Women and Men

BETWEEN US: A BREATHER TOWARD THE END

We already recall what has just happened.

But these events left in their stead a light which is our faith that we have enough to go on even in the face of awful interrogation as to how many things can be meant at the same time on the point of the torturer’s pin.

Have we not teamed in research of one solution to two or more problems? Like, how People slope around Obstacles may prove how they’ll sometimes go right through them. If so, we may find ourselves explaining at one blow or, if it is the next to last thing we do, in one breath, both the Obstacle’s power to repel approach causing refraction-detour, and the Obstacle’s power to be passed through, though this is due as well to the Obstacle penetrator’ s at least short-term understanding that since if you look at the history you find that the Obstacles we are dedicated toward can be seen to have been made by Us out of what from a parallel angle looks like the very void through which we passed in order to reach the Obstacle in question, it in turn must contain sufficient void for us to pass through it.

Yet not so much that we feel nothing.

Surprised by brotherhood maybe between Jim Mayn and him (while granting Mayn a perfectly real half-brother Brad already), Spence we already recall turned away from a sensational puzzle converging upon a less and less gay opera. But in turning Spence found himself drawn in all over again. Yet with the actual danger outside him and some inkling that everything outside was really inside, he thought to locate within him whatever still was to be unearthed on the actual site of the Windrow burial ground to judge from what the late T.W. had sensed there. One evening Spence discovered that the messengers Jimmy and Gustave were no longer using his office space. The next morning Spence decided not to redye his hair and this proved to be the same morning that the visiting (DINA) intelligence officer de Talca, suddenly the day before contemptuous of our exile-economist Mackenna as caring much less about Allende’s programs than Neruda’s history of mud and sweat and the man moving like a ship among the barley, and suddenly the day before seeming to Spence perhaps satisfied that there was no New York-based Castroist plot to kill a key Chilean leader yet seeming this morning on edge about his diva’s warehouse-opera dress rehearsal now ten short hours away, warned Spence by machine message and in Spence’s return call that, just at a time when de Talca had concluded the most risky arrangement for the release of a famous important house-arrest detainee in Santiago, a New York State prison inmate by name George, who had been friendly with the dubiously anti-Castro Cuban himself now fugitive for several days from that same New York State maximum-security prison behind whose gray concrete ramparts founded in dark-forested hills Spence himself had received more than once the fluorescent visitor’s stamp on the back of his hand, had claimed to be in contact (hardly the first time this inmate George had announced this sort of thing) — but chemical contact — with a woman named Myles who proved not only to have been telephoned by our exile Chilean economist Senor Mackenna at her home in Minneapolis and to have come at once to New York to see him this week, but had said privately that she believed she had an acquaintance in common with the Cuban woman in the baseball cap whom she had seen in fact arrested for the street-murder of Thomas Winwooley (whose initials, de Talca added, were his real name, referring apparently to geo-chemical gifts through which he contracted out as a "ray reader" to clients as far away as Seattle and as close to home as Spence himself), the Cuban woman assassin seen by Myles and others in the company of a Chinese woman with diplomatic immunity who in her turn had been seen with a child identified (by a tiny but luminous scar under one eye and by two pistols in twin holsters) as the prison fugitive’s kidnapped son; but on top of this, the woman Myles had accompanied the journalist Mayn and a young, dark-haired woman to New Jersey this morning to the same town that T.W. had apparently been sent to at least once by Spence, and a young woman had followed them in another car who was identified as the daughter of Mayn. At this mid-morning moment with the warehouse dress rehearsal but a few hours away and the Lady Luisa in a state, due to inquiries she had been subjected to that she could not discuss with de Talca, Mayn had re-emerged as a figure "in" this opera: for a Chicago mountain-climber economist on General Pinochet’s staff, originally trained as a classical trombonist and recently interrogated on his association with a homosexual meditation troop of Araucanian Indians near where de Talca had had military training, had wired from Valparaiso the news — personal and private news — that the excerpts of score that de Talca had photowired him were taken from a legendary opera score Chilean and feminist never performed in the day of its composer because of its curious re-emphases of the Hamlet story but surfacing most strangely, one brittle, brown, folded, and envelope-sheathed sheet of it, on the person of a woman dead at the bottom of a cliff near Valparaiso more than a decade ago, and of the two inscriptions, the older one read "To the healer, muchas gracias, this is yours now," the name a mere scribble, Men-something, while the fresher inscription read, "To Mayga, a lady who spoke softly in my ear goodbye, here’s ancient music from my grandmother who would have liked you — I’d like to say this came to me in a dream of the future, Jim Mayn," the handwriting verified long since from Washington.

So Spence in turn must conclude that whatever of the "traced" burial ground he might locate or unearth within him, this being furthermore the day of the night when he must be present at the Hamletin dress rehearsal, he must post-haste visit Windrow itself as if it were in reality outside him. Meanwhile, he was feeling deep inside some need to arrive at a semi-permanent home where he could hang T.W.’s fur tail with the female figurine or stub his bare toes in the middle of the night. And while having for these final days to pursue what in some way he was pursued by (including the wonderful Pearl Myles, whose marital breakup Spence knew had come after an argument over an event indirectly caused by Spence), and follow out to some provisional ending his relations with the two Chileans and several other persons with the annoying outside chance that he might already be targeted for death, given the awesome excess of data de Talca with reckless menace had poured down into the compound pulses of the phone’s ability to hit the body system’s addictive brains within brains within brains. . Spence felt — he felt, and felt he felt — in possession of enough knowledge to live out the rest of his life if only he would decipher that knowledge in him though with help he knew was near in that common consciousness (was he speaking?) that was more than community spirit yet less organized and tense than the seeming collaborations spun, for instance, from the original words he was told of the opera in question if not leading to an anti-Nazi symphony about the very mountains that went way back into the American Southwest as if the same discovery had been made six thousand miles apart, certainly involving much traveling and explosive links with the Mayn family about which Jim Mayn’s personal unconcern must have been due to some numbing process caused by the very mass of these networks that clung to the world. Spence’s hair was growing out dark again, the jojoba oil might keep his natural black hair from looking, as it always had, dyed and false, he could see it grow so terribly slowly it had a mind as much its own as many. And if Spence began to make out conversations in a bagful of voices, he could secretly think of himself as We and begin to stop caring what Mayn’s relationship was with the young hunger technologist Jean in her Village apartment apparently festooned with Native American paraphernalia, or for that matter how it had come about that Jim’s former wife Joy had never made the acquaintance of the terrific and funny Grace Kimball and her army in the days when Joy lived in that odd, large old brick apartment house built the year Marcus Jones was in Montana, we believed, or for that matter how it had {if it had) escaped the attention of de Talca and his people that one of the two men who had been with the airline executive’s journalist wife Mayga Rojas Rodriguez was named Morgen, with an e, himself related to—. . examples by the gross with a continent of earth t’bury them. . mouths all by themselves talking… or an invisible event. . yet, beyond Spence’s mere head trips, circular possibly because of the slight torque given his emerging hair by the follicle root, work to do, the old woman yakking friendly in the street near the Wing lady’s racket, and the old guy with her, who was unquestionably into meteorology and had unquestionably been visited by Mayn as if that was all there was to it.

We had learned we were a language; or was it we’d been asked to be? For questions came our way at such speed they were only implicit, such as Wie gehts? full of such problems as the uses that that language had been put to during the War, so for our part we would right out up front respond, "Say la question." We had been told or had learned we were perhaps words; or we were of all things the collision course along which larger matters tracked; or we were the "all" that proved Part to be oft greater than Whole; or if not "all," then we were the "us" {in we) so buried that we could but bear with it, for then at least if it came to light, so would we, though if not broken now and again toward parcels of life seen by bent parts of light that from another system seemed straight we when we are most turning seem, multiple by multiple, most dark as if by an anti-light.

Sometimes we imagined we didn’t know who we were, and this was sometimes in turn because when told we were angels (or, as "file ‘em"-type category, "angel" as in "vegetable" or "mineral") it came as an accusatory interrogation painfully circular could be so don’t take her serially. Yet from different direction came dual charge (1) that Light, which had theretofore been not understood, was totally devoid of rest and the energy that goes with rest (thus all up front and restless), and (2) that all the time that we didn’t know it, Light was Us (or, speech-patterned the way the late century in question sometimes couched information, What if "Light is Us?).

That there ran threads in us of Light who could question? not even an interrogator in a sequondam language-quoia whose pay don’ go as far this month because of inflation in your tight-money Chicago-school pocket-pool export reinvestment system. But when both women and men took to seeing their own trademarked thread of illumination outside themselves in Others and at the instant when they themselves (qua selves and, more deeply, quoia) felt the loss of these light threads, and, feeling this, then felt, lo! the threads of light return! (return like parents we had no less than off sprung!), . . why then a faith spread among us and evoked its supporting arguments like those ancient preliterate metal clays from which life after the fact claims to have arisen (like a smell) — and this faith threatened to prove that these threads were our collected and collectible brain. Needless to add, faith’s threatening argument relied on such jumps as dreams are laid on and such acts as belong to, say, terminal segments of their own tail that certain earth-red once-purely-Chilean lizards will jettison when stalked by the sky-blue hypnosnake of the Andes whose attention (eye and tongue in terms of snake-minutes of attention) is so drawn to these independently twitching links of lost tail that the lizard for its part makes its getaway so long as it never looks back, in our opinion. And by acts of jump such as the above, or, better said, without such acts, why should we have supposed it would be in the end a literal bomb, when it came right out of our own restless Light: a burst responding to a passing intimacy of our own contrary matter, which is almost like love except with no time to admit there’s hardly time. Only the gates that light turns to and into, dark gates the obstacles Light finds and leaves in memory which is also obstacle and gate.

We think now that we knew the why for all these things once upon a time at the beginning but then the things ensued and the reason got left. At the starting gate? asks the interrogator with his idiomatic pedantry from the next room knowing no more about the future than we except fingering his well-wired (solid-state import) Persuasion Button which inclines us to give not a double answer to one question yet neither one to two — but. . one to one, that’s it! Yet we’ve got such a staff working on this we can forget responsibility almost, there’s such a wealth of history and we are making it, and by all continually processing ourselves into one we are transcending the old outmoded individual responsibility thus not passing buck but saving it. We wanted to tell our friends that we were pregnant.

O.K., I got the point: I am only the second person you’ve told these things to. So who was the first, if it wasn’t your wife? (It’s good you had some practice!)

A journalist named Mayga Rojas Rodriguez.

The one who died, the Chilean.

I don’t know that she was mainly a journalist. She lobbied for liberal politics back home and she had some big friends who weren’t friends, and she didn’t talk about all that.

You cared about her. But go on, what kind of settlements were they? They sound quite real, routine like they’re based on mature technology.

I wouldn’t know. Yes, I guess so.

Maybe not planned out with all these sophisticated alternatives we can think about now, but when you were fourteen or fifteen the agriculture and the torus-shell stress stuff wasn’t even in Galaxy I bet.

I wouldn’t know.

I know.

I simply saw a giant silver doughnut with spokes.

You keep saying you don’t know, Jimmy. But thirteen, fourteen? that was when these daydreams began.

Who knows where they came from.

I couldn’t care less about that; but what kind of settlements were these Earth-Moon stations?

My father would say, Don’t say "kind of."

To you?

I recall him saying it to my mother, too. I mean, he was harmless, he had a weekly quota of discomfort he had to absorb from us, from my mother’s irony and so forth. But he would say, Don’t even say the noun kind by itself, because it’s always more than you honestly mean.

Now, torus shape you said.

I didn’t know the name then.

It’s been arrived-at as the best shape for the space stations. I mean mathematically. And it gives you horizons and it gives you the option of building up from small units which are more fun, instead of macro—

I don’t know if that’s true of toruses alone.

I’m sure you don’t. Your mind sneaks out, Jim.

In 1945 I didn’t know any math. I had a geometry teacher who stood up in front of the board and looked like he had lost his next-to-last friend. He used to go in to New York to the opera and would tell us about it when he walked into class in the morning with gray-green moons under his eyes.

So the doughnut came from your mother’s kitchen.

God no — it might as well have come from my wife’s.

Joy didn’t do much cooking?

No, she did it all. All except doughnuts, but that’s asking a lot. And I never asked her.

You wouldn’t dream of it.

Homemade doughnuts were out of fashion. Pop-up waffles were what validated Flick and Andrew’s Weltanschauung hold the italics. But you were making a point. I got it. But of course Joy and I talked about dreams. Like any other couple.

You are funny.

Apparently, with you.

But you can’t kid me: you didn’t dream.

Didn’t read books either, to speak of.

But you did.

You make me say funny things.

So the truth comes out: you and Joy swapped dreams, and you did dream, all those years.

Not in the least. These were dreams that all came via her.

You make her sound like they didn’t come allfrom her.

It’s where they get to that matters.

Aren’t you a smug old thinker, really.

Now, you’re sounding like a slinky vulnerable intellectual lady I met actually in Bloomsbury when I was writing a piece on English breakthroughs in waste-disposal.

I can see why your marriage didn’t last.

No, I don’t think you can.

Well, help me.

Oh, it lasted. It would have lasted longer if I had said these things to Joy instead of you.

I’d rather go back to L5 and check out the future from your daydreams and forget where they came from.

I’d just as soon retreat to us.

No, you can’t do that. You said "via," and you have to say what that means.

Some came through her from her occasional paramour, a man named Wagner, a dog I once almost cured of his habits.

Through her from him?

Some dreams she had and some he had. And they would tell them to each other, according to her. It was like her going back into her family history for the whole last year we were married, a glut of family lore, she read some old letters that had been stuck inside her father’s piano and she found she had some close relations she didn’t even know about and it was big drama for several months and took her mind off—

What about her and Wagner and their dreams?

I reckon some were made up.

Do you?

It was the use they were put to.

They were telling each other things through these dreams?

How did you know?

Maybe the gods were communicating with them.

Let’s get back to us.

Or communicating with each other.

You’re some scientist.

Was it raining upward at the pole?

I myself have no memory of that and cannot be made to confess to ever having believed it. Not even at the South Pole does it rain upward.

Amy told me—

Oh yes, you said you knew her.

— that in your grandmother’s day, when I gather she claimed to have been pursued all the way across the continent by an Indian you never told me about, they had winds that blew straight up from the ground; so why not rain?

I do recall an overhead mirror in an indoor pool someone took us to in New York once. I went off the high board and thought what if I spring high enough to reach the pool in the ceiling, there were these huge oblong panes of tarnished mirror-glass. Later I entertained some daydream of very-low-gravity swimming pools.

In your space doughnut?

What’s more it can’t be held against me.

You spoke to me of Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer, one night at Cape Kennedy.

That was the motel that launched us, I remember that time. You weren’t so much of an interrogator then.

I have to know things if I’m going to pray for you.

Pray or pry?

Cry for you. You remember speaking to me of Nansen?

He locked his ship into an ice floe and tried to drift up the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. Sure. Nansen.

It’s like nothing has happened since you told me that stuff.

Then there were the Norwegians who figured out weather fronts.

What is "93"? Is it the distance to the Sun in millions of miles?

No. It’s the year Nansen tried his stunt.

That isn’t quite what you said.

Well, I am subject to factual error. It’s the story of my life.

I’ll share the burden with you, Jimmy, but let’s include the mountain that compacted to next to nothing.

Let’s get back to us.

We are.

Feels more like me.

Your daughter, according to Amy—

— Amy doesn’t know my daughter—

— but works for a man who knows people your daughter does know—

Flick has traced toxic waste right into the conversation of mutual acquaintances.

Amy said Flick thinks the Indian pursuing your grandmother across the continent is a terrific putdown of native Americans and probably some old family legend.

I didn’t know she thought that. I did know that she had figured out two of the possible ways this mythical Navajo met his death.

Also, she wants to be called Sarah.

Maybe so.

You’re getting mad. Did you say Let’s get back to us?

We are.

O.K.

But we have had other curves to trace, trusting at times they would be parallel in their surprising ways like the pot calling the lid empty, or the lid we seek for our unconscious life mirroring with its dark storefront underside our incessant approach to it, uncertain if all this means People Matter or Are Matter, Are The Matter, or, by turn (potentially) of mind, first Equal (=), hence ARE (if not already Were), thus R (ARE’s real sound that hence turns back to us the (phenomenon, hence) law (of the letter) Rotation containing our now verb rotate) M — once the study of our child in the next room who went on beyond Rotation to other things, leaving us turning and turning in wonder and love at having been exposed to this multiple child, for, left alone now in a room that recalls departed tenants and so much major that by turns proves margin, we feel (or feel we feel) that, if less group-safe than Grace Kimball officially backed rape-proof group sex for being, our own group-shared discovery of a new reincarnation ensured that the Anasazi healer’s prophecy would not come true, for no one of us much less one "young person" (quote unquote) bears sole responsibility for discovering that wonderfully commonplace if mind-bent simultaneous One-into-Two, the S.R. that the Anasazi surely meant when, prior to the cloud he became, he predicted that the discovery of a new reincarnation would doom its discoverer (—though to what? for S.R. was always there) a l-screen-into-2 basis for that 2-into-l coup that might lead like Matter’s largely Rest Energy to Bad News as well as Good News, from knowing your spouse so well you might so become his attaché case or her bag and/or its absolutely familiar and known contents or, say, your spouse’s body and with it his-or-her desire to jump out of it so that at a moment’s lack of notice you’re willing to risk said spouse or spouse-hood (all the same thing) in a game of chance — all the way to, say, knowing a loved parent so ill with one power of your soul that you redo that parent inside you without first asking and wind up possibly legal tender (to recall the name of a famous Pennsylvania reincarnationist’s child) for a future transaction in which you lend yourself to that miracle witnessed by a ruddy-tan daydreaming adolescent lying bemused on his slightly sagging bed in an upstairs room of a New Jersey house whereby two regular people (maybe accustomed to twin candles at the evening dinner table) are trans-mattered (perfectly safely!) outward into Earth-Moon space arriving as one person, not two, at the destined pioneer place so as to give new sense to our question Where you coming from? and since two persons, two personalities, have become one, should not their parallel warps of past come to rest in some new time? For how do we compound a deadfall animal trap set upon a western mountain and a treehouse nailed and wedged into an eastern maple? how mingle memories of an elder voice haunting you from behind as you stare at a dismembered Statue, and an explorer’s sight-unseen fantasy of that Statue’s harbor and that harbor’s city while the identical voice warns you not to embark eastward toward that fantasy? We already remember, as if we always knew.

His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare a shadow rubbing her neck along the sinew of a sky-gray tree like others recently seen. And a smell that nearly spoke to him, spoke like mist from this curious, long silvery cloud close overhead that had materialized above him at night containing waters of light. His bed a river edge of earth, leaf mold, cold web of boughs. His fireless camp tonight alone at such distances, yet many of them all one.

At a distance now from those farmhouse doorways he had been passing. A distance no different from where he might journey another day, rain or shine. Other farmhouse doorways, maybe Virginia under the same sky, or the territory whose name of New York was heard for a generation and more among his People through the tall and talking knower named the Hermit, Hermit of New York, who had lately described with his own hands steep, cloud-high houses of rock that would be built in the city of Chicago where the East Far Eastern Princess had been and would be built soon in his own harbor home of New York, and some of rock carried from mountains down to the water, and some of rock that could be mixed like adobe out of water, bricks laid so that the walls would give with the wind like sail. So that the name of Hermit must mean him who knows and talks much. Whose voice was now near at last, and with it the territory of New York, the place which the Hermit and his ancestor had left to come to the People in the Southwest so many summers to sojourn near the mountains that could think or dream.

Mountains that had always been there, not like that other mountainous Rock called the Ship, that most men said had sailed down across the People’s desert from the northern ice lands, but with no sail now except in memory, there in the desert where the People had walked and lived and that was theirs long before it was given to them by the white men of the East. Yet, No, some said — and he heard his mother say — that Ship sailed instead from the ocean to the west. Twice she had said it in his hearing, if it was even a ship. Once he had been in the Northern Arizone with the corn-eating people, finding at first power in seeds but then receiving a command to go away, to migrate.

The farmhouse-doorway people here along this river said, "New York," and pointed the finger of an outstretched arm east or north so the hand looked like a pistol. The smell of the low silver cloud this night held the softest, most inaudible voice. Through the forest to the further curve in the river, a farmhouse doorway always was: and coming from it, and from the faces, a current: coming out and through him and back through him and into the doorways: so he would not think about it.

Faces knowing, unknowing; the constant doorway not like the People’s doors. Distant, distant; so now his bed nearer the sky; the near lumen cloud lower than the sky. His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare softly stirring. His hunger forgotten for some moments now contemplating as he never stopped doing what his hand held warmly in his buckskin pocket, the dried, strong-warped cut of tongue he had had with him since he had left his people and before: cross-section of northern bison’s tongue, while now in the night of this rich, moist territory sloping always eastward toward that ever-homing white girl who was no more the one reason for his journey than were the pistol and its designs he carried after her and some more and more bodily part of his soul, this collop of northern bison’s tongue compacted such old forces that suddenly he knew himself not just here two arms’ length above a river for the night but also far away in motion across an isthmus thinly hinging the top of this one world to that other world whence mammoth and bison came to this; and the power secretly at rest in the dried, grainy section of tongue in his pocket came out and enclosed the meat like the skin of his own knowing hand, much as the pocket of cured hide held its source, the great deer that he had so trapped with his own advancing eye that he had felt himself to be the human form of that demon-timberwolf, and he killed with his hand that great deer and opened and divided it under the afternoon and all-night eye of the mountain lion that could turn itself into a huge timberwolf, it was said. Watched closely and with understanding by the mountain lion. Not with the haste today and yesterday in the eyes that stood in the doorways here in Pennsylvania. He would stand waiting until food would be handed to him that he never looked at as he ate it. Haste in the eyes of these farmers, these people, like what came from their doorways and passed through him where he stopped, then back through him into the doorways seeming to make them close up tight again, for they did then close, and the thing that had passed out through him and back through him and into these doorways was a current that could injure him if ever he woke up to what it was, a fluctuation he did not need to know of while, at the riverbank at night, his hand upon the bison tongue with all its waiting power took him closer every time to the doubled sight of that isthmus at the top of the Earth, where the two continents could not be looked at at once unless that isthmus could be seen for what it also was — a moving, a turning from there to here, a motion, a moving which, if seen, made the mammoth and bison and the hunters with foreign seeds clinging to their leggings, frost in their eyebrows, no longer move but wait like pictures carried by this perhaps-soon-to-be-broken land from the world out behind to the world here before, one sky behind (oh quoia, he hears, or more exactly, oh quay a, or even, oh quay), and one sky before: though the Great Spirit ought to be near either sky, yet some power in the Navajo Prince’s science said No to that: the Great Father was not always near, and then it came to him that that was why he thought "Great Spirit" ‘stead of "Father." Yet if ahead, where the East Far Eastern Princess sought her home, then the Navajo Prince might take strength and faith from his own hunger: not at the door of some farmer who did not even see the true figure of the Indian in front of him (for the Prince did not see that true reflection in the eyes of the farmer) but at some longer step the Navajo Prince envisioned far further ahead than the thing hanging over him tonight was above him, the cloud lumen with some shape in it, wheel yes, but wheels, but one many-wheel, as though a ring had blossomed laddering faint vines up and down its many rounds that now the Prince might spy only if he did not look at this tower-like shape for then it would not be there but it was in the cloud, shape of some memory of withheld storm or force-to-be that he would study if the cloud would come down; and for a moment as his blue Mexican mare’s neck abrading the gray-blue body of this river-tree he might name before he left this territory tonight or tomorrow seemed to take with the briefest sound a split of bark although his horse was not hungry enough to eat bark, whatever bark might be made into as you turn bison spines into jackrabbit traps and bison feet into saddlebag buttons and into such wind handles as only the Prince knew of though he their accidental conceiver did not yet comprehend their workings, he found himself across that ancient isthmus (so brief a hinge between huge world-islands yet also so puzzlingly long), found himself in motion there if he wished to see that way just as the riverbank here in Pennsylvania night he now saw might be what moved and not the river that it thus left behind, so the cloud that almost should not be there above him alone in a sky of broken Moon moved also and with him— and, crushed once again though for the briefest moment by what lay always around him and ahead in the person of the white girl he wastefully in love pursued together though with the other things all unequal he sought too, plus the anguish that if he let himself be in that far isthmus long enough to discover what he was doing there apart from witnessing and rooting forth what he knew from his own living and dead family forked world-dividingly from that point that the Hermit of New York when he’d once heard said was just the old Bering Strait, that’s all, when the Navajo Prince knew it was a place in motion and between — he now also here in the cold eastward night knew that the split-sound he’d just heard wood-like, bark-like, was not his horse again meeting the tree that he must name before leaving, but was of another presence nearby, and that if he slept and dreamed, he might lose his horse stolen into his very dream by night to ensure that he would not recall it in the morning on this bed of eastward riverbank he so nearly rises from, in impending sleep, that he wakes with a start hearing half in half out both a questioner deep in him saying, "Eastward? which was eastward? the river, the bank, the passion-slave’s Oh quay-a head? and what means ‘broken land’ and what will he someday use this forked force for? to speak dupely and find the sky’s light in the very Earth and weigh it and wind his way into it to speak out of both sides of his tongue?" and, "half-owr" (hearing) that split-sound again and the weight, then, of two steps he felt were a woman’s (but why? was it that she should at this cold moment come back to him? but how? — did she know where he was? had she not only the power to leave him as she had done the night after the strange storm, to go away into the land alone as if never to come back, but also the power to come back to him at any time?) — while he knows that whatever happens here, someone stealing his horse or even picking his pocket of the bison tongue, he must risk being elsewhere on that far-north icebound isthmus he has only heard about and never actually seen: for there he will be able to understand what he knows he has the spirit of inside him already; and he knows this as he knew before he met and heard tell from a Zuhi outcast under a red cliff that his own already storied departure from his Navajo home in pursuit of the East Far Eastern Princess had caused his strange mother to come to life again together with the demon-raw hole in her head that shifted from forehead backward and forth, and that had closed up when she had died but opened when she had, according to the report, come again to life following her son’s sudden departure. And he hears inside him and outside the words Go away, but mixed with other words as if he is mixed with other people, who recall him in honor and remember him as man and child, and the words are here near the riverbank yet on the lips of a medicine woman speaking out of a cactus while his mother, who has tried to tell how her chronic malady came upon her, is restrained by an old woman and a young woman while the lips windowed by the head-like cactus explain for her that the Prince’s mother went walking in the mountain and saw a hunter withered suddenly to his mere skull and clothes and saw another man who told her to go away for there would be another flash hailstorm and she would be broken by those rocks of ice if not sucked away into the mountain. But these words (interrupted by the small boy’s being taken away from the sick person’s lean-to though he heard more words for a long while after that were carried to him or reached by a wind where they already existed in him) in turn have come, this night in Pennsylvania, from that immemorial isthmus the Prince, who is only a would-be knower, cleaves to a knowledge of that he seems, under the night light of the strange-smelling lumen cloud above him, to have come all this desperate way to find mixed inside himself: and these men, these hunters crossing from one world-territory to the other following the mammoth and the bison feel the brief isthmus breaking up under their strong feet—"strong man," he hears, but asks, Where are the women? and thereupon finds them tracking the brief but in some way unthinkably long isthmus, children on their backs, things in their dark hands, coming closer and closer to the men, from whom they are indistinguishable, falling back from the men as if drawn to the homes they left—"home," he hears, "Home is where one is," he hears, though the words come back to him from inside him where he has yet to go, if ever in this life, though "home" he hears as well outside him in the eastern night cold, holding still to the isthmus at the top of the two worlds breaking apart as the fur-skinned hunter people flow unconcernedly onto this world hardly looking back but he knows one man, no, one woman, no, a man and a woman near each other, turn away from each other to look back for each other and see only the isthmus dissolving into mist, reshaping all the other animals besides mammoth, bison, sheep birds of the long mountains bearing asleep in their stomachs the egg from which the whole rainbow range of most powerful snakes will uncoil upon and give motion to a heaven of new mountains and within grasses thickened by weathers not yet breathed: until this man and woman pair turn further and see each other and know it was each other they saw shaped and fluctuating and lighting up and glancing off the animal mist of the isthmus’s dissolution into sea.

But the blue mare snorted long, and the Navajo Prince who sometimes now began to think of himself as "prince" felt without looking at her off there by the tree that her neck was tense, and he felt her eyes roll, and the isthmus of the two continents withdrew before a woman’s voice: "Are you a strong man?" It was what his mother had said to him sometime after the hole had opened in her head but before it had begun to shift position. But he must hold if he could to the isthmus, or to the pair standing together on the shore of the disintegrating isthmus, who saw this developing bay of suddenly broken land, this Bering passage of mist-hung water, curve away from them, or so the Navajo Prince now in another age saw from his riverbank in 1894; and now above them all, all of them, he felt a cleft or clefts opening where the heavens dropped a channel of such light as devoured some thing in those fixed in its anchorage: so that, as he looked up—"Good heavens, there’s nothing here, why where’s your camp?" — he could see sun-risen that old hunting couple rejoined into one aim so that, with safe canyons to the south in their single mind they turned as one, turned to the south. . that is, he could see what he found he had wanted to explore in his own memory maybe set off by studying forces ripe in the bison’s dark tongue both fresh-killed in the North where his mother had secretly, wordlessly hinted he must go away as if from danger, and later dried so that the forces had compacted and withdrew into such intensely sleeping force that he heard in his taste glands their vow to sow this Earth with food that would never make the People hungry again: "Where is your home?" came the words, his mother’s when he had returned from the North convinced that in the narrowest compactions even perhaps in his very mind rested some chance of food, of trees, of health, and even unity between his own old Athabascan ancestors now the Dineh known to outsiders as Navajo, and far away where tiny fires bobbed on the water the Yahgan and the Ona peoples he knew of from an old, old man the Anasazi healer who had not healed anyone in centuries and who had chosen to die precisely when the Navajo Prince needed him yet could sit quiet and remote in thought no matter who came to ask him questions and who was honest in his knowledge, ascribing it to those who had brought it to him, in this case the irritable and thoughtful woman with hands like desert crabs, Mena, who studied (and reputedly sang to) desert javelinas as the Navajo Prince studied bisons’ bodies and who reported with such exactness she would say two different things at once and had told the Anasazi of these peoples from the South where she came from who wore no clothes part of the year and slept in the cold and rainy beech trees, though she told as well of other peoples who made feather cloaks like sand paintings and split and hacked out and ground mirrors of obsidian rock and sailed as far up as an island called Cuba and studied the heavens as well as the pods of food bushes: and again, "Where is your home?" he heard, looking up now mto the long and quite friendly lumen cloud immediately above containing, he saw, lensed widely into liquid, precisely that part of the bright Moon that was darkly missing from the sky tonight, a cloud he saw he had just plain not admitted to himself had followed him for days to pause each eastward night like a miniature sky or giant trunkless tree, or some threat of cloudburst in these regions so much more watery than his own, for in the moist messages like those columns he had pondered as a child mushrooming out at the top to tell a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, he smelt now seared metal fleshing such welcome with as well a hunter’s breakfast-taste of cornmeal cake that the distinctly communal "Oh-quaya" or, so faint was the last sound, "Oh-quay" (not unlike the "Dee Quay" he had been told was the Hermit-Inventor’s (quick) Anglo for Dineh quaya, "the People always") that came to him seemed to be out of this bright break in the lumen cloud opening a Moon-reserve he knew to be at the very least his old neighbor the Anasazi healer’s will though not his body unless his expressed wish not to be reincarnated had been ignored by those self-breathing airs into which he had given his life—"Oh quay," though, was what he heard, and it was the same secretly painful current the farmhouse doorways had passed through him showing him he now saw just how far he was along their river, yet, in the outward and returning threat of that current, telling him what he might not catch onto without losing what? some portion of his sleep? some swath of pride that went with him on the way to that East Far Eastern Princess and other inquiries and studies and explorations he bore in mind? some bottomless power in the bison-body he held in the pocket sewn of the great deer’s skin? And yet this loss — of anything, of everything — of the Anasazi’s heart-voice dropping light down through the Navajo Prince so he must turn and face the woman voice that likewise said, Oh quay, but in the question "Are you oh quay?" turn away too from the Bering Strait hunter couple with one aim now bending south seeking not just food, but not each other either — this loss that divided him like one who bleeds from two wounds far apart came at him faster than the fastest attack, suddener than the Pressure Snake that drew the sky into the mountain as the second hunter man had said — his very last words to the Prince’s mother one afternoon before the Prince was born when she had wandered away up into the mountain like a lone visitor — and the loss came at him now in the "Pennsy" night (for he heard in his head and in the knuckle of his left, free hand the land’s name thus shortened) so he knew he was watched by what he watched and by, if not the Anglo girl Margaret doubled like the Moon, doubled as Margaret and the Eastern Princess, doubled as a strong-faced woman who endlessly asked about drying vegetables for storage and about crop-planting season and rainfall, and about irrigation, and about customs of rolling in the snow for strength and birthing babies by hanging on the branch of a pine tree (and many female questions to Tall Salt and other women) and about the use of cedar for houses and dead wood for fires, and must learn to weave and must think through thoroughly the cooking of what she named "less sweet yams," the fruit of the blue yucca, and make very small circle cakes with no middle so the women laughed at them and looked through the hole — this person who was also the soft-cheeked young mother, as he imagined her, singing, "Put on your old gray bonnet with the blue ribbons on it, and we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," this foreigner who toward the end of her stay gave him the name of Prince, Navajo Prince (their private name for him he wasn’t sure he liked, though drawn possibly from the plants he taught her) and kissing him like an animal he had seen in a dream with her lower lip and upper lip separately though together many times one night upon a mesa watched by the eye of a tall, ripe old cactus, while she softened like late light so he realized how tough and strong she had been, watched as he knew he was now, months later, at his poor camp on the bank of the Juniata, not just by the pale-haired woman standing urgent near him but by some pale-faced boy somewhere — in the smoke-bright cleft of the cloud overhead or in the dream-blink of after-image when he looked away, some pale-nosed boy lying — where? — wide-eyed but asleep behind those eyes, who was also a man and yet who was always dividing and dividing in the pound of the Navajo Prince’s ears and temples and eyes, pounding into two, into two boys: but, thinker and studier of things and of force — and of terrain reaching always behind him to mountains that, whether it was dream or thought they sent outward over the land, had changed and plagued and sickened his mother since before he was born, and terrain ahead, east and north. .

east to the Susquehanna Iroquois who he had heard nearby would tell him the meaning of two dreams he had had after fighting to the death a Plains Cree warrior with six rifles lashed to his horse over the way he had wasted half the body of a great queenly bison in order to get her hide to paint his conquest of her on — in the middle of one solitary morning’s vast and silver dawn during the spring when he discovered invisibility both in the presence of his father and far away while watching a Thunder Dreamer at a campfire wrestle a many-fingered yucca-creamflower-eating mestizo until the two of them became one suspiciously looking for the young nomad Navajo studying them while chewing a local winter-loving plant like prince’s pine but up there called by the Cree pipisisikweu ("it breaks it up into small pieces") — though he felt so firmly his invulnerability to their single-minded search for him that he knew the leathery leaves and pink and dark-pink flower had dispersed his material appearance sufficiently for him to be quosi-quaia unseeable for a time. .

and north to the Iroquois of the New York State where Margaret said a relative of her family had visited a league of Indian nations so devoid of poverty he had written her big-footed cousin Alexander that to be poor in America was your own fault in general and here was a society where no one stole, and white men in other worlds had heard of this and would copy it. . the Navajo Prince, thinker and studier of things, will not put mere vision of one or two pale-faced boys over truth, guessing from the Hermit that, just before leaving, Margaret was with child: so it was way too soon for those two to be his own sons looking pale-faced up at the sky: nor need they be two! for suddenly they are one again in the face of the pale-haired woman wrapped in a green blanket here at what she pitied as not much of a camp at all, talking to him about being out of work and of a man who will lead an army of jobless soon and she was his beloved cousin near here along the Susquehanna but is not any more, while the Navajo Prince knows perhaps in her honest face that the vision of the two boys who were one and then one again is their vision and theirs is of him, here, and thinking of the waste of his forces wandering these continental paths in search of knowledge and the Princess and the eastern coast, he feels the sweat of his buckskin pocket’s bison tongue and wakes to such residue of that current that flew through him forth and back into the farm doorways he has visited that he is stabbed to understand that the hunter couple crossing that disintegrating isthmus were a nearly unthinkably long time past and the boy or boys seen by him are ahead in time so that while he cannot understand how that can be, for he knows that that boy is not yet born, he knows he is seen by the boy, watched in wonder, it comes to him in the midst of the woman’s words about a man named Jacob Coxey he doesn’t know and a cruel town named Chicago he does know though through the Hermit, who had watched over Margaret there and had studied the shadow of the wind blasting off the Chicago Lake and the secrets of new stone buildings in which people would work — knew of Chicago also through Margaret, who found it a wonderful meeting of all nations — meanwhile as that boy who is at once a man lying as if buried where he sleeps looks straight upward not over here toward the Navajo Prince in 1894, the Navajo Prince by some turn knows himself to be there before that boy’s eyes, light that glances off the boy’s speaking lips and that bends vision to oneself and gets bent and divided by it into other people’s stories that ours become, divided by it into the useful and the great, the colored and the penetrating, and is a mask through which the orphaned Prince recognizes the holes in his head, the eyes forming and the nose and mouth, holes opening even before the face forms in some time held glimmering within a cloud maybe like the cloud above him that he knows contains his old acquaintance the Anasazi in his interim and humorous compromise with reincarnation; and the Prince is glad that this future boy-man he has seen sees not only him but other worlds, other moons, other mesas, valleys, skies, new food sources that could keep hungry people from weakness (for Margaret’s circle cakes called doughnuts that she had said did not puff out well enough gave strength though made one want more and more, indeed like Margaret’s words), even new beings in those other worlds of the future that like the bison’s tongue-flesh could compact the past and life of other beings into power that the Great Spirit or all the gods dispersed in smaller scale could receive and return as creative force for living at peace; and the Prince now could read the very light on the lips of that boy who is somehow Margaret’s boy, and the lips meet and part, meet and part, was he recalling happily something eaten? was he saying Margaret’s name? for the Navajo Prince can’t be sure he’s not finding himself on that dividing mouth, having found his creature self inside that glimmering cloud, with something like light running out of it which was only unfriendly when it came from farmhouse doorways that did not understand a stern, hungry Indian who refused to steal field roots or chickenhouse eggs, only unfriendly when it was that current that passed out into and through him and then passed back, returning into the farmhouse doorways from which it came so that he did not want to wake to what it was, lest he feel pain or die, until now he realized it was Time.

How long have you been here? the pale-haired vagabond woman asks and she sits down beside him tight and tall in her blanket as the cloud closes above them and his wrist presses the metal of his pistol and its designs.

How long is the future? he asks.

The future takes too long, she says. The workingman is forgotten every day. That is why Coxey’s Army will set out on Easter Sunday from Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York to march to Washington.

The white workingman, the Navajo Prince replied, feeling in his right palm the sweat of unknown compactions breathing from the cut of bison tongue, word of him among his People, his going-away, his mutual teaching with an Anglo beloved whom he told of the original casa blanca not in white Washington but in sandstone Canyon de Chelly, oh word of him, his love for an Anglo and for his studies, his mother’s death, stories woven larger and larger in the future he now had a terrible belief in, or pressed smaller and smaller by ostracism and forgetting.

The woman opened her blanket and reached and gripped his shoulder to the bone. Tomorrow is what matters, she said.

Will they march from New Jersey? he asked, and wondered if the pale-faced boy who was not his son, yet was, and who he knew watched him here from years ahead in future but might not know he did, saw this night’s scene in his dream of the past or must rely on Margaret to tell him what he knew.

The woman said she did not know. She brought a loaf of bread out and asked if he had any food to go with it and asked him for a knife. The Mexican blue mare rubbed her neck along the shadow of a beech tree. The cloud, the night-lumen cloud, had moved. I have a horse, the Prince said, but then he said what he had meant: I have a woman.

He felt himself grow so sleepy the sounds of his horse were magnified.

What is Easter Sunday? he asked.

He was born on Easter Sunday, the woman said. It doesn’t matter.

The woman looked hungry and he found a potato and an apple in his bag and gave them to her. He got up and bade her goodbye. She was looking at what he had given her. She looked back over her shoulder at the horse, which snorted. You need to sleep, she said.

He changed his mind. He lay down beside her where she sat.

We too: that is, along the curve of our resolve to be just lying or just sitting, not think angelic we can do both at once regardless of that same old brother’s-keeper-type interrogator bent on making us toe a line while he painfully (read painlessly) unhinges one of our toes each time we say two things at once like that crocodiles when extinct will not be able to grow new teeth: when we already remember it’s best to be all the elements in a dream, the person bravely setting forth, the sea chopping at the gunwales, the pickle sweating in the wax paper on the thwart, the boat itself so regardless of the person said to be sitting hunched amidships that the boat can be seen as empty, all the elements we are, the Moon mistaking itself for the Sun (as Mel mistook Pearl’s telephoned dream for his own), or even the double Sun that the bodiless Anasazi healer on his post-mortal tour was amazed at the last to see when he arrived above the famed fog-towers of northern Maine and felt the sleeping light in the cloud that was his transitory form turn literally liquid to some point of his own happy satisfaction.

Is it feasible (read bearable) that we may never see these people again whom we already forget their names? Or may never have seen as we may never get to see our own heart? If they are parts and parcels of us, we must be biggish and can’t even see our knee. What is (read was) length, anyway, another shape of void? We are a function of our habit of periodic one-hood not to be confounded with that last-gasp or between-histories (read B.H.) sans-space sans-time sans-everything Singularity, a trans-essential Absence within, though, a non-rotating overall Absence inferable from accelerating activity in its vicinity threatening yet not, in turn, to be confused with Presence so deep, so far inside (± Y) our/your head that one has gone beyond the chance of coming out the other side until the rotation once taken like inertia for granted yields untold other sides coming to and from us: and we would tell the interrogator and his abstract incarnations that sometimes the distance between our eyes is two feet five inches so if he upped and tried to single us out, firing right between the eyes, he wouldn’t go far wrong if we were still there by the time the fire arrived.

For who knows where it will end? who the hell knows (I certainly don’t, ‘least since Schlesinger blew into Defense from the Atomic Energy Commission in ‘73 and dreamed up selective-strike target packages, says M. as Barbara-Jean has taken to calling him) that is, where this late-century last-minute course-correction reciprocity race will end (we thought) whereby the homed-upon target itself acquires shift capability and an entire town according to our pre-negotiated input can be moved off "Home-Zero" at the eleventh hour screwing up a multiple-reentry vehicle’s target-package program that itself can make multiple random course corrections at will: is this keeping things in balance or is this escalation (read speculation)! especially when with research reaching breathtaking informalities or even small-scale intimacies of in-flight breakthrough, the other side’s disguised improvisations as word of them is fed in are capable of being countered by original "Command-Thought" within a real on-board micro-lab already launched weapon carrier’s and thus countered faster even than old Light itself could have moved with its still very special speed regardless of its late inclination to, incredibly, Change — change traced not only dawn to dusk in two pairs of lancet windows in a cathedral each showing, he was pretty sure, a man on another man’s shoulders with a fifth lancet in the middle with definitely Mary carrying her child on her left arm, but change of light toward Rest, which light heretofore has had none of but now seems ready to be given (given back? given back its original Rest Energy?) yet Mayn will settle for the dawn-to-dusk change of light in that cathedral he will casually visit again in this upcoming "business" trip he has mentioned to B.-J. (sometimes Jeanie) — if he can just get away (well, he has to) on time — it’s a non-official therefore maybe interesting National Technical Means conference (Barbara-Jean surprisingly didn’t know NTM, "means" of surveillance) — para-disarmament, para-national oh god a brains convergence (though for cause) in the French Alps near Grenoble (fly to Geneva), geologists and thinkers and a black CIA executive named Andrew B. (for Blue-sky) Jackson posing as a "close-look" satellite-camera designer, eee-und some happy gentlemen and ladies who interpret reflected-microwave signatures like uniquely readable wakes left by all manner of missiles passing through Earth’s already troubled ionosphere — National Technical Means to catch present and unknown future cheating within of course the Balance of Terror. Meanwhile Mayn’s deadline seems brought closer and closer by a prisoner’s message (incidentally floated upon his announcement that he is getting free of his personality in order to exist within his essence) that Mayn had better attend that fringe Shakespeare opera: that he had guessed independently from his daughter’s marginal but stubborn involvement with unreliable elements and his friends’ curious convergence on a local cluster of events including though hardly keying upon the opera production, all this regardless of how close the prisoner in question often had said they two already were through a (what he called) colloidal awareness (colloidal? said Barbara-Jean, thinking) mutually multiplying this fragmented dispersion of particles bonding their knowers one to another by this universe of surfaces and their concomitant surface-frictions (Mayn thought it was), but more than the message and the opera (and word from Flick, nee Sarah, that her brother, his implicitly estranged son in outer space up in Boston, had phoned her and was to appear in New York), there were these events surrounding (or surrounded by!) the surfacing of an old high-school teacher, and the nagging interrogations of a person (B.-J., Barbara-Jean, or, by her preferred, Jean, by name) whom he had come to love, plus the street death of a man he had talked deeply with on a pickup ride from Windrow to the City who it had turned out was coming back into his life and shifting some key point from Nowhere to a cemetery if not to the home of which it once had been a part or, ‘least, that home by its other name.

That was your name for the town? I like it.

My grandmother’s name for it. No, ours.

How do you make up a name together?

You just do it.

You have to be in love.

Well, she did teach me how to whistle.

Did your mother love you?

She said she was so frustrated by her life she could kill herself.

When did she say that to you?

I think more than once. Probably when I was thirteen or fourteen.

And you didn’t say anything? — or you told her not to kill herself?

No: you make me remember: I said it must be terrible to feel that.

What did she say?

I remember. She said, No it wasn’t. Because I said, O.K.

Did she accept that?

She said, Your father doesn’t approve of O.K.

What did you say?

I think I went out. I don’t remember where. I asked my grandmother Well, what about O.K.?

You always went to her?

Depended which way the wind was blowing.

What did she say?

My grandfather told me what O.K. came from, but something else— another meaning some friend of theirs. . I don’t know.

Did your mother love you?

So much else has happened since then.

Didn’t she?

Yes.

I know she did. How did she?

By being herself. By telling me to be.

But she killed herself.

Even if she didn’t, she went away.

I know.

But the Interrogator, sleepwalking while on duty among his victims, must trace this albeit idiomatic "O.K." that he has heard. Secure in his victims’ relative dismemberment, he won’t settle for being just in or on someone else’s flesh, feeling himself them while at once himself. Absolutely will not settle for just living their informations, divvied near-sensually by their light, turned double and then back to single by their quaint myths of weather, cosmos, trajectory, charity — myths as gently sexual as

Oh Woman

Old Woman

scrape the sky

clear it up

make it good

all over

with your little knife

the copper one

scrape it down

good

but he must trace this "O.K." that he has heard because he knows in his ignorant heart that it is related to our long-aforementioned "D.K."

Yet in the dark thus, and, his torture workday over, gratefully so (despite games-theory mind-set employed in torture training to simultaneously tap one’s energy secret and auto-relax), he feels through his sleep some half-light coming off his would-be decaying victims as he strays across a next room stepping on our occasional flesh or going out (he smiles) on some strewn limb or steering clear of a passing clutch of bloodlessly extracted nerves beeping like Frau Doppler herself alone and seeing waves from a passing boat gather in frequency as they wash into the shore of a native Austrian lake which seems also to be moving (shore or lake?). Yet the interrogator is at least not talking in his sleep (whatever he might in his heart of hearts think), for we absolutely will not see ourselves as victims of voice-over for your reality is made by youse (the interrogator has heard) and is known as youse value or basic unit, nor need we be angels to know this, nor need we give off light to see him start tracing "O.K.":

first, to "O.M." (as in Open Marriage) from the Indian humdinger song about the "Oh Woman" with which the East Far Eastern Princess like Margaret the wife of Alexander was familiar:

thence to "M.K.," short for that volcano-of-the-decade that an implicated young friend of Margaret’s grandson James named Larry time-framed (we’d already forgotten) ninety-four years after Krakatoa’s mountainous eruption with the also circa 1883 locoweed-naming spree of the botanist Marcus Jones and the rhythms of his original bike tires congruent to all surfaces through some adjustably cogged memory of any landscape, but also time-and-space-framed in an elastic year with all the weather work that Krakatoa opened up, the new twilight effects, the layers of stratospheric aerosols, the staggered New Mexico sunsets protracted sometimes by the cosmic-cleft synchrony the Anasazi healer explained:

and from "M.K." (with its proven fallout of noctilucent cloud so influencing the Anasazi’s sense of his own resolutely non-reincarnational future that he, who in fact gave us our word "fallout" for a certain kind of mild and generous death, planned on becoming such a cloud — (at an experimentally lower level) the interrogator, dreaming on from wherever he is to New York, New Mexico, and from w/zoever he is to being a roving intelligence officer (naval in training like the lover de Talca, high-caste and broadly cultured in origin, individual in personality), double-shifts (codein) to "D.M." — which may be the Dreaded Modulus of Lar’ fame whose meaning the interrogator has temporarily forgotten, though more likely (since lives hang upon it) is DeMilitarized, without the "Zone," which has disappeared in a puff of once-up-to-date bomb that rules all acts to be transitive, hence, as a prepositioned hit man "offs" an approaching or receding contract, "disappears" zones (a "zone bomb") much better than simply demilitarizing, or witness the reciprocals P.M. and/or P.R.M. (shorthand), each derivable we now know from the other (like Some People) with or without we disappear the R (he knows by rote): he hence leans toward that "old friend" (as he puts it in his second language) the Dreaded Modulus by which one system can be turned like tables to another (though the Friend concept functions more really in terms of the white American males Mayn and Larry, himself the user if not proved discoverer of D.M.) by which the even slightest Nanosecond-degree Rotation normally needed to turn from one pivotal view to another may, in sleep or some alternate refiguring, be bypassed, so that, say, hearing what some bond teaches you to hear can instantly by Modulus mean not the duplicity of answers tortured (or not) out of interrogees, but a woman’s thrilling hunger for her lover in an aria betraying maternal hunger for a son sung by a curvaceous diva to a man in her life listening in a small theater, fellow national at heart who this afternoon arranged the release of her faraway father precisely at a moment when a news flash erroneously had him falling from the roof of his sixth-floor bayview casa de pisos—doubtless a victim who only thought he was her father, dreams the interrogator, and anyway in the southern hemisphere we fall upward, we already remember, which gives a lightness and unreality to events and whole centuries — and for a second he knows he is not dreaming but witnessing in his sleep facts and could move with that implicated white male, age eighteen to nineteen, from the either I or system-switch of D.M. to the twain egal individualized screens seen bothland, and thence to the theory this newly real interrogator can embody so why trace it as a dreamed-up substitution (occupying conveniently a position) in the way, which might be calculated for Through and Around, but better instantly (codein) shift M., whatever this constant scrambled or unscrambled equals, and, through the D. of dread and the K. of that volcano thinking through its dream to spread twilight effects into the air we see for years beyond, even unto the present, reach D.K.: but by now he imagines he is no longer himself but solely into the flesh of that other, de Talca, and can leave a Don’t Know, with, inside it, at secret rest, the knowledge that, like information shared, Don’t Know is the answer to two or more questions.

Because people often don’t answer the question asked, Grace’s friend Maureen had been fond of saying — who had been all for going ahead with the "spontaneous light rape" plan (first man to enter Grace’s apartment after a randomly set hour is to receive multiple, painless, nurturing rape by sisters assembled —"like the millionth couple to make it across the Verrazano Bridge get an instant free legal separation," Grace joked with Spence).

Spence himself, it transpired, would have been the man in question, that day, if the first candidate had not failed to ring and gone away; but Grace had called it off, and when Larry had come up to see her soon after Spence had left, she had taken Larry into the bedroom to get away from it all and to give him support for changing his life at least so far as leaving his father and that apartment downstairs and moving in, à trois, with Donald Dooley and his girlfriend not because Sue, Larry’s mother, would then be more likely to move back in with Marv (which Grace figured she was going to do anyway because Sue was too sex-positive to accept a pair-bonded hyper-romance-serious Lesbian relationship) but while men living together was healing because it opened them to each other’s bodies, an experience pretty much taboo’d in male heterosexual society — Larry was a natural Top, Grace was convinced, and had lately run a number on himself in habit patterns of misplaced loyalty and compassion and identifying with one parent or the other, and had faked himself into playing Bottom, when his father Marv was the natural Bottom, which was probably what Marv was going to his new girlfriend for and likely why he didn’t bring her home but stayed at her place (didn’t he?). So Grace had supported Larry’s moving out, getting into threesome sex and healing self-sex at a time when he wasn’t so sure what he wanted. But the upshot was that Larry had thanked her and said he most probably would stick around for the time being, which only proved he was still Bottoming out while closet-Topping.

It was late afternoon of dress-rehearsal/preview day of the Hamletin warehouse opera. Grace and Ray Spence contemplated Grace’s body. She sat cross-legged, small, wholesomely rosy all over, freckled along her shoulders and with a lovely, perhaps yoga-related light that curved across her very flat abdomen. Spence was not the same person as a week ago. He told of his sense that he might be brother of Mayn. Grace told Ray that when one of her workshop women Lincoln had told her months ago of the Navachoor Prince she had recognized through her own part-Pawnee blood and her sense of that strange Indian’s centuries-old need to grow beyond tribal/racial roles that she (she was smiling like she really but only half meant it) had been him in an earlier life that nonetheless included Now and partly because of the obvious S & M dogging his trip in pursuit of the pale, doubtless Oriental East Far Eastern Princess.

"Your abdomen," Spence said; "you could fly, I’ll bet."

Grace looked at him and said she was willing to believe, O.K., that he knew what he was talking about. Spence was enthusiastic. He said he didn’t know really why he was here. He had heard there was a new type of reincarnation that could be scientifically proved. Grace said he thought like a newspaper. Grace said she gave Larry a week in that apartment downstairs, he was such a great kid but was freaking out telling her a Chinese woman he had seen in a shop uptown sitting on some old phone books was real and then he had looked through his peephole into the hall and there she was but with a little boy who looked Puerto Rican ringing the bell of his neighbor the opera singer but still he knew she was real. There. An ordinary non-freaky person. Spence said there was a report in the Mayn family that the young person who discovered a new form of reincarnation was doomed. Grace said that was masochistic thinking. Spence said she was mixed up about whether it was good to go along with S & M roles or they should be exposed for the silly numbers they were. Grace said that was male thinking. Spence said it probably was, and he asked whether the Chinese woman had actually taken the Hispanic child into Ford North’s apartment. Grace said Spence was into intrigue like Larry. Spence said Well she was coming back as a Navajo scientist for God’s sake who died in strange circumstances apparently two thousand miles from home you know. Grace said, "Unless he turned into a slave cloud" — because a friend of Lincoln’s had said that was one possibility. "Well, his Princess evidently turned into a mist to give him the slip," Spence said.

"Oh I figure I’m a couple of thousand years old," said Grace. She had urged one of the women who could not let go of her grown children who were living back in Chile but they apparently thought the regime wasn’t so bad, to go with her husband to Past Lives Therapy, because Grace knew in her body someplace that Clara and possibly her husband had had such a hard time being born into a previous life that they felt hurt and guilty about it and had projected this onto their children who they thought (or maybe dreamed) were saddled with this terrible load they couldn’t see was blocking them.

"I’ll settle for just plain mcarnation," added Spence, and, they both knew, was surprised at himself.

Then Grace said — but Ray, too, then, and simultaneously, "We…" and then again and simultaneous, "We. ." they said and touched each other laughing, and then started all over again and all unexpectedly said "We" together a third time but then said together like a longer effort, "We’re onto—" but stopped and said, rehearsed, "something."

Where did we learn to do that?

We were together.

Let’s try it without sound.

We already are.

You rippling?

All ripple.

What time is it? — oh, two hours till curtain, but they’re doing it without a curtain.

That’s why you got a light in your eye. At least it’s gay so they won’t be doing that opera trip.

There’ve been some changes. The composer’s more serious than anyone thought. He might even be a crook. Historically speaking.

So we’ll go together.

One on one.

Let’s be nude.

You already are.

With the women two days ago at the moment the steps came to the door, we were in battle and it was long ago and we could have been seen by the future then if we had known how, and we were on the move goddess-like and by a dark river that moved like an isthmus between partially congruent globes, and to break the cycle now in the New York Body-Room one had to turn away from that well-meaning but reincarnated group and be alone, and time collapsed like the Goddess into one self and another person was at the door with whom one could turn away and be alone, younger brother-going-on-son, maybe not yet a natural Top but a Larry.

O.K. — and by like token wanting to tell about our life too but frankly not knowing anything about our life (except it was expensive especially our beginning that we didn’t know about) — we found ourselves in a mountain probably of flesh and trying so badly to get out that we seldom caught on that the mountain with this stumbling bloc of us inside it did not want us to, until our motion and the mountain’s mixed, like pulse, and, no less no more representative than that one life left at Krakatoa the heroic micro-spider not Mayn, not Ted, not Pearl, not acid-tongued de Talca knew we were at least as interested in as a Boston-born internal medic in live physics more far (worm-thread) fetched than the dark, flabby leaves we have heard about in some northern New England Indian swamp — spider so tiny that Krakatoa had not seen it, surviving ultra-privately under a horizon that was beyond itching and disease, just acres of ash and igneous and seismic junk… we (O.K.) fought our strange way out head-first guilloteeny or feet first (we already forget) mutilated unit by unit as the clockless hermit notches his stick till the head (all that’s left) comes out and there’s only it with all its relations asking who that first comer was before Spence, and hearing what we did not know we knew that the man she’z shure she saw from her peephole, with one, two, three women and Maureen behind her, was walking away down the hall toward a dark-haired, much younger girl in a sailor’s pea jacket waiting at the elevator and seeing him like he’s her own grandfather, and we were born in that previous life dead and had to get over that while the mountain moved on.

He made ready to leave in anger and doubt. He stared into the paragraph his still-prospective father-in-law said might after all be usable and he could just about crunch it in his fist so it would crackle like fire. Anger that Margaret — Oh God what was going on out there along the footsteps or railroad tracks or horse trails of the continent! Anger that Margaret — for what was between the lines, was there any curiosity as to what Alexander had been doing all these months? he had had tea with a Senator’s wife in Washington and she had asked polite questions about the Democrat and had urged him to visit Boston, he had deplored the need for troop movements after the panic of last year, she had asked him if he knew the poems of Matthew Arnold, whom in fact he had read with this damned Margaret who he was sure had been sinisterly changed by her visit in 1885 to see the Statue of Liberty before it was put together, her father’s strictness seemed only to indulge her, while Alexander’s indulgence and intimacy ("Ah, love, let us be true… So various, so beautiful, so new. .") only made her more — more strict! (the only word for it) and now, instead of her at last coming home, this damned paragraph from Cincinnati. His cousin who was visiting for a weekend watched Alexander yank open a brassy highboy drawer. Anger that Margaret, who had his trust, could write so outrageously intimately this account of sleazy commercial types in a hotel parlor discussing paperworkers out of work in Chicago, a rein(t)arnationist spouting at the Chicago Fair last summer, the future of ballooning, the next world’s fair in St. Louis maybe, but nothing this time to Alexander about when she was actually going to be home, though something between the lines. Between the lines there was—"Look at this darn thing!" he handed it over to his cousin who was at the university in Philadelphia, who said, after a moment, "But this Jacob Coxey who’s organizing the march on Washington — if she’s really interested in what he’s doing — I mean, a self-made businessman who cares about the workers—" "It’s sinister," remarked Alexander, looking into an empty satchel on the bed, "a sinister history, this slowdown coming home." "Oh it’s probably her pre-wedding trip," said the other, who had amusing ideas undeniably and was going to Paris in July. "It’s one thing," said Alexander, "and it’s another thing, and which fits inside which I do not know." "You want to go to Paris with me," said his cousin, "that’s what you need. Get you out of your books for a couple of months."

Her father could bring Alexander the copy and seem worried to death and ask him what he thought, that bluff, bearded gray gentleman with a family mole on his jawbone like a dark stone beneath running current; and Alexander knew then that he was going to go after her.

"Uncle Jim will be glad to have word of those union people in Pennsylvania, but how far do you intend to go?" his cousin asked with a light of humor in his somewhat nasal voice. He laid the crumpled paper on the white bedspread beside the satchel that now contained socks and long underwear.

Anger—"Do you know that Mrs. Lodge asked me if I had seen any Venetian glass with that special exquisite crudeness. I took her reference as being to Ruskin and asked in turn if she found the living wage advocated in the Gospels, but she may not have taken my reference for she said God helps those who help others to help themselves, I think that’s what she said, maybe not, maybe not, and she asked me what sold newspapers and I said sometimes it seemed to me imponderable, but I had lost my wits because I felt she was telling me something I wasn’t comprehending, or making fun of me, and she said she would like to introduce a young man like me to Mr. Roosevelt."

His cousin laughed and straightened his necktie in the mirror. "An imponderable young man. A vendible imponderable."

"Oh dry up," said Alexander, examining a stickpin Margaret had given him a year ago Christmas and wondered if it was a real emerald.

"Are you really going to Pennsylvania as a journalist, Alexander?"

Anger at the imperfect curves and edges of Venetian glass, anger at Paris — for, yes, he might just go to Paris with this cousin with the square head and fat jaw — while between the lines and more finely still between the words, he felt his dear Margaret was in trouble and he didn’t know what it was and it might be his trouble, and, worse, it might not be his at all.

"A self-made sandstone-quarry businessman from Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, indeed," he said. "Is that where his quarry is, then?"

"I know not a thing about Jacob Coxey," said Alexander’s cousin, "but his heart is in the right place."

"What place is that?" said Alexander suddenly and did not know why, but felt he was watched, no doubt by townsfriends and family who wondered with him what his supposed fiancee was doing between the lines of her less frequent dispatches — so he could not see in the great banks of leaves out the window anything but the future as if it already existed contemplating him with doubt.

His cousin was laughing at what he had said. "Where is Selinsgrove?"

"On a river," grumbled Alexander. ‘The Susquehanna, or anyhow close by it."

"What did you mean ‘one thing’ and ‘another thing’ and you didn’t know ‘which fits inside which’?"

"Don’t dissect me — I don’t know what I meant," said Alexander, looking toward the bedside table. "It’s between the lines."

"I wouldn’t read there if I were you," said his cousin.

"Hmpf," grunted Alexander, placing two small leather-bound volumes in one corner of his satchel. "I read wherever I go."

His cousin laughed and reached for his jacket where it lay folded on a chair. "I meant between the lines, not Selinsgrove-hard-by-Susquehanna."

"I will be near there," said Alexander.

"It should be an education," came the answer.

The river in late February was moving. A brown bird stood briefly on a miniature raft of ice. The town nearby was for a few tranquil hours a future that could not be rushed. He vowed that whatever happened he would come back to this point on the riverbank. He had a stone in his shoe.

In the wrong town you can still pick up news. Jacob Coxey dealt in scrap iron before he went into the business of quarrying sand for steel and glass manufacture. Now raised race horses in Kentucky, though didn’t live there. But didn’t live here in Selinsgrove either. Selinsgrove — more woods than New Jersey, but much like. But Coxey was only born here. Moved, at five or six: picture of small boy directing adults which bed to load into which wagon, the wide wagon, the narrow wagon. Settee and wash tub. Fire-irons and spade. Caned chairs sitting on top of crates. Somewhere a German accent. To Danville, downaways. But not far. And furthermore not where Coxey, with a growing name among Greenbackers and Populists, lived now. The farmer he asked, the storekeeper he asked, the man with the unconscionably high forehead he asked in front of the church did not ask him the question he asked himself, a young fellow with a black leather satchel and an already somewhat distinguished scalp: What was he doing in Selinsgrove if he was looking for Coxey? The question took him some miles back to the riverbank he had come from, but not to Danville — but not because Jacob Coxey was no longer there either but in Ohio, if Alexander had only asked, to begin with.

He had mailed an exemplary dispatch from Philadelphia. He had mailed another the next day to Margaret’s father from a place called Laurel Summit.

Some said armies of unemployed would take over the railroads. Constantly, it was only Margaret he had seen — Margaret on her way long since to interview — but who knew? — a man "of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania," as her written words put it. Alexander had waited for months for her, and now in motion himself had "waited" for word to come to him somehow as he had made his way into north-central Pennsylvania as if her word in print meant she must be there where Coxey was "of." But a most irresponsible way to seek her — as if he had bent his will or had needed for months to cut adrift in his own small way westward — to be not home if she arrived — his absence noted: while now he had uncharacteristically built himself a lean-to and produced from his bag shadowy food to eat beside the current of the shadowy river, arrived there for no good reason, but watched — by his children, it suddenly came to him, of which he had not yet any — for he had not yet his bride.

He understood only brief, separate things, like beginning nowhere. He was tired. No good cause explained his being here. The wistaria that he could smell but weeks away outside his bedroom window at home was named for the man who wrote the first American anatomy (two volumes, Caspar Wistar, honored hardly more than a year ago at the opening of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology housing the collection of anatomy he left at the University in Philadelphia). The night came around so mossy-cold and so blank that it was no different from the river at first, even the dubious head of the night’s body through the maps of tree branches, that moon tilted away far where things of true importance were going on while Alexander, instead, pursued some alien education, as his cousin the medical student predicted. Some new history, was it? A voice nearby, a woman’s voice, for a second seemed caused by the darkness but (no) came with it: "I camped last week by a river under a long shining cloud and a man there breathed in a dollop of that cloud, I saw him, it was a long spill of light and he breathed in a whole dollop of that cloud, I saw him, it was a long spill of light and he breathed it in and coughed and talked, and he was well-informed."

Alexander saw that he had already seen the blonde woman when she spoke and had trusted the human figure in the corner of his eye. He had predicted her appearance through some study of history; that was it.

Eyes closed, resting, he’s a very old man, his hat in his lap, the straw upon the heel of his palm, fingers resting in the crumpled crown, air sliding and curling like water over his skull; and he foresaw what is happening in the sun of a backyard the ownership of which hardly matters any more, only the people small and tall who use it, the little girl with long light hair throwing a ball up and up and up again and catching it in one hand nearer and nearer her grandfather in his chair; and he is not dopy, and knows his grandson whose daughter this little girl is knows he is not dopy and would not make anything of his not at once replying to the question his grandson asked; and when, with his eyes closed, he had an answer, he heard a powerful whoosh and did not open his eyes, it might be an exciting death coming his way and he heard a young gasp and knew his great-granddaughter had caught her ball practically in his lap, but he had the words in his throat answering Jim’s question: "In his letter that he wrote me when I was all of six years old, his last letter and he was up in New York visiting the Indians and the envelope had a bright red scarab seal on it, and he said he had dreamt of swallowing something, I know what it was, it was a storm he swallowed, complete with rain, thunder, lightning, what’s that other? hail—the works — and then singing out his name in the dream which was Morgan of all things, but something else, Jim, I really forget but it had to do with the spelling."

"Oh Poppy, I’m not Jim; I almost hit you. What are you talking about, Poppy? I almost hit you. I stepped on your beautiful shoes, Poppy, did I hurt you? You have silver on your red socks, Poppy."

He opened his eyes and his mouth in the sun, and remembered how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been.

Their smoky fire held their faces close to it and kept the Moon’s clearer light far down the course of the tree-shrouded sky. The blonde woman gave Alexander an apple and wrapped herself again in her blanket.

"This Indian said he did not need to eat much. He had been followed by this cloud. I did not believe him at first. I know what work pays and what it costs to buy a blanket, I don’t believe in magic. But then neither did he. He said he knew the cloud contained an old friend. He said he himself contained spirits of ice stones that had come from the sky, and they were spiral — and he made the motion with his hands, and then he went to sleep. But later he woke up."

"He did not dishonor you," said Alexander.

The woman shook her head pensively. "Some mad Indian you mean?" she said. Alexander smiled into the blazing, smoking fire. He felt compelled. " ‘What work pays’?" he asked. "I don’t understand."

The woman ignored his query. "Your clothes, your shoes," she said. "Do you travel like this?"

"Almost never, but my cousin who is a medical student says I am part porcupine."

"He had a horse over by a tree. It looked blue in the river darkness."

"Near here?"

"Not the same river. A different river. The Juniata, south and west from here. He was on his way to consult with the Iroquois. He had come all the way from New Mexico territory."

"To do that?"

"He was on his way east. He said he was going to meet a woman."

"Going?"

"He asked me if I had seen storms rise up out of eastern mountains. He asked me if I could smell seared metal coming from the night-glowing cloud above us. He asked me if there were tall houses that cast a wind shadow."

"What did you say?"

"To all these questions I said I did not know."

"How did he swallow the dollop of night-glowing cloud?"

"He said the friend up there was hundreds of years old."

"Perhaps he meant that through his people he carried a long history in him."

"He was more of a scientist. But I liked him because he said he was studying secrets that would give his people more food to live and more water to grow their crops and he was looking for material to build with that would last. I told him that white workers did not have enough to eat either."

"Old Marion Hugo, your" (Yes) "in those journals, Granddad" (Yes) "Was he the one who mentioned a Morgan" (Yes) "a mathematician from" (Yes) "from Europe, an Alsatian, I think, who played the pickel flute" (Yes, yes, the pickelflote) "and did he know — did he know that zoologist gal who had the mother back in South America who wrote music? what about that, Alexander?"

Later he woke, and he reached at once into his pocket as if to see if something was still there. She herself never slept except when a dream was coming on and then she would find a place to sleep for the length of the dream. He told her he was going to the Iroquois to find the meaning of two dreams. This was a turning from where he was going but he had faith he would meet his beloved. She was carrying his child, he was certain, but she had left without telling him. There was a great emptiness between them and they were in touch with each other because there was a river like an underground river in their bodies, a river of blood and milk with a thousand invisibly small beings flowing in it and each was a thought of theirs in common.

Alexander felt like he was asleep and the campfire was losing itself in him. He asked why the Indian’s woman had left. The blonde woman said she had to go back and see her people, he said. The Indian loved her very much and he loved his studies. Alexander could understand that.

Yes, said the blonde woman. And she had in common with the Indian that she had a beloved who was apart from her.

How so? asked the young man with the black satchel and red socks and muddy shoes.

Her beloved was married and lived in Ohio, and she had known him once in Pennsylvania when he was only a boy working a stationary engine in a rolling mill. She knew what he knew. She knew how the ingot is rolled and rolled to become the right-shape sheet of steel. How the mills use sand from quarries. How much the owner sells the steel for. Her beloved knew the workers. He knew the farmers, too. He had General Grant’s love of horseflesh. He became a rich man but cared for the workers. He was leading a march on Washington at Eastertime. She was a fallen woman, but she did not care now. Her lot was cast with the real people who made the industrial clockworks run and who made the corn grow and who walked long roads to get to their work and to look for work as well. Her lot was not with the hundreds of Pinkerton detectives ferried by night up the Monongahela (Alexander nodded), but with the men who needed greenbacks to seed their fields (Alexander nodded, thinking that Monongahela was both an Algonquian name and the name of a whiskey). A river has two coasts, she mused.

He said, You are talking about Jacob Coxey. He is the reason I came to Selinsgrove.

The woman frowned. She told him that that was what she had heard in town and why she had followed him here to the river.

"No, of course you’re not your daddy Jim, sweetheart; I was replying to him… but I took so long that. ."

"Oh Poppy."

"Dumb old Poppy."

"Yes, you’re very old."

"I’m almost ninety."

"Sweetheart old Poppy. See how high I can throw the ball."

Two rivers, the Juniata where things were heard and the Susquehanna where those things were told.

"That’s very high, Flicky, very very high. Who taught you to throw that high?"

"Nobody."

"Where did your father go?"

"In the house. What’s the matter with him?"

"Nothing. I think a friend of his died."

"Is he going to the funeral?"

"I think she died far away in South America."

"Look at Andrew. He can ride his bike."

He said air came in vast sheets that water might ride on or ice or poisons, or bad spirits or mixtures. He said these planes controlled the wind and might raise water like a hundred buckets so it ran nearly upward into the great bush of a cloud and might well pass back above the river guided aloft by the river’s course and empty down into it so you could wash in the same water seven days later. He said he and his woman talked all night and each learned to hear new things that only the other had been able to before. Each bent the heart and will to the other. She told him of a Statue that was the highest in the world guarding an ocean harbor with light and she had seen it when its head and limbs were scattered over an island. When she went home she would go inside it. He must have been talking about the Statue of Liberty.

Yes, said Alexander.

He said his woman had a friend among her people whom she respected very much, and he had very big feet and was wise and went fishing in a lake where there were pine trees only smaller than the ones in the West, which was of interest because, as this man told me, they might be smaller because they were weaker or smaller because they grew for a different purpose. His woman’s friend back among her people went fishing because there were many lakes there. She must go back and see him someday, she would say. She called this cousin an angel.

Alexander was wide awake and got up to find more wood. He offered the blonde woman the apple she had given him but she shook her head and he bit into it. He brought a great branch and left it beside the fire and sat down.

He began to fear the blonde woman like sleep you don’t understand. She asked what was in his satchel. He showed her two books bound in calf; she shrugged, and said her beloved was now under the influence of a man who believed in reincarnation and was a dime-museum speechmaker and called himself the cerebellum of Christ but could not spell Calvary. A passel of rogues will try to make use of that good man Coxey.

Alexander asked where the Indian had gone. She said she had told Alexander this already.

He said, Two Indian wanderers, perhaps a child between them.

No, said the blonde woman. The woman was a white woman.

Alexander felt a long chill across his face. He threw the apple into the fire.

You throw away food? said the blonde woman.

Will Coxey’s marchers all come from Ohio? Alexander asked as if to say, Don’t talk to me about an apple — and felt terribly watched and cold and inflamed as well and felt the sweat in his smooth palms.

No, said the woman. They say marchers will come from all over the United States. Why do you ask?

Because I was thinking of something else, said the young man.

They say he is worth two hundred thousand dollars. One marcher for every dollar by the time they reach Washington. They will force Congress to help the unemployed.

Was the Indian armed? Alexander asked.

Well, she had thought he had a pistol in his pocket but it was a hunk of dried meat. Alexander contemplated the large, damp branch and the lowering fire. But he did have a pistol in his saddlebag, said the woman.

In his saddlebag, said Alexander.

We had been asleep, we already remember, but this might prove our patented way of being awake. As when a thing is done to us, and instead we are brought closer together and see some bend of will by which so far from our being acted upon, the responsibility belonged to us, and no hassle at that.

Big Foot Porcupine; or anyway, Big Shoe. The woman asked to sleep against him in the late February stillness. He said it was against his religion and at once corrected himself—those were not his words, surely. His thighs were resigned with cold, his mackinaw bulky. He felt behind him the tuck of her hard arms in the taut winding of her blanket, and after a mysterious time which was motion both absent and present she reached one slow arm around his ribs and he found that he took her hand between the thumb and palm of his woolen glove and she seemed to press a ring on his finger. They murmured with the soft, bed clarity of wife and husband. Where, then, was Jacob Coxey? Why with his family in Massillon, Ohio, three hundred miles from here, two hundred and eighty to be exact.

Anger, horror, pain, curiosity gathered him up into some darkling person and he knew he would sleep in the cold, despite Margaret, despite the Indian wherever his eastward frontier had gotten to. Alexander was thinking of geometry, of all things, and his loins felt better than he could have said. Have you borne a child? he asked the woman over his shoulder, the late winter and the undreamed solidity of near, dark trees cold against his eyeballs.

He asked me that, she told him. He said he had thought there was more time but he had been absorbed in his studies of secret force and of earth veins and mountain messages and mixtures and absorbed in this woman of his from the East, to the cost of his People, yet also forgetting this woman who was sometimes all he remembered from hour to hour. His studies are for his people, but his march is not revolutionary like Jacob Coxey’s which will be an army as great as any Union.

Your news overwhelms me, said Alexander. Your heart is with the workers, said the woman; trust it.

But Alexander had not meant Coxey’s march of the unemployed. But have you borne a child? he said. No, she said, I have not borne a child, though I would have done so for him, though I am a fallen person anyway.

Do you want to be married? asked Alexander.

He thought of what the future expected. New thoughts shifted this trip as if the land it was grounded on — a land of dreams, he had once read to Margaret — mattered no whit more than farmers clamoring for paper money or Idaho silver miners forcing recognition of their union or railway-car workers getting a company model-town to house their families at dubious rent. A curiously compelling map grew like land in Alexander’s mind containing it (but which containing which?) that moved — this diagram of distances moving if he chose but making him choose — and he could not tell the woman that Margaret over the magnetic slopes of this darkling state rested but was in motion restlessly toward home while talking to a Jacob Coxey whom this woman behind him loved and had brought to Alexander by converging lines from Massillon in the west and from some bank of the Juniata in the south or southwest, while Alexander’s various trek for news and for Margaret was west while hers, upon a parallel equally various, came east, pursued (no question) along another parallel by a man with a pistol who was ahead of her, and was between her and this Alexander who went out to meet her: yet what if even now, and east of here, she was fingering a Navajo silver buckle passing through Pennsylvania on a sleeping train whose parallels of track curved some collision course of war or the American continent atip toward unknown commerce (west or east, inertial calculi of ours could trick suns into dramatically dying in the direction of morning if our cost-benefit figures arrive at such results for the sake of World’s Fair or parallel answer to multiple question) — and when he said to this now silent woman, This Indian is not my enemy unless I choose. ., and got no reply except a whole bodily pulse coming into his spine from possibly more than the woman… in these coordinated parallels that could lean like a curve-fleshed parallelogram or converge into some terrific clusterhood, Alexander eased over to the quite exhausted woman he had not bothered to ask about her home and about what she, a "fallen person," did here in the vicinity of her at least former home of Selinsgrove where the beloved had been hardly more than born, according to Alexander’s information — and he tipped her dozing chin and smelt on her breathing raw potato’s moistly glimmering root, and kissed her lips, and turned back to, briefly, a diagram until sleep caught him up loins and all into that gathered voice that could include what the future expected, conferring with him as to whether (damn all this land of dreams that lacked light though not geometry which itself equaled or was in the way of geography and of seeing clear, so he wondered what Margaret looked like now and if she was big with child), conferring with that gathered voice as to whether he would go to Paris with his elegant cousin who wished to study epidemics — or, as an obvious possibility, would not go to Paris but live as he and the future tacitly had agreed he would.

The woman spoke and hummed and spoke in sleep, their sleep it seemed: "He said he carried in him unknown mixtures spirited from a mountain that moved with shapes fine as snakes and some said formed by them and through human flesh and weather that sometimes came down a long, long cosmic room from a North he had once thought timeless, yielding spirals grown dense and tight as the inside of a tree bole that might help us or end all weather or might bore holes in us as in his mother who had died of such a demon-hole that moved around her head from forehead to top and back — and these mixed spirits or rays (though not visible like sun) he carried some of in him—in him! (I nearly laughed, we were hungry, we had already forgotten why we were sitting by that tireless riverbank, and he brought out a potato and an apple, and later his saddlebag proved to hold a pistol with devices or signs cut into the metal so as to make the finger fear touching them could make the piece go off) until Alexander did not know who talked to who, but thought the woman would not steal from his old black satchel his shirt or his forgotten long underwear or his books, his three books — the two diaries at this long instant of embrace humanly useless with their neutral needlework reports of Chapultepec passion or sun-swallowing dream or, as yellowing perhaps as one of President Lincoln’s greenback salary-warrants, that strange sheaf of foolscap music with Italian words shaken by a Thunder Dreamer coolly under the nose of a lean bicyclist-botanist at a remote trading post — and always, money-getting Democrats from rude wigwam to Congress hall, easing past mountains of, what was it? salt and iron, lead and silver; while in this woman’s orie-armed embrace he dreams of freedom, yet not from her, though he would never see her again more than he saw her now curled not so uncomfortably behind him: freedom in fact from those impediments of Margaret’s months, for let life start and let’s go home, to where (with what help from the person behind him he could not think, asleep or half-asleep) he heard himself read to a young girl he had named before her birth, words (words words) recited to her by her father, of motion that could not stop and so was stopped for, in some sense spaced so intimately far to one side current history that the name of this child came to him who looked at him from the near future bearing naturally the name of this poor, strong woman behind him humming like a cello in her apparent sleep now, and Margaret would accept that name, he would make sure of that.

Neither porcupine nor angel: yet with, between them, some relation that would be Us: so mightn’t we prove upon the twain drawing boards of everyone’s peripheral vision to be what rose from such thoughts as that not Matter became God, but God at’s own developmental pace became Matter, plus that the Whole seeking Parts to share, give way, and lose its mind-set force to, must force them Parts into being in its way.

We had first heard of relationship in the early forties. But of what century?

Or two burning eyes shared among four eyes of two driven people flowed with the greater burning stranded through Nature.

Regular coughing like that of Alexander’s one-night landmate so went through the body of his dreams that he, too, at his own slower intervals coughed his way at last out of a western mountain only to find, clear of the mountain, that the woman Sarah had left and that all this time the independent territory of the nightmare mountain with its luckily only internal contagion had been moving in another direction.

But we in our day have learned that we can accept other systems. Yea, incorporate them. We are about to forget but have not yet, that right in the middle of apparently major events we had been mispronouncing the hard T in Chinese Tao, which should mean "the way" but in practice embraces like the whole show/flo as if Nature, spied back through one of its own eyes, was stratified ocean or at least successfully liquefied. The Chinese invented T, so they should be allowed to sound it like our D if that is what they do, but if they then cannot accept the topological relationship with Dow the chemical concern, lest by western pun linguistic contaminant find its way into their Tao, they may in long run have to let the original source-compound go — i.e., DOw (Dual — Di — or two, Openings, or Obstacles, to each power of Waste), which reframes (for easy reference — in other emergencies other times when the older transformation equations got us through ethereal obstacles as if they existed or plotted our inequalities up L slopes and round R curves) to: either DOw (one unpredictably divided atom of waste — or was it water? — for each ho-muncule of reaction), or doW (where the lower d o designating the W’s "prior power" identifiable uncertainly as "di-obstacled" or as dioxide or — oxen or — xin, or the more and more widely used interhemispheric verb do) acts on a W which is Waste/We where if We will = Singularity Rotated to Unity or I, we’ll still get W but a new W shared between the Waste and the We in relationship not yet known, in part since relationship at the present time is reciprocal with whatever this We proves-out to be. For as with angel and porcupine, dream and its forgetting, relative viewing screens one in each of two next rooms reciprocally showing (if we would only get them together) no other responsibility than our own to end the agony (and at least half surprised that a leaf of music from one North American person should join by way of a soft pocket-in-motion the suddenly parted legs of a warm-hearted, calm, fine-looking South American person who has plunged toward a long sea whose choppy swells the moment fixes into rocks), so with Relation at large in the nutshell of Our sea-to-land base, it strives now inertially, now non-, to be a We we have been privately assured is us.

"We didn’t decide if your granddad actually went looking for her."

"I wouldn’t know; he never talked about it. I think he met with some union noise-makers in Philadelphia somewhere in there, maybe February of ‘94 (? I guess it would be) and fired off a couple of pieces to Margaret’s father at the Democrat—maybe a farmer’s group in eastern Pennsy, I’m not sure; he did mention a band of jobless vagrants at a riverbank campfire."

"In his sleep?"

"You’re in a funny mood."

"We haven’t decided if we’re staying there for the night or coming back for that silly opera."

"We could cover both."

"Let’s not divide the labor."

They stood toe to toe beside a turnpike phone-booth capsule, and, occupying unbudgeable a cleft that perhaps they themselves made and were, in the ambient oxides and simultaneously approaching and receding noise particles of happily stabilized vehicles-in-motion, the world that could not easily get lost for love (so close about them was it) still promised in their silly old bodies to be waiting for them when they got back. And he stepped aside from all this hotline lovingly between them whose telepathy he had known of long since with his wife but then only as they receded from each other — and had now a thought or two private to himself wondering if he could even reach his daughter (who might be on this same turnpike right now if she had turned again to some link between the death of that weirdly gifted Trace Window guy’s murder and the place where he had recently used that gift yielding however information that Flick-Sarah was unlikely to have obtained) — and then also accepting that he had not thought about his son by love or image-signal reconstitution in hours if not days.

But he would not stay within himself apart from imagining himself each of the elements of this scene according to her serious-hearted dream theory (that he would like to tell his old friend Ted if it would give him a remission from sickness) — so he came up with:

(1) himself as the turnpike cars en route to Windrow et al. running on automatic leaving fauna, flora, other machines to breathe what he gave off;

(2) himself as the glassed-in phone booth both target for relatively faster-moving eyes and slot relatively removed from a person who knew him and loved him and was not always charmed with his charm but would stand in his way like a guard fully exploiting the rules and with her lovely arms outstretched toward him;

(3) himself as her, as B.J., Jean: too strong to be split between resting here with him, marrying, living for this long moment, and winging off to an endless nutrition project in East Africa — as Jean? he felt her legs warm and conscious and knew that she was not telling him to go away along a warp of age differential as if he ever would die and come back either younger or in her body that he knew pretty well;

(4) himself as also his own (actually leased) car, accelerating like gravity from a city tunnel toward a past home (decelerating to then use the speed of sound to phone to check on a daughter’s safety and with marginal disloyalty to call an extended son, Larry, whose life and thinking had changed dramatically) — but this was not the mere car — it was him, it was Jim Mayn. . part of a multiple scene but not any one answer to it: until he rather casually and humorously spoke: "If I put myself into each of the components here, the cars, the pike, the phone booth, you, it comes out pretty dreamlike." She laughed with a tincture in her throat of contempt, and shook her head and said, "Make your call, and let’s get going. I was talking about actual dreams. You’re bullshitting me for some reason. I mean, you don’t believe this is a dream, this is a pretty odd day, I grant, when we have to go to a thing in New York tonight and you think you have to visit your father and the cemetery which is O.K. with me even if I don’t know what’s going on and you’re bullshitting me; but I know you’re more serious about the not-dreaming than even you are telling me." "If I don’t tell you, does that mean—" "Oh shit, man, ‘holding out on me’? Yes! When it’s this important."

She was bitching him as if he hadn’t been through twice her life. Larry had given over his systems hunt and relative reincarnation hypotheses, but they lived on. Say this Obstacle Geometry made a middle term by association with life on one hand and on another with how paths of astral bodies — light itself! — got deformed by massive bodies they neared: how did you — how did Larry, who said he wan’t talkin’ like this n’more — get from that middle-term stuff to being in more than one place-time at once? Mayn wheeled into the booth and told the operator to bill it to his Manhattan number, glad he had never installed one of those singles-people answering machines, but Flick/ Sarah was not at Lincoln’s or Amy’s or a club her mother’s fiance kept up his membership in, and Larry was out also, and Mayn seemed never to have stopped facing Barbara-Jean (Jean!) as close as a shower, close as some trip he left in a mind bag of unsorted non-news, though facing her to say he did not really think he had been through twice her life, not even twice his own — hers was her own—"I dreamt my own death, I think, once," she quickly said, glad they were friends again—"No," he said, "I know we get along." And he conveyed to her without more than a touch that he could explain something maybe in the car, which she then said she would drive — asking suddenly and lightly what the pistol was doing half-concealed in the lower sidepocket by the driver’s seat. Oh he had forgotten it the other night, in fact got into a discussion with a police detective and forgot even that the pistol could just as well be returned to the man from whom it had been easily taken except he’s dead now.

"You sound thorny," she added — to what had gone unsaid. This thing down here beside her wasn’t the Mayn family pistol she had heard about, was it? That? he said. But she really didn’t care. The driver sees more along the road than the freer passenger and might talk and question more. She said that a bicyclist in her rear-view mirror back a half mile had been sideswiped by a car and had disappeared smoothly into a ditch. Jim suggested that turnpikes shouldn’t have ditches. She said that as long as they existed you might as well use them. She said she didn’t see anything moving along the ditch’s horizon. She put her hand on his.

Jim explained that he had given up trying to see recent developments as unimportant or as necessarily unconnected to mysteries and oddities he himself was marginally confounded with. She laughed and asked if this would interfere with his work on anti-missile particle-beam weapons. Work on? he said, and laughed. Oh sure, she said, why wouldn’t he dream up a missile or two on his own? Or an anti-missile, he said like a proposition to her knowing she would not confuse it with some old anti-missile missile. Made of anti-matter? she suggested. Too easy, he said. Anti-light, she said. He had tears in his eyes. He said he had been downright fond of the modest short-range Sprint in its day, one of the only mildly threatening curiosities of Mr. N.’s regime, and it had been trotted out again after the ABM ban in ‘72 as a short-range tactical. You sound like a salesman, she said restoring her right hand to the wheel. For "enhanced radiation," he went on, finding her thigh with his left hand. . low thermal yield, cut down on damage, leave motels and churches and the Congressional Office Building standing, kill the T62 drivers but leave their vehicles intact right there in the main streets of Dusseldorf and Paris— Livermore Labs were playing around with it for God’s sake in the fifties when she was having Babar and Little Miss Muffet read to her.

Men know so much junk, said Barbara-Jean (Jean!). Hey, he said, she could explain the fusion doughnut to him better than Lawrence Livermore himself, and she hadn’t even been there. Simple, she said, you get this ring of magnetic material, keep changin’ its field real fast so you induce an electric field that’ll give a bunch of particles a push and then another push and then another and oompa-pa oompa-pa, but there isn’t any Lawrence Livermore. Well, that’s a linear accelerator, he said, I can tell, and thanks — anyway that particular one was trying for fusion energy, which is more sanitary and peacekeeping. Oh, she sighed half-intelligently half-contemptuously, we all end up the same either way, right? But she was there with him, turning turning to him constantly though she never took her eyes off the "ribbon of highway" he briefly hummed. That bullshit about fusion makes me mad, she said, it’s so fucking expensive you know. Actually, he countered, he’d prefer to wind up ashes more than dust. She laughed and took one affectionate hand off the wheel: Angel dust, she added, to whatever he was thinking, if anything. He said he imagined she didn’t know what angel dust was. What are T62S? she asked. Russian tanks by the hundred was the answer.

Had bicyclist been resurrected? No, she murmured, without looking, but — can’t even see his ditch. Mayn reported a multiple-car wreck between Lausanne and Geneva along the lake road, in fact extravehicular and intramural (—what? — hit a wall), an acquaintance named Karl, this was a year ago, expert on arms-limitation protocols and on potential Russian cheating on the overall strategic-launcher ceiling, anyway he was declared by doctors on his arrival at hospital to be a miracle, and with that he died.

A miracle? Yes, that he had arrived in two pieces.

Why are you telling me this?

Because this is an arms negotiator who sat at the tables of our international power vacuum always armed with a small pistol.

What’s that got to do with your daughter and your grandmother’s trip west and your grandfather’s diaries that your daughter is returning to your father today and your grandfather’s briefer trip west, and dreams, and us?

Because if you don’t dream, you get something else.

What?

A fairly advanced design, your doughnut, Jim.

Oh sure, I had all that energy left over from not dreaming.

You read the old Galaxys.

Never heard of it. I don’t even know now exactly why a torus is better than a dumbbell-shape or a sphere or cylinder, I know it’s the inside usable surface and the strength of the shell, but—

And it had spokes?

They were just like a bike, but not all the same length; but the wheel—

Doughnut—

Torus. . was circular just the same, except, yes, there was a break, there was a break.

It broke in two? she asked.

It separated at one point and they added to it, but it stayed in one piece. God I’m tired. Why are we pursuing this total fantasy?

I’m pursuing you. You discussed all this with Mayga. Also, now that I’ve postponed my food trip to Africa I feel I want to justify my existence, so I’d like to know if they grew potatoes in Styrofoam with the roots hanging free and if they developed whole-wheat rabbits and sun juice from specially treated squeeze-paper — all the fruit juices direct so you bypass the fruit.

Oh I knew, as surely as I made that trip down to the shore playing the detective at the suicide site, that when they made that air-lock cut in the torus so that for a few days while they added a segment the torus was like a pair of nearly closed calipers, it let some of us or maybe it was only me make an unofficial escape.

Maybe you were a dream the system in the torus had.

You know me. I wouldn’t count myself among the distinguished or the mad.

You went around convinced you were in the future and needed to warn others what had happened.

Why didn’t I, though? I went on with my job.

You always say that. But what are these things happening around you? Old meteorologists, your daughter involved with a journalist named Lincoln who stagehands for an opera starring a friend of the woman who runs Lincoln’s women’s workshop.

Waste.

The mountain that compacted to next to nothing. What about that mountain?

I don’t remember. Was it made of moon matter flown in to the L5 station?

When did this future all begin?

I don’t know. But I always got transferred Earthside out of the break in the torus, let me draw it for you, no, touch my heart; and when I arrived, I was in both places, the future and the present, and some weeks the present was my past and I had just about made it up, but this was all in my head, and years later it still happened, sometimes when I had a couple too many or woke up in a new room, a motel in the desert, where I had been sent, I felt, not just by assignment, and I would think the problem was tequila or the worm in the mescal but it was like the things that happened when I was fourteen, fifteen: I had been returned unofficially to earth, which was both past and present and insofar as it was past, I had to make it up, but it was real enough, the M/E transfer zones where colonists went two by two and stood on this plate to be launched, to be really off’d into the Earth-Moon-space settlements and would tell them what was happening to them but they wouldn’t believe me, and at some point in time but not always time I might see that the settlements weren’t dazzling or original but heartrendingly functional, and God I’m boring you too.

You’re interesting, Jim, don’t you know that? Or did you mean you had bored Mayga? I keep wondering about Mayga. She died.

And I would find myself back in that settlement and later on in my life I would have stuff to add to that picture, although it’s not my bag, I’m a humdrum type, professional—

But how did you get back?

Well, that’s what’s odd. I would wind up back there, swimming in a very low-gravity pool where the water waves stacked up slowly and then subsided like sandy gravel; but while I was the same, I knew that I had gone through the same thing the colonists had gone through, I mean again.

But you would have had to go through it with someone. Probably some woman.

But I couldn’t remember.

Neither could the other twosomes who got scrambled into frequencies and wound up in the space colony one person rather than two. Maybe it was happening over and over again.

Maybe I had some memory of it. Search me. All because I didn’t dream.

You need to think so.

It was important to me to let the world know what was going on, though you know I was never a muckraker investigative type like what my daughter might have wanted. And so I would arrive suddenly on Earth and go to one of the departure centers where these metal plates with electromagnetic-plate domelets received and processed pioneers two by two (so there were always at least six on the way because the units wouldn’t work singly but only three at a time), and I would stop these people and sometimes they were descending from government buses and I would say, Hey, when you get there you won’t be two people, you will have been turned into one. Do you see how this isn’t me? how it doesn’t get us anywhere? not even to Mayga, who was a nice woman and I have never understood her death, it cast a long shadow—

Onto you?

Yes; onto me. I mean, I read a novel a year, maybe every two years, standing up in a line at an airport check-in counter or waiting for the shuttle (then fall asleep when I get into my plane seat) and I recall a chapter at random and then throw the book away or leave it in the seat for a stewardess, it was a pretty good book—

A particular one, you mean?

I think so, yes; I was reading a dream, the author had put in a dream which switched on and off as if it was… I don’t know. .

Each dream was displayed on the side of a box kite? How about that?

And I had just picked up the book but I didn’t need to go back to the beginning to find out what the dream was referring to or what the dreamer felt about it all, and it was obviously the author’s way of taking care of some tricks he couldn’t pull off in the regular story, but mainly you felt the story got stuck in there in place of something else or to communicate between parts maybe, in place of some work, y’know, I mean some real work of storytelling.

Oh that’s it: dreams don’t take enough work; that why you don’t go in for them?

Oh in the book it wasn’t just the past. It was the future that was so slick: the guy had this dream and then he knew what to do next, his life had made sense, and the author didn’t put him through a scene that demanded some thinking and some guts, but just made up this. . where did you get the kite you mentioned?

But why shouldn’t this dream of yours come from somewhere?

I told you the thing wasn’t a dream. I was awake.

But why shouldn’t it come from somewhere?

Well, I wasn’t any junior birdman, and it didn’t come from studying Galaxy up on the roof at night, though I did have a subscription to Popular Science the year I was in the Boy Scouts and I didn’t like Buck Rogers in the movies any more than I liked jungle nonsense, I went for westerns, the saddles, the boots, the hats, the horizon. What about the kite?

We could cover them all at the same time, the four-paneled dream-kite flown by a couple of newly weds making plans, the visit on opera day to Mel Mayn and the cemetery, attendance later at the opera, and some experience of waiting for what must long since have happened to a young Navajo whose tracks turning up here and there across the American landbridge from sea to sea break for stretches sufficiently impressive to account for his joining the un-precedentedly low-leaning noctilucent of the late Anasazi but not remaining with that old spirit young in cloud — as if making way across the also moving but inertial continent, he merged his non-inertial coordinate system with the inertial coordinate system of the Anasazi’s stably humid afterdeath. We could cover them at the same time had we the people available. Which means for us actually finding a preferably live body (Coxey’s or the dime-museum orator Browne’s only if the era was right) in which to incarcerate this idea one of us might have, might be, if the price is right, if the chemistry is right, and the idea might be just our self (helped) or selves, sometimes a locked-pelvis-type-focused person, sometimes a man such as Mayn feeling again the ache of wings long-halyard-vectoring to "where" he knew he was telling the truth about the future and more nearly to his father’s house where two cars parked in driveway so we would not have Mel to ourselves hearing an elder doctor-friend of someone’s intone that the last thing you decide (according to a patient of his who had gotten back with his waif) is what comes first (prioritywise though in a coordinate system full of a multiplicity of small-scale inertias you better not wait too long or she will be gone and waiting elsewhere if in motion) — so that, seeing the cars and knowing his daughter had come already bearing the diaries that a guy in a fringe jacket and black-and-tan hair had left with the doorman of Lincoln’s apartment house, Mayn could contemplate bypassing this visit and going straight to test his Trace heritage at the cemetery with or without the wonderful girl who might rather stay with Mel and Flick before she and Jim returned to the City for an opera called Hamletin, and he could be glad that, tired as he was, first he and Jean here in the car passing as one unit a chain of bright-capped bicyclists as they approached the turnpike turnoff, had settled the dream question even if at his expense.

The mountain that compacted into next to nothing, she had persisted. What about that mountain? Obviously, he said, I talk too much; was that at Cape Kennedy? I don’t recall telling you a story about such a mountain; I don’t have one, in fact; but there is a mountain around at the moment. Yes, she said, I’ve heard — it’s both around and approaching; but you don’t talk too much. Try not to disagree with me, Jeanie. I could try, she said, except it’s a losing battle. Well, you’re so damn smart, he was saying while she said, Some things I don’t know: like "Visa to China" then "Along the white mountain" (is that a pop song of the forties, sir?). And some things like "Beagle onto corporation," then "Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving."

You’re speaking telegraphically.

I have to be careful about attributing: I feel I’m on dangerous ground.

This is a service road, the town’s up aways.

When did you first know you were not dreaming?

What a question! First time it’s been asked. I remember a Thunder Dreamer, and I remember my brother Brad screaming at night and a voice passing through his screaming — there’s the cemetery, by the way, but we turn into town — and later I remember more screaming but different and a deeper voice passing through that, and in the morning my mother and Brad were comparing dreams, and I don’t remember his but I do remember hers, which my father kept interrupting like he’s calming her to a point where she won’t talk about it, though I doubt that he cared about what she was saying.

What was hers?

Now I can’t remember, except it had Thunder Dreamers in it and I never asked but kept this in mind but I thought about it at my, yes, at my grandmother’s house one afternoon, maybe the same day — it was raining, of course — and she could have read my brain because she told me a story about Thunder Dreamers getting pistols and music and carrying them hundreds of miles across mountains and passing them on and she said she had never told anyone this.

Well, was that true?

I love you for asking. I love you, Jeanie. I love you for picking something up. But it’s done with, and who knows or cares why what happened happened?

Now you’re the sentimental one. But your eyes just lit up.

Pay attention to the road. I told her she must have told my mother too, because my mother had mentioned dreaming that a Thunder Dreamer (what’s a Thunder Dreamer? — I’ll tell you some other time) — had passed music to a man who studied plants who had passed the music to a woman who had studied animals all the way from South America to North, and the Thunder Dreamer had passed a pistol to a man who used to cure people but now let them do it themselves, and there was a picture on the pistol but my father kept shushing her like a nurse soothing her.

What did your grandmother say?

She said my mother must have heard that stuff from someone else, maybe a friend of hers — because she had never told the western stories to her because they were. . they were something, I’m not sure what. But where did you hear about the box kite with dreams on it? You turn there.

Never mind. It’s attached to that mountain we’ve been hearing about.

I’m an old factual hand but I’ve been dragged into that mountain at last; it’s the other reason we’re here.

Seems like we’re here in New Jersey in order to get back to New York to the opera. It’s a long route.

"Good grief," my father used to say whenever he began to get exasperated, and that’s as far as it went.

We’re getting close.

Pull over a second.

"Along the long white mountain but mountain itself is moving." Ring a bell?

Sure; you said it before.

"Beagle…"

Same thing.

"Visa to China."

But the question is, who told my mother about that music and pistol? I mean it hardly matters now, but. .

These are direct quotations. And add also, "Compacting down to next to nothing — Indiana, Chile, Choor, blonde." Is that right? "Blonde, Choor"? Is that the end of a sneeze or some word I didn’t get all of?

Are you asking me because I’m responsible? I didn’t know I had mentioned—

Naturally you wouldn’t know.

I can’t know everything.

I don’t know why I’m so mad at you.

You’re sort of in love.

I hate "sort of" and it’s further from "twice" every additional year. Shall I turn off the motor?

Where did that kite come from?

It had dreams on it, and it was flying inside someone’s mind.

It feels familiar without being.

Your young friend Amy heard it from the Chilean economist who got it from a woman who flew in from Minnesota. It had been flying inside her mind from time to time since the time of her divorce.

It’s a fine thing to hang your dreams on. Amy’s your friend, too.

We share a messenger named Jimmy Banks, who has an incredible head, inside and out. The woman who helped him protect this bike of his that changed his life is a strange old woman who is always with a strange old man who is a defrocked meteorologist. I went to see them both, because of what I had heard through Jimmy, that this man had invented new weather according to the old woman and was a hermit but lived with her, and they were both from New Jersey and she named a town that was eerily familiar.

You’re telling stories, said Mayn.

You’re upset, M.

Start the car.

What was the other reason we came out here?

I want to introduce you to my father.

I feel I know him already.

We already remember the difference between dream and wake. We heard of a seminar, all-day, all-weekend in fact, part under the table, part up against it as the interrogator translates into colloquial. We remember the seminar as a generally articulated structure capable of accommodating a multitude of small-scale resource and promotion weaponry. We learned later that in the next room we could have learned something about receding from our embodiments into pure idea under command or electromagnetic auspices or mere stress. Later still we learned that we had been doing this anyhow, as if it came natural to us, angels, porcupines, closet-exhibitionist hermits, incarnations of others who have already remembered in order to forget. Until one of us, a journalisto named Mayn clustered his signals together enough to see a dark-haired beautiful young woman-technologist speaking to an old spine-crust of an unemployee who said he needed a vacation and had one in mind — north-coast working vacation — who might be called Hermit-Inventor of New York, though not possibly connected with those wages of exploration and stupid risk and disperson that we have made become us in honor of such late persons as Margaret Mayne and Alexander her spouse, plus the Navajo Prince and so forth.

Then you don’t see how I could treat the Hermit-Inventor down in the Village as separate from—

Was that "Choor" the end of a sneeze?

It comes to me, it came to me, it came on top of something, it didn’t come from Margaret, it doesn’t matter where it came from but where it goes to. But I didn’t know I had mentioned—

Naturally you wouldn’t know. Here we are. Your father has two cars?

Are you being caustic?

About your not knowing? No. Historical.

Why would I naturally not know?

Because you said these things in your sleep, some in Florida that time and some in my place the night before election day.

In my sleep?

Got you now!

In bed I relax. I blather, I run on, I sort of chat.

Like you sort of love me. It was night. You were asleep. Believe me.

I believe you. But even the night allows space for daydreams.

Even nightmares allow space for someone who cares about you to be there and not get translated into a frequency.

I love you. My father doesn’t have a car. He has visitors. I knew my daughter was ahead of us. There must be one of his local friends here, too. Maybe this isn’t a good time. Who is the old woman who is with that old man down in Greenwich Village?

Your pal Spence has been visiting her, but she’s crazy probably, according to Jimmy Banks.

I have to go out to the cemetery by myself, but I want to take you in and introduce you.

That’s so incredible it’s almost not rude.

We’ll get back into town in time to have dinner before that thing.

If you have been dreaming all these years, how do you account for that leftover energy you said enabled you to travel into the future?

I don’t know about any of that. Maybe I can dream now.

Maybe by forgetting your dreams you found energy for the other trips.

Mayn introduced (B.-J.) Jean to Mel. Flick was downstairs with the books. The diaries lay on the table. Mayn excused himself, hearing his daughter speaking with someone downstairs. It was her boyfriend he hadn’t met. He said he was very upset and wanted to go to the cemetery. Jean said he was very tired. Mel put a hand on Jean’s elbow and asked Jim if he wasn’t going away to Europe. Jim said he supposed so. Mel said he didn’t understand. Then he laughed. "Don’t know," he said. " ‘D.K.,’ your grandmother’s friend the hermit said, because I heard him."

The news woke us. It was like having holes in our heads in the right places, all the right places. We had proved just among ourselves that radioactive decay acts generally so we can figure it ahead of time but is not only capable of accommodating a multiplicity of unpredictables it is made up of them, the parts that are not greater than the whole but just not predictable in the same way if at all. We had proved that this proof was like other proofs that would displace it. We absorbed Larry to us in order to prove to him that he was one part pure abstraction — one part pure, he jibed back, bodiless — and while we had him we learned that Simultaneous Reincarnation might not be simultaneous when occurring between divergent frames of reference and because he was disembodied while voicing this he was apparently not a candidate for that doom the Anasazi healer predicted for some young person who would describe and therefore have to take responsibility for a new form of reincarnation. All events are connected by their horizons, independent words say, and the dream Mayn enjoyed in the cemetery might seem to come before the opera but came after it, as witness the time of day, and, ultimately, witnesses who came there for related reasons:

The Dream as Later Reported

The news woke us, or the frequency of phone pulse approaching our own rose into our sleep. It was Ash’s voice, and his information seemed ancient and unreal. Another bomb, another secret rising from the drawing board — a device this time that knew what none had known before.

We felt still asleep, but in a future that followed from Ash’s brief report. Our new bomb was resolving a multistage executive tower so that I-beams and bricks, bolted-down furniture and solidly transparent walls condensed to nothing. A thousand people in recognizable attitudes, and as if on an infra-material photograph, were caught by our vision still distributed according to the now vanished grid of their building’s floor levels. This was a bomb that left people more or less alone.

The voice on the telephone-speaker came through so matter-of-fact that one thing equaled another. Was the nuclear device in question no more earth-shattering than the experimental motel where Jim Ash had stopped for the night? This passive-energy accommodation had been built from ground-level downward to take advantage of year-round moderate temperatures just below the surface, but Ash was phoning from a hilltop pay booth, private if exposed. His voice would recede for a second as if he were turning away from the receiver to keep an eye out. "You see, this thing discriminates between what’s living and what isn’t."

"It does what?" we asked.

He meant what he said. The miracle of the bomb was that it would destroy non-living structures ("resolve" them) while leaving anything alive unharmed. We asked Jim if anyone else had it. He didn’t know. We felt it was our bomb. We believed Ash when he said it didn’t make any noise.

In those days the men and women in the labs dreamed of the unified force field, but they got up in the morning and did their work. Economists ran their cost-benefit breakdowns, and we all took it one day at a time because that is the way the job gets done. We knew roughly what to expect. But a device that wiped out everything except life? A bomb that leveled buildings but left people very much alive? How alive we did not reckon at first; for who was prepared to understand what was happening in the colossal quiet of this uniquely silent weapon. People it left standing, Ash quipped grimly — a joke that took hold in those days of queues and informal marches.

Left standing, maybe, but not sitting. Unless you were sitting in a live tree or on a live horse or upon fertile areas of organically arable soil. For if you were within the bomb’s silent scope hearing the clink of an unbreakable coffee cup in its saucer or a random radio playing, you could not hope to go on sitting on anything inanimate or inorganic. It would be blown out from under you. If you were sitting on your porch across the domestic hinterlands of the continent or at your office desk, get ready to be inconvenienced. Porch and rocker were instantly gone, your desk in the city likewise demattered. Not to mention the building that housed the desk — three hundred desks. For this bomb liked structures made of steel and stone and the more transparent substances.

That night when Ash phoned, none of us knew how close we were to the strange advances in personal power and self-possession soon to occur in a large number of citizens who now seem legendary. We slept and dreamed a dream so natural it did not come back to us as the answer to our waking question until later when what we had dreamed happened. Happened again and again on the limited but vivid video footage available showing a building’s entire population of dark, luminous persons making their way to earth like sky divers before the chutes open. Which answered our first, waking question the morning after Ash called: how would survivors descend?

The silent bomb would not be hush-hush for long, Jim Ash had predicted. His opinion was soon matched by hard fact. The desert, like the sea, had always seemed beautifully right for tests of megaduty devices. This time some sites were ruled out as being too near one or more of the hexagonal dwellings called hogans owned and/or inhabited by the Navajo. Then a man named Babe who had never contributed a dollar to a presidential campaign offered his jojoba plantation. He hoped to dramatize the hardiness of that remarkable bush whose pod contains a waxy liquid that was already replacing whale oil and would eventually find uses in auto lubrication, scalp treatments, and cooking. But this desert entrepreneur hoped also to prove the scientists’ claim for their bomb; and to this end he volunteered his ranch and his jojoba-processing plant. If the thing went well and the buildings were leveled, the government would replace his home according to his wife’s own plans, and would import, lock, stock, and barrel, a whole new processing plant from the Orient as if he had bought himself a Saudi mosque or a Roman bridge. His loyal staff would stay on the job during the test, whatever the uncertainty about the bomb’s "discrimination profile." Anyway, it would be an experience.

At detonation, however, to the surprise of practically everyone, sections of the desert as well were suddenly not there; they had dropped away, swept by some local collapse of time or accelerated into silence by some unseen wind. The sandy, alkaline landscape had vanished around the blast, leaving gaps deeper than craters. Two men and two women raced out to take samples along the rims. The targeted buildings had been not just leveled, they were now nonexistent, leaving their occupants shaken up but grinning with some knowledge not quite yet theirs.

Religious leaders wanted proof of the bomb’s powers. Unfriendly continents demanded Washington share its bomb. Reaction in the financial community and the construction industry was mixed. Meanwhile, we needed to know in a hurry what happened with larger structures. People who worked in them at first preferred not to take part in the upcoming tests. But when a sensational test in a major seaport "resolved" a modern three-story outerwear factory, employees in other buildings came forward. This was a double development, for people were volunteering not only themselves but also the buildings they worked in. Our man Ash, having covered the first test, had now covered this second one where, after the detonation, the factory workers were seen descending so slowly from the vanished upper floors that it seemed to be against their will; so slowly that many escaped with the simplest bruises.

Ash checked on the survivors of the first blast. Where the narrow, deep gulfs had opened east of the jojoba groves, soil samples tested out devoid of life. Not even a jojoba bush would grow there. When Ash phoned to ask the planter Babe if he was really going to get a new house out of this, and what were the authorities doing to his employees during the follow-up examinations, Babe thought Ash knew more than he did, and divulged the location of the lab where survivors had been sequestered for debriefing. Jim Ash flew there. He posed as a hermit and met a woman he had seen at the desert test. She moved among hillside trees with a grace so centered that, as Jim was able only much later to express it, she might have been a continuum present elsewhere as well as here.

She wore a linen headband, and her name was Mara. Through her, Jim Ash saw the grasses and the orchards as if he were on their far side looking back. Where were the fences? Wasn’t the place classified?

This was Biomorph Valley. The debriefing lab was in a bunker nearby. The survivors, most of them, were very much alive. Jim felt Mara saw through him, yet she seemed to tell the truth when she said it was natural for him to be a hermit now. Back at the lab it was important, she said, to seem to know less than she really did, in order not to disturb work going on. A friend had had all too much life in him, she said; he had died of his own very intensity yesterday at dawn. Only then had Mara found both a power of peace beyond attachment and a new connection with this friend. She loved him and Jim Ash too. She was one of the few women he had known who when they knew something did not ask him to guess what it was. He did not pass on to us what she had told him, or not until the late changes alluded to above were widespread. Tests went on apace.

The employees of the three-story outerwear factory had learned what was happening only one minute ten seconds prior to blast. Therefore, none experienced prolonged preblast anxiety. An outerwear executive who was a part-time major in the National Guard and so had kept secret the pacemaker he had had installed next to his erratic heart was restrained from jumping to safety during countdown; most of the building’s occupants did not take the test seriously. But when the countdown reached the ultimate silence of detonation, participants suddenly found themselves following the one simple instruction: concentrate on the locus area both between your eyes and between your ears and think of this as a source of both choice and buoyancy. But those who descended with surprising ease to ground level after the factory was resolved experienced this not only as the result of concentrating as instructed; they reported to postblast debriefers a veritable flair for this mode of concentration and controlled movement.

What was this? Where had this flair come from? The debriefers and lab analysts were not prepared to say; and the survivors were urged not to speak of what had happened to them. Who had given the instruction? The personal physician of the National Guard major objected to the sequestering of survivors, but when phoned by Jim Ash, the physician had no comment. Ash wondered which had come first, the "flair" or the blast. He told us he himself had concentrated on the locus area between his ears and between his eyes, and thought he recalled (unless he was wrong) Mara telling him the blast came before the inspiration. But we, whom he had not yet told of Mara’s other confidences, reminded him that Mara had experienced blast in a one-story jojoba-processing station, so she had faced no threat of falling or problem of descent. Yet there was a basement, there was a basement.

Pressure at home compounded pressures from abroad. The limited video footage available was shown again and again. The government was beset by demands for future tests.

But the government must decide more than merely who were to be the lucky survivors next time, assuming there would be a next time in the supposed increasing sophistication of our somewhat low-key device. Jim Ash reported that enemy tanks would vanish by the hundreds but not the soldiers occupying them; car factories and high-rise dwellings would "resolve" into nothing more than marginal weather, but not the people in them. However, Jim asked privately if we were not faced with a curious problem like what you do when you have achieved the capability of reducing the food supply but not necessarily the number of eaters.

He talked to slum redevelopers. Obviously we had within our grasp rubble-free demolition of buildings. But citizen groups pointed out that the buildings in question had been condemned and the risk to life and limb in getting people into position prior to blast was prohibitive. But when, one spring day, a thirty-five-floor insurance tower was resolved in a test to explore breadth as well as height, the government saw the truth in what a small group of observers had lately urged.

For the space vacated by the blast proved to be not just physical but mental and most mysteriously environmental. Visiting the site, the Secretary for Urban Communication said, "It was as if suddenly, looking into the revealed distance, we could think."

Tests with the creation of space in mind began to be carried out in selected cities at sites where the authorities saw no special need for vertical economies in the housing of equipment or people. Meanwhile, the influential group of observers extolled unenclosed space as a virtue in itself. Philosophers argued there was no such thing as unenclosed space, but they were moved by the group’s tranquil conviction.

Now, Jim Ash knew the members of this group and was not surprised when a spokesman for the building trades pointed a finger at them as being bomb "survivors" one and all. Next thing, architects, anthropologists, and the incorporated Committee for a Sane Bomb converged upon the issue. They got hold of debriefing dossiers from the initial examinations right up to the present, including hard information from follow-up surveillance. Had not the survivors sparked a general disparagement of architecture, as if buildings were in the way? And had they not tried to give the awful crux of deterrent strategy an aura of charm? (The executive of the outerwear factory had resigned his National Guard majority and was seen ascending steep hills and surfing with a board.) Why had the survivors not been detained pending fuller analysis of changes in their behavior and further inquiry into their affiliations?

Two watchdog anthropologists insisted on attending the debriefing of five new survivors. They had not known they were within target range. No one else had known either. The five had been inside a local church the principal threat to which had been the ongoing excavation of a new subway branch directly under its east corner. The moment of blast came, and the house of God was gone into the middle of the afternoon. Two widows were arranging flowers; a male derelict was relaxing in a pew; the sexton, who had been fishing under his cassock for a coin to buy a paper, had significantly at the instant of detonation wondered why blast survivors had never to his knowledge wound up naked; and a boy in a baseball uniform was leaning up against a pillar enjoying a breather away from his friends. But these five found themselves suddenly at large in the city under the pale window of the sky and still supported by the old floor, doubtless because the church was half a mile from the main target.

More curious, they did not mind being naked; for that is what they were, and each knew the others didn’t mind. At the post mortem, as Jim Ash called it, the two anthropologists zeroed in on the sexton. He had ever been a man to accept coincidence below as design from above. Moreover, this paradox suited his everyday inkling that once you have noticed a phenomenon, you find it again and again. But had the bomb been waiting for him to spot its inconsistency regarding clothes? Which bomb? The bomb as developed tradition? The bomb as conscious formula? He granted that he and the boy baseball player had been wearing polyester, but the derelict who’d wound up like a really quite fine nude on the ancient stone of the holy floor had been wearing a tweed jacket made of natural fibers which, as any tailor will tell you, "breathe" as polyesters do not. On the other hand, Mrs. Holly had been wearing her plaid wool skirt, though mind you all but one of the chrysanthemums she had been arranging had gone up with the church.

Both anthropologists insisted on talking at the same time. The sexton in his survivor’s robe answered easily, as if the questions were all one. So why’d the bomb zap clothing now but not before? Did he mean us to believe that that thought of his about clothes just before the bomb detonated was just a coincidence? And how come he wasn’t upset about his church being demolished? And had the thought preceded the bomb?

Ah, what would be the point of getting upset? said this increasingly benign elder, his glasses intact; and in any case in the absence of debris what evidence was there that the church had been demolished? If the bomb respected life, perhaps it had one of its own both in substance and in its eternal formula and was therefore capable of growth; and if so, perhaps its growth was reciprocal with our own, and coincidence no more than the powers of the multiverse converging as the hand learns to love the leg, the body the mind, the brain the heart. And the sexton raised a hand in greeting or farewell, and his lips hardly moved, if they moved at all, as he apparently said, "The main thing is that all the survivorsjfo?/ so good."

Whereupon his questioners were distracted by the appearance here and there of other robed survivors. The two anthropologists remembered they had neglected to ask this humble savant why the hundreds of other survivors had not been denuded in this latest test. They saw the boy baseball player, the stubbly derelict, and, from the building that had been the bomb’s central target, two male elevator operators and a female draftsman raise a hand in the same manner as the sexton simultaneously although they were not all in sight of each other. The sexton turned away, and the anthropologists were ushered out before they knew it.

Jim Ash, who, humble journeyman, found himself drawn inexorably toward hard science, noted that the two investigators did not report back to their watchdog subcommittee. They volunteered for the next available test. The debriefing lab teams weren’t talking, and Jim Ash reported that they had now been sequestered. Asked how they had fallen safely from great heights, many survivors smiled with a new form of wordless generosity. An elevator operator said it wasn’t like falling down a shaft; there was no shaft. A pilot, who had been weekending in the penthouse of a targeted structure, said that for her it was like being struck dumb by love and that instead of support being taken away when the building was erased, on the contrary some impediment had been removed, and she knew deep within herself that she and gravity were friends. An anti-abortion group said the women survivors were hysterically possessed. The small but vocal political opposition to the government charged that survivors ate and worked sparingly, seemed at times drugged yet suspiciously alert, and stuck together. Large groups of survivors turned up in parks and open plazas and brought with them a silence natural and fascinating to bystanders — to "non-survivors," as Jim Ash called them. In these hushed gatherings the survivors would nod or shake their heads, smile or open their mouths as if to breathe something more than air. They communicated among one another without words and often without looks. Two sailors reported that in the vicinity of a group of survivors odd shifts of air current and moisture-dryness ratio were felt.

Eventually a survivor was kidnapped. It was the former National Guard major who had been an executive in the seaport outerwear factory. The kidnappers phoned Jim Ash to report that their captive had disappeared on them. Several known survivors phoned Jim Ash to say they were convinced there had been a raid on the rural lab where the bomb formula had been discovered. The ex-major was accused in absentia by the Committee for a Sane Bomb of stealing the formula to sell. The kidnappers reported that the major had had a peculiar incision in his chest before they had worked him over; the committee accused the government of altering the survivors. A hundred survivors selected at random were called in and found to be feeling fine. Ash was known to have visited the missing ex-major’s physician. Ash phoned to give us in strictest confidence a fuller account of what Mara had told him in the valley. Several foreign powers complained that the varying effects of the bomb made its formula difficult to infer. Unaccountably, Washington offered to share the bomb. The sharing would be phased. Demonstrations would be given abroad on targets mutually agreed upon though chosen by the United States. Then the formula would be passed to nations that could show a real need for it. Gradually, postblast findings would be shared. A mass protest of archaeologists in a green field near England’s famed ancient baths was given a surprise bombing, to demonstrate good faith by the targeting of an area where there were only people and no buildings; the archaeologists reported afterward that they, in the American phrase, had a good feeling and in terms of their profession were looking inward as never before.

Unavailable for almost a month, Ash was reported to have said that the increasing sophistication of the bomb’s effects — its growth, if you will— might not be the result of tinkering with the formula. Jim was usually onto something when he was not in touch with us. Now he phoned to report that a top science adviser had told him that in fact, from one test to the next, no changes in the bomb’s formula or in the operational nuts and bolts had been contemplated. "They" were letting the device "have its head." They were going to clear away the Golden Gate Bridge in an upcoming test in order to prepare for the construction of a new bridge which the contractor had promoted by enlisting several survivors as advisers.

A brain-scan technician at the original Stateside postblast debriefing had asked to be included in the upcoming test. His request had been denied, and he was in a dangerous state. On a day when saffron ceilings of pollution over New York, Denver, and Los Angeles mysteriously turned into three great gentle gray clouds suggesting the forms of future animals and then almost simultaneously condensed into a rain so rich that acid lawns turned blue and the very police stripped themselves naked in the avenues giving thanks to that tonic flood of new weather, the technician whose request had been denied expressed his rage by calling a press conference. He would tell all, or at least more than he knew.

It was a violent scene. Jim Ash and others blocked the double doors as long as they could. The technician was letting it all out — anger and information. Survivor brain voltages, if anyone cared to know, had hit levels so far beyond parameter models as to be either freakish and lethal or an adaptive mutation that made this a whole new ball game. Moreover, these unthinkable sharp loads of electrical charge — if it was electricity — were coming from such a small fraction of the brain that large areas "looked" positively dead, and this was presently borne out by the trimensional pictures, though they came out spotty. But one thing was clear: there was endless variation from survivor to survivor as to which brain areas were nonfunctional, yet the actual amount was a pretty consistent fifty percent in most of the subjects, while from other brain sectors came these giant flows of more force than you would think a head could handle.

The technician stopped — his mustache drooped — something in him had stopped, or his powerful rage at being rebuffed in his effort to be a bomb survivor was beginning to translate force into guilt. Newspersons scuffled with federal officers at the door. Facing a dozen questions at once, the technician ignored them and talked fast. These survivors had seemed to know each other. No matter who they were. Yes, and they laughed too damn much, many of them at the X-rays. They said the machine must be one of the early models. Big joke. What happened to the synthetic sieve my surgeon tucked into my liver last Christmas? one asked. A more potent X-ray "eye" was flown in from the Caucasus. One survivor had laughed so hard he clapped a hand over his chest and his eyes stood out; his hand covered an incision. He wasn’t the only one with an incision. Like some others with incisions, he looked at his X-ray and said, "There’s nothing there." Big joke.

Jim Ash, struggling with federal officers who were trying to enter the long room, called out over his shoulder, "Was that man a part-time major in the National Guard?" but the technician, in whom for a moment resentment had seemed to slow down into nostalgia, pressed on: These people! Secretly communicative people! Happy, frighteningly happy! Well, when their follow-up scans came in, the voltages had risen again but now the huge charge had distributed itself, and amazingly the voltages were coming from all quadrants and yet the new trimensionals showed that the dead hunks of brain were now gone, obliterated, what have you, removed—

"Vaporized?" a woman called, and Jim Ash picked her out.

— but the measurable brain power now perfectly spread itself, the technician continued, and came alike from the cell matter that had gone on living as well as from these gaps, these vacancies, these voids with shapes that you had seen before. . these voids. . presumably left by the bomb.

The fugitive technician had rediscovered sheer science. His ruminative pause made Jim Ash and the other defenders at the door turn to look, and this was just long enough for the feds to rush the room. This happened so suddenly that Ash had a moment to get away.

The officers were not interested in him then. The former major’s physician phoned to ascertain Jim’s whereabouts. A medical hardware firm phoned, wanting Ash to see their lab in a remote wooded area of New England; they sounded too nice. One of the six biggest cathedrals in an unidentified eastern European country was reported to have been resolved and absorbed in a test employing American advisers and technicians. More and more survivors were being sequestered because their common problems of adaptation were thought to be best met among their own kind. A woman known to be checking out the links between the breath of survivors and recent changes in weather patterns was visited by Jim Ash, who tried to explain what an early survivor woman had revealed to him — how total-body auras dispersed pure vibration prior to the light of dawn.

Ash at last phoned in to report that two California survivors, who had been about to present to the bridge contractor their plan to replace the Golden Gate Bridge with a force field spread like an airy milk by the energy of people who had been resolved by survival, had suddenly been sequestered. A test on an Austrian concert hall was called off because Ash was reported to be racing there in order to become a survivor, but later a group of heart specialists convening only a stone’s throw from the concert reported that Ash had come and urged them to support the bomb as a cure, whatever it did to the pacemaker industry.

Above the Hungarian pampas an unidentified hovering object was resolved without residue in a test that failed to determine if any aliens or Hungarians had been aboard. Here in the U.S. in areas where homes had been resolved/ subtracted, we arrived at a new clemency of weather. The government investigated a link between this meteorological change and a diminution of wind velocities at what had been the third windiest place in America. Jim Ash was caricatured in the newspapers as a man both hiding out when no one was looking for him and trying to discover the next test site in order at last to become a survivor himself. The Committee for a Sane Bomb advised the President that these unpredictable alterations in the weather were due to the wholesale elimination of building across the continent. A philosopher replied that Memory is the estranged spouse of Prediction. We could not put all these facts together but we knew again that the contemplation of a completed past might yield not just regret but certainty.

The government shut up shop and declared the so-called "People-Oriented Bomb" illegal. We were not clear if the now very great number of survivors sequestered around the world were letting themselves be sequestered or couldn’t help it; and were they affecting the rest of us from their safe distance or not? and was it safe? Widespread information on the dynamics between the extant and the vacant areas of survivors’ brains achieved fabulous proportions. It could now be told that many survivors had disappeared during extended debriefing; they had relatives to prove it. More disappeared than reappeared. One day a man called to say he was the kidnapped major whose landmark pacemaker had been vaporized; he had felt so good after the resolution of his three-story outerwear factory and subsequent debriefing and hilarious X-rays that he had tried to double his luck and had got past the guards claiming to be a physician in attendance. So he had been resolved twice over, and this second time he had had exploded out of his overall person that last anxious urge to maintain his body as constant evidence of the past and assurance of the future. Thus, he had found he could suck by means of a quickened circulatory system all of himself into those new gaps of brain vacancy that this charge, so curiously equal in distribution, disguised as regular cells. But he did not take to invisibility and was glad of it only since it had helped him escape his kidnapper-torturers who were prepared to impose old-fashioned nuclear blackmail upon a major city to be named later even though everyone knew the government would not buckle under.

When we spoke of Mara’s love for Jim Ash, we knew it was the truth. Her two loves, really. We remembered the first, who had died of excess charge and died at dawn. Jim, then, had been the second love, but it was the two men together who were the love of Mara’s life. And Jim she had loved too much to attach him to herself. He must remain outside the company of survivors. This was a familiar issue. Had the sexton called forth by his thought about clothes the new added capability of the People-Oriented Bomb, or had the potential in the bomb caused him to think the thought that proved to be prediction? Likewise, Jim had often said he wanted no part of survival and would rather be himself, as long as he had all his faculties and, if it wasn’t asking too much, his limbs and principal appurtenances, and would rather from his limited angle look at these people and the powers which survival gave them — and here the former major was saying Mara had wanted this for Jim, perhaps destined it for him.

In his absence Ash was being discussed. He became the current history he had been unwilling to sum up. Why didn’t he get back in touch? He was dead, if that was possible. He was sequestered. He had been put to sleep, or we had. Wherever he was, information from anonymous sources kept reaching our news bank first. At perhaps the birthplace of wind power where Nile boats translate taut sails into authentic motion, a fugitive archaeologist discovered in the inmost burial chamber of the one pyramid not yet leveled both the formula for the pyramids and the original plans for the Parthenon, which had recently fallen apart in gratuitous sympathy with what was going on. The archaeologist disappeared — twice-resolved, sequestered, or stowed away.

Mara had told Jim that blast preceded flair. The flair, of course, for controlled personal descent but also for concentrating upon the buoyancy-choice locus both between the eyes and between the ears. Yet who had given the outerwear employees the last-minute order to concentrate on this locus? It was an order that became standard in later tests. Jim himself had tried concentrating on this locus. It helped him forget a whole lot of what he didn’t much want to know. But when he had gone hang-gliding off a two-thousand-foot ledge during an energy trip to Vermont, he had felt it was the wings and not some subcerebral buoyancy that held him up. But we knew in our banks that he had never been the same after Mara confided in him that day in Biomorph Valley. The test at the jojoba ranch had left her with a white rim beginning to grow around her head and the knowledge that if she kept changing she might have the dubious chance to go on living indefinitely. The radiance given off of her and the other survivors would be measured, she predicted, but its source, no. What had been cleared away in her left room for motion; but the motion was a growth form of what had done the clearing; and the life she now held in her was wholly in the motion between what had stayed and the new gaps. These were partly in the flesh of her head and her calves and her waters, and were partly the activity freed as if unknown hopes had become space.

Scientists eventually knew pretty well how the "persons" of survivors had worked. Elimination of dead matter in the brain both concentrated energies already present and opened gaps that let that energy jump and grow; the void left where internal body parts had been, set off kinetic potential uniting upper with lower. How this turned the whole or entire person into a multiconvergent window radiating communication and genuine feeling outward was not yet known. But meanwhile there was work to do every morning—"chores," as a prize-winning physicist put it.

One evening a freak storm put us in mind of what Mara had told Jim the day he posed as valley hermit. When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightning by an imbalance between earth and heaven. As Jim once said, this wonderful person may have meant by "heaven" nothing more than the lower, positively charged edges of cumulonimbus thunderheads, but then again she may have meant what she said. In the middle of the night we all got up to listen to our freak storm and check the terminals and endless tapes of our information bank. Just before dawn we looked at each other and knew that the storm had covered a silence we had not heard and that the bank was gone and with it the storm, and that we had contemplated all this before it had happened. Someone had saved one last P.O.B. device, or the government had; and if it had, it would announce that that was absolutely it, the People-Oriented Bomb had been unilaterally liquidated.

We found we could let go of all that data we had been doing. It had impacted and condensed into such a hard load that perhaps only the government could have resolved it, albeit through local control.

The weather was changing back to its old self. Sixty thousand new homes were built to be electrified by the great single-blade wind rotors of Wyoming. The World War Two one-and-a-quarter megawatt device atop Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont was repaired. Tales of the P.O.B. survivors persisted. Thinkers posited that if the People-Oriented Bomb had in fact generated a thought about itself in the mind of someone about to receive the naked, concrete effect of that logical possibility, the bomb’s new attention to the sexton’s polyester and to a derelict’s hoary, living tweed argued not only that the bomb might always have been under the control of the communal mind but, as the government suggested, might have been a figment of that mind.

Scientists had a harder time getting up in the morning, much less addressing their spectroscopes and proton skimmers. It was not that they were still dreaming of the unified field. It was the feeling that we all had missed something.

Which in turn kept us going. Which in turn kept alive — if memory is alive — the memory of our sometime bomb’s discrimination profile and what might ideally have happened if its aim had not been dispersed by so much adjacent non-living material. And so it was that we overheard, by chance or our own nature, that somewhere a People-Oriented Bomb would be set off in a chamber surrounded and sealed by life alone: a chamber planted with soil and ceilinged by soft, breathing skin, a chamber walled by leaf and hill, by live animal flesh and blood, containing at its target center an unborn child.

Spiraled back then into the waking night, we saw we should have believed ourselves when by the light of our own broken breath we had guessed ourselves to be relations. As among pockets of weather bagging here and there out of a rubber sheet of atmosphere; or like stories of the unknown that our light bends into in order to come out as some further end that we make near; or like these witnesses, some known to each other, watching a man wake in the middle of the night hearing his name called across grass and gravel and stones of a burial ground, each with its own name.

But it’s going to be O.K.

For whatever else we said, our relations are ourselves and there’s still time, though for what? It kept us going. For we had succeeded during that moment of the people bomb in forgetting all that had preceded it.

The past, though, is beautiful and, according to recent healers, "done with" (what you will) up to but including a singer’s physician with a countryhouse interest in plumbing, so secretly arrived at a New Jersey cemetery that he had a long walk from his car with his anguished companion, and he remembers as if it had happened this same dear magic one beside him somewhere in a dentist’s chair and leaning over to the porcelain bowl and vomiting such worms that his imagination apologizes with silent passion adding then the vacuum system he knows of designed in all its lines (and, not least, into the straw-mode-tube mouth-sucker) to handle a sea of saliva under city regulations "hopefully" ensuring that in the event of cloggage in the basement, the backup won’t upflush the plumbed waste of the building’s other users into your very mouth happily tickled or alternately press-sucked by your dentist’s gurgling tube. A definite mouthful! but why — in the medic’s darkling mind at the instant when a woman’s voice called a man’s name in the night cemetery who stretched and stood up as if we had been asked if on the horizon we lacked anything by chance or our own nature’s guesswork and suddenly a figure proved it such as an event that collapses two years into one, or folk, or two lost instants.

And when the man’s voice, its hand upon a New Jersey headstone under a moon multiplied only by all who saw by it, called back hoarsely, "You were right," our heart had burst had it been not already divided through all of us and more.

Though he had not sounded a word during his whole sleep.

The wind had come and turned about him.

He had been returned from one surface of the universe to another.

He was thinking, The unborn child was Margaret’s; was Sarah’s; was what you do as the result of the dream, wherever it slipped into you.

We stood on not the head of the pin but pin-pointed. So we’re upside down-loded only to find in that state of liberation that gravity is what you make it. Long as you keep talking round or under the tables of power. We could talk not so much in our sleep as in others’. Light pursuing other light. Which is what light is the pursuit of. As when (as Shakespeare could have said) throwing the gist of life’s book up against an adhesive partition you can’t throw it all up at once so it arrives in its own time but then is known to have got there also all at once, its speed everywhere the same, and to describe a curve. So life describes itself, in which event it must take full responsibility.

"The Hermit-Inventor!" called the man across the Windrow night cemetery suddenly aware of others here besides the young woman walking toward him. "He said that!" And in the silence he turns a degree or two staring toward what might be in back of him, the direction of the wind? no the presence of or scent of someone else here in this stage of his life where he came he recalls in order to test his windowhood tracewise like a do-it-yourself EKG (for don’t go near a hospital, his plant-waterer neighbor Norma, now happier in her marriage, reported the woman Kimball virtually ordering her when Norma had a serious, even painful dragging in her uterus and her husband lately engrossed in non-invasive medical technology, malpractice precedent, and newly opening areas of environmental law had told her it was fibroids while himself contemplating a new Kimball workshop in part because Grace Kimball had intrigued him with strange talk of new weather generated by new air in part told her by a manic old lady who remembered only that she was from New Jersey, which is not why Mayn is here in Windrow cemetery in the middle of the night having dreamed what he can only now know was not his first dream): while we, who will take his part even if he will not, recapture the events of three hours or so ago that now remember us, having happened in the ancient city fifty miles from here; and, remembering us, these events find local habit in us; and, in twin next rooms, two screens we’ve found out how to join in us need no Dreaded Modulus to trans-hither and trans-yon.

But we don’t now know how we found out how — except we had the heart for it because, come to think, we had bypassed the phosphorus-detecting trace that told us once upon a time if we could only digest its information about the left ventricle’s muscle tone! and learn to join two hearts and more.

As to what had happened at the dress rehearsal, prevue, or one-shot deal, Clara and her eminent, bald eco-husband were in agreement on no surprising number of things regarding Hamletin, Hamlet, and the real show out in the audience. E.g., that the newly basso Prince (after eighteen previous Hamlet operas where he’s a tenor), singing of poison that was so vividly heard trickling down the ear of his in-process-of-being-murdered father’s hearing that some heart in him failed ere henbane could curd his fine milk or waste his glands of smell that felt like they’re at the rear of his brain, uncannily paralleled the lovely aria in Verdi’s Otello though the parallel seemed curved or semicircular where in the soft opening two alternating notes and succeeding amorous fourth Iago love-songs his dusky master’s ear and soul’s aorta to seal some tornado of his love forever in the amazed semen framed by jalousie — surely Verdi here in this warehouse Hamletin! — and Clara and her beloved agreed also that collaboration had here flowed everywhere on wings of love pressure plus other arts unknown: for Luisa’s father had been released from house arrest but then had disappeared in Santiago while Ford North’s stammer had, albeit operat-ically, invaded his singing just before or just after the pianist-composer-conductor in the pit (such as it was, shallower than other pits) his doughty, diminutive young boyfriend in lush black evening clothes had angrily shaken his head during Fordie’s aria compounding the "my offense is rank" soliquoia normally Uncle Claudius’s in Shakespeare’s family drama, with Hamlet’s own "I must be cruel to be kind" speech da da "That monster custom…/… is angel yet in this / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery. . / but heaven hath pleased it so, / To punish me with this, and this with me" da da deliver’d message-like some shadow moulting from some dream, where the boyfriend’s ambition shoehorned Ford into this warehouse showcase and Ford’s bulk compacted to manipulative pathos for Luisa precisely at a moment of her history when guilt for fatherland tinctured in her body to a terrible readiness of her house-arrested father that there let flow along the satin legs de Talca kissed such lust and tenderness for that elegant, terrible, vulnerable agent trained in Chile’s fine ships that she would fuck so deeply with him as to risk her and her father’s life by making her favor seem to depend on the favor of de Talca’s influence in Santiago, himself already stranger to himself than he had known, here "variable and uncertain" (Clara’s husband quotes to her in bed) as Hamlet when placed in a predicament worst possible for the display of his nature and gifts, where like Shakespeare (Clara’s lover gently quotes again from some critic read long ago) Hamlet had not fully planned the course of his action.

Many more agreements which we will get to as they to us, and no surprising number of things to these two who held hands in the theater, disengaged them when moist-warm, looked at each other’s profiles, sat sometimes one or other forward in the seat so the other gave the spine a firm, wonderful rub as much the breeze of passion as any light bending down at them from the stage, this immigrant couple who argued and played and talked and argued always in some suddenly and glimmeringly unpredictable agreement of near-touch like lovers who ring each other up three times per day and, at that, can aria and game through their pair-bonded circulatory systems to heart’s content like aliens (with green cards) who are three hundred percent married and flying always into loss of home and into the sea between that still takes them out of themselves and to themselves, let Grace Kimball (whom he has never met) reincarnate herself as she will as priestess of le Swing, doctor of Open Marriage, promoter of posture, poet-lariat of addiction that explains everything except Clara and her husband, isn’t that true. .?

In such shorthand (he by the way loathes dotted ellipses in fiction) and in conversation they two could forget the shadow of their country far away and hence huge — or the source was far away, but then the whole Thing was inside them (to coin America) — forget for hours "on end" (but which end, my love, which part of the—? —The umbrella? — Which point of the umbrella, oh God bless you darling for— Aiee, she broke in again, I just remembered I saw the green grass rains of the south coloring the Pole in a dream and— And where was I, Clara, where was I? was I the rain, wasn’t there an out-of-wok economist cooking up weather-predictions like weather itself like Michelangelo’s visions— Oh you move me, you move me, and a hell of a lot more than that opera — Only if subtracted from the theater as a whole! — Oh you move me, you move me, oh by the way, have you been spinning lately? because you haven’t mentioned the spins, your head-trips dear, maybe you won’t have to have one of those American scans) forget for minutes the wired skeleton of an unjointed country that shaded every impulse almost, except the impulse to themselves, whate’er that meant in this bison-torso-shaped land of dreams that all claimed New York was not the center of where the self helped itself to language of such weekly obsolescence and instant package that— until all over again these two elegant immigrants, but with freshness like the drama that’s rehearsed by you in a state of faith that you have it inside you to… we sometimes forget what comes next except faith, spontaneous faith. . that the next will come, e’en be it some near room. . and to forget yourself, my darling. . shading all impulses except such love that they might sit together in a downsloping audience in a resinous or wood-oil-smelling dubious theater (for we are particular who we go to the theater with, for we must love them) and Clara and her husband know that if need be, they completed (joyfully) this Hamletin (the suffix compacted from — tina, large leather jar, wooden vat, bathtub, where they themselves repaired at three in the morning when they could not sleep because the phone would ring once and not again and then again once but not again and they would think de Talca or someone was thinking again and even of them, by that connection that breeds reactions to a void of guesswork and fear though fear was not their problem, they could lie together naked to their necks and independently not be afraid, that is not be afraid in themselves of an agent’s revenge, abstract or personalized) yes, they completed this Amero-Chile-esque spiel-fable with a lithe black dame as a contralto Ophelia singing sometimes lines that had been the mother Gertrude’s, "Oh speak no more," yet wired in fury to those raised arms and her outraged throat, a tough Ophelia insisting on being present when her lover drags out his weapon, and insisting on holding it (though back and forth was not clear) in some fight that then propelled it through the arras into the next act — all impulses this shade of their country crossed except their impulse to themselves, these Chilean exiles watching Hamletin because their friend Luisa coerced herself into it — up there above them on a stage while they so private were in love yes beyond the friendship they had once for starters unfolded in each other in a London park, a friend’s London kitchen, a pub near the British Museum laughing at each other sometimes silently until they had to hold hands to keep from singing crazily in whatever place they were that had been forgotten. So put that in your vibrator, Grace Kimball, a continent well lost for pair bondage, she said to her husband, who shrugged with such subtle sexual fondness she jabbed him in his bicep and he turned to briefly mouth the tip of her nose that he had once in vain promised to write a poem on, and now he told her she had overreacted Kimball ward (he’s heard "overreacted" from Amy, but he meant it) and they laughed, and then Clara said it was true and that someplace between meeting Grace while seeking to help the one person in her world and later finding some new crushing load of silences controlling what she said to those naked women (one of whom ominously inquired if Clara and her husband saw a lot of other expatriates), she had seen the pretext become real, but not so he would notice it in her arms, her cheek, her voice, her love, but. .

They were in agreement about Hamlet’s mother’s ghost appearing just when an intense hushed unsung argument arose in the audience between evidently de Talca and some other ticket holder; in agreement that the greater event (though center and margins might gently shift each other inside out like light disbelieving it found state of rest at last) proceeded on perhaps three separate tracks: (i) the sung text individuated as per ego continuum, yet ensemble; (2) also, some real and "now" intrigue involving a number of them and climaxing now or soon; and (3) pieces of unknown individual life for instance frictioning North/boyfriend; Mayn/Jean (seen by Clara once kissing lightly shoulder to shoulder and Clara pointed them out to her husband); a family of four including two teenage daughters who kept leaning across the adults to convey messages; a well-known black model whose name escaped and her sleepy little boy; Grace Kimball/Maureen (who herself several times at end of row got up to leave and sat down again as Grace said Go ahead); the ex-con Efrain and the aura reader Hortensa to whom Mayn had gone asking about Clara; a long-headed, slick-haired, slender, predatory-svelt dark athletic man next to fat, russet-bearded type; and several empty seats that might raise again the rented question how much life is required to be exchanged for a thing you want if only to use, not own, where own means not wife but our wigwam we are at liberty to tear down.

And Clara and her husband, though only later in the privacy of their bed suddenly afraid, agreed as well:

that de Talca moved about and sat in three or four seats during the scenes when Hamlet devises his play with the "coagulated gore" of that other, most un-English woman Hecuba’s monstrous fate

that (for they recurred to this) Luisa had done this strange performance stint in the first place because Ford North, coerced by his boyfriend, had urged her, yet because it might somehow help influence her lover to help free her father

that this work was not some mere folie North was helping his certainly dangerous young, highly metabolized boyfriend show off

that in the Play-Within or self-styled ‘‘wormhole" (phrase unquestionably translated out of a nineteenth-century Spanish phrase for, among other furnishings, "mousetrap") Hamlet played Claudius, who dumb-show woos the Queen, who spurns him richly, delicately, only to be kissed long in her ear which maketh her mad if not literally to suck out of her the "her" soon to appear

that it was a pity the aborting of this perhaps after all dress rehearsal had to cut the famed Yorick skull-session not to mention the tricky spread of toxin at the play’s ultimate good night

that Yorick nonetheless got mentioned earlier in a line neither Clara nor her husband thought was in the text and would check tomorrow having decided to get some distance on the opera by going home to their exile-home’s seamless bed, and maybe Hamlet was no more than regional literature recording what it was like to live on the coast

that the line "My heart lies buried there" which came in the amazing doubled scene of Gertrude’s ghost sleepwalking near Gertrude herself had been lifted from that later Yorick scene we never saw that upon the singing of that line by Gertrude’s ghost low words were said, though whether onstage or in the audience wasn’t clear, that caused a sharp pause, a static suspension, during which the journalist Mayn rose and left, and the villain de Talca after him, and a man with long hair Clara described to her husband who did not turn soon enough to see

that de Talca reappeared, followed by a heavy-set man heretofore un-apparent but recognizable by both Clara and her husband as an employee at the Chilean consulate

that Grace Kimball called, "Right on!" when the black Ophelia sang a totally interpolated aria about woman’s lot being to lift her bloatprince up out of his rank bathtub vat where he daydreamt new lives more animal than the last that in the scene where Gertrude’s Ghost dreams out loud her own self-sought death, two upstage-directed spotlights seemed to cross and join each other’s body-beams to make, as the Queen and her Ghost patrolled their brief area, an illusion of mutually embracing light unmoved at source but, through the elevation of the strange principals, casting a very singular Moon, but now single now double, and disturbingly so, as all the appearances we—

that at a moment when, visiting King Claudius, Gertrude’s accompanying Ghost, played here first by Hamlet her son, tells Gertrude herself that her Prince (sic) so becomes his horse, so grows into that brave beast’s back as to demi-nature and encorpse himself into—

that at the moment when Hamlet himself appears in this painful but luminous scene at full blast necessitating Gertrude’s Ghost’s disappearance and reappearance now played by the hence absent Claudius who, as Ghost, now embraces the real Gertrude, an echo drummed from a known early Elvis Presley folk-burst light-motivated certain shadows cast by the double Moon—"pale breasts, tanned neck to last a century, keep out insidious rains" — and through some freak of angle a spotlight retargeted itself so fine there seemed an entry or an exit from—

that at this moment Gertrude’s Ghost — when Hamlet, not seeing his actual mother, rushed slowly across-stage toward it — sang of having dreamt that she would cost her young horseman prince his life unless he dreamed his way away from her by—

that at a later moment a photographer flashed upon Luisa’s scene a light that seemed to come not just from his bulb but from behind him for the double door at the rear of the orchestra, one young man seconds later said, had swung open briefly, and Luisa stopped in mid-note and cried in anguish "My love, my love!" having seen something, perhaps some truth, however broken by the life onstage that must go on, though a moment later it in fact did not go on.

But, awake again at two, two-thirty, two-forty-five, arms along each other, so warmly known they were afraid for once and told each other so and found it was that they had dreamed — probably the same dream and now mutually forgot — Clara and husband found they also ^agreed on what had happened at the Hamletin.

Whereas Clara, as they had flagged a cab and boarded it to go north on Sixth, felt a woman’s work restitching here the famed darkness and brilliance of the Shakespeare and the dependent plight of Ophelia/Gertrude as the axis to catch our conscience, her husband easing back in his re- or de-sprung seat and looking suddenly back out the window into the glare of a street lamp felt vaguely a crisis that never comes, a music half-Italian half-Hindemith half-mountainously supernal that continues with utmost intensity independent of the drama of the love of man and woman, "plus" the Moorish virago Ophelia with her sex and dancer’s strength and spitfire and height hardly commits suicide, don’t send flowers! but was briefly said (wasn’t she?) to have plunged her rage into the long and troubled sea, witness steam rising from some strait of the Baltic misting our eastward window so the obstacle of Sweden dissolves! though the lull in the music evoked, he had to say, really that old rippling canal (remember?) in Bruges with the market belfry in the background, yet it was nothing he wished to identify — her hand upon his cheek to say he was crazy but original, and he "Yet I feel myself in some other’s words" — "A critic’s?" — "A dead critic’s?" — "Long gone"—". . into the long and mountainous sea" — "You’re thinking of home"—". . of bed" — "of bed, too," so he knew she had meant "Chile."

And whereas Clara swore she’d heard the agreed too-early- (and Polonius-) mentioned skull’s name Yorick with "New" before it, her husband scoffed and had his hand upon her lap, . "from know—as in, ur families knew de Talca’s family"; and whereas Clara knew she had heard nearby some cry of surprise upon "My heart lies buried there," her husband knew he had not; and while Clara felt some earlier palimpsest of Camp in making Rosenkrantz and Guilden-sterno woman and man then absorbed into a large, secret unity of art, her husband felt parts never really met but as if ideas were buried here that could conceivably be unfamiliar, like, oh well, new boundaries discontinuously defined not just by what they contain but also by where they are in their course, a quality of translation even in the double Moon and that sudden retargeting of light upon Gertrude’s forehead as if "this arrow of song" (was that Shakespeare?) would burn a hole full of—

— but no, said Clara, resting her hand on his so he crooked vaguely his little finger where it touched the valley orbit of her groin, no hole but a glint of glitter she had applied to her skin that came out under the—

— no matter, Ford North’s bombastic stammer was Hamlet turned briefly buffo, said her husband yawning; but no, his wife retorted softly, Ford felt a ray of trouble coming from that little bully at the piano before he knew why he was mad, and responded in advance—

— like provoking a fight because you know it’s coming—

— exactly (though a car blows up in bed their minds silently in Central Park but two bikes rented with the two of them hiding away was dangerous enough to be trapped for assassination) a few moments later left again, had hired a Chinese woman to spirit away the kidnapped child of the Cuban just escaped from the prison so familiar to her husband, he believed he had—(say that again?) — though neither of them as the cab wound past muddled old Columbus Circle into the older lights of upper Broadway believed the missing Cuban posing as anti-Castro could succeed in killing "Pin" whose Santiago security was in inverse relation to the Food-Employment curve’s Reassurance Skew; and whereas for a second both Clara and husband believed that the man Mayn’s leaving precipitately after the "buried heart" line had nothing to do with de Talca following him, Clara shifted her lap in some abbreviated irritation or anxiety, and disagreed — while neither she nor her husband could talk in a friendly way now for a block or two about the relation of the aura reader Hortensa (present in the theater) to the florid fortunist from downtown, Seiiora Wing, known to be a Castroist information service, who sat actually near a black boy with a large, somehow familiar head that was turned right round facing back so one saw his lightning-bolt T-shirt when Clara and her husband looked back and saw Mayn leave and heard someone say, "You all right?" — doubtless the young friend of Amy’s, Jean, said Clara, but her husband added superiorly Amy was a friend also of Mayn’s and had been escorted to Madison Square Garden by him on one occasion:

until, easing away from their clothes, murmuring of the Leipzig Ring last year they would have enjoyed seeing, where a white web spun by the Norns ensnared the whole stage, they said simultaneously, "Yorick" and looked with humorous sadness at each other and moved gently toward each other’s welcome strong bodies:

until, in bed, they disagreed about Grace Kimball’s doctrines regarding women, money, and the patriarchy though their minds were elsewhere, and disagreed softly as to the nature of Margaret’s Ghost—Gertrude’s, he said— What did I say? said she, oh! and laughed — Your grandmother! he said — he then feeling the Ghost was a living double Other reincarnating Gertrude here and now by some scheme divined by Shakespeare and kept to (even lazily) himself; she feeling (with her hands now, and while one sole ran up his hard shin) that the Ghost was a dead thing in Margaret, a dead part of her— Gertrude—Yes, Gertrude, yet "Margaret" was also from Grace Kimball the other day meeting a demented old lady in the street in Greenwich Village who had had to leave New Jersey, and her name was — yes, the Ghost was a dead thing that had wound and fumed and circled its way up out of Queen Gertrude’s ear earlier-sucked like priming pump, to recompose in the outer world to be seen at least and last as the trouble it was, and make trouble by just, you know, standing in the way, and by the way (were they falling asleep or would they make love? — why, love made itself over and over with them — and under! — yes!), and by the way, Clara said, he had heard the young fellow behind them say "reincarnation" then — but her husband rolled toward her so she loved that mouth of his and brought his hand up in hers, and he said he had heard nothing behind him but she said that was the source of his thought, and he disagreed, here in bed, and then disagreed on the issue of Luisa’s "My love, my love," not sung but called sharply {porque? — well, Clara thought Luisa had not liked leaving abruptly like that, but Clara’s beloved knew deep at the base of his own horizontal, tense neck, which he therefore asked his love to gently but firmly rub, that in that sudden light-shed in the opening of the double doors at the back of the warehouse theater she had seen de Talca her lover in difficulties, but he did not say this to Clara) and he also disagreed about their not visiting Luisa after the outrageously aborted rehearsal-quasi terminus given the performance in disastrous arguments onstage and, too, because Clara was tired — and getting out of his seat he had known that he had seen this reincarnation boy in the row behind someplace before — and disagreed, too, on what the young Prince growing into his horse meant, and the issue of whether all our appearances turn double at times so that in the botheration of their obstacle-hood we help oneself to find (but he did not express his disagreement here either) — to find… my love, my dear, this April night when our grown children may be lost to us like our country, we will always love each other, true love born again all the time in a wild land, music isn’t it? side by side combatting fear, fear, which we’re not so prone to but as, with sex-sleep’s congruent drug encroaching and sex always between them whatever they got up to, be it nothing even, the phone rings and stops, rings and rings, and stops, in some void of headtripville threat, until, passing through each other toward first sleep which is like the most ancient first love he senses like blood not his own splashed from some passing adult onto the face of a small child and for one flickering frame of wish sees de Talca turned into news in next morning’s newspaper dying as he lived by bad works though he could not have been all bad if Luisa loved him even as she did, and Clara murmured Maybe the real ending of Hamletin tonight was elsewhere — and he didn’t care to discuss it and they passed into sleep and the mutual dream they will eventually forget for they’ve too much good stuff to remember already, each other’s ventricle of memory.

We already know what will have just happened next, Mayn’s dream in the Windrow burial ground (known as Maplewood Cemetery by people who lived in that town who would not necessarily know more about it than someone gone far away from it, say to name it). But Mayn and his grandmother named the town Windrow while he was still there in it, gentles the interrogator. But, we counter, she had already long since gone away. Yes, but come back, compounds the interrogator who fears what he can’t put into words, which is some newly arrived-at integral personality we wordwise help-ourself to.

We already know what will have just happened next, but not what that touching new bomb device will make its dreamer do — beyond laughing; rising by his personalized gravestone; and taking certain steps toward the girl Jean through the night obstacle course of model edifices capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale unit-memories, a stone city built up rather than out. He bears on his very tongue words he will say to Jean because you can’t rely on mind-touch here, and you can’t pick your place; and he loves her and will ask her despite his age to marry him. But then he hears a voice abstracted in him of our very interrogator now more himself than once, who disagrees "You can pick your—" and O.K., O.K., growls Mayn, damp as hell and with a granite print upon his upper back’s mind and his thick-haired cerebellum; he will go along with that; and when "We don’t know enough about Barbara-Jean" is dimly pursued, ButI do, spreads answer into the body of all of us — and, for one thing, she is coming from a different place, scientist (or, precisely, technologist), prospective childbearer, she would not lie dreaming above family graves making herself accessible to what traces be windowed by a heart’s half-memories, which collect right now only parts of the Jim Ash dream, but enough to go on as the distance closes.

We saw the Indian on a wheezing blue horse at night; saw him come near and then there was no horse; yet he was on a train describing some diagonal through a land more and more settled, until there was no train — no more than the buckle-like silver money clip he had traded for money which would be the speed to reach the coast, lightning speed if the Spirit of Good Power allowed, to reach a place where, his beloved Margaret had said, harsh January winds blew always behind you even when you turned, and the rich, red fields of New Jersey were deeper than even the greatest planted fields where he came from, where the sun now would be bringing out colors of the desert and beyond, the purple aster, the blue-eyed "maiden," orange clown locoweed named by the two-wheeled nine-fingered man who knew the javelina-tracking woman who brought strange written music to the Anasazi who didn’t want it, the dwarf yellow-wort, the white sand-lily, flowers blooming but always there in the life of the land, like the weather that the retired healer insisted to the retiring hermit might go away but never could arrive because that weather was always somehow in this original place — power, though sometimes without body but only there like a track, a good bear-claw track, or the rattler-jaw arc-like sunray

but with teeth drawn inward

or the lightning arrow reversing the Anglo letter Z, for these signs in absence of the thing itself meant it would come back in body as would some Abundance known to be in a big mountain and waiting and remote yet close as rays of thought that took him back to the isthmus at the top of the world that he had told the blonde woman of (for he could not help telling her) where something he did not yet understand had happened, to do with the two trekkers from that other world and with some air or storm that… he was not sure, except that the rays of thought took him back as fast as the train dissolved in the power of his poverty (though hadn’t the money gone too soon?) though the silver had mattered only as a means and the sun graven upon that Zuni money clip stayed with him as certainly as the bison-tongue chunk in his pocket and a huge dollop of light that had thick-watered down into his upturned face-mouth from the night cloud so it sucked him as he drank it, and then he could not be sick, could not, but the waterfall dollop-tongue from the Anasazi’s noctilucent cloud stayed in and he accepted what had happened like new weather that came from new acts and seemed to help him go on east but both for the sake of the bison tongue and the Anglo girl Margaret, white but so deeply tanned, neither for one alone nor the other alone, he said to himself, regretting his blue mare but knowing life left death-things and was right: so the pursuit of Margaret? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself; the quest for knowledge-energy? he reasoned; no, not enough in itself to explain this trek of his over the — the landbridgtl the land-sea bridge! it came to him like one answer to how many questions. Yet he looked back at least in his dreams of coasts and guessed that she was on some diagonal like his and had been thus behind him some of the time, and he met an old man with a wagon and one horse working their way up a hill toward trees and rode with him and realized Margaret was both behind him and ahead, and remained convinced she was with child. And stranger, he felt close to many people who would not protect him from his wandering but he would gain from many knowledge. So much in him still unknown seemed to know, as we, that an ending had already come long ago. But what was this? — these senses that others and he converged and were all equally alike whether from moons of distances or from nearby, from New Mexico mountain and Arizone and Ute-Colorado trails, or from Chicago to New York — it made no sense, drawn though it began to be along the curves of his thought: for people differed as the bison from the eagle, even as the pistol from the saddlebag, or the track from the gila "dragon" making it; or Mena’s words about this written-down music-messagery she showed the An-asazi and the use she might make of it, taking it home to a woman of her family who made powerful music for many voices and instruments but no one would play it. And the Navajo Prince as if his Margaret-given name drew the curved eastward parallels of these people toward one coast or point felt in his belly hungry for some fact, a soft shape drawn within them by not all these people but some very few he knew of, west to east, and the shape pulled him on toward where he would meet Margaret.

So that one day along the Hudson River close in to the ancient city of New York or New Yorkondo or — quoiandam, he had within him not so much food for thought (as Margaret had sometimes said when he told her things) as thought for food, and the question whether thought followed energy or energy thought, thought its way through his feet and his loins knowing that, close to him in time, others who were close to him had passed, and passed him, but he was almost there, the outer parallels, the inner shape, the strong sound of Margaret’s voice in him, the bison tongue in one pocket, the metal implement in a bag across his shoulder.

Yet where was she? they heard each other think, and what had she done? it was still inside her, and not all the words she could think up helped her forget, mmhmm not words written down in secret pain (the interview with Coxey, interview words) and posted in gaiety from Ohio to her father in New Jersey made what was still inside her speak, so she needed to just understand it and think that it was not the same as the new burden she carried with her on a train that could take her almost home to be met anyway in New York by her elder friend if he had had her letter, and she held (she smiled at her own phrase) on for dear life to the parcel wrapped and layered in years of weeks to hold its breath until, once home, she could do what a dream of her lover told her to do which (she smiled again and was smiled back at by the gentleman facing her) justified her in what she might well have done even without the dream which was wrapped like the cocoon she had in her arms, and she smelled the brown wrapping paper, breathing it so crazily and desperately she could smell the color, which kept her from crying but may have made her look a lunatic, the glass and upholstery and even the sound of rolling stock dissolving away into a sadness that might have been freedom but was not yet freedom, so that herself dissolved leaving for the unknown gentleman across from her only the smile which in turn recreated her by reminding her of the lady and the tiger, and the rhymes, and then the whole thing; but she did not laugh to let her fellow passenger approach what she puzzled through, which was a dream about a daughter she did not have:

She and her lover had ridden across a mesa into a ravine of strewn boulders so largely tilted they seemed about to roll together, all different shapes; and she got off her horse and the horse vanished and she saw a cave in one rock which began to move as she entered it but so that, once in, she did not feel the motion; but because of this she could not get out but could only call to her lover who called back from his rock where he was living similarly. Then she heard but did not feel all the great shapes of rock come together, and she looked out her cave door with a terrible pain in her stomach to see a warren of levels and corridors — because all the boulders had been connected — but she didn’t know where they were going because she couldn’t see out, and she resolved to tell her daughter when she got home — her daughter? yes, her daughter — but then she saw through awful mists that maybe they were not going home, for her lover called to her that this was how she had gotten here from home. But he was somewhere else and she was afraid to go look for him until she saw that she was the awful mist in the complex caves of some other stonework all here joined in a great artifact but then saw he was right there but could not see her, and she had woken in a friendly stranger’s cold Ohio house, her secret hospital, weak and in a state, and reaching suddenly and with pain for the parcel under her bed she found she literally poured like vomiting such quantity of tears onto her nightgown sleeve and the floor that she thought the bed was full of blood, and she thought, What if it’s a boy? when, after all, in a way, there was no child.

But when she boarded the train having heard that Alexander might be in Pennsylvania or even seeking her and wondering where her elder New York friend was, she felt boxed in by these men east of her, west of her, while seeing that they all took her side. But the box was on the move and she knew that her dream of her lover had determined her to do what she was doing which was bring her stillborn child swaddled and sleeping in its mother’s dreams which were all it had, to Windrow to tell her faithful Alexander. And when she found the Hermit waiting for her in the smoke of the terminal and looked about lest Alexander be there, or, who knew? the Indian, she knew she would tell him her dream. But when he said to her Did she plan to go west again soon, her reason deserted her and she thought she could smell the package, which he reached for, and she cried, "I love him, he is my own true love," and the man said, "There, there." But later, when she told her dream, the act it had now determined her on seemed one answer to two or three needs: to be honest with Alexander, whatever it cost; to be faithful to the Indian, whatever he knew, so far as honoring the stillborn child; to obey her simple, not morbid need; and thus to hold some freedom that began to shape itself in her head as a taxi drew them gently to her friend’s house, among all these New York bicycles, and she knew she would be a good and firm mother.

We are waiting for it to come to us. We know it does. It was, like something to do, in us a long time back, where it ended to tell the truth; and thus transit angels not always out "thataway" to incorporate but inward to this other body of information so lovingly marginal we will let ourselves not know which we are, the margins or the core-core; yet we have found within us a pair of high workshoes given him — Who? asks the interrogator — by a doctor driving a one-horse shay who found them under the seat and they fit and the doctor confided that that coming Saturday he was remarrying (no wonder; he had been happy the first time); also a dark blue woolen shirt, held out to him by a fair-haired girl in a doorway holding a tiny red baby in her arm; an old, sun-singed straw hat with holes in it a short, bald holy man with a white, round collar gave him on a Sunday in front of a white mission built entirely of wood; a princely new pair of overalls donated by a fat young woman who found him asleep on her property and said he must be tired not to wake when she come along; a green-and-black-checked bandanna given him by an underwater swimmer, who came up out of a lake near Yonkers and offered him any clothes he wanted from the pile by a birch sapling. No one knew how he had come so far, but the Hermit-Inventor, who tried to comprehend his own responsibility here and what might happen, did not quite wonder how the Navajo Prince had come so far, not only because Navajos travel vast distances but because he had heard scientifically proved that things might appear at widely separate places with no apparent movement in between, and so why not people? and he had voiced it to Margaret when he had interpreted her dream for her a few days since. If the Prince detected anxiety in the Hermit looking fitfully out a begrimed glass window into a street full of yelling and horses clattering metal hooves like weapons on the stones of the street, and bicycles running in and out, each felt somewhat cared for by the other, and they spoke of the people here — some girls coiled their hair in squash blossoms each side (Yes, replied the Hermit, they are Jewish); and they spoke of the weather and of the late Anasazi whom the Hermit joked about affectionately and warily until the Prince said, "He is in Maine by now and I will join him there," which turned the Hermit from alarm over Margaret to alarmed fascination over this after all strange possibility, the single tie or question between these events, these consequences, these "event horizons!" in New Jersey and in Maine being this long-haired, long-fingered, diamond-eyed traveler so honest and so momentous that astounding strength in him had made him perhaps an answer not a question; but still they did not speak directly of Margaret. They spoke of seacoast and its limitlessly varied and mayhap variable outline north to south, of the east wind that may penetrate a thickly settled coastal area well inland whereas an inland wind from west has forests obstacling its progress and is deflected and dispersed, yet why should there not be forests that will take that force and use it as the Navajo barques coming across the sea kept on when reaching land and sailed the land as well? The young man stood by a window and asked what were the shapes upon the posts in front of the houses across the street, and his Anglo elder said they were pineapples, a fruit yellow and juicy on the inside, prickly on the outside, a sign of friendly welcome, of home, and nothing to do with pine trees. The young man said he would go to both places. Both? Yes, to Margaret’s town and then north. When the Hermit upon being asked with such directness of vision what Margaret’s dream had been and what it had meant, that he must answer (and having anyhow previously brought it up himself as if to put it between him and the incredible young Indian who had walked into New York and found the Hermit and on his way here inspected the new great arch not two years old) answered at length concluding that her dream had brought her home, for it was evidently of the Statue of Liberty, whose parts had been the occasion of their meeting almost nine years before on Bedloe’s Island and which had now been assembled (She had told him, she had told him, the young man answered, not of meeting the Hermit but of the Statue in the harbor, and she had laughed about it and said it was big but not very good, but he would have to make up his mind himself and maybe she would meet him there, too)— anyway it was there, said his Anglo elder, whose charts and instruments cluttered his home, that he had told her to go west and later on her way to Chicago she had seen him in New York and—

— and the Hermit-Inventor of New York had been the one, said his visitor, to tell her of those sojourns in the Southwest, the mesas and canyons, the washes and the great grasses, the crown around the moon caused by nectar from the cosmic ocean (I never told her that! said the host) and flower colors and the cliff colors and an old former healer who made predictions.

The Hermit told him his mother had been restored to life on his sudden departure, and the Prince retorted that a Zuhi outcast had told him long ago; and when the Hermit said the sooner he got up North the better, since the Anasazi would see what he had traveled to see and then would be no more, the Prince returned that he would go to both places, to find Margaret and to see the Anasazi in his cloud, for the Prince had within him a huge compacted dollop of that cloud’s light.

Yet when the Hermit did not believe him, he told him his mother had also not been believed when she told his father, her husband, of seeing a hunter on the mountain withered instantly to mere skull and clothes and of meeting a second hunter who sent her away down the mountain saying another flash hailstorm (though she had not seen the first) would come from the north sky-path and she and her child would be sucked away into the mountain, for she was very pregnant, and she had never been happy with her unbelieving husband after that. Never. And had become sick.

The Hermit-Inventor was so fascinated by this that, about to take it up (for he sensed some tie between the corridor of hail and a coastline intimation he had long had), he both half-forgot Margaret’s danger and simultaneously half-forgot his own discretion and, with wind-dispersion absorbing his mind plus that strange source of spiral winds due to shearings between cactus’s dry and a certain vegetarian reptile’s moist breath whence spiral winds faintly green due part to cactal skin part to the reptile’s prior incarnality as the dreaded Pressure Snake he now years later realized he had heard of first from Owl Woman who had known this young man’s mother, he blurted out, "Let her be; she’s home where she belongs; she’s got a good life with a young man who’s waited for her all this time; let her be—I’ll find the money to get you on a train back home yourself; let her be, let her be — I don’t know what I been thinking of, if you go back West you’ll serve yourself best" — but in the pressing silence that ensued, he found in the energy of his fear this fascination, and began again about hailstones from the northern corridor and their effect through apparently the blue Pressure Snake that Mena had said existed in other but like form along the extreme mountains of the South; but the Navajo Prince said simply, "My horse dwindled into death, and the train I took faded from what lived; life leaves death-things and that is what I will go to Windrow to show her."

"That life leaves death-things?" said the Hermit-Inventor, who, suddenly older and Anglo and insane for a moment, laughed at his amazing visitor who had just walked in off the great table of the American continent. "She is with child," said the young man. "Not to my knowledge," said the Hermit. "You told me she might be," said his visitor. "She is not with child now," said the Hermit. "Life will leave death-things," said the Navajo Prince. And if for some minutes they pursued this other matter of the precipitate air that mattered to both as knowers, the elder knew that the younger was already gone and must wonder if he was armed. Did he happen to know how the spiral interior of those hailstones carried every so often down this corridor from the north to join with the stunning work of that blue snake actually made these whatever-they-were, these rays that came from the mountain? The Navajo Prince, who was an unusual Navajo, removed the black, brown, and gray chunk of old bison in his pocket, and took then from the bottom of his pocket a small lump of red-orange clay-stuff. The red might be from the blood of those hunters who had been caught upon the mountain at the time of a particular hail and been sucked precipitately right out of their own bones into the high slope where a big cat might watch from among the trees. The Hermit did not touch the lump. The Prince squeezed it respectfully in his long fingers and it looked to have a softness of very cool butter. The Hermit did not like it and did not like the bison chunk, which the young man was talking of as a compacted secret that his hand would someday absorb. And then he would go back to his people to help them.

"Don’t wait," said the Hermit, and then, "Where are you going?" for the Prince had politely turned away toward the door. A box kite came up even with the window and there were yells from the street. The Prince looked and must have seen the strange writing on the kite, which disappeared, tugged downward. "The Statue is worth seeing," said the Prince. "It is on my way." "You can see it any time," said the Hermit too casually. The Prince was such a fine young man in his gift boots and overalls and blue shirt. He seemed to say his cells enabled him to be in two places at once, and to be those two places; he spoke as if he must risk being elsewhere. He knew something about that couple who had trekked across the Bering Strait, and had become one, according to the Prince, during a north-wind storm, and this was thousands of years gone by.

When the Indian left to inspect the city, the Hermit followed but at once lost him and went to a small hotel nearby where there was a telephone. Outside the hotel a carriage was leaving for the Hudson River pier with a gentleman and a lady going to Europe, trunks stacked behind, the two of them looking at each other as if they couldn’t wait for the romance of Europe. The Hermit knew the porter at the hotel.

He made a phone call. Margaret’s father did not answer. Margaret did. Her voice made the Hermit’s whole face spread outward as if it had exploded, and he knew he was in love with the girl who so many years before he had jokingly told to go west.

He told her what had happened, where the young man was heading, and what he had said about life leaving death-things and her being with child. Margaret said that she had an idea. She sounded strong. But she asked, then, "How did he seem?"

The Hermit thought of saying nothing. But he replied, "He is in love. He is dangerous. He has found the way to New York. He will find the way to you." The Hermit said he had told her dream to him.

"In ten years," she said through the static of the phone, "I will smile at the memory. I will make sure my daughter understands such things."

"Your daughter?"

"I have none yet," the young woman said with such life in her tone that the Navajo Prince might have been a dream, no more.

If he could help, would she call on him? She said she thought she knew where the Prince would go. She sounded different, as if telling some story.

In the street again, the Hermit found the Indian waiting for him, as if he had been following the Hermit. "Was she carrying her child with her when you saw her?" asked the Indian. The Hermit could not find the answer. "Is the child dead?" asked the Indian. The Hermit looked at the young Indian’s hands and then his face. "I know where she will be," said the Indian, and turned away.

Suddenly the Hermit said, "She will go to the Statue."

"Why do you say that?" said the Indian, but did not wait to be answered.

He had waited long enough.

Boxed in and watched by even the future she felt; hating all of us in her, but calm and so determined — she felt him in her very eyes, how she saw maple trees here in Windrow that he in fact had never seen, how she saw faces she had told him of; and she loved him and was sick of him and could have killed him if he would kill her. And wanted no bad thing to happen to Alexander, who had waited a long time for her but because he had chosen to, and who was so kind she had kissed him once on the mouth, and it was different and friendly, and there was a slight smell of tobacco and she wondered if Alexander had had any experience. He told her the family place in the cemetery looked good as new and she smiled at the phrase and lived a horror of it fixed somewhere beneath the skin of her smile, which Alexander told her sweetly was the light of his life.

Why did you go down to that woman’s apartment and buzz and walk right away before she had a chance to come to the door? I mean, did you know she wasn’t home? I mean Grace Kimball.

I heard people in there, and I knew I didn’t want to ask her anything after all.

About that old lady and the meteorologist you—

Yeah. That’s ended. It’s repetitious.

Isn’t that what your friend Ted said history was?

Like cancer cells. Like memory cells.

But why is history repetitious?

Take the Middle East.

It’s a hot potato, Jimmy.

Ted said he was pretty sure he would die before the world did. But he had an idea how it would end.

So your dream decided you about us. And that’s getting back to the subject.

So he walked miles and inspected the City from farmyards down to the Battery which had been a place of guns once. And he took a boat and thought the Statue threatening the more he looked. He could not stop the boat taking him to the island. He could not stay on the boat when it docked. He did not go in the Statue. He watched from a grassy lawn, with the harbor breeze turning him ever and anon to look at the great cluster of buildings on the Manhattan Island far off.

He knew he would go inside the body of the Statue which was made of metal and he smelled its cold, dead smell where he sat upon a stone walk, but he did not know when he would go on in, because the afternoon was getting on, and he knew the time would come when he would know what to do.

He was half-hidden from the Statue behind a large piece of stone that had been shaped; so he did not see from the harbor side a new boat approaching until it passed, and then he watched it dock, and his eyes hurt but he saw Margaret’s face shadowed by a large straw hat, was he asleep? and she had on a long white dress, and when she got off the boat and the sun brought the wind on she was with another woman. He thought he had been asleep, so cold had the afternoon become. She looked around her and spoke to a lady who was not with her, and went with a group round out of sight, and the Prince thought he had been asleep and dreaming, because he had known she would come and that that would be the moment to go into the Statue. He looked keenly toward the group, who were far away from him, but she was not with a man, there was no young man with her.

Why would one nation receive such a giant carving from another nation? What could America give back? Would not the New York white people always be in debt to the nation that gave this Statue? He had thought about how he would go inside when he went. He had seen where he would track his way, the people he would have to pass.

He did not want to go in, but if he waited until she came out, he would have missed a chance he did not understand but must not miss.

In the Statue he waited below. He climbed some stairs and went deep inside. In the Statue he was far below, and he did not like the metal stairs. He heard the clatter of steps and the echoes of chatter, of women and of men. Of laughter. Of silent upstairs stepping. Or were they coming downstairs too? He wanted to give her a present, but he had nothing. He wanted to know if there was a child. He listened for an engine; there must be an engine in this Statue. He wanted to go outside to see what he was in again. He thought a woman might turn into many things here. As if here, far east of where he came from, it was later time. A woman’s laughter hooted up and down the tower, but her laugh was like a Navajo woman’s sometimes, surprised and unrelenting.

He did not wish to hurt her. If he knew she would stay here, he would go to Maine to see the Anasazi before the cloud dispersed, but meanwhile he pictured how the dollop of noctilucent cloud which was also the Anasazi might move in his own blood and flesh. The Statue here inside was not like that dream of hers that the Hermit had told. It was not blue and yellow boulders gathering their caves together. It was more like his own dream of being invisible that the Iroquois healer had called a wish to best his father. Inside the Statue were cold steps and walled-in tower, a cave like an engine. No one knew enough of what was happening to keep silent. The voices hung downward toward him. He started up. He was strong. He saw he was sad in this damp shadowy space. He put his hand around the bison flesh and wondered if it did have a secret after all. He forgot where he was going and remembered. He was sad not to have Margaret any more. What was sad? Maybe it was just the buzz in the ears and that he could not move and was chilled and removed so he could not hear his thoughts living. He had come into the Statue but a new thing had come into him. He met shiny shoes and shrill voices coming down. He heard himself identified as Indian. His climb reached a small side place where he could sit down; and he waited, looking neither upward nor downward, and people passed and he did not look at them. He wasn’t going to the top; he did not care to be in the head of the Statue. He would see the top when he got outside. He heard Margaret’s voice and stood up as it swung closer. He thought of the second dream he had taken to the Iroquois, and instantly forgot it. He sat down again and the holy man’s old straw hat slipped over his forehead and he wanted to sleep but could not, and he smelled Margaret’s body and some flower on it.

And remembered the flower from the beginning but not from later, as if it had gone out of season while she stayed with him and his people but now she had it with her again. And he felt light come down the stairs to him but closed his eyes and wished he had a brother near and remembered clearly when he had had his body inside Margaret’s, her knees hugging, and her fingertips pressing, and her life needing whatever he had to give, and she had said, "The sky and all the stars, the sky and all the stars."

And he slumped on the bench, his gift hat down half over his face, and he felt his held breath whine like an engine in his chest where she still lived like a naked soul that is now more than one person.

Their skirts rustled, he glimpsed their shoes, a mist came across his eyes from within him and he held within him the soul in his chest and thought he would die of the engine in his ears. The woman she was with said, "He’s an Indian, see his hair." Margaret, invisible except her shoes and ankles through the mist of his narrowed eyelids, paused, and with some minor sound agreed, and when her friend said, "Seeing the sights, I guess," as they passed on down the steps, Margaret said, "Probably sees more than we did right there on that bench." Her companion laughed and said she didn’t see what she meant.

He felt for the pistol in his bag and with his other hand he gripped the greasy and dry cut of bison meat and he pulled it from his overall pocket and put it there on the bench. When he got to his feet and straightened his hat, he knew that what was bursting inside him was her heart as well as his, and he knew that she had recognized him as she passed.

Then he fainted.

And so your dream decided you about us? we already can foresee Jean continuing — very slightly bothering her mid-forties beloved.

I would be a fairly old father but a humorous one.

And you already have children, though where this son of yours fits in I "haven’t the slightest," as my mother used to say. I think you’re a romantic about marriage but who would ever guess it?

Ted said that.

Ted said how the world would end, I seem to remember.

Yes, with a digression.

But what in the dream persuaded you?

The humor of nothing but life.

Amy thought the dream was great.

A female colleague of mine thought we might see a family therapist.

Suppose we make it up as we go along.

Far out.

The Hermit’s second call came as Alexander entered the printing office and Margaret’s lately somewhat shaggy-haired gray-bearded father was at the back with the pressman and Alexander strode to answer.

What will Flick say?

She’s Sarah now. I think she is getting into family history, what there is of it. She’s welcome.

But Spence the other night — he was coming across the cemetery like what he had to ask was. .

You’re right; it was scary. I thought he had gone nuts. Which is better than what my opinion of him had been.

Alexander hung up the phone and asked his future father-in-law if he had seen Margaret and ascertained only that she had discussed her future with her father who had found it, as always, enlightening; her father had hoped she would go on writing for the Democrat when she got settled. They had reviewed several topics and one she had particularly cottoned to was revisiting the Statue of Liberty, having never visited the fully assembled "monster." Alexander observed that of course he and his cousin had paid a visit to the Statue last autumn when Margaret was still in the West. His future father-in-law observed that the spiral stairs had made him dizzy. Going up or coming down? asked the future son-in-law. Both, I think, was the answer. The men chuckled. Alexander said he must find out where Margaret had gone.

Her father said that it was interesting what she had said about Indian language having a word for water in a pitcher for drinking and a word for water in rivers, harbors, lakes, and so forth, but not a bunch of words to distinguish among those various bodies of water as we do.

Alexander politely rejoined that he believed the word for "geyser" was the same as the word for "waterfall." He had to go, he said, and bade his future father-in-law goodbye.

"The Hermit-Inventor—he said that," said Mayn loudly as the first dark figure moved toward him among the gravestones. "If you can describe something, you must take responsibility for it. My grandmother must have told me."

Jean was calling to him, she was horribly upset — what had he meant by leaving like that after some aria of Gertrude’s? she kept waiting for him to come back, she thought he was sick, and then the dumb show aborted and before anybody could leave the police came in to ask questions because that Chilean de Talca had disappeared and there was blood and one of his handmade English shoes lying on its side in the theater vestibule if you call that a theater, and it was being said that de Talca had either murdered someone or had been murdered, the flurry had begun about ten minutes or so after the end of the show when no one was sure it had ended, and she had looked outside and couldn’tymd him, and from what Spence had said — she was crying somewhat tensely, not sadly — she had guessed from what that Spence had said that Jim had returned here of all places, she was crying excitedly and he held her so close she grunted into humor and ran her hand over his grass-and-gravestone-clammy back, and he said he had been intensely tired and had lain down and dropped off and had had an incredible dream and he was sorry he had put her through this, and she said As long as he was sorry, while he half-wondered how she had obtained a car to drive the fifty miles.

But three other figures were making their way across the turf and gravel of Maplewood Cemetery, and it was God knows two in the morning almost.

We already remember his dream, since, thinking to find being in it, we had encouraged trace matter to beam it up to him where he lay hoping to window what would come, until, like queer turns of coast weather, we found we had been the trace but knew this only after we had passed from it to being its effects so much less bodied we hardly recalled tracehood except the glow so red-orange in the cold, cold ground it might have been a heart.

He was coming across the Windrow burial ground, he knew he had come as fast as the wind and he had not actually passed all the places between the Statue and here. He could see himself by the misty force of a Moon that was turned mostly to another world and gave this one tonight only its doubts. He kneaded the vermilion clay in his pocket. Her ancestors lay here and he knew the place was by a field on the far side with a short hedge on the field side and two maple trees on either side of the family stone, with small stone markers also here. And so he found the place and smelled the recent turn of earth against iron and found this trace of digging a few feet apart from a stone whose name his fingertips and eyes read to be that of Margaret’s mother who had taken to her early-hastened grave secrets in letters known to have come to her — confiding in her — from a great man in Washington who "lost nothing save honor," Margaret once said, when he sold railroad bonds to friends in Maine, where even now the Anasazi healer might have arrived and found what he had voyaged the continent to see. The pistol was as warm in his other pocket as the lost bison cells had been precious. He wanted to be with the Anasazi seeking those small famed foam volcanoes that form below waterfalls when it has warmed up and then gets cold again, towers like buildings, though two or three feet tall only. The Hermit-Inventor had doubted such existed, but the Prince had wondered if the Anasazi needed to go so far to find them. He heard pressures upon the ground at a distance and knew the dead do not walk and he crouched to the place that had been dug, and his hands felt the shape of his child there in the New Jersey soil. He felt the pistol again and remembered the Anasazi saying he would give it to the right person when the time came if he had patience. The pistol was outside him and he outside it; but long time had entered him, he knew his people were thinking of him as best they could, and he recalled what Margaret had liked best in him, his way of thinking about objects they would contemplate together and after a long time he would say what they made him feel. But there was a thing in him she had said she did not like, and she scarcely told him what it was, it didn’t matter because she loved him, yet it would matter. He saw the figure nearer, and felt the steps in his very fingers, and it was not Margaret coming across the burial ground but a person he knew as well as the thousands-of-years-past people he had seen join into one, descending from the north straits toward better country. But the long time that had entered the Prince was now new, it was not back in time but forward but as if not so far ahead in time from that old Bering Strait crossing that it passed beyond this moment: as if nothing strange should happen to him.

But Spence, his ringed hands flashing wildly, his voice deeper, his need immense, was telling and asking, and could not say enough except this was not what he was really about; and Mayn, who tolerated him in the damp aura of faint danger here that would pass, recognized that de Talca had been convinced of Mayn’s involvement with Chilean interests from way back though it had been de Talca’s own family that had been responsible for the death of Mayga Rodriguez upon the discovery that her intimate liaison with Mayn around the time the U-2 cover got blown extended to pages of a music score known by certain Masonic elders to have circulated its never-performed opus plotting the demise of patriarchy in the haciendas, the business of the mines, the male-decreed alliances of marriage, the public power of the arts, and education in the sciences and techne even to the organization of Chilean shipping and the redesign of the railroad system.

The other two figures came more slowly, but, but for one, all the speeds equaled out — Jean’s intensely attentive silence and her soft touch upon Mayn’s neck and ear and ribs; Mayn’s strange easing of Spence, calming him, reassuring him; the man and woman hand in hand approaching close enough to be now the diva, her hair not piled high but over her shoulders, and her friend the physician who was talking to her steadily; and always Spence’s final, frantic summaries of what he understood to have been de Talca’s deal through an ultimately warm-hearted and tactically unreliable Chinese woman to get hold of a child and thus lure the Cuban escapee in return for the risky freeing in Santiago of that renowned old logia lauterina liberal the diva’s father at a precise moment when de Talca’s superior had found tampered-with a messenger’s large envelope containing coded music and a fortuneteller’s witness that Mayn and Spence were brothers and in cahoots with the woman Kimball who had arranged a secret retreat to some supposedly spiritual center in Colorado near the national meteorological research center for the Chileans her intimate the wife Clara and Clara’s exile-economist husband who had openly criticized the American government for clandestinely supporting the operation of DINA right in his own adopted backyard of New York—

all speeds equal to ours so unincorporated if still accommodated to a multiplicity of — but ours until we felt again light that did not have to reach us nor anywhere, light at last at rest, not gong nowhurs no matter how real the people who claimed to brang it to us cheap, split, fused, shredded, exploded like possibilities, imploded like an uncertain East Far Eastern erotic praxis— until, arriving to ask what was happening, what was happening, and full of such should-haves and should-haves as would have driven a less dramatic person into chaos, the distraught woman Luisa was, she said with a smile, now calmed by the anguish of Swiss citizenship, and her doctor, a polite man of perhaps Mayn’s age though less healthy though less used, suddenly said, "I believe my mother knows your aunt… in Boston?" while his beloved diva looked into all the faces there as if to know them and one day become them, and Spence and Mayn communicated agreeably by Colloidal Unconscious to say they were sure what they would find on this old site if they should pursue it, but—

what had long belonged to us was the nothing that thus was strange in his heart if he could only leave his child here in the ground with its surely mountainous heart where it would rest its own light even in this New Jersey territory. He rose, wondering if he would return to his people or go elsewhere. He imagined a foam volcano risen as some hollow cylinder when bubbles formed in the unexpectedly overnight thawed water and froth oozed from its holes and froze — or so they had heard from the nine-fingered botanist Marcus, or perhaps from the traveler who had been in Chapultepec and in California and in Utah and northeast among the Iroquois and alone.

And seeing the figure of his rival Alexander slow his steps, he found the other figure clear across the burial ground, rushing toward them with that girl-mother’s imperious and loving swing of her wonderful hips, her dark hair now loose and thick, a person with the most beautiful large eyes in both worlds put together, eyes in which he would see his own country again when she came nearer, yes she was finished with even the fears that she had seldom admitted to him when they had smelled the ponderosa bark and seen the sunrise out of the mountain and laughed at a big-pawed wild cat halfway down a tree, and he had said, Nothing lasts for too long, and she had said, No. . no— this brave person who scoffed like him at magic.

He wanted to throw away the pistol and the man near him was angry and was going to speak to him, and the Navajo Prince took out the pistol to give it away perhaps as a present, but to give it away as the Anasazi had said, which now seemed wrong and unknown but here it was in his hand, loosely, not gripped, and as if the trigger were two thousand miles away, he understood the man before him as if he became him at the same time that he was himself.

He extended his hand with the pistol, and Margaret called, and he saw into Alexander’s hand and saw that Alexander was going to shoot him.

The northern sun spread through the overcast, which hung like no noctilucent cloud if such had ever existed at the height at which the young Indian had claimed their reincarnate friend the Anasazi traveled. The Hermit-Inventor had reached a place where indubitably three foam volcanoes rose evanescent out of the ice-bound April stream. But the Anasazi and his cloud were not here, unless precipitated in some happy form here during some recent night. Nor was the young Navajo, who might be anywhere, on his way home, on his way here, or speaking curiously to some resident of the land.

And then, for seeing was believing, the foam cylinders risen from the stream or descended from these brief waterfalls drew his attention upward to what he had not seen before. A double sun replying to itself through the overcast. An optical illusion. Hard to explain. The Hermit gazed at it until it became the one sun, though it was still clearly two. He heard a motion along the surface of things. He thought he would stand here awhile.