Women and Men

THE CURVE SPEAKS UPON THE VOID

If it could speak — and he and his new friend were discussing whether it actually could — his heart would have had a thing or two to say about how two older friends of his, Amy and Jim, had acted. Larry’s heart wasn’t going round in circles so much, and had let some part of itself go. He had plenty of heart; he wasn’t cold no matter what his mother had once said about how he kept the lid on, and no matter if his father said Lar’ needed to see Martha and he paid the bills.

But, O.K., what had looked like danger the other night still might be; but he cared a lot less now. So hosting his new friend Donald Dooley from Economics class in the clear light of a cloudy day, Larry thought of Amy as quite far away, far more than thirty blocks’ bike ride (or walk); an older chick, an older (O.K.) woman, or anyway person; or a government agent implicated in something. She had vanished from her apartment (and she only five or six years older than Larry!), and, that night, had left her things all over that made it look like she had been abducted. Meanwhile, Jim Mayn mattered much more to Larry, who could not understand how on the morning after Amy’s apparent disappearance if not abduction Mayn had emplaned from La Guardia airport on a tristate business trip without knowing if Amy was all right for God’s sake, so maybe he didn’t even care; yet the night before upon learning from Larry that Amy was gone, Mayn had made with him a whirlwind visit to the East Side foundation where she worked (maybe one more interruption before Lar’s life finally began): it was a building and block where nothing was happening at that late hour, no abductions, no light rape (like what Maureen and Grace kidded they would subject a man to someday), no thefts, no cop cars screeching up onto the sidewalks, no execution of babies, nothing at that late hour except a Mexican watchman Mayn knew in suspenders playing a battery-powered electronic game at a rickety little logging-in table, one knee crossed over the other (while, as a bike flashed past exactly like Lar’s old Raleigh and come to think of it with a black kid on it but painted silver—repainted? a bit thickly? — down the street in a closed but brightly lighted shop that sold mainland-Chinese shirts, pants, and trinkets, an Asiatic woman who stayed in Larry’s mind had been sitting on some phone books).

Anyway (but God! nothing was anyway), the next morning and early afternoon Larry had bothered to check out Amy’s fate, though she was drifting away from him, well always close at heart for he would never change toward her, he’s her friend for God’s sake and prob’ly on some strange parallel trip to hers, meet for a beer some year or cross jaws on some far-future phone waiting maybe just around the rincon if some angel (Hell’s or other or all of the above) hasn’t ripped its hookah out by the roots in anger at the system, drifting ‘way from Lar’ along her own parallel path, but his own orbit had to be his course, which was no-going-in-circles any more but was heady-looking toward unknown new friends, new people, wing out to the West Coast (New York’11 be here waiting) so, then, if, given, a heady orbit into the immediate future, well just a bit of a spin, if skewed — but fuck skew! let it go, let it crawl up Dr. Rail’s blackboard graphed out of someone else’s mind who was controlling the economy if not every day — Amy, Amy, the fine beautiful elsewhere-skew-orbital Amy’s all right — she had come to work at noon, having called in; and Larry had finessed the switchboard lady into telling him that Amy was wearing what he knew to be the same clothes as those in which she disappeared the night before, though then he contemplated her underwear and that upset him, skewed him, he didn’t know why, it was because (yes) he started to take off her clothes only to fear her helplessness. But having finessed the switchboard operator he then spoke to Amy in the flesh and she sort of said she was sorry. Oh she had been summoned on an unexpected research chore— What chore? Lar’ didn’t block himself from asking— Oh a deadline, some music, some ethnic music, they had to get some information on it, her boss needed her, she should have left Larry a— Sure, sure, he said — but she was O.K. And Larry did not seem to surprise her by not pursuing the matter.

But now four days later, Larry thought he was over Amy, and Larry’s Economics classmate Donald Dooley, a new friend, put his great backpack on the floor of Larry’s room and leaned up against the edge of Larry’s rolltop desk purchased for Larry by his mother shortly before she had split (split? but she was the one who had stayed — or, that is, stayed on in the Long Island house). Donald was agreeing at length, that the heart as a bodily organ had little to do with your feelings, for that was bullshit, though your chest was for sure a key area in the feelings and the heart of course could be affected by the feelings, even a plastic heart, if there were any yet; feelings, whether heart-rooted or not, must never be dismissed, especially your own, and happened to be the basis of most thought (not all) and might be more (than brain) why thought went on and on, though sometimes it was hardly, you know, thought.

You say "sometimes" quite a lot, Larry said. Actually, Donald and Larry awaited Donald’s girlfriend, who was meeting Donald at Larry’s apartment house in Murray Hill. Larry and Donald were discussing not exactly anatomy or "capital pun." or Mai thus in a Radioactive Era or straight Economics assignments, but reincarnation; God, Donald had brought it up, not Larry, Larry was sure of that, though they shared the view that there were different forms, some in action from moment to moment though Donald wasn’t sure how.

Donald had raised his chin aiming his brown beard at the photograph of Sequoya, the Cherokee genius whose English-alphabet syllable notation for his people’s language enabled them to put out their own newspaper and influenced them to write their own constitution. The picture had been given to Larry by Mayn and had come from Mayn’s father’s basement in the old hometown in New Jersey. A relative of Mayn’s had taken the photograph. Donald said he wasn’t sure they ought to be discussing reincarnation, because it didn’t feel too good today, he didn’t know why, did Larry know what Donald meant? And Larry, who was envisioning Donald’s girl, whom he had never met, recounted a dream he had had the night before.

First, however, he added that he had an elder friend who claimed never to have had these regular sleeping dreams, and Donald, who turned out to be surprisingly just Larry’s age to the week and with whom Larry realized he wanted to be. . not outa here, though it’s like that, but — outa here and here at the same time, or left alone… but with Donald (or whoever) who had seemed militant and superior when Larry had heard him in Eco class try to carve Professor Rail limb from limb, silver horseshoe belt buckle and all, but now was just Donald (yea D.D.!)—nodded rapidly as if he too had known someone who didn’t dream, and, though listening to Lar’ here, then abruptly so softly interjected, "You might be dreaming/or him — know what I mean?"

In Larry’s dream, driven on but braked and reined in ("You’re a dream, guy," sillies D.D. suddenly), a dream that in fact Larry had set out to dream so maybe it didn’t really count or so he’d told himself as he dreamt it — and Donald shook his head reassuring Larry that it did count) — Larry had (and here was the point) lost his father’s name. Martin, Dave, Donald (!), Ted, Stanislas, Asa, Lou, Beebe (! there was a first name for you), Jaime, Manny, Angel, Sandy. But then it came back to Larry underground like a thing or animal and so he could introduce his father to an eligible woman who by chance had shaved herself according to the cunt-positive program of his mother’s friend Grace Kimball who dropped in on Larry and rapped about whatever he wanted to rap about and licked the drip flow off the rim of the buckwheat honey jar having generously sweetened her coffee hit — for Lar’s into making finest (home-ground) Colombian lately. Donald Dooley frowned at all or some of this, maybe the Cunt Positive? but tilted his face to show he was still here — and it was still hard to see through a piss-saffron shower-curtain-type robe which in the dream Larry knew was no big deal, it was like taking a pee, and the "underground" through which his father’s name came back to him in the dream was ducted into Larry’s vein so when that name "Marv" came back to him it was wired into circulation desde luego (at once) if he could only figure how, but in the dream his heart was a big octopus-eye with its friendly arms curved back into it and it knew how the stuff in the dream got wired into circ but didn’t let on how except within the motion of its own "dream" system, except Lar’ felt that where the curvature of the at least left ventricle was greatest the pressure of the emotion was, too — which was the reverse of some Dreaded-Modulus-mode ratio stuck in the back of his mind like he had a windpipe in his mind but the curvatures in question under varying degrees of dilation might contour-code an actual other person which in some mode you were—under certain unknown pressures. Yet, God knew, Larry was so tired coping (and mainly with his parents), that — he had given up and woken, knowing that his father was not here and knowing, as he resisted the coincidental drive to make waking up congruent with getting up, that it would be all right to lie in bed — chewing chalk, his gums felt like — and let his dreams — (Be good to your body, said Donald.)

Larry had a lot of dreams, a real load of dreams, while this older friend the newsman Mayn claimed never to have ‘em at all, and Lar’ privately, because it was complicated to get into with Donald, knew that Mayn awaited Larry’s latest and (who knew?) definitive views on Simultaneous Reincarnation — not, he hoped, so Mayn could retell them over a fatherly beer with Amy (who Larry knew now could never love him), or even to a humorous, husky, and husky-voiced man named Ted though Ted had only a few more months to live and wanted to spend it in memorable conversation — but to settle if Jim’s past life could really have been in future, for Larry cared about Jim and not in just the sense that all people matter more or less). Jim, O.K., did have waking dreams, though ofttimes thorough and far-grasping. Larry could say almost anything to Jim but could not for some reason disagree with him on this if only to the point of reminding him that infants dreamed far more than grownups. Champion of all dreamers was, you know, the fetus. And if with twins or triplets (the Ur consciousness-raising group) your fetus didn’t have on average as much privacy and freedom of growth to get the circuitry developing, maybe on the other hand sibling interference multiplied the voltages, and if during gestation the individual fetus didn’t have much content to dream about, God, think what it had been recently through, arriving into being ! — plus the fact that humans had nothing to do during gestation unlike shark fetuses that had teeth from the seminal moment or absolute beginning— Conceived with teeth? challenged D.D. — and went after each other in-womb, getting right down to it, obstacles each to each uniting a good fight and nutrient value where only one can win, that is, the one that survives for the mother-sub to fire forth her one surviving offspring (but shit! it’s astern, of course) full-speed on B-day.

"Ur?" asked Donald, and Larry explained, while envisioning with some happiness or other the Chinese woman seen the night he and a tight-lipped Mayn had gone in search of Amy at the foundation ("Nice space here," Donald indicated the apartment as a whole) and Jim when they were on their way downtown later gave Larry a five-dollar bill when he left the cab. But now Larry hardly heard himself answer like homework the "Ur" query, for he and Donald had not necessarily stopped discussing the heart, and a beatless, perhaps timeless measure came to him and was gone as if it had thought better of him! — md he reported that Mayn had told of a lighting designer-dealer whose girlfriend had had four miscarriages and had been told by her doctor that now she was again with child she would have to take it super-easy virtually like a flat-on-her-back invalid, and the man, who had once been Jim’s wife’s employer (when she had been, obviously, Jim’s wife) had actually seen the thumb-size fetus, and the fetus (if you want to hear the news) was all heart, and he talked to it and hoped it would know his loving voice when it came out; but Larry could tell that other parts of the body could dream, so why not a heart?

This was Larry’s first new friendship since his parents had split up— hey, he had just come out and said that! to himself, that is — yes, first since his parents had split up, launching him into a Manhattan apartment with his dad, while his mother and her friend lived on the Island (whom Larry wanted to talk to Donald about but he was shy about betraying his mother and also didn’t really know much on the new road of their life—their life? their life? — which was in the house in Long Island where Larry grew up. Donald pointed out that your feet and arms could go to sleep, so presumably they could dream. They laughed and Larry said there was some vino in the fridge. Donald asked if there was a vacuum handy and Lar’ said he’d been cleaning house when D.D. arrived. Good, said D.D. Yeah, said Lar’, what did he need it for? His typewriter needed a vacuum, said Donald, tapping his pack beside him on the floor. Larry felt that Donald liked taking off his backpack with its twenty-degrees-below-freezing down bag rolled on top, and putting it back on. Donald was rural-oriented but also, he said, urban-oriented; and Larry could see he liked being on the move. Larry had not been reaching for the phone to dial anyone when Donald Dooley had rung from the lobby to say that he was here, unexpectedly, and he would like to come up (because D.D. made statements more than asked questions).

Out by the elevator, there was a giant dark-orange couch left by the opera singer Ford North ("Please call me Ford, won’t you?"), and it had tasseled cushions and had been arrested there in the public hall on its way out of the building, perhaps to a new apartment, but it hadn’t moved in three or four days, and anybody could steer around it or could sit on it, for example the liquor deliveryman, while waiting for the elevator, which seemed to Larry too small for the couch even if they took the roof off; and this little guy Ford’s friend with the big eyes and a huge charge of dark-haired energy sat there waiting for the elevator or something like Napoleon on hold, but he had had a fight with Ford North, and Larry had learned from Grace that this strange little dancer-type gay guy who wrote music was probably going to be in her first Men’s (Nude) Workshop. And if Larry had any outside obstacles (not his own) to dropping all this obstacle (well, not course, but) hunt, he had no objections to their leaving him (alone, that is — that is, alone with his new-type friends). So Larry knew that there was a lot going down, but he had not been inclined to reach for the phone (like, to call Mayn, who was back). Mayn had gone to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Washington at a hell of a time, when Amy had been missing and Larry had had an insinuating call from a son of a bitch who asked if Larry had the phone number where Mayn’s daughter was staying, and Larry had had a dumb inkling, like a gentle dopy looping boomerang that came back to him, that the caller already knew the phone number.

The new plug-in instrument (in addition to the kitchen wall-phone) seldom rang, but when it did, it felt in its off-key tinkle like the middle of the night: which it lately had been, for his mother Susan phoned him once at midnight, he told Donald — and once at three-seventeen a.m. in red on his clock radio — in tears, wondering how Larry was (so he said, Are you awake? the very words Amy had said when she called to ask when Mayn was coming back and if Larry knew if Mayn knew this guy Spence and a messenger named Gustave part of a strange group of retarded messengers Spence was said to employ in connection with a warehouse-theater over on the West Side) — Sue’s call and her words and her tears were light years from that Larry’s gotta get laid crap in front of other people, Grace Kimball’s friends many like healthy-looking TV-commercial actors/actresses, none into marriage though some still in it, lots of eye-contact friendliness boo-buoying up a confidence training itself by supporting others-others-others, some of these folk in training to see who can be most trim-line, most "up," most free of habit patterns but confusing when they called work "addiction" and love likewise, and listen, quaaludes were definitely not the same thing and less like love than like heroin, O.K.? so Larry held to his small corner of history, of conviction, surprised that never in the dark of her Major Life Change (though Marv had always done dishes, some cooking, shopped for food, bartered money for forage after hunting down the money in hill and valley), never had she plugged into the available jack of probability circuit in order to imagine that her son upon the Person, Object, though no Obstacle ("Treat me like a piece of meat, Larry!") of Diane of Port Adams already had lost his virginity (if of guys it be so called), for he had given it and to himself as much as to Diane of the Visine-rinsed eye whites and mouth and eye sockets relaxed into soft stone, Diane of the slow tongue and of the shopping-center shortcut when they all lived in Port Adams — while Susan where she was with the Other or ‘‘Great Spirit" she’s trial-living with seemed for the moment to be doing all the dishes and cooking — simultaneously apologized for waking him up, it didn’t sound like her and not because it was three-seventeen till his red L.E.D.s turned three-eighteen, she didn’t sound like that toughie she used to be, but oh the luxury of having this extra ear against his and being able, through the bedside plug-in, to turn on either side or on his back, to curl up or down (curving his whole reception of the voice so it became part of him), it made other people only as important as they were, not more: unless you gave in to them so you let yourself think about waiting for them to phone, which if he had done with his mother (who was still a strong mother through these flowing, glistening, misting tears, but he might just not say that kind of thing because) it would be understood as pigeonholing women into vulnerable, weak, etcetera, which wasn’t what he was feeling at all!

And while receiving feedback from Donald Dooley on reincarnation as arising out of crisis in your life when the void opening in front of you could outguess you if you put yourself into it so you found you were more than one person which was O.K. and scary and creative, Larry went on savoring the dream of the names, savoring even some reach within the nest of them to a next he didn’t quite get his head around where he was subject of a prediction.

Donald agreed that the evolutionary reincarnation ensued through social history as a whole, not in literal reappearance of souls in new forms they had earned or longed for — speaking gently, slowly as if knowing that Larry had something wonderful and troubling to continue with. But savoring Donald’s words and friendly manner, Lar’ wanted to detour around reincarnation, and not because he savored the dream of names: from Martin (which was one letter off his father’s and the closest but really far away from his father’s self) to Angel (a Puerto Rican name in all probability), Lar’ comprehended a nest of dreams coming up out of good ground bearing more messages than he had regular time for or light to see by, and these included his dad’s own name, which had proved upon waking no substitute for his dad’s presence standing under the shower so quiet inside the falling water, bending his head and curving his whole contentment along the path of the steam iron ironing some shirt of his (he didn’t iron Larry’s, and neither did Lar’!).

So when the phone rang, Larry saw he had been slipping away from Donald, yet was it because Reincarnation of which un branch was Simultaneous Reincarnation (S.R.) threatened Larry? No big deal because Jim Mayn looked forward to Lar’s definitive formulation in good heart and faith and a good casual smile lay between them and related to the possibility of breakthrough vis a vis S.R.; yet it was in the air, and Kimball breathed S.R. in and out and Mayn did not oppose research into it, and there’d been this near-dream involving Larry in it as target of a prediction, and somehow shit S.R. in its theoretical warp seems playing into the wilderness of those older people’s lives full-up with dejd vu (see recent scientific studies of) cum painful recollection cum should-haves and shouldn’t-haves etcetera so heavy all in all and wall to wall with after-lives that come to think of It they are downright abstract, and Larry doesn’t just now want these people’s sympathy and the strings attached, or even praise, specially for his no doubt epochal concepts. Nor wants to even, like, explain that he’ll settle for the mainland-Chinese lady sitting on the phone books.

And let Mayn muse in the night taxi that the noted man whom Amy gal-Friday’d for — where research might well cover surveillance — at the foundation, continued still, upwards of four years after the final manned Moon shot, to be mixed up with a hustler whom Mayn would like to throttle who even Mayn the world’s (according to him) least-prone-to-lurid-plot-speculation-much-less-conspiracy-peddling of "current historians" is coming to believe may now be engineering news without quite knowing it in order to make a buck out of being there when the lightning strikes; and let Mayn muse that he felt he might be indirectly responsible for the death of a fellow journalist in Chile in 1963—Mayn’s great to know, etcetera, but this morning Larry thinks he would never have moved back into that apartment where Mayn and his family had lived even if Mayn did have some co-oping deal with the landlord (according to Lar’s father) plus Lar’ knew of Mayn’s daughter-inspired interest in a landlord syndicate’s link with insurance groups, O.K., O.K. already— Larry would frankly rather listen to Donald Dooley reveal how tobacco firms borrow great sums from insurance groups in return for soft-pedaling cancer when approaching that mass of client-insurees who matter too deeply to their insurers to be asked to worry about the mysterious workings of inflation or cell play: and if, for an awful moment right out of some poetry that Lar’ had read in high school, a shadow passes Between, an unembodied smile, deja-vu’ing weeks-ancient words of the Dreaded Modulus that People (not just) Matter, People aRe Matter, till as — quite far from Lar’s dad Marv’s 1940s sexista ^RU/18 (‘less dey raise de age) — R turns into (and therefore equals) =, the wind, with perhaps that secret curve attributed to it in an "off-the-wall family discussion" Jim Mayn half-recalled from "outer space or outer something," bore Larry toward the phone a la part slippage from Donald via daydream warmed by abstraction, part Donald’s fulsome conceptualism (where one sentence became an oration) since his girlfriend was coming over but it wasn’t Donald’s but Larry’s abstract and traced not by D.’s word-content but only by his voice-print though Larry knew Donald was taking off on some of Larry’s guarded remarks on reincarnation being Now and a matter of crisis and a void that opened in front of you that you filled before you hit it, in his opinion, and as Lar’ rose to go for the phone and heard D.D. say wine was good unless he had some Cuerva and saw gratefully the particular Chinese woman of four nights ago sitting on three phone books with covers ripped off, her gray wool socks puffed by her plump feet out of her slippers, he had to speak and hardly knew what he was fast saying (or, rather, why) between the first ring and the second: "Look, my mother is living with another woman out on the Island, and I was freaked out about it underneath all this insane fucking Open Marriage BiSexual Cool that’s going around, you know, but I didn’t know who to talk to but now I’m freaked out that she isn’t happy and probably wants to get back with my father but I didn’t see why they split in the first place but now I don’t feel good about them getting back together." He was moving out of the room toward the kitchen, looking back not at the plug-in phone but at Donald, who was nodding and smiling and saying, "You’ve had a lot to deal with, man, but it’s all right, you know? it’s all right. It’s all cool. Let it go."

We gotta get outa here, Lar’ thought — a piece of him out there beams back but not so fast as light to its old spot in his shoulder-neck-tension field finding in its place there a living-breathing eye{\), wait, an eye in his newly relaxed neck-and-shoulder area? as he concentrated it became an all-purpose heart (up there) and in touch with feelings though others’ (don’t please try to explain it!) as fast as light, attractive as somebody else, and charged with such communicative volts it flares the contradictory decadence of the would-be returning weak piece into one a billion times less weak as if to take the measure of—

"I think I just saw my father’s death—" Phone ring again before he seize (about to sneeze). . " — but it didn’t look like him."

‘That’s heavy, Larry," said Donald Dooley from the bedroom, "but—" Way ahead of him, Larry took the call and sneezed beyond it, receiving in return a current of nothings sidestepping him as they came at him and flowed by, while the voices in the ear-mike of the receiver were not the Chinese woman in the shop who was as real and there as D.D. or D.D.’s girlfriend approaching through the City — or the raspberry on Mayn’s cheekbone acquired in an uptown police station the night he got home and he told Lar’ about it, O.K., O.K., but meanwhile here’s this phone call, ‘n. .

"God bless," interjects the quieter edge of man’s formality like an interruption before he has begun, though opening upon (what?) marriage? for the courteously strong foreground voice is heard against a woman’s in the background, oh along the waves of a whole life strung out behind him not just accented like his but speaking in Spanish, so Larry, who’s (a big piece of his Body-Self) light yards back in bedroom with new friend Dooley, is hardly into this call and picks up from this female background a hysterical "curva" something, and a moment later (curva what?) amongst all the other words a highly dramatic "curvadura" (it sounds like), the man meanwhile calmly asking if he may speak to James Mayn "eef hee ees theyr": and here it is again, this living web that’s nought to do with Lar’ who’s anyhow so far from it back with new friend Donald the noise level rising behind the Spanish-accent man comes down over Lar’ too as if it’s a hood over his heart beamed to Donald’s voluble hands with which he talks, but fuck it’s this outer crisis again, this living maybe even breathing web Lar’s let go (man) & doesn’t matter if Lar’ turn out on someone else’s breakdown to be, unbeknownst to him, an employee of this courteous Spanish-accented gentleman, Lar’s having his own crisis, and he names himself (Larry Shearson) at this distance of curve and of letting go and of courtesy and asks if Mayn gave the man this number, and the man’s voice with hassle or anxiety skipping a breath tells clearly the truth that he found it on a pad on his secretary’s desk with another number and Mayn’s name (Let’s get outa here, Let’s get outa here!): but sure enough the intrigue of these older people’s lives is nipping through the screen or something, and Lar’s own crisis you can’t put an equals to or formula, its task though is To Be Real — yes, with new friends and the ordinary stuff like the random Chinese woman on the ragged phone books, O.K.? "Sorry to trouble you," the man has said. "No trouble," said Larry. But the man went on: "Everyone has trouble." So Larry: "But not everyone takes it." And the foreign man, who has turned into his sound, is answering strangely (Ah is this the young man who has understood a strange pattern of reappearance, interhemispheric reappearance? — a young woman of the Spanish-accented gentleman’s acquaintance reported she heard this from the man Mayn himself), while Larry, sidestepping whatever trap this is, coming at him with the woman weeping in the charged background and carrying on (curvadura, he’s sure he hears but it’s another woman’s voice there), and Larry’ll see this cluster not on old two screens but (shrug) one, he knows that the curve (not Rail’s economic graph line or some part of the body) having left him has taken some spinoff force decaying off his Let-it-go into Let’s get outa here:

(who cares?

both true—

hey Don!

that you?)

And Larry hears and smells motley clothes skin-deep laying another’s matter on him (dig that! another is mattering him — so what if it’s the current moon we’re passing through or period we live and light and have our We in)? and another’s bent brain, like potential, arrowing through his own (Nothing to write home about, we want to emphasize, but…) and Lar’ has wordlessly and in an instant said No to this alter embodiment, toward which "a piece of him" has got Curve-slung, like look no matter how much People Matter (which can be a drag on an off-day), nor R matter in the poor but earfelt phone pulses that they become in order to get reconstituted at the long end of the line by the in-house soul attached to the ear, like this Curve itself that is not so on its own since let go by Lar’ to find other articulate host-solids to Be through that it decays in-continentally into that old We, muttering or would-be mattering some refraction where Larry just now isn’t, "If P R M, when, as ever, MRM, then maybe P R P" (People R People — where R for Rotation that here means "Rotationally Activate oR Turn To" — embracing also the sense of "get cracking" — oR "Turn Mo" or for that matter "Equal" — read also "Will Be"): yet, jettisoned by Larry along with its sometime-angel-fleshed ever-lonely-abstract Curve, this communal breakthru is lost on the aforementioned bluebird waiting for its fencepost which, cut from osage orange and not knowing it could serve as a feeding station, has gone in search of aforementioned crow lost on the Spence or Person the Curve bends into:

Who is both called up and unknown by that faithful gap Larry shares with the Chilean economist, whom Larry, making a minor mental note hanging up the phone and wondering if that sound was Don and why Don did not answer, has to like and whose secretary (the Amy he is supposed to be getting over, having never kissed more than her lips) would never let herself be called "secretary":

and this Person (turned to and from Crow, let’s stick with that), like a third phone-party though not talking at the moment to this extended son of the man Mayn he Spence most watched (until very recently) or to the distinguished exile the Curve now recalls he has hounded on business since shortly before they met at a Moon shot four years ago, stands before himself in an office with a full-length mirror sniffing still the odor of his serious and funny and tough messenger’s silver paint, his own strangely (for he’s never been able to do anything about it like his orphanhood) sandy face — yes, sandy— lit up by the desk lamp near him and returned to him by the mirror and by the smiling frown he also conveys into the phone as he works his way (they really both know) around the resistance of this woman Dina West with "a family" (he said) in Albuquerque (So what? she said) and a husband running a radio station, only to himself skid up short round the bend half past ("Hey, here’s another Dina I didn’t know!"). ("You didn’t know me at all, Mr. Spence") ("Oh I mean I know you’re in the Indian Youth Council water-rights litigation and all—") ("Well, that’s slightly inaccurate, Mr. Spence") (" — and I gather you’ve had a few things to say to the Interior people but you turn out to be as environmentalist-oriented as Mayn’s little girl" — ) bent on documenting what she thinks Spence already knows ("Well, don’t you?" Dina West asks) from having scanned those many pages Flick Mayn turned in to her father while Dina West hears a man she imagines insecurely contemplating his technique or himself ("Oh hell, lady, I’m standing here in a nothing old office looking at myself in a full-length mirror and if you want to believe I know what’s in Flick Mayn’s document, I can’t stop you, ma’am").

Hearing a scream of tires at his end and the gunning of an engine right afterward, she asked what it was (adding, "Oh we’re just talking, it’s just words"), and Spence said, Business as usual; and she said, You are in the business of information, and he, I’m getting out of it and go settle in the West, run me a boots-and-tack shop someplace small, maybe manage a supermarket; she said she hardly believed him and he said he hadn’t known about that supermarket or the boot shop till he had said the words.

There, she said, you see? but she caught at a gentleness they both felt in her vowel, and she said, I’m sick of city phoning, I’m all phoned out, I want to talk to you face to face. Who had she been speaking with on the phone, he asked, that is since she had brought it up, and in the moment of her being nonplused by his "move," she brought up his strange charge of four or five days ago, four or five? the City made her lose track, did he even know what he was making up? she asked — Collusion? he asked, and their voices met beyond them, seemingly beyond any concrete shape of line or spark of arc—He knew what she meant, she said, oh she needed to talk face to face, she hadn’t even known what National Technical Means Capability was when he accused her of teaming with Mayn’s daughter whom she didn’t even really know against O.K. her least favorite company at least in the West, that was destroying land and life.

What? he asked, she never heard of NTM? She knew about it now, she said. More than she used to, he bet ("Long-range satellite photography," she said angrily, "laser eavesdropping," she said, "sophisticated earthquake devices," she said, "God knows what they’ve dreamed up" — "But you know what it’s all/or," he said) — and she knew, she added, more calmly and with more assurance, that it didn’t much work except the earthquake-sensing stuff her husband said was better than nothing. Spence said he had thought her husband was involved in this, and she said, Couldn’t they meet face to face? it was important to her, and Spence said it was no skin off his nose if she and the Mayn girl were into exposing this destroyer of landscape as being also indirectly in the NTM hardware business as part of a long-term commitment to missile network in the western states, but this wasn’t what he was most concerned about.

She paused and said could they meet, could he come to her hotel? she would pay for his cab; he said O.K. she come to him, the corner up from where he was right now. Good, she said, and by the way, did he know somebody named Santee? — so they both felt they were suddenly looking at each other yet with something new between. Why yes he did (he sneezed and she did not say God bless you — Paint smell, he said) name of a part-Sioux he had had business dealings with — may have been part Ojibway too. She had never heard of that. Oh he had heard of some Creeks mixing it up a little. With what other tribes? she asked in his pause. He didn’t — oh he had heard it from someone. Who? she asked. Some hitch-hiker, he thought. Which hitchhiker? she asked (like a woman).

This guy was a professional.

He was? she said — I feel I’ve heard of him (and they both believed for a moment that she had).

Spence didn’t say anything, and they heard the phone line, which was there but nothing to speak of. All right, she said, if it wasn’t the missile trade he was concerned about, what was he concerned about? Survival, Spence said — but, he added, how about the mountain? All right, the mountain, what about it? she said with slight finality — did he mean the mountain she’s heard about here or the same one maybe that somehow she forgot she had heard the rumors of back home before she left? she’s getting talkative (Oh don’t say that, said Spence softly), the mountain that had some mineral resource that affected people near it, some said (she said) a mountain that was on the move, hidden by what was inside it. Did she come east looking for it? Spence joked; he had learned that some type of trace radiation had been picked up near a cemetery in New Jersey, but there was something going on right here in Manhattan and even closer than that — ask her friend Mayn — hard to know just why Dina West had come to New York, but had she brought her family with her?

Are you implying I came to see Jim? You really do look for trouble, she said. A surviving observer was all, he returned. More than an observer, she said; where had he learned about Mayn’s family. Oh, Mayn and he went way back, said Spence, long before the daughter knew the difference between bedtime stories and fact, fertilizer and explosive, before she knew the real Indians out there from that Prince who came a cropper. Well Mr. Spence I don’t know your ins and outs but if you knew how he was murdered, you must have found out the same way Sarah’s father did, and he was amazed at what she knew.

All I said was he came a cropper, said Spence, who knew what they both did — that each wanted something from the other, and they were just missing.

I been slightly acquainted with him for years, said Spence.

The Masons and the global network (was it weather stations or Masonic societies?), and the weatherman’s German relative in Chile and—

Oh there are still Masons in Chile, said Spence, and one of them is under house arrest.

You couldn’t resist saying that, but I don’t know what it means, it’s unreal to me, but I have to talk to you face to face, Mr. Spence. I feel you’re dangerous, to yourself anyway. I feel you’re right in my mind right now; I didn’t know it till I said it.

Just waiting to see, he said.

You’re probably not as bad as I heard, she said.

Spence identified his corner she was to bring the cab to, and he gave her directions. She asked him, before she got off the phone, who Harflex was, and he said, hesitantly, that he didn’t know, so they both knew that he had it back there somewhere but not quite on tap.

Well, you phoned me, Spence said, I didn’t phone you. She replied that he had phoned her two times at her hotel when she had arrived in New York.

Once, said Spence. Twice, she said; the second to have breakfast the message said.

You sure that wasn’t a phone call you made to Mayn?

A Mr. Spence phoned twice, she said.

Sounds like you didn’t bring your family, he said.

What do you know about my family? she said, and hung up, though doubtless en route to a Manhattan cab. The phone rang and rang, stopped, then started up again.

Spence, on the pavement, and Senora Wing, decked in platinum opaque sunglasses as she emerged from the entrance to the warehouse-theater, seemed to catch each other simultaneously; they liked each other’s embodiments but not each other, which was suddenly now clear to each as he looked to his left only to find her as she pulled back the operating half of the old steel double-door and stepped forth into the bright, gray day. "You knew I was going to be here," she called; "I feel it." "I do now," he said. "You’ve been in here" (she tossed her head indicating the building she had come out of), "so you know." "Know what?" "I’m almost in the play," she said, "the opera. It’s destined." "What’s destined?" he asked, rotating his wrist to check his watch; he took a tooled-silver money clip from his jacket pocket and looked at his bills and returned it, and she touched a curl at her temple as if he should have understood something.

"Is the messenger still working for you?" "He was never working for me." "You make problems for yourself; anyway, he is not in the same place any more." "Oh is that where he is?" said Spence, and they both laughed. "You don’t know what you doing," Senora Wing said seriously, and she shook her head as if it were only her eyes and it was light she had to dislodge from between her and him. "I used to know," he said; "do you know the name of the old lady who comes around your place with that old guy?" "Does she have a name?" Senora Wing asked.

Spence followed some glint of her glasses and knew as he did so that the Chilean intelligence officer in, today, beneath his open overcoat, gray pinstripe, purple flower in the buttonhole (cum soft-looking black boots) was known to them both and that she knew this, too. He was crossing the street in their direction, and Spence stepped to Senora Wing’s side and asked, "Did the old guy ever call her Sarah?" "You would be amazed at what she knows," said Senora Wing, "for a nuts old lady."

The Chilean gentleman paused at the corner and deposited what looked like a sealed letter in an ashcan and then inspected the can’s contents. "You want me to ask you what you mean by that or forget it?" Spence asked. "Did you want to avoid me?" Senora Wing said, and they were both keeping an eye on the man at the corner. "I didn’t know you would be coming out of here," Spence said—"you always meet the ones you want to avoid, and it’s O.K." "Are you looking over my shoulder behind me?" she asked. "Yes, I was, there, for a second, I thought the door was opening again, it was in my head, an optical illusion." "Of course," said Senora Wing. "You make trouble for yourself," Spence said; "is your sister in there, too?" "You make trouble for jowrself." "That’s where we’re all coming from," Spence said, and Senora Wing, as he sidled around so his back was to the approaching Chilean, said, "You didn’t know you was going to say that, did you." "That’s right." "You going around in circles, Spence? What’s your business in here? you know these people doing the opera?" "You’re on the crest of something, Wing, you’re not just getting into the Off-Off-Midtown theater." They both felt the surprise coming before it came out of Senora Wing’s glitter-illuminated mouth: "That old lady told Goodie and Baddie she liked to see them fight because they didn’t hurt each other and she would always be their friend if she could come and watch, and they said they would remember. And she told them she knew of two brothers who carried messages from their mother and their father separately and stole them and never got caught. But they must never tell the people inside what she had said; and they didn’t until Goodie told Turnstein, who isn’t their real father, and Baddie told the old lady who told the old man right then and there, who got mad as hell and said that that was a long time ago in another state and Turnstein was sure the old lady knew about his freaks ripping off one of the clients and maybe she have second sight, who knows?"

The Chilean gentleman was upon them as a cab drew up on the northwest corner, the very curb where the wastebasket stood. There were two people in the cab, a man with a burnished face at the window glinting against the light from the day and the few drops of rain roaming in a light breeze. "She has a mole on her jaw," said Spence, and the Chilean bent abruptly past them as if to just turn in time, and inclined his handsome face so the whole curve of his behavior joined the two of them.

"I know the woman in that cab and so do you," said Senora Wing. "She came for a consultation and she asked if I knew where she could find you— it was wonderful how she knew I knew you."

The Chilean entered the warehouse and the door banged behind him. "Where were you headed?" Spence asked. "Where were you headed?" Wing returned. Spence nodded at the heavy metal door. Wing said, as up at the corner the taxi door opened, "The West woman asked if you had a brother and I said I did not know you but maybe I knew your brother."

Spence hauled on the door. "I don’t have a brother that I ever heard of." "The West woman said she didn’t believe in such powers but she asked if I thought you might be brothers though I didn’t know the two of you." "Who was the man?" Spence asked, and the City touched him in a way that drew him away from the words passing between him and this highly colored figure who was no fortuneteller he was sure, as he was sure also that he was carried along by a track or current he had tried to figure out so that now he was less himself but only like being a whole lot more than he had been for years and years of mere motion. The cab could be ten yards or a hundred yards away. "The man’s name is Mayn, and he is interested in that old couple, too, but it is the man he is interested in, I think." Spence started across the threshold, and Senora Wing said, "They’re not getting out after all." Spence left her without a word.

At the top of the dark entry stairs where the wide, old corridor that would serve as a lobby went away to the left into the dusk of dim music and voices, a child was holding her bike. "Can you ride that bike?" he asked. "Yes. I learned in the park," the little Puerto Rican girl said. "You’re a long way from the park," he said, but the child said, "No, it’s over there," and she pointed at the stairs with a grand motion and brought her hand back gently bending to smooth one of her dark braids. "How old are you?" he asked. "Seven," she said, looking at him. "Do you ride in the streets out here?" "No, there’s too much traffic; I’m not supposed to. We go on the sidewalk and we ride in the park." "Who are you waiting for?" he asked. "My uncle," said the little girl. Rising on the far pedal, a girl’s bike, she eased back onto her saddle as she rode away down the glimmering corridor. One of the doors to the theater opened, with a sudden argument of voices, and she seemed to almost decide to ride right through but a tall young man in a khaki army jacket came through and when she didn’t brake he grabbed her handlebars and laughed, "Hey, baby." Without a word she turned her bike and came back toward Spence, who thought he was recognized and thought that in some way he would know this sauntering, cool guy. The little girl braked and stepped forward onto the floor. "How old are you?" she asked. "I don’t know," said Spence. "Are you a hundred?" "Amy," said her uncle. "No," said Spence, "I’m not a hundred, but you’re a smart girl, can you count to a hundred?" "She talks a lot," the other man said, and picking up the bike by the frame under the saddle with one hand, he took the little girl by the hand and they went down the stairs, but the little girl said, "I can carry it. Efrain! I can carry it."

The man Talca, or de Talca, was in one of the last rows, intimate of the great lady singing onstage with another woman and a large man Spence knew as Ford North. Spence and Talca became aware of each other at once, and Spence’s dangerous contact (though hardly then releasing some curl of sight that he left in motion adrift for Spence to worry about as the diva stopped and said, "I keep hearing Otello" laughed, said "Good!" and resumed) might have been sweeping the small "orchestra" with a cool hand to say to Spence, Certain people are not here:

the exile economist, for one, was not here, whose wife was particular friend to Talca’s lover onstage turning and walking away now from the big man North as if to leave with him what she had just finished singing while the composer himself was at the piano half-singing with them; and some other figure was not here:

but here Spence and Talca parted company and both felt it at a moment when Luisa turned back, like that gracious lady mayor with a white feather in her piled hair ordering a planeload of snow flown down from Nueva York for her island waifs just beginning to get wind of P.R. liberation — and Luisa sang so gladly to the audience or at least Talca if not the big man North or the tall, ghostly black girl who was in the scene too,

You ask the matter but you have forgot,

Forgot me in my inmost part which part

Is yours, yours, too

(and repeating this song so gladly) that the hammering notes of big North being nasty and the thin black singer singing high high above them seemed not to touch her and Talca’s head swayed until Talca rose to come back to Spence, a standing-room character in this give-and-take, and then she did respond to North, who half drew his sword and they acted like they would like to kill each other though singing all the time, as Talca arrived and the black singer sang

I have remembrances of yours I long

So long had longed to exchange for you

That now it feels I long have longed to re-deliver them

while North seemed to sing at both of them, left right left right,

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt then sunlight doth move

and more words that Talca (or de Talca) and Spence hardly heard:

for involved with each other even for the moments when Talca strode to a small door and disappeared and a toilet flushed instantly and he instantly returned to where Spence stood gazing at the stage, they were communicating almost too fast, like actors (though as if over each other’s shoulders) before the words like lyrics against the enthusiastic pianist-composer’s music even started uttering themselves:

Why have you followed me here? To see that Puerto Rican con who just left?

You know I like the music.

You don’t know a Fedora from a—

His name is Efrain, that’s all I know about him and his little niece was in the hall riding her bike.

He has been seen with our "friend." So what is the connection?

The prison, maybe. Which friend?

The one who is not here, said de Talca as if not to say the name.

Hortensa, the aura reader, is not here, said Spence.

Wing’s sister?

She is friends with Clara.

Who is not here either. Nor our "friend."

Oh you mean her husband.

Your client, yes. Ah, you thought I meant—

So you’re the one who got hold of that communication whatever it was.

Ah, Spence, were you there ahead of me? perhaps waiting in the Mayn wastebasket with the other shit?

I guess I haven’t had to since I’ve known you, Talca.

Quite right. Right on the button. I was intentionally rude.

Deals are deals, Talca. It doesn’t matter.

Of course. It is not a matter of style with you, Spence, you are fed up with your client the economist and you and I have interests in common anyway, your side of which I do not inquire about.

I have a wastebasket, too.

You are one, Spence. Look, I grant you the letter in question—

It sounded like more than a letter. There’s a lot between Mayn and his daughter.

Obviously, and so I will grant you the letter—

Grant me? Maybe you mean something different in your own language.

I know you speak Spanish, Spence, and we must speak it sometime if you like but what I am saying is that I grant you that I have seen the letter, O.K.? or at least the longhand draft of it; and our mutual interests will be served if you will amplify for me what is said there concerning the woman Mayga Rojas Rodriguez: you knew her when she was lobbying copper but in reality promoting Frei’s presidential future. Mayn’s young friend, how much does he know?

I may not know much, but the music is beautiful, Talca.

I can only guess all that is in your head, Spence. The music is excellent, and strangely familiar. The work is not some merefolie that North is letting his boyfriend show off; and Lady Luisa is not herself, she is waiting for something to happen. Preparation is all, as the poet says.

And you are waiting. .?

O.K., I am going back to my seat in a second: we know the letter Mayn wrote to his daughter, I at least the longhand draft. But Spence, you must tell me where are the diaries of this corrupt clan of invert begetters?

Marion Hugo Mayne you mean? The legendary Chapultepec encounter with the girl who looked like a boy.

Marion Hugo Mayne I mean. Information relating Mayga’s death to the Masons.

Talca, next thing you’ll be relating her death to the famous false ring finger Jackson had to put up with after that blood-ritual game in upper New York.

Spence, even you who do not matter may be in danger, because if this entertainingly mythical mountain approaching is code talk for an attempt on a South American President’s life by Cuban elements posing as anti-Castroist—

Is there such a thing as a South American President?

— then we have to weigh the meaning even of some presumptuous Indian’s rumored prophecy that a friend of Mayn’s, possibly young, possibly gifted, will die for discovering a non-lethal radioactivity that enables one to be two people at the same time and in two different places and then apparently the two can become one just like that, because with the educational system here in the United States, such future-madness may just be possible.

If Mayga’s death is related to the Masons, said Spence against the rise of the passionate piano, it could be related to you, Talca, as easily as to Mayn, because there’s plenty of Masons down in your corner of the hemisphere. Yes, the more I think of it. . yes.

What do you mean "yes"? It is obvious from the letter and evidently from other "effluent" documents that certain Masonic order secrets connected with an engraved pistol Mayn’s grandfather and others before him kept safe from Indians who needed it for something and sought it may explain not only the origin of their family newspaper designed to promote Andrew Jackson but the death of the woman Mayga—

— I was there when he heard, said Spence—

— in ‘63, I believe—

— she went off a cliff near Valparaiso harbor—

— while walking with a well-known German-American printing magnate named Morgen connected on his mother’s side to an Alsatian mathematician whose solutions yielded designs instrumental in the development of Chilean railroads but also formulae bearing on other matters and connected on his father’s side to a Communist printer protected by Marion Hugo Mayne after he ran off with Masonic secrets and threatened to expose them.

The Anglo-Indian blood rite in northwest New York State was not ridiculous, said Spence.

The Masons interest us only insofar as—

Your family had some Masons in it, said Spence. Like Luisa’s.

The piano had stopped, the tiny woman Lincoln was onstage with an electric drill, the singers had been shouting at each other and now Luisa called to the rear of the orchestra, "Will you please be here or not be here, I am doing this, this, Opera perdida chilena because you urged me—"

‘ 7," said Ford North with a deep frown that projected far beyond the house lights, ‘7 urged you, my princess, my priestess, my—"

"— please to discuss your business outside the theater."

De Talca raised a hand and tilted his head in humoring apology and turned to Spence, who had stepped back as if to go, as another hassle ensued onstage with words uttered so richly they sounded sung, and at this, other lyrics came back to mind that had been actually sung during the interchange between Spence and his client, but whether Spanish or other, Spence, flickeringly alone, could not tell, while the bright sword of the big man came out again and he made a pass at the curtain and the pianist became engaged in a three-way argument repeating what sounded like desde Menal (the pianist saying it; Luisa saying it perhaps first; North saying it) — while through all this Talca turned and turned a bit too slowly to Spence and—

Do not speak of my family, Spence.

I don’t spend my time in wastebaskets, Talca.

Which reminds me of one last thing: what do you know about these crossed initials?

I’m a free-lance photo-journalist.

Did you photograph the prison break? You know the man Foley or he knows you, and he predicted the break.

He dreamt it probably, said Spence.

He said he was in touch with the Nos Otros (is it two words?) and that’s how he knew. Is it true the child is being hidden in Mayn’s building?

You know more than I know, Talca. I don’t know any Nosotros.

You came up with very little information altogether, Spence.

I’m waiting for something to happen.

Will it be here? said Talca. What has it to do with these… are they people, these initials?—S.R.s up-and-down and across, and O.G., L.S., P.M. (maybe afternoon?), and other abbreviations or initials. Who is O.G., who is D.M.? if they go backward, too, it is a whole new ballgame. M.R.M. may be M. H. Mayne. And S.R. abuts upon O. at one point.

I don’t know any S.R.O., said Spence. What did they mean by desde Mena?

Oh Spence, you don’t know Fedora on a bike from Louise with a pot au feu on the stove and her father dying. S.R.O. is Standing Room Only.

Talca turned contemptuously toward the aisle to return to his seat and Spence said, And is it the pot you’re waiting for or is Luisa’s Masonic father dead already?

Talca paused a split second and showed his profile, and Spence heard the word insect and said, The Cuban who escaped, does Luisa know who’s got the missing kid?

Again Talca paused to show his profile and the turn carried Spence away on the sounds of lyrics he had partly heard while not paying attention; and again, after another call from Luisa to her lover, the words Spence had understood before but now in another voice harder to understand not because of accent or lower register but because of some meaning given to them by the strung-out composer-boyfriend of North’s took a moment all to themselves, Este opera perdida chilena! and, looking back once more, Spence caught Talca’s angry eye; and a red-haired, red-bearded man was suddenly standing near the piano, and North at the back of the stage by a black curtain ran his sword back into the scabbard only to haul it out again like doubling its shape and stab the curtain, stab it again, half singing, half saying as he stabbed it yet again and again, "For a ducat, for a ducat, for a ducat, dear ducat, dear ducat, dear ducat," but Spence was through the door into the corridor choking on the word insect while hearing fall away from him his own familyless name.

An accelerating sanitation truck ran a light with a racing yellow cab on either side, as Spence and a good-looking woman in a fur coat were about to step off the curb, and the phone started ringing in the booth at t)iis corner and they turned to look and watch. After several rings Spence smiled and slid back the door and picked up. He shrugged and the woman turned away and stepped off the curb. "Drew a blank," he called out through the glass, and she turned to frown and smile with an intensity that seemed to surprise them both.

"He’s supposed to be here," the older woman’s voice said from the foundation office; "he has an appointment."

"Oh my God of course!" said Spence expressing cheerful surprise. "He’s meeting an old friend of mine. It’s a small world. It slipped my mind completely. An old old friend. Have you tried his apartment?"

"If he’s there he’s not answering," said the woman uncertainly.

"Well, it’s urgent," said Spence, "maybe I can track him down. Thank you so much for the information — oh, and give her my best."

In the pause, during which the woman did not ask who Spence meant, Spence said (and sounded it), "I’m breathless and I don’t have another nickel, my number here is. ." (he read it off fast as if the dial were an interruption)" — oh you don’t need to know that. ." (he laughed genuinely).

"You don’t want to speak to Mrs. Myles?"

Spence said, "It must be not having any more change. I’m saying things, you know what I mean? I mean I’m looking out the glass into the street, and there’s nothing much there and I’m saying things I didn’t really think of so there’s something there by the time you get to it, do you know what I mean? I’m sorry."

The woman said, "Strangely I think I do."

"You’re a pearl," said Spence, laughing excitedly.

The woman laughed back with affection as if it were her name instead of the person waiting to see the Chilean economist.

"Who shall I tell her said hello? I have a call on another line."

"Oh, my brother," said Spence, and laughed as if he were surprised. "God I must be in a rush. I mean Jim Mayn."

"Don’t I know your voice?" said the woman. "I don’t know him."

Spence hung up. Coming back across the street was the fine woman in the fur coat; she looked haggard as she caught Spence’s eye, a dark cut curved down her cheek like a shadowy parallel to her nose and nostril and so dark that the blood looked like it had never been bright. He went out toward her and found himself extending his arms in comfort and she did not shy away at first but stepped over so the wire trash basket was between them, yet smiled at him, but this might be because the phone started ringing somewhere at a compressed distance from the mass of traffic emerging then around them. She looked at him puzzled and leaned on the trash basket and vomited onto her hands.

Spence went and answered the phone and it was the low, resonant voice he had heard before with the definite, almost audible Mexican capability though the voice was not a Mexican’s: "Mayn, is that you?" And in his hesitation, Spence heard, "No! It’s Santee, hello, Santee. Dina West knows your twin brother named Spence (joke, eh?). So whatever happened to the technical specialist I was supposed to pick up in New Jersey that Mayn picked up, did you run across him again?"

Spence laughed and asked how Ray Vigil had found him here, though he knew.

"Or should I say Spence?" said Vigil. "Because it turns out I knew of you before we first met. So you are the Spence I heard about. Listen, I heard Santee knew where the child is."

"What are you doing there, Vigil?"

"Watching the cars go by standing in a pay booth with an empty can of grape soda on the floor and a non-reusable straw coming up out of it. Sounds pretty noisy at your end, too."

"I keep the windows open," said Spence. "Did you know this is an unlisted number?"

"The lady at the foundation gave it to me," said Vigil.

"I don’t know where the Cuban’s child is, and I don’t even know where the mother is," said Spence, and the sick woman watched him hang up the receiver.

It came to them together that they each were coming full circle, if that was ever possible, and she was in a new line of work and interested in life all over again almost, although he had never known her but he could see this was true. How had she known enough to find him? This hardly mattered. He had found her and she found him to be not the person — there on the street outside the foundation — that she had thought, from his intro, and then he told her he had heard of her through Mayn. Which was indirectly why she was in New York now from Minnesota. Hearing about her was, he said, like actually hearing one-time words of hers. What did he mean by "through Mayn"? they both wondered. Listening from the far end of a bar for years, he said. Which bar? More than one: D.C., Houston, Colorado Territory; and, right here, an Argentine joint near a saxophone store. And listening with much better ears than the guy Mayn would sometimes be talking to.

Heard so keenly that once Mayn had been heard to say he had not heard something — the last of a sentence — of hers — of Pearl Myles’s.

Which one?

Something said to Mayn’s father in a cemetery. How begun? Beginning, said Spence responding happily, that she had been "shocked to hear…"

When was that? she asked.

You were getting out of a pickup truck.

She laughed, then, as if at everything, at having thought him Brad Mayn because he mentioned learning of her presence at the far end of a phone call an hour ago and had known her instinctively when she came out of that old foundation and looked at the sky — a woman strong and inquiring, maybe five feet eleven or six feet, in a red tailored suit and a black cloth coat with collar that looked like a sexy cross between a marmalade angora cat and a fox that had outwitted all but the smartest team of Minnesota hunters (part Indian, part Anglo!), she was funny on the subject of clothes. She kept her coat on in the coffeeshop on the corner across from the mainland-Chinese clothing place— they had a window booth, she and Spence — and she told Spence what, he told her, he half-thought he had already envisioned, the camping trips she had taken near the greatest of inland seas though she had never felt the warmth of a trigger in the crease of her index finger’s second joint, while naturally she had her ups and downs though living more and more practically in the same house out there for thirty years.

Jim’s grandmother got mad as hops at her once, and Pearl felt reduced to a primal mass of jelly, the woman had this firm, Victorian charm and would sit you right down and bring out a tea tray with the biggest cozy in the world stitched with blue patterns and ask you what your pet hates were and whether your people had traveled. But in the middle of all this act of hers she had some painful trouble — maybe it was just all that character she possessed— and she would get short with you. Pearl had said once that she shared the lady’s sorrow for the death of her daughter Sarah, and she didn’t like Pearl’s saying that. Those people kept the lid on their feelings really by seeming to show them but so confidently so elegantly you know that the job didn’t get done. But the morning of that earlier day when they eventually went to the cemetery, Margaret looked like she would kiss Pearl, this relatively unknown teacher from the high school who had come uninvited to the house at a time of crisis and saw a strange light in that hall mirror coming from upstairs but from within the mirror too, and suddenly there was Margaret out of the kitchen, and Pearl Myles remembered grease on her fingers and a real leaning of the lady toward her as if to embrace her and kiss her without having met her. Pearl Myles in redecorating her home years later — in fact two years ago— had gotten so confused and fascinated by lighting that she likely had "redone" that entire time of her life, mirror and all (she laughed again). She was in Minneapolis when Margaret got sick and committed suicide some years later.

She knew the family, Spence said. Oh she remembered a low-pressure zone in her orange juice now that he mentioned it — ("it?" murmured Spence) — that day of the cemetery.

Not the funeral, said Spence.

No, it was when the younger boy had a fit of grief. And Pearl Myles heard from a local lady who had it from the father that the boys were having a crisis at home that morning and when she got there and stood by that mirror the grandmother Margaret came out with grease on her fingers and like to have kissed Pearl, the teacher, and then didn’t kiss her. Was Spence close to Jim? — but hadn’t he said he was his—? —no, she was fuddled by the city the last twenty-four hours but maybe by why she had come here, which could have been business but wasn’t, for she had not found what she needed for her home in New York or Minneapolis and so she had done the next best thing, which — she laughed — and so did Spence, funnily enough — which must sound like. .

She paused, and Spence, delightedly, said, Words, words, words!

Oh, you are a scholar, Pearl sighed ludicrously and then lifted her cup for the "Greek devil" in the white shirt and black pants to raise his eyebrows and nod to both of them.

As a matter of fact, no. Spence knew where his bread was buttered but was no scholar though if he had it to do over again he would — but did Pearl Myles know that New Jersey family well enough to know. .

Well, she had dreamt of that mirror and then put in a phone call to Mel Mayn the following morning, but. . "know" what?

If there were other. . surviving children, Spence said.

She had to wait a second and look at him. . someone had been with Spence on that phone call, and that person knew her, she had thought: but he knew her, through Jim — but who knew that she had had an appointment? — or was she imagining that? What was it, in some fatigue she did not actually experience that was in her, that screened what she was picking up? Spence knew time, and it was wonderfully slow, here. Slow enough for him to stare in a friendly way at this quite young woman of about sixty and trace a day that began in a pay booth near Mayn’s home calling the Chilean economist at his, turned away to Turnstein & Wing’s where there was no Wing, sloped upward to the office rejected by Jimmy Banks where Dina West had tried to give a little hell over the phone, and wound up variously here, north of Mayn’s but suddenly closer to that New Jersey town with the code name than to the Chinese shop across the street. He told Pearl Myles that he understood time now, and she put the back of her hand on the cold glass of the window and said that now she understood what she had been feeling a moment or two before. And that he had changed jobs, too. He said he wouldn’t say that. But they watched each other and turned, as one, to see an Asiatic woman come out of the Chinese shop, change her mind, and go back in, and they had a quick, quiet laugh about that. Pearl Myles inquired how he knew the Chilean economist and Spence replied that they had a mutual interest in an American company’s actions in Chile.

But it was this family he was into.

Oh yes.

And as to surviving children, he knew of course, didn’t he, that the brother Brad was an illegitimate love-babe by another, but had grown up as Mel’s beloved son; they got along. Spence knew this. But she hadn’t thought about them for years, but something rubs off. Oh yes, said Spence, he himself had been insulted earlier today by a man who—another Chilean—

Oh yes, she had heard of him (as if there were only two in New York!).

— who Spence thought had called him an insect though the word might have been "insult" (Spence an "insult"), but we ask for these things, hit our head up against a stone wall in order to get somewhere and find that we thought we were only observing but were much more than that. Pearl knew what he meant and asked him if he had been to the Statue of Liberty but he hadn’t. He asked if she knew Spanish, and she said New York really was like this, with people running into each other and then talking without any actual reason to begin with. Spence thought there was real value in it, he had found a part-Sioux businessman in the Utah desert and they had discussed the commercial possibilities of a nondescript bush only to learn in the course of what turned into a whole night that they were brothers in knowledge if not in blood, that each knew of a woman named Manuel who had healed with the balm of this desert bush’s pod a Salt Lake City Mason who spoke Japanese so synergetically (Pearl smiled and smiled and nodded rapidly) that he had grown to sometimes look Japanese though very brief-spoken. And before the night was done, Spence had forgotten both the "bush" business and a legendary pistol that had been his original reason for meeting this part-Sioux-part-Mormon carpenter-businessman Santee. However, Santee then found that Spence knew both that the Japanese-speaking Mason had been killed for guessing in his own very medication and recuperation the link between that dry bush and the oil of whales, and that the famed botanist with rock-oriented corrugations on his bike wheels, who had been modestly mutilated by a father-son team of saguaro-cactus exploiters very likely responsible as well for the Jap Mason’s death, was loving colleague to an itinerant Chilean zoologist-woman who at the top end of a ladder once cast the famed double Moon, like a destiny, on a handgun that later could not stay in one place and that Santee-Sioux’s grandfather who somewhat earlier had almost certainly carried it across the Plains to the Rockies had always said there was a thing in that pistol strangely hard to find, so precious in value as to be, like what the South Africans call "future platinum" or the southern Indians of Argen-Chile "wise silver," the true unit of value.

Mena! exclaimed Pearl Myles and Santee-Sioux (in Spence’s voice) simultaneously, and Spence had added "from that musical family" a split-instant before Pearl Myles added that that Santee was cousin to an Ojibway who was why she thought she was in New York, certainly not to buy a giant thousand-dollar lamp designed by Alvar Aalto with tiers like a fir tree (wonderful in its way, too).

They waited, knowing that this was the Soon through which they would come to be silent in some other way. It sloped gently through both their minds — as if they didn’t need to worry about it because the slope was the thing and in charge — that they were drawing near to one another because something quite beyond them was the matter, and the matter even in a good way. Let the world’s interrogations go on outside this big pane of street glass, go on and on; and for a moment she told him how her husband had been very young when she married him and they were both affectionately (or something) repressed, or (you know) shy and were just right for each other, really cared for each other sexually, and when he hadn’t wanted to share her with a child she got nauseated with sex and felt guilty at denying him, well they really enjoyed it but she couldn’t help herself. Years later, neither of them was so repressed but it didn’t help. Spence said he thought she had skipped something in there but he wondered if something like all that had happened with his parents. She asked why. He didn’t know.

A fury came through him, she told him.

(On the way somewhere else, he thought.) He said, What?

Yes, through his shoulders — shoulders like magnets, did he know that? Sure, sure, he knew that. Well, she was going to leave him two phone numbers where she could be reached. Yes, through — through — through — all the many thongs of cowhide fringe ready to move, underneath that hair of his, she said.

They shook their heads laughing skeptically, while sunlight slid away and came back (via speeded-up dawn). On the way where? she said — now why did I say a fool thing like that? (I know, he said.) (You’ve got my number, she said, a bit intimately.) Buffalo hide, please, he said, and, glancing at his watch, pressed the date button.

They talked some more, but she said he wanted to ask about something and he said it wasn’t what it would have been if he hadn’t run into her.

And how it happened didn’t matter, she added, and he nodded as if he had added it, which by running into her he partly had. How old was he? she asked, and he didn’t know and used to think it didn’t matter, and then uncomfortably asked, Which Ojibway was Santee-Sioux a cousin to? and she said only some faraway part of him cared, which was true (though he understood out of next to no experience at all that it sounded like a New York woman), and he tried to crack a joke, Are there any more surviving Ojibway cousins? but she said, Ojibvva; but why had he asked about surviving Mayn offspring? she had to know.

They looked away from one another, the long-time Minnesota woman in appearance as executive as her current physical position coat-on, boothed, and windowed, was more visitor, her companion as sandy-faced a buckskin-fringed itinerantly ageless trader as a hinterlandsman could imagine erroneously was no New Yorker, and they saw the Chinese woman leave the shop across the street listening to her companion eagerly talking. I think I know that woman she’s with, said Spence. She’s got a baseball cap on, said Pearl. Pirates, said Spence. You don’t make it sound like urgent news, said Pearl Myles. It probably is, said Spence, but I feel like I’ve never seen her in the flesh, and he leaned back in his booth, placing his fingers on the table, but finding not a keyboard but only Pearl in front of him.

She was asking for it but nonetheless said, Well, was this one of those rare moments in life or were they two doing business or about to? He said she had asked him how old he was and who were his people and he didn’t know, they might as well be Californians who introduced whales to the Great Salt Lake. She hadn’t asked him who his people were but thinking they were the whale people or they were a last-century private meteorologist of New York who dreamt of a new weather and then passed on his dream like the Good Advice a Bolivian-general client of Spence’s had had from his own assassin-to-be and swimming-pool contractor, namely "Pass it on," took Spence sort of out of himself like when this lady across the table from him had seen, she said, one day that she would make up her own lighting for her house, having found nothing that did the trick on either side of the Mississippi.

Presently, the Devil stood at their table frowning at them with deepest attention and with no other customer in sight — a large-straight line in their peripheral vision, an example, though of what? of recent Greek immigration?

Pearl said that when Spence’s client the Chilean economist and she had talked he had said Spence was a New Yorker from way back and he had praised Spence.

Too far back, said Spence — so far back his mother and father merged in the distance.

When Pearl and the Chilean economist had first talked—

On the phone?

Yes, long distance. He was friendly but it was tense for him.

Well, you know his situation, said Spence and then smiled at some awkwardness they both may have understood.

O.K., said Spence deeply enough to be noticed, why had she phoned him? And Pearl wondered out loud if he wanted to get into this and when he said, Sure, it gave them both pause, and like a couple of lovers she said he had been after something else she thought — further surviving offspring of the Mayn family. Why had she phoned the Chilean all the way from Minnesota? Spence asked, but— Oh, he had phoned her, she reported. This is some nightmare, he smiled as if unused to speak or think of nightmares, etcetera, plus the fact he had to be in two other places right now.

How did he have your number? Spence asked. Oh, such things could be explained, was the answer. As easy, he in turn asked, as turning away from where you were focusing and bending over backwards to be friendly only to find you were being pulled this way and that back into what for years you hadn’t known you didn’t want to be in any more? but—

You poor thing, she said, I heard you were the smartest. He just made her remember giving Mel’s father-in-law two phone numbers of hers the day of Margaret’s funeral.

But Spence didn’t know what he was doing here; he was supposed to be at least two other places by now, and Pearl Myles smiled and said he was not free to go, and the Greek pillar withdrew as if temporarily.

And if there were more Mayn offspring, where did they come from, and when?

Well, Spence had always said he was only an observer and now knew for sure he was being turned this way and that in the course of — but someone would throw you a curve if you asked for it, and the issue of further Mayn offspring was what Spence suddenly had come to think he had been sent to settle through some obstacle course of all these years, and now he really did have to go, if Pearl would only let him (they both smiled). For she, she said, had gotten drawn all over again into those strangely silly circles of—

— of news, Spence abruptly and sadly said, and they laughed again, discovering each other again as if this scene would pass the whole afternoon and turn it into evening.

Yes, of news — that doubtless he knew she had worked in and around for years, telling high schoolers about vigil sidebars (—what’s a vigil sidebar? asked Spence) and contributing items by the dozen here and there, and eventually her marriage busted up, she added for some reason. But she had known of the Ojibwa named Santee—

— she hadn’t said he was called Santee—

— because in other days she had been drawn far enough into the—

— isn’t it funny, interrupted Spence again (as the Greek proved again to be standing at their table), that in the midst of all this there are people who may get killed and it may be somebody’s doing. .

— she had to go, too, but let her just get this out: in other days she had been close enough to the Mayns to catch in passing the fact that the suicide-mother’s sister lived in Boston and was active in music as a sponsor not a performer, and feuded periodically with a very rich sponsor (Life Patron, was her category) over the matter of ticket pricing and allotment climaxed by a terrible skirmish over the matter of the Metropolitan Opera’s spring visit; so the scuttlebutt regarding the diva’s dramatic weight-loss brought to the long quiescent attention of Pearl Myles the fact that the Pride’s Crossing dowager’s son was the diva’s devoted Park Avenue G.P. lately most uncomfortably billed as a specialist in ulterior weight-loss regimes of such threatening grandeur that he was getting the wrong sort of name: but having long ago stepped out of it, Pearl had found herself back in it: in what? extended family junk or queer tragedy? endless local peacetime in a medium town or some plan that was receding out of hand but who from who? — back in it again, she recalled now going to the opera one mild night, driving in from New Jersey when the Met’s dark old barn stood southwest of the Public Library and she had a ticket from the math teacher’s sister two rows behind Sarah Mayn and her younger son, Brad, and Sarah whispered in his ear and at intermission put her arm around him, brown velvet short sleeves, and she kissed him and he stretched. And though Pearl had been out of that for so many years and lately engrossed in lighting design right down to nice clusters of hidden forty-watt bulbs, she found it all adding up again — or dividing and dividing — and one morning she found she knew that this Ojibwa healer had been enrolled at the diva’s doctor s expense in a state aeronautical program and since Minnesota is not normally a great state for New York City gossip a little goes a long way and before she knew it she—

— she was Pearl Myles High School Teacher all over again, Spence observed, who looked at his beeping wrist watch and said it hadn’t been a lost Chilean opera that night, had it? because he didn’t know anything about classical music, and suddenly he told her that he had had the wildest nightmares all his life and he didn’t know what they meant and every time he tried to escape them they got worse—

— How would you escape a nightmare? the woman in front of him asked.

And when he made an effort to see them as concoctions of the future and lies out of the past, he would lose them, some horses, hermits, Indians, all talking and as one, plus regular people he had never met and wouldn’t know if he saw them again unless he could get these awful dreams back but they went away when he went after them and he heard them but couldn’t see them.

Because they would vanish inside of you, said his extended coffeeshop companion.

. . when he and. . and they . . knew they were waking him up in the middle of the damn night whether in the mountains of the American desert or in an underground shelter whose "government" contractor he was quietly tracing by photo-investigation to a South American operator who owned newspapers here but had faked the plane-crash death of a brother in order to establish, for corporate purposes, the originally quite dubious existence of this brother complete with jojoba-bush investments and substantial gifts to the Presbyterian world mission.

Pearl Myles said, O.K., bad dreams were dreams we asked to be affected by, and though Spence asked her what a sidebar was, she went on: she could care less where dreams came from — a brief journey across our brain from one locale to another during which an infinitesimal "flam" of daylight where the head is thin lets some part escape, and what’s left was a piece of the ideal but it wasn’t where dreams came from that mattered because anyway who really knew about ‘em, they’re scandal-ridden — and she had only her own testimony to go on, but what she could share she could be sure of, and one real effect of some dreams she had had was that she put in a phone call to Mel Mayn, for instance, though upon hearing his blunt, inquiring voice nearly unchanged after thirty years, she just blurted out that her husband who always walked with his hands clasped behind his back had left two years before which was a good thing for them both because they became instantly closer until disaster struck — when why on earth would Mr. Mayn or for that matter his son care about Pearl Myles’s married history though she had said her husband’s departure made her recall that great mother-in-law of Mel Mayn’s who on the day of Brad’s Day in the hall mirror had seemed the pillar of practically everything. But in the few weeks after her husband split, Pearl had first slept like a stone then dreamt like crazy, then commenced changing the house around till she got drawn into the lighting business.

Which erratic period — together with a dream that took her in one night to that mirror but more to the light angling into it from the small-shouldered, tall, strongly sculpted woman with the thickly stream-lined gray hair plaited and neatly and tightly bunned in the back with a small copper feather that could glint through you fearsomely and could keep you from following and maybe make you think she was with you even after she had gone back into the kitchen — brought her to phone Mel Mayn out of the blue and learn that his son Jim had phoned to ask if an unknown old-book dealer who might have pocketed a nineteenth-century Mayn-family diary had had speckled hands.

Spence pointed out that he had speckled hands, speckled with blue and amber dots patterned past ordinary freckling. The Chinese woman came back along the street and went into the shop, and Spence said in his case these bad dreams taught him how to forget, because he remembered everything else, and too much. You have to want for it to come to you, she said; and Spence said that he had not been able to wait — he couldn’t for years. He had to go. He asked if Pearl Myles was all right, and she said everyone was asking this nowadays, even in Minneapolis. Spence could not confirm this, though he had been out there. It was getting to be another Silicon Valley what with all the technological companies but without the valley, he said.

But then the phone call and its cause in the dream of Margaret lighting up that terrible mirror outside the door of the music room where Brad’s choked mourning beat the floor like some artifice or alien custom brought wonderfully back for Pearl so it could pass to old Mel yet stay with her that flimsy kite flying high in her very body four-sided now for perhaps twenty-three months but seen for the first time now with on each side dreams she had had in those days and a kite big enough for the nimbus of Ben Franklin to sit beaming inside and all she could tell Mel was this ancient silliness that she had been in a borrowed bathysphere beached but rolled by a great tide and as the water in windrows of white crests rose and a child inside her pressed upon her bladder (she hoped Spence didn’t mind) this sea-going room proved skeletal at best, its walls but windows and not closed off but striped with light like beams of darkness, so the briny deep was kept from coming in by—

The Trace Window man Spence had to see appeared incredibly on the far side of the street between the foundation and the Chinese shop, and Spence told Pearl he feared for her safety yet didn’t know entirely why.

Until, she went on, the room or light box was picked up and she was carried roughly and well aware the chair she dreamed she was sitting in and having trouble riding was obviously set off (but so what) by all the capital punishment talk then, when the point was that it switched into the next dream she told Mel Mayn where she was at the stove and literally transparent because of salt sweat and could be seen right through like a jellyfish and she was cooking up a pot of chili except her husband, who in case she sat down on his lap was sitting right behind her in part of the dream following her knife chopping peppers, was also in the next aisle under a tilted mirror because he’s a guard and the kitchen is part of this supermarket and just when she’s accused of stealing some of the vegetables she’s cooking up — for him—he is taken away and the earthquake that bursts and splits the ceilings and floors and warps the aisles seems O.K. with the customers and the most natural dimensions for them to slope along and she looked up with some nice ripe vegetables in her hand and saw the guard in the mirror holding up some robbers in the other end of the store and at the instant she learns how to stand she looks down at the warping and buckling and upheaval and it’s South America with dark-scaled armored animal or submarine pushing up everywhere. And Mel Mayn, who wrote such a brief narrow little obituary for his wife it was widely talked about, suddenly said that when she looked back up the guard had escaped, right?

Spence held up a five-dollar bill — a fin, he told the Greek, who nodded and took it, and Spence rose awkwardly from the booth. Pearl continued: Mel said he had had the same dream: escaped prisoner, salt waves, imprisoned child: and now that Pearl had had it, he knew what it meant.

Spence cautiously observed that there had been a model, green and reptilian, of the South American continent in the high school where Pearl had taught. Tears came to her eyes and she was amazed he knew, but shrugged it off. She said she had known then and there (but had not said to Mel) that dreams meant for sure only what you did as a result of them, and—

Your husband had left you by then? said Spence anxiously.

One dream before he left, one after, she was sure, but not the order; and then she did not have to ask Spence who the man was across the street because Spence knew she was thinking it. How about this young friend of Jim’s? she said.

There’s sand on the supermarket floor, a lot of it, said Spence stupidly, and his words curved gently, dumbly to hers: That’s not stupid, that’s right, that’s right, there’s sand; and I knew that the meaning of the dreams was (when no one would tell me which of the vegetables I had stolen), We’re on our own; act accordingly … but Mel Mayn saw them another way.

Spence said he was concerned for Pearl’s safety, didn’t know if it was what she had said or hadn’t. She said she never knew what that word concerned meant. He had to go. Nobody was stopping him, they both felt.

It was because of Mel Mayn that the Chilean economist had phoned Pearl and she was here. This young friend Larry? he had a theory about interhem-ispheric reappearance. .?

Spence stood waiting and the Greek waiter came and stood nearby with some change in his hand.

Well. Mel had told his son; and the next thing—

Which son?

Her old pupil Jim. And the next thing, well a day or two later, this cultivated voice with an accent was talking to her on her kitchen phone in Minneapolis asking her—

But how had the Chilean gotten Pearl’s number?

Wasn’t it easy if he had her name? Couldn’t Spence manage that? though of course he was in the racket.

Spence said quietly — out of character but into another maybe — that the object of this little coffee break had seemed for a time to be to go away from all that information into — but how had she made him talk so much? — and who was that imprisoned child? (He darted a look out the window and she knew he was out there for an instant.)

Oh a mutual acquaintance had had these dreams from Mel’s son and relayed them to the Chilean (a fellow economist, apparently, though the Chilean seemed to joke), said her receiving these dreams meant that she knew much more and—

Spence was looking down at Pearl and out the window, and asked what Mel’s escaped child had to do with it all.

Imprisoned child, said Pearl, with a laugh and a shrug. But what about this opera in the warehouse?

I’ve been pulled back in, said Spence glumly.

So have I, said Pearl Myles. Mel said my phone call meant I still questioned his wife Sarah’s death.

You do? said Spence.

Which would never have occurred to me, since I merely believe that sometimes we become the person we’ve been in the dream or always were simultaneously.

Spence thought this didn’t make clear sense but he had had a dream or two like Pearl’s and there was a We talking in some of it.

Yes, said Pearl.

The opera involved favors Spence thought three or four people were doing and what it led to was anybody’s guess, possibly unknown, but probably a feather in the cap (or someway utilized) of an opera star’s boyfriend—

Ah, Pearl had heard of him.

— but where the opera came from was getting to be another matter.

You like opera? said the Greek.

Pulled back in? asked Pearl, rising as if not to be excluded yet maybe to

go-

From where I was when I left the.rehearsal, said Spence.

You are in the opera? asked the Greek.

You were feeling something when you left that place, said Pearl, and Spence said, It’s why I’m concerned about your safety but I’ve got to go. Why do you look like you’re already in a couple of places? said Pearl — you probably know what your associate asked me over the phone as well as you know I got in touch with the Ojibwa healer Santee at the aeronautics school as soon as I learned the Park Avenue doctor had obtained a tapeworm through him.

I used to know all these things, said Spence. As recently as yesterday, in fact. I guess I have to go on being myself.

Your associate was upset underneath that pleasant sophistication of his, and he asked me if I had heard further from the Ojibwa as to the progress of his aeronautic training and if it was true someone was presenting him with a plane upon graduation.

And? said Spence.

And if certain journals of my old pupil’s family that had been taken by his brother contained information—

I am concerned for your safety, said Spence.

She asked him why, like a woman rather sternly on her own, and said he could have her phone number if he wanted it.

Because of what you are carrying in your head, said Spence.

Well, if he meant the information that had come variously to the Chilean economist — a charming, rather funny man, but in some kind of, pain, yes? — it was of a German sub that had been borrowed (or, he said, perhaps rented!) in 1945 for the escape of a thirty-year-old composer who had with her an unperformed anti-Nazi symphony with odd subject matter but a very plain message—

And it passed near the Jersey coast, said Spence. The Greek took one small step closer. Spence glanced at his watch and pressed the date button and— What’s the matter? she said — Oh either this thing is flipping afternoon today into tomorrow morning, or— Maybe you need a new battery!

— and while there is no question that she surfaced in Chile and was known to be trying in the most unselfish way imaginable to get produced a mysteriously original yet popular or somehow familiar opera partly composed by her great-grandmother, rumor now had it that the submarine had paused off the American coast to take on or let off some fugitive and had been threatened by a waterspout and disappeared but that the composer had more importantly been the great or grand niece of a legendary Chilean zoologist who had traced the scent glands of an inter-American mammal to the night habitat of a hermit-healer where she had left her mark upon a firearm later to figure in the Mayn family fortunes and that whether the reference was to her work with desert javelinas or to the opera still unperformed, there had been nothing equal to it since her day—

— since who? said Spence reaching and jamming his hand into his pocket so the Greek waiter stepped back.

Why, since Mena, said Pearl, shouldering her bag. Since Mena — the obscure sister (think I got it right) of the young symphony composer’s great-grandmother.

Desde Mena, said Spence.

This was the information you meant? said Pearl, and Spence opened his mouth to answer but could only ask what had been the opera’s strange subject matter, so that the tall and dear woman in front of him could quickly say, Mountains, mountains that could speak and think and dream and so forth, did it sound like Wagner or Berchtesgaden? certainly not New Jersey! — and still keep alive her query (This was the information you meant?): and Spence, who felt he could not see straight while Pearl Myles felt he saw her through a fearfully expanding angle, and each understood the other, told her that Jim Mayn never dreamt, whereas he, Spence, had never… but he could only let it show, not find the words, but then said, You think I may be a brother of Mayn’s.

Now I do, said Pearl. Some information is worth more.

They were going separately toward the door, feeling somewhat clothed amidst the booths. Spence asked to know why she had really looked up the Ojibway — Ojibvva, as she said — and she said it was because of her husband who had left her after an argument to do with a father’s death caused in her opinion by a retouched composite photograph of two other shots taken by a pro with the same name as the Indian healer-flyer.

At the door she bent forward slightly to kiss Spence on the cheek just where an abandoned tear stood. Yes, he would like her number, he said. The Greek nearby sighed, amused — but when she said, Here or home? and Spence/ Santee said, Home, and she named that old number, he lifted from his pocket a brittle oblong of paper with two phone numbers on it. I like a little permanence, he said. Oh my God! Margaret Mayne’s funeral! said Pearl Myles, and felt in her fingers the paper she had handed Alexander on the day of his wife’s unwanted burial.

A bookmark, said Spence, and was gone.

In the plate-glass window of the bank the two knew each other. What do you think you’re doing? you were following me, weren’t you? asked the gaunt-faced, once-murderous man in the windbreaker (suede), medium-small backpack (red), foreign cigarette burning away. I’d just given up, said Spence, you turned away from where we were supposed to meet and I’m going there anyway, I’m looking at myself to see what was wrong with me. Was? croaked T.W., exhaling as Spence turned to face him. Yes, in the eyes of the man I’m going to see I hope, said Spence. That’s his problem, said T.W.; who is he? He might have been my brother all these years, said Spence. Listen, said the man, if I got into tracking down my family, it’d be a full-time occupation. A fur tail was poking out of his backpack. T.W. pulled out two small green lozenges Spence knew to be eucalyptus from Sweden specially made for singers, and popped them into his mouth. T.W. scratched the cactus-green double lobe of his right ear. I’ve decided to believe you that you didn’t dig up that firing-squad picture yourself but got given it like you said, though how you could have thought the restaurant in Minnesota went with the Cuban firing squad I still can’t see but my father’s dead and my mother I hear got married again so who cares? Probably not even the electrician who married her.

They’re both talking low and fast along the edge of the City’s engine, their separate urgencies splayed outward from the point of a city sidewalk where passersby like blind people who knew where their lunchroom would ultimately be found parted to let them stand where they were. Well, T.W. had been still going to meet Spence up the track a ways though the track was always curving, but he had detoured after a ghost in the flesh and lost her and thought that in the crowd crossing the street he’d overshot her even with the distinctive headgear she had on and looked back and then really lost her only to find Spence. Spence said it didn’t matter now, and T.W. said he was delaying his Trace Window trip to Portland where a sadomasochistic businesswoman who’s a quarter Kwakiutl and her very young slave-husband who she’s afraid is going through some changes and causing her a load of suffering had contracted T.W. for an on-the-spot body-reading hoping to develop potential residue trace as power versus poison and had kept it secret because no one in the northwest coast believed them. Spence said he felt he had been led all day, beginning with an old person he had once thought could be Mayn’s lost mother but because of the absence in her immediate vicinity of the person Spence sought he had been slung around northward only to be diverted, detained—

T.W. likewise as a matter of fact, yessirree, on the incline all day, thanks to—

Spence too—

Don’t want to talk about it except waking up this morning a flame of daylight except not quite a flame windowed simultaneously outside and inside T.W.’s, well, thinking; and he went with it and knew he was more than a Trace Window, he was a Trace, and could have known years ago if he had talked to that halfbreed kid Ira Lee then instead of yesterday—

Spence didn’t want to hear about it, and T. W. said he knew — and Spence said it was all like something some relative had never told him — yet T.W. held Spence by the elbow so Spence felt it might go off like a pistol, yes Ira had thought T.W. was after that old double-breed Natchay-Creek Indian Uncle Willy’s things, specially the hunk of blue-red glass which curved anything you could see through it there on the porch in the black section of town with the old guy’s always-full pitcher of ice water, curved even the other "things" of Uncle Willy’s that Ira liked, the jawbone of the huge flying fish found over a thousand feet high (and dry) on a desert lookout crag cradling like a gateway or the mothering mouth of a tender tabby cat the figurine of a woman s’posedly famous who under the blue-red of the glass not only curved but sang of how far she had come to see the land—

Spence disengaged his elbow and T.W. seemed to lean away, far away, but still talking: Ira Lee therefore had never told T.W. that Uncle Willy wanted to see him and T.W. hated old folks in those days because of an old piner who scared him by jumping ten or fifteen feet right up into an old dead tree at will and took others with him, but if T.W. had really troubled to talk to Ira, T.W. now said he would have learned from Ira that that old double-breed Uncle Willy had known the redneck boy who’d been visiting his piner relations in Rompanemus Swamp to be a Trace Window because Uncle Willy, himself a Trace Window, had felt the womanculus start to vibrate to the boy’s trace waves as he approached, meaning that the boy whom he had seen once before without event must have become that ultra-rare "personal-contact" Trace through having been locked in conflict with a Trace who was under some mortal pressure from either burial grounds (and of course the cemetery was out near Rompanemus Swamp) or from demands made on him or her by another Trace afflicted with one of the original radioactive abscesses in forehead or fontanel forked in potential and spiral in spirit from origins in both Canadian-border hailstone cores and the exponential esophagus of that southern-Rockies sky-blue Pressure Snake in actuality also alternatively insect-fleshed (hence the spiral thread of the throat)—

I didn’t want to hear this, I don’t need it any more, Spence was saying, I am going to find my brother. He pressed the date button on his watch.

— if you have a brother, you have a mother, said Spence’s gauntly agitated belaborer — and so at dangerous dawn this morning came the near flame (the "flam"!) of day, a light infinitesimally cleaving the head so it felt it lined it up with many other heads, T.W. had stopped dream-hiking major arteries into endlessly hitched future and had seen that that client who had indirectly (in theory) caused T.W.’s father’s death could have been telling the truth; and seeing this, T.W. had ‘‘seen" coming out of the jean pocket of the greater Minneapolis restaurant robber with the inflamed abscess (or other) in his forehead, a highly compact black case that could have been an instant camera—

But Spence didn’t care now, he said, who had taken the picture or—

But T.W. cared, because—

You didn’t let me tell you, you wouldn’t listen to where I got the picture and your father wasn’t alive to say whether in fact he did die because of seeing you s’posedly in front of a Cuban—

Don’t get me mad, said T.W., but Spence was pointing into a moving crowd — and don’t try to distract me, said T.W.

The woman in the picture, said Spence, the woman with the cap.

Vigil, called T.W. to Spence, who had moved away — you know Vigil you used him; well, Vigil says "Wide Load" is code name for—

The Cuban woman with the baseball cap, shouted Spence but could only, now, stare at T.W. — who with scarcely an interruption was saying, — for a mountain, a mountain, and only Mayn and his daughter—

— She’s gone around the corner of that bank building, called Spence and a limousine backed onto the curb just missing him—

— and only Mayn and his daughter and maybe you know, and it’s some national mountain that moves and Vigil said "N.T.M." like I would know but he wouldn’t elaborate.

She’s there again, called Spence, stepping further back, his hand on the rear fender of the long black car.

But all I know is, said T.W., that the day I got to be what I am Jim Mayn was at crisis and they were at the burial ground but the mother wasn’t there, as everybody knew, because she was out in the ocean somewhere or lying on a beach or on a three-day train west for all anyone could be certain — and the grandmother wasn’t dead yet but someone was resting there, I know that as sure as I know that someone is going to get killed.

What do you mean you talked to Ira yesterday? said Spence, and a firetruck was on top of them suddenly and as suddenly gone, whistling up the avenue as if the avenue were a building tuning the city, so Spence moved closer — a thing was speaking through him and he was alone, and it was not a thing. What do you mean? did you go back to Windrow?

The fire siren rammed its curve onward away down the City and T.W. seemed to bend for his shoelace but he had boots on and was kneeling, the engines of all vehicles drew away from him and from Spence, drawing Spence close to what he had moments before thought to go around in order to pursue his way toward an apartment building where he now knew at least four apartments though he had been inside but two; and T.W. was on his side resting against the fixed pillow of his backpack, people stepping deftly, almost stopping deftly, over him, his head then arching a bit back to see Spence/Santee, who was suddenly with him, feeling the simple blood on T.W.’s bruised cheek, catching his latest words like finest advice: Go with it. You warned me. The gal in the cap, baseball cap. Her name is… I think it’s Nos-. . Nos- . . I did a trace, you know, on the guy in prison. Mayn knows, because I told him driving back from New Jersey. She shot me.

Spence found the dark mark on the suede windbreaker. Am I a Trace?

No, the wounded man said. You’re not a Trace. That’s O.K.

Is Brad a Trace, then?

T.W. seemed to shrug an inch or two along the pavement, and a cop appeared. Brad? murmured T.W., Brad?

He’s been shot in the back, said Spence. The cop began talking into his box.

But what was the "flam"? said Spence. That’s what it was, said T.W., sl flam; why didn’t I think of that? Specialist. Got drawn in. . but into what? Yes, said Spence: what? Yes, brother, said T.W., what did I care about that family, what did I care about a Wide Load with its own built-in. .

Built-in what? asked Spence, torn, saddened, receiving bodily what he would as soon sling away far down to the sound of the engines down the avenue though it was a mysterious shape-like "nothing" in that sound.

National. . technical. .

Means? asked Spence.

. . music. What’s in the way makes it. Mean a warehouseful, wonderful, store a Nazi symphony for a generation, what energy. .

The cop was asking Spence who T.W. was. A black boy in a tweed overcoat knelt down to watch. He wore new thick white sneakers, and he straw-sipped from a can of soda in a brown paper bag.

Nazi? said the boy.

Means anti-Nazi, ‘xcuse, murmured T.W. He took my gun, said T.W. Who took your gun? said the cop, and looked at the boy and at Spence.

Pull the fur tail, said T. W., I want you to see the. . the light’s changing, said T.W. That’s right, said the boy. It threw me a curve, said T.W. Right, said the boy. T.W. grinned: I’m already on it; see me out there?

You’re right here, said Spence.

Let’s get outa here, said T.W.

Right, said the boy.

Portland.

Right.

Don’t leave just yet, said T.W.

Spence remembered his hand on T.W.’s shoulder. National technical. . music? said Spence, as blood appeared on T.W.’s upper lip slanting into the corner of his mouth.

Nose is bleeding, said the boy. They heard the clatter and static on the cop’s box. I’m dying, said T.W. I’m flush up against it.

A smell of scent came down and an elderly woman with chapped, rouged lips bent down: You’re not going to die, she said.

It’s only way I could see what was going on, said T.W. Such a waste. Made trouble for myself. Pull the fur tail.

The black boy reached for it and the cop told him Don’t touch it.

What waste? asked Spence.

We’re the same, said T.W. wearily.

Same what? said Spence looking back over his shoulder.

People, Santee, people. You’re out there someplace, aren’t you?

Yeah. That’s it. Are you the one who found the new reincarnation?

Up against it. Asked for it. Flush up against it. Drew me in so I can be just this one person, but drew me in so I buzzed right through it. Or around it, too: I can’t tell.

Who is the Chinese woman? said Spence.

She got the kid.

What’s his name? said the cop, and Spence looked up and said, T.W.; and T.W. murmured methodically, Thomas Winwooley. Of the Mayo Win-wooleys.

And where’s the mountain? said Spence; does Mayn know?

Can’t imagine being anyone else no more. Oh the load on top of the mountain might just be a lost anchor.

The mountain? said Spence, sorry for himself. He looked back across the intersection and saw a familiar broad-shouldered man with thick gray hair watching from across the intersection and rose and took a step or two and raised his hand. A cab came by, over there, scarcely stopping, and when it passed on, still seemingly empty (though the light turned its inside opaque), the man was gone. Maybe Mayn was still going to be at his apartment, but Spence did not check the date again, he had lost a day somewhere along the line.

What did he say? said Spence, turning back.

Mega death, said the cop, who had a mustache. Mega death. Do you know what that is? Do you know him? Do you know what he was talking about? Mega? What’s mega?

Spence reached and pulled the fur tail. T.W. seemed out of it. The cop told Spence, Don’t. . but the fur tail came all the way and attached to the end was a figurine of a woman. She had an owl face and she looked whittled, as if the wood had gone to stone. Spence gripped it. We’re buddies, he said to the cop. This thing belongs to both of us.

The boy looked up at the cop and back at Spence.

A cab pulled up in front of Mayn’s apartment building and Mayn came out with a young woman with thick, dark hair who had on a sailor’s peajacket and bluejeans. Mayn reached for the cab door and opened it, but the woman was talking to him; he answered her, throwing out his hand in some gesture; she grabbed his arm and went close to him, talking fiercely; she got into the cab and could not pull the door shut because he was holding the handle; he got into the cab and closed the door, and the cab pulled away from the curb and stopped at once. The door opened and Mayn’s arm could be seen and then his trousered leg, but his shoe never reached the street. He withdrew his leg and the door closed, and the cab accelerated to make the light, and as the cab passed him, Spence raised his arm and by coincidence or kindred force, the familiar man in the cab turned away from his evidently intense conversation and caught Spence’s eye, and Spence continued in the direction of Mayn’s building.

The knot of his mother Sue’s Knuckle (he knew it was her fine knuckle as if he could see it miles away) on the phone instrument at her end of the line spoke to the Eye so newly established in Larry’s shoulder-to-neck field. It had been established by reciprocal Weak Force slung out of another context yesterday though it seemed only half an hour ago, a context out there that he hated to think might be a coordinate system. And slung from distances so meaninglessly much greater (equal to these other distances, say from here to Long Island or to Donald Dooley’s girlfriend’s apartment find or Amy’s foundation, etcetera, or the place from which the Chilean guy who’s friend to Mayn possibly had phoned, equal distances all, like light in theory) that Larry half wearily yet sniffing some change knew would be tied in with the other discovered systems and forces, and he was determined to either make these discoveries go from him or make himself go from them. Meanwhile, she was telling him she loved him, his mother was, and he was seeing so clearly, against the sporadic down-the-hall, next-room voice of Donald as if D.D. thought Lar’ was still there, his mother and her friend (her mother? her daughter?) massaging each other and talking late into the night, and he was just bottomline bored with all that, and here she was seriously wondering what it would be like to come back to him and Marv. Marv, Lar’ knew, thought he didn’t want that any more, and Larry tried to find words to speak that would be between saying nothing and saying something and only succeeded in knowing that, parallel to her out-loud words, this messaging of her Knuckle to his Eye (though an earlike Eye) newly situated in his shoulder-to-neck field, proved again the Differential Telepathy whereby, even against Lar’s determined refusal of a future in it and other recent discoveries, voiceless communication over no matter what size area between unlike body-parts (as from shoulder blade to instep, or heart to hand, or ear to intestine or thigh, or, here, knuckle to eye) joined the two persons via the most extreme experience of each body part or organ in question so the memory became the power, i.e., of being winged or of so mutually taking one another’s life that a new one arose elsewhere or of caring to hear another’s circulation poured into your own without knowing if’t be ichor or terminal toxin. And while, on this phone with new friend D.D. now pausing in his speech in next room, Larry had his mother down his ear, up his brain, congruizing his personal body-envelope like that plode-plast invented in one of his bad dreams that’s tucked like a rubber into a wallet and when set off by hostile touch of mugger-thief as he takes your wallet blows up into plode-plastic head-and-torso-hugger to neutralize the mugger thus encased and threatened with suffocation — until he was able to not only be joined to his mother by mutual memory of friendly fisticuffs at bedtime when he was eight, with mutual heartfelt bloody noses, but could thus separate from her and say, "Try going with it, Mom, I don’t know how I feel about your coming back and I can’t speak for Marv, y’know," while simultaneously seeing that sure he wanted her back but in an earlier time that he had access to only in dreams and not at this present spiraling end of conversations bridging two days with D.D. and girlfriend who had come and gone and might come back and conversations that in an almost sexual way felt like negotiations in the real world plus being in the best cool sense warm. "Darling, I said some things to you I shouldn’t have." "I know, Mom, but I wasn’t a virgin, then, and that wasn’t what I was threatened by." "You weren’t?" "I can’t explain. I’m still going through it." "If you need someone to talk to, darling." "I’ve got some people." He had to say goodbye and said he was sorry in order to get off the line and also away from this uselessly intense Differential Telepathy he’d as soon forget about much less take credit for discovering when no doubt the guy Mayn knew in prison and half a dozen other transponders around the infinite network clinging to the Earth’s made-to-measure finite sphere-cozy of a surface had already figured out what anyway Lar’ would leave even to his well-after-all-pretty-down-to-earth older friend Mayn and/or Mayn’s smart, young if science-oriented girlfriend in favor of being more real, via new friends, via regular existence, even not too economical if need be, and via, too, that Chinese woman sitting on three old phone books knitting (or was she sewing?) in the Chinese shop after hours, so ordinary and routine she might be a youngish grandmother, she was Just There, thinking about the work she’s doing, planning on a snack before bed, on some television, on whatever small matters mattered to her and that Larry loved without knowing.

Meanwhile, if such a new friend as Donald Dooley (cum, or not-cum girlfriend) might intellectualize at length upon genetic engineering, weather modification, seismic surveillance of nuclear tests, and taking the measure of Earth and its chains (food chain, profit-tradeoffs chain, crisis-intuiting chain, et al.), Lar’ nonetheless felt from these new folk who mattered in his life their physical nearness, their waiting energy of concern in terms of concentrically expanding small-scale self-help vis a vis total-global — their moment-by-moment, particle-by-particle evolution in Spontaneous Creative Faith — an experience coined by a woman writer apparently so important he had heard her quoted without ever being named.

But back in Lar’s room D.D. proved to be reading a poem or poems aloud and talking to it, or them, or the poet; yet talking to Larry too, it might seem, who, on reentry, said that that was his mother, his "ma," and it had been heavy. D.D. shook his head smiling and said, "Cut the tie if you can’t loosen it," and asked if she ever played music to him when he was a child because Mira played the piano in the evenings, like Schumann stuff and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Chopin, nothing heavy or loud, music to unwind to. Larry said sure he knew what Donald was talking about, and he hoped to hear Mira play, and Donald threw out his brown-bearded chin, "Say ‘when,’ Larry, just say the word." Larry said if we got it together globally we might not need dreams in the future and when asleep we might just hear music. But not cut-rate prescription, courtesy of Big Brother, put in D.D. — No, Lar’ went on, hearing the door buzzer go, more like a fantastic waterfall flowing out of the mountains of the right brain into the— Was Lar’ going to answer that? — Lar’ said he didn’t want to — but D.D. said it might be Mira and stood up and left the room, Lar’ saying, Sorry—"It’s O.K., it’s O.K., I know where you’re coming from," he heard his new friend quietly say. Lar’ went to look at the book of his that D.D. had picked up and put down, and on that page was a poem of D. H. Lawrence Lar’ had never seen and didn’t know Lawrence wrote poetry, "Piano" it was called and was about a woman softly singing to you, but at a glance it wasn’t just about that and probably when you got past that, you found it was about — but Lar’ got just as far as "betrays" when D.D. came back, looking puzzled. "Must have had the wrong door, got a glimpse of his back and his hair, then he went out of sight from your peephole, should I have opened the door and—" but Larry said No, it was O.K., though if it was someone off the street the doorman should have buzzed but maybe they did buzz the right apartment. Donald was telling how he and Mira had the whole floor, where they were, and it was good space but too much, and this older guy he had run into at the college told him he had moved back into a pad he had lived in years ago (Hey maybe it’s a friend of mine, he did that, said Larry) and someone had stacked it full of junk (—Same thing, said Lar’), couple three statues of women, y’know, and a rusted-out drill press and some other useless machines and he discovered while he was clearing all this shit out and thinking, Is it worth it? and is this junk telling me the place doesn’t want me? that it was his own body he was. . (Getting in touch with? said Larry — No, said D.D. — Looking for? said Larry — Well, . —Looking to find, said Larry; unearthing, he added; it almost sounds weird enough to be my friend; there was a weird bust of some woman he didn’t know where it came from, and a busted machine with a lot of small functions he didn’t have a clue about and gave it to the super or the doorman but they threw it out, but this was different because he had kept control of the apartment during the time he had been living in other places after his marriage broke up and his wife and kids moved away). . "Right," said D.D., staring at Larry’s photo of Sequoya: this guy was pretty interesting, he had been around the country a dozen times and had slept in many rooms and once was sure he himself was the person in the next room yelling in his sleep (You know it does sound like my friend but he doesn’t dream and never did)—"O.K., O.K.," said D.D. trying to reach the point, "because then he woke up, y’see, and the person next door was a woman (he’d only dreamt she was a man yelling) and she wasn’t asleep at all but being given the third degree by a man you could hardly hear until it got very quiet and then the man started yelling" and this guy D.D. had run into right outside Eco class and. . and. . (What? said Larry). . "and I hardly ever saw him again," said D.D., puzzled and staring preoccupied at Sequoya. "But you had quite a rap for just first meeting him, you know." "Well, he said that he felt incredibly empty like he was surrounded by nothing and he went back to sleep in that room and dreamt he was burnt to an ash, a perfect ash facsimile of himself and woke up and was afraid to move for fear he would crumble and had a shipyard foreman he had to go interview about his work when he was really looking into some smuggling racket he had heard was using dry dock work as a cover for unloading, and he was lying in bed ("Strange, it could almost be this friend of mine," said Larry) — and he knew then and there that it would be good for him to live with somebody, like maybe a family, and as soon as he said that to himself he felt really together and jumped out of bed and knew it was impossible, he could never find anyone nor could bring himself to do it, but ("Did he ever find his body in all the junk in that other apartment?" said Larry, unsure of his own empathy for whatever’s happening right now with D.D., who said:) He really dreamt that, but he knew it had happened in the past and it made him go buy a horse and stable it in New Jersey, he didn’t have a clue why although he had ridden in the West now and then."

"He’s one of those missing persons," said Larry, wanting to go out and look through the peephole." "That’s right," said Donald Dooley, "can’t afford to have them turn up because they’re living your life and you didn’t know it." "Didn’t want to know it," said Larry, and left the room because D.D. was about to discover Simultaneous Reincarnation. "God, we can’t stay off reincarnation," called D.D. as Larry strode to the front door and, through the peephole, saw an ageless man in the outer hallway in a (best) western-style fringe jacket and bluejeans and a ponytail at his age, standing next to Ford North’s giant couch but not like waiting for the elevator: Larry imagined the Chinese woman jumping down off her phone books, removing one to look up a number, putting water on to boil, sitting down again on two phone books, saying hello as he entered her store to turn away from a street full of parallels trying to turn into people where this man in the hall by the elevator was, say, Mayn reincarnate but not because Mayn was dead and returned for we had here (5.R.) Simultaneous Reincarnation like the two screens of truth that, on his previous bike, Larry had reached by descrambling Mayn’s informations about some future existence in a very real torus-shaped libration-point space station and his conviction that his grandmother had done a number of peculiar and heroic things out West as someone else, a princess or something, plus much more information that when Lar’ had descrambled it yielded theory weeks ago, and Larry felt it wearing him down and bothering his very existence as the man out there moved from the couch to ring Ford North’s bell, and like a body of light went up close in case North’s peephole was open so Lar’ himself, riding some curve of (call it) relativity away from his new friend and the Chinese woman so he might be in danger of — and Mayn’s voice, on the topic of his romance, came into Lar’s body — of standing in someone else’s place. So keep away from being inhabited by that curve. Oh how (but Lar’ knew the answer) could we be simultaneously incarnate elsewhere (he tried to wipe from his head, returning now to D.D.).

"I thought he was coming on to me," said D.D., "he walked with me the first time — I don’t think you were in class, because Rail read your name off, and this guy asked what we were studying in class and whether there was good interaction and what type of fellow students we had, so he could have been looking for someone else."

And the second time D.D. had run into this guy was just last week near D.D. and Mira’s space and he said he had never been to college but had dreamt of D.D. finding a new home and asked if he had any friends at college who would be interested in horseback riding in New Jersey in, actually, the vicinity of a good undisturbed cemetery, and though this drew a blank, it turned out friend D.D. and this guy shared an interest in the relation of Earth chemistry to sudden layer changes in weather and D.D. had mentioned Larry as a likely contact for this guy ("He sounds like my friend Mayn," said Lar’, "heavy-set with gray hair, wears the business suit" — "Not the same guy," said D.D.) — and he asked if we were into any secret societies at college such as the antique hand-gun sect in Texas or the — come to think of it — Masonic offshoot he had heard of that seeks a lost degree of radioactive effect that divides people into two without their knowing it and — ("I think someone’s at the door," said Larry, "the buzzer doesn’t always work" — the Chinese woman was on her phone books, the weird guy in the hall was just stepping into the elevator and the light was still green, the man D.D. described was right out of Mayn, and Lar’ had to deafen himself to what was to come, a reversal economy by which two people then became one, although if Mayn never dreamt, how could he, this rational guy, find himself so sure of his presence in the workaday future of an Earth-Moon system? the Chinese woman was a random particular, Lar’ loved her, she was remote even from our after-all-quite-real smelling-of-ginger-grass (in a green bottle) Amy, who worked at the foundation in the same block as the Chinese woman, and the threat of abstraction wasn’t just abstract, there’s a memory maybe Lar’ needs to dream up that puts him in danger from these tangled others—otros—and in need of new friends, he feels the encroachment again of some special relativity that corresponds to oW-fashioned reincarnation (time travel yet you come back out there not here and you’re one, not two) and feeling drawn to new people because people matter but, by turns, are matter drawing seemingly him toward them as if they were empty chance landscaped pathwise (fuck gravity), he knows what he after all did not (so well) know, that people are the obstacles we choose and by a system that is always double we are inclined toward these obstacles in order by some last-second correction like multiple-reentry of missiles to veer away around them at risk yet with awful chance, too, if we can find the way in to the risk of our lives, of tricking our old computers into passing right through, the way a medicine man Mayn joked of made his death an event horizon of new obstacle, which brings Lar’ so close to a threat to his life that he is back in company with Donald Dooley before almost either one knows it, and Larry knows now that the man D.D. reports knowing is of or in or from Mayn.

"So he was going out to N.J. to a town where they tell direction by the nature of the wind rather than the wind by direction, and winds have natures not compass prongs, he had to do some digging he said, some final digging, he said, and I said, You a newspaperman? and he said, More a photographer, and he was looking for some old Indian who had turned into a new species of weather in order to avoid being — yes! by God there it is! to avoid reincarnating as—"

"Please don’t," said Larry, "that was the Indian who made a prediction a hundred years ago that could fall on my head, I have to keep some stuff out of my head, Don, you got to help me but I can’t tell you what it is, though I will say that even if General Relativity does confirm Obstacle Geometry, I would rather pretend at least that General Relativity won’t help us understand local events, like life, for instance."

"Get your head out of here," said D.D., "especially if your mother’s freaking back when you’ve accepted her leaving. Anyway things aren’t always relative."

"What do you mean?" asked Larry, but the phone was ringing and he hated this need he had for privacy, and he rushed to the far phone yet it kept ringing (no doubt accented, no doubt demanding to know from him what he knew or had worked out, demanding surely some particular thing that then turned into events already going on in the hall by launch-elevator and opera-star couch) still ringing of course because in the curve or his small piece of it he had been abstracted once more to the front door which was not ringing, and in the peephole he saw only what he could not afford to believe was there, and D.D. was calling, Do you want I should answer it? while Lar’ saw also that these outer people were extremely dangerous like the embodiment of that tensor geometry of, really, Time which made Obstacle Geometry law but law he must leave to Time to work out, for the Chinese woman he had so treasured was there in the peephole approaching Ford North’s door with a very small non-Oriental child, and she had a key, and Larry rushed back to his room as the phone stopped (but not, blessedly, picked up by D.D.): "What did that guy look like?" asked Larry, leaning against the door jamb. "What’s it matter?" said D.D. "The main thing is you could help yourself." "Yes, I could do that." "Me and Mira got more space than we need, we got enough for three, or even four, depending — and the place is designed with plenty of acoustical privacy — and we need a share to swing the rent. So how about moving in with us? We discussed it, and Mira thinks you’re great… I mean…"

Larry’s heart stopped for a moment. Life accelerated, but he had felt that for quite a while, y’know. Life seemed as dangerous as finding what tensor may plot the obstacle curve of the heart and other interweaving parallels; and he said, "I want to, I really want to; but my father might need me and. .

I want to but I want to think about it." "Sure." "I might talk to a friend about it." "Sure." "This friend is upstairs, she runs these workshops." "Sure," said D.D.; "we like want to get somebody by next week, so there’s time." "I think I might not," said Larry, "but I really have to think about it."

And for an instant of nebulous future containing all the new people Larry would meet, with their strange but no doubt often familiar names, the eyes of Sequoya upon him as they had been upon that last-century relative of Mayn’ s who took the photo and recorded his travels told Larry he might economize and find the basic unit of value and that here at the edge, full circle but jogged up a notch, he might throw his light into the void and whether the void we had encircled with a kind of pseudo spiral went upward or downward, he need not worry about his light coming back to him.