ." — "About what?" said Alexander—"About why" was what Pearl Myles had said. The voices in the living room and dining room were not hushed and they drove Jim out onto the porch as if they were a clamor sifting him, dividing and dividing him.

"Spence might get himself buried," said the father calmly.

"And Daddy, I couldn’t decide if he was crazy or not, I mean maybe he’s dangerous but he’s sort of up front, obnoxious but I mean why didn’t he ask you about that printer Morgan who was mixed up with a relative of ours? I mean, what do I care about all those people, but there seemed to be Chilean fathers mixed up with Masonic lodges past and present and two daughters we’re supposed to be involved with, but I don’t believe it, any more than I believe that a German submarine had anything to do with me that surfaced one late afternoon off the Jersey shore and helped a person escape to South America who had a banned opera in her head and was either daughter or great-niece to a strong woman who nonetheless found time to listen to mountains think or knew some people who had — does that mean anything to you?"

"I don’t know a thing about Chilean opera, but I remember the story about the sub. There was a waterspout out there the same day."

"Chilean?"

His daughter had not said escape to Chile; if she knew this much she would have picked up Chile, but only if she had cared to. The follower makes up the followee, who reciprocates: but these cannot be Mayn’s thoughts: he does not know what they mean, he knows the poignant politeness of an unknown economist at Cape Kennedy in December of ‘72, his ex tempore remarks re: astronauts and their overnight bags disappearing into space for a break from domestic responsibilities, wives, secretaries, kids, even the bachelor geologist who, however, was not the one who did a brief dance-like hop before stepping up into the white van with the rusty tailpipe; a Chilean economist who spoke of a prisoner inventing a chemistry of thought or communal-think in the void of a prison Mayn found for himself.

"Spence has to be stopped."

"From what, Daddy?"

Only Norma had a key to "the wastebasket," and she would never have taken the letter. He heard questions answering his knowledge that what he had in his power he would use. But interrogations directed not just to him. Though passing through his head, signatures of lightning that when he heard of he thought they had been in his imagination already. So he didn’t figure where they were coming from.

"He listened to Ted and me talk years ago and then he started turning up in my life. He’s not even a journalist but he’s everything that stinks in this racket." But who was Mayn talking about? He felt his daughter angry, saw her lips puff, her eyes narrow and seem to go vague.

"I mean I don’t care about some old relation of yours or your grandparents’ who described a pistol in a two-volume diary so I couldn’t care less where the diary is hiding. But now the mountain: there’s something in the mountain, Daddy. It sounds—"

"I told you about that diary in the letter I wrote you last night."

"— but that mountain sounds like pure insanity but, like, when the fantasy gets really pure, that’s danger; that’s critical mass."

He was tired of big talk, but smiled at her "critical mass" and turned away.

"Don’t turn away, Daddy."

"I’ve told you about mountains that think — Mountain Capability — don’t you remember? I don’t remember where it came from, I can’t imagine Margaret referring to ‘Aimed Being’ as a form of thought, but I’m listening to you talk about critical mass as if you had any idea what it is. (Not that I do.)"

"Well, I don’t remember your telling me about mountains except Ship Rock in a letter but it’s not a mountain, but some of Spence’s information sounds right."

He had a heavy day and he told his daughter maybe he was the "reason" to Spence’s "rhyme" and asked her to come up to Connecticut with him, but she wouldn’t. She said, "I asked him where he was coming from connecting my family to some people named Morgan who used to carry diagrams across deserts that might be about sunspots and harvests or about pistols or railroad routes but were Masonic messages between the hemispheres and he said you were an old friend of his and he was worried about you."

Mayn saw a hand get hold of the four or five handwritten pages in last night’s wastebasket and pull them out carefully but he had never seen Spence’s hands.

"He’s no friend of mine."

"He said a dangerous character had phoned him in the middle of the night asking him about some of this information but he himself had known only what he had heard."

Mayn wanted his daughter to go up to Connecticut with him, the very first women’s interstate Bank; get her away from this.

She said, Business, Daddy? in that ironic way, and said she had something to show him that she had been writing, and he said, Can’t wait, and she said, It’s in the mail, What’s wrong with business? and they were drifting into an old fight in which he might say technology wasn’t demonic, not evil in itself, the machines were to serve us, the real risk was — but though she didn’t want to hear she asked, then, if he’d gone into this because of the family paper and he distinctly felt her mind reach to hang up her receiver, and he said No, and wished she could see how much he loved her but she sounded tired, the "tired" that would last only on the phone. She said, "He asked what I knew about the death of Mayga — he just threw her name at me like we were all friends. Why did it feel like extortion?"

"She was a Chilean journalist Ted and I knew. She did a kind of respectable P.R. more than steady reporting. Mixed up in liberal politics, working for the election of Frei, opposed to foreign involvement in copper. Interesting person. And there’s more to it than that."

"I know who she is, Daddy."

"Spence doesn’t keep information in his head long, it comes in and goes out the same day."

"Mom told me about her."

"Well, I’ve got to go to Connecticut and I think if you don’t come with me you should go back to Washington. What did you come up here for?" He could brain Spence.

"I think it was a mountain I didn’t know about till I got here."

"What on earth did your mother know about Mayga?"

"I don’t want to go into it, Daddy."

His grandfather’s words exactly: when Jim asked what Pearl Myles, who’d come and gone, had meant about there being no doubt this time.

Then Anne-Marie whom he hadn’t seen since a year Christmas phoned the house from upstate New York from college because her parents had told her about Margaret, and she loved Jim; she knew how to say such things and she found some ease or rest in him or put it there, though she used more words to speak now than in high school, so for a second the funeral lunch felt like a surprise party. And Sammy was there because he hadn’t gone to college but was learning the construction business. And Mayn, with his daughter’s words or some accelerating leverage in the phone line’s magnetic current, could not tell if, in 1950 he had a gap he saw back into that was his own ongoing mystery or stupidity, a congruence that memory teased you with, and that was also an absence of his grandmother, her strong shoulders, her eyes as largely observant as his wife’s, buried nearby, yet also a big nothing of his mother, who wasn’t buried nearby. Lunchtime voices rose in his grandmother’s home, and he felt himself swell or deform in one direction or another for the voices pulled him and rose like a classroom of voices when the teacher goes out of the room for five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes. And feeling inside out in the least dramatic of apartments in New York in 1977 where the elevator stopping and moving on sounded like the power supply accumulating, resting, practicing its power, circuit-breaking off into cerebral lesion as if the group house let a universe dissolve its walls and repointed bricks, Mayn didn’t have words to think the wordless panic bordering on absolute inertial not-caring with which (read congruently; read responsible for two suicides; read We) he had to know and absolutely had to know what his mother who had conveniently preceded both of them would feel about this rational death of his grandmother, her mother, who had had enough of "stretching" with or without anesthesia and wrote her letters and then her last multiple identical notes of concern for all who should enter the household before her death was known but especially her husband, who had cigars on the mantelpiece, Jim saw them, three lonely Dutch Masters, and would never light a match for any other reason except, on special occasions, red candlesticks in the andiron-heavy brass holders on the mantel in the living room or on the dining-room table — and howling to know, he thought that his difficult, remote mother, who would talk so directly to you sometimes when she felt like it that you thought you were remembering her words already, would have wept at her mother’s practical act and have admired the woman, and he could have given his mother his love at a time of shock and sadness for her, she would have been polite to all the people who came, and there were people in the house Jim had never seen before, and in his own apartment a century later he’s standing in all the angles of the house turned inside out and looking outward dazed into his usual ease and fair good humor but not alone — what did that mean? — but ready for anything, which was like being ready for nothing, afraid of people coming to him to say they’re sorry but seeing that they had come to his grandfather, the bereaved beloved, who materialized at the mantelpiece thirty feet away from where Jim was standing near the phone, and was actually smiling and nodding with Jim’s mother’s sporty friend whose speaking voice flowed over from his singing voice, and Alexander paused in his gentle amusement to light a cigar so there were only two cigars left there with the pewter ashtray and a small, pale-green Oriental bowl of flowers Jim knew had come from the cemetery. Then he saw Brad, whom no doubt he had been seeing, his half-brother who hated the devious, lunatic winds of January mornings, and he’s taller in a three-button gray flannel suit and more upright, with his girlfriend who’s touching him shoulder to shoulder until Brad greeting his half-brother raised his hand in the sleeve of his suit jacket, French cuffs and all: so that a quarter of the same century later hearing steps near his apartment door, and finding good old tears standing out in his eyes, he saw his half-brother come toward him so that he knew Brad was here in Windrow and he, Jim, was not, but wasn’t aware of the tears that had passed out of his eyes clearing them, until Brad shook his hand and did not know if that was why Brad had come over to him leaving his girlfriend talking to a tall, skinny man in khaki pants and a corduroy jacket and no tie, and to the Indian Ira Lee, who was working at the firehouse: "She wrote me such a tremendous letter, I got it this morning; I’ll show it to you."

He was telling his brother that he had spent all of Thursday afternoon and evening with their grandmother, but Brad knew this because Jim had spent Thursday night in his own bedroom down the street. He had gone away to Pennsylvania and everything had happened in his absence. He had gone away into the horizon of many years and standing in a city apartment hearing his buzzer go he blinked away the feeling that nothing had happened. "We talked about you, Brad." "You did?" "We talked about reincarnation." "You did?" "Hey, when you getting married?"

Joke or no joke, his brother took it serious and smiled sheepishly. "Grampa didn’t have her cremated. He couldn’t do it. Grampa’s writing the obituary for the Transcript." "That’ll be like an obituary for the Democrat." "Dad says Grampa made it ten times too long." "He’s already written it?" "You know him." "Where were you Thursday night?" "You were asleep when I got in. Where were you Friday night? We were trying to call you."

He forgot what he had answered — something like Asleep under the Allegheny stars, or had there been night clouds? — after supper he and his girlfriend got inside their tent. Which indeed was partly what Margaret meant once, twice, three or four times, by saying—

But it was reincarnation she meant, "Better get it now because you don’t after you’re gone," and yet he did not remember in so many words how she meant it, for what he recalled, like some sought-after obstacle, was all the reincarnation he and she didn’t mean: so that he knew then and now as if by an intuition which meant no one would have to tell him, for they could assume he would know: his hand was on the doorknob, eight-thirty a.m., Larry’s urgent voice on the other side: the door was open, the boy stood there alive with the attention and city urgency that covered all the other stuff: he was talking fast like they were standing in Mayn’s living room already: and in the gap of not knowing where his mother was and not wanting to know (any more than he would want to look at the cold face of his grandmother on this her burial day), and not wanting to think about an unthinkable (a record!) two suicides (in less than five years) which kept becoming one in his always grab-bag, humdrum head, in the gap of what you could talk about and what not, what report for sure and what not at all, for this was no politic time to speak to Larry about reincarnation or let into the open void the fact that his place had been entered and his letter to his daughter removed; in the gap of knowing his mother and grandmother were in both him and his fairly dull, illegitimate, love-child half-brother Brad clothed fitly in a suit inevitably from his girl’s widowed mother’s store, and in the gap between a long (read historic) obituary for your wife of fifty-odd years (read uxorquy; read obsequoias) and on the other hand an obit as brief as a weather report, he realized he had decided what he was going to do, as if decision were disappearing for a moment that might be years depending on your time of view, and surfacing like the very same person, yet with his grandfather advancing toward him to ask him if he was going to have anything to eat, the old man’s calm doubtless dragged out of him by the nearness of others’ very bodies, he absorbed the impulse to tell him what work he had just decided to go into and he grasped his grandfather’s arm, who said, "She loved you," and, in a better mood, remembered the slip of paper in the breast (or cigar) pocket of his jacket, for Pearl Myles had left two phone numbers for Jim to call her and he crumpled up the paper and, inhibited from trying a six-foot set shot at the square wicker wastebasket at a funeral luncheon, he went and dropped the ball of paper in, upon which his grandfather said, "My sentiments exactly," and, man to man, they shook hands again, and when Jim came out of the dining room later with a roast-beef sandwich on a gold-bordered plate, a few people had gone, though Brad and his girl were still standing together, now alone, enjoying themselves.

But hearing Larry now so upset about Amy because he now thought those keys were her only keys, and knowing as if from inside Lar’s skin that Larry was unhappy at having to suspect that Mayn, even in a friendly way, knew things about Amy or her work that Larry did not, Larry was tired because of anxiety — his father had gone out to the Island last night to see Sue, and hadn’t returned; and the people down the hall had been coming and going all night and Larry had twice looked through the peephole to see the opera singer and the guy in the pinstripe suit come back and later the guy in the pinstripe suit leave and come back in a matter of minutes — so that Mayn did not trouble Larry with any self-occupied speculations that someone had gotten into this apartment.

Larry’s repeating that he feels in his bones Amy’s in danger but maybe she was fed up with him and with being but a potential girlfriend, a chill though tender in the hand, a gray color at rest in the green of the eyes and then the green scaring the gray away as if he is the gray and according to her too much in his own head (and don’t say "one" the way you do even as a gag, One feels at times, One has forgotten, One remembers why one’s folks split but then one forgets) — but that’s a dumb way to walk out (and of her own pad); she could have felt they’re getting too close, y’know, she on the rug leaning back on her hands staring and talking, sure y’know you can get pulled away from yourself by another person in fact Amy herself had been saying that, and he felt it too so he agreed but couldn’t tell her it was her the light of his life that did that to him—

— all bent out of shape, Mayn murmured in the midst of the kid’s frank language, he didn’t know what Lar’ had asked of Amy; and Mayn took and shook Larry’s hand and Larry started across the threshold but had to get back upstairs in case of a phone call, he had his father’s new Phone-Mate turned on.

He was at the elevator. "I got the reincarnation thing all worked out. I’ll tell you when we have time, O.K.?"

The wind behind Mayn rattled the windows. "I think I had it figured out once, old man."

"We can compare notes." Larry’s real ready for the elevator.

"It’s lost. The field is yours, sir." Mayn had a breakfast meeting at a hotel uptown. Forget the whole shebang and go for a workout, take some steam and a massage at the mercy-killing hands of Manolo.

The elevator window lit up its diamond shape, and a lone rider might be inside. The door slid back. "It’s never totally lost, in my opinion. It comes back because it’s… oh probably worthless, Jim." Larry shrugged and the elevator door might have been taking him away forever as he stepped in and was shut from view.

So that James Mayn, not half so sure of everything as this celebrated neighbor, Grace Kimball, well-known warm humorous influence on downcast and even suicidal women (Norma said) cum glad theories re goddess dispersing own flesh to heal patriarchal poison — all preached in an apartment in Mayn’s building that Grace had once shared with her (ne ex-) husband — James Mayn found himself left again where he’d about chosen to be: on consignment facing down the four corners of his one-time permanent shelter, unsure which was margin, which center — Women’s Interstate Bank, or a disappearing if potentially plural, non-curseproof pistol that came to roost bearing on it somewhere a worn emblem possibly miniaturizing a plan of sunspot economic cycles with a lot of 5s in it; droughts in the American West every twenty-two years, or the Great Spirit’s reportedly Four-Cornered Ear grounded somewhat as was the radiation fog of the coast-like Plains-and-Rocky-Mountain upslope challenging the Thunder Dreamer’s progress westward to give up the dancing pistol to an ancient survivor.

But margin and center turned out to be fact or lunacy, too: total-waste-use apartment-complex project, or some movable mountain’s mineral "bank" capable of, upon installation wherever it surfaced, literally brainwashing all those dwelling within its range so as to pan, like gold it could become, the illusion that it had stood there for centuries. Margin or center? — the hopelessly rigged, hawsered, shrouded, and convincing stories where that Hermit-Inventor figured, and the (well) real man, skinny old geezer who really died fifty miles away in New York City and whom Jim had asked Margaret about, and, after her death, did not ask Alexander about any more than Jim had even, over the years, had to struggle to keep from linking these old matters with his sudden interest in the U-2 fiasco and, from then on, during the sixties, its cover story’s subject, which was real weather reconnaissance, a fictional cover story made out of actual meteorology.

Margin or center? — Margaret’s Hermit-Inventor’s reputedly incarnate nephew carrying on original weather work; and some elder maverick in this later routine life surfacing twenty years later in the seventies, sometime employed in Texas and in a Colorado "center" then later as expert consultant on a New Jersey pirate TV station where he first voiced his "coastal" theories till he lost that job, released to custody of self (and social security), there visited by Mayn — but, if disemployed, now at his free work and with barely enough from a forgotten patent to support an old unrelated woman babbling someplace in that railroad flat with shit-eating old walls—

No problem, this original man unwilling to spend time (and living space) telling workaday newsman (covering he’s not quite sure yet what) differential equations for minute variables in evolution of atmosphere — for a weather conceived as scene for or product of a unified field locking together the four great forces: a new weather (according to this lone, unfrocked weather thinker) in that not only precipitation and cloud formation but the apparently local precipitation of wind might be indirectly radioactive in origin: you begin to get a reading on the overhead dynamics in the vicinity of some eastern coastlines — to be specific, vertically stacked interfaces, these possibly due to an oscillating radiance you infer from graphs of upper-air heat-swings and of shifts of cloud cover. .

(which Mayn checked against the "pictures" done in black and red on opened-out brown-paper supermarket bags on the battered walls of the hermitlike maverick’s apartment; and heard the old lady’s continuing, rather musical talk in some next room; and found in an awful unframed window of understanding become his whole torso and head, that his elder host’s science-on-spec ("Oh, ‘guess science gets the halo nowadays — or am I out of date?") is tracing an old daydream seed of Mayn’s too long ago digested: so unthinkably far away from (apropos of future lasers penetrating storms and reflecting information perfectly back through turbulence) the old maverick’s humble mention of Lewis Fry Richardson (good English Quaker who resigned from the Meteorological Office when it was swallowed by the Air Ministry and who died — just three years after Margaret — having taken the study of wind distinct from its velocity so far as to have formulated a law of turbulent mutual dispersion of particles): and oscillating radiant (O.K., he’s hearing this succinct and separate man) energy product of relations between some near and stationary magnetism and some far and moving magnetism: these due to radioactive parcels or process, associated in some quirk-phenomena of the last decade, with coastline configurations themselves changing in some radical way measurable by image; meanwhile this radiance builds in intensity, mounts because of some mountain-like approach from the West.

Margin or center, or fact or term Mayn won’t yet make up. Two screens of material you don’t quite look at at the same time: old nephew of the Hermit-Inventor of New York who died and whose obsequies Margaret attended; and then this new, newsworthy actual person in an apartment with a face that looks broken and rebroken and complete, demoted to such contemplations as made Mayn contemplate some extra homework; and he had long since told his daughter of this maverick’s speculations, which made her nod moodily and say, O.K. but that word "mounting" made her think about the chance of radioactively produced weather threatening changes maybe due to some tide of slowly heaping government-sponsored wastes.

Margin or center? Mayn went on and on, angelic waste like education passing through him so he mattered so little he would just go on living contaminated to a ripe old age, the "rhyme" to Spence’s "reason" — think how, in quickly boning up what weather he could to at least grasp what the i960 U-2 plane was supposed to be watching while keeping the Soviet Union under surveillance, he could have discovered for himself why wind seems to us on Earth to curve like a bullet or anyway to the Anasazi Healer who could see whatever he felt was out there, but in fact blows straight as a latitude to any observer outside our rotation-obsessed Earth’s (God knows) inertial system— while failing to connect this after all fictitious (after some French mathematician) Coriolis effect with the Brad’s Day wrangle about curved winds — as if in condensing a news release out of California one weary day that, to wit, even forgetting our manned capacity to change the weather we might look forward to Canada and the U.S.S.R. turning hot and dry while some Third World disaster areas might turn into moist green savannahs, soft mountains, hectares of orange soil, black soil, we never connected this future with the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and its itinerant clouds of acid droplets that caused the Little Ice Age by stratospheric blocking of the sun, not to mention the Hermit-Inventor’s symmetrical tornado of ‘83 which seems, within his inertial frame to have been the model for the monster of late ‘93 early ‘94 not reliably chronicled by the Navajo (though woven by Earth and sky) that coincided by convergence flow not strict causality with the afternoon of the long sunset when great forces came out — instead of "going home" and that one-in-a-lifetime alignment of clefts and the new post-mortem career launched all but weightlessly by the Anasazi healer’s will so much at rest among the disintegral dust remaining of him that he became a cloud whose name he had never known and, in his only shrug in honor of the reincarnation he eschewed (long, long before a woman named Grace Kimball was saying she disappeared into her workshop members like fragments of the goddess and then would resurface having swum through their circulations for days on end, and know that simultaneously she had never been away), he passed over Landbridge America aiming, if not before he died, so soon after as to be practically the same thing, to see what he had always been curious to see.