

Embellishments

More Stories, Et Cetera

by

S. P. Elledge

Embellishments

by S. P. Elledge

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 S. P. Elledge

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Table of Contents:

1. Ogooglebar

2. Pan in the Exurbs

3. Unseen, Unheard

4. The Driftless Area

5. The Vicar's Wife

6. Lilac and Kerosene

7. Newcomer

8. Hic et Nunc

9. Memoranda Regarding Our Most Preeminent Collectors of Ephemera

10. metasequoia glypto, albino variant: The Ghost Tree

11. The Knacker's Handsome Boy

12. City of Somnambulists

13. That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do

thanks to David Ferry for suggesting this collection's title

for my Snudge

Ogooglebar

(Invention in a Diminished Scale)

ogooglebar: Swedish, "un-look-up-able"

Reader, we must begin with a logical impossibility—the highly improbable and absolutely implausible idea of my meeting you here, at this very moment, on these printed pages, which must within any presumable context remain wholly imaginary—still, while I have the advantage, let me introduce myself: I am... That is, I was... You may call me... Never mind, I simply can't do it; you wouldn't have heard of me, anyway; now that I think of it, there's no sense in using my own name here, or any of the infinite particularities of a failed career that could just as well have been counterfeit. Once one's shadow has been stolen, in effect, one becomes untethered and floats into the farthest realms of the great blue oblivion. There is nothing left to do perhaps but reclaim oneself and regenerate. Why not, then, construct together, reader and writer, the ridiculous story of a ridiculous person who couldn't be me at all?

Deception requires the cooperation of at least two willing participants, for, as the prestidigitator can testify, we are only fooled by what we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by. So suppose that, even though there isn't the flimsiest chance of it ever having happened, you had first encountered me under the very unlikely pen name of, let's say for the nonce, something like Eixe Whye Zeagh. Pronounce it how you will. Not very euphonious and certainly not easy to spell correctly, such a name would have been intended, frankly, to be no more than an abecedarian's logotype, a marque, as it were, for a nascent literary persona, a demonstrably bogus appellation one would choose not by drawing scraps from an upturned hat, but by mix and match from chiseled slabs in the immigrants' cemetery around the corner from the two-room apartment where one once lived (as long as we're just musing) in the distant days of one's apprenticeship. To be sure, I would have liked the look of those brisk engraved patronyms, and also that, with minimal substitution or doubling of letters, they betrayed no explicit ethnic or linguistic origins. Absurd to think of it now, how I once (play along with me!) tried to cloak myself in what seemed then a glamorous abstruseness, when an all-encompassing twilight would of course fall upon me—or my substitute self—soon enough. My, that is, this Zeagh or Zedd's intent, was in part to twit prospective critics and scholars: Go ahead and try to smoke me out, ye varlets and spoilsports! But then some meddlesome reviewer eventually did manage to tear off the grotesque disguise I thought I had affixed a bit more securely, and so the mocker was forced to reconstitute as the yet more preposterous if fairly middling Ellym N. O'Peye, before ultimately exiting stage left as the sinister Abie C. D'Effigie. (Quite regrettable, I concede, even in a sad parody of a life like mine, but maybe not so bad when you consider that he or she was simultaneously the diacritically challenging foreign military scholar, Dr. Hûpp Hoõp Hreéhåa; thankfully, that silly aspirational alias—no easy exhalation for the emphysemic—never traveled further than one privately issued chapbook of topical satire in epistolary form. No sense in leaving any lodestones unturned here, or minding whatever curiously demagnetized things scuttle out from beneath them. Moreover, without online evidence, who could once and for all prove or disprove that a sincerely insincere artist such as myself would go so far as to use a name like one of those above?) Each of these ungainly gender-neutral auto-denominations, the guilty wordmonger—if that's who you figure I am or was—had probably hoped, would be as memorable as it was ludicrous. Each, so was the gambit, would draw some attention to itself and, more importantly, to the admittedly recondite, sometimes downright oblique, and worst of all, easily obliterable texts attached. Speaking freely in the first person and on behalf of that person, if only because it is easier, I reckon I couldn't always have been totally unread, for the chances of that being indisputably confutable would be nil. Looking back on it all now, I'd hazard that some few people must have seen my first volume or two somewhere—bought, stolen, borrowed, or bestowed—and maybe a few even skimmed parts of the whole—but don't try to hunt me down nowadays; as I've said, you won't find me anywhere, no matter how exhaustive the search. The individualized elements of my auctorial embodiments (poetry, prosery, or whatever you call what lies betwixt or beyond) are no longer to be found on any shelves or in the remainder bins of any stores, or even languishing in the most comprehensive bibliothecae or impressively extensive warehouses. For, according to the algorithmic engines that consistently and unfairly overlook me, I do not and never did exist.

Oh, G—gle, oh, G-d! If that's the way things are, I might as well have not been so self-effacing, but instead feigned to be more multiform than the Trinity thrice invoked or the many incarnations of an Asiatic deity, or have gone about being mistaken for various other transcendent divinities masquerading as a singular godhead, to be so taken for granted, or more accurately, taken for nothing at all, like this. Whether or not I or anybody else had once regarded my role-playing as low prank or high concept, whether or not I was in spirit heterogeneous or homonymic, one acting as many or many acting as one, I—who for so long acted as if I had no history at all—have been buried by history. I, not just this generic Qwertie Azzerty or Loren Ipsum or whoever was invented on the spot, have gone missing from the archives. This is of course not the way things should be. Pseudonyms and noms de plume, anonyms or hoaxes, even the most faceless hacks and the most spectral of ghost writers have or have had real living breathing entities behind their names, however slippery and changeable their exoteric personages. The Bible and The Upanishads, The Popol Vuh and The Book of the Dead, also, were scripted by mere mortal souls, no sense arguing with me about that, my devout friend. But it's as if I had never been born! Innumerable bloggers and social network columnists and chat-room commentators, not to mention electronic manuscripts and digital scans enough to fill the Libraries of Congress and Alexandria many times over, clutter and clog, populate and pollute this planet's illimitably expanding binary repositories. But, again, try to find me: No search results! None. Zero. Zippo. Zilch. I don't believe you, almighty Internet. When something is not to be found in a database or on a website, does it therefore cease to have any value? If someone's biography and oeuvre are negated by omission, did one live and toil in vain? Let the world's spurious computations hereby be known as nothing but barefaced lies.

I, now just another inscrutable and untraceable soul—I, I, I who once took dictation directly from Thalia and Erato, am no longer any more than the quotation within the quotation within the quotation, ad inf.; at some point along the line my origins, like the earliest poets', were lost as irrevocably as my individual voice was muffled by the silence of the ever-encroaching public domain, that demeaning democracy of anonymity we all shall inherit—although I recognize that protesting my existence by affirming that I am dead and undetectable amounts to a contradiction in terms. Honestly, this is rather an untenable position I have found myself in—not knowing in which direction I should wave when all around me are blind or how loud to shout when the entire universe is deaf. And, curses, neither light nor sound travels through an absolute void; the words I once engendered have, without question, long fallen into an abyss—irretrievable, forever ignorable. Others, uncountable others throughout the ages of man, I daresay, have found themselves in the same predicament. One might very well attempt to assuage me by saying that nowhere is essentially equivalent to everywhere in my present condition, that I am henceforth both eternal and timeless. Unquestionably I have been entirely subsumed into the electronified ether; if I might molest other metaphors, I'd say I have been dissipated into the atmosphere like smoke from an idolator's censer or, to indulge in more direct self-loathing, like stink from a bog. Virtually anyone might regard that as a sort of an esthetical or, more accurately, spiritual fulfillment, to have attained such pluperfect untroubled nothingness, but I—who always liked beingness and a certain earthbound equilibrium in my health and welfare, who liked eating my fill and staking my claims, as it were—I am not so happy with this unkind twist of fate. I and my works were of an analogue age, thick and fleshly and bound to expire; while the modern spirit is quick and heaven efficiently digital. Reluctantly I have conceded that, locked out of the memory banks, no space exists for me up there. Past, present, and future I have none.

To elaborate further upon my thoughts somewhere above: What is ironic, if that is the right word, for in this instance one cannot use it without a touch of irony, is that it is inconceivable that you or anybody else should be scanning a single one of these paragraphs, if I can still call them that, as weightless and immaterial as they might seem to be as they flicker past; it would have been far easier to have literally read my mind, when I was ostensibly alive—for, as a point of fact, it is impracticable to imagine that these words as fleeting as sparks in a dying fire could ever be placed, printed, or published in any manner. And if they were, even if they were, you'd never have the practical means to locate and obtain them, should you for some fantastic reason genuinely want to read them. (Comprehension, sympathy, illumination are triadic components of the whole that the trustworthy wordsmith should contemplate, so an unseen and uninvited counselor advises me; timbre and pitch are other qualities you don't want to pretermit—that is, tune out. I should endeavor only to please with my endeavors, and other buncombe like that...) But... if somehow you are harking to my otherwise silenced voice, you would be imprudent to swear by everything you think I am whispering in your aural cavity—for if we have succeeded in communicating, then there is something wrong going on here, something out of joint in a toroid cosmos turned upside-down and inside-out. Could you truly be following my faintly phosphorous trail in the dark? Do you too have faith in the hereafter?

There is no way, alas, to certify that I was ever anything more than unreal. To create a mental image, to ideate me, as philosophy says, you would have me make up something viable in an instant or less. In the absence of falsifiable proof, you need at least the suggestion, a tentative outline, a contour to color in. Well, then, painful as it may be, suffer me to go back and array this narrative in the mode of an earlier convention, thereby cloaking myself in yet more semitransparent tissues of conscious deceit:

I was born in the County of ***, in the town of ... , during the year 19—, to the well-respected Mr. and Mrs. ???. At the beginning I was much like other infants, or so was my original premise; I grew at a moderate rate and learned the same valuable life-lessons, followed all the rules and did what I was told, fa la la la la, developed useful everyday skills, la la la la, played the typical games and sports, made common mistakes, accumulated my share of hopes and fears, fell victim to a demographically moderate number of childhood diseases, progressed upward through the universally acknowledged endocrinal and pedagogic stages, went through a phase of adolescent indecision and upheaval as everyone does... until one day I said farewell to my parents and mentors, who were not so very taken aback because they, like most other parents and mentors, had been waiting a long time for this to happen, and without pausing to indite a coming-of-age tract I went my own individualistic way. Afterward there came an inescapable interval of adjustments, with a good share of disappointments and setbacks, but not lacking the normal number of satisfying and, of course, formative experiences that reassured me that somehow I was still on the right track.

Then of course there came Love. Love—you saw it coming... All the usual stuff, love, all that which is undeniably propelled first and foremost by biological urges and societal conventions. When I saw that I was

[several missing pages]

despite it having felt irreparable at the time. Of course, the Other rebuffed me again, but with sufficient courtship and frequent gift-giving was evidently persuaded to desire me in return; we would engage in torrid bouts of recreational skirmishing, parrying, and baiting (from whence should I draw the analogies—war or sport?) whilst trying to outmaneuver one another for the prize; then with the customary last-minute change of heart, found common cause and cast mutual aspersions at the rest of the world, which it was suddenly plain to see had been pieced together solely for the benefit of us two alone. A romance such as you would read in a book (but still disbelieve). Ineluctably, after reaching the apex of our relationship in regimental intercourse of the common variety, we argued, separated, were reunited, then separated again—this time for good. I blamed the other, I blamed myself, I blamed society; everyone knows this plot, alas. But no reason to dwell upon momentary miseries; as soon as I was sound of body and mind again I began trawling for other potential partners. One might go so far as to contend that when I found someone suitable, I excoriated my rivals and practiced no small amount of guile to get what I wanted. This is common practice in both the sexes, I have found, and the things I said or did to justify my actions are not unique, but it could be a precedent had been set. Patterns in my conduct may very well be starting to appear by now, but I'd be wary of electing for the wrong verdict when it comes to sorting out the anagrams of another person's rudely ruffled life and times. Remember, most if not all of this is purely conjecture on your part, and if I appear vain or shallow, tempestuous or fickle, then it is only you who have fancied me so, though indeed I am the one to have thoughtfully supplied you with ready adjectives. Now that we have these important but tedious ground rules out of the way, let's go back to playing with this idea of who I might or might not have been...

In the midst of the preceding declarations one would not be amiss in thinking that I should have begun focusing on a vocation, or at least have proposed a system of achieving steady financial security. And I did, viz. shirk duties, abdicate responsibilities, gain the most by doing the least, exactly as I had in matters of the heart. Such, though it might sound antipathetically mercenary, is part of the routine, of course; a representative sampling of the current adult population would reveal nearly the same motives, I am ready to wager. One may assume rightly or wrongly that I tried many things, as sundry opportunities and temporary expedients arose—working in a back office, say, or laboring in the fields, or likewise standing at an assembly line, maybe knocking on doors with a briefcase full of samples in my hand, acting as an extra in movies, driving a truck, substitute teaching; just as well, I could also have been training to be a nurse, blasting dynamite, digging graves, taking dictation, mopping floors, even joining the circus—have I mentioned enough colorful alternatives? In spite of all these dabblings and all my passing enthusiasms, if that's what they were—even if that's just another assumption—nothing ever seemed to pan out or interest me for long; after a short while, in any event, my attentions would be deflected again and again by passing thunderheads in the shape of Spanish castles and sundowns the color of gold doubloons. So as not to bore you or myself any longer, let's speculate that by all outward appearances my conduct began to deviate more and more from an acceptable norm. If I were to rise above the average, it was important of course to fight the averages. Feel free in a few sentences to call my conduct erratic, but let me explain first how such an attitude came to fruition. Sure enough at my game, I was never so sure of my own incontestable self, never knowing precisely what would be best to do or be or pretend to be, when, as the Aristotelean would have it, achieving entelechy, an idealized self-realization, excludes a thousand unfulfilled potentialities. If the dark glass I saw myself in hadn't been fractured, or if someone had offered to stand in as my understudy, or if I had died young and with a flourish, things might have been different, but it seemed for years that I was doomed to living my entire life in the subjunctive, never knowing exactly what course of action, given that I was properly actuated, would render the most satisfying results. Hurry up, make a definitive decision, figure yourself out and settle down, some unpaid volunteer inside my head kept chastising me: You're waxing psychoneurotic, losing your willpower, becoming positively and clinically abulic! But as always I was only half-listening to myself. On the application blanks I deliberated over, it was imperative to become someone different in each and every instance. (Must be detail-oriented, must be proficient with numbers, must have own transportation, must like people, must be insane.) At the interview, in training and at trial, from first promotion until final hour of employment, I was ever the actor. In essence having to make myself up as I went along left me dizzy and unable to orient myself in this workaday world I had reluctantly entered. Already, it seemed I was in danger of becoming no one by being anyone: a presage of things to come. An algebraic genius once postulated that he had successfully calculated the solution to the beautiful theorem he had crafted, but regretfully there was no room to show it in the margins; following that example, I can say that I managed to piece together the parts to make a whole person of myself during this state of flux, but that no number of alleged facts, no amount of documentation or sworn affidavits I could lay before you could ever decisively prove that I did so with any favorable outcome. Whereby I mean... I don't really know what, but it's a way of getting around, in a roundabout way, to saying that I had always, in my humble opinion, held that I possessed an especially felicitous (if conversely nerve-wracking) way with words, or more accurately, now that I am through with boasting, that words had their way of getting around me, words conveniently routed or replaced reality: for I confess that I kept little notebooks, inside of which I kept little notes, even rehearsed a few rhymes and plotted hit-or-miss schemata; and so, following the signposts, I set my sights on becoming yet another damned writer in a world that demonstrably doesn't need any more in that line of business—it all sounded very easy at the time, you see, and there was apparently no experience necessary. If I offered reasonable replies to the questions no one had yet asked, I would find my audience, ultimately, and I might even be paid well for it. (Bereft of such naïve dreams, I'd venture we'd never have met like this, within the agreed-upon confines of this private conspiracy of ours.) Even famous authors must begin somewhere, and so I must have gone to work as a midnight-shift proofreader for an advertising firm, or something else, anything else, maybe even meekly peddling photocopied sheaves of my heretical sermons door-to-door, or, or... Or, again, nothing like that at all; to be straight with you, I don't want to present just another extended menu of options, but encourage you instead to have imagined me doing anything at all during my early unknown years that sounds profitable. As lofty as you very well have anticipated what my ambitions must have been, you'd be right to foresee daily humiliations, offset only now and then by small introverted triumphs coupled with fleeting gratifications. Just wait, I suspect you would have me say to the world, and watch how quickly I rise and conquer! On the other hand, I could just as well have quietly shouldered my burden and merely hoped for an annual raise and a holiday bonus. Maybe did or maybe didn't; that's the glory of my life, and if we're just keeping up pretenses, I'll say, half in jest, that I penned a popular how-to column (the faqir of FAQs, I once quipped about myself), and when no one was looking I drafted inspirational speeches for illiterate deans and trustees, meanwhile composing term papers for lazy fraternity brothers; above all, it is imperative to append that during my spare time I forged on ahead, if a bit surreptitiously at first, with Something Big (fiction or nonfiction, I didn't understand why there had to be a difference), when I wasn't more flamboyantly, for all the world to see or maybe just for my darling of the moment, jotting down a few impressive lines of a sonnet or sestet. And who doesn't or wouldn't care to? Everyone, it could be argued, must needs acquire a similar bad habit at one point or the other—in my case, better sooner than not at all.

But probably I shouldn't have done every improbable thing that I did, or you can once again presuppose that I did or did not do—for after not too long the managing editor found out (or was it the campaign boss, chief executive officer, operations supervisor, etc.?) and said person accused the presumed guilty spouse or business partner and then the betting agency or insurance company or whatever and next me, broke up what definitely looked to my colleagues like an affair or some sort of illicit alliance, and sent me on my way, no one even a tiny bit cognizant of the worse crimes that conceivably were committed regarding my employer's accounts and my employer's good relations with sundry politicians, community leaders, or moderately corrupt clergymen. Who wouldn't I have sold out, double-crossed, two-timed, stabbed in the back, as long as it made for good copy? The smell of blood and newly minted bills had always excited me; I would have done anything in the name of Art. That's right—make me a terrible person! It could be I technically didn't do anything morally or legally wrong; it's a moot point, at any rate, for instigated or impaired by honest-to-goodness events or not, spurred on by a desire for attention or common luxuries, if not just plain revenge, or none of the above, I led myself to believe that I had succeeded in getting what it wouldn't take an overly indulgent reader to recognize as a viable narrative, drawn from my very own amoral and amoristic experiences, both real and unreal; consequently, merely by dashing off a few dozen letters and licking a lot of stamps (these were the good-slash-bad old days) I managed to acquire an agent who was on intimate terms with a great-uncle or second cousin of mine, doesn't matter, and thus this agent fellow gladly put his foot in the firm's door on my behalf, prying it wide enough for me to enter. Not wishing to implicate family or friends, and relatively adroit at, to put it discreetly, "drawing a veil across verities," I decided at the last minute to publish under a name nowhere close to my own, something more than obviously spurious, as I explained at the outset. Hence my visit to the graveyard in search of the most outrageous of forenames and surnames. (There were also potential lawsuits and other embarrassing scenarios to ponder, I might add.) After many negotiations, the agreement on behalf of all parties was not to take the risk of representing my "brand" to the world as anything less than vague, if not to say chameleonic, to imply (nay, to shout it!) that I could be someone far different or far more important than who I actually was. Evocation as provocation, all those involved concurred. A stock photograph was used to portray the alleged wordsmith on the dust-jacket, a portrait so blurred and shadowy one couldn't even tell exactly what was my age or sex. It wouldn't require much talent to dream up a better front cover than the one that was used: Telescoped as I am now by time, I can only myopically see something unspecifically seamy, with a quasi-ecclesiastical font in red, bordered in black, over a latticed field, the total effect disturbingly suggestive of budget motel rooms and storefront chapels. The binding would only just manage to hold to its bosom several hundreds of thousands of words, with the accompanying punctuation marks and typographic elements in mostly their proper places; as would be more or less essential, the chapters featured the requisite expository language, depictions of landscape and weather, cursory summaries, prolonged elaborations, inner and outer monologues, dialogues, trialogues, peripeteias, characterizations, personifications, and so on, continuing in obligatory amounts all the way up to the denouement, its aftermath, and the epilogue. Miraculously enough, this initial effort of mine, perhaps only because I was an innocent victim cast oarless upon the seas, was noticed by a couple of eminent reviewers in important periodicals eager for something new to talk about (or could be they were friends of that great uncle or second cousin), and they said I could have done worse, no harm done, the reading public might as well take a look if there was nothing better to do. (I will afford the present onlooker an occasion to judge the book's worth without having seen the conclusive evidence, though I can assure all interested, while trying my best not to abuse further the double or triple negative, that clearly I wasn't canny enough to pass convincingly as a bona fide imposter.) There is no use in divulging the work's title here, for as I've indicated, it is no longer cataloged or stocked either in virtual or physical configurations, so for convenience' sake, let's just call it something relatively noncommittal like At the Starting Line or Tuning Up. Let the contents fulfill the credits as may be seen fit; the distinguishing marks I'll prudently keep hidden. It turned out to be—that is, it couldn't have been anything but—five-hundred-some pages of trivial generalities interspersed with the derisory pronouncements of a kind of phony prophet, someone ought to have said; by and by I manifestly disowned it, if memory doesn't totally fail me, never realizing at the time that it must have sold a decent amount, enough anyway for me to sign a fresh contract and receive a fair advance on whatever would be my next book. (But again this is only one version of many, and far from the most credible. When I am inside parenthetical remarks like this, I feel like I'm practicing hypnosis before a mirror. If one must improvise a new life for oneself, is that a form of parthenogenesis? And if I have subsequently permitted this verbal abstraction of myself to be erased from all the records, if I knowingly or not participated in this grand elision, isn't that just another means of saying it was professional suicide?)

Self-satisfied as I fear I may seem to you—best to call it yet another contrivance, this way I have of hedging bets—I'm getting what feels like a vicarious pleasure from this little true-to-life fantasy you and I are weaving out of something that very closely resembles whole cloth. If we are to examine this matter closely, I must attest that I could have been somewhat of a semi-success, even so, hardly a total disaster! Trust me or trust me not, I recognize that such simple statements, like saying by writing this I offer proof that I exist, sound merely axiomatic in the Cartesian tradition. Well, nevertheless, to carry on, if I might... There is nothing like the sudden windfall of an immoderate sum of dollars, combined with callow youth, to encourage one to become indolent, and conversely somewhat reckless. It is not likely inaccurate of you to have foreseen, were events to occur as I have suggested they might have, even if they didn't, that instead of sitting down to think and write, I would go through a few months or years of the familiar profligate sort, just to see what that would be like, and then, having become bored with myself and my ever-so-lazy and perverse ways, that I should decide to travel; thus, one could easily take for granted that I then embarked on a series of hapless but amusing misadventures in foreign lands among interesting strangers, who I hoped would one way or the other make their way into my next feasibly better-selling book—whenever I should return to that cramped carrel I had for all intents and purposes left far behind, that is. Contingent upon your acceptance of the not-so-farfetched possibility that I could have and therefore did, I journeyed by various methods of transportation here and there, near and far, searching for something, anything, perchance trying to find answers, as so many seekers do, and naturally enough never getting any nearer to (or, I beg of you, farther from) The Truth than someone who just stays at home and only journeys abroad in daybed daydreams. Sometimes, in theory, I spent weeks in one place tracing and retracing my steps up and down endless sidewalks and footpaths, while at other times all I experienced of a city or landscape was what I glimpsed from a bus or streetcar window—and yet that could have seemed all I needed to know of the place. In almost any other's suppositional ad hominem arguments, things would invariably have gone very much the same; the same caravan routes would have been followed and even the same luggage, albeit with different monograms, hauled aboard a rocking deck or down several flights of a questionable hotel's backstairs. My letters home became predictably shorter and more evasive with each passing month; that is, they probably would have if I had cared enough to correspond. My funds, I likely as not saw with some alarm, were being depleted much more rapidly than my wanderlust. Well, all for the good of the upcoming book, I told myself, devising exculpations to balance my improprieties, while continuing to crave just one more revelatory encounter with a stranger or a strange land, that epiphanic moment that would inspire unrivaled scenes to fill out the diagrammatic trajectory of that work which I never seemed to get around to begin taking down in shorthand at the instructions of my dictatorial conscience. Given time, whatever it was I hungered for would appear just around the next bend, or maybe over there, up in the shining heavens, beyond that waterfall's quivering rainbow...

Posit this, if you will, even if I know you won't: that at last I would have no alternative but to return home, broke, tired, and hoping it wasn't abashment or regret that would soon be curling up to estivate inside me. Here then comes the hibernation that often serves as incubation, where the world-weary wanderer must sit back and reflect upon his or her many (alleged? authentic?) escapades until they provide their payback. Nothing much materialized out of my recent peregrinations, nevertheless, if that is the premise we must go on, and I was left feeling debilitated by the four dingy walls that now hemmed me in, condemned as I was again to that exquisitely prolonged torture known as "everyday life." Just a little more time, for it's starting to come to me, I kept pleading with both agent and editor, and to my great surprise they coddled me, even pandered to me, if you're believing any of this—until there came a day, a bright sunny day, which I am unable to substantiate, when they would not respond to my requests for any further extensions, monetary or week-wise. The clock was ticking, the clock was set to go off like a bomb some day soon. And then, marvel of marvels, after I had (if forced to give an example) surveyed my empty larders for the dozenth time in one afternoon and noted the concurrent rumble in my gut, it seemed I could not scroll down the screen fast enough to keep up with the sudden torrent of newly typed words. Well, if I might qualify my assertions for the hundredth time, such actions are not outside the realm of possibility. Delusional or merely disillusioned, I worked furiously as minute and hour hands scoured the bloodless face of the alarm clock, while a story that seemed to have nothing at all to do with me sprang forth almost through no exercise of my own will, a story eager to evade revision and retraction, and it may have been little more than gibberish, or it may have been genius—who was to say such was or wasn't so, when the tale is all in the telling? No one, it appeared, had noticed that my first book was no good, even if it was very good, or that against all odds I was very good, even if I was no good, so nothing was stopping me—or at least can stop me now—from throwing caution to the four winds and trying my best to act as if I were only doing my worst. (It was that cynicism known only by the young and inexperienced, you will gather, though it seemed to me at the time that I was neither. Again and again, knowing implicitly that there was no answer, and afraid of falling into a trap of my own ingenious design, I paused above the keyboard to ask myself why, outside the bounds of contracts and the thrill of the bookseller's window displays, I felt impelled to create at all, what it was that called to me, toward what revelations or rewards I was being beckoned. A faint glimmer in the stormy darkness, a foghorn and the clang of a lonely buoy, anything you can place in the scene to illustrate faint hope.) And so I learned—slowly, slowly—that it at least felt better to find myself preoccupied with simply anything than to do nothing whatsoever, worrying not over how little the human race would notice and how unimportant that activity is or isn't, all things being equal.

As I should have foreseen, no one stooped to notice my energetic but still somehow careless ploy, and in all likelihood the book sold almost as many copies, could be more, than the first, I think, which still meant very insignificant quantities, estimate as you will—but I recognized that it, my sorry lump of wood pulp, had failed me in every way, and/or that I had failed it, and this time I had even more grounds for starting to feel ashamed through and through, as my reviewers probably would have been for me, had there been reviewers—as if that should have concerned me (but so I was). Free in a sense again, yet not free at all, for I was now more impoverished than ever, mentally and materially, I privately vowed to become humbler and wiser; robbed of the chance to live like the wealthy libertine of my dreams, I took on humbler quarters and resigned myself to even longer days at that pine coffin-plank they call a desk. (Is any of that not untrue? I ask myself yet again, wondering if such weak asseverations make for a better or at least a more honorable confession. Guess I'll never know.) Time passed, more time passed, a great deal of time passed. The third book can be nothing less than my magnum opus, I prompted myself every morning, cracking my knuckles while booting up the machine for the nth time; this masterpiece must seek to confound and astound, while containing all the realistic heartbreak and joy of a life that was, with corroborations unavailable, no more than a figment of someone else's nervous fixations, compressed into an easily readable nine-hundred and ninety-nine pages (to pull a lazy number out of hazy air). When one hushed midnight I watched the last of the pristine pages come to rest atop the towering stack spat out by the printer, I expect I felt as relieved as a new mother and as proud as a papa. Here at last! I exclaimed without fear of disavowal to the hateful clock that spent all its days watching me, and eagerly I trundled the weighty bundle off to my sleeping publishers. Then I slammed the door, threw off my ego, and took to my little bed, as would be the order of things, and stared blankly at the ceiling, waiting. And of course, if I am not again wrong, waited some more. In the meantime, if I might further hypothesize, I went on to have another disastrous love affair or two and was told on more than a few occasions that I had aged fairly dramatically. Envisage what you like. As the astute observer must have already anticipated, after many weeks my manuscript was rejected, if my memory is not erroneous, because the powers on high had determined that my sacred text was (to interpret their many polite words) what amounted to "inchoate" as well as "interminable," and I was exhorted to cut it down to a more digestible three or four-hundred pages—better yet, start all over again. Oh, dear, I wish there were something remarkable or at least unforeseeable in this familiar sob-story of artistic woe. Life can be so painfully derivative, even when at my most earnest I am not.

Life had also left me no choice but to soldier on, and so, not unlike a soldier left shell-shocked and incapable of extricating myself from the foxhole I had dug myself, I hacked away dutifully at what hadn't passed for a novel or something really not quite like one, tossing out characters and subplots with the ruthlessness of an impassionate god (ah, impassionate, cursed adjective that contradicts itself), struggling to clarify the language as well as dumb down or else smarten up the sophistical conceits. All to no avail, alas, for the product of my labors was even more maddeningly incomprehensible, I was informed, than the amorphous mass from which it had been hewn. Still not quite ready to wave the blank white sheet, I nearly completed a third or fourth or fifth redraft, I forget which, this round fueled by undiluted anger as well as an increasing sense of abject despair, before going bonkers and sending the computer file to the recycle bin, immediately followed by a period of mourning. Blinds drawn, phone off the hook, suppers in bed, insomnia, sleeping pills, one thing after another. It took a thoughtful house-call from my old agent to demonstrate to me that it was not I who had died, rather my book. I should give it one more go, if only to see what would happen. And so in less than a month I dashed off something fresh and fast-paced instead, with no extraneous conditional clauses or over-exuberant descriptions to impede anyone's progress, yet that great exploit too, despite several slush-pile readers' heartening endorsements, was turned back at the gates of my erstwhile publishing house and then another and then another and so on and so forth, without so much as a nod toward my natural abilities or promise, former or latent. "Sorry, but not for us," "No room on our list for it at present," "Come back another century," "Who do you think you're trying to fool," I was told—or things like that. Younger and more photogenic writers were waiting in the wings, I had no need of being reminded: craven scriveners every one, impertinent upstarts, ripe for premature acclaim just as I once had been, and so much more marketable, you know. There was nothing I could do to reverse the ways of the world. And so the good X. Y. Z, of unknown age and address, of dubious merit and questionable wherewithal, met with an early and ignominious end.

Clinical depressions, curious addictions, obsessive behaviors, suicidal thoughts—count them up, subtract them from the years I was allotted to walk this earth... While I was left for untold eternities unable to structure a single sentence, fighting an ice-cold block that left me tongue-tied and word-blind and about as quick-witted as a slow loris. Many persons and even more inanimate objects suffered my frustrated wrath during this pianissimo entr'acte in that melodiously atonal symphony of my own life (which I had been carefully composing all along from themes so highly strung it turned out only I could hear them). Just imagine this: once I tossed a whole set of an outdated encyclopedia from a high window, but never heard a single volume hit the ground. In the end—that is, not the end, not the end at all, if endings count—I mustered from within my dwindling reserve of self-confidence a firm new resolve to belittle my inferiors, those other taradiddlers and yarn-spinners of whom it seemed everyone to the last had heard and, for this reason, everyone to the last must read, for popularity, as is popularly known, only begets more popularity. Perhaps these unnumbered back-pages of my life should be framed with heavy iron-barred brackets, with everything between them mercifully struck out or summed up using the vaguest of euphemisms (such as... see below). Some might even insist that this chapter should be banned outright, cut from the threaded spine, so to speak, and thrown far away, since the alleged episodes contained within amount to no more than the fanciful fictionalization of a dissimulating make-believer such as yours untruly. But I will go on, for I always go on; namely, I never know when best to shut up. Back then, by which I mean to say after my first and only editions ran out, no one wanted the old untrustworthy me; as a result, I must become a very different me, a familiar voice told me, but still I must not give my own self-evident self away. Accordingly, I was not idle in my idle time—there was suddenly an astonishing amount of it—and so several perhaps impracticable tactical maneuvers regarding how to "further my career" in novel (or not) and innovative (or not) ways occurred to me, including (you may feel free to skip this section):

1) Training myself to think as impartially and yet as productively as a biomechanical or physio-automatic engine, in that way the most emotionally compelling artificers succeed in doing, or so I thought (yes, I know that has been tried by others, surrealists and super-realists, who had arrived upon the scene earlier); verily (usage archaic, that word), I could use my cognitive processes to render a set number of characters from my choice of prefigured templates, and then strategically adjust for their motives, accounting for intrinsic quirks and what are commonly perceived as ethical flaws, wholly within the recursive elements of what is known as a plot (pick any of the low-hanging fruits abundant in mythology or ancient dramaturgy, for instance), subject to expendable or collapsible quantitative elements (that is, time) and general tenor (that is, tone) of the language, chosen from sundry tried and true models–and without too much mental exertion, out would flow the expressive discourse of what would be taken for conventional narration, prima facie, at first glance, and, if I were cunning enough, ultima. The key was to input enough "ifs" and "could have's" and "depending on's" to absolve one's fiercely tenacious self-interests. But the labor and discipline required of following through with my plans would not have been worth the hours lost, for after a few trial runs I only proved once more that such ruses only end up sounding exactly like ordinary thinking masquerading as something extraordinary. Besides, in hindsight, I must say that I dislike clever people being clever (including me), I hate wordplay, and I abhor making a guessing game of reality, even if it appears that's what I'm doing here.

2) Taking two of my previously unfinished drafts, in effect sealing them within the hermetically controlled environment of my cranium, admitting no outside thoughts and so giving them time to steep within the same climate and thence through a form of osmosis or cellular fusion allow them to intermingle and propagate—to explicate, by layering or alternating the voice of one with the design of the other, forcing the disjunctively abstracted elements of the first to commingle with the affectional impacts I had struggled to achieve in the second. But this operation was as difficult to achieve under ordinary laboratory situations as it is to exposit, and no germination was induced, no predicatory gestation attained, and again—too clever. A little too late I recognized this is not exactly the way most successful authors go about it. Ah, me.

3) Taking a random number of words, assigning them each a numerical value, placing them in random order generated mathematically, while obeying a finite number of syntactical rules (for I do like things to make some sort of sense), then manufacturing a random number of chapters aggregated in spontaneously derived sequence until I felt the random harvest was sufficient. In short, what I said about the others. In hindsight, I see that this experiment was maybe just a subset of 1) above. Additionally, provisional results were as a whole disappointing, in parts and places, inconclusive at best. Often what one mistakes for original intuition will sound meaningless to another, so after a false start or two I hesitated going any further with any similar stochastic recipes. I would either end up sounding like an impenetrable sub-genius or a rambling idiot, as here, and I didn't need to be identified as either.

4), 5), 6), etc. Not even I want to be reminded how many ideas I evaluated at length and then rejected because of one crucial fault or another. This process of excogitative conception, audition, and elimination was taking a destructive toll upon my intellectual capacities; in other words, I was bit by bit being driven to distraction by thought processes I had voluntarily requested to occupy my mind. And however doggedly I tried, my reconstituted psyche could never free itself of the habits and prejudices that a lifetime of second-guessing myself had bestowed upon me; too late had I learned that if you set off to do the opposite of what you want to do, and then you do that, you are still not taking the alternative path. It takes greater powers, much greater powers than I have within me, to truly negate oneself, to become undone, as the trope goes. Leave that to others. It would happen, it would happen.

Giving up at last, I opted for the simple expedient of plagiarism, that swiftest and surest, or so I thought, of the has-been's time-tested and true fall-backs. Outside all that, literary theft seemed to have grown virtually respectable during my involuntary absence from the world at large. Would it be petty of me to cite several examples right here: [censored], [censored], and [censored]? I could have even claimed that [name redacted] had previously stolen from me. [Expletive deleted]! Nevertheless, these kinds of enterprises certainly seemed to be [illegible]. Once I had begun smattering in such crimes myself, to my dismay I discovered that copy-work is no fun, probably even much duller and more arduous than writing something on one's own, although the results can afford one a somewhat ineffable (but still I do not scruple to say) almost sensual pleasure, as long as the thievery is done with what is called surgical skill, mindful that making too large a cut too hastily can have tragic consequences. After much research through the dark and dusty lanes of used bookstores, I chanced upon a long-forgotten novel by an unheralded scribe from a far-off decade; with minimum transposition of scenes and a little switching of pronouns or points-of-view, making allowances for changes in costume of the times, even—if it does not sound too boastful—improving on the original in many ways, I had myself a new work to thrust upon the so-called unsuspecting populace. (I can't even say it was a rapier-swipe at my critics, those from whom I had won some small attention and who I should instead have embraced as friends, for they once had been more than generous to me—and I must add that they also had faded away the same as me.) Despite barely altering the title, and making no attempt to cover my tracks, no one noticed my fraudulence or called it to anyone's attention; in fact, no one seemed to care about my persistent presence at all—why wasn't I dead by now, why did I refuse to die? That long-neglected author might as well have been myself, not so many years from the present moment. Allowed the benefit of retrospection, I see how I had made the wrong move once again: My cunning pantomimic camouflage had prohibited myself from stepping forward from that pretty backdrop into which I had meticulously painted myself. Confidentially, I might just as well have handed out old copies of the original novel with my name scratched over the name of Mr. or Mrs. Whoever-It-Was. Maybe if the book had sold more than a few dozen copies, someone might have stirred up a scandal, and the notoriety would have garnered me a modicum of celebrity as well as a new contract, but then you must have noticed the keynote of this humbling essay before you already. (Redact that!) It is easy to see now that I would have been better off committing murder in broad daylight; at least then, no one could have avoided noticing the gore dribbled methodically down the sidewalk, around the corner, up those stairs, and right into my chamber, where I sit smiling in my armchair, lapdog upon my lap, waiting for public exposure. As it was, the humor of a joke is lost if the point of the joke must be explained. Complete and utter failure, however, was not an option I was generous enough to countenance quite yet. Right you are, I could still make a real name for myself in a markedly different fashion. There followed that burst of satiric lyrics in the neoclassical mode (which I had printed myself under one of the names mentioned far above) as well as a sheaf of woefully foreshortened short stories—the aborted false starts of unfinished novels, orphaned chapters, widowed passages in prose—that I began "shopping about" with all the farfetched optimism of a national lottery player, with even greater odds against me. (It would take years for the other sides of my split personality to mature and fix their names to echt works published by infinitesimally small and then even smaller houses, but I am in no hurry here to give the details. Cherish the thought that we can be precise in fiction while always restricted to the general in real life, which is all I care to discuss at the moment, upon these particular pages.) Details, refutable or irrefutable, should follow; kindly bear with me as I formulate the data... at some point I think I got married, only to divorce soon after. Maybe there was a child or two. It could be that I contracted a nearly fatal disease but made a nifty recovery. Jury duty, bum jobs, broken engagements, unavoidable accidents, friendships that came and went, romantic interludes, manias that peaked and soon waned, taxes... but not yet death.

The years passed me by, the furrows upon my face still not quite equal to the scars upon my heart. You could well not be listening any longer, I might just be humming the words I have misremembered, so maybe I am freer at present to say or write more as I like. Many versions of my life are not mutually incompatible or altogether inconceivable; here's another one: Late in middle age, having listed a few ever-more difficult-to-find books on my half-fabricated resume, I found an impermanent but perpetually renewable lectureship at a very lenient and sloppily supervised liberal arts college, though records will show that my duties were never entirely specified, and so it is no wonder that after a while I felt no need to show up more than occasionally for my classes. I believe I got married again—twice more, if truth be told, once to a student who really shouldn't have bothered to seduce me. Fortunately these events happened when I was no longer impatient to earn my keep, for an uncle—no, not the one who might have been mentioned previously, but one near enough to him—died at a convenient time and, as is time-honored tradition, left me a manageable inheritance that would at least keep me (barely) solvent for the rest of my life. (But I am getting ahead of myself—I couldn't in any event become even conceptually deceased for years to come.) I continued to live on, though without any real enthusiasm.

The point of this apostrophe is not just to give a synopsis of my wonderfully uneventful life or to craft an unusually unreliable autobiography, but to demonstrate how one can fade into the gloaming without trying at all and without anyone in the whole wide world noticing, nonetheless caring. I didn't die so much as I disappeared: carve that if you must upon my own tombstone. My later books, though much better than my first few, in my humble opinion—or at least cobbled together with a little more forethought—met with ever-diminishing reviews and sales. At last it seemed even I wasn't reading what, to put it less than decorously, was expelled from the bowels of my word processing software. The most generous of reviewers could justifiably have accused me of falling asleep on the keys. Meaning to say, the words as they electroluminescently flitted past me (so pretty, those falling pixels) seemed as evanescent as rain turning to snow, and the dwindling drifts left behind seemed not so much to melt into microcrystalline rivulets, as to evaporate or sublime, as is the scientific definition for vaporization, from whence they had settled. Seasons came, seasons went, only a gluey, dingy sort of residue upon my morale remained as any trace of evidence. The forecast was gloomy. And then it struck me; yes, it struck me...

Manuscript fragments snatched out of the funeral pyre, extracted from a corked bottle floating on an ebb tide, inky tatters caught whirling within the vortices of a Saharan simoon, discovered by torchlight inside an accidentally exhumed sarcophagus, retrieved from a broken hard-drive, makes no difference: otherwise, I mean to say, notes to my future self, like myself as good as lost forever:

describe limbo, its terrain, the price of its real estate, the color of its sky, what its waters taste like, how barren the soil

show some emotion for a change, damn it, stop being cagey!

it could be a very civilized pleasure, reading a book no longer read, like rarest vintage rescued from deepest cellars, a little soured with age but still supremely satisfying, or so I tell myself

—is that right? that's what I'm trying to say?

absolutely not!

all the same, could be.

maybe I am only trying to justify myself

define "pretermit" (my life in absentia)

must first be remembered to be forgotten

must last be possessed to be lost

must have once been happy to know such sorrow

dust that mutes the mirror

(oak) leaves burying the path to the (shining) lake

a broken bell

unsung/unrung

blackout

give further examples...

Coherence balks in what you will think is this, my distinctly unverifiable and irrationally conclusive ratiocination. Kindly disregard what I said near the beginning of this treatise, then, for I wasn't in my right mind, it doesn't take some meddling doctor or editor to tell me. From the start we should have only been discussing the fine art of becoming invisible. By vanishing into nothingness, I had at long last realized in my embittered solitude, I was able to encompass everything, I could reverberate throughout all time and space in an endless multitude of providential voices, a magnificent choir of castrated archangels, or just common tree-frogs, if you prefer; I could be anyone or no one, I was not so much words as the echo of words. The last echo, I swear to you, is the purest, the least driven by sublunary anxieties—it is the voice of the ancient bard inscribed upon the rock, decipherable no more, somehow still heard. For oblivion is as a rule the endpoint of all things; lasting fame is that most uncommon of anomalies, a white blackbird, a black blizzard, while I felt nearer and nearer to becoming a shadow with no light to cast it. I was that common but still beautiful coral fungus that sprouts in the dark and arrays its branches in the dark and dies in the dark with no one to see or admire, and yet it was splendid while it lasted, it groped upward toward a heaven only it could have known. I did not so much die as disappear. Lay your wreaths at the tomb of the Unknown Author, lay them here if that is your wont, but remember that, statistically speaking, you are probably unknown, as well.

Slow fade, as I believe they used to say in the motion pictures. It may have been painful at first, like ripping a bandage from a wound, this separation of dreams from reality, but even the worst torments of hell must get boring after a millennium or two. Martyrs at the stake have been known to yawn. Go ahead and flatter me by envisioning someone wealthy and retired, living wherever it's quiet and the weather's good, resigned to what chance and circumstance have bequeathed. If some part of me is to live on in the last installment, then give me health, all my teeth, at least half my wits, and mind I have no use for a walking stick. Think how splendid such an afterlife would be for anyone! Spending days puttering in the garden, nights before an unnecessary fire, polishing the brass or is it silver—no, make it brass—walking the mutt who hasn't been thought up until just this moment. Reading the greats, listening to early baroque chorales, ordering seeds and sweaters from foreign catalogs, sleeping late, playing solitaire. Isn't that what we all desire, or would settle for? If respect and renown pass us by, very well, for then so might the approaching hearse's creaking wheels. Look around. This house is large and empty, and though its walls are no more substantial than these words and a sturdy roof it has none, I have grown fond of it. No one ever visits, no one ever calls—but you know, I like not knowing anyone out here, and no one knowing me. There are many autumnal apparitions with me here, besides, rustling like dry reeds when I walk through the half-unfurnished rooms, so though I am everlastingly and luxuriously lonely, in a highly perfected state of loneliness, I am never alone. We, the dead souls that haunt this place and I, hold seances on occasion, through the Ouija board or conducted via rudimentary table-taps, or whatever else it is one does; I'm the one who spills brandy across the baize and holds forth, addressing with exasperated vehemence the varnished ancestors in their frames, and I'm the one who kicks from the room the beast who never was, after all. Before I go too far around the bend, if I'm quick enough, I must shut the windows, lock the doors, switch off the mirrors upon the wall, before, with one puff, the entire house evaporates. It suits me, being alone like this in the dark. I have learned that obscurity is a habit easily slipped into and worn with a peculiar brand of dignity. Hush you now, or like a fool I'll cry.

Before we were born we were nameless, you know as well as I, and after we are dead we shall be nameless again. That's been said before, hasn't it? I've already said as much right here. Everyone, anyone, therefore no one—that simple thesis you see laid bare before you is all I have to offer at present. You're not going to accept it because you're not going take the time to read it, so I can say anything. Didn't hear me then, won't hear me now, I know. Still, I've tried... I... "Time has come to close the book," someone will whisper into the microphone, which should elicit a groan—but there is nothing new under the sun or stars; my story is as familiar and unremarkable, after all, as one fallen raindrop's among trillions. I should be so candid as to profess that I have been lucky. It could have been so much worse. Expansive as they are, try as corporations might, the most comprehensive of internet searches will never net my bright ineradicable soul, nor yours, never nail sunlight to a floor, never uncover who remained best hidden, as I may have insinuated before, by standing there stock-still, fully in view. Wait long enough and the footfall will pass you by, you'll be free.

Throw me a rope, you or whoever it is who remains with me until the concluding act; it's there in that woven basket, exactly as fabulists have always depicted the old Mughal Empire trick. (So, no, I wasn't going to make a noose.) Watch me toss the rope into the air, hook it to a cloud, and begin my barefoot ascent. A crowd who did not notice me before has silently gathered. Some people laugh nervously and others hold their breath. A surly child throws a pebble but misses me. Do you know, the wind seems to have suddenly died. The heat has grown terrible.

Up I go.

I wave to those far below.

Up and up, into the heights.

Farther, a little farther...

And I am gone.

Pan in the Exurbs

Sunday, 6:04 AM

Heralded by automated chimes, Pan shoves a shoulder against tempered glass and bursts into the Sycamore Heights Grab & Go, first customer of the day. There is no further fanfare, no expectant entourage of woodland creatures, no hamadryad to court. Instead, the slumping clerk, as if cursed by a sibyl, is barely able to lift her head or eyes; after an all-night pot party, she would not be surprised by anything—and her head is still a twirling whirligig. As he was meant to do, Pan trips merrily along, across the dirty vinyl flooring, on cloven hooves. He winks a smirky wink at a life-size St. Pauli Girl cutout that guards a tidy pyramid of boxed cases, six-packs, and singles. She does not respond, poor soulless thing. Nevertheless he tweaks one of her half-exposed pasteboard breasts. If he were fully a god, he might bring her to life and have some real fun! Down the aisle, Pan admires his inimitable reflection, or segments of it, in the frosted panes of the dairy case: There's his snaggletoothed grin, like that of the cat who molested Alice, hovering over the yogurt tubs, milk jugs, egg cartons, and smoothie bottles; elsewhere there's the gleam of his naked chest, somewhere farther below an interesting tangle of curls (such as is often conveniently hidden by an uplifted leg or impenetrable shadow in the old portraits), and lastly, visible from an indirect angle, the fuzzy luster of his robust upper rump. He touches his incipient horns to ensure they are intact, still growing; he feels them there, but a fluorescent glare glancing off the foil-wrapped cream cheese packages obscures them. Coming a bit closer, Pan examines the igneous sparkle of his amber-brown, downright bestial eyes, superimposed over a row of butter substitutes. Ho there, handsome devil! There are his lips, too—plump, berry-stained, moist; he can't resist giving himself, or the breath-befogged glass, a swift hard kiss. The oily imprint of his two full lips will linger there for some hours, dismaying or perplexing other early morning shoppers. Ah, but he was here looking for orange juice; that's it in the cooler to the left—he snatches a waxy carton in one cunning move, then spins on the spot, patting his shaggy thighs—of course, there's no way he could carry money or a wallet. The clerk notices nothing, anyway, engrossed as she is now in the recently arrived edition of Maxim, and so Pan rams against the sticker-emblazoned entry again, juice-box under armpit, and re-enters the golden glorious bird-filled dawn of this glorious golden Sunday, the first Sunday of another immemorial September. The Grab & Go's security cameras would gladly and willingly report the curious events of this morning, but the record of their watchfulness will never be viewed or reviewed, and so the tapes will be taped over, endlessly, or until a greater and more prosaic crime is committed.

6:17 AM

Traffic in the outermost 'burbs is almost always nonexistent at this hour, especially on a weekend, and so the trim lawns and wooded ravines between the lawns are given over to deer and rabbits and the occasional woodchuck or raccoon. One bony-antlered buck regards Pan as he crosses the intersection of Oak Ridge and the recently completed Greenmeadow Lane with fearless curiosity in its onyx eye; Pan, it has decided, is one of us. The grass, where it has not been tonsured to its roots or superseded by mulch and redwood chips, is still cool and heavy with dew, and the well-trodden paths between the ravines have a slick sheen upon their ruddy clay. Pan has no trouble leaping from rock to rock and across the little muddy streams, and, refreshed by the nectar still dribbling down his chin and chest, is feeling lusty and young and alive. After all, he is hardly more than a boy. Heart, be gladdened! The dells are alive, too. In these little Edens bound by paved walkways and stone walls, it is as if the Puritans never came with their ugly kitchen-garden orderliness. Wild thyme and hay-scented fern, sapphire-jeweled Solomon's seal, tattered nettles, vetch, clover, club moss: such is the humble botanica of low-lying herbs crushed beneath Pan's heedless hoof. Over there, across an expanse of early asters, inside a little cavity in the crotch of a wide-spreading horse chestnut tree (last of its dimensions around these parts), is the panpipe waiting for his breath to bring it to life: over recent weekends he had carefully fashioned it in the traditional way, from sturdy reeds found at Gristmill Dam, and fastened the flutes together with tough strands of catbriar. A proper ode to this new day would be fitting—here in the scattered, wind-bent copses, amidst the leaves and long shadows, the wild random tunes he invents could be magic or just another variety of birdsong. Trotting now along dusty Quarry Road, under cover of the sun-tipped trees, Pan sways, even swaggers, in time to his wordless chant, calling all the birds of the air down to him and the few remaining Guernseys or Jerseys, in that neglected burr-and-burdock pasture where a strip mall will soon be built, to their fence-row, nearer to him. The cows chew their sour cud and gaze reverently at their master. Pan can read the simple but benevolent thoughts behind their placid, soulful eyes. Blessings, girls! Bees and butterflies encircle Pan as he passes, dancing up and down just a moment on their voyage to the remnants of a Jerusalem artichoke patch. Somewhere at this furthest edge of the old countryside, a lone chanticleer has crowed for the tenth time today, ignored by his henhouse and reviled by neighbors half a mile down the track. Pan throws back his head in wild joyousness, bare brown throat glistening with perspiration, and skips along the roadside. A Fed Ex van passes them all, but the driver is studying his cell-phone and not even watching the road, yet alone the wonders along it.

6:36 AM

Pan knows that the Atkinsons, godless trusting Universal Unitarians, keep their back door unlocked, as he has visited this house several times before. It is a long, low "western" ranch house, one of the first plotted here after the farms failed—a pioneer dwelling, erected nearly fifty years before, when this was still deep country and the bedroom communities had yet to extend their reach and engulf hayfield after hayfield, apple orchard after apple orchard. Inside the screened-in breezeway between garage and house, all is shady and the cement floor has kept the area cool, and it is as if Pan has suddenly entered an ancient grotto. Another unlocked door, then three doors on either side of the pine-paneled hall within, and, if he remembers correctly, Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson would be dormant on their waterbed inside the first door on the left; after that, on the same side, is the computer den—and opposite, two doors, two more sleeping chambers—but whose is whose, Melissa's or Josh's? Pan will try the nearer door first—carefully, carefully, for the brass knobs and hinges on these hollow-core doors can stick and squeak. This room is even darker than the hall, and is too scattered with objects and shadows to see beyond them and discover who is the occupant of that twin-bed. But that smell—overripe cheese and locker-room deodorant, tells Pan instantly that this has got to be Josh's room .... and there he is, twisted amid the sleep-tangled sheets, blankets kicked to his ankles, smiley-face boxers and rumpled Red Sox t-shirt only half-concealing where and with what comeliness the tawny body lies. Gradually Pan's eyes adjust, and he can see Josh more plainly, sunburned limbs asprawl on the bedding, buttocks jutted and one scabby knee angled above his hard and hairless abdomen, where his shirt has been rucked up under the logo. For a moment or two, Pan considers—it would be easy enough to pull down those shorts just the few necessary inches, and one pretty round bottom is about the same as any pretty round bottom... But he will leave that exploration for another morning, for he can already hear delicate girlish snoring from the next room over, through these thin plaster-and-plywood walls. Pan merely gives the slumbering teenager's backside a pert pat (Josh will have troubling dreams to contend with later) before he slips slyly around the scattered exercise equipment and swim-team trophies and out the room, closing the door as carefully as he had opened it. He hears a troubled rustling from the parents' room, but it is nothing, and so he nears the farthest bedroom down this darkling corridor—in Pan's fevered state a passage that might as well be far beneath the earth, a labyrinth winding through dismal Dis and inching upward toward Olympus. Only a few more silent steps, actually, and as in a dream her sacred portal opens with a provocative sigh. Just as he might have suspected, Melissa sleeps like the fairy princess she pretends to be at school, pastel-pink comforter pulled up over her slim shoulders, head to one side on a sateen pillow, a few ferny locks pasted to her rose-red, rose-white cheekbone with something only a brute would call sweat or spittle. Pan comes so close to her she must softly feel upon her hallowed cheek his halting exhalations while she dozes, that breath with its citric undertones and more than a whisper of morning halitosis. Nothing worse than what she must have tasted on the lips of innumerable bumbling ball-playing swains or dumbstruck skateboarders. Her forehead is pale, is smooth, only one lovable blemish there; and her softly trembling, translucent eyelids are as rich and silky and pink as the peony petals of Maytime, or so Pan our poetaster thinks. Below the eyes the perfect nose, the perfect lips. He could kiss them now. They, too, are damp as with dew or maybe a "stays on all night" lip-gloss, and they curve and quiver slightly, almost smiling an invitation, as if expecting to be kissed and maybe about to be kissed in her dream. Or more likely it is merely her asthma, for that is why she snores. It is so difficult to hesitate like this, but he must look down upon her entire body, curled under her bedding and hence nearly shapeless, for all intents sexless, vulnerable as a child's. He leans in closer, so that he sees now Melissa's silver eyebrow-ring glinting against her feathery white-blonde eyebrow, and might kiss that, too, though the swelling lips are so proximate, so roseate and receptive... And then there is a sound like the rending of an entire world, a squealing scolding screeching alarm with a thousand threats in its voice—actually only the gentle analog bleating of the Atkinsons' clock-radio above their bed, which they had forgotten to turn off the night before, not being responsible churchgoers or weekend early-risers. (Pan's long tasselled ears sometimes exaggerate, though he doesn't realize that.) Surely the girl should have awakened and screamed now, too, but she drones on, merely burying herself deeper into her bran-stuffed pillow, though Pan is already out the door, only just missed by Josh, who has slipped half-asleep into the hall, going the other way, toward the bathroom, throbbing and stumbling and cursing the dawn...

6:59 AM

The Atkinson driveway, all crushed rock and mucky puddles, slopes reluctantly down toward Old Froghollow Way and a newer subdivision, dips under a grove of threadbare elms, and reappears as a blue asphalt lane, once a cow path, that leads past a melancholy row of identical prefab houses painted different "colonial" colors and separated by a variety of fences and hedges and stone walls under the still towering hemlocks and cedars in this acreage that was until fifteen years ago a tree farm. Pan must be more cautious here, for there are morning-loving nature-worshipers and punctual Baptists about, and there is not much cover as he scurries from one Rose of Sharon to the next or prances from garage to carport to compost bins. Mrs. Elaine Bowers, watchful eyes to binoculars, thinks she has spotted something unusual racing past her bird-feeders, a coyote or possibly even a large bobcat (this far from the foothills!) or—could it be?—a stray kid goat (from where, with all the farms going and gone?) but is not quick enough to put down the binoculars and put her trifocals back on, to verify her suspicion. Over nearer the old Congregationalist cemetery with its toppled angels, its skulls and willows etched upon tablets of green-stained slate, "Jock" Phillips, the retired high school football coach, is sure there is something or someone hiding out by his toolshed—and as always, he has his shotgun ready. But Pan is too quick and too clever for that old fool; with a flick of his little whiplike tail, he feints to one side of the adjoining lilac bushes, making sure to give their mold-mottled leaves a good wave like a flag, then pirouettes around quick as he can back toward the shed and then on past the barbecue grill, all before the coach can even cock and aim. Next Pan hops across a rut between two weed-edged yards and back into relative obscurity, amid the stacked cords of a recently timbered lot. From there it is a simple matter of following another strip of piney woodlands, then through the sheltering maze of corn rows in an outlying field, until he comes out near the rotary between a shopping center and a much older subdivision, where the houses, like heiresses at the end of their funds, are more elegant and shabby, as well as their shady yards, and so easier to traverse without being noticed. One of the most elegant and oldest and shabbiest houses has a "For Sale Ready to Demolish" sign on the unkempt front lawn—in back is a brick-lined fishpond, its water black with oily rainbows, but also silvery with the reflections of breeze-buffeted clouds and beckoning branches above; up closer Pan sees the brilliant undersides of maple leaves rippling, sees glimmering pieces of sun and sky skimming across the surface. There has been rain enough lately to keep this abandoned oasis almost full, and so Pan dives in at the far end, swims through greasy clots of rotting waterlilies, and surfaces at the shallow end, a wreath not of laurel but sumac on his horned head and water thick as snot dripping down his bronzed chest and into his furred nether-regions. Despite the viscosity he is cooled and refreshed again, and in delight he twitches his tail several times to shake the heavy drops from it. He could pleasure himself here, to tell the truth, but he knows he can save that for later: this idyllic morning must not be wasted before church-doors swing open and drive all pagan thoughts and forms from the land.

7:23 AM

Old Miss Amelia Stokes Lawson lives in one of these large "Tudor" bungalows; in fact, she tells her much younger ex-suburbanite neighbors and their many very vocal children, she can remember when her place was a sort of farmhouse with a truck-garden attached behind. Nice. Quiet. Back then the nearest city was a long ways off, she adds, and they wonder which city she means; they all seem too near these days. Nothing surprises her, she says, and they know she is crazy or senile because she has collected glass jars and plastic containers in her garage until it is overflowing, and she is not surprised to see Pan trampling through her tatty plots of bee balm and bachelor's button. "Mind my beds!" she cries from her back stoop, where she has been busy rolling old newspapers into bundles. Pan is momentarily stunned, to be so easily caught like this. "And don't you think you should fix on a pair of pants? If you wait I can find some of my brother Henry's old ones." Pan guiltily tries to put back into position a bent stalk of viscid nicotiana and shakes his head never-mind. He is still dripping from the pool—such a thick pelt below his waistline takes a long time to dry—and has begun to enjoy again the warm caress of the sun on his wet shoulders. Miss Amelia tries to get a closer look at him with her feeble blue eyes. "Ooh, ain't you a hairy one!" she cries, wishing she had remembered her glasses. Pan laughs, that deathless raucous rollicking laugh, and jetées like Nijinsky's faun out of the flowerbeds and nearer to the next open oak-spotted pasture (a pasture horses no longer graze). "Don't feel you got to run!" Miss Amelia calls after him, gathering yesterday's papers into her apron. "There's some raspberries up the arbor you might like trying before they're et to nothing by all the bitty birdies." At that, Pan bows low, pretended bowler hat to his chest, and waves her adieu with an invisible handkerchief like any honorable gentleman caller might. She waves a real hanky in return and watches him skipping across her driveway and then cantering through the sunny pasture and up the closest hill.

7:41 AM

Pan knows that the marvelously bewitching Grace Stewart lives at this address, one of the newest meadow mansions in the district, another sprawling hodgepodge of so many architectural styles it baffles even the well-versed classical imagination. First, one notices the crescent-shape azulejo-tiled swimming pool sunken among effetely oriental-looking trees and fountains, next the freshly dusted tennis grounds and sculpture-lined loggia and birdcage belvedere and potting shed with purely non-utilitarian greenhouse attached, then the well-serviced (that is, over-groomed) box hedges and flowering vines embracing every angle of the principle edifice; and then, attached to the house itself, a gargantuan three-story four-or-five-car garage (it probably fits in lap pool, saunas, workout room, and racquetball court); lastly one gazes onward and upward across the clapboard and stone expanses of the castle-like house (lacking only a moat) and the soaring glass-enclosed atria and cantilevered gables that assault its irregular roofline, until perspective is lost or hopelessly confused by the many Piranesian tiers and towers and terraces, as well as decks and balconies and twisting Escherian stairway: premises efficaciously guarded by several dozen security lights and rotating closed-circuit cameras. The onlooker is bedazzled further by a myriad tiny whirling rainbows cast by a myriad dutifully revolving sprinklers, tucked within the privet hedges and gardens making up this standard one-acre plot—automatically regulated irrigation that keeps everything permanently and artificially fresh and green. Such gargantuan domiciles (maybe this one is magnified in Pan's mind) are invariably highly alarmed if not highly alarming, quite possibly equipped as well with land-mines, rooftop missile-launchers, and booby-traps. Pan must proceed with extreme wariness, hoping only that Grace might have her boudoir's fenestrations cracked open just enough to pipe a soothing tune through (but in a house with central air-conditioning powerful enough to refrigerate an entire town?). And which of the dozens and dozens of windows, of all shapes and sizes, heights and widths, modern and antique, Gothic and Romanesque and Early Federal and Mid-Century and Neo-Palladian and Post-Industrial, might be the gateway to her magic kingdom? He has never visited her room before, never even dared to dream it, for Grace is a girl as unapproachable as she is irreproachable. She is the Stewarts' only child, and she has been given all the advantages—ballet, dressage, solfège, Zumba, hatha yoga, jai alai, jazzercise—and yet she has disdained them all, he knows, and devotes herself to libraries, bookstores, reading rooms, poetry slams, open mikes in community house basements. She has been in this school district only seven months and already she has alienated herself from almost all the other girls—while still being beguilingly mysterious enough to attract the many suitors she will reject again and again like a teenage Penelope. Her parents are both in finance and they would send her to a Swiss boarding school if Valley Regional Middle and Upper were not so close by and convenient, so well-equipped, well-accredited, and well-funded. Pan has been in love, not lust, with Grace since he first saw her carrying that spanking-new recently re-translated updated unexpurgated and expanded edition of Lemprière past the lacrosse-field bleachers to the home-team dugout, where she could read its profiles of gods and heroes alone and undisturbed. Her own profile, she would tell anyone, is less than Greek; she isn't quite so beautiful as the famous Helen, and yet... To feel her glance upon yourself was to feel touched by what is called the ineffable, to have become a giddy gilt-edged cloud traversing the zenith. Now, go away, her eyes would say, and you went. In love, not lust! And he—Pan—so terribly embarrassing it all is. If he were simply human like she, what could he ever dare to say to her? But never mind all that; now he must find where she sleeps—luckily, it proves easier than he had expected, for there, in an obscure corner, at the top of a dizzying vortex of spiral stairs, perched like a citadel on its own steel-beam stilts high up in the clouds, is an overhanging sort of loge or skybox with cambered casements behind its spiky railings, and there is something glittering on the other side of the windowpanes: an ordinary telescope would reveal an extraordinary mobile, an ingenious metal-alloy mobile, scientifically significant, circling itself and setting off sparks of diamantine rays—and he knows she is just the sort of girl to have a constructed a holographic heliotropic bi-helical sub-Calderian device like that. The secret and presumably gardenia-scented zephyrs that drift and flow through the interior of the Stewarts' illimitable manse must set it revolving like that, with help from an ever-rising sun, spinning it madly, stopping it with an invisible finger, then spinning it ever more madly in the other direction. Pan's keen animal eyes can see all this from thirty-five feet below, no binoculars required. He mounts the lowest sundeck, then the cast-iron steps, trusting motion sensors and sleepy Sunday eyes will not intrude in this remote corner of the house, which even the farthest-reaching tentacles of convolvulus cannot attain. He ascends the series of lookout landings as one levitating through hallucinatory realms, almost as if he can already hear her heartbeat on the far side of that intimidating window far above. There are the shining panels and there the shining, gyrating simulacrum. (Dummy, it's deoxyribonucleic acid, she would tell him if he were ever so honored as to become her lab partner in Advanced Subatomic Biophysics.) There, the decal Grace's parents applied to the glass to alert the local police and fire departments to the fact that a valuable minor was within, and alongside it another decal, applied by Grace herself, to inform the same authorities that the pets within also should not be neglected in case of emergency. Inside, her enormous high-vaulted bedroom, one suitable for a head of state but oddly spare, just a lean and elegant desk of Scandinavian origin, with old-fashioned notebooks and sketchpads but no watchful electronic monitor atop it, a couple of equally lean and elegant chairs gossiping in an alcove, and a narrow platform bed more befitting a lady-in-waiting than royalty. Only the bookcases which rise to the rafters call attention to themselves, crowded as they are with every title she has ever read or intends to read, from juvenile Sendaks and Silversteins to the now-renounced Harry Potters of junior high days to more recent boxed dispatches from Gormenghast and Middle Earth. But where is she, where is Grace? The futon, with its dustball-gray duvet turned back above matching sheets, is empty, a brick-thick leather-bound volume (whatever could it be? certainly not a Bible or even the Koran?) nestling in the folds between billowing pillows and bamboo-fiber blankets. On the walls there is just one framed poster, of the infinitely reproducible Frida Kahlo, and she and her gnostic parrot are looking down upon this abandoned bed as in sorrow. Oh, how horrid, to press against the storm-proof glass like this and not to be able to enter and search for one's beloved! He could cry, if he were not merry Pan. Mocking Pan. Lovestruck Pan! But .... but there beside him is Grace—staring, standing tall and still as a ship's figurehead in expensive watered-silk pajamas sporting kanji filigree, on this balustraded gangplank high above the world, up in the mackerel sky, already wearing her serious little octagonal glasses despite the hour, shiny waxen bangs pinned back with shiny day-glo barrettes in the shape of centipedes. "I have dreamed this before," she says, kneeling now as in reverence, or facetiously, though really just to move closer and test the physical reality of Pan's expanding and contracting ribcage. "Wasn't I a nymph you chased through a sun-dappled glade before kind Venus changed me into a pomegranate-sapling? Was it you who stole my garments while I bathed in a bubbling mountain spring? Or did I follow you unnoticed through flowery dale and bosky glen, before finding you rutting a shepherd's son under the ancient myrtles—which as you can imagine made me so furious I hurled myself off a precipice. Is it indeed you? Go on, speak! Speak!" But Pan cannot speak; his sharp cuspids have bitten so hard into his tongue it bleeds, and his throat has tightened so, there might as well be a noose around it. Grace has seated herself in a characteristically graceful, gracious way, bare heels tucked under her silken haunches, one thin freckled hand grasping a thin freckled ankle. Maybe she is sleepwalking; maybe this is only Pan's fantasia, not hers. "Or maybe I bribed old Silenus into cutting out your goading tongue," Grace teases. Pan can only just dare to meet her eyes, for they are the only unexceptional part of her—no more lustrous than a nearsighted bookworm's ever are, just an olive-drab hazel brown and rather yellow in the whites, neither fulgent nor fiery, yet heartbreaking because they, like all the rest of her, are doomed to death one day. And then she laughs, as if to break asunder his gravity, and her laugh is husky and muted, so as not to wake the parents ensconced who knows how many floors or corridors away, or just because it is that sort of hoarse sardonic laugh, so fetching and memorable in a girl so young, a girl so lovely to look at. "Forgive me, don't mind me, ignore me," she says between bouts of breathy hiccuping, "I guess I've been ingesting an awful lot of Bullfinch's bull-pucky lately. I suppose you, being who you are, prefer the pastoral poets of the Silver Age and all their prettified crap. What about Ovid, do you adore him, too? Dryden? Spenser? The Georgics—or do I mean the Georgians? I'm too solitary, I read and 'woolgather' and sigh too much, just like my mother says, I suppose. If you doubt me, ask my outrageously overpriced shrink." She gulps, once, as if swallowing a large pill, and yanks at a stray strand of her lank oily locks, as if to rip it right out of her scalp. "Shhh .... My parents are light sleepers—watch your hands. You tickle." For he can't help but test her flesh, too, to ensure it doesn't turn to dream-dust under his groping fingers. She wears no bra under her charmingly gamine sleepwear—of course not. And panties? "Stop!" she commands. "The gods are watching, you know." Parental intruders? No, just sun dispelling clouds. Spangles from her extra-credit science project, gliding aloft, blinding his eyes. Skin, limbs, lips. Ecstasy. And then she pushes him off her with surprisingly strong arms. Her glasses have fallen and one hoof has crushed them—now he will really incur her wrath! Instead, she just laughs again, and pushes him toward the corkscrew stairs. One ceramic centipede has loosened and a swath of waxy hair has fallen over her left eye. He nearly stumbles on the next step, in these Himalayan heights miles above the old-world bocce court maintained by Grace's Sicilian great-grandparents. Pan is in a swoon, so hot under his hide and within his aching muscles he would settle for caressing even Grace's pajamas, so supple like virgin flesh and as smooth; he'd like to be enveloped in that cool watery tissue, for that pleasure in itself might at once quench and restore him—but she won't have any more of his nonsense; she is swatting him with a dozen hands, though she is giggling even harder... and so he must go, he must descend from the luminous heavens, foiled again. But there would be other mornings, Miss Stewart, many other mornings!

8:00 AM

What were once meadows hard-won from primordial wilderness and are now gussied-up "landscapings" populated with palatial estates, each more ostentatious than the last, subside into just a few hectares of the original homesteaders' commons again just around a bend in the road, here in Brookhaven Orchards; in truth, there is no longer a brook or a single orchard on these newly bulldozed parcels neatly demarcated with surveyors' stakes flying fluttering vinyl ribbons—but on the other side of the still-unwidened road, among gaunt granite ledges and scrub pine-crested rock faces, there flows an icy rivulet that feeds a river of buttercups and clover and wild thyme that the sheep who once roamed here used to love to nibble and to repose upon. Today, now that Grace has denied him, Pan believes he will not curvet and cavort as he is expected to do across this vestigial hillside; his straggly first-growth of a beard is pressed into his chest, his downy shoulders droop, and his pipes were lost back there in the brambles, some time ago. Despair, despair. That might well be a glowering raincloud over his head, but look closer—there pestering gnats cluster and nettle and disappear again. Pan might feel his heart has emptied itself of joy, but that too is not possible; saturnine sulks and black moods like this cannot last too long for one so sempiternally carefree, if not to say chronically rhapsodic. Pan is not dead, for despite Plutarch's assertion the great Pan can never die. Let's give him instead of those bothersome no-see-ums a happy buzzing nimbus of bumblebees and the privy parts of the most priapic of billy goats gruff. Lower a tiara of late-blooming black-eyed susans over his whorled, adolescent horns—and might as well gild those horns if we can. He is, after all, the capricious demigod Pan, mischievous cohort of jolly Bacchus and wise Comus and his Arcadian herd of learned centaurs and rude satyrs and fauns as girlish as schoolboys. At last, now, here in this tenacious remnant of the aboriginal woodlands, out of modern mankind's cruel and moralistic sight, under the well-awake sun, he can breathe freely again, kick up his hooves, waggle his wiggly behind, fling his hands into the clear air, and dance! Dance across the granite outcroppings parking lots might never eradicate, through groves of birch and hawthorn where the spirits of old flit out of reach of sodium light, dance down along the last rows of forgotten grapevines heavy with wet black wild grapes and amongst the crippled apple trees, minding their wormy fruit spilled across the grass like forgotten croquet balls... dance and gallop and buck and snort and pirouette in this landscape still more used to murmur of deer-fly and antiphony of birdsong than hum and hustle of road traffic and construction, though to be honest about it, civilization, cell tower by cell tower and wind turbine by wind turbine, is fast approaching just over that ridge. Pan has always danced, Pan dances now, Pan will dance forevermore...

8:17 AM

The boy's bedroom is really nothing remarkable: the requisite scattering of athletic and academic awards, the major league pennants, the confrontational posters, the bikini calendar, an unstrung tennis racket and a half-strung guitar, a broken joystick, a dead mobile phone, the racks containing that semi-precious rock collection he gave up at the age of thirteen, the dry aquarium in a corner (sand, ceramic castle, clogged pump), everywhere the candy-bar wrappers and potato-chip bags and scrunched-up sheets of lined paper that might have been attempted love sonnets or pop quizzes or birthday lists, the underclothes and muddy sneakers strewn across the carpet, the still-dripping board-shorts hanging from a bedpost like a limp flag, the exotic beer bottles displayed like trophies, the magazines we can't see and he wouldn't dare let his parents see hidden under the mattress, and pervading it all that familiar goatish air of overripe cheese and locker-room deodorant. And over there, the model car, a '66 Mustang, never quite finished but still redolent of intoxicating glue, on a high shelf; here on the disheveled desk, the game console and sleepless laptop, together emitting a quiet and dim son-et-lumière display of bleeps and blips and x-treme sports locales for no one living's eyes or ears; and right there, the stack of untasted library books on Greek and Roman civilization, for his already well overdue research report. This could be the bedroom of a million or more sixteen- or seventeen-year-old American boys—it is almost the mirror image of Josh Atkinson's—and then again it can only be this one boy's. That boy, too, looks like nothing outside the mainstream, lolling there on his side amid entangled bedclothes, pillow wet under his bristling cheek, that mess of black-rooted bottle-bleached hair snarled over his brow, a look of nonplussed concentration on his drowsing face (as if he were studying something holy or wondrous in his visions), with his sunburnt limbs pointing out four crooked directions of the compass. He is gurgling and snortling like a faulty drain; it is hay fever season. Under the clinging top-sheet he is bereft of all modesty, and we would never know, would we, that just a short time ago Tyler Winslow Belknap (just beginning eleventh grade at VRHS) was covered in thick, matted, smelly fur midsection on down, with sinewy thighs and a quizzical tail and hirsute calves and ankles that tapered into the hard black nails of an ungulate—not to forget the other end, with its scrappy beard and pointed ears and fine firm young horns such as might be seen on an actual farmyard animal. It has been a long, arduous morning, and like most adolescent boys he will sleep late, today until well past noon. He won't remember much of what he has seen or done, and then it will only seem like a fantasy—but upon waking in another part of town, Grace Stewart will have a compelling if fleeting sensation that she has walked like an awestruck revenant through strange times and lands, past blossom-bedecked, ivy-garlanded temples and through courtyards of mixed terracotta and tesserae, with alluring but obscene mosaics on their walls, down past the cracked marble terms and beheaded herms into a sun-dappled glade where she was seized by something she had never before realized could feel like equal parts fury and love–and immediately she will wish it had been possible to carry a camera like a tourist into those heathenish and unnavigable regions, so that later she might more accurately write a poem or fable about it all.
Unseen, Unheard

In the poor people's cemeteries here they pour cheap mulberry wine over the graves of the newly dead and then toss the bottles into the bushes. The bent little man with only half his teeth or fingers remaining waits until the rag-tag gong-beating funeral cortege has departed to run between the crude concrete tombstones, seek out the glint of glass, drain the dregs, and collapse on the bare yellow earth of a fresh plot. Come closer and listen with us. Staring up at the sun diving and swimming between clouds and gingko tree branches, the man softly chants a sort of dirge not for the departed one but for himself, while clawing at the clay beneath his body and weeping profusely. It is our duty in this foreign place to offer a rough translation:

O, pity me! All my old friends are gone. And all my family, too.

O, pity me! Where are you now, sweet mother? Where have you gone, dear father? Sister, brother! Dear friends, dear loved ones, you have done me the dishonor of leaving me alone.

Now I am nothing more than an abandoned house with all its windows shuttered and its garden barren. O, pity me! Pity me!

From the open windows of a slowly passing tramway, outside the comfort of a taxi caught in traffic, beyond the doorway of a popular restaurant, from a hotel balcony, one might see the poor man darting out from cemetery gates beneath a sudden cloudburst, hurrying toward the temples of the old city, on a springtime day like this one, when the splendid guzau trees are in bloom. He is a temple-sweeper of the lowest class; he comes and goes to clear the burnt offerings and set traps for pestilent lizards and spotted mice. (Don't worry; he will set them free later, down by the river.) Sometimes he will scatter fara nuts for the sacred monkeys with their strange mournful catlike faces. Little children—admit it, most anyone—will sometimes laugh at the temple-sweeper's funny hunchbacked figure as he scuttles along sideways like a sand-crab.

But he is surprisingly not all that old, barely old enough to remember much of the war. His eyes at least are not ugly. They are fine alert eyes, round as an owlet's, a sort of tarnished golden color like coins left over from the monarchy. If a pilgrim or tourist approaches near enough when leaving tributes of foil-wrapped candies or paper flowers, he or she might hear a snatch or two of those ancient phrases the ragged man intones, still a bit drunk, like a prayer under his breath:

O, pity me! Why have you left me, dear mother? Where must I find you, sweet father? Oh, friends, do not leave me here to the vultures, upon this desolate shore.

The tourists and pilgrims and devout old ladies from the neighborhood will wander back out into the shining streets, unfolding floral umbrellas, clutching purses or satchels, and not a soul will look back, though in their minds all can hear him still, back there, babbling on. If the chosen one we have been entrusted with here, the aspiring musician who hopes to record sounds indigenous to this place, were to continue watching and listening, he might begin to picture and dread that far distant future the temple-sweeper invokes, a future farther and more distant than another galaxy, as absent of sound as the space between stars, where he too might be left alone, hungry and friendless. The young man thinks perhaps too often of his mother back home, sitting at her desk, sipping a glass of aquavit as she impatiently drubs her fingers on a pad of paper, narrowing her eyes as she begins to sketch something amusing like, say, a bespectacled frog on crutches, thinking in her own unconcerned way of her only living son, on the opposite side of the world, or thinking merely of how long to steep the black currant tea in the pot. Her newly arthritic fingers protest as she tries to summon that political wit for which she is celebrated. Lately she has been ill again with an old complaint and her son worries about her. Once she collapsed at a meeting with her gallery agent. People always say he is too close to her, a mama's boy, but indeed how could he go on living the same way if she were gone?

"Into silence I must go, and you as well," that young man under our benevolent surveillance taps out on his ticklish pocket-sized tablet, standing at dusk on a busy street-corner lit scarlet and emerald green and scarlet again by blinking xenon-fired advertisements. Is it a quotation, a poem, a lyric, or just a reminder? Later, on his faithful laptop, back at the tiny guest quarters in a modern high-rise dormitory, he will add: "Into a new land where all of us are strangers and no one is a comrade. Where a different sun shines in an unknown sky. Where there are no more written names left for things. Or we forgot the names. There must be sounds however to represent these things—or lack of things... Still, bird calls and street singers are disembodied once captured. Maybe I am a just a zoologist of phantoms, collecting only the shadows of unclassifiable specimens." (We are glad for even these hesitant words. We might be getting through to him already.)

All of this, and more, is what he wants to put into his incipient aural collage, the gathered fragments imbued with real feeling, juxtaposed and layered and transformed into a new kind of music: for instance, the sweeper, the sweeper's despondency, the silver-blue shimmer of a world he has revealed beyond our own, weeds and wine bottles in a graveyard, candles guttering in the rain, horrible monkeys scattering paper flowers and defecating on prayer scrolls, the holy city's windy trash-strewn alleyways deserted after midnight. What sounds do such quiet things make? In addition, there were all the taxis and buses and motor scooters and bicycle horns and the distorted pop music the camera shops play on speakers beneath their canvas canopies and the traditional opera one hears in tea-houses and the radios broadcasting smog alerts and the exact legal time, down to the second. How to cultivate music out of such a random clamoring and how to take it apart again bit by bit like a clockwork toy or infernal machine and scatter or defuse it, then dissolve it back into that warm silence he sometimes longs to feel living and moving inside himself? Consider a scale, make it pentatonic or its tuning Pythagorean, say, the formulae of ancient days; pluck or blow notes of that scale on something small and heartbroken like a Cantonese liuqin or a melodica or one of those bone flutes beggars play here, or sample and manipulate engine and brake sounds with timbres similar to such instruments; accent that simple melody with harmonics so high you might not hear all of them (here one might use the thrilling flutter of kites battling in the sky or the tinkling plashes small bronze gods make when tossed over a certain monastery's embankments into the River of the Blessed); and offset the keening flight of these notes with a nasal drone in the far left-hand keys of a harmonium or small adenoidal reed organ, still barely audible even in that ideal venue, the acoustically impermeable chamber of his own mind.

"But you still barely speak any of their language, you dreamer," a similar young man—save an incipient beard so similar in physique and manners and voice he could be the other's half-brother, but is not—says to the object of our attention this fine morning, across the little low dining table scattered with stale green rolls and coffee mugs (so hard to find such rudimentary items here!). "How could you know what it is that drunken caretaker sings? And did you really see him passed out in the potter's field, or did you make that up?"

He of course will not be able to understand or explain the subtle assistance we have given him. His friend will be satisfied enough that it is all just a figment or one might say an extension of an overactive musical imagination. "Pass that bitter brown sugar, please, and stop that confounded humming." That other young man gets a bit on our nerves. He had sorely wanted to come along, to witness firsthand such an intriguing little-known society, and at the start he was eager to visit the museums and war memorials and prehistoric dwelling-sites, but lately all he wants to do is race up and down the sidewalks looking for just the right sandals and souvenirs. Nearly three weeks have come and gone. He no longer really looks at any person or sees a thing. Ah, but he is so young, too—we mustn't forget that, and so we must forgive him.

Right now that other young man, the bearded one, is saying to his partner, the preoccupied composer: "Hey, donkey ears, I forgot to tell you your baby sister sent me an email last night—although I think it's still tomorrow our time, or the other way around?—anyway, she says they have three feet of snow up there and she wonders why you never write or call her. And she says your darling mother will be going to Helsinki or Vitebsk, whatever, next month after all with what's-his-name and not to worry because he's given her new reason to live, can you believe it. But she says she's heard she's feeling better, your mother, I mean, and you really should call or write—your sister, I mean."

But our friend the composer, who brushes away this kind of desultory nagging with a nod or two (much as he loves his lover), has a renewed excitement for this place since he came across the lachrymose temple-sweeper. (That was a happy stroke of intuition on our part.) It is a good thing he consciously discounts our presence, for this is his project and his project alone, and we do not wish to unduly influence him—at least, no more than would be right. A suggestion surreptitiously bestowed, a friendly nudge, that is all he needs. We have been amused to see him come to an abrupt halt before an unprepossessing garden gate or office park and stand there stock-still, head cocked like a schnauzer, in pursuit of something even immortals cannot perceive. Often he will remain motionless on the sidewalk, in the midst of a polite but teeming populace, for several minutes, palm of one hand placed over his bad ear to suppress the perpetual monotony inside, and simply listen—to what, we have no idea. With his brand-new hand-held computer device and binaural microphones he has taken to going out into the streets and shops and recording without any forethought whatever passes by, be it a demon-fish vendor's cry or a rickshaw with a dozen horns and bells upon it or a flock of those large long-legged geese that always seem to be skreighing "Catch me! Catch me!" (in his language, not theirs). He must then polish and transubstantiate carefully selected elements of what he hears, those sounds unique to these environs, until they breathe with real life. At all times he has his commission for the university to think of; after all, that is why he is here, why they flew him over, adding a surprisingly generous stipend for the six weeks he'll be in the capital. The result of his labors is merely to be about fifteen or twenty minutes long, on the theme of national identity, using altered or unaltered audio fragments and the latest in synthesizers and sequencers, real and virtual, as well as actual performers or programmed ones or a combination, followed naturally enough with a short talk about his exploratory methods and tools. Does anyone have any questions? There, in the back row... Flush with new tourist money and anxious to prove it is no longer a cultural backwater, the government has reached out to "emerging" artists of all stripes across the globe, especially younger ones who have less of a tendency to condemn the nation for the mistakes (some say atrocities) of its recent past. Everyone everywhere is most kind and a few in the music department have said they found enjoyable his electronic submission, with its clever use of quotations from nature and from the classics; the department head has even said that she'd found quite interesting what she'd heard of him "on the airwaves". That was a most unconvincing fib, considering how farfetched it would be that she just happened to be listening either of the two times his works were aired on his local public station and how even more unlikely that her high-frequency band radio had somehow picked up the signal from tens of thousands of miles away. Nevertheless, she speaks his language well and seems sincere, even asks about his shy young friend and how comfortable is their mattress. (As modern as he is, that last matter brings a flush to the young man's cheek.) We seldom feel a need to prod her with an invisible elbow or umbrella, so to speak, and prompt another outpouring of solicitations and assurances from her. She no longer wishes to be addressed as "Madame Chairperson;" he is free to call her simply "Xa," as even the graduate students do. Sometimes we think the Americans have been too influential here, as they are in most places.

Today the budding symphonist and his consort are to meet Madame Xa in the center of the former free-trade zone, a place you and I would prefer not to go because its storefronts are so grimy and outmoded and no one likes a Westerner and the traffic is so dense with bikes and scooters and trucks and rust-bucket double-deckers (but relatively few private automobiles) it can easily take ten minutes just to cross one of the main thoroughfares. But Madame Xa had said there was to be a parade in the zone at eleven "your people's time" (since the "conflicts," as she calls them, "modern" time—in the sense of clocks and watches—has of course been encouraged, even though few follow it here) and that annual event should prove to be stimulating as well as instructive for smart young men interested in the arts and music. "One can learn as much from us, you boys, as we can from you!" Although meeting her at a popular ladies' parlor would mean several confusing changes of buses and trams, this invitation seemed to be more or less an order from the school itself, and so they bought their ridiculously cheap tickets and reluctantly went out into another rain-soaked day, with you and me trailing like shadows, as always. Almost as if by arrangement with the university administrators, the rain lifted as soon as our two wards stepped down from the last of the buses (slow and sagging under the weight of its occupants) and entered the busy neighborhood where they would meet the director. The director was apparently on her second or third cup of blood tea (so it is called) by the time they sat down to join her. "The parade," she presently informs both of them, barely looking up from her steaming cup, "is in honor of the conquering of the evil god of the Underworld"—they don't quite catch the god's name, but we know it is Sho-Lin-Fa—"by Prince Lu and his Forest of Four-Hundred. I fear you may find it rather old-fashioned, although it really can become quite rowdy, I think is the word, if not a little unsettling, even for those of your media-saturated generation. At any rate, it is most invigorating for a five-thousand-year-old vernal ritual. Invigorating like this tea; please avail yourself." Herself, she takes another vigorous slurp and proceeds with her obviously oft-told tale. It seems the lucky prince had thwarted the indescribable earth-scorching powers of the Underworld (well, she tries to describe all of the myth, but we won't) by commanding his entire army of athletic leafy-haired soldiers, trees transformed by a spell into infantrymen, to stamp its feet and howl so fiercely it seemed like they were forty thousand and not merely four hundred, and in a twinkling the evil overlord was sent sliding down an inverted rainbow back into Hell. "The dissonance, you will find, is fascinating and may be useful to you in ways someone like myself who enjoys only her Chopin or Bach could never understand. Oh, you have brought along I hope your little talking seashell!" Our newcomers surreptitiously poke one another in the ribs and smile more openly as they maneuver the teapot and cups back and forth across the crowded table, a little amused and also a little charmed by Xa's girlish sincerity and tiny flittering hands. It is our turn now to convey another telepathic hint. "Aaah!" the two young men exhale as one. She has referred of course to the new uncompressed-digital recorder, knowing no neologism for such an object in this language she learned long ago from the colonials. She goes on to tell them more of the evolution of the parade, the local customs, the various sects and ethnic subdivisions, the political ramifications, the postwar revival of traditions. Her more obscure phrasings the foreigners can approximate as needed, as surely as if they were telepathically translated by us, though the words she chooses are often diametrically opposed in flavor and perhaps intent from ones they might select from their native tongue; their language is of course vastly different from ours as well—as different as horse-talk is from tiger-talk—though of course we, the visitors' ever-present guardians, do our best to facilitate such interactions with minimum discomfort. That is, you and I can help everyone understand one another—we invite the wince or grimace that can convey more than words, the flick of wrist or shrug of shoulders that underscores or contradicts the disparity between what is said and can't be said. Our composer's consort leans toward his companion's right ear. "Isn't she one batty old dame? I think she—" he begins to say in a voice he trusts will be obscured by the brattle of a hundred teaspoons and the chatter of an equal number of patrons. (Oh, that was cheeky of you to make him choke on a tea-cake just as he began to criticize!) In the end, however, everyone is giggling and even a little giddy—perhaps it really is the potent native beverage. After the child brings the bill and Madame Xa pays, everyone goes out into the street, umbrellas bursting open automatically (as they tend to do here) before they step out from under the broad awning, even though the sky is such a resounding shade of cobalt right now each person quickly folds up his or her own with a bit of embarrassment. The sidewalks are still damp as dawn and the gutters are brimming with waste-water and litter; the atmosphere, however is warm and there is a distinct smell something like boiled camelhair and ground cinnamon-cloves all around. That, along with the ammoniac scent of guzau blossoms, is the smell of spring here.

From a distance of what sounds like countless echoing blocks comes a great tumult like the lowing and charging of several thousand distraught cattle on their way to the abattoir, and so apparently the parade has already begun. Down the narrow winding side-streets and alleyways—festooned above from balcony to balcony with multicolored banners and flags and pennants—thunders the first of the festival crewes, waving still more of the nation's tricolored flags and banners and blowing on deafening antelope horns (called qiriqis) while beating snakeskin tom-toms and shaking gourd rattles. Everyone is costumed in vibrantly dyed silks and satins, a magnificent efflorescence like a great scattering of artificial flowers, nearly crushed by the enormous wagons thundering through the mob, each of the wagons carrying aloft dozens of nearly naked adolescents, their flesh smeared with magenta and chartreuse pigments, their headdresses stuck about with palm-fronds and budding guzau twigs like the crests of jungle parrots. Far atop the highest and widest wagons, the ones with silver-painted wheel-spokes each as tall as a man and huge panels depicting the many incarnations of the god Ma-Wa, still more youths, dressed up as frogs and storks and other harbingers of spring, cavort on the steps of the towering simulacra of palaces and temples, declaiming in unison the famous chaqa-chaqa-chaqa of the (famously monotonous) "white panther chants" as they spin whizzing prayer wheels and throw down firecrackers and gunpowder-filled "cherries" on all sides into the throngs of revelers. The eardrum-piercing vocal choruses, the random explosions and grating of the rocking machinery, the manic percussion and shrill trumpeting, and the nonstop roar of the paraders on the ground fills the air so thickly the cacophony is a presence seemingly every bit as physically stupendous (if not to say oppressive) as all these lithe and writhing young bodies. "You see they are the vegetable court of Prince Lu!" Madame Xa shouts, although she is normally such a refined elderly lady, "and that is the prince himself in the—" but the rest of her sentence is drowned out; just as well, because it is evident who the massive gold-leaf-coated and blue beryl-eyed effigy enthroned atop the most towering of the swaying wagons represents; in his wake is dragged across the pavement an impossibly long creature made of leather and sailcloth, half plumed dragon and half scaly serpent, which trails a slimy red foam in its wake (merely whipped guzau-berry juice, one is relieved to learn); and the vile creature is assaulted on all sides with pebbles and mud and old shoes and cans and bottles, and also beaten with canes and bamboo switches. This, of course, must be the vanquished emperor of the Underworld. But again it is not just the visual element which leaves such a lasting impression on the onlooker, on any of us, but the sheer volume of all the screaming, clanging, hooting, bellowing, booming, banging, and screeching. There is also possibly a little real blood mixed in with the fake. When our sensitive composer demurely looks away from all the half-naked dancing youths (in that ecstasy engendered by fermented river-dolphin's milk), he sees Madame Xa standing next to him on the sidelines, her eyes squeezed shut, fingers in her ears, and a broad smile on her softly wrinkled face. "In the noise," she shouts, balancing against his shoulder, "you can feel within its center a certain contemplative stillness, no?" Or that is what he, still unsure of her accent and what he has learned from his phrasebooks, thinks she says. He notices then that we have thoughtfully reminded him of the recorder in his hand—and so he dutifully memorializes a few minutes of the din on all sides of him. Like clinging to storm-battered sea rocks during a hurricane, he thinks, and he happily drowns. (You have naturally enough withdrawn from the throng for a while, having seen it all too many times before, but I must remain hovering near enough to our principal ward to witness and remember.) The crowd surges relentlessly ever forward, carrying outlander and native alike with it. It is a blessing later when two of the wobbly wagons collide at a corner and at last escape is possible.

Not long after, once they have bid goodbye to Madame Xa (how small and frail she looked as she boarded her tram—but only we could know how tiny a house she was returning to in the outer suburbs and how very deep in genteel poverty she actually lives) the visitors decide (with persuasion delivered from myself in the form of a seductive northerly breeze) to go for a walk in the expansive city gardens, just to regain their senses, if not their equilibrium. Neither remembered to pocket a map, so it is up to us once again, as dutiful chaperones, to offer a little much-appreciated but only subtly perceptible guidance as they head farther and farther away from the pandemonium and licentiousness back there in the Zone. A feral cat crossing a lane there, an open manhole over there, or simply a tree ablaze with orange fire-flowers waving from the end of an alley: it is easy to encourage one's charges to go this way or the other. Before long, here at the evergreen periphery of the gardens, beyond the cries of food-cart proprietors and the orphans who live on street-corners, it is as if they have entered another, more serene world.

"It's like we've entered another world!" the composer exclaims to his (once and always) truest love, who has bent his boyish head, ash-white in the dazzling sun, to tie his shoelace. How like a baroque salon painting it all suddenly is: the prismatic dew on the leaves, the blond bearded dancer poised over his slipper, a cloud of iridescent doves dropping at their feet. Effete it may be, but we are pleased. In another instant the truest love has linked arms with him, as do all couples old and young here, and drawn him deeper into the depths of the park's foliage. One might drift along happily lost for days here; two might swoon together—as often repeat the pretty poems everyone in this land knows by heart—in a fragrant bower of overhanging blossoms. "Listen," says the more musical of the two, thinking of certain lines he has tried to memorize, "everything is so quiet you could almost hear those guzau petals falling upon the grass, after all that racket. Do they keep cicadas or crickets in cages in this country? Or is that an English nightingale someone has imported? God, it is good to get my ears back at last."

"Mine are still ringing," says his friend, shooing a mangy pigeon off the path with his foot. "It's like I have a million hornets swarming inside my head. Or do you think that blood tea poisoned me?"

We tactfully petition them to sit and rest on a thoughtfully provided bench next to a crescent-shaped lotus pond. It's not our fault more sooty birds choose to fly up onto the bench, as well, asking for no more than a handout, only to be brushed away once more. Unless that was you, trying to be funny.

"Maybe I'm beginning to understand how to go about it all now," our conscientious artist says, pulling his feet up onto the slats of the bench and looking out across the bobbing white spears of the half-opened flowers. "It's a matter of contrasts. Come on, let go, let me speak. Because have you noticed that sounds are almost like scents, that after a while you forget they're there? In the middle of constant noise, say a dog barking or even a noise as immense as that parade, or rush-hour traffic in the center of the city, or even standing under a cistern-pipe like those down by the river, you can discover a silence, just like Madame Xa said, or I think she was trying to say. That's what I have to insert somehow between my notes. Not silence exactly, but I must allow enough noise inside my rhythmic gestures so you really feel the silence when it comes. I've been concentrating too hard on manufacturing some sort of false quietude; I somehow have to make the foreground more pianissimo I think and the background this rising fortissimo. You might have to deafen someone to get them to hear. Do you follow me? Say, are you even awake?"

It is at moments like this when I understand why we have grown enamored of our recently acquired pupil: he is such an earnest young man, really, and though he is still so brash and unformed, he sometimes seems almost in touch with those ostensive celestial spheres you and I inhabit. We haven't yet needed to glean too much about his formative years or delve too deeply into his private agonies or pleasures (judging his mind through reading his expressions or gestures is usually enough), and yet I know that should we ever need it to, his past will open up to us like a bright and fully imagined thing: what might naively be called his soul, if you will, is aching and inquisitive and joyous and only longing to one day display its brightest plumage. Forgive my lyric effusions, you, but I sense that the music he will make some day—not these first steps and jejune experiments, but something he will one day animate out of pain and anguish and most of all grief—will live and last.

The darling beloved, fingers still entwined with his own, is no longer listening, any more than you are probably listening to me; in fact, the fair young swain has closed his slightly swollen violet-veined eyelids and melted throb by throb into sleepy sun-struck reveries. Peace at last and no need at the moment to translate anything into its real worth. Meanwhile his partner sits staring ahead, senses acutely alert, nearly aware of our unseen presence, feeling coolly embraced by the lush green and silvery-white landscape surrounding us all, listening with well-trained ears for tiny sibilant sounds in the branches and upon the air. In the lotus pond a huge copper-scaled carp with almost human eyes rises from the shallows and catches a dragonfly in its mouth with a plop and a gulp, leaving the green and silvery-white surface of the water rippling in its wake.

To encapsulate, to adumbrate, that is to omit more than you and I maybe should: Time follows different rules in a foreign land. The hours and days here seem to accelerate and splinter around our two guests from a distant boreal republic, for they are continually hastened from one novel experience to another, all remarkable and memorable (if only there were time to remark or remember!), with each succeeding event seldom having much to do with the last. Such, we suppose, is the common predicament of travelogue and tourist. Picturesque performances, operas and folk-song contests, restaurants clean and squalid, guided excursions into the countryside, shopping malls, museums, movies, balletic martial arts displays, indecipherable lectures, hikes, religious observations, arts-and-crafts exhibits, horticultural displays, tedious historical tours, authentic Western-style bars, and dozens of other items (are you not exaggerating their number?) to be checked off on their to-do lists feel vividly intense (if not necessarily inspiring) while they last and then they fade away, superimposed upon and confused with what came before and what came after. Only late at night, to the growing displeasure of his weary chum, is our composer able to concentrate upon his commission, developing stubbornly in nail-biting, hair-pulling fits and starts. We have watched him often at two or three a.m., the gemlike glow of the laptop screen doubly reflected on the lenses of his reading specs, as he pecks aleatorically (or perhaps not) upon the keyboard in search of a magic combination of numbers and notes, chastising his errant mouse and taking sneak-peeks at the internet as well, all while listening to something over his headphones no one else in the world, least of all his lover, is privy to hear. Likely as not he is, at any hour of the night, biting his tongue and cursing under his breath, ready to throw the bedeviled machine out the window at the mocking moon.

We must hasten our step. Let us ignore a few of the more trifling episodes and incidents and jump forward, to that day when yet another miscommunication regarding money and maps (really, it was no fault of ours) results in the object of our now intense scrutiny being ejected from one of those hulking two-tiered omnibuses into the midst of a sprawling district everyone he has met here has quite carefully omitted to mention in their circumspect encomiums regarding the splendors and innovations of this reborn country; block after endless block of dutifully dull concrete balcony-browed apartment buildings line the disquietingly vacant streets, all of their façades of a uniform newness and democratic blandness, with equally bland shopping centers placed at regular intervals along the intersecting boulevards. The few people he sees here avoid his moon-pale Nordic eyes and his corpselike complexion as if he were a creature from Hell. He feels a bit like one, too. That last bus had been the hottest and most crowded one he's taken yet—and the smell! (Forgive us for being too delicate to provide suitable comparisons.) He had planned on visiting a small factory that manufactures those swan-necked three-stringed musical instruments known as qui-ba, but it is nowhere to be found. For over an hour he has been walking and sweating and damning his luck under a sky one moment steely and spitting rain and the next blazing hot and blue; most probably if he had asked for assistance, we could have conveyed the directions to him by this or that aspect of the horizon or perhaps in the form of a friendly white-gloved police-person. But the youth wouldn't heed us, still shaken by that singularly rude bus-driver, still angry with his lackadaisical lover (who has elected to spend the day back at the flat with a heap of outdated regional magazines). The day before they had both gone to the university's rehearsal rooms to meet a group of post-graduate musicians—far more talented than necessary—but this had bored the tag-along to the limits of his admittedly short patience. While our dedicated composer graciously listened to the students demonstrating various autochthonous instruments ("this one is a favorite of the rain gods and is called a qa-see," "this one makes a sound like the northwest wind in autumn") his friend wandered out onto the campus and into a conspicuously illuminated hall that he took to be a souvenir emporium. But when he lifted a porcelain statuette (god or goblin?) off a shelf, he was immediately accosted by two pistol-wielding guards straight out of the old regime—how was he to know this place was a museum? (Alas, we had neglected to call his attention to the small print, utilizing diverse alphabets, on the placards without.) After much confusion and the intervention of kind, understanding Madame Xa, the young men had returned to their flat in a state of silent animosity, while in the pits of their stomachs lay heavily that empty weight of loneliness one feels worst when fated to be a stranger among nothing but strangers in a strange land.

During his long afternoon's walk our artist has periodically had his clever electronic device's red record button under his trigger finger, but this area is ominously silent, as if unseen citizens are watching him from behind those interminable rows of opaque windows, waiting for him to pass before they can return to the streets and resume their noisy lives again. Where is all the traffic, where the shoppers and pedestrians? Barely a pushcart has passed him by. And no birds sing. The composition he is supposed to have finished by next Tuesday is still not much more than a magpie's nest of glittering bits and pieces of audio shards he has picked up here and there: the plaintive keening of a dying car alarm, a snatch of a song sung by a fisherman consecrating his wicker traps, the searing wail of a faraway jet engine, the reverberations of a temple gong but not the gong itself, a bitterly complaining fountain, a beggar's droning request for alms, a creature he cannot identify but sounds like an out-of-tune oboe, a pack of pariah dogs yawping at an enemy pack of pariah dogs, a recess-yard cheer, a drunkard's mumblings, a wild bull up to its belly in mud, a traffic director's whistle. In his mind—for again when we want we can read it backwards and forwards as easily as flipping through the pages of a phonebook—you and I can hear him testing out that little melodic phrase like a primitive nursery rhyme he wants to underscore the entire piece, and also he is thinking of an esoteric treatise on musical theory he wishes he could remember better, and deeper within himself we can sense that he is sensing something tenuous but insinuating growing between himself and his fickle partner, something that he will not understand better until he is back among the fresh cold lakes and peaks of home. (You may disagree with me, but I am inclined to think he wants to cut himself free from everything he has witnessed gestate within himself since he came of age and left his mother's house.) For nearly two hours now he has been wandering aimlessly—and yet productively, too, for there's nothing like getting lost for making one alert and more receptive to one's muses—and so it may be time for us to do something. We must send him back. By now his friend has thrown aside the crinkled magazines and is gazing down from the heights into the concrete plaza below, where uniformed schoolgirls are practicing a traditional line-dance. An antique boombox addresses them: discordant vibrations of disco beats and the ululations of electroacoustic djinns. Amazing echoes. There is no meeting or merging of the pair's minds. So we conspire to present our wandering artist with a significant roadblock in the form of an enormous excavation in the middle of a half-finished block hemmed in by shuttered tenements and various misplaced obstructions and construction vehicles; disappointingly, instead of turning back, he manages to squeeze around the pylons and makeshift guardrails and then back through a tunnel-like series of tarp-covered ramps and then under ladders and plywood platforms, until he is suddenly expelled on the far side of the world, in wide-open space at the outskirts of what first looks like disused farmland: uneven, weedy, rocky fields rising and expanding into unknown regions, far apart and far away from the charted boundaries of the city, or so it would seem. He is holding his little recorder aloft the way someone carries a candle in darkness, as if he is on the trail of a reclusive nightbird. (Do you hear it? I don't.) Farther beyond this vacancy he can see the blurred and serried edge of what must be the rainforest, miles and miles off, with a threatening veil of sulfurous clouds above it, but in between that wilderness and where he stands is not just a treeless emptiness, but true wasteland, vast plots of blasted soil pocked with bomb craters (or ruined cellar holes) and many uneven mounds of what look like blackened, ruined masonry and shattered, fused glass. "Danger Please Live Mines Death the Consequence" the bullet-riddled signs all along the perimeter of this wasteland forcefully threaten intruders (if he would but follow our loose interpretation!) with a graphic depiction of a black stick-figure pulled apart in four directions by a red star-shaped explosion. You and I are therefore relieved when he wisely proceeds no further across the broken land, but instead begins to circumnavigate the nearest field clockwise, along the ridge-line of unoccupied or unfinished buildings at the easternmost limits of this district. Oddly enough, he is not really paying much attention to either our attempts to get him to immediately retrace his steps or to this persistent reminder of the last war, some decades ago now but still not fully effaced or transformed. There is only that half-formed melody in his head! How to split and scatter that fragment into silence? He is oblivious, and why shouldn't he be, you say; it had not been his country's war, and he had not yet been born when it was declared over, and besides the heat is starting to pound out the tympanic tempo of a migraine within his skull. A tempo, a rhythm! Something he can imagine somehow acting as a structure for the exquisite silence he wants to arrest and make beautiful for Madame Xa. Later, on his laptop, with a universe of lifelike as well as purposefully synthetic sounds under the command of his software, he will attempt to recreate what he did and did not hear in this place. Did and did not imagine. Maybe he can incorporate the high hiss and chirr of locusts here or the whispery thrum of thermal currents rising from and rushing over the long-scorched earth. The cries of the dead will sound like that, he thinks. He has read extensively about tape-recordings of so-called paranormal vocalizations, elusive and epiphanic prophecies from the great beyond, which spiritualists and mediums search for in radio static and acousmatic sounds. EVP: Electronic Voice Phenomenon, the Latvian Raudive's reel-to-reel mechanisms. The Ghost Box, yes, he knows it, too, and so on. Will it be possible to capture such nearly subliminal sounds, sounds that may not even exist except in auricular hallucinations? He cannot quite express it yet, but he knows already that here may persist the sound and echo of destruction and annihilation—not just the mere absence of sound but an omnipresent, viscerally carnivorous rage against all things living and dead. At last, at last in this place he can hear what is necessary to his piece, but until now has been afraid to confront. There must be the aftermath of war, of torture, of genocide, in his slowly unraveling and enveloping silences. All this, he tells himself, must go into my program notes!

In fact, our young genius is so lost in what he has learned to call, like others in his field, "the creative process" that he does not at first notice the oddly subdued cluster of smudge-faced children playing at the somewhat sheltered juncture of these blackened fields and the meanest and lowest of the municipal housing estates. (That was another serendipitous arrangement on your part; I had simply wanted the relentless sun to finally force him away from here and into the nearest hotel lobby or go-liq bar.) Although it looks to him very different at first, their game is essentially the same as one he once played in his own country, in his own not-so-foregone childhood: here they are employing a broken board for a bat, a wad of rags for a ball; and a large square of discarded cardboard represents that territorial dominion universally and so fondly regarded as either "home" or "safe." They are both boys and girls, this glum little troupe, although in this land of course it is often difficult to tell gender at an early age, and indeed sometimes much after. Most of them are semi-naked, or wearing pieces of castoff adult's clothing—enormous boots or tattered skirts that trail to their ankles or fringe-brimmed straw hats that obscure half the face. He halts and watches their thin stunted figures for a while: they seem to know exactly where to run in their corner of the empty fields, right past the danger signs and around the barricades, up over the middens of brick and glass, through the tall weeds and vines growing out of the gaping craters. And perhaps because sound or the absence of it is nearly always on his mind, he notices that it is indeed so unnaturally becalmed at this outpost of the city that (although still a few yards away) he can still make out the panting of their breaths and maybe also the beating of their rapid little birdlike hearts; their play is a pantomime, it is as if he were watching a silent movie; even when a child falls and skins a knee she does so without a word or a moan. It would be futile, he tells himself, to attempt to get them to leave behind such dangerous sport—and besides even if they couldn't any more than himself read the words of warning, they assuredly know better the rules of conduct (or misconduct, of course) in this land where he understands barely more than a few rudimentary phrases. (All this despite the long hours of our implicit prodding!) So he merely withdraws from his mental abstractions long enough to observe them for a while, consult his hateful watch again, and wipe his brow. Once he even catches the spheroid of soiled rags when it curves wildly through the air and hits his chest (really, that was a bit too forward of you) and with a laugh tosses it back to an expressionless girl with queer icy casts in her doll-like eyes; perhaps she is partially blind, although she charges through and fights for her space among the other children easily enough. Now I know why you prepared plot and players: He is immediately reminded of a particular winter's afternoon after one of the worst blizzards of his early adolescence, a time when he and his siblings had retreated with his recently divorced mother to a long low sod-roofed farmhouse at the edge of a rock-strewn pasture where they kept their shaggy pony and their mother tended a plot of cabbages and kale, all of it exactly as if they existed hundreds of years in the past. The always-windswept pasture fell away abruptly, unimpeded by either wall or fence, down a black granite cliffside a good fifty or more meters above the ocean. So far we have avoided delving too deeply into our subject's past, because he would prefer it that way, because he determinedly lives in the ever-promising present—but in this instance (and one more to come) we must make an exception. That cold and gale-buffeted afternoon stands out because he remembers as if it were yesterday the snowball hitting his face so hard it felt like a bullet, although it fell apart into a million frozen white flakes once it struck him. There was his brother, halfway across the steep drifts of the pasture, laughing and shrieking: "The king is dead! The king is dead!" he cackled insanely, acting out the triumphant culmination of some heroic regicidal epic of his own invention. His brother had always been like that, lost in games and plays only he himself could comprehend. He would die a week later of meningitis. But that day our future composer had chased his brother around and around the snowy kitchen-yard and pasture, his cheek still red and stinging, and chased him right to the precipice, where again there was no fence or wall to stop what might have been a fatal plunge into the sea. (Why their mother had chosen to hide them away from their father in a place so inappropriate for children of any age awaits an answer that might never come, and maybe his memory or his imagination has redoubled the dangers.) At the last moment his quick-limbed brother swerved, and it was he himself who stumbled at the edge of the rime-coated cliff. He remembers for the thousandth time seeing the jagged black ledges jutting out below him like a giant's grasping fingers and the strand of sudsy half-frozen surf and the ice-tossed whitecaps, but he has never been able to recall any sound at all—not the wind which was perpetually howling, nor the tide that was from high-water mark to low sliding across the shingle with its eternally piercing lisp and suck, nor the seal pups yapping in the waves, nor those wheeling arctic terns that delight in taunting boys. Instead, he turned over on his back on the pebbly ground and considered how the snowball and then the fall must have stunned and deafened him; in fact, he might now be permanently deaf, and his brother's maniacal laughter would be the last thing he would ever hear. But looking up into the cloud-curdled, whey-white sky he considered how comforting this newfound silence was, how he felt somehow safe and cocooned from the icebound world and all its cares, how much his sudden loss of hearing made him so much more aware of all his other senses. It might even be something to thank his brother for, this admission into another sort of experience and wonder.

And now he is here again—in this alien land, we mean—watching the grubby shorn-haired amber-skinned children darting from base to base and all the way to home under the unflinching eye of the sun on a humid spring afternoon. He hadn't gone entirely deaf that winter's day after all, only wound up in bed with a racing fever under a mountain of blankets and quilts he was constantly kicking away, a scalding flannel like a branding iron pressed to his forehead. After that, nothing else really to remember of those days, that time, not his cure, not his mother's constant fretting, not even the inevitably quick death of his only brother. All of it long ago now, when he played the organ in the choir and was called something of a prodigy; we must nevertheless not forget that though plagued by often painful tinnitus in his left ear to this day, he makes do; in fact, it is important for us to remember that he is still quite young and has the rest of his life to explore this thing called art and music which so elates and delights him. So I see what you were trying to do, sending that ball and that child his way, trying to get his attention in a manner which I might call a little too unsubtle. What must he do now? we wondered. Will his music be merely a matter of subtraction or addition? There must be more to it than that. It must have something bloody and unclean in it. We alas cannot guide his hand directly; he must come to his own conclusions. Soon, very soon, he will have it all down by the multibit and megabyte in his files, preserved in a memory cloud empowered by satellites; the university's commission will be "performed" after a fashion at his lecture; and the presentation will be high-resolution, three-dimensional, multichannel, super-sensory; it will shift and mutate across the sound-field like sunrise mists gathering and dispersing in an upland meadow; it will index and collate all his objective (if admittedly naïve and only provisional) impressions of this confoundingly complex culture, as well as subjectively and self-reflexively comment in a very post-postmodern way upon those impressions, naturally enough; it will enact a dialogue, posit a dialectical monologue; render an atmosphere, a mood, a space for meditative reflection or perhaps just an alleviation from the burden of thought; it will, to its listeners as well as its creator, he hopes, belong to a new category of the age-old mysteries. Most of that (pardoning our effusive description here) was in his prospectus, more or less, and all of that, fueled with the righteous certainty and perhaps a bit of the folly of his youthful determination, shall struggle to coalesce and be. Give him time, give us time. After his debut in the eccentric new recital hall known more for its architecture than its acoustics, he will take the carefully weighed questions of the very serious scholars they have here, and he will drum his fingers on the podium and meekly try to explain the inexplicable. Unlike most composers eager to show off their new work, he will have insisted the amplification be kept to a minimum, so that many of his hallucinophonic sounds were often barely audible above the respiration of the air-conditioning vents and the polite throat-clearing and program-rustling of the attendees (or that nearly sub-audio sinus tone he constantly feels more than hears, originating from within the sinistral side of his head). He wouldn't go so far as to say there are either strophic or through-composed "movements," withal any attempt at conventional orchestration, but, as he is expected to do, he will repeat certain excerpts—perhaps a little louder this time (thank you) and preview parts of an alternative mix or two. Maybe then the tentative silences will take more of a clearly defined shape in the darkened hall. Those doleful strands that weave their way throughout the entire piece, tenderly binding its minutes together: why, someone will ask, do those strands sound so strangely familiar, and where did they come from? Does he know the sad lullabies about soldiers and lost families mothers sing to their infants here? He himself has wondered why he gave license to that mournful little tune that forced its way into his composition, like something encountered in a dream, forgotten, and recalled much later. Of course, he will be glad to display a few instructive waveforms on the overhead projector. Once again he will press "play." A necessary hush. No one will talk about what the piece seems to them to be most like: a requiem, to be precise, a requiem for the victims of war—all wars, perhaps, but mostly the last one, the one few people here ever talk about. Department Head Madame Xa will look a bit perplexed and struggle to hear what to her sounds like the far-off cries of wounded curlews—curlews, indeed, they must be, and perhaps a hint of those red-crowned cranes known for their very vocal lovemaking in the mating season, and also golden-eyed ichneumon flies clustering under eaves and the conversation of fox-kits and a gargling mountainside brook, and below it all the almost imperceptible preliminary tremors of a small earthquake .... Yes, absurd as it might be, she can still hear echoes of the avalanche that buried her childhood home and crushed to death her cruelly unsympathetic father (although it freed her to study the violin and pursue her own small but not insignificant career in music and education). Absurd as it might be, in the silences between bursts of the odd foreign boy's abstractions she feels her mind strangely freed, she lives for brief broken moments in the memories—but that, as is always said, is another story, and we must leave her to her dreaming of a much altered past while we prepare for our departure into the future.

We are back again in the stuffy two-room flat, now even more crammed with gifts and souvenirs and shipping boxes and piles of dirty clothes and dirty dishes, two days before the artist-in-residence's obligatory premiere. He has just snapped his laptop lid shut, as if trying to keep all the sounds he has squeezed in there the last several weeks from escaping. His partner, heedless of commands to keep quiet, has once again been trying hard to pronounce all the names of the days of the week here: vexing because there are only five names and yet their weeks are the same length as anyone else's. (Little does he know that under the old system, days were divided into twenty hours.) "How the hell can I concentrate?" the one we now can say we love asks of nothing and no one in particular, removing his headphones with a threatening snarl. "The both of us only have one prison cell here, you oaf, and the pipes in this place always sing off-key, and your attempt to only mouth your words is nothing but another of your attention-getting tactics." We had no idea he could be so irritable. But with only two days to go... His troublesome friend beetles his blond brows at him (doesn't work: still looks just the spoiled brat) but says not a word more, choosing to escape to the tiny windowless bathroom, and so he grabs his backpack and slams shut the door behind him (alas, it emits only a cushioned sigh of air) on his way to first the suicidally plummeting elevator and then the mezzanine and the street.

You anticipated my next move: of course almost the first person he encounters on the sidewalk is the half-crippled temple-sweeper, who almost collides into him on the way back from this cemetery or that, tipsy again and uttering under his breath that bitter litany of self-pity and woe, which of course is not his, really, but an old poem and an old song, a corruption of something almost everyone learns here at a grandparent's knee. But our award-winning composer and digital virtuoso, usually so sensitive and attuned to everything around him, would not know that, and now he barely notices the madman who lurches into his path! Instead, he steps politely and agilely aside like one avoiding dog-droppings or a street busker, and strides down the street in search of the first bar he can find. This will be a good test of his ordering skills, and he knows already that the sweet cold beer here tastes very good.

Therefore, we will have to send the temple-sweeper to him in his inebriated dreams tonight; the man will have to press his sour wet whiskery mouth against his ear and whisper closely, closely, so the scent of mulberry wine will permeate the dream, and the song will be one with the scent and the words will be explicitly clear: O pity me! Pity me! And what if his own mother were to die? What then, when he too is left alone in the world? Who will he sing for? Who will attend? After she is gone there will be a silence worse than death. Worse than a battlefield after the battle. But it is only a dream, and the dream will fade; his partner, contrite, reconciled, is breathing rhythmically right there beside him, the sounds of the awakening city are distant and no more disturbing than the rushing of the sea and its waves.

You and I have learned many things about our subject, our beloved, but there is neither time nor space enough to tell. We can riffle through the chapters of his short life however we like, but will conclude our conditional report with just one small, perhaps insignificant incident from his past. You called this to my attention and I thank you. So, I will let the words of this communiqué spin slower, spiral down, legato—or perhaps better to say fade into the blueish murmurs of a kind of twilight. Listen. Quiet, please. Let us play a game, he used to tell his sister and brother when they were all extremely young, out in their own secret forest near their father's house, far from their mother: Be still, very still, and tell me everything you hear. That's it, just tell me what you feel with your ears.

"What a stupid game!" his little sister protested, as she always did whenever he suggested a new enterprise. They were alone quite a lot in those days, out in the country, missing their family as it had been, no one else to play with, bored as only children can be bored. "Be still, maiden, don't say a word, the stars are cast down by the angels like snow," he sang, in the husky tones of the timeless songs of their far northern language, to his sister, so as to assuage as usual her doubts. When she quit squirming and looked at him with humid unblinking eyes he resumed in his normal voice: "It's not really a game, then. Even though we've played this before, you know. But anyway tell me what you hear, shut your mouths and shut your eyes and simply try to hear everything. And I mean everything."

"I hear the ocean rushing through the cedars," said his brother without further prompting, twisting a spikelet of sedge into a ring around his finger, squinting at the sky. They all three lay on their backs in the bright cold sunshine in the middle of a clearing. Any passerby would have said there wasn't a solitary sound to be heard, but that couldn't be true. His brother raised himself on his side and cocked an ear heavenward. "I always hear that sound, it's not just wind or waves, but like God breathing."

"Then eliminate it," his older brother insisted. "It's the rules. Our rules. Try to hear something beneath that sound, not the obvious things."

"Birds, then," said the brother. "A couple of busybody jays up there in the fire tower gossiping about us and a sea hawk far off, I think."

"All right, but too easy again. Eliminate them."

"The worms abiding in the ground, then," his sister piped in, contemptuously, imitating the younger brother's precociously poetical manner, but seeing how seriously both boys were taking all this, she continued. "They're chewing ever so loudly upon the earth, in the earth I mean, pushing it through their bodies, making dirt out of dirt. Ugh."

"That's ridiculous, baby, don't be so silly," the second of her two siblings said, but the game's instigator hushed him.

"No, that's good," he said, cupping his pink and curiously elongated ears as if to hear underground, "but ignore those worms, I say, ignore them. What else can you hear? Attention, you two! I can detect some rustling in the fallen oak leaves, probably a deer-mouse running across them. I think it's carrying an acorn in its mouth."

For almost a minute—an eternity—no one said a thing. "All right, dummy," said the middle member of the trio at last. "Do you hear Mr. Mole burrowing through the soft loam? His fur is like velvet and it's the quietest sound in the world."

"You're wrong. Eliminate that, too. Try listening harder."

"There's a tak-tak bird a mile up," their sister whispered, opening her eyes to stare into a pale sky crowned with a pale sun. "It has a gnat in its tail-feathers and I can hear the gnat scratching a mite on its teensy tiny hind legs."

"You're making that up, too, but eliminate it, anyway."

The little girl was thinking hard, scrunching up her freckled face in an ugly way and pulling up clumps of frost-moss in her small white hands. For a while they did nothing but lie there almost dozing, yet still listening, and it seemed to them then that the world is nothing but a chaos of sound and echo. At last the girl put her palms over her eyes like a mask and said, "Remember when we were in that troll-people cavern with daddy up the coast? And we felt our hearts pumping and the guide said if you're still enough you can even hear the blood gushing in your veins? And it was dark and I got scared. And I could hear the woolly rhinos snorting on the walls."

"Eliminate those intrusions, now. Concentrate!"

The younger brother threw down a starry sliver of flint he was holding and shot up. "I can't hear anything else, idiot! There's nothing else to hear!" And then suddenly he halted, his eyes and ears searching the fugitive light and shadows of the forest. "Unless you mean that sound the earth makes moving through space. We watched a movie once in science class. There was this vibration, this sound the astronauts recorded out in space. It's like a really, really low whooshing or rumbling, or the creaking of... of... an enormous wheel. Very slow, very low—ooh! Ever since I saw that movie, I'm always thinking of that. It's a sound that's always there, underneath everything. But most of the time you can't hear it."

"Yes!" his older brother cried. "That's it! It's the earth falling through space, you two. Falling, falling, falling. See, nothing is ever really silent. Everything that moves and falls makes a sound."

"Everything?"

"Yes, everything."

"And we can hear it while we're falling?"

"Because the earth is falling. Yes, we can hear it. Everyone can."

"But what if you're never even listening for it?"

He drew in a long breath, and it was as if he were drawing all of the life of the world into himself and holding it there. "Then I guess a person would have to be dead, not to ever hear. Not deaf, because then you'd still be ticklish in your bones, I suppose. I mean really really dead, never listening at all. But we're alive, all of us, aren't we, and we only have to close our eyes very tight," he said, rising and gesturing toward the deciduous leaves around them, turning up their silver sides in the wind like gamblers showing their winning cards, "and you can hear it. Seal your eyes now. Hear it. Feel it. It's going to always be with us. You can't lose it. But we should follow it." They were walking with him now between the tall trees, all of them blind but knowing the way, sensing the way. They walked reverently after him, touching the rough bark, wrists and sometimes cheeks brushing the cool ferns, snapping twigs, stepping over rocks and stumps, like enchanted children in a nursery fable their mother had told them. The world was alive with sound; the world was sound. "The universe is taking care of us, you see? It's like someone rocking us very, very gently in her arms, and maybe you imagine it even more than you can hear it, but it is a sound, it's a real sound, and it is there."

"Always there?"

"Always there."

"Forever and ever?"

"Forever and ever."
The Driftless Area

The ward attendant, standing in a near corner watering a dusty plastic philodendron, and to whom they had paid little mind until he spoke, turned to their father and not to them. "He knows it's his daughter, not his wife—right, Eddie, old boy? Look, it's Rose and, and—"

"Amelia."

"Right. They've come to wish you a happy holiday."

The old man reached over and seized the attendant's thick blotchy wrist, with its chunky steel watchband and "Live Strong" bracelet. "Merry Christmas!" he croaked, looking very small in the oversize lamb's-wool cardigan they had brought him.

"No, Eddie, it's not Christmas, it's Labor Day. Your children have come a long way to see you." The attendant was a large man in sky-blue scrubs with an Army Reserve haircut and the small insipid eyes, Amelia had already determined, of an opossum. She wished he would call her father Mr. Erwin.

Amelia approached her father from the other side of his slump-back lounge chair, but she was invisible to him; he did not even turn to her when she touched his shoulder and whispered loudly in his ear. "Daddy, Mother's dead, remember? It's only us now."

The attendant narrowed his moist little eyes. "We try not to use terminology like that," he said, setting down his watering can.

Amelia sighed. "What, like 'dead'? But that's what she is. Dad never liked being lied to. Never likes being lied to. And don't tell me I should say 'passed.' Unless you're talking about gas."

Her older sister Rose shot her a sharply disapproving look, then smiled quickly at the attendant. She had decided to take another tack. "Edward," she said, bending over her father as the nursing home employee backed out of the room, "you know I love you and so do the girls. Amelia is very sorry it's been so long since she's seen you."

"Amelia? Is she, she—" their father said, his mouth falling slack as words failed him. His still-strong hands gripped and twisted the padded arms of the chair.

"Don't worry, dear," Rose said, watching her sister move onto the high, hard hospital bed, the disgust obvious not in Amelia's carefully composed face, but in her crossed arms and hunched shoulders. "I'm looking after both Rose and Amelia. Amelia is very sorry it's been so long, isn't that right, Amelia?"

"Shit," Amelia said quietly, arms tightening across her chest. "Tell him it's not my fault I can't get away as often as you do, it's so far here from St. Paul ... and I have my job, you know. Or had it."

Their father seemed not to hear anything his younger daughter on the bed said. "Elvie," he said to Rose, looking up with joy at her welcoming face. "Elvie!" That of course was not their mother's name.

Outside, on the newly paved parking lot, under the lace-work pattern of the spindly locust trees planted there, both daughters stood on opposite sides of the compact car Rose had driven the nearly two-hundred miles from Des Moines to Decorah, too angry at each other to want to sit together inside just yet. "I might as well not have come here at all," Amelia said at last while Rose finished pretending to fish for the keys in her canvas carry-all. "Tell me, what's with this sick thing of pretending to be Mother? And who in the hell is this Elvie?"

Rose took her time unlocking the car. "Oh, who knows, who remembers. But anything to make him happy..."

Amelia opened the passenger side and slid into the stuffy, hot car. "You know, you even sound like her, Mother I mean." She slapped the burning faux-leather seat with an open palm, as if swatting a fly. "If he can see that old girlfriend or whatever, why can't he see me?" she said, settling her handbag between her feet. (It was from her trip to Rome two years ago with a gal pal; Rose had already told her the stripes and tassels might pass as trendy in the big city, but...) "At least he thinks you're someone. Turn on the air-conditioner!"

Rose saw with some surprise that her usually tough and ironic sister was on the verge of tears. "Sometimes I'd rather be invisible, too," she said to Amelia, wishing she could hug her as she had when they were small girls together and she was the always overprotective big sister. "You know, I used to be able to fool him, at least before this imaginary Elvie came along. It's not my fault I look and sound more like Mother than you do. Getting fat like her, too, damn."

"You think that's why? Come on, you know he always loved you more."

Rose flipped the visor down to ward off the mid-afternoon sun and caught a glimpse of her face in the rear-view mirror; it looked more worried than she had realized, with those eyebrows almost meeting in a furrow of wrinkles over her nose—just as their mother's had. "No, he didn't," she said matter-of-factly to the woman in the mirror. "I don't even know if he loved Mother. Or Elvie! He was so much older by the time he met Mother, after the war. It was the farm he truly loved, the land. And maybe just the idea of a family." She started the car and headed out of the nursing home lot onto the ancillary road. The entire town and all the roads in front of them seemed emptier than they had only an hour before.

"So," said Amelia once they were on the highway, her window rolled down despite the air-conditioner and the wicked blast on her face, ruining her hair, "you still want to go back there? It's been years. You're sure it's not just another Lowe's parking lot by now?" She watched her sister, wishing for a moment, for the millionth time, that she were the prettier one, the more practical one, the one both parents had always preferred.

Rose laughed that dry-throated way she had of laughing, almost a cough. "Not Millersville! The new four-lane passed it by, remember. I just hope I can still figure out how to get to Bonn Road and then over to Ainsley."

"Rural Route Four, you mean. Nobody calls them that anymore, do they? But every house across the state has a real address now, have you noticed. Those long numbers, for emergencies, I suppose. The next terrorist attack."

Up ahead the high, soft, undulating hills, the everlasting green hills of the Driftless Area began, the land opening out into another sort of world, a world of hidden valleys and secret slow-running rivers, lost further in time...

The farm was indeed still there, as always, and so was the house, but of course everything was changed. The fields were maintained by a Korean or possibly Japanese corporation that had bought their father out for a pittance, and they looked more uniform and productive than they used to, with their long straight rows of hybrid soybeans and this year not a cornstalk in sight. Though history had never recorded the fact, the beautiful old weathered-red barn had collapsed in a storm years ago, and now there was just a much smaller corrugated aluminum shed where it had stood for over a century. The house hadn't been painted in the seventeen years since their parents left—no reason to—and it seemed to lean to the left and a little closer to the ground, its front windows slightly askew in their frames and the wooden gutters falling in or sprouting weeds up in the air. But there was the old battered and rusted mailbox out front, its bent flag half up and its newspaper tube now a nest for swallows, waiting for papers and mail that would never come: ERWIN, the name on its side read, barely legible now.

It was still theirs if they wanted it, the house on its acre; the corporation apparently had no use for it, and it would probably cost too much to dismantle or burn. There were hundreds, maybe thousands just like it across the state. "Sometimes I've thought of coming back here and spending some of the summer with the girls," Rose said, easing the Camry into the long-worn ruts of what used to be the front drive. "But I guess since Mother and Dad moved into town I thought it would be too lonesome."

Amelia slammed her door and wiped grit from the gravel road out of her eyes, smearing the mascara her father wouldn't have noticed even if he had cared to examine her closely. She had never wanted to see the house since their parents were bought out; it contained too many bad memories, she had told herself for years, and she didn't want any of them refreshed. Now memories good and bad were much less distinct and had lost both their comfort and sting. Still, if Rose hadn't made this trip a precondition of picking her up at the Cedar Rapids airport and taking over the driving this weekend, she would never have agreed to come here. "You really haven't even driven past here yourself in over five years?" she asked her sister, looking up at the forlorn front side of what had once been home for it seemed forever. That worn wooden scallop over the central door; those coffin-like window boxes that hadn't held any flowers, ever, as far as she knew; the mossy, sagging eaves. The morning glories pulling down the lattices and tattered screens with their weight. The dangling wires.

"It's getting closer to ten," Rose was saying. "Last time was when Mother had me take her out here to dig up some of the old peonies. Let's go in the back door, that was never locked. No one even had a key, imagine that."

"And what's to take?"

Rose led the way around the house through the wild rose brambles, past the lilacs they cherished so in their memories, the bushes now ragged and graying and thin as spinsters, past the cast-iron pump and bathtub-turned-horse trough, and past maples that were now twice as tall and half as full as they were in their dreams of the old place. That pump, it had always reminded them of a seahorse, the tub was their ocean when they were toddlers—and what had become of the rhubarb patch? The hitching posts? The boarded-up outhouse? The sheds? "We ended up leaving most of the old furniture and stuff here, you know. I didn't want it, either. Look, Amelia, there's our old swing set—or what's left of it."

At the top of the drooping back porch steps they both turned to survey the lay of the land. In the late afternoon sunlight, long shadows of these eternally watchful hills and ancient Indian burial mounds pressed in from all sides as if to hide the rich black earth's secrets; from their vantage point, the sisters could see clusters of pale cattle like the ghosts of bison past, grazing between distant groves of white oaks and red oaks, those groves like mystic islands in a sea of yellowing fields, and above themselves and everything else, incoming cumulus clouds rolling like a conquering army across a vast jewel-blue plain. The darkly forested heights where the bluffs gathered and rose gradually, tier by tier, to meet the swampy Mississippi some twenty miles to the east, seemed even loftier to both women since they had moved to flatter, more congested territory in, separately, another county and another state. It was a consoling landscape they both held deep within them, a map made of resilient memories, good or bad, whose deep rifts and valleys they often explored as they settled into sleep—and yet at this moment it seemed like something entirely new and freshly created, too. For many different reasons, each of them also hated this farm and this farmland, probably most of all for forcing them to become again, if only temporarily, what they had left behind at this place, long ago. Nothing much in these parts had improved or even managed to stay the same since then. Back to the southwest in Millersville, when they had driven through, the little town had looked more faded and desolate than ever, the yards untended and even the familiar church steeple looking ready to topple. They had seen no one they knew or recalled on the potholed streets or broken sidewalks; indeed, they had seen no one at all.

Out here in the country, Rose thought to herself, Mother and Dad might as well have been king and queen, since they owned almost everything in sight, several hundred acres, up to the second ridge-line. How many decades had it been—their little family, and the Kemps down the road, and the Arlens, and the older relatives in town? All that was over. And their ninety-year-old father would be dead soon, and no one but she and her sister would ever really know what it had been like. No one would ever know those unending winters with their agonizing waits among the snowbanks for the school bus or those long simmering Junes, Julys, and Augusts spent half in the fire pond (was it still there, behind that rise?) and half in the cool of the barn. Their father growing poorer and their mother more resigned. Now Rose had her own family and responsibilities, and Amelia had her busy life as well; neither of them had ever wanted to be a long-suffering farmer's wife herself, though it was still sad to think what might have been; both still felt partly responsible for the loss so evident before them.

After a minute of staring indirectly into the sun, Amelia could only see emptiness. The sky here was too big after the city. The rows of dusty legumes too monotonous. The summer-seared hills too quiet, not yet a "locust" or bird at this hour. Amelia had left home when she was eighteen, long ago in 1978, and had rarely come back to this farm; she had returned somewhat more often to the house in town once their mother became ill, but even then seldom came within five miles of this humble structure she had implausibly enough grown up in. Those years seemed as far-fetched as a schoolhouse fable now—in her sophisticated clothes and "done up" in a way her mother would not have recognized, she knew no one could have guessed that now, well into her forties, she could have lived and matured in this small but absurdly pretentious house with its gothic windows and high prow-like dormers and gingerbread fretwork, all those small but grandiose nineteenth-century flourishes dilapidated now, nearly erased by time. The sisters left the steps behind and walked right through the torn screen door, into the bare screened porch—and then it took just a jiggle and a steady sort of sliding push to force open the warped back door. No one had ever, as far as they knew, entered the house any other way.

The building was based on the old mid-Victorian four-square plan, popular on estates of the period, with a room in each corner and a central hall constricted by doorways and a staircase with a railing that encircled the upstairs passageway; and now they were in the modest old-fashioned kitchen, last fully renovated before the Depression, and holder of the keenest memories for a farm family. For a few moments the hushed darkness told them nothing new. Gradually, as their eyes adjusted, they noticed the enamel-topped breakfast table under the ceiling lamp as it always used to be, before their parents left and abandoned their mutual past. And then the sisters noticed the plates, the napkins, the flatware, the adults' water-glasses and smaller children's cups, all neatly arranged.

"Did they really leave everything here like this when they sold the acreage?" Amelia said, picking up a plate, one of the ones she remembered from decades ago, with a border of pop-art pansies circling its rim. Their mother had bought them with Green Stamps from the long-extinct grocery store in Millersville.

Rose required a bit longer to take it all in. She took the plate, dustless and as shiny as if had been freshly washed and polished, from her sister's hand. "Kids must have been in here, playing house," she said. "The Schreiners' great-grandchildren, maybe, if they have any." Now she saw that the entire kitchen was spotless, from the slick linoleum floor to the white-pickled deal-wood cupboards to the deep and ample porcelain double-sink. Exactly as she had always remembered it. That sink, especially—so much of the slavery of her girlhood was centered around it, scrubbing insurmountable stacks of dishes and pots and pans after every meal.

Amelia set the plate back down and walked over to the window, which looked out onto what used to be the barnyard. It was where she used to look out for her favorite horses over the years, through the enormous sliding barn door right into the shadowy stable, to see when they slept and when they were restless. Once she had spent the entire night in the barnyard, leading the little roan called Blaze in circles so he wouldn't succumb to the "sleeping sickness," equine encephalitis. "Could someone actually be living here?" she appeared to be asking the view.

"You saw all the weeds and rust and rot," Rose answered. "Maybe Mother came back here before she died to tidy things up. Though I don't know how she had the energy. And that would have to have been over two years ago."

Amelia looked at her sister, seeing once again her mother in her eyes, her chin, her graying hair. "I suppose she was a bit nutty in those last months. But I am surprised she kept all this old stuff. I remember these ugly rubbery clown cups from when we were tiny! They would have been the first things I threw out."

Rose was studying a calendar on the wall, one with calico kittens in a basket, set to September, the present month, but a date long long years before, the year their parents had moved at last into town. "Imagine, I used to drive by but never came in. I should have come here a long time ago and cleared the old place out better," she said, flipping through the months to come—or, rather, which had come nearly two decades ago. "Mother must have been bored, and you know what a neat house she tried to keep."

As they moved from the kitchen into the front parlor, Amelia took her sister's hand, something she hadn't done since their mother's funeral and hadn't done much at all since they were small girls. There was the old bentwood rocking chair she had once loved because it creaked so wonderfully, like field crickets, when you rocked in it, when Mother held you, and there were the matching camel-back couch and armchairs with their fancy frilly doilies, and in the corner the second-hand Baldwin "home" organ, upon which their mother had once played "There is a Tavern in the Town" and "Du, du liegst mir im Herzen." That was when they were both young; that was in another century. "They didn't take any of this?" Amelia asked, disbelievingly. "I seem to remember that the last time I was here they were already throwing some things out, or moving things around. This is kind of spooky."

Rose was glad to feel her sister's hand in hers—maybe that meant she was no longer so upset with her for what had happened back at Shady Acres. But she was disconcerted, too. "Someone might be living here, after all," she said, trying to see through the fading light across the hall to the room they used to call the blue parlor, because it was the mirror of this room, except its flowery wallpaper and curtains were blue, not pink. "Or maybe was living here recently."

Amelia gave the rocking chair a light shove and it made the same maternal creaks she remembered; there was even an old Saturday Evening Post face-down on the rattan seat, showing off its ad for Tareyton cigarettes—or maybe it was their father's Grit. Maybe he was the one who would come back here, just to read and think. "Now I am getting freaked," she said. "Suppose the squatter's still here? Let's go."

"Well, I wouldn't think..." Rose demurred, reluctantly turning to catch up with her fleeing sister. "We can come back tomorrow when it's lighter and look some more." The wallpaper, she noted on their way out, was not floral as she had remembered, but a design of small stylized leaves in the shape of interlocking triangles.

That night, at their fussily tidy budget motel on the highway, they avoided talking about the farmhouse or their father. The room was too jammed with beds and chairs and desk and mini-fridge and gigantic, boxy TV to start any arguments in. Rose sat cross-legged on the edge of her twin bed in her bra and slip, talking on the phone. "I don't care, tell her she'll have to wear the plaid one, then," she was saying, followed by a series of hmm's and sighs that must have meant a lot to her husband but signified little to Amelia.

The only other thing she said that drew Amelia's attention was, "He's playing games with us, that's what I think! .... No .... Oh, he's always like that, the dirty old cuss, and I think he resents— Yes, but..." Was it their father or simply a neighbor they didn't like?

At last she hung up and turned to Amelia, who was facing the other way like a bride and taking off her clingy mid-length skirt, something batik with miniature Indian elephants marching across its hem. "Don't you just hate wearing them?" Rose said, tossing the shapeless sun-dress she had been wearing off her bed so she could lie down. They had fixed themselves up especially for their father, who of course probably hadn't noticed.

Because I'm a lesbian? Amelia thought, but instead said, "I'm used to dressing up. And I do like the freedom, the air on my knees."

"Then wear shorts or culottes," Rose said, taking up the TV remote. Her sardonic sister had told her almost as soon as they had met in Cedar Rapids that morning that she had lost both her job as a senior call-center manager and her latest girlfriend to "outsourcing," in both cases.

"Turn up the sound," Amelia, now in her robe, requested as she folded her blouse and skirt neatly, and they both began watching a drama where neither plot nor characters could ever make sense to latecomers like themselves.

After their stale muffins and even staler coffee obtained from the neat but crowded motel office the next morning, they headed back down the highway to the indisputably unshady Shady Acres. Outside his room, in the doorway, stood the large attendant from yesterday, this time wearing scrubs one could only call pink, but which a big man such as himself probably considered merely red, washed too many times. Brutish biceps folded over a bearlike chest, like a guardian genie or unshaven Mr. Clean—they could tell he recognized them both from the day before. Or maybe it was just a similar-looking man; the sisters didn't really exert much attention on any workers here, and he was of a certain type one met often in nursing homes and hospitals.

"Your papa's in slumberland," the attendant said to Rose and not to Amelia, putting his fat pink finger exaggeratedly before his lips. He even wore a gold hoop earring like Mr. Clean in the old ads. Both women tried looking past his broad shoulders and could see the old man lying fully clothed atop the bed, still wearing his new cardigan, both his mouth and eyes wide open. He might be dead, for all they could tell. "Sound asleep," the attendant emphasized with a flex of his shoulders, this time eying Amelia, his bulk seeming to grow larger within the door frame. "Try coming back for second lunch. He's usually waltzing down the aisles by then."

Rose appraised the giant, not certain how funny he was trying to be. "All right," she said, "is that one-thirty or two?"

In the meantime, they decided to drive the twenty-five-odd winding miles to Millersville again. The two-lane county roads were scarcely busier than they had been late Saturday afternoon, and they felt very alone in the world in the cramped car, wave after wave of ripening corn rippling past them and no clouds at all in the oppressively enormous sky. Through crooked vales and up across steep sandy ridges and between wind-whipped cornfields they rode swiftly and nearly soundlessly, all the way to their unheralded and insignificant birthplace on its hill above the serpentine, golden-brown Rhine River—not much more than a shallow, mud-choked creek in this dry season.

Even in the best of days, a century past, no more than a thousand people called this place their home; it was never quite a market town, and you passed through it only on the way to even lesser settlements. Unlike most Midwestern towns, it was not built on a grid or around a square or along a river or formed from a combination of all three, but instead wrapped itself around the hillsides in a series of declining terraces. This morning no one was visible on the streets or front lawns, and the few cars in evidence were parked, the rest presumably garaged. Quiet, as their mother would say, as a churchyard at midnight. The sisters did not even pause as they drove past the weed- and lily-choked Catholic cemetery where grandparents they barely remembered had been buried an eternity ago. The last one-level, utterly nondescript house their parents had rented here (until their mother had died and been cremated two years before and they had had to put their father into the nearest decent nursing home) seemed to be occupied by a large, active family who had no problem with putting a trampoline, above-ground pool, and skateboard ramps all in the same undersized, unmown yard. "The Freitag's," the hand-carved sign hanging from the wooden mailbox read.

"I wonder what the Freitag is," Amelia, who was educated enough to be pedantic when she wanted to, said. "Sounds like some sort of dragon."

Her humor sailed over Rose's head. "Oh, that has to be Shirley Baker's house now, you know, Shirley who got pregnant at sixteen and married that contractor over in Drake. She must have a ton of kids and even grandkids by now! Poor girl, she was wall-eyed, remember."

The only business left in town, or at least the only one open on a Sunday morning, was what used to be the Mobil gas station at the corner of Main and Hilltop. Around the corner lay the burnt-out "opera house" and closed-down A&P, and further along, the post office, and town offices, and Sutter Drug (boarded up), and what used to be the Bluebell Diner, and what had served as a library, and what else they couldn't quite remember. It was growing hotter, and Amelia said she was dying for some bottled water, so they went into what was now just a little convenience store with dismantled gas pumps out front. The boy inside was probably not yet a high school graduate and wore, Amelia noted with a smile, both a nose ring and a lip ring. Her friends back in St. Paul would find that amusing. What would her parents have made of such changes in the world? When the women greeted the boy he only stared, as if just looking at them was acknowledgment enough. Amelia had to content herself with a Diet Pepsi, while Rose bought a regular. "I wonder if he could be one of Shirley Baker's boys," Rose said back outside on Main Street, under the catalpas, unscrewing the plastic cap. For some reason she almost longed for a smoke as in the old days, sitting for a minute on the hood of the car parked outside the store like that—and she wouldn't have been surprised to find Amelia was thinking nearly the same thing.

"She stole my first boyfriend," Amelia said, getting back into Rose's Toyota, spurred by memories of illicit vending-machine Camels and truant afternoons spent inside and outside the old station's grimy garage doors.

"Who—Shirley? What boyfriend? I didn't know that," Rose said, looking as nonplussed as if this were truly an important topic. She hopped off the hood and followed her sister.

"There's a lot you don't know," Amelia said, and laughed, then took a swig of her tasteless soda pop. "Are we going back to the farm?"

"That's why we came all the way back here, isn't it?"

In broad daylight, the old house looked both less strange and a lot sadder. Several windows were shattered, maple saplings were growing up through cracks in what had been the patio their father had constructed long ago, and the shallow front steps had simply collapsed into the ragweeds. Again they went around back, scratching their ankles and calves on thorns and nettles, and walked up onto the screened-in back porch. Once again the landscape opened up for them toward the north, though now the hills seemed lower, more worn, and the dark oak-groves were no longer crowned by gold in the afternoon sun. A thin yellow dirt road wound between the cattle pastures like a length of yarn, and a lone, distant tractor left a lingering cloud of saffron-like dust behind it for a quarter of a mile. Otherwise, the countryside was static and absent of either animal cries or traffic noise.

This time they saw even better than yesterday how well-preserved the kitchen was: the shining white sink, the gleaming "harvest gold" Formica countertops, the double-doored burnt-orange refrigerator (another relic from the early nineteen-seventies), and the bulky microwave (from the dawn of the eighties, bought used just a couple of years before their parents left here). The floor might have been mopped just for them, and even the windows, veiled by ripped screens on the outside, had unsmudged glass panes within. There was a curious absence of grime or grease anywhere; maybe the room was airtight, like a laboratory. But that still didn't account for all this.

Rose studied the room admiringly; this was where she had spent many of the happiest mornings and evenings of her early life. "I remember now that Mother told me she used to come back to the old house every once in a while, just to make sure everything was in its place and to sit a while and watch the fields across the street from the pink parlor. Just to reflect, she said, that was her word. Reflect and watch the sun go down." She paused to pick up what had been her father's favorite mug, the one with the ring-necked pheasants on it, and added, "I think Mother really was expecting us to come back here some day and take over."

"She must have been very lonely or very bored, sitting in this empty house," Amelia said, leaning over to examine the water jug in the center of the table. It was cracked but decent enough crystal-ware, handed down several generations of their farming family, she supposed. Why hadn't it been offered to either Rose or herself? "I wonder why I didn't notice this yesterday," she said to the jug. She lifted it up, and it seemed surprisingly light, almost as if she had been expecting it to be weighted with water or iced tea.

"There's a lot I never noticed, either," her sister said, putting back the mug exactly where she had found it. "I feel guilty now for not coming out here with Mother once she started getting sick. She must have thought if we didn't, she could move back here some day after Dad died."

"Did I just hear someone?" Amelia said, almost dropping the jug. Oh. It would be the rocking chair, of course.

And of course, it was only an open window, one they hadn't noticed was open the evening before. A yellowed lace doily had blown off an armchair and an old magazine or two had fallen down from the small low table beneath the sill; Amelia put them all back where they belonged and shut the window, though it protested all the way. Rose was already rocking in the chair, flipping through the pages of a rain-wrinkled Look magazine. "Stop that," Amelia told her. "You really do look exactly like Mother."

Impulsively Rose reached for the chain above her and switched on the standing lamp with its fringed lampshade, now faded to the color of the dimestore lipstick their mother and aunts had once all worn. "Looks as though they never cut off the electricity here," she said, a bit amazed. The rows of triangular leaves on the walls seemed to be floating around them in the hazy, pinkish light. The sun through the flimsy crimson curtains, still in place, but faded, too, only added to the illusion.

"Well," said Amelia, looking between the parted curtain panels toward the ugly corrugated shed where the new landowner's employees most likely stored fertilizer or equipment, "I guess they need it out there. Just hope we don't get stuck with any bills Dad forgot to pay years ago!" Instead of the shed she saw the big red barn that used to be at the edge of the fields, large in her mind as a cathedral and as sacred, and thought of how they used to play hide-and-seek in the hayloft until the day came when she fell and broke her leg and they were forever after forbidden to climb the rungs there.

"Look at all Mother and Dad's things they left here," Rose said, stooping before a bookshelf that held far fewer books than knick-knacks. "Of course, we told them we didn't want or need anything, and I suppose they thought their first rental was too small for all this. Remember how they loved everything being neat and new."

Amelia thrust her hands into the pockets of her hiking shorts, afraid if she touched anything she would break it, every object looked so antiquated and fragile, despite being treasures from her own lifetime. "I don't remember that china palomino," she said, "or I would have taken it." There was also a blown-glass swan and an incomplete set of wooden alphabet blocks and a small hand-painted chamberpot, among a dozen other pretty but useless things. Each souvenir or memento looked as if it had just been washed or dusted.

The blue parlor opposite, which had originally been intended as a dining room but had not served that purpose for most of a century, was strangely barren, as if ready to receive in all due time whatever furniture it required. In the past, it had served as a less formal family room with a record-player and console TV, or as a guest bedroom with a fold-out cot for the occasional overnight friend or relative who couldn't share the girls' quarters upstairs. It seemed the parlor should have at least some framed family portraits or a grocery-store reproduction or two upon its blue-papered walls, but they too were bare. The sisters knew their mother had never known quite what to do with the room in later years. Behind its rear door, the "office," as they had always called it, on the other side of the kitchen, at the back of the house, was just as full as the blue parlor was empty, stuffed with old filing cabinets, boxes, crates, broken lamps, discarded chairs and tables, and whatever else had been thrown into it in those last months of their parents' habitation. Even when she had lived here, their mother had seldom entered this room, which was supposed to have been set aside for the business of the farm, but which their father rarely used, either, in his later years. The battered green oilcloth shades were still drawn down in the long windows, and the overhead fixture lacked a bulb. Except for pinpricks of sunlight that shone through rips in the shades, the room was dark and entirely lifeless. "Let's go upstairs," Amelia said, disappointed, and already heading down the hall. "I want to see if we'll meet our own younger selves in the bedroom."

"I think I've seen enough," Rose countered, but knowing she would have to go take a look, too. "It probably looks the same as it ever did." The same since when? Amelia wondered.

And the room did look the same—as if isolated in another era, as if they had never left behind their childhood or their childish wants. The narrow sloping space consisted of two beds on either side of the dormer window, a nightstand with a double-headed reading lamp between, a small blanket chest at the foot of each bed, and identical bookshelves and dressers against the opposing walls and their peeling, flowery wallpaper. The first of the many things to catch Rose's eye was the sausage-pink and sausage-shaped "autograph hound" lying on her bed, which had always been the left one, the messier one. Before she had learned its more appropriate and less crude name, she had called it her "wiener dog," and its canvas-covered hide had been liberally defaced with the names or initials of almost everyone she had ever known or met from second grade through fifth. Now she took it up by its scruff and leaned against the window to examine it more closely. "Rhonda Harris, Suzie Koehrs, Lynn Myers, Gail Jensen ... I hardly remember half these names, do you?"

Amelia was lying flat on her bed, a bed as neat as if it had been made that very morning. "I burned mine in the trash barrel out back," she said, staring up in disbelief at the big-eyed ballerina pictures in sequined frames on the wall, the 4-H ribbons, the trophies and fairground banners and tacked-up snapshots of friends she had mostly forgotten, too. "When I was twelve. It stank like dead mice. And Lonnie Snyder—remember him?—wrote something dirty on it. I wish I had it now just to see what I considered so offensive then."

"Always making yourself out to be tragic, Meelie, always burning your bridges," Rose said, using the name and tone of voice she had once used to tease her baby sister. She was sitting on the edge of her own bed now, smoothing out the girly chenille bedspread. The caterpillar feel under her palms, that same lump in the middle of the mattress... "But isn't it amazing how Mother kept this room together and couldn't bear to throw out a single thing? Neither of us expected we'd ever miss any of this junk or want to pass it on. I remember the last night I spent here, before I helped them move out the next day—most of these things were in boxes by then, I swear. She must have still been hoping we'd be bringing our own daughters back here some bright morning."

Outside the window a bare black walnut branch rapped against the cracked glass, as if to demand entry, and hungry shadows chased daisies across the wallpaper within. Somewhere a cow bellowed low, but otherwise it was so quiet out here in the country Amelia thought she could hear her own or her sister's heart beating. She stared at the water-stained ceiling and thought of those many nights over many years when she and her big sister would hour by hour sink deeper into those quicksand mattresses parallel with one another, dreaming up separate but equally blissful futures. Hers mostly involved horses and rodeo stunts; Rose's, dozens of children and a movie-star husband. Rose had settled for someone in insurance and two daughters of her own, both teenagers now. Amelia's college and business school had been a long way from the wild western ranches of such childhood fantasies, but she had not been altogether unsatisfied with most of the choices she had made. In the city she rarely thought of this countryside she had once cherished and despised in equal measures. It was possible she now understood that she might have been repressing more than she had been forgetting. Rose's suburb at the "nicer" edge of Des Moines was so pleasant and lacking in distractions or disturbances (or anything else that might have served to distinguish it from countless other such places) she hadn't minded giving up teaching kindergarten to tend to the needs of her family and parish committees. "Suppose one of us had stayed on?" Amelia asked, taking up the much-abused copy of Anne of Green Gables from the nightstand. Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, their sun-bleached faces blank and eyeless as primitive masks, sat upright at the foot of her bed, listening to her, if unable to watch her, and Rose turned to look.

She laughed at the pathetic scene she witnessed—those old dolls and that old-fashioned book—before standing up. "Then I really would have turned into our mother! I wonder how she left their room."

The room across the stairwell, around the corner of the suddenly very dark hallway, was locked, however. After jiggling and jostling and then pushing and kicking in the darkness for half a minute or so they gave up, not wanting to break the rusted lock or hinges. "Maybe she was keeping something valuable in there," Rose said. "And I suppose no one will ever find the key now. Oh, well ... I doubt if it was bricks from Fort Knox."

"Or maybe something she didn't want us to find. We could get a ladder and try to go in through the window." (Like their room, the locked one was under the eaves, with an identical dormer window.)

"Ladders, are you kidding, we'd break our necks and still not get in. I'm sure there's nothing in there, the wind slammed it shut, it got locked by mistake, the way doors do." Rose remembered other times when as a very little girl she had found the door locked but heard voices like actors playing their mother and father within.

The bathroom, which had at last been given new fixtures around thirty-five years ago, was as ready-for-occupancy as the rest of the little house. Rose was surprised again to discover the taps still worked, although the well-water was running brown and was probably poisonous. The half-sunken bathtub looked so much more inviting than their motel shower had, Amelia was tempted to use it; there was even an unopened bar of Ivory soap on the fiberglass basin and a full emerald-green bottle of Prell shampoo on the adjacent foot-stool. The medicine chest above the sink, however, was empty, and Amelia caught how odd she looked in its mirror, which was fractured right down the middle and gave her a schizophrenic aspect. Her new hairstyle, which was as modish and professionally dyed and frosted as Rose's was nondescript and gray, suddenly reminded her of the awful "pixie" cuts they had both worn as young girls.

"What are you smiling at?" Rose asked, at her side again, half-twins of her own self invading the reflection in the mirror. "I don't recall this being here. Or that. Funny, all my dreams seem to get things perfect, while the arrangement of everything around here is just wrong. I guess that's called getting old."

They walked around the house once more, trying to decide if it was some trick of memory or the light that made some things look very little changed, while other things looked entirely new or disremembered, like that depression-glass vase on the prim little hall table, still filled with brittle purple statice. The hall was dim as dusk: a hemlock that had once been a well-behaved shrub now hugged much of this angle of the house in its giant embrace, and thick leafy ropes of trumpet vines had bound the small blue-tinted wavy-glassed "spy" windows on either side of the front door. On this side of the door, however, the entryway looked ready to welcome guests from the world without, with its cheery rag rug for wiping boots and brass umbrella stand ready to receive umbrellas (which neither of them believed it had ever been used for, although once it had served as an oubliette for dolls). In such a twilit atmosphere it was easy to forget this was an abandoned house, one left long ago to the slow, annihilating progress of time.

Back in the sunny kitchen, as accurately preserved as their memories of it, Amelia took action without forethought: she rapidly began opening the warped doors of the cupboards and cabinets one by one, and they both saw the shelves and drawers inside were stocked with the foodstuffs of their youth: Corn Flakes, Grape Nuts, Rice-a-Roni, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, Ronzoni noodles, Campbell's soups, Jell-O, Kool-Aid, Borden's Chicken Bouillon, and a score or more additional products, lined up as precisely as they had once been on the racks and shelves of the much-missed Millersville A&P, shuttered these past ten years and some. Could this food actually be that old? The boxes looked new. What was one supposed to make of all this? Rose and Amelia stared open-mouthed and wide-eyed at each other before the well-stocked cabinets, both feeling like characters lost in Grimm's. "I guess Mother should have thrown this rotting stuff out," Rose said, if only to break the spell. And the food obviously wasn't in bad shape.

The sisters grew closer again before the bountiful shelves, Rose's warm hand on Amelia's cool shoulder. "Remember how we used to all say 'store-boughten'?" Amelia said with a chuckle, checking in vain for an expiration date on a box of Jiffy corn-muffin mix. "Mother always said what she could manage to bake was never as good as store-boughten."

Rose stiffened. "There's nothing ungrammatical about saying 'store-boughten.' "

Out in the fresh air, on the back-porch steps, Rose's tiny silver cellphone sprang open like a jackknife. She made a face at it, attempting to read what it told her like a fortune-teller before a crystal ball. "Damn," she said, snapping it shut again. She was shaking, though Amelia knew it wasn't because of the phone. "How am I going to remind Ray to go pick up Emma at the pool? No service. No bars. A dead zone!"

It was Amelia's turn as usual to make a joke. "A dead zone, for sure. I'm beginning to feel this place is haunted."

Rose, who was indeed somewhat shaken, examined her younger sister as Amelia lowered a pair of what she supposed were trendy and expensive sunglasses down over her mottled nose, considering how young and susceptible she still looked after all these years, especially with that new hoydenish haircut. "Listen, Amelia, Mother believed in a nice clean and orderly Catholic heaven. She would never agree to haunt anyone. She's up there hemming the angels' gowns, just like she'd always said they'd put her to work doing. But golden pins, we used to say!" Somewhere a ghost giggled, or more likely, groundwater trickled through a pipe in the cellar; ignoring the sound in any case, Rose continued to address Amelia's retreating back. "Listen, there's nothing around here we've seen that isn't easily explainable. She was just trying to keep the old place in good working order until the end. And I might not be psychic, but if she were here, I would have felt something. I would have—"

Amelia was already down below their parents' bedroom window, struggling to look up and in, but the noonday sun glared too harshly on the panes to see a thing. Still... was that a hand on the other side of the glass, waving hello or possibly goodbye? Of course not—just the spasmodic, serrated reflection of an elm leaf. "It's getting late," Rose called to her from the car. "We better make it in time for 'second lunch,' whatever the heck that is."

On their drive back to Decorah they argued the way only two sisters who rarely see each other can. The air-conditioner was on the fritz again, and the heat accumulating inside the black car only made things worse. Convinced the freon might begin to work again any minute, Rose refused to allow the windows down or open the sun roof. "Being the oldest has never been a piece of cake, either," Rose was saying, listening to the fizzling throb of a distant country station, her eyes intent on the road, which somehow made it easier to say the things she felt she had to say. "Look who had to make all the funeral arrangements, from the flowers to the casket to the god-damn choice of urns. And who had to go in there and clean up the rental house and get Dad into the right place. I didn't see you helping much."

"I'm a hell of a lot farther away," Amelia said in her own defense, feeling only somewhat protected by the dark glasses that hid her highly insulted, almost brimming eyes. "And I work for a living."

"As if I didn't have two daughters and a husband and a dog and a house and garden and a cranky mother-in-law to look after. You don't call that work?"

"Which is to say I should be married, too, but because I'm not and don't want to, I should have just stayed home and taken care of everything. Could you turn down that damn radio, for Christ's sake."

"I happen to like whoever that's singing. Amelia, come on. It wouldn't hurt for you to settle down a little more, you know."

Amelia clicked off the radio. "You just hate it because I'm not tied down with a husband like you. Because you think I'm freer than you ever were or could be. Because two women together will never equal a man and a woman, in your opinion and the fucking pope's."

Rose drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and tensed as a motorcyclist passed her in the no-passing zone of the two-lane blacktop. "Let's not get into that," she said bluntly.

Amelia turned to her sister, who pretended to be concentrating too hard on the road to look sideways at her passenger. "What do you want me to do?" Amelia said, the way she might reproach a recalcitrant underling at her last, unlamented job. "Make it better somehow by sticking around here until Dad is dead, too. Huh. Would that make you happy." No question-marks in her voice.

"Damn it!" Rose said either to her sister or the pickup that suddenly began to brake in front of her. "Do what you want. Whatever makes you happy!" she almost screamed. Something in her tone of voice reminded even herself of their late mother at her worst, when one of them had been caught coming in too late or with a failing grade. Amelia had recognized that tone, too.

Rose tried to rein herself in. She didn't want to cry, especially didn't want Amelia to witness her crying. She wished she were the one wearing polarized lenses. "You know what Mother told me that last week at the hospital, with all the tubes stuck in her, when you were off having fun, sightseeing in Rome?"

"We've already been through all that. How was I supposed to know? I have to live my own life my own frigging way." Amelia directed her attention as furiously as she could, considering her confinement, toward the view outside her window. The only thing of interest out there was an old windmill spinning uselessly in a fallow field. Stupid windmill, stupid field, stupid world.

"Never mind all that. I only meant to say that she told me to always look after you, that you would always be her angel no matter what, that you were more vulnerable than either she or I ever would be, that you—that you..." And then she was crying, damn it.

A third attendant, or perhaps the same as the first one or the second, informed them that their father had unexpectedly rallied enough to go to first lunch, at twelve-fifteen, but after eating only the tater tots had immediately retired to his room, where he had instantly fallen to sleep again. Immediate, instant, Amelia thought—odd words for the slow pace of a nursing home. There was no way he could rouse the old fellow now, the attendant said, blocking their passage down the just-waxed hallway; he'd been given all his pills and there was no telling when he might wake—maybe not until very late, maybe not even until after visiting hours.

"Is that how you handle all the problems here, with drugs?" Amelia snapped at him, not caring what he thought.

"Don't," Rose said, apparently to her sister, but looking at the big beefy man who could have easily tackled both of them together. "We'll be back right after supper," she informed the attendant, who she now noticed wore neither blue nor pink scrubs, but outlandish striped ones, like clown's pajamas. "I trust he'll be ready to see us by then."

The attendant said nothing, just took a wheelchair from a long row of them next to a food cart and began pushing it away. The sisters walked down the hall in the opposite direction, not daring to look at the horrors within each undersized room: bent old men, blithering old women, a few younger accident victims or MS patients—their own future, if they were not lucky.

The motel room seemed more like home now than it had that morning: it was good to get back to their suitcases and their paperbacks and the mindless TV. They would nap a while, straighten themselves out, then just grab a bite at whatever fast-food place was nearest, and return to Shady Acres, that wonderful place. (They'd learned the hard way that trying to join the residents at their early-bird Sunday supper was an exasperating and hazard-strewn experience.) Already the hour of Amelia's flight the next afternoon was rapidly advancing, and already Rose was planning what she had to do as soon as she got back home to Ray and the girls and Molly the Labrador and their combined problems. There were house plants and the lawn to water, too, because probably no one else had bothered, and the cake pan she had to return right away to a neighbor, bills to pay, calls to make, and the dry-cleaning to pick up...

As Rose fell into deep slumber over her Oprah recommendation, Amelia remained half-awake with her detective novel, thinking less of its impenetrable plot than what she herself would do once her plane had landed in the Twin Cities early the next evening: go see her friend Tamara? Find out if she had seen Caroline? Start circling ads in the Free Press or just say the hell with it and go on a Caribbean cruise with her savings? She knew what she didn't want to think of: the farmhouse and how bizarrely welcoming it had seemed, so restful, how she wouldn't have minded just staying the night not here but in the bedroom that had consoled her so often as a girl—her sanctuary and the place where in the midst of the very darkest hours she could tell her big sister Rose anything... almost.

Miraculously, there was no attendant in evidence when they returned to their father's room at precisely seven-fifteen that evening, just as the sunset outside his big "picture" window was beginning to alchemize those ordinary fields into fields of fool's gold, a while before nightfall would succeed in overtaking the horizon with coolly indifferent blues and grays. The old man was sitting upright not in the comfy lounge-chair but in another one of those tailbone-pinching low-slung models the place was littered with, his face lit up by that sun that always and only found him a prisoner, Amelia was thinking as they approached him. "Daddy!" both daughters cooed in a way they never would have, had he been compos mentis. He didn't seem to notice them or the sunset, intent instead on a patch of silvery alfalfa rippling in the breeze, just visible across the suddenly vacated county highway, if one leaned toward the north, as he now did. A pair of buzzards was wheeling over something in the midst of the hayfield, but neither sister wanted to find any particular relevance in that. After several taps on the shoulder still failed to gain his attention, they dragged over another chair and waited for him to get bored, and at last, without warning, he turned to them. Dentures in place and lips aquiver, he greeted his daughters with teary affection, though now he saw them, apparently, as the two old unmarried women who had raised him after the Spanish influenza epidemic had carried away his parents. "Aunt Ethel, Aunt Edith," he said over and over again, as if willing them to become what they could not. Rose and Amelia smiled at each other, relieved that at least now he was awake, active, and happy to see both of them. "There are some people around here," he told them with a wink, "who are off their rockers! They'll steal your handbags and hairpins and smelling salts, if you don't watch out."

"My, my, isn't that sunset just as purty as a picture postcard?" Rose rhapsodized, pulling the chair closer to her father and settling herself into it. One would have thought, given her locution, that she was indeed one of those old maiden aunts. Amelia took her place a little behind on the bed and watched the view, too. "It must remind you of the farm. We were out there today, you know."

"Where?"

"The farm, remember? The corn is as high as Jack's beanstalk this year, you should see it." Rose leaned over her father's quaking shoulder, feeling his sour-milk breath against her cheek. It was heavenly. She could pretend for just a minute that she was his little girl again, couldn't she? And she knew very well it wasn't corn this year, but yellowing soybeans.

The old man turned to her; suddenly she was a stranger again to him, she could tell. "They stole our farm away," he said with undisguised bitterness. "Damn foreigners took it from us."

Rose couldn't help hugging him, though his bones felt frail as a child's. "You sold it to that enterprise, remember? Oh, it doesn't matter. We could take you back there tomorrow morning if you like. Mother kept the place so clean, did you know she was doing that?"

"Martha?" he said, and took her hand in a raptor-like grip. "You've seen Martha?"

"Yes," Rose said, "I talk to Martha all the time. She sends her love."

Amelia watched from the bed, disapproving of the whole scene, wishing they could take a more realistic approach, when the original attendant in the blue scrubs, or perhaps yet another one entirely, appeared in the doorway to alert them to the fact that visiting hours, for some unfathomable reason, ended at seven-thirty on Sundays, and it was already seven thirty-seven. Time only for a swift hug—no more tears allowed.

That would be their last visit together this time, they decided over take-out Subway sandwiches an hour later. The next morning would be too rushed, getting packed and making sure Amelia was back in Cedar Rapids the mandatory one-to-two hours before her flight to Minnesota. Besides, they knew by now that the home kept its patients asleep as late as possible—and who was to say how much more awkward the next meeting might be? Better to remember him happy or something like it until the next holiday, if there would be one for him. The day had exhausted them both—maybe it was their father; more likely it was the enigma of the old house. (A good girls' book, they both agreed.) Something did not add up there, and yet neither of them really wanted to talk about it. Rose spent much of the evening talking on her cellphone or trying to reach people on her cellphone; Amelia wished she could appear as wanted or needed, as well, but could think of no one she could call or text out of the blue who wouldn't be asking inconvenient questions about her job or Caroline. The book she'd begun just two days before ended as suddenly as a door slammed in her face, and she was left with nothing to do but watch the muted television while Rose droned on—worried mother, sympathetic friend, patient wife. She was still talking while Amelia undressed and when Amelia fell to sleep, only to dream of her old bedroom, those photos tacked to cork-board of former best friends she only half-remembered; of menacing ballerinas and blind dolls and painted porcelain horses; and resilient, red-haired Anne, sweeping through the resplendent fields of Prince Edward Island. Somewhere in the middle of the night, only partly awake, her mind as filled with questions as Nancy Drew, Amelia decided what she must do.

Rose must have already been up for an hour or more. That morning's Des Moines Register was powdered with sugar from the donuts she'd taken from the lobby, she'd sliced an apple into pieces, and coffee was perking merrily in the maker she'd only lately decided to trust. She estimated it would take them just under one and three-quarters hours to get to the airport, not counting the time it would take them to stop at a roadside Perkins or Country Kitchen for lunch. She had providently packed her suitcase and garment bag the night before and made all the necessary phone calls, stowed her baggage away, checked for flight delays, checked the gas, and loaded the car with snacks and bottled water, as if this were a trip to Mexico instead of just partway across the state. Amelia decided to tell her at the last minute, as they pulled out of the motel parking lot. "Rose, I'm sorry, could you just take me to the county airport? I think I'd rather rent an Avis and drive up to St. Paul instead. I have a hellish headache, and I just can't face flying after all we've been through this weekend. You know how jittery air travel makes me."

Rose looked at her sister, who was dressed more demurely and sophisticatedly in another skirt-and-blouse combination than herself in jeans and smock-top. Amelia, she thought, looked like she was on her way to a business meeting; then again, people always used to doll up like that when taking a train or plane, even a bus, even in the middle of the night. In any event, she couldn't help but wonder if her sister were trying to prove something, always dressing like that. Growing up on the farm, they had seldom worn anything other than cut-offs or overalls and T-shirts, at least in summer. "But you've paid for a round-trip ticket, haven't you?" she said, putting Amelia's two heavy suitcases in the Camry's trunk. "Why waste it—and aren't you in a hurry to get back?"

Amelia tossed yet another smaller, sleeker traveling bag onto the backseat. "I was thinking, why rush things, and driving relaxes me. It's a beautiful day, summer will be gone soon. I might as well enjoy the views. It's not really so far when you drive as fast as I do. And I got the tickets a lot cheaper than I thought I would, so it's no big deal."

"Well, it's your money to burn." The sisters stood on opposite sides of the sedan, poised to get in. "But I was kind of hoping we could talk on the way to Cedar Rapids. After all our fighting yesterday, I mean."

They both got in, and once inside Amelia turned away, looking back out the window at the quaint old motel as she talked. Another era, this place. In another year or two there would probably be a Motel 6 or Comfort Inn here. "That was nothing," she stated. "We were just wound up about Dad and the—the house."

Rose briefly interrogated the highway map, started the car, and pulled out of the lot onto the commercial strip, past the Wendy's and Menard "Super Store" and Kwik-Trip. "I still don't know what to think of that, the house, I mean," she said to Amelia. "Mother must have worn herself out putting things to order all those weeks I thought she was hardly able to get out of bed and up on her walker. Just like her to kill herself cleaning. You know, I guess, maybe she's, she'd had some old friend come around now and then just to maintain things until, until—"

"One of us comes back?" Amelia smiled and evaluated her frumpier but prettier older sister, who she did genuinely like and missed between their visits. She wished Rose would come up to Minnesota more often, despite the family. Or with the family. "I guess that explains it," she added. "Maybe she has the entire Ladies' Auxiliary coming by weekly with their dusters and artillery rifles."

"Well, it looks like it. I'd be surprised if any of her friends are still alive, though—she outlasted nearly everyone, I think, even that old Erma Benson, her and her smelly poodles. Remember?"

"Everyone but Dad."

"Right, and Dad. Oh, Daddy dearest! Great-Aunt Ethel and Great-Aunt Edith! Can you believe it? They must have been in their late nineties when they died. And now there's not a soul left alive to remember them but Dad. Those old farm folks do seem to live forever sometimes. Did I tell you the attendant told me last time that they have a 105-year-old in Dad's ward who's always singing songs from the Teddy Roosevelt era? Drives everyone just plain bonkers, he told me." They were going exactly sixty-five now (Rose would exceed the speed limit no more than she would commit murder) as they followed the map to where the small municipal airport lay, a little way outside of town across the river, where the bluffs began.

"You still sure you want to do this?" Rose asked Amelia outside the toy-town terminal with its one car-rental office. It was too late, anyway; Amelia's stylish travel satchel and overly elegant luggage were at her feet on the sidewalk. No one else was around on this quiet holiday Monday. A Piper Cub was taking off down the runway, but otherwise the whole area was a treeless macadam desert and suddenly, with this departure, it all felt very bleak.

In a few trouble-free minutes Amelia rented an economical little no-nonsense Saturn, and she was ready. Rose had meanwhile been scanning the recipes in an old Woman's Day on the low table in the adjacent passenger waiting room, which didn't look like it had been renovated since 1962. Turquoise vinyl cushions! And fizzy soda pop that was automatically poured into little waxed paper cups from an antique vending machine. How it all took one back, and how tired she was beginning to feel... Tonight she would finally have that chicken-and-all-the-fixins sit-down supper with Ray and at least one of the girls, the way she had been promising them for weeks, or so she hoped.

Outside again, Amelia hugged Rose, something it had grown increasingly difficult for her to do over the years. Surprisingly, Rose held her embrace longer and tighter than she had expected. She must love her funny sister Amelia after all, Amelia thought. And then they were both crying, thinking not of themselves so much as of their parents, this weekend already gone and lost forever, and wondering how long it would be before they'd be coming back here for the next funeral. Amelia stood alongside her subcompact for several minutes after Rose's slightly larger car had vanished into nothingness, as if afraid to get into the vehicle and do what she had already decided to do. But it was mostly because she suddenly felt very, very alone and lonesome—the way one so often does in airports and train depots and bus terminals after seeing someone off or going off by yourself.

Luckily, she had remembered to take a district map from the motel lobby, or she might not have found her way, with all the roads built or rerouted over the past twenty-five-odd years. Driving fast down roads that snaked between high rockfall-scarred ledges on such a lovely sunshiny day was pleasant and exhilarating, however, and once she was really deep into the cool and shady river valleys she felt comforted as if by a gathering of old friends at a celebration. So little of the locality itself had changed, despite the calamities of the rest of the world and the explosive growth and mall-sprawl of metropolitan areas like her own Twin Cities or even Rose's subdivided suburbia. Traversing these open fields and weaving back and forth across the thin bronze-brown rivers and streams, delving further into this region the last ice-age glaciers had somehow never shaped or scraped as smooth as most of the upper Midwest, felt like going back in time, which, in a sense, anyone was when they came to this semi-forgotten corner of the country. And then just as rapidly as she had come to feel alone and sad only a few minutes before, a glowing happiness was spreading outwards from what must be her heart, it seemed, into the very tips of her fingers and toes. As if she had just taken a long swallow of a very mellow and effective glass of good wine.

Amelia passed few cars on the way to Millersville, and on this holiday Monday it too was quieter even, if that was possible, than it had been during the sisters' two recent visits. Did anyone live here anymore, at all? If it weren't for that boy at the convenience store and the evidence of cars and trash and children's toys scattered across lawns, she might have guessed this was a ghost town—which reminded her of the Rocky Mountain ghost towns she had imagined as a child, not too far from her horse ranch, of course, like the ones the Hardy Boys or the Bobbsey Twins might have explored and discovered the solution to all life's riddles within. Well, she could just keep on driving; her return to Millersville hadn't taken her too much out of the way; one could bomb all the way to big bright St. Paul nonstop and be there before nightfall. So far she had done nothing she hadn't promised her sister she would do or not do. A few miles ahead the thin black county road would intersect with a state road (blue on the map) that would eventually merge into the north-south interstate highway (red). Maybe she would do that. But for a moment she halted in front of their old church, St. Olaf's, upon the topmost side of the hill, with its views far east and north, and wondered if it would be locked. Probably; every church seemed to be these days whenever she got an urge to remind herself of some of the terrors of her childhood—the priests in their flapping robes and the candles that smelled like what she thought dead people must smell like and the altar boys who gave you dirty looks and wrote dirty words down the alleys in chalk or on your favorite stuffed animal. No, she wouldn't go up those steep crumbling steps and through the wide double doors, even if they weren't locked and no matter how much she craved the cavern-like aura of sanctity within. From here, at least, you could look down over the treetops to the chimneys and rooftops so small below and down at the bottom, at a bend in the Rhine, remnants of the old grist mill with its incongruous limestone tower like a feudal fortress.

Across the street from the parochial school (used only for catechism classes even in her time), she remembered, some of their best friends from school had lived: the Dankwardts, five girls in all. A big lively, loud, messy, happy German-Irish family. Often after late mass they would invite Rose and Amelia over for cookies and lemonade; and the girls could ride ponies or pitch balls and play as tough as any boys they knew. Raven-haired Maggie was the prettiest but Katie was the smartest and the eldest had a lame leg from polio. She longed to hear or see any of them! Now the house, formerly a tall and quite proper "painted lady," one of the best in town, was in near-ruin, the clapboards and trim that had once been cherry-red and canary-yellow now flaking and faded to the dullest of colors, and the shutters hanging off their hinges or fallen into the rose briars below. Out on the lawn was a "4 Sale" sign, but it was so oxidized it might have been swinging there for years. The three-car garage, newer but also in disrepair, had the word "ASSHOLE" spray-painted across its door, along with some indecipherable gangland graffiti. Even here in rural Iowa. What had become of the world? Amelia wondered too what had ever happened to the big happy Dankwardt family and why, once they had all graduated from the regional high school, they never kept in touch. In later years Rose and Amelia's mother had always made excuses not to attend mass, as much as she was invested in votive candles and holy water and saints' days, so even that part of their life had ended sooner than it might have otherwise.

Yes, it was a ghost town, a town of ghosts—hardly a house or lawn in sight seemed to be lived in or even minimally maintained. Windows were closed even in the heat of noon, curtains drawn, blinds down, every door shut tight and probably locked. Some lawns and hedges were clipped too short and burnt to a parched yellow, but the houses on the lots still looked empty and abandoned. If a tornado were to wipe out Millersville tomorrow, would anyone notice?

The farmhouse stood silhouetted against the bluer-than-blue sky, surrounded by its overgrown bushes and trees, and despite the general decline was somehow cheerier than anything in town had been. As if driven by an unseen force, Amelia decided to trip up the fallen front steps and try the main door, which the sisters had just assumed was always locked; in fact, it was never used even when they were growing up, as everyone used the back porch door into the kitchen, even important visiting relatives and the occasional county official—and once the parish priest. It was a broad door with inset panels and a delicately hand-carved frame, too self-consciously genteel and out of place for the original design of such a house, the whim of a long-dead farmer who had had a good year, and though it was of normal height and windowless, its arched lintel made it seem much higher, and it was set between the two long thin windows through whose tinted and leaded panes Amelia remembered watching purple thunderstorms and blue snowstorms approach and retreat. Above the door was that fan or seashell shape, an artisan's crescent molded right into the wood, like the semi-medieval side windows and other fussy details a ridiculous affectation for a purely practical little country house to flaunt in its old age. Under the peeling paint and smoothed by the years, it was difficult to make out the fine work that had gone into incorporating this neoclassical—or was it late American Federalist?—touch. Her family had of course never known who blueprinted or built the house, at some time when the state of Iowa was still young, probably around 1860. Maybe later. What must that newlywed couple or pioneer family have thought, looking out onto unplowed fields and untimbered hills, off into a blue-gray distance hazy with some Fox or Tama Indians' campfires and farther still toward the east, the wide sandbar-choked Mississippi, across which another, more completely furnished world was left behind? Were they afraid of what they had begun here or, more likely, were they too busy to contemplate such esoteric things?

The big black agate doorknob turned easily, and the door opened at the lightest touch, as if its hinges had been oiled only yesterday, and it tore some of the trumpet-vine tendrils and seedpods down with them as it swung inward. There was the grass-green pitcher filled with status, there the silver-flaking hall mirror with its old-world hunting scene painted on its top half, down the passage a cane-bottom hardback chair and a great-grandfather's rabbit-hunting rifle upright and alert against the honeycomb-patterned wallpaper, and after that the doorway to the cellar, which Amelia told herself she would explore as soon as she found a flashlight and the nerve. (Under the house, it would smell like spiderwebs and wet fur and coal dust.) And there was still more to notice: The ornate cobalt-glass globe of the overhead light. The pink parlor on one side, the blue on the other. The tarnished brass light-switches. Had she seen that heavy floor-lamp with its fluted bronze stalk in the blue parlor before? It seemed the window near the rocker in the pink parlor had sprung open again, as old windows will, and the rocker was once more ever-so-slightly rocking, creaking in its bones. Another magazine lay spread open on the floor, thumbed through by the breeze. In a little while she would go back to get her clothes and satchel and bring them up to the girls' room, but first she knew she wanted to revisit the kitchen.

At this time of day it looked more impossibly clean and shiny than ever. The flowery melamine plates lay there smiling on their vinyl placemats, awaiting a family lunch (they used to call it dinner) that would never come. Along the Formica counter were arranged the old Mixmaster blender with its gleaming aluminum mixing bowls nested beneath, the tin breadbox with its decals of rosebuds and bluebirds on it, the mirror-bright toaster almost as large and heavy as the newer microwave next to it, and the series of squat stoneware canisters, diminishing in size: Flour, Sugar, Rice, Coffee, Tea. The mullions above the porcelain-enameled double-sink, looking onto what had been for so long the barnyard, showed each one only a bright blue square of sky licked clean, as if by rough horses' tongues, from where she presently seated herself at the table. The calendar with its insipid basket of drowsy kittens read "September, 1982," and it might be 1982—or 1972, when she was so young, or before she was born: say, 1957, 1944, 1931, any year since her parents or mother's parents had first come here. Amelia could almost see her reflection in her ancestors' cracked cut-glass jug with the sunlight pouring through it, spilling out and sparkling like water across the table and into her eyes.

Pause to think. She could sublet the apartment, sell her things. There would be minimal expenses here, and thanks to prudent savings she would have more than enough to last through next spring, maybe even summer—and by then there might well be the inheritance, not too large, but adequate. Enough to buy back at least a couple of acres and to restore this house to some semblance of respectability. She would plant a garden, build a new barn, maybe buy a horse or two. Rose would say she'd gone crazy—and maybe she had.

Without thinking she turned to the large old Amana refrigerator, that peculiar orange-red color many housewives favored forty-some years ago. Why hadn't she or Rose noticed before that it was humming and rattling enough to just barely vibrate the empty glasses on the table? It had been left running all these many years?

Amelia got up, walked across the cool linoleum (she had kicked off her torturous pumps as soon as she sat down) and stood in front of the refrigerator: such a homey, innocuous thing, now so full of portent. She spread the twinned doors like wings; it was fully stocked: ice cream and frozen vegetables and juices and ice-cube trays on the freezer side, orange juice in glass bottles like the old days and cottage cheese and butter and jams and jars of olives and pickles and dozens of other things on the other side. There was likewise whole milk from the dairy she'd known since childhood; she took the sweating glass bottle out and swiftly, automatically went to the cabinet opposite for a box of cereal, and the cupboard next for that familiar ceramic bowl, the drawer below for a big children's spoon with a little figurine of Huckleberry Hound on top. Her actions were as smooth as the motions one makes in a dream. Nothing seemed unusual or surprising. In a little while she would go upstairs and take a nap on her bed, maybe after reading a little from one of her storybooks on the shelves, one about young girls in trouble and the remarkable things they could do to save themselves. Later she would take a hammer and screwdriver to her parents' bedroom doorknob, or take the door off the hinges if need be, and expose the secrets of that chamber. And she and Rose hadn't even bothered to look in the linen or broom closets up there, or the many other nooks and crannies and drawers elsewhere about this, their childhood house and home she never wanted to leave again. Indisputably, there were many wonders yet for young Miss Drew to discover. Things she might have wanted to forget once upon a time but needed to recall, reinvent, know again. Things she now had the words to describe... All of that, eventually. For now, she shook the cereal into the bowl, peeled off its curious little bonnet-like paper cap and poured milk from the bottle, stirred, sighed, then began eating as hungrily as any farm-girl might. Next she would drink down a large glass of that orange juice.
The Vicar's Wife

Above the sandy sun-warmed tidal flats of Llywrff, the vicar's wife raised a fresh protest against me and my cynical ways. "Now that you know everything about me," she said, tidying up her breeze-blown hair under what she had earlier told me was a Balinese scarf, crafted by blind orphans, "don't be calling your latest something like 'The Vicar's Wife,' or if you do, at least please don't make it one of those. I guess you know what I mean. On a day-to-day basis, I've no objection to sociopaths, except in books." We both laughed; she had admitted to me the first time we met that, although her group had chosen one or the other from my most recent paper-bound series for discussion, she had not yet read any of my works and did not in fact like murder mysteries at all. Psychological crime fiction, I had corrected her. "Yes, whatever, I really don't see the point," she had said two or three weeks before, almost as soon as we sat together on the bench overlooking the little blue sapphire-bright bay, "when there's so much cruelty and misery already in the world, you know. Not to say one can't or it shouldn't be done; it's just not to my taste, you know. I'm married to the vicar, after all, we're still fairly new here, I have to at least pretend to be interested in social justice and the like. I left my interest in forensics back at uni." I also suspected she didn't take at all seriously the profession of what she had derisively told me her grandfather called "the lady novelist"—neither do I, in fact. Also, that windy forenoon we first met, I was under the illusion that the last "lady novelist" she had bothered to read was one at school, Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, probably. Up the Junction, Margaret Atwood, or even Jane Goodall seemed much more in her line.

On that morning I hadn't asked exactly what those social justice issues she mentioned might be, and so far she had neglected to inform me. Frankly, I was relieved that she hadn't read one of my latest, even under the duress of a book club's deadlines, because I was afraid I was going to have to make my usual excuses as to why I had done this or didn't do that. I was here in Llywrff for a little seclusion, to get some fresh ideas, as it were, and I wasn't expecting or hoping to have literary conversations with anyone. Unless I were to come across the ghost of the locally famous poet who had lived here all his life.

Her many children had been with her on that day—exactly how many youngsters there were, I wasn't able to determine then or ever; it could be she hadn't ever dared count, knowing full well that women like her just don't have so many, unless they were adopted from places like Malawi or Uttar Pradesh, in this day and age, especially a vicar's wife setting an example in a village with as many unemployed and indigent as one might nowadays expect. The vicar's wife hardly seemed old enough to have given birth that many times. Before we met I had been watching the children for a happy half-hour; they were not a great deal different from the little fidgety birds (curlews and snipes I'd venture, if no ornithologists are listening) that I saw skitter and spin from one swarm of gnats to another. They were racing up and down the glistening beach at low tide, those children, and all had their mother's wild dark Celtic hair and fair freckled face—so much like her there seemed to have been no involvement on any father's part at all. The children, and their mother, as well, wore striped jumpers of the type that are ubiquitous in charity shops across Wales, and although it was quite cold, they were barefoot. Unlike most anyone their age that I encounter these days, however, the children were remarkably well-behaved, unquestioningly obeying their mother's every request; they hardly made a peep, shooting past me, colliding into one another. In fact, despite their animation, they seemed altogether a bit too solemn, seldom laughing except in a very grim sort of way, going through all the motions but not having any of the fun—maybe that characteristic they had inherited from their male progenitor, the vicar.

It seems I got a little too near to their party, out of curiosity. "So, you're the American in town," the young woman had shouted to me then, wading barefoot, like some large long-legged shorebird herself, through the shallow tidewater pool separating us, to come shake my hand. With unexpected pleasure I took her own and was dismayed to find my palm so much colder than hers. (Lately I had noticed few women around here shake hands or expect to be shaken. Without doubt it is a habit picked up uneasily when you are a public figure.) If she told me her name then, I did not catch it—maybe it was obliterated by a seagull's cry. Mine, one of mine at least, she already knew. American, she had said, summing me up, even though I am loyal to old Montreal. After only a week in this little place I was afraid I had already been similarly misidentified on the streets, at restaurant tables, in most of the shops of the shire, as if now I were the bird, and I'd been tagged and labeled like one that has flown off its migrating route. But the stranger had recognized me from the photo (younger than I could ever be) above the brief but misleading bio on the book she hadn't read, and America was about the same as Canada to these small-town Welsh. "I've a sister in Ohio there," she said, "but I've never yet been. She says I wouldn't like it, anyway, they eat tons of beefsteak and can't call a toilet a toilet! So, you live in Boston now and raise bromeliads, is that what I read?"

"You know what they say about not believing everything you read," I said, infected immediately by her smile and the words that tumbled from behind it. "The parasitic plants, however, that's correct." She found that particularly amusing, for some reason—so much so that I wondered if she might do a headstand or cartwheel there and then, as several of the children had earlier. I think Edward Lear must have once put them all in a drawing. It was immediately obvious that she, too, was not from these immediate parts. Unlike the other villagers, who were always obliging but a little shy, she was upfront, inquisitive to the point of rudeness, and I like that in a person—although at the start I could not ascertain exactly how this fit in with being a vicar's wife, expected to hold boring teas and run chaotic jumble sales; the answer, of course, is that one must maintain a sense of humor to survive. Either one is forced to learn and practice over and over, or one is just naturally that way: I bid on the latter, in this woman's case. In the end, I was right. "It's so like a writer, I fancy," she said within the first five minutes of our being together, "to end up in a nondescript place like this."

"And how did you end up in a place like this?" I asked in my own bold, supposedly American way.

She stooped to pick at something in the sand—a shell? no, it was only a gritty tennis ball once thrown for a dog—and began to say something about happenstance, but then the smallest of the children came up to her, sniffling quietly and holding an inflamed little foot. A sea urchin? Gathering the infant into her arms, she turned back to me and the rest of the children, who had been following as obediently behind her as a brood of well-trained goslings, and name-checked everyone before departing the beach en masse. A forgotten child, indistinguishable from the rest, came running out of nowhere at the last minute to take her free hand. "If you can, come to service tomorrow," she called to me before I moved too far away. It seemed a mere afterthought, something polite to say to a stranger, but then in an odd, marginally off-putting way—as if only at that instant did she really see me, really appraise my value—she began to plead when she saw how swiftly I was walking away. "It's at ten. Oh, please, please, please, do come, say you will, do do do come! Think of it as something to write about, won't it?" And then we fully diverged where pinkish sand met pudding-stone pathway. I watched them go down the high street, sometimes spilling off the high curbstones onto the pavement, always at a danger whenever a speeding car or truck swerved down these one-lane devil-may-care streets. "They're not all hers, exactly," the postmistress told me when she saw me wave through the big display windows as they trooped by on another day soon after. "Some belongs to her sister it is I think, does artsy-craftsy at a wool-spinning empo in Cardigan, and then if I'm not wrong, there's maybe a neighbor's or two's in the mix, or one of those women as helps out in church." On other occasions the good woman, who should suffer no description here, informed me that one never knew who was who in the hordes the vicar sometimes brought down in a van with him from Bengali Alley in London, Banglatown, that is, around the bend from Brick Lane. Ecumenical summer programs, slums to farms, all that. I didn't want to tell her that none of the children I had seen looked even half-Asian or otherwise "foreign." The queue behind me was already forming. "Where my son goes up the street fairs," she went on, "he says it's just another Far Eastern free-for-all, 'culturally very instructive'—his words—but he's the schoolmaster, has to, he has."

I did not forget what had been asked of me there on that beach, at that time when we had originally commenced our delicate acquaintanceship, but all the same I did not go; even the most earnest-sounding invitations are often merely pro forma, and being an avowed atheist I fear traps right and left. Besides, I had promised myself to finish at least one chapter by noon the next day and then reward myself with a little souvenir-shopping, a little sightseeing. Probably if I had been invited to lunch at the vicarage instead I would have gone, because then they would have wanted to see me as a person, not just another potential soul to fill up the pews. Since I faced the kitchen window of my little housekeeping cottage as I struggled to flesh out my outline, my mind was often misled by what was visible directly down the hill, past a few exotic yucca bushes—in the near distance, a flag flying the red dragon over a cobblestone plaza, whose dry fountain was filled with litter and spattered with those gnostic spray-painted phrases as indecipherable in Welsh as they are in English; a bit further on, teenagers wearing bun-like headphones and ghetto-style hoodies, lounging outside the sandwich shop; and in between, pigeons picking at the remnants of potato crisps and pork fagots, as they are called—and so I had not written five lines before the clock-tower of what I now thought of as the vicar's wife's church rang thirteen times. (Why thirteen? Had I miscounted?) It was a sunny September day, good for walking; I needed exercise more than the pleasure of being a tourist, and so with a slight change of heart, I took myself up to the always indirect footpaths along the cliffs running to the west of town, thinking I might meet inspiration along the way. Instead, I ran into the vicar's wife again, sitting under the weather-beaten palm trees on a high point above the harbor, and it occurred to me again that although henceforth she would be addressing me by the pen name I otherwise did not travel under, I still didn't know her name, and it was probably too late now to ask. She might think I was a careless, meringue-brained old woman. And she would be right, but I didn't want to demolish any more gracious illusions.

"Oh, there you are," she said, putting aside the book she had been reading, carefully among the rocks, so that I might not see its cover. She was wearing the same striped woolen pullover I had seen her in last, but she didn't have her oversized woven-hemp canvas bag with her this time; consequently she seemed a freer, more relaxed figure, someone who didn't have to be mummy for an hour or two. "I may have overlooked you this morning," she said, "if you came at all, which I have my suspicions you didn't." Saying it right out loud broke any tension in the air. "Don't feel bad," she continued. "I nag everyone new I meet, on my husband's behalf, I'm his megaphone, his own personal 'mind the gap' lady, always on about it, and yet no one ever comes... So I guess I shouldn't really have expected you to, either. People are so very, very busy these days." On the page, all of this might look full of resentment, even hateful, but it sounded anything but.

I laid aside my walking stick, shimmied off my knapsack, and sat down next to her on what we'll call a shale outcropping (I'm no geologist). So now we were simply old friends admiring a view together. We sat for a minute or so without saying much. Nothing more was mentioned about my not attending mass that morning; neither did she seem to mind my absence of an excuse. Far off we saw the glittering sea filling up the estuary, the trawlers enveloped by clouds of gulls like flies on dead fish, and a foggy stretch of what I hoped might be the northern shore of Somerset across the Bristol Channel, but which might have been only smoke from a distant refinery. Only then did I think to share a granola bar I had with me—or rather, she ate most of it, and I got the crumbs. In thirty seconds flat she was licking her fingers. Mothers who fight to get their children to eat are always like that. I regretted that I had not brought an entire dinner for two with me. "By the way, where are the children today?" I asked, a little impertinently.

She wiped her fingers down the front of her jumper, a habit of both the careless and the preoccupied. "Doing a program with the village youngsters," she answered. "My husband is quite keen on early religious education, no Blue Peter or Teletubbies for him. But none of your scaring the living daylights out of them with divine wrath, either."

"Was it he who brought you here?"

She embraced herself, laughing, as if this were an old joke. "Oh, he's not even Welsh, you know. It's my people are from around here, though I mean Cardiff, which is quite a different place, as you may have seen for yourself. No, he's from Spitalfields, in London, and we met there while he was in seminary. He's part Paki, you see—there's a dirty word for you—bet you didn't guess that from the kiddies, did you? No, you see, he's always been a member of the Church of England, there are Christians even in Islamabad, and that's only the half of him. Honestly, I couldn't expect an American to understand—there are plenty of Taffies twice as dark as me—but these people here, they are the real thing, they are wonderful, and yet it seems they'll never get over it, never never never, and we've been here nearly three years—forever—now." She told me much more that is not reduplicable here, because I couldn't fully appropriate her hybrid tone of mirth and barely contained derision. Everything was related to me without a hint of genuine personal animosity, only that same secret sort of bittersweet amusement, as if she were talking about a situation very much like her own but entirely fictional. It was implied—but never stated—that she had married at least a class or two below her. Whether it was for love I couldn't tell: it seemed to queer old quidnunc me more of a meeting of minds than bodies or, dare I say, souls. He apparently had little interest in meeting or saving souls in general, despite his calling; it was a higher kind of devotion to a perfected God, a desire to arouse a kind of super-intellectual awakening, that had caught him up in the clergy. We sat there happily looking at the faraway waves as they turned from indigo to jade-green and back again, and not at each other (such an arrangement often makes for more intimate conversation, I have found). Eventually we both stood up to stretch, me with my pack and staff and she with the book now deftly tucked under an arm. I could tell only that it was slender and had a bright pink cover. So at least it wasn't those one or two of mine she had mentioned; she wasn't doing research.

"Besides your plants, you undoubtedly have a husband and children, too," she said, somewhat accusingly as we moved on down the steep path. "That's why you understand me and I can talk like this. Or are my assumptions entirely askew? Please don't answer that, I'm often dead wrong when it comes to feminine intuition, my husband says." I saw again that she seemed perpetually amused, as if in private she couldn't take this position of a village vicar's wife with perhaps the gravitas people might expect she should. Eventually I decided that she found all of it—the village, the vicarage, the half-caste husband, the children—to be part of some novel she had accidentally walked into and taken up residence within.

Before the switchbacks ran their course down to the flat, shining beach, we stopped at a bench inscribed with lines from that famous poet I hadn't read and probably never would, and rested again, at my insistence. I found another granola bar and fed her as one might a hungry animal. She had no need for recovery, being young, but the fresh rush of sugar to her brain stimulated her to resume her story. That didn't bother me; I was glad to hear her lovely lilt, thankful she asked so little about me, and I admit half the time I wasn't really listening. There on that bench or another, and on subsequent days when I met her with or without the children on the beach or on the cobblestones of the central plaza, she gave me in bits and pieces enough information for a long novel, though only in retrospect could I give her anecdotes and accounts narrative cohesion. Every time there was so much left to say before we must part. Her children would be tugging at her or I would have a phone-call to make. If we were in town, I was also a bit apprehensive in case any of her husband's flock might be within earshot, but early in the afternoon, when she and I were most apt to be out and about, the streets were nearly deserted; she informed me once that the Welsh in these parts had their own version of the Latin siesta.

So, then, she and her husband had stayed on in East London for a long while after he put on his dog collar, working with the underprivileged and the mentally ill, while she finished off her own degree. The usual postgraduate sort of thing, she assured me: living in extreme poverty themselves, overburdened, underpaid, never meeting anyone young and serious and selfless like themselves, despite it being the big city, growing a tiny organic garden in the cement area, acquiring new tastes in cheap immigrants' food, marching for world peace, attending seminars, taking in the homeless, changing nappies, that sort of thing. Again, she related all of this tinged neither by regret nor rancor; it is only I who supplies any pathos. When the aged and alcoholic vicar of this village died and an offer was made, they jumped the overcrowded ship of London, eager at the chance to give their growing family a freer and cleaner life in the country. At first they loved the humble little out-of-the-way place as I much as I (it was the serendipity of website links that had led me here, after all), but then they came to realize how beloved and irreplaceable the former vicar had been. Beloved why? she asked the question for me. Not because he was so very good at heart; all the villagers, when you prick them, are. In her opinion, he had shirked his duties to both church and fold, he had read his sermons from the back of racing forms, he had allowed babies to go unchristened and issued annulments like hall passes, he played darts with the boys down the pub every night, he forgave the villagers any sin, no matter how great. In turn, they forgave any of his. That was why. Everyone knew he drank too much, but so did they. No wonder they thought her husband such a prig! The new vicar had tried everything—youth groups, drug programs, raffles, suppers, guest lecturers, art shows, nature walks, et cetera, not to mention rehabilitating the pipe organ, new robes for the choir, the latest hymnals, veritable through-sung masses, even karaoke sing-alongs—all in line with the latest revisions in theological practice—and still the congregation, like those in the rest of Great Britain and Western Europe, was drifting away, dwindling, disappearing, due to an all-encompassing moral lassitude, as she put it. Llywrff was rife, like any other, with your usual pregnant teenagers, meth labs, pedophilia, spousal abuse, and of course dependence on alcohol or gambling or both. Or so the older parishioners, who swore by the telly, told her; she had to admit she had uncovered little such despair on her own. Sensitive to the issue, she did see a lot of racism in a changing Wales—with an Indian medic fresh from India in almost every clinic, Chinese grocers everywhere, Laotian or Cambodian chambermaids employed by so many innkeepers—she overheard a lot of people grumbling about sending them "back to the city" or "back to their own country," even if the younger generation had as likely been born in Pembrokeshire or at the foot of Mt. Snowdon. Undaunted, she threw her tea parties at the vicarage, she organized her jumble sales in the church basement (just as I had suspected), and she brought soup to the sick, visited the school, judged farm produce, raised money for a new belfry—she did everything a good old-fashioned vicar's wife was expected to do, sedulously avoiding the kind of do-goody touchy-feely experiments she knew the villagers feared she would try out on them. She had her advanced degree in psychology—she knew people, she claimed, despite her husband's scoffing, and knew they didn't like her, as much as she liked them and like the old vicar could overlook any of their faults. Yet three years later, she still feared that when people saw her getting on the bus with her children, they were thinking, "Poor Mrs. Mukhti, married to that wog." (So at last I grasped half her name, if not the exact spelling.)

"They can't be that harsh—I've found them to be very open and generous," I objected, as we came down to the flats from the hilltops one weekday afternoon, only to be halted by a high tide that would make it impossible for us to pass for another ten or fifteen minutes. We had to sit again on the poet's bench there, provided for just such occasions, and watch as the waters slowly drained away. In the meantime she as usual filled me in on more of her private and personal history. Her people, she said, had all died off or left the country for one reason or the other, and though her husband had an enormous family back in London and Lahore, he never left this place, and neither could she, there was so much to do in just keeping the church afloat. And yet, she said not two minutes later, baldly contradicting herself, there was nothing at all to do here; she had slogged through every one of the Dance to the Music of Time and Forsyte Saga volumes at the inadequately stocked public library and still had too much time on her hands. The book club, she added, was something she'd started herself, and now it was primarily a support group for the retired women of the district, which was fine and all, though that wasn't what it was meant to be; and even though the church always provided plenty of refreshments that proved to be quite costly in the end, after two years the group still had no more than five or six very irregular members. In the end she took from her handbag what proved to be that bedraggled pink and purple paperback—"See," she said to me, "this is the only kind of thing they want to read! I can't get through the damn thing!" She thrust the book as if it were a small incontinent pet into my lap. "Maybe it's the author's picture—I just could never take a woman with three names and all that lacquer seriously." For once, I was the louder to laugh, as I remembered my own doctored jacket photo and what had led to our acquaintance.

Once the waters had sufficiently retreated, we made our precarious way across the slippery causeway, and I bid farewell to her at the edge of the beach, where she must go one way—back to the vicarage up the hill—and I to my cottage, around the other way and up a rocky rise. Already, I am not ashamed to admit, I was wondering again how I might use everything she had told me so far in the next book of my own series, which I still hadn't gotten around to even beginning.

Later that week, when I had foresworn using any local color, and had therefore been able at last to type a couple of chapters—or travesties of chapters—I decided to take another walk, this time up the hill on the other side of the plaza, past the gated cemetery and church I had only glimpsed once before, upon my arrival into town by bus. I hadn't thought much of the vicar's wife for a few days, so taken up was I in contemplating other more malleable plots, to the point where she and everyone else here had begun to seem a little less real than my own inventions. Therefore, the actual presence of the sign on the peculiarly Mediterranean-style building that read "Vicarage" took me a bit aback. (The local architectural vernacular, with its red pantiles and brilliant colors, and the unexpected subtropical foliage of this place always took my mind to other climes, so much so that I sometimes wondered if I were seeing the real Wales at all.) So this was where they lived, then? The place was by no means large or properly proper or even quite respectable-looking, as one might imagine a vicar's residence should be, and unlike most of the houses on the block, its pastel stucco had faded, in this case to a rather bilious yellow. Gutters sagged from the eaves, weeds had conquered the roses in the miserably constrained front yard, a few of the mullions were cracked or missing. Well, I suppose they were too busy with parish concerns, after all, to bother with upkeep. Nonetheless, I wondered if I should knock—maybe I'd even be persuaded to step inside for early tea, and if he weren't too busy writing that week's homily in his den, then it could be I'd meet the man of the house at last, as well. As it was, despite having begun to think of myself as a fat and pushy and overly curious American, I couldn't do it, the place looked so dark inside, so dreary and uninhabited, and instead I continued on past and toward the ornate Victorian angels I remembered from my bus ride. The churchyard also looked more than a bit on the neglected side (angels' stone faces ravaged by acid rain, ryegrass high between the headstones, crosses cracked and obelisks toppled, broken glass and dead flowers), but the portal of St. Michael's was freshly painted—a brilliant red perhaps more suited to a Hindu temple—and so I thought I might take a look in. The entry was unlocked, unlike many others I had tested throughout the British Isles in recent years, and its ironware was well-lubricated. On the outside, the church was nothing special—neither attractive nor unattractive, a competent but by no means wholly successful early twentieth-century version of the Gothic model, a guidebook might say—and, stepping into the vestibule, I quickly became aware of how very cold and dank the interior was; but then, stone buildings with stone floors on the shady side of the street are usually that way. Of course it took some time for my eyes to adjust to the general gloom, with the only light that which was afforded by the thick and grimy stained glass, of philanthropic origin, most likely—legacy of a richer coal-mining period. Preceding any other impressions, I noticed the posters on the broad plate-glass windows of the inner doors, advertising all those programs and events the vicar's wife had told me about, on fluorescent paper with all the attention-getting typefaces a computer and color printer can offer, and then affixed firmly to the moist walls of the church itself, between the high windows on either side of the nave, granite slabs likely transported from the true Gothic revival church that had stood here, so I had been told, until it burned in the nineteen-teens. The lichen-stained slabs dated back to the late sixteenth century and bore the names of various town fathers, I would guess—probably these tablets had once roofed their tombs; one could spend hours reading and deciphering them, but frankly, I'm not all that interested in long-dead portreeves and burghers. In the high-backed pews I saw piles of hymnals with such a sheen upon them they looked as if they'd never been used, and down the obviously new aisle carpets and past the transept, I saw the gleam of those recently refurbished organ pipes between the inner arches of the chancel, as well as all the golden clutter atop the white linen of the altar: candlesticks, crucifix, chalice, ciborium, receptacles of no discernible use or meaning to a lifelong nonbeliever. Gigantic speaker stacks stood on either side of the altar, substantial enough for a stadium, I should think, and to my surprise, one of those awful karaoke machines I see in every bloody bar these days, British or American. The cynical part of my mind asked how such a relatively poor community could afford all these superfluous trappings; what little makes up the remainder of my mind appreciated that at least the church seemed equal to all the demands of modern worship. This place was otherwise not worthy of investigation, and so I turned to go. But then I heard someone whistling energetically, not without talent, and saw the topmost and shiniest part of someone's bald brown head slowly emerging from behind a gilded latticework concealing the exit to the sacristy; certainly it was the vicar—going up a ladder to fix something on the reredos or rood screen or whatever it is you call it—and I had no desire to meet him under these somewhat awkward circumstances, with me in my hiking shorts so unsuitable for any kind of church and him probably a little embarrassed, as well, to be caught whistling something from pop radio and not Palestrina, Britten, whoever. That he was wearing a cassock and over the cassock a surplice—one of those that reach the ankles, with lace at the hems, and a big silver cross around his neck, and that he might strike me cold with his iron crosier became instantly implanted in my brain. I couldn't shake that ridiculous image as I cowered behind the choir stalls and then slunk from column to column. Within that flash of irrational thought, I had seen what was the real matter here: the old vicar had been Low Church, and this new one was High, but nothing would work in this age of No Church. It didn't matter if I was making everything up or not—a writer has her muse drop in on her at the most impractical times—and it didn't matter that I stumbled and nearly fell into the stone stoup (rough-hewn, Celtic, probably the oldest thing in the church) as I rushed past it. Soon I was safely out among the marble markers, pretending to be busy looking for the grave of a certain famous poet, in case anyone should happen by. My whole shirtfront was wet from the baptistry—incriminating evidence—and I reproached myself for how silly I had been, afraid to meet the man whose wife I already knew so well. But the simple reason was, like most authors, I would prefer not to meet the characters I have invented.

Days passed, days when I barely left my rooms. Although I had lately willed away anything to do with my present terrestrial situation, so I should have a clear head for concentration, the novel I was fiercely attacking and yet had barely begun was being invaded by the vicar's wife, despite its conception as something firmly American, all about senators and stockbrokers (more of a thriller than your average cosy, a significant change for me). I didn't see how it—or she—would fit into my planned trilogy. I told myself again that the primary thing an artist must do, whether it's outlining a painting or sketching a symphony or fulfilling a contract, is to separate from the immediate surroundings, mentally if not physically. Besides, there were many other people in the village I've had to leave almost entirely out of this report for brevity's sake—the chatty postmistress, the knowledgeable proprietor of the wine and cheese shop, the odd man at the bookshop who (purposely, I suppose) spoke only Welsh to me although all his stock is in English, the well-read owner of a nearby B and B who'd been very generous in lending an "electric fire" to me. Why should just one friendly woman demand so much attention, when I had them all? The only alternative was try to ignore her, throw my hands up and my intentions aside, and devote myself to the pastoral scenes other pilgrims regularly seek here: clouds like sheep, sheep like clouds, primrose-dotted meadows, purling brooks, country chapels down in the dingle dell, the roadsigns that all look like anagrams: all those things but the last being what I would imagine that famous regional poet wrote odes to, half in Welsh and half in English. But still, in the end, she had skillfully insinuated her way into my plot, and even though I changed her nationality and came close to changing her sex, she seemed to be forever sneaking behind doors, hiding in closets, overhearing clandestine conversations. If I hadn't let her in, she would have pounded on the door of my work in progress until she gained admittance. I really didn't know how I should treat her or dispose of her. This was not long after she, the real Mrs. Mukhti, I mean, had admonished me about how she must be depicted in my book, which of course she oughtn't have known anything about in the first place. At any rate, she was never meant to be a main character, and the title certainly wouldn't be "The Vicar's Wife."

The most recent afternoon when we had stepped out into the hot sun onto the smooth glassy surface of the sand, she had gone on to say, "Please don't make me—I mean, her—the murderer, or murderess, at any rate. People might wonder. But, you know, it's not that they haven't given me plenty of motives!" She took another hungry bite of the egg sandwich I had provided her, intently thinking whilst masticating. Apparently she had been thinking for a couple of weeks now and seemed to have undergone a change of heart regarding the artistry or social value of what I write. "Simenon, Inspector Morse, Cain and Chandler, even Chesterton... " she listed some of the male authorities she had consulted in the past. "Do you ever write about serial killers, or do you think one or two murders a book is enough?" We were both laughing and sitting on our now customary bench, looking out over the blinding sands toward the sea, miles and miles away it seemed today. That hour the children were again nowhere in sight; eager volunteers provided ready at-the-last-minute nanny care, should she ever desperately need some "mental health" time—as all mothers do nowadays, she explained, as if I had never known a similar need myself. She quoted some know-it-all newspaper columnist, then shamelessly drank up the last of my kefir; it seemed the poor girl was always famished, and so I had learned to keep my knapsack loaded with fruit and chocolate, as well. She was very thin, thin even for a vicar's wife.

I told her how, given her propensity for those gentlemen with their nonstop anecdotes, she must know characters have to occasionally do uncharacteristic things, if only to keep things on the unpredictable side. "Oh, in that case," she begged me, wiping away a little of the eggy paste from her lips, "make me vile as you like, but also make me prettier!"

"You're pretty enough," I said, with all the equanimity someone less than young or beautiful can bestow upon one so truly lovely and young—with such bright eyes, that extravagance of freckles, those ropes of thick unruly hair...

"People are always described as prettier than they really could be," she interrupted what I hadn't been thinking aloud. "I'm jealous of so many of the girls those men describe. My husband says vanity is one of the worst sins an ordinary person can regularly commit without fear of serious retribution. If you don't count aging as punishment enough."

"Spoken like a man who has gone bald," I said, without discretion.

"How did you know that? Oh, but then of course, you would have guessed it. There's only one way to describe a vicar, we all know."

We sat for a moment in silence, both of us considering that, watching the clouds chasing the waves in from the sea, waiting for the approaching sound of the surf to meet our ears. And then my companion shot up without notice. "Oh, my!" she cried, as if I had pinched her hard. "I almost forgot—I have a forum on—what was it—post-prenatal care or something like that over in Llansteffen to get to in just a few." She gave me a sort of unapologetic feline grin, like the cat caught with the goldfish in its mouth. Why she should think I would care, I don't really know. Then, out of habit, perhaps, she embellished for appearance's sake, adding, "Oh, it's appalling what these new young parents don't know. There'll be NHS officials there. A surgeon or two I know." She was losing her concentration and maybe her patience, having some trouble locating an item in her can-do all-purpose mother's and wife's overstuffed handbag. "Like it or not, I'll have to borrow the company car, although I like to champion public transportation. You know—climate change, petrol prices, the cartels, et cetera." In practically the same breath, she added, "And you must make her a little unstable, you know what I mean?" I shook my head politely, neither quite sideways nor straight up and down, and she went on. "Not just lovably scatterbrained or absent-minded. No, I mean disturbed. That's always so interesting in movies and books—insanity, have you seen that new one with what's her name? And if you're truly mad, they forgive you everything, maybe even murder. Make her—I don't know—somewhat duplicitous, a liar, even, but after all, the people around her are even worse, right?" She put on her sunglasses, surprisingly glamorous high-end ones, and wrapped her head again in the Balinese scarf. "Did I tell you I got it right here, in the bazaar at Cardigan? That it's real batik, made in an orphanage? Look at that—the pattern looks like ye olde Y Ddraig Goch, the Welsh dragon, I mean. I had to buy it, even though he said I oughtn't have." She tucked the silky thing coquettishly behind her ears, pleased with herself. "Costs a pretty penny, being correct. Have you seen the price of free-range eggs lately?" In scarf and glasses, I think she wanted to look more like a woman of intrigue; maybe she had been inspired by the author in our midst. After that burst of sun a few minutes ago, it now definitely looked like a regular British rain. I decided then that she really was going on to that forum, after all. She was still readily supplying me with ideas. "Maybe her husband cheated on her. Maybe she's cheating on him and now she's pregnant with the other man's child. That would be brilliant. Sorry—I really needn't tell you how or what to write, now do I?" She laughed and pulled away from me at last. "Oh, just look at the time—ta ta, Mrs. Christie!" And with that brusque London farewell, she was gone. She hadn't gotten my nom de plume quite right, after all this time—it's Christmann, with two "n's," as I'm always telling people.

A week passed before I again saw Mrs. Mukhti—as I was still forced to think of her—and this time it was right outside the wicket gate of my plain stone cottage, a little way up the hill from the sunrise side of the plaza with its dirty dry fountain. "Yoo-hoo!" she called to me from the road. "I thought this must be where you've been stopping—an old milking-barn, I should call it! I know it well. Whenever I go jogging past this place, I go 'moo,' just in case anyone answers."

"Well," I said, glad she wasn't in her jogging kit just now, "I hope I won't be developing a mania for clover. Come inside, please, and have some pekoe. Oh, no, I forgot, you don't drink tea, none of you Brits do anymore, but I have some arabica, as well."

I quickly showed her around the tiny two-room place: its neat furnishings, the up-to-date plumbing, the cable tv I didn't know how to work, the comfortable fold-out sofa, the pantry closet where I had at last found the ideal place to set up my laptop. Best of all, I explained, its porthole looks downhill, toward the back of the plaza—you can see everything. She giggled for some reason at that; I hoped she wasn't thinking of the comic image of my bulk squeezed into that confined space. It occurred to me then that I still didn't know her first name, and she knew only my assumed one, and my bio was partially fabricated, while hers was selectively edited, you might say, and so an intimate indoors type of confabulation might be a bit circumlocutory. But we managed it all right, once I had figured out the Krups machine, and sat like old friends at the bistro table that served the galley's needs. As it turned out, I had some cookies—I mean, biscuits—and even if the landlord might, I didn't mind if she smoked, though I was surprised by that request.

"I have just one a day," she informed me. "When his Holiness isn't looking. Helps me to remember what it was like, when I lived in the alley behind the British Library."

"Is there an alley behind the British Library?" I asked.

She looked at me as if I were a cow, indeed, and said, "I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. Are you getting much done?" She nodded toward the closet door. "Are your clues all in place? Doesn't DNA take all the fun out of everything these days?" She was unwrapping a fresh pack of American Marlboros with a great deal of cellophane fuss and sniffing of the air; obviously, the tobacco ceremony still has as much to do with the sounds and tactility as it does with the actual smoking.

"Well..." I began, not wishing to speak shop especially when no shop-workers were present except myself—although I wouldn't have been surprised to hear next those perennial words, "In case you do find the time, I happen to have a manuscript..."

But she didn't. Instead she lit her cigarette at last with a kitchen match, took a taste, drained her mug, asked for more, and then professed that she had "read your book. Last week. Might as well, I told myself—I bought it new for a whole thirty quid, didn't I?"

I put on my questions-for-the-podium face, prepared to face the inquisition. But she merely said, "It's none of it to be believed, but I suppose those are the conventions."

"I thank you for your honesty," I said, hoping to cut the conversation short.

She exhaled invisible smoke from the cigarette exactly three more times and then crushed it with some brutality into a china saucer that was not there for that purpose. Then she amended herself. "Still and all, it's clever, not bad at all, I turned every page, I did. I shouldn't have absented myself when our group got around to—what is it again, now?—Filed in the Granite Index, of course—they all told me later how they were waiting for a movie, they can just see Daniel Whoever and Kate What's-Her-Name, but of course you'd have to do away with most of the subplot."

To be honest, I didn't actually mind that she'd guessed something far afield of my actual title. Enthusiasts, even those liars among them, are always welcome. "If options were the case," I interjected, "I'd be much richer and we wouldn't be sitting in this low place."

She understood me; I liked that enough about her, and she had a way with her laugh. Nothing could be serious around her, I had found. We were all just characters tired of plots and plotting. For a little while we talked. At some point, I don't know how, I discovered her name to be Penelope, preferring Penny; and she could call me Peg, I said, not the Margaret of my books. This Penelope, suddenly new because she had her own name now, handed me back her mug, which like half the things around the flat (in the whole country, indeed) had a red Welsh dragon on it, and she rose ceremoniously from her chair. In this little room with its low timbers she looked very tall and elegant, but as usual too slim. She had gobbled down more than half my toffee biscuits without my even noticing it.

"Oh, do come to hear my husband this weekend!" she begged me once more. "We need to swell the ranks, we really do. And he's going to speak about the overseas problem."

"Oh, am I the overseas problem?" I asked, not sure if I were being funny or not. She had already closed the bottom half of the Dutch door on me.

"No, of course not, but maybe America is!" Her tinkling voice rang down the stone walls as she paused to amend herself. "It's mainly so you can meet him. So you can see that he's not the way you'd describe him at all. He's isn't half so pasty as the rest of his calling, you know, and he's never worn glasses, and his teeth are as straight as yours."

"In that case..." I said and stopped at the door, aware that I'd already gone too far.

She turned back to me, hanging over the door, nearly ecstatic with pleasure. "Oh, you will, then, Peg? You will, you will? That would mean so much to me, you can't imagine how much. Come just this once and it will pay you back a thousand times, I promise—surely churches crop up in your stories? Feel free to use the entire assembly. You'll have to change the name of this town, though, make it as farfetched as you can, make it as hard to spell as it is to pronounce..."

I stood at the door, eager now to get rid of her, as much as I liked her. I was also a tiny bit tired of all this talk, as if writers were vampires, sucking the life out of everything. Not that that isn't true, but naturally even one in my humble position has to be wary of people who are all too willing to help. I was prepared to say that a little more civilly to Penelope (Penny would have to come later) when I saw she had already bobbed off down the road—skipped, I was tempted to put here, but adult women do not skip, do they?

Unfortunately, the next Sunday I did not get to St. Michael's, after all, due to an untimely sitting of the muse, who had rung me up at an ungodly hour and then stayed on through breakfast and quite a number of pages before I snapped my laptop shut in disgust and noticed the time. That morning I had at last succeeded in setting down more on the page than I took away, and yet I knew it had cost me a burgeoning friendship; I could never face Penelope again after having promised—or seeming to have promised—so much. I would simply have to be more careful when I went for my little jaunts and in particular avoid any areas near the beach, which she and the children often monopolized for hours a day. Ultimately I saw that I would have to change all my plans in regard to this retreat. I would have to go elsewhere, maybe down to a friend's empty farmhouse in Provence, for the rest of my month away. It was a nuisance and a bother, but that afternoon as I walked the winding streets of the little village, all of which seemed to end at this inland seaside, I saw it was a necessity. I couldn't go on sneaking around, peering through hedges and bending low at corners, like one of my bad guys. Besides, I'm too wide to hide behind a lamppost. Better to allow Penelope to think I had been called away on emergency; I had already unknowingly planted a seed when during one of our brief encounters I had mentioned a dying sister in Toronto. Maybe I would write her in care of the vicarage some day soon and apologize precisely as much as one must to someone a little more than an acquaintance and a little less than a real friend.

That Sunday evening I went to my usual watering hole and made my usual small talk with the staff and the regulars. They were familiar with me by now and allowed me my little heterodox quirks. Usually I follow the rules and never bring up politics or pop stars, but this night, with an entire shepherd's pie and a pint or two in me, since this would be the eve of departure, I felt more daring. Talk was of the weather and the end of summer, and someone had mentioned the upcoming Michaelmas Day, on the twenty-ninth, so it seemed apropos. I suppose I was thinking of chrysanthemum-bedecked Harvest Day festivities in oh, I don't know who—Hardy or Lawrence. "Do they have much of a fête at the church?" I asked my nearest bar-mate. He was an elderly gentleman about my age who always smelled strongly of lye soap, as if he were fresh from covering up a hideous act.

"Well, now," he drawled in that way only men of his particular generation and nationality do, "I have ter say I dunno as of ours does much of a do. He and his sister are kinder tight when it comes ta the silly-brations. Last year they cut out the most of t' Yule at S' Mike's, says it eats too much into funds. Why, I remember when S' Mike's would feed a ham dinner ta the whole blessed town..." Forgive me; I don't do dialect so well, and so I'll use him sparingly. Like him as much as I did, the old man did go on, now with an extended excursion into his childhood memories of ones of those twee Welsh Christmases past. I wish there were as efficient a way to silence such people in real life as I will now with a wave of this sentence.

After a few minutes, when I dared, I leaned into him in case I hadn't heard him right, and so he might also hear me the better over the battalion of voices surrounding us. "But his wife must see to it that something's done," I said, or rather, shouted.

The man just took another sip off his pilsner and winked at me. Someone else, a tattooed younger woman to my left of the sort who freely goes behind the bar and back, helped out: "His wife's left him, not that long ago," she said. "And now he's got their brats plus his sister who's unmarried plus all her horrid brats, as well. Oh, but they do fine up there on the hill, I hear, got the van from Fortnum's or Harrod's dropping stuff off all hours. I say someone's dipping into the offertory!" In likewise manner she helped herself to some of the leftover chips from my basket. "Lord," she added, "I miss Reverend Watts. I wish these two'd get back to the city and then we'd all be the happier." She spoke with such vehemence that I was surprised that she added, "Not that I ever believed in any of that crap. Oh, I shouldn't say that, all you Americans are so pious, aren't you?"

Before I had a chance to refute this, a man in front of me turned around: it was the owner of the wine and cheese shop, a man with a cultivated air—if I'm not getting too close to a pun there—and he said, "His sister's a little barmy, if you ask me. Good-looking, but pokes her nose into everyone's affairs."

"His sister?" I broke in.

The woman with—now I saw it, a spiky red dragon emblazoned around the nape of her neck—answered for him. "Maybe half-sister or cousin," she said, pushing the greasy basket away as if to say now we had both had enough. Just as the old man had, she too winked at me, maybe because she was on the chubby side herself. "C Y R M U" read the length of her bare arm, in medieval uncial. "I joined her club just to get a closer look at her a ways back. But she was always harping on us to read something from the Booker list, or one of those classics from the movies, and I just want some light reading after a long day teaching at the grammar, you know?" I was glad she hadn't guessed my profession, although she was my audience.

"Then it must be his wife, or I suppose they'd both be in the group," I said, realizing that this woman, having been a member of the book club, could have recognized me after all from my admittedly idealized photograph; maybe she was privately working on her own little digs at me. She might have seen Penelope and me together and felt she had to undermine whatever it was we had going.

The woman gave me a wary look—the one you give to a dog who you're not sure is rabid or not—and then said, "Sorry for saying so, but forget her! She's not even in the picture any more, is she, Davey? Couldn't take this place and take it straight." It seemed to me at the moment that she was indeed rivalrous—of one woman, or two, I wasn't quite sure at this point. Her laughter—her breath, too—was remarkably unpleasant.

My friend the shopkeeper tried to intercede, probably thinking this rivalry had something somehow to do with me and the woman who had just spoken. Everyone was more than a little tipsy, I suppose. "It's because you never go to church, you old slag," he told the woman with the serpentine tattoo, that red Welsh wurm that sweated when she laughed. (And a grade-school teacher? I thought. Well, them's the times.) "And hell, neither do I, not anymore," he added helpfully. "No thinking person does, the Church of England is bust, it's corrupt as the Catholics, and so no wonder the vicarage resents us, stuck here among us paynim. None of us caring a damn about Save the Children, or whatever that shite is. We don't give a fig what his holiness thinks, and bollocks as well to all these dodgy day-trippers and travel writers and the pageants just for show. Right, that vicar's nothing but a toff, and I only use that word because our guest won't understand it." I remembered then how I had always come across him in his shop: reading the arts section of The Guardian, laboring over a cheese imported from a distant duchy of France, listening to BBC 2. In that other life, he didn't want to be taken as a hick from the sticks, either.

I took the basket back and bit off another chip gone cold. "I've only spoken to his wife—or recent ex-wife, or sister, or half-sister, or third cousin, whatever the case may be, and never really discussed doctrine. Myself, I'm an unbeliever, or maybe my fault is I believe too much. Thank you anyway for the information; I should have listened better to any hints she might have dropped. Not to excuse her, but maybe it's just the cultural difference," I said, suddenly feeling defensive of whatever woman we might be talking about. "You know," I added, hoping they would blame it on the frankness warranted me by the empty pint next to my basket of chips, "the Pakistani side of the family—you've got to admit you Brits have had a bit of a complicated past with them."

The wine-and-cheese shopkeeper rose to his full height of about five-five in front of me. "No one's talking about the English here," he growled. "It's her I'm talking about, she's a Welshie like us—the one with all them hair and freckles. Sam and Di know what I'm talking about, right? She's all the lardy-dar, I tell you, with her doctoral degree, she says, and her high-flown ideas about what the church ought to be or not be like these days. Nonalcoholic and vegan and bleeding gluten-free. As if you could ever agree with or even trust that stuck-up bitch."

I suddenly had an insight—probably just a novelist's wicked flight of fancy—that the vicar's wife had spurned the shopkeeper's advances and probably proven to be far too much for Llywrff in general to take, with her books and her charities and those very same earnest social programs she had pretended to disdain. "I'm afraid I think Mrs. Mukhti is a very nice person," I managed to say after a moment's mental disarray. "We've had some lovely long heart-to-hearts, so I simply won't hear of anything bad you may have to say about her." Being called upon to be honorable can be on the bracing or at least sobering side; without realizing it, I, too, had risen quaking from my seat and was looking eye-to-eye at this man for whom I had only had the pleasantest regards previously, whose tastes in dairy products I admired, and I was ready to pummel him hard with the walking staff I'd left against my stool.

He burst out laughing, as so many men are apt to do when confronted with their own sort of pigheaded truculence. "Who said anything about this Mrs. Mukhti, Mrs. Christmann?" he asked, slapping me on the back as if I were an old war comrade. I noticed that the other two members of our little discussion were looking on me with the same sort of bemused derision. "Oh, I think his sister's been up to her old tricks with you! They'll be sending her off to the loony bin again next—not that I would know anything at all about her past. Or that this lot isn't just as crazy!" And then there was general jollity around our section of the pub, with new rounds ordered and much generosity given to me, the foreigner and the dimwit. But in such a small community, who could not know the vicar's wife, when she'd been here three years? Were out-of-towners all the same to them? I was going to get no answer; the conversation veered as quickly into the current football season as it had earlier from the health of the queen to the storms down the coast. The tattooed schoolteacher sat down next to me and began to relate to me her ideas for a YA. I left soon, however, lest I say something else equally ignorant and become even more of an object of fun, and made it back to my cottage before I wouldn't be able to walk, even with an assist. Who knew, I pondered turning on all the lights, as if I had expected the room to be as ransacked as my mind felt, who knew what those people intended to convey to me, or where the truth lay—it's the usual thing, people playing, consciously or unconsciously, with visitors and other people they won't have to face again that way. Sometimes it is malicious, most often not. I have frequently been led in four different directions after asking the way to a popular tourists' restaurant. Each of us has a desire to create; every white lie is in its own way a little work of art.

The next morning I was to return my keys to the estate agent before taking the noon bus to Carmarthen and then the train to Swansea. I travel lightly as that fellow on PBS, with only two bags, and so packing didn't take long; with so much time to spare I decided to take one last look around Llyrwff. I walked toward the almost perpendicular path where I had met Mrs. Mukhti, Penelope—whoever she was—the second time, but then thought better of it and kept to the broader side of the beach, where I wouldn't be surprised on a constrictive footing and could see anyone else coming or going from a long way off. It was a dismal day; the sands no longer looked strewn with diamonds; there was that thick fishy odor in the air I thought I had gotten used to. I did not want to have to say goodbye to the village or the woman; I suppose a part of me felt angry for being tricked, but another part of me insisted I should be feeling just as sorry for her. It seemed neither of us had been entirely truthful to the other—in fact, she thought of me as only that person on a book-jacket cover, someone without even the same last name as my real one. Who was Margaret Christmann, after all? She exposed herself to no one, she deceived everyone—even well-intentioned readers' clubs. So, all things being equal, we had done nothing but try to outfox one other, Penelope and I. At least that was the way I thought of it then, my feet sucking into the muddy edge of the beach for the last time, still feeling that hangover of remorse no amount of coffee can cure, still a bit stung by the mockery of the pub.

As befitted my experiences in the village, there was a valedictory moment, almost an epilogue, if a very small one. The local to Carmarthen was idling at the stop, a good ten minutes late to get going, by my watch, with no apparent reason for its delay, as is the usual case. As we waited, the bus began to fill with tardy passengers; I suppose this was a game of "last is first" that the Welsh, I had been told, always play. Making a great show of it, I resettled my bags upon my seats once again, hoping I wouldn't have to share the space, or at least not with some bothersome old grannie like myself. I was about to raise my objections to the driver, who just sat there reading Page Three, when I saw through the penknife-scrawled etchings of the window the gang of them marching in a line down the pavement. Those matching pullovers, the duck-yellow wellies on the youngest, their mother's bright pink plastic clogs. It was raining, in my mind if not yet in actuality; at any rate, they all looked rather sodden and bedraggled to my eye, as if they'd just been swimming in the cold sea—and for all I knew, they had. There should have been brollies and macs, but there were none. Unable to restrain myself, I pounded on the window to get their attention and managed to get my head partway out. "Lovely day," I said, suddenly struck stupid.

Penelope put out her hand like a police officer and the children all halted. "Yes, perfect!" she shouted up to me from the sidewalk.

"Been to the beach?" I roared above the diesel engine. People boarding the bus were looking at me now, I was certain.

"Yes, indeed!" she shouted back. "Are you leaving us, then?"

My neck began to ache, twisted like that. "Oh, no, oh, no," I said through the window. "You'll be seeing me soon."

The children were now growing impatient, milling around their mother and trying not to inhale fumes. But Penelope acted like we had all the time in the world; in fact, she paused to do up one child's buttons and undo another's. "We're going back home to bake some cakes for the fundraiser," she said between spurts of evil black diesel smoke. "Won't you come to service tomorrow morning? Afterwards there'll be quite a little do in the vestry. Mr. Wells is going to sing, he's been on Sky TV, and he has the handsomest tenor. We're going to discuss GMOs in our milk supply. Won't our farmers be pleased!" The bus made a false start, jerked forward seven or eight feet, and then stopped again, still vibrating all over. "Oh, do come, Peg," she pleaded, keeping pace below my window, unfurling her scarf to do up her hair. "Do, do, do, you'll have the best time ever, you really will." The bus seemed to die all of a sudden, letting the air out of its brakes, and with that she resumed a more leisurely air, as if we were back at my bistro table. "You know, I've promised my husband so many times. You'd meet his sisters from London, too."

"Mummy!" one of the little children cried—or maybe it was "Auntie!" I couldn't hear or see very well. Now it was raining, violent drops on my bare head, and a wind had come up. The noise of rain on the tin-can roof and the sputtering engine and the bronchial gasps of the brakes were overtaking all possibilities for conversation. And yet I heard Penelope telling them all to shush and to get out of the way of the big bus.

At last the vehicle started to pull away from the curb. "Don't worry! I'm not expecting you to make any promises you can't keep," I think she said, not very loudly, it seemed a little petulantly—or maybe she said, "I expect you always make promises you can't keep." I saw the bespectacled driver watching me in his big rear-view window; he would be glad to be rid of this noisy "American," the likes of which he'd seen before. I needed to say something quickly, anything. "Oh, I'll be there, I'll absolutely be there this time!" I nearly screamed. At this point I wasn't sure if she could hear anything, so I could say anything. "Come by my place, later, with the troops. Bring your husband. Bring one of your cakes. Oh, Penny, let's throw a children's party with crackers and balloons and make a regular racket!" I watched her as we pulled away; we were all sopping wet and deaf, but she had that serenely indifferent smile on her face, her scarf was coming loose, the children had grouped themselves as if for a family portrait. And then there was another cold gust through my window. The last I saw they were all chasing the fluttering scarf down the walk, and they all were laughing. It was like a bird that had escaped its cage at last.

In the months to come, I thought of that young woman often, but usually liked to stop short of trying to parse my version of the truth, which isn't the same as that kind of cold unvarnished truth people are fond of spouting in pubs. I am not at all like my bulldog detectives, who beleaguer people until they bleed. There is more nuance in real life. The benefit of a doubt, they call it. Most of all, I am just a sloppy sentimentalist; I only wanted to remember Penelope's laughter, and how she had always seemed so frank and forthright with me—as much as I like the British people and the United Kingdom in general, it is not often, I've found, that you'll come across that kind of almost hostile honesty there. Innkeepers will pretend they'd do this only for you; shop-girls will say that your taste in blouses is brilliant. But it was more than that—I thought I saw in Penelope a rare talent in any society: her ability to expose our separate but equal absurdities, even at the expense of endangering our public selves. Or my chosen profession. I can only hope that our perception of each other was mutual, or indeed that she saw me more clearly and under a higher wattage than I can see her, even given the benefit of hindsight. Probably I gave her more credit than she was due, as I do all my discoveries, in this case skirting the borders of what is fashionably called a borderline personality. Even so, at the risk of repeating myself, I can attest that there was much in her type of spirit I can see to admire and even envy.

Also, it's not often I'm around younger people like that; it's nice to remember they can be just as sarcastic about life as those of us of a more advanced age. Which is all somewhat ridiculous, much of that preceding paragraph is, because she had to have been at least forty, and I hardly really knew her. Nevertheless, whenever I told people stories of my recent sojourn in Wales, I always made sure to mention the long scenic stretches of beach and the vicar's wife. Immediately my listeners recognized exactly what I was getting on to. How very sad and British and repressed, some said. You'll have to write about her! two or three others insisted. She sounds interesting. Would this-or-that actress be too old or too plain? True, if I had written a book about her, it might have been good, but only a certain sort of good. And, as my late husband constantly reminded me, I have my limitations. But I could be easily seduced. For a time it did indeed seem as if rectors and sextons and prelates and what-have-yous were creeping into every other paragraph I wrote. Their wives, too, of course. Nevertheless, once my next book is published, you will see that I have deleted every reference to her or anything else to do with vicars and the Anglican Church. In a way I suppose I have killed her.
Lilac and Kerosene

I see you; I can see you as you were then, at fifteen or so: a thin, pretty girl—not quite beautiful, but pretty enough, even if you didn't admit that or see it yourself, then. We are all at least a little fresh and pretty at that age, aren't we? Even the girls who are picked on or neglected—even they might have lovely glowing skin or sylphlike hair or enchanting eyes. You had all three, and more. One might also have noted your excellent posture, your preternatural grace, like that of those rich girls glimpsed through the broad windows of the dance academy downtown (though you, you never danced); or your long, slender limbs that betrayed no adolescent awkwardness, no foolish movements, no flashy mannerisms. You were prematurely elegant. What is strange is that when people looked for more than a moment at you, it was as if they were doctors studying an x-ray: What fine strong long limbs you have, a kind relative might say, or such cheekbones! See how delicate her ankles and wrists are, like a baby doll's. (Behind your back you imagine they said, What a pasty, bony girl!) Under the eyes of others pretending to flatter you, it was like being more than naked, just a skeleton, admired for something invisible and unknowable to yourself.

It is true; your hands were remarkable, too, at that time in your life—like acrobatic spiders racing up and down the sleek neck of your guitar, fingers spread wide and hopping over the frets, pinkened tips under pearly nails you cut to the quick on one hand and let grow longer on the other, as serious guitarists will. You played well, for someone so young and—dare we say—for a girl? Because that is what the boys would say, back then, knowing nothing of Dutch domestic traditions and caring little for the likes of tenderhearted female folksingers. In your room, your little novitiate's room under the eaves, like most other girls you listened to the music that jangled and thudded and throbbed with electricity, in 1965, but unlike most girls of your age and time, those were transcriptions from various generations of Bachs and Scarlattis that you played on your Montgomery Ward acoustic twelve-string. Yes, you were more than competent. Even so, music never truly moved you; it was just a hobby—every healthy teenager must have a hobby—no more emotionally involving than the cross-stitching your older sister Francine won Future Homemakers of America plaques for at the county fair.

Francie had done the worst thing, but at least you had her room now, just big enough for bed and dresser and guitar case. You were freed at last from sharing a room with the twins, Mindy and Marcy, and you could cut out magazine photographs and tack them up all over the walls if you wanted to, the way your sisters did, but you didn't. Not for you the likes of adolescent idols or ingénues; you hung your carefully selected collection on one wall faced with corkboard: colorful and exotic strands of satin or moleskin or suede or wool or rayon that were like pennants, like awards for having such remarkably thick and shiny hair. Admit it, you were vain only about your hair, though you almost never let it flow loose over your shoulders, instead kept it cinched back in one simple braid like the glossy tail of a coal-black mare, and usually swept your bothersome bangs up under a headband or scarf. Danny Armstrong, who lately thought he was your boyfriend, who thought you were going steady merely because you allowed him to hold your hand when you walked home from school, longed to untie that pretty bow or knot of silken ribbon, but that would never be allowed. After what Francie had done, you had sworn off boys, would wait for real men to come along—some day, some day, but not too soon.

In that freshman year, you were part of a small but sartorially influential set of girls. The watchword was "tasteful." Heavens no, not the cheap flashy styles some females flaunted, that worried pastors and teachers so (at school, girls were made to go on their knees before the vice-principal to prove their skirts reached to the floor, and hoop earrings were outlawed). Makeup too was shunned, except for a little Coty blemish-concealer when necessary. Even when slumming, you rarely wore raggedy cut-offs and sweatshirts like other girls. Stacy, Wendy, sometimes Jill, and you pored over newspaper fashion supplements, magazine ads, the blouse-and-skirt combinations of the Patty Duke twins, the swimming apparel Gidget proselytized, the accessories Tuesday Weld or Miss Teenage USA displayed during television interviews. None of you were wealthy, but that was not quite so important or damning at that particular time, in that place. Simplicity patterns and Junior Singer sewing machines got you girls through, as well as hand-me-downs and careful shopping during the January sales. Church-going hats from doting aunts, Christmas cardigans, birthday blouses, and shoes meant for growing into would supplement the growing trousseau someday to be kept in the cherry-wood "hope chest" now on layaway at Leopold's Furniture and Appliance. You were of course known for your various hair accouterments, Stacy for her immaculate knee-socks, Wendy for anything tartan. All of you adored capris, culottes, sweater sets, and Italian-inspired flats. All of you traded Seventeen, Junior Miss, and McCall's. Vogue was too expensive and tended to make you all a little too excitable. The odd thing was that you saw little of each other outside of school, seldom went to dances or the Teen Center to show off your more creative ensembles, seldom talked on the phone or met for cottage-cheese salads at the diner—except now and then on weekends. Part of the reason was that you were all serious about your studies and especially music, spent a lot of time practicing: in marching band, in all-school orchestra, in Glee Club, in Swing Choir, or alone, like yourself, on guitar, piano, or flute. Boys only occasionally got in the way.

You are wondering how I know so much, every single detail—but you should know I was there, too, I saw it all. I would never and could never forget a thing. What happened happened because you were just that sort of girl—solitary, snobbish, very afraid. No one, not even your mother, really understood you—but I did. See, you can keep no secrets from me. I can tell the story, but only now.

So, boys. That is, men. In a mostly female household they seldom counted for much. Father was a figment of your mother's imagination, and the old photographs proved nothing. He had never existed. How could one forget someone who had never existed? The family's scattered relatives maintained silence about him in your presence. Francie only recalled the dolls and candy he used to send her from cities with strange names; the dolls would be cheap imitations of the ones she wanted and the candy stale or something only Mexicans would eat. Nobody had ever really known your father, not even your mother. The twins certainly knew nothing. The baby, Billy, might be almost ten now and a proud Webelo, granted a bed in the semi-finished basement, but he had been born too late, just at the end of the things—and hardly counted, either. All those girls and their mother, who worked in the ladies' shoe store at the new shopping plaza, filled the small bungalow and kept it overflowing with womanly possessions, often neglecting to wash dishes or vacuum floors or tuck away stockings. Friends and neighbors were kept from the door with the constant excuse that the place was in the midst of "spring cleaning," no matter what time of year. The house was only a rental, anyway; you all had lived there for a dozen or so years, on the dicier side of town, always talking about that day the family could afford to move. It seemed to you that Jesus might return before that would happen. Like most girls your age you sometimes felt like a changeling in that terrible household, though unlike most girls your age you felt more like the gypsy child left behind than the stolen princess. Maybe it was because you had come to that stage when your mother was afraid to love you as she had when you were a child and you were afraid of her love even more.

Rusty Burton was your guitar-teacher—you remember him very well indeed, for he was your first true crush. There were many reasons why he did not reciprocate your unvoiced feelings, not the least of which was that he was devoted solely to Segovia and de Falla. Though he caressed and cherished the feminine form of the Gibson he'd bought on installment, he was chaste as a choirboy and as innocent. When his hands alighted upon your own, shaping a chord for you, or when his fingertips shyly held your slim wrist closer to the neck, there was no more passion in his touch than that of a moth that has rested for a moment on a nervous leaf. Not that you recognized then his thoroughly professional disinterest. You earned your money working the concession stand (Lemonheads, Red Hots, Good & Plenty) at the Afton Theater down the hill, seventy-five cents an hour and all the sweet buttered popcorn you could eat, and you paid your two or three bills to Rusty, the gallant young man working his way through music school, with some of that guilt you would later read of in French novels, where the unrepentant woman must buy her love. Rusty was especially shy around female students, seldom dared to breathe near them except to explain a notation, and had longer sideburns and a shaggier pudding-bowl fringe, tamed by neither tonic nor cream, than most Midwestern boys of that time had yet dared to grow. Perhaps it was only his yellow-gold hair—the color of October, the color of sadness—that you were truly in love with. "Cindy's Beatle," your mother chided, gently, glad you were truly interested at last in someone.

Your mother! Hard to imagine that, despite the gray which resisted the dye and despite the thick lenses, she was barely forty then. But forty was so much older then, and hard work had already bent her frame and weakened her spirit. She had been a child of the Depression and was used to having no money and making or taking every possible economy, but no one had ever told her what it would be like without a husband but with five children to feed. Well, four now that Francie had married the Dutton boy and moved out to Madison. You were nearly oblivious of her troubles in those days, however; you had pocket change and nice enough clothes and the right number of friends, and you could be incredibly cruel even for a teenage girl. You demanded that your mother drive you here or there at any hour when you didn't feel like walking or biking, you took Danny Armstrong's admiration for granted, you knew how to bat your eyes at just the sort of teachers who would act on such things, you got good grades. You told such pretty little white lies it was the truth that felt like a dirty, unspeakable thing.

Remember, you had lied when your mother first asked you to take the rent money to the Fleming house that second week of April. You told her you had "the cramps," which was a code in the household, and meant that it would be impossible to ride your Schwinn that far to deliver the cash money. But when she saw you riding your bike home from working the matinée the following day, a Saturday, there was nothing convincing you could say to excuse yourself. Of course the twins were at a Campfire Girls meeting and far too young, besides, so the task devolved upon you. Your mother was adamant when you met her at the door. Well, Miss Cynthia Nealy, she said looking at you, through you with her bifocals, for she knew very well that your lessons never came on a weekend afternoon, and you knew that she had to get back to work as soon as she had eaten her late lunch. The Fleming house was nearly four miles away, at the woodsy edge of town, past where lay the quarries that are now all fenced off and abandoned. Even then there was something dubious and mildly dangerous about that area, where the dirt roads were not maintained and families lived under the pines in house trailers and what some people called shacks. You argued that she should have driven there earlier, though you knew she barely ever made it to work on time and the money was already over a week overdue. She reminded you that the rent had to be paid in person as usual or else Gunther would get things mixed up. As addlepated as he was, he never erred on his tenants' side. You lied again about your "time of the month," but ineptly, for you knew she had just cashed her Friday check and had lent you a whole three dollars that morning and would simply not answer back, while you sat there at the dining table, glowering and twisting your braid. A minute more, and she was gone.

It wasn't that you were not up to the bike-ride or that you were afraid of Gunther Fleming; he was that "gentle giant" (your mother's trite expression) who had been around since she had moved out of your grandparents' house, when you were a toddler. Listen, missy (as your mother was wont to say), Gunther is assuredly the entire reason for this story. Don't pretend otherwise. You once knew him well enough. The whole town knew him, though he was infrequently seen. His family had once been important here; his father had been an early union lawyer and a leading local member of the Industrial Workers of the World. (You can still see his impressive grave-marker in the town cemetery, honey-colored sandstone carved into the shape of an ivy-draped tree stump, engraved with three stars and a phrase auf Deutsch attributed to J. W. v. Goethe.) The legend went that Gunther had fallen over a gravel quarrying ledge when he was eight years old, hit his head on a rock and almost drowned. He wasn't entirely stupid or retarded, but he was slow and mentally erratic and had trouble finding words—what used to be called, with almost no malice, a "simpleton." Once in a while your mother took you or your siblings along to pay the rent while running other errands, and once in a great while, whenever it was too cold to sit impatiently in the car, you went in to "visit," which meant that your mother, who was easy with people, who could if necessary carry on a prolonged conversation with anyone no matter how inarticulate, would be found reminiscing with Gunther about the handsome younger brother she remembered (lost in the Pacific war) and the parents she had never met but who your lately deceased grandparents had once known and admired. Property disputes and broken marriages and problem children and other sorts of small-town gossip, too, while you sat there, sweating in the heat of that kitchen and taking in the smell.

The smell was not one you got used to and then forgot, like fresh paint or hot tar; it was skunkish or catlike, though you never saw a single cat. (For there must be many cats, every farm or country house had them to kill vermin, of course.) Gunther stank the same as this house full of cats you didn't see, but he was nice to you and called you not plain Cindy but Cinderella, as in the fairy tale—as if he were the kindly ogre who really hated to take that money every month from your mother. It hadn't been his arrangement, after all; he had merely inherited your own house and the small apartment building downtown from his parents, who had died during the First World War, not long after the German language had been banned by the town council and the German newspaper shut down. His parents had come straight from Westphalia to the wilds of Wisconsin and made their fortune, such as it was, through their legal expertise and fortuitous business deals. His mother had been known for her tyrannical housekeeping and shrewd bookkeeping. Though Gunther had been born here, it had been in the last century, and there was still much of the "Kraut" about him, though it might be hard to say exactly what. Big and broad and bald, he could neither read nor write, he drooled like a hound whenever he got the least bit stirred up, and he was clumsy with both carpentry tools and household conveniences. Whatever siblings besides his younger brother he might have once had were either long dead or missing. Gunther had lived alone and off his meager rentals for decades, and no one really knew how he did it or what he did with that small a legacy, with taxes to pay and basic upkeep. (His properties were notoriously below code and the cheapest in the county.) A boy from the IGA delivered groceries a couple times a month and a man delivered coal, that much was known—and also that he threw his trash in a creek bed and had not paid an electricity or telephone bill since 1949, so that you had to see him in person if you had any troubles with your rental unit, and if it was after dark, your negotiations would have to be enacted within the circle of light cast by an oil lamp.

The only room you would ever see of his house was the "summer" kitchen, an afterthought amidst the additions to that big old lopsided edifice, attached to the back, facing the disintegrating carriage house and stables, entered through a torn screen-door in summer and a heavy glass-fronted door in winter, and dark as an attic even at noon. When your eyes quit blinking and watering from the stench, you took in the stacks and stacks of egg cartons and waxed produce boxes, the crates of empty juice bottles, the machine parts, the towers of Mason jars, the fractured pottery, the heaps of soiled laundry, the rusted utensils, the old zinc sink piled with grimy dishes, the outdated calendar, the flies, the filth. Perhaps most repulsively you glimpsed the cot with its unspeakable bedclothes half-hidden behind a barricade of old law books and random planks of lumber. There was much more to stumble around, too, but above all there brooded the antique fire-breathing stove, cast-iron and ornate, like a beached steam-ship that spit sparks and belched diabolic smoke at times and was always extremely hot, it seemed, even in July; with jewel-blue geysers that leapt up at your approach, with a sooty surface coated with decades of hairy dust and bacon fat, with fitful clankings and moanings resounding throughout its iron innards. Was it coal-powered, wood-burning, gas-fitted, or all three? Gunther would sit sweating and stinking near the stove even on the hottest days, among his mountains of reeking rubbish like the guardian spirit or insane oracle of a temple hearth, and laugh like one of those demented clowns from a shabby traveling circus. But he was nice to children; he was childlike himself, he made silly faces, and he was too old to be or do any real harm.

Last time, two months ago, you had grown tired of waiting in the cold car listening to stupid Billy in the backseat gurgling and chuckling under his breath as he read aloud one of his usual comic books (hydrocephalic children and talking animals making uncannily witty or idiotic comments one after the other), so you had gone out into the snow and past the shivering lilac bushes and frozen cabbage patch and pumping shed and into that hot and horrible kitchen, where you found them sharing a pot of black coffee. Your mother didn't even look up from her mug (probably unwashed—disgusting!) when you slammed the heavy lead-paned door behind you, but Gunther rose like a true gentleman, babbling something you couldn't understand. His tongue always seemed to be caught in the back of his throat when he spoke, and what words you did manage to catch were heavily flavored, you surmised, by the language and accent of his parents. Listening to him was like having to endure a foreigner's painful attempts to explain something arcane, and this time you could tell he was making further allusions to pretty princesses from the Brothers Grimm, tales he had probably heard in the original. Besides, it was embarrassing, now that you were nearly grown, all this princess talk, a creepy old weirdo paying you that kind of attention; you wished your mother would stop encouraging it.

How can you stand this odor (the polite word)? you meant to convey to your mother with a quick frown, wondering if this was just a strength women who have reared five children acquire. And how is it that you, Mother, can always answer and interpret him as expertly as you can find the vaguest and most exasperating customer just the right shoe?

Your mother shot you a glance from under sharply penciled brows that meant several things: that she was not going to put up with any interruptions, missy, that she was tired and wanted to get going as much as you did, that Gunther should not be poked fun at in his presence, and that one could learn something, for this is how women must behave when the rent is fifteen dollars short. You stamped your heel just once and huffed enough to blow a stray strand of hair from your eyes, but took a seat as far as you could away from Gunther, as far as was possible among all that old trash. Going to the thrift store over in Hillsboro (where you were less likely to run into friends) would have to wait. Meanwhile, the stove was against your back and it felt hotter than ever. Girls your age specialize in the surly pout, don't they?

Gunther did not seem in the least offended by your off-putting behavior. Instead he was waving his huge soot-stained and callused hands about and making gestures that you eventually realized were a mime of someone playing a stringed instrument. So your mother had been talking you up again. "Music, you wait!" he shouted (though he pronounced it "moo-zeek") and suddenly turned and dipped around the heavy drapery that separated the heat trapped in this room from the rest of the house, a cretonne barrier you realized at that very moment was almost exactly like the one at the Afton movie theater, separating the real world from the imagined—in this case the known kitchen and the vast unknown, unexplored house. You would have eagerly followed Gunther or anyone else, for that matter, just to glimpse some of the mysterious chambers and corridors this huge house must contain (you were not immune to the charms of orphaned heroines and their adventures in books). This house, which loomed large upon the hill above the rock quarries and this whole side of town, must have been one of the largest ones in the area when it was built, and since the end of the second great war, it probably had only seemed to grow larger in the eyes of those looking up from the ticky-tacky cottages that had sprouted in the subdivided fields below. It was mostly brick, with wrought-iron trim, constructed in the days when Queen Victoria's health was failing, and it towered three whole stories in the air among the red and white pines—your dead grandmother, your father's mother, had told stories of secretly dancing in the ballroom at the top when she was a young serving-girl living under the gables. So your mother said. Now the bird inside the pinecone-embellished clock on the wall was demanding an exit and your mother was calmly agitating her coffee, carrying on that conversation she was undergoing with you with just her eyes. She drank too much coffee even then, was always stirring or tapping or fretting her spoon enough to drive you crazy...

It had seemed an hour but couldn't have been five minutes before Gunther returned, panting heavily and carrying a small stack of ten-inch records in his arms. "Für Sie!" he rasped in his gargling way, and thrust the grimy stack at you. You reluctantly took them (they were much heavier than they looked), minding that their dirt didn't come off on your new Loden coat or very smart second-hand cashmere sweater (the one that matched your so very "darling" blue barrettes), and after another look from your mother thanked the old man as profusely as you knew how—which wasn't much. "I was telling Gunnie again about your music," your mother said, getting up at last. "He's from a very musical family himself." And then she did the unthinkable—gave Gunther a quick squeeze before you both passed out of the door back into the world. In your eyes, that half-hug might have been a sustained kiss on his blubbery lips.

Back in the car, pulling out of the rutted drive, you said as stern as a nun to your mother, "He should be in a home or something." You had set the records at your feet without much care. Billy behind you was oblivious, chewing on the candy necklace around his neck, lost now in a private dialogue with Little Lulu.

Your mother gave you a glance out of the corners of her eyes that was as good as a small electric shock. "He's a sad man, Cindy," was all she said to the right side-view mirror, a whole saga of decline and failure in her sentence, and, never wanting an argument, she turned on the radio in the big dented-out station wagon to just the sort of easy listening you detested. The three of you had then driven on through the sodden black fields and barren hills of March, the car's weakling of a heater doing nothing to warm your feet or hands, the Hundred and One Strings swirling around you.

Eventually you took out the neatly ironed linen napkin you always carried, spread it across your knees (not covered in the warm cotton-blend tights your mother had suggested, but fashionably sheer white hose), and lay the stack of dirty records on top. They were in torn and tattered paper sleeves, some of them with antique silhouettes and sinuous designs on them, ten or twelve in all, 78s like you remembered from your earliest days; with a flip of the needle they would play on the record player Francie had left behind. But the shellac you held was heavier and thicker than the newer vinyl discs, and some were reddish or even see-through scarlet in color. You recognized the astute dog with its well-trained ear, but not the labels of the others: Regal Zonophone, Vocalion, Electrola, Berliner, and other logos and titles, some in that black-letter German you recognized from scores you'd glimpsed in Rusty's studio apartment; you had grandparents of "Hunnish" extraction yourself but knew nothing much beyond "nein" and "ja." (They only offered French and Spanish at school in this town named Bremen.) Handling the records by their edges, half repelled by their fusty fragrance and half curious, you tried to decipher a few of their titles: "Elsas Traum," "Dich Teure Halle," "Whispering," "Deep Night," "Der Lindenbaum." Nothing you had ever heard, though the names "Richard Wagner" and "Franz Schubert" were of course familiar even to a beginning musician. The sleeves proclaimed, "Vitasound!" "Our Finest Race Music!" "Qualität aus München!" Thinking again of Gunther's grinning, drooling smile, you thrust them beneath the seat and resolved never to listen to the ugly old things. How could he think you would ever want to, you thought, huffing the bangs out of your eyes, when there were The Byrds and Donovan?

And yet ... a week or two later, during a persistent rainstorm on an interminable Sunday afternoon, you found you could concentrate on neither the J. S. Bach partita nor the Dowland galliard you were trying to get down well enough to impress Rusty. Your fingers couldn't pluck the arpeggios and you couldn't get used to the capo Rusty had lent you. So you laid the uncooperative twelve-string to rest like a dead thing in its velvet-lined casket and found yourself staring at those old records you had almost forgotten, shoved in a pile under the dresser. Rather than calling any of your friends up to see what they would be wearing the next day, here was a project to occupy the long gray hours: you took the 78s, wiped their sleeves with a dust-cloth, washed the thick platters with a sponge and a little soap in the bathroom across the hall, dried them with a hand-towel, and arranged them across the top of your dresser. Maybe they were valuable; the ones that bore dates ranged from 1903 to 1925—from the heyday of the immigrant Fleming family, you guessed. Old Mutter and Vater Fleming must have been light classical music-lovers, the way so many semi-cultured European immigrants were. (There were still quite a few left around town, ancient people who never missed a school recital or community choir.) Displayed together, the discs were like those rows of commemorative plates you'd seen in friends' houses, and a few of the pictorial labels were evocative of a dim romantic past, your grandparents', that you wished you could reach out and touch just as easily. Maybe you could hang the records on the wall, between your garlands and sashes, but then again you knew you wanted to give them back, to rid yourself of their indefinable burden; after all, your mother had told Gunther to consider them a loan, not a gift.

Somewhat suspiciously, you placed a record with an enticing silver-foil label on the turntable: "Der Leiermann," performed by someone named Gerhardt Bierbaum. A piano, its repeated then transfigured measures played as softly as fingers striking lightly upon a harp, could barely be heard above the surface noise, seeming to shimmer in an aural mist, and then an eerie baritone voice rose like a ghost or an echo of the distant past, singing incomprehensible words in what was almost an incantation or lament, a kind of singing you had rarely, perhaps never, heard. You had no idea what the song meant—one heard a faraway carillon, one felt sorrow, then defiance ending with resignation, like a vampire reluctantly returning to its grave—again, you had no idea what it all meant, though something in the song chilled and intrigued you, something you hadn't yet heard in that logical though mathematically fantastical world of the high baroque. It wasn't something you could likely replicate on a cheap guitar. Later, when you took it to Rusty, he explained that it was from Schubert's Winter Journey, or Winterreise, something he had once heard in a concert given by a well-known Liedersinger at the state university. He didn't really like it that much—to his ears, it was overly "Teutonic" (he usually preferred the French, Spanish, and Italians), mystifyingly grim and disconcertingly personal. The sound of slow suicide. Saying all that to you, he looked a little embarrassed and blushed in that unpredictable way redheads have. Maybe, he added, it meant more if you could speak good German. Still later he let you know that the words of the song were about a man who plays on a barrel-organ or hurdy-gurdy, this droning folk instrument, and sings about the end of his life or the world, anyway, something like that. Franz Schubert had died maybe heartbroken when he was still a young man, not too long after writing those songs with a poet named Müller, Rusty told you. But by then you didn't care, you no longer loved Rusty or anyone else, and you had suffered enough because of Schubert. We'll get to that.

But that first afternoon when you had heard it through once, you played it three more times in rapid succession, trying in vain to analyze and undo its strange power, but it was too late: the notes had already merged with the rain and the thunderclaps and you knew this was an afternoon you would long remember—why, you could not have said just then. Stop! you told the corpse that seemed to live within you and feed on yourself then, so you raised the tone-arm to put "Seven or Eleven," backed with "Whispering," on the player: likely as not, this would be a jaunty jazz-age number—and it was, and it filled the room, something you could imagine your grandmother might have heard in her head as she twirled about in the middle of the night across that candlelit, empty ballroom. The kind of music one heard in monochromatic cartoons on after-school tv, the sound of a windup Dixieland combo, its mechanical syncopation enough to make you want to open the window and poke your head out into the rain, shouting the stop-and-go chorus. Soon enough the twins, who had lately been waging a silent war with you, would pound on the thin wall that separated your rooms to make you turn it down. Over the next few hours and days you listened to all the other songs and distillations from famous operas (as you would later learn they were), and though you were amused by the foxtrots and waltzes, the Wagner piano-and-violin duets were harder to appreciate, partly since they had been recorded so long ago and by such primitive means it sounded like music coming from a long way down a very deep cistern. Something like the haunted music you might hear in a dream, but not one you would wish to wake up from, still frightened. In fact, you didn't always like thinking about the long-lost past you encountered in this music. Sometimes it disturbed you, thinking about all those dead souls gathered to create this music, and it felt like returning to sunlight to go back to your own folk-rock lp's and ep's. No, you wouldn't keep these silly records no matter how much you enjoyed them, not even "Der Leiermann," but would free yourself of them as soon as possible.

Remember now, we were following you on that spring afternoon, the next month, shiftless and unreliable April, after you had argued with your mother, when you had just set off on your bulky old three-speed Schwinn for the Fleming house, those arduous three-and-then-some miles away. The day was clear, one of the first truly warm ones of the year, and there were hills to climb and your mother to curse as you climbed them—but you hadn't forgotten the records, for they gave you a better reason to run this errand; they were in the wire basket in front of you, beneath the big rocket-shaped headlamp. (But you kept back the Schubert, slipped it among last year's 45s, didn't you?) That clumsy, unfashionable five-speed, with its seat like a horse-saddle and spring-held book holder and quaking mudguards and balloon tires—you could never forget how lead-bottomed it was, heavy as a tank, how it rattled and how it jarred you, wiggling and woggling across every pothole and sewer-grate and around every turn. If it weren't for your mother, you could have been home, practicing on the porch, or walking in the town arboretum with Danny, but here you were, sweating and angry and thoroughly compromised. Yet—you had a secret agenda; in giving back the records you hoped to gain access to the secrets of that formerly grand mansion ("mansion" sounded much more alluring than "house"). You wanted to do this for yourself, not to brag about to your family or girlfriends, but to hold your discoveries inside you as within an armory or treasury, a secret defense and a prize, knowing you knew something probably no one else alive could know, except old Gunther, of course. Some day, when it was needed, you might be able to use this knowledge.

It didn't go quite that way. Coming up to the Flemings' high-banked driveway you slipped on loose gravel and though you did not fall all the way to the ground, the records went flying out of their paper sack onto the rocky ground. Three of them shattered into pitiable shards, two were cracked, and several of the paper sleeves were ripped further and smeared with mud. Why, oh why, did this have to happen to you? Who knew how valuable or invaluable they were to your landlord? Now you really did fear Gunther the ogre, keeper of the castle. You pushed the tottering, top-heavy bicycle uphill as one might escort a drunkard, then threw it down angrily and forced yourself to go through the gate and past the pumphouse and budding bushes, trying to think of ways to apologize, though you were never the type to apologize. Well, nothing to do but face the situation head-on, so you knocked at the kitchen door and held the damaged goods out to him when he answered.

He took almost no notice of the records, instead shouting out in that half-coherent way he had, "More! Gut! We haff lots, lots more!" and leading you through the fumes and the darkness past the cretonne, pulling you so quickly by the wrist (ugh—the grip of his callused fingers!) that you barely had the breath to tell him you had the rent money in an envelope and really didn't need any more old records. Nevertheless, here was the house itself; in the chilly semidarkness, as your eyes adjusted, you saw that the interior was furnished—not expensively but not too cheaply, either, at least in your unschooled estimation; some of the chairs and tables had sheets covering them the way you had seen rich people did their summer homes in movies, but others were bare—and as you walked through the rooms and your vision improved, you saw the revolting horsehair erupting from the upholstery and the sawdust and the kapok strewn under stuffed chairs and across balding carpets. The dust was an inch thick in places, and it floated up in little puffs wherever you walked, irritating your eyes and mouth. The many tall arched windows were shrouded with mildewed tapestries and opaque canvas shades—only where they were torn or altogether shredded did a little spring light penetrate the interior passageways. There were gaping holes in the wallpapered walls where lime and gypsum like the sands of time had leaked out, exposing the skeletal wall-beams, and grotesque stains spread across the bulging ceilings and in places dripped like ulcerous sores. In full daylight, this might have all looked like the ordinary decrepitude of a dwelling long neglected, but in these shadows streaked with deceptive sun-rays, it was easy to see why some of your schoolmates called this one of the many "haunted houses" of the area. (In those days, as today, older farmhouses and barns were falling into ruin in every corner of the countryside.) What was perhaps most remarkable was that these rooms were not piled to the ceiling with junk, as was the kitchen, but fairly uncluttered, as if they had been picked over by greedy inheritors—besides these few scattered tables and chairs and bureaus and standing lamps, there was relatively little to trip over or bump into. Obviously Gunther spent little time in the depths of the house; the parlors and halls must also be unheated, because even on this fairly warm afternoon they were cold as meat-lockers. You shivered in your short rayon sleeves and pedal-pushers, wondering if you really should be following the creaky old castellan (or castle-keeper) farther into his lair.

At last you stopped at the edge of infinity, although in truth you had passed through only half the house. This inner room was darker than the rest, but from its half-empty shelves and bookcases you could see it had probably been some sort of library. Here, Gunther lit the railroad worker's lantern you only now noticed must have been swinging from his elbow all along. Its scent, sharper and more cloying to your sensitive nose than either gasoline or lighter fluid, immediately infused the room, nearly choking you—kerosene, such as you had only experienced before on backyard camping trips with friends, but a smell once smelled never forgotten. In the lantern's silvery glow the room sprang to life, if rooms in dead or dying houses can be said to live, and aroused the blue irises on the wallpaper, the pink roses on the rug, the twining acanthus leaves trimming the brass ceiling fixtures and lintels. This room seemed not to have been picked as clean as the others, perhaps because Gunther, smiling so broadly now, apparently liked it so much. The words you a minute or two later comprehended that Gunther was saying were "music room"—and yes, of course, that was not a sarcophagus but an upright piano under a sheet and a ukulele or mandolin at rest atop a display case, with a wooden music-stand between. Some sheet music lay face-down or scattered haphazardly along the rug, with more of that Gothic lettering in red and black. The covers you briefly examined depicted either opera halls as grand as Versailles or moonlit scenes featuring palms and Seminole canoes. Gunther went to a lacquered cabinet, one with pinprick grilles on its doors and curlicue gilding—maybe it was a prehistoric Victrola—and took out another stack of records from within its recessed doors. "M-more moo-zeek!" he said in something of an awed whisper, handing them to you. "Für die schöne Pr-Prinzessin! P-please to keep die moo-zeek, danke!" When he got excited he would stutter and was even harder to translate.

In truth, you didn't want either a gift or loan, you didn't want to come back to return them now you had seen at least part of the house, but there was nothing you could do then but thank him. Nothing to do but tell him you couldn't possibly keep them, but would play them all and return them safer than the last pile. He seemed pleased enough with that, standing there in the half-dark high-ceilinged room, his face lit even more ghoulishly than it actually was by the kerosene lantern he held aloft. Naturally he reminded you of that scene from the Frankenstein movie, set in the quaint feudal land where his parents had come from, where the creature is spellbound by the hermit's heart-wrenching fiddle. Here, the music and memories were only in his head. Maybe he was remembering gemütlich family gatherings around the Bösendorfer pianoforte in this room, decades ago. He truly was a figure from a nightmare, but he was kindly and only wanted you, such a mournful girl, to be happy.

Back at home, you put away the records more carefully than you had last time, intending to listen to them one by one, but of course this episode was only a small part of your life at that time. You had school, you had your friends and your clothes, you had Danny traipsing after you like some misguided duckling, you had the moviegoers at the Afton, and of course you had the guitar and Rusty—though you found yourself neglecting the latter two more and more as the weeks went by and the weather grew warmer, as you grew ever more adolescently sullen and estranged from your family and the rest of the world. The mirror could not lie, however much you willed it to: you were sad, but about what or who you could not exactly say. You didn't really hate your mother or siblings, but felt uncomfortable in their presence, as if they were trying to penetrate you, discover your deepest secrets, though in fact you had very few and they simply weren't interesting enough. The twins tortured you with their tomboyish antics; Billy was less than useless, your mother had been experimenting with decaf Sanka lately and was crabbier than ever. When Francie visited one weekend with the baby, you pretended to like the bawling, undercooked-looking thing, but it might as well have been some slimy amphibian to you. I'll never ever be a mother, you told yourself. And I will never ever let a man do that to me.

Francie seemed more distant to you than she had been before, before everything had fallen to pieces in tearful fights and silent recriminations and words no one can ever really take back, although a truce had been declared in the household and she had no real reason left to resent your mother or you, the daughter who nevertheless still had a better life ahead of her. Perhaps it was you who lately acted more withdrawn from her.

"How's the geetar-pickin'?" she asked you, lighting a cigarette and plopping down on the bed that used to be hers, the baby asleep at last in the twins' room. It was nighttime and your sister was worn down. The light from the satellite-shaped lamp above you two was harsh on her face. She had aged so spectacularly! She wore pointy, glittery glasses now that gave her a feral, feline look.

"Oh .... you know," you said, cross-legged on the floor, flipping through the story magazine she had given you. You were trying to concentrate more on the somehow comical advertisements for facial cremes and waist-reducers than on your sister. "It's all the same," you added, as if that would explain everything—though of course it wasn't, and neither were you. You had never allowed Danny to go beyond a barely Parisian kiss (tasting of Dentyne); why had she allowed herself to end up like this, when you two had once been best friends?

"Mom says you're doing all right, for someone your age," Francie said, pressing on—and you couldn't really respond to that, either; what was your mother talking about you for, in the first place? You smirked, wishing you could blot out the entire world's opinion of you. Ah, you were fifteen, we can remember that!

Francie exhaled smoke through her nostrils and snatched True Confessions away from you, visibly annoyed. Her peroxided hair was up in a way she hadn't worn it before, teased and sprayed into submission, and it is no surprise that she looked more like your mother than ever before. "At least tell me about Danny," she insisted, holding the magazine above your head as you swatted at it. "He's playing varsity, isn't he? Did he lend you his letter-jacket? Hal knows his family. Lutherans, huh?" Hal was her new husband, and old enough to be drafted.

You scowled like a chastised monkey, snatching the magazine back. "Like everyone doesn't know everyone else and their business here... Besides, Daniel and I are not really that serious," you insisted, as Francie stubbed out her half-burnt cigarette on the sole of her open-toed shoe. "We're both awfully busy."

"Right," your big sister said, meaning "that can't be right" or "certainly" or possibly both. Her new glasses had dipped to the end of her perfect pert little nose—the nose you wished you'd been born with instead—and she looked down through them, a little cross-eyed, at you, measuring your bones. "Cyn," she said at last, "I'm really just the same. But you aren't." With that she stood up, pushed her cat-eye glasses back in place, and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her so slowly and soundlessly it was like one long unspoken insult.

You got up as well, went to what your mother still called the gramophone, and put on one of the new records you had once again lovingly washed and shined. It was something whose English subtitle read "Song to the Evening Star." Its muted piano notes pleaded and soothed, yet were painfully wistful—when you looked out your window, and the violin entered, there was indeed an evening star waiting there just for you.

The next day, after Francie had gone back to the city, was the day you and Danny broke up. It was after-hours at the Afton, after the last showing of the dreary low-budget comedy, the one that made obvious jokes at the expense of boys with mop-tops and girls in minis, when Danny, who got his license the day he turned sixteen, came to pick you up in his father's second car to take you to the diner for a milkshake and then home. Danny was in his baseball cap, you remember that, looking not athletic but small and tired. He'd been pitching and running bases since three-thirty in the afternoon and through the long spring evening. His stovepipe jeans, the ones that just grazed his bare ankles, were grass-stained and when he at last did you the courtesy of taking off his cap, you saw that his usually carefully combed short-back-and-sides was a mess, with splashes of mud in it. Obviously he didn't care what he looked like around you, anymore. And later you could tell he smelled vaguely of fried onions.

"Hey, Cynd," he said to you again as you silently wiped down the greasy glass and chrome interior of the popcorn-maker. The manager had entrusted you to lock up, since it was Tuesday nights that you did this extra bit of cleaning. "Man, I'm hungry!" You still didn't deign to look up—you knew he was there, all right, you had seen him coming. "Busy night?" he asked, reaching around the popper and helping himself to a heap of leftover popcorn, which was always the saltiest and the best.

"Busy enough," you replied at last, shutting up the machine's doors. You took him all in: how tall he was but how very lean and slim-shouldered, thin-hipped, skinny-legged. Maybe in a few years he would be more handsome, more assured within a more fleshed-out body, but for now he was merely ill-fit to his clothes and graceless in his movements. You weren't interested in the ride in that ugly car, the grainy milkshake, the fumbling in the parking lot before he consented to take you home before midnight once more. You simply weren't interested in him at all.

A little later, he was telling you, "If you ask me, I always thought that Rusty kid was kind of that way, sort of a Liberace type. A lot of those musical guys are, you know."

You hit Danny hard on the shoulder, next to you in the booth that faced Main Street and its one stoplight that was always set to flashing yellow in all directions, at this time of night. "Quit it!" you commanded, knowing he was just jealous. And you said these exact words: "You're just jealous. Are those dirty Rolling Stones all that way? Those 'Surfin' Bird' guys we saw at the state fair? Johnny Cash?"

"Maybe, maybe," he said with a grin, and blew bubbles into the last of his root beer float. "The Raiders wear ponytails and sissy pants. But I like that song 'Kicks.' I just don't get that kind of fancy-prancy music you and Rusty like, I guess."

"Anyway," you informed Danny, "I'm thinking of giving up the guitar. I'm never going to get any better and Rusty will be going off to graduate school this summer. It doesn't matter, I only see him for an hour if that every other week. That's all I can afford, you know. You hardly have reason to be jealous. I have more reason to be worried about you and some stupid cheerleader."

Danny smiled, worrying his straw. He liked being thought of as a sort of Romeo, it was obvious. He had such a boyish face and childish gestures! You could never love him.

And you told him so a little later that night, on the funereal drive back to your house. He cried, wept hot tears, and you hated that in a boy. He couldn't get you to explain fully (as if you could have), only that you wanted to stop going out together, altogether. No, it wasn't because of Rusty or anyone else; you simply wanted to be left alone until you figured out what it was you wanted or needed, exactly. Danny grew quiet then, though the tears still clouded his vision so much he wasn't driving straight. He parked the clunky old-fashioned Nash across from your house, that shabby little house on a block much shabbier than his own, and tried to take your hand—you thought at first, to caress it, but, no, it was a mere handshake, as if you were concluding a business deal. "I don't want this to end bad," was all he managed to say. It felt ridiculous, shaking hands—yours cold and his hot and sweaty—but the gesture allowed you to get away, to walk away from that car like any other night, and enter the unlit house, where your brother and sisters and mother would all be sleeping in their separate rooms, not one of them aware of the quiet drama that had happened right below their sills. From your windowpanes as you undressed in your dark room, you watched Danny waiting there, his face illuminated yellow and green in the light of the dashboard, waiting as if he expected you to come running back to apologize any moment. Soon enough he was gone, and the next day in the halls at school you were as complete strangers.

Your mother had been surprised when you volunteered to deliver the rent the following week, that as-always first glorious week of May. Surprised, but easily distracted, as she was too often those days, too busy at work, too busy trying to keep the house a little cleaner and make meals from scratch instead of from the box or can; she seemed to be wearing down before your eyes, her hair going a little grayer between home-colorings, runs in her nylons neglected, her dresses more and more outmoded—though of course her shoes were always faultless, always the latest in trends. She also wore a Playtex eighteen-hour girdle now—you saw the shameful object thrown over a chair—for both diet pills and Jack Lalane had failed her. Outside of keeping up with business or social matters, where she was good at sounding other people's opinions, she was in truth a woman of comparatively few words, even when a store manager or older sister berated her, and she had grown even quieter of late; maybe she was just tired of trying to get her children to cooperate, or tired of the always demanding customers, or maybe—and this you couldn't possibly realize until much, much later—she was tired of growing older with not even a possibility of romance in this small town, where she was merely the widow, someone to be pitied, someone to feel at ease with because she couldn't possibly expect any more from life, could she? She who was all of forty.

Your mother must have at least been pleased, though she was quiet about it, when you rode away on your ungainly bicycle once again, with the records bound securely in a cardboard box padded with newspaper. (You wouldn't miss them: after a while the tin-can sound grated rather than gratified, and the great composers' selections all sounded undernourished, played as they were on insect orchestras.) It was good to be out under the welcoming sky: The whole town was made anew with the spring—at last, at last—fresh carpets of grass on every lawn, tulips blaring their colorful music all over, and most of the trees and bushes shot through with that annual surprise known as green, some in full leaf or flower; children were defending kingdoms in the streets, girls and boys you recognized but wouldn't speak to were walking hand-in-hand down the sidewalks, fathers were washing spotless cars, mothers hanging spotless laundry. For this morning, at least, the inexplicable and impenetrable sadness faded from you, you felt alive with the sun and breeze, too, and knew what you wanted to do when you got to the Fleming house, so far away. This morning your Schwinn seemed to sprout the wings of a Nike, and you glided past the Methodist church, the Bowlerama, the little shopping plaza, the public swimming pool, the riverside park, the arboretum, and the junior college's playing fields.

The lilac bushes along the Flemings' long driveway were already approaching full bloom, so that it was like going through a tunnel of magnificent heavenly scented blossoms, white and light purple and the deepest indigo purple with the deepest indigo scent you could imagine, on both sides and above you; this had always been your favorite time of year, when you would take long walks in the lilac-colored dusk down the town's secluded alleys, bending the occasional lilac branch down to you, so you could partake of its sweet opiate odor once again, feel the dewy petals against your cheek, and admire how many shades of purple there are in the world. The smell could smother you to death and you'd die happy. You liked being alone, you realized on those walks—such times were so uncommon, without a boy to bother you or a sibling tagging after, and you liked the illusion of a town deserted and stilled just for you and your soaring dreams. Now you were going toward the house you had fantasies of possessing one day (of course Gunther would leave it in his will to your always kind mother), careful to observe its discontinuous roof-line, its irregular accumulation of wings and additions, the antiquated design of its windows and doors, where the awnings were torn and steps overgrown. You would restore it, revive its garden as well, plant new trees where the old ones had fallen or grown misshapen, and people it with artists and musicians and painters, as maybe it had been in its glory days. To think the humble Flemings despite their overly ambitious house had ever been so sophisticated! It was a little like a fairy tale, your fantasy, only you would not be a mere princess, but the queen of this domain, and suitors would drop like sparrows at your feet. Rusty could have the music room to write concertos at your request; your closest friends could have their pick of bedrooms and walk-in closets; and the king would be young and tragically beautiful and lately if also conveniently deceased, or else living in another country. The tower room, once you built one, would be all yours, and yours alone.

Today the last living heir (that you knew of) was outside the kitchen door, digging in a small plot where you knew he, like half the old folks around here, more out of habit than necessity, annually planted a few tomatoes and corn-rows. He was wearing bib overalls even grimier than his usual ones and knee-length rubber boots, galoshes really, that laced up like military ones; the laces, you saw, getting closer, were undone—because probably he had never learned to tie them. As usual, he was delighted to see you. You hopped off the bike, minding not to scuff your freshly pressed madras slacks, and went over to Gunther with the well-padded box. He did not reach for it, but took your hand in his enormous mud-encrusted hands instead. "Happy happy!" he exclaimed, mindless of soiling you. A good thing you always carried that linen handkerchief. "L-like the-the moo-zeek? We haff m-more!"

"Yes," you answered, "they were nice. But I was hoping instead of more records you could maybe show me the ballroom I've heard about. Please? Please!" You knew he always understood much better than he was able to pronounce. "My grandmother, you knew her, Bertha Nealy, I guess it was Boyle then, used to talk about it. I'd really love to see one, I've never seen one. It must be so wonderful." You felt you were babbling almost as badly as he usually did, but once again he was delighted to show you inside. The kitchen did not feel so hot for once, probably because the door had been open a while or the gigantic stove had at last expired, and Gunther clomped ahead of you in his boots like a pack mule, leading you around the piles of refuse and again through the heavy-curtained exit, a hurricane lamp held in his hand.

The rooms were as silent and bereft of any dead ancestors as before, though now you noticed even more how ruinous the decay was; rats or squirrels seemed to have built nests in the stuffing, a strange spongy fungus grew all the way up to the crown molding of the far-off ceilings, and broken chair arms and table legs lay here and there across the moth-eaten rugs like limbs scattered across a battlefield. The strong vernal light piercing through slats of blinds and tattered lace drapery insubstantial as spiderwebs allowed you to see more this noon hour, more of this sad devastation, and also the pictures on the peeling walls or propped on mantels—sun-bleached photographs of family outings from a half-century or more before (the men wearing jackets and ties at a picnic, women shrinking under parasols!), large colorless portraits of stern unsmiling figures standing stiffly next to Chinese urns and fern-bedecked pediments, small amateurish oils of Olde World scenes—canals, cattle, castle-keeps, the Matterhorn—that were cracked and blackened; Gunther must have loved them, protected them, or they would have been taken along with anything else of real value. Maybe they were just cheap prints, maybe a brother or sister had painted them, who would ever know.

There was no grand staircase with balustrades, as you had longed to drift up like Scarlett O'Hara in that book you nevertheless considered ludicrous, only a wide but average enough staircase instead, whose carpet runners, you could tell, had been ripped up probably long ago. You longed to explore all the shadowy rooms and alcoves and built-in wardrobes you passed (more in your memory of this event than there actually were), but Gunther like an archangel in his glory of lantern-light was urging you faster and faster (Schnell! Schnell!) up the flights and past the landings, toward heaven. (How many flights and landings could there have been, really?) He had lit the pungent lamp back in the depths of the house, and its darting beams of coruscating light revealed here a beaded sconce-shade and there an armoire on its side, stranded at these heights, almost blocking your path. The cobwebby ceilings here were lower but the steps steeper; soon enough however you were on the top floor (you had already determined there must be at least a partial attic above that), where the double-doors at the summit stuck fast, admitting no intruders, until Gunther heaved against them with one bullock shoulder and then another, and with a reluctant groan the warped pine panels opened up onto what seemed at first a heaven indeed of stark white light—for these capacious dormer windows under the eaves and between the gables were not curtained, and the full May sun poured into what appeared to be a vast emptiness.

Of course this was no place so celestial at all; it was merely the top of the house, a place where people had once casually assembled to dance forgotten dances on bare creaking wood, under bright chandeliers that were no longer there but could easily be imagined and, being imaginary, could be made to be much more extravagant than they probably had been. Your blurry eyes adjusted, drew a sepia filter over it all, as it were, for the faraway past is always sepia-tinged. Interesting. You were disappointed, even so. This was not the sophisticated ballroom depicted in innumerable Regency paperbacks you would not admit to having read. This was merely a glorified attic with rafters like a horse-barn's. The floorboards were warped, even sticking up in a couple of places; the whole room seemed to list like the deck of a ship. There were still quite a few wooden folding chairs stacked against the walls, some of them covered with mouse-eaten sheets or crumbling tarps for no good reason, patiently awaiting a utility that would never come again. Further doors led to unseen reaches—possibly cloakrooms or servants' quarters, for there must have been many more servants than just your grandmother, the little Irish scullery maid, at one long-lost time. How imposing, how otherworldly this top floor must have seemed to her then, if not to you now. Filled with recent immigrants in brocaded gowns and fur-collared coats, filled with light, filled with joy, the music from the hired string band permeating every corner of the house. Flirtatious white petticoats revealed under the dresses of whirling dancers and young men risking scandal when, cooling off by the punchbowl, they exposed their shirtsleeves and even their hairy forearms. Grandmother Nealy must have loved ladling punch and "freshening" ladies' feathered or flowery hats, and in midwinter dusting snow from the rich farmers' frock coats.

Upon a small oak-board platform like a makeshift stage sat another upright piano, possibly a twin of the one in the music room. Quite likely this was all the orchestra the Fleming elders had ever actually been able to find or afford, supplemented now and then perhaps by an itinerant violinist or clarinetist. What music had they listened to at such dances? Dignified Strauss waltzes or daringly hotted-up, fragmented foxtrots? Ballads or drinking songs? Such were the disorganized parts of the past that last batch of records held: something from The Merry Widow, something else called Die Morgensonne, an unfunny "comic turn" about "two black crows" milking a heifer, another number about flying in an aeroplane with someone named Jane, a "gipsie melody" called "Dark Eyes," a tune you knew as "Love's Dream," a ragtime ditty by The Peptomist Six, and others by turn melancholy or shrilly insistent. Half-remembered, half-forgotten snatches of those pieces revolved in your mind like the motes on these sunbeams as you crossed the squeaking floor to the piano. You opened the engraved keyboard lid and touched a note or two: foul, flat, with the low strings buzzing like roused wasps from deep within the instrument's innards. Since you knew a little about the makings of music, you thought in guitar terms and tried to reconfigure a few bars on the bone-yellow keys. It was all out of tune, but your ear could substitute or replace what was or wasn't there. Gunther stood there, enrapt below the shallow riser, his eyes closed, listening as if you were Paderewski. Maybe like all idiots, you thought cruelly, for you were always a cruel girl, he had a special affinity for music, as do the dumb creatures of the forest where Orpheus strums. Or, once more, a mad scientist's monster. Ha!

Gunther had set the lamp atop the piano and even in the intense daylight up there above the world it seemed to illuminate your hands a bit more and warm your pale young face. You must have thought you had the power to entrance as you haltingly picked out that lonesome semi-refrain from "Der Leiermann." Instead, it sounded more like a fractured nursery lullaby. The old fool stood there, saliva or tobacco juice running down his chin. "P-pretty rib-ribbon!" he almost whispered, clapping his hands together softly, as if he wore a ball-goer's kid gloves. You thought then he meant the satin bow in your hair, the one that matched your pastel-pink blouse with its Peter Pan collar and cuffs, but then again maybe it was the ribbon of music he felt wafting around him, fluttering against his ears (you sometimes felt music that way, too) and tickling his throat. You played another cluster of broken notes. The lamp-wick sputtered a bit as the piano vibrated. The smell of kerosene was like a tense, watchful spirit on the air.

He drew nearer to you, leaned a bit over your bare arm with his shoulder. "M-mine le-leeba sh-vess-ter," he mumbled, murmured, sheer nonsense, and you could feel his almost fetid breath on your neck, in that moment you paused, your arachnid fingers still spread across the keys, listening to the sidereal overtones still ringing in the piano's iron heart. "Meine liebe Schwester," were the words you thought he was repeating (this you would decide much later, when memory failed), "my dear sister," his grease-stained bibbed chest already pressed hard into your shoulder before you could turn, and maybe he did or didn't pull at your irresistible hair-ribbon like a kitten at yarn. From afar you heard a voice, your voice, crying, "Don't touch me!" "Meine Cecilia!" he moaned (you thought he moaned), rocking against the piano. Your carelessly braided ponytail did unravel, you know that much for certain, before one of the two of you or both of you together sent the lamp flying across the piano-top and onto the floor behind, where the hurricane-glass shattered and the kerosene exploded, setting a drape-cloth on the chairs nearest by aflame. You screamed. You didn't scream. No, you must have screamed. The fire had already raced across the floor and up a wallpapered wall. Gunther was crumpled on the floor against the piano, crying like a real adult man, a wholly intelligent man, as you walked—not ran—away from that burning ballroom. You walked—not ran—down those dark stairs as into the night, you did not hurry through the half-lit rooms and corridors towards the summer kitchen and freedom from the house. You heard nothing as you got on your bicycle, it was quiet as a cemetery there, but you did smell the smoke on the air as you rode away. You would not look back, not look back, any more than Orpheus should have when he fled Hades.

You did the right thing, you always told yourself later. You rode straight to the police station downtown, which was next to the fire station. First, you told them about the fire at the Fleming place, and that you thought Gunther might still be in there, possibly trapped; after all, you had no wish for the man to die. He was strong, you expected him to be able to escape—which in fact he did, you were soon vastly relieved to learn. Only a few minor burns and scrapes. He was pretty shaken up, raving even less coherently than usual when he was found at the bottom of the stairs, but would be all right. The house, too, escaped for the most part; the attics and top floor were largely destroyed, but the local fire department did save the rest of the house, solidly constructed of brick and mortar, with asbestos between the inner and outer walls, maybe therefore less likely to collapse in and upon itself than most houses its age. Its walls were smoke-blackened and there was water damage, but it could of course be rebuilt, if anyone ever cared to or had the money. All of what you heard later was well and good; you had done what the world and your mother would have expected of you. But the rest—the rest you needn't really have said, could have let lie. You should have thought, but then you were shaken, too, we can allow that. And you were, after all, not quite sixteen. Still... All it would take was one sentence, only one sentence, you knew—actually just a phrase, spoken to the kindly old police captain who had known your father. He had already asked you how you came to be at the house and how you happened to be on the third floor with old broke-headed Gunther.

You looked into his warm, sympathetic, paternal eyes; you sniffled into your kerchief. "He, he tried to—he tried to..." you said, your words trailing off into tears. That simple. Three little words to irrevocably alter the humdrum life you had known. Quite enough; they saw your disheveled clothes, the kerosene splash and dirt down your blouse, the straight black hair loose around your shoulders when you were famous for your braid and ribbons, always pretty and polite as a Disney starlet, a Hayley Mills or Sandra Dee; that's what you were—right? (That had been you—a year or two before.) He .... tried .... to .... what? That you didn't know, couldn't know, though all these kind men at the station and their nice lady dispatcher with her Toni perm seemed to know. It wasn't such an awful thing for you to have said, for who was to say what Gunther might have done, if somehow that lamp hadn't been knocked off the piano. They brought you hot cocoa and tissues, called your mother at Zaiser's over in the new part of town, and told you everything would be all right. You were sobbing too much to tell them they had not quite understood you, after all, and of course you were fine, why shouldn't you be? The lady dispatcher even held your hand. You were glad for once to see your mother and be brought home and expected to do nothing but lie in bed the rest of the day and read Silas Marner for English. Your mother brought a bowl of lilacs into your room, as if you were sick. She was shaking the way she did when she had had too much caffeine, but you knew that wasn't it. The lilacs seemed to have lost their scent. You slept.

They sent Gunther from the county hospital to the state mental hospital after that. He would at least have regular meals and baths there, you reckoned, everyone reckoned, and it would be cleaner and nicer than his kitchen, with people to talk to every day. Often enough your mother had worried aloud that Gunther would end up needing to be institutionalized, so how could it be your fault? No one in town ever saw him again, and he died three or four years later, when you were away at college, so you heard. There had been no need for the police to investigate any further; he was a feeble-minded old man and couldn't help himself. Your mother, however, knew where to put the blame, though she never fully expressed what she felt or thought she knew. She had forgotten the already wilting lilacs on the dresser and came to sit near you on the bed later that afternoon. Her searching eyes told you everything; they stopped upon you lying there like Little Miss Sleeping Beauty in bed, and they froze hard upon discovering in your own eyes the truth of what had actually happened. "I should never have sent you there," was all she said, her words blaming you as much as she blamed herself. She drew the curtains she'd made out of terry towels, closed the door behind herself, and left you alone in the dark with your own recriminations on that splendid spring day.

For a while there had been a chance, you supposed, to take back your words and leave Gunther to go his own way, sticking to his hot smoky stove and disorderly kitchen attached to the back of the damaged house. Your mother could have continued paying the meager rent to him, as would the tenants downtown, and all could have been forgiven and forgotten. That was not to be, that could not be. There being no other relatives anyone could find, the Fleming house went up at government auction (Gunther had also never paid any taxes, remember) and was eventually sold to a local bank, which tore it down and sold the land to a contractor; there's a dingy little treeless suburb in those parts now, and those houses they built already look worn-out and ready for the wrecking ball. Well, you left this town a long time ago. It doesn't matter to you.

Del capo al fine: go back to the beginning and play to the end. As was said, it doesn't matter to you because that was a very long time ago now. You have been properly punished, as everyone is, by time and loves and lives lost. There were boyfriends and a husband long after Danny, who went off to be happier elsewhere, too. Rusty died too young, like Schubert, you suppose, and yet not at all like Schubert. You think he was teaching middle-school band somewhere. Or in a monastery. Billy and the twins and you all drifted apart, while your mother was alive and further after she was gone—an inescapable fate, you suppose. You'll see each other now and then. As for your guitar, you almost never played it after Rusty abruptly left for Haight-Ashbury—though it's not that you missed it or him or anyone else that much. One has to go on living. You suppose. When your mother was in the nursing home she mentioned Gunther just once, to say that he had had a much younger sister named Cecilia, which also happened to be the name of the latest old lady she shared her room with. A name you don't come across everyday. Maybe she was calling attention to the coincidence just to bring up a touchy subject. Cecilia Fleming had died at fourteen, during an epidemic, but old Gunnie used to talk about her quite a lot, as if she had never died. He had loved her very much. She used to sing Volkslieder, he had once told your mother. Sure you remember Gunther, your mother reminded you. Was she trying to make connections where there are none, were none? Trying to tie things up too neatly, with a pretty satin bow? Trying to make you feel any residual guilt all the more? No, because this is not a story of just deserts, not an alarm or lesson or exemplary tale, but, if you like, an evocation of a very specific and unsalvageable past only, of a painful time when I was that love-starved, angry, bitter girl who liked listening to old records and dreaming of a happier future—and this is just an attempt to call back that time and recapture those intangible moments that mean much more to me now than they could ever have back then. Back then, anyone could say you or I were innocent. Back then, one lovely lilac-filled spring, when we were all fifteen. As you know, lilacs once cut perish soon. Time passes, effaces, erases. Though sometimes the sweet nostalgic perfume will linger in a closed room for days.

Repeat refrain. Who is to say that you, which is to say, I, could not justify all my actions? Yet I know myself, I know like my mother where the wounds fester and sting. Perhaps those words are too strong: I live with my heartaches and headaches and other people live with theirs. The past is just a fortress built around us all. But I hate stories with a moral and none is intended here. No apologies are necessary from the girl who never apologized, but neither is there any escaping who I was and the youthful mistakes I made. As the saying goes, you can hide from others, but you cannot hide from yourself: and that is not a moral; that, like this story, is just the truth.
Newcomer

A stroll past the famous fountains—everyone always liked that, the Museo de Cultura Panamericana and perhaps coffee there, just a glance as usual inside the Catedral de San Estéban, a few blocks of sightseeing, lunch at La Iguana, a couple of the nicer shops if they could find any ones open during siesta, perhaps an artsy-craftsy place for the inevitable souvenirs, and last of course, flowers at Zizi's (so the temperamental cineraria or clianthus wouldn't be so terribly wilted by the time they got on the bus back to the base): this was Estella's time-tested itinerary—and Mrs. Arden had damn well better like it. Not that she had anything against Mrs. Arden, who she had just met, but she knew how the steamy weather could get to some of these new teachers and how it could be like dragging a sack of wet cement behind her if she wasn't careful to keep the pace brisk and diverting. It would all depend on the conversation; if they liked to gossip about life on the base and what to expect, Estella knew these extravagantly early hours of acquaintance would glide by so much quicker. Someone as artistic as Mrs. Arden should like all the culture, at least, even if she might be bored by her guide's company. And then there was the major's wife's little gathering later...

Her wristwatch seldom lied: Twelve minutes past ten, ten being when they had agreed to meet at this corner of Balboa Square, and Mrs. Arden had still not shown up—a bad sign for someone who should be seeking to make a good impression here in her first weeks of teaching at the international school. Estella considered taking the next bus back to the American district; she could justify that by saying she had waited as long as she could in the heat (which would always bother her, no matter how long she lived here), but she would give this new young teacher the benefit of doubt. Five more minutes: then she really would leave. The buses were so temperamental in the city they could come at any time or not at all—Mrs. Arden might keep her standing here another hour, even half the day. A taxi honked somewhere, and then she remembered that Mrs. Arden was coming from the consulate, where she was checking into something about her passport or work visa, so of course the young woman would be coming on foot—her arrival could be any minute (or, knowing the consulate, weeks).

Estella withdrew under an awning which had just been unfurled outside a café, assuming that Mrs. Arden (unless she were blind) could see her just as easily in the shade as on the corner itself. It was peculiar, she thought to herself as she waited, that after all these years she had been dreaming about snow and winter again that morning, but not a clean white snow; it had been grim and grayish, and it had sifted down over her garden thick as ash from a blast-furnace, swirling like the Minnesota blizzards of her girlhood. Perhaps it was because of those new sleeping pills she was taking for her relentless insomnia. Even within the dream she had realized she was dreaming, though she had been frightened, nonetheless. The flakes stung hot and cold like dry ice—she was outside, she half-remembered, brandishing a trowel, and yet she was not there, or anywhere at all—and meanwhile every rose, every lily was bursting into flame. Within moments the world was consumed: Pompeii after Vesuvius, the whole country burnt barren and black, silent and dead but for the wind. An overly dramatic scenario for someone like herself. Still half-asleep, she had called out for Douglas—

"Oh, Mrs. Weir, I am sorry I'm late," Mrs. Arden, who was suddenly at her side, announced with a snap of her chain-link purse. The woman—a girl, really—laughed and Estella laughed, too, despite it all, and extended her hand. "I hope they're not always so difficult at the consulate," Mrs. Arden said. "It's so boring I won't even go into it."

Although they shook hands as coolly as strangers, Estella already knew Mrs. Arden slightly; they had been introduced a few days before at the Newcomers' Reception and had conversed briefly once or twice since on the phone. Estella had been amused that this new music instructor had assumed she was a native, because of her first name, even though her own hair had once been blonde, too, and half her family northern Italian in origin. "Oh, that's so typical," Estella said now, looking admiringly at the pretty girl (who must be younger than her own daughter). "But I am sorry I had to drag you out into the hot sun while you probably still have so much class preparation, Kate." Estella had just recalled with great relief the girl's first name. Kent Arden, her husband, would be working on the base as—what was it? a—civil engineer, yes—she remembered that, too, because he had bored her for some time, as government scientists and their kind always did, at that same reception. Kent, Kate—easy enough.

"Oh, I love the sun!" Kate was saying, possibly for the third time. "It can never be too hot for me. I'm just one of those people." She was dressed in a copper-colored polo shirt and shorts with an excess of rivets and zippers, making Estella wish she had not chosen something as comparatively prim as her own floral-print blouse, matronly skirt (which had seemed so chic when she bought it ten years ago), and straw hat nearly suitable for a garden party. And her own purse—what women of her mother's generation used to call a "pocketbook," must look like a saddlebag strapped onto her, next to Kate's smart little metal clutch. As for herself, Kate was already wondering if their lunch was going to be a bit more formal than she had expected—but then, why worry? Mrs. Weir, who she remembered now insisted on being called Estella, unlike the other teachers over fifty who seemed to prefer the old-fashioned distancing devices of Mr. or Miss or Mrs. or even Ms., had been nice enough to her, nicer than many of the others. She liked music, the older woman had assured her, which had made her feel a little less frivolous in this land of poverty and natural disasters. She even liked classical, Estella had said, as if that would make up for any rebuffs Kate was bound to receive in the future. Estella's husband, she knew from talk at the reception, was recently dead, a naval administrator who had spent at least a decade here with his wife, who substitute-taught math, grades first through fifth.

"It's just a short walk from here to the fountains and then that really charming museum I told you about," Estella was saying encouragingly as they came out from under the awning into full equatorial sunlight. "They have some indigenous instruments you're bound to be interested in."

"Actually," Kate said, "I'm really wanting to see the markets Mr. Shockley has been raving to me about." Mr. Shockley taught English in the upper level and Estella knew all too well his way of leading young people on with talk of "local color." "You see," Kate admitted, "I promised souvenirs first thing to my family, and honestly I just want to get it over with."

Estella paused on the sidewalk and asked the girl if she were sure—they wanted to have plenty of time to see some of St. Steve's (as the witty old-timers called it), didn't they? As she spoke, she noticed without meaning to their figures in the plate-glass window of the office building opposite them, distorted and wavering in the stifling heat, like one of those fairground mirrors that make you short and fat and then tall and thin. Even if she weren't wearing the hat it would still be easy to tell which one was her and which was the slender girl perhaps thirty years younger.

Kate lowered a pair of reflective aviator glasses from the crown of her platinum-colored head to the bridge of her golden nose. "Would you look at these plantings!" she said with a short gasp, as if the flowers were blinding her, and then started walking along their low cement urns northward up the street (without further negotiation, the question of where to go somehow seemed to have been settled, Estella realized—they would be going to that awful market without delay). To emphasize her point, Kate designated the surroundings with a sweep of her hand across the entire public square. "Aren't they something! Gardening must be so rewarding here." She had learned already that Estella was proud of her beds in the most well-groomed part of the American district.

Estella looked over the ragged planters, infested with colorful native weeds. "It's an experience," was all she wanted to say about gardening right now. Besides, without Miguel she would be lost here, even after more than ten years. "If you want to hit the shops downtown, we should try to get as much in before lunch and the siesta hours."

"Mr. Shockley said the Mercado is right near here," Kate said. "Where everything is cheap and authentic, don't you know."

Estella tried to look disapproving, which Douglas always used to say only made her look a little cross-eyed. "There are some very high-quality crafts you can get in the nice, clean shops not so far from here, you know."

Kate was already a few feet further down the block, as if drawn by a strong fishing line. "I love native crafts!" she was exclaiming. "The old Mercado is full of them, Mr. Shockley said."

Damn Mr. Shockley. "Wait up!" Estella cried, giving in. "They've just opened, if at all."

Kate was even farther ahead of her now, her snappy little purse swinging on her shoulder as she strode down the shimmering white sidewalk, every bit as poised as Joan of Arc going into battle, in full armor. Already heat waves were bending the light in much the same way that wavering shop window had; the nearer you were to noon, Estella knew, the more illusory the landscape could become. Sometimes the whole city seemed to float on hot, humid air. Kate had nearly forgotten about the older woman in her desire to obtain the Mercado before they sold out of everything, which she considered quite possible even this early in the day. Mr. Shockley had issued his caveat.

After all her years between the latitudes of Cancer and Capricorn, Estella might not enjoy it, but knew she could manage the heat well enough, knowing it was all a matter of when and where to do what you needed to do. Moving from shade to fans to air-conditioners, one could keep up the pretense one was living in a modern, thoroughly inhabitable country. Kate, she thought with some satisfaction, would soon realize how one could court exhaustion, even sunstroke, if one did not pace oneself, no matter how young. On weekends she saw the new military wives at the international beach, sprawled like marine iguanas on the rocks. They'd bake themselves to a brassy hue the way this girl must want to, and they always lived to regret it. Her own skin was almost as pale on her forearms as it was under her arms, for there was a strict regimen she had always followed. Lots of sun-cream, in short, and long sleeves whenever possible.

Then it occurred to Estella that Kate couldn't know where she was going, and yet she was going in the right direction. Could the girl have actually deceived her and been here already, even with Mr. Shockley, the old letch? Or was it simply that his directions had been flawlessly memorized? Between this square, which was kept reasonably decent for the tourists, and what used to be the Mercado, Estella knew the neighborhood became less decorative. Kate shouldn't be sashaying with her purse the way she did, especially with all that blonder than blonde hair and those short khakis. She should tell the poor girl—but then again, it's sometimes better to learn these things oneself. And then, as predictable as an alarm clock, she heard a whistle and a wolf-call and flinched the way she used to, when the whistles and wolf-calls had been for her.

"I should have alerted you," Estella said, at last catching up with Kate as the girl turned toward wherever it was the men were. "A pretty girl like you isn't really—"

"Oh, I don't mind so much, though I know that's not the correct thing to say. It's kind of flattering at my advanced age, I guess. Won't you be jealous, Kent!" She added the apostrophe with a wink invisible beneath her sunglasses.

"Not after the twentieth time, it's not flattering. And it can be downright dangerous." Even as she said this Estella knew the girl must be thinking, "So, how would you ever know?" But she did know, and that was the point. "I'm afraid you don't need me—you need your husband or some older male escort."

The girl laughed—needlessly, Estella thought. "Oh, Kent and I have lived near some pretty rough places before. And I carry a pistol in this purse!" She laughed again, and it was hard to tell if that was a joke or not.

"You must think I'm a great big bore," Estella tried again, "taking you away from the fun on one of your last free days before classes begin." She wondered if she should take the girl's arm, like a Castilian duenna, and lead her through this danger zone. But Kate smiled so largely and looked so self-assured she hesitated to even try to penetrate the girl's glasses.

"Well, I hate beaches," Kate said, "if that's what you're thinking, and there's no one I really know here yet and not much I have to do the first week of mornings but introduce the Orff blocks."

"Oh," said Estella, not fully comprehending what the girl meant. "Still, you probably got enough of an eyeful of this area on the bus ride in this morning."

"It's... interesting," was all Kate cared to say. She felt a little sorry for Mrs. Weir, who was probably the sort of veteran who always felt duty-bound to offer her services like this. She did wish there were other things to do; she did wish she had friends here, and wasn't really as wild about souvenir-hunting as the older teacher thought she was. But she also knew she wasn't up to museums and cathedrals and those other touristy things, the things Mrs. Weir had talked about on the phone; there would be afternoons and time enough for those things when she had real friends her own age here to share the sights with—or at least Kent on weekends.

A large and trash-strewn park opened up before them now, which, but for some hardy variety of hibiscus planted in plots running jagged as inflamed scars through the parched yellow soil, was dead as a desert. (In the American district, both women knew, native plants bloomed lavishly–but this Kate would learn, Estella realized—everything imported or fragile perished sooner or later in the sun. Hoses and sprinklers and gardening crews could only do so much.) Dry season was coming to a slow end this year, and what rain they'd been granted so far had coaxed little life or color from the branches overhead or the beds beneath. This sort of stagnation sometimes deeply affected Estella, making her feel as if it were the Americans' fault that they couldn't bring the whole country back to life the way Miguel could with plants that would wilt in her own garden. Kate was surveying the park in a different manner (not being able to see her eyes, it was difficult for Estella to determine her thoughts), apparently watching for someone or something—more wolf-whistlers? a historic plaque? "I suppose you'd have plenty of ideas for the parks commissioner," Kate said, turning to her. "Maybe you could grow something in this wasteland."

"Don't overestimate my gardening skills, whatever you've heard," Estella said, fanning herself with her hat. "It's mostly having one of the mestizos make the decisions for you." She thought momentarily of the garden she had left behind long ago in Okinawa, her favorite garden in a lifetime of gardens, because despite the pleasant weather it had been the hardest won. Douglas had barely noticed, Dawn was too young then, though neighbors on the base could attest to that small horticultural miracle. It hadn't happened in a day: seven years she had tended it daily and devoutly, and for years nothing much had grown at all, or grew too wildly. Flowers used to a northern climate were unpredictable in the semi-tropics—some bloomed crazily year-round, others not at all. Until she had learned a few native tricks, she knew only constant frustration. Now that garden was thousands of miles away, probably overgrown or long dead or dying off.

"By the way, there's where the first colonial mission was until the second or third Indian uprising," Estella said, interrupting her own thoughts and pointing somewhere east of this spot, perhaps the middle of the Atlantic, perhaps the coast of Africa. "Those rocks, you see, and that's part of the campanario, I think it is, or campanile, though you wouldn't know it." Kate gave her noncommittal look, if her sunglasses didn't by design make all her looks seem noncommittal.

The women passed a few defaced and broken monuments and a dry fountain (relics of a grander colonial period) on their way to the edge of the park, where the open doors of a small vine-choked alabaster-white church unexpectedly welcomed them. Suddenly Kate decided she should show a little more enthusiasm, if only for Mrs. Weir's benefit. "These old churches are probably just as lovely in their own way as that cathedral," Kate said. "Mind if we peek inside?"

"If Mr. Shockley's Mercado can wait."

"It can wait."

Estella followed Kate up the smooth stone steps and into the dim interior, which promised the coolness and solace of a seaside grotto. Kate briskly dabbed herself at the font, curtsied at a rough-hewn pew, and knelt in silence, meditating on a point in space above the candlelit altar. Always at a loss in other people's churches, Estella felt a little flustered, not sure whether it was proper to join Kate in the pew or reverently admire the architecture the way one would at San Estéban. Should she take off her hat or leave it on? Kate did all she did almost automatically, glad at least that she could tell Kent about it later. In a moment, she was looking up, waving her on, so Estella stepped softly down the far aisle of the narrow, empty church, studying the crude plaster of Paris stations of the cross, cracked and discolored by mold. This church was nothing like the cathedral she had put near the top of her list and which even people who knew nothing else about the city must have heard of (a massive and elaborate edifice, blinding with conquistador gold and silver and innumerable candles); at first she thought it odd that Kate would rather pass time here than at that one, but something of the stillness and poverty of the premises did eventually stir the deepest part of Estella—there was perhaps more of a sense of what might be called plain and simple holiness here than in the gaudy cathedral or dull base church. Her father's family, the Italian side, had perhaps once understood this feeling better than she could. Only one thing, Estella thought, unbalanced the serenity—a profusely bleeding wooden Jesus crucified high above the altar, a mannequin-like Christ with bluish hair, iodine skin, and terrified bewildered canine eyes. How could anyone worship such a primitive and pained image? She was glad again that her mother's side of the family had been practical and thoroughly conventional New England Congregationalists. "He is awful, but I had to see him. They say he sweats blood." Kate was suddenly at her side once more, whispering into Estella's ear. "Every Good Friday. And the cripples walk, you know."

"Really? How—intriguing. I should be the one telling you these things!''

"But the Carmelite sisters say that about half the wooden saints in town, Kent told me."

Outside again, Estella flapped her arms in the heat. The weight of the big ugly touristy bag, which grew bigger and uglier with every step, pulled on her shoulder. Maybe they should have waited for the bus—though buses in the centro were rickety and hot and the drivers drove like maniacs down the stony eight-foot-wide streets. Ahead of them lay what Estella knew to be the very poorest of the many poor sections of the city, an area she usually cautiously avoided: Kate herself had seen just a corner of it before from the tour bus—a neighborhood of eye-smarting sun where even the shadows seemed bleached out, its crowded, crumbling tenements incongruously festooned like circus wagons with clotheslines bearing bright clothes instead of pennants. That incidental festive aspect was the only thing which made these slums look any different from others both well-traveled women had seen throughout the third world. Something else about it reminded Estella of the desolation of that morning's dream, the ashes and cinder...

Kate could see a look of some sincere astigmatic concentration in Estella's eyes, though it was mostly rapidly fading recollections of the wintry dream disturbing her. "Mrs. Weir—Estella—I am sorry if I've rushed you. I was only following Mr. Shockley's precise directions," Kate apologized, a hint of elderly exasperation in her girlish voice. She could see that Mrs. Weir—Estella—probably would have preferred her guaranteed-to-please itinerary. Could she be near the same age as one of her maiden aunts back in Kansas, who never varied their routines—or judgments? The older woman, not really that old, looked tired, undone; Kate had to remind herself that Estella's husband had died not too long ago, after all. Was it a heart attack or a stroke? "We can sit soon. But I suppose we do have to keep in mind that major's wife's tea at four and it's getting late and it's getting hotter and this is supposedly the quickest way to the marketplace I was told to investigate for my souvenirs." Why was she talking so fast, so formally, so apologetically?

"It's fine, fine, completely fine," Estella said, thinking quite the contrary. "I nearly forgot about that tea myself, and I promised to bring some macaroons or something." Silly military affairs. "Walking is fine. Does one good. I spend too much time sitting at my desk grading pop quizzes." A bus had just passed five minutes before. If they had only... Never mind. Adjusting the strap of her handbag lower, as best she could, over one upper arm and against her hip, in imitation of her ward, Estella followed Kate down an uneven black-tar sidewalk that burnt through their soles, as the day, already stale, drew closer and closer to noon. It was only when she was next to youth as unbridled as this that Estella felt the full weight of her fifty-six years, though in truth she rarely thought of herself as feeling much older than thirty. For her part, Kate often felt much older than the thirty-six, almost thirty-seven years she carried upon her shoulders, especially after a morning teaching a classroom full of precocious students who would rather be anywhere but listening a fourth time for the syncopation in a Joplin rag—though Kate knew people were always telling her she looked much younger (which seemed a sort of insult, if she thought about it too much). How old was thirty-six, after all?

"It's always nice taking alternative routes. Such a pleasant outing we're having," Estella said to Kate just to say something, anything as they strolled along in silence, and immediately she regretted the mannered tone of her words as much as she regretted her frumpy clothes, for of course the weather was already far too sultry and this district was anything but pleasant. The girl, Kate, merely nodded in return. She was wondering if she could find a way later to make up to Estella for both consuming her valuable time and putting her in this depressing place. Buy her a new hat, a new purse? Or would she take that as an insult?

They had paused a moment on the sidewalk, contemplating the hulking tenements as if neither knew if they dared go on. Well, best to maintain a cheerful composure. Kate displayed what she hoped would be interpreted as a grateful if not wholly abashed smile, and, setting an example, sallied forth down the sidewalk as if this were the high road, swinging her shiny purse behind, inviting Estella to follow—which Estella did in haste, trying to avoid the quick avian movements and quicker eyes of the townspeople who had begun milling about; most people here wisely liked to have their shopping finished before noon's torpor. So many of these slum-dwellers (that term alone wasn't a slur, was it?) or indeed most of the so-called lower social orders looked alike to her, an opinion she never would have voiced, though she thought they really did look as if they were mostly from the same big happy family, with similar facial features and coloring, and they always seemed to be appraising her, estimating what she was up to—even the children. A conspiracy, a shared secret. What one might categorize as the ruling class here looked perhaps a bit more individualized in their expensive clothes, but they, too, probably were all of a sort and could condemn her with a glance, as well. One would think they'd be used to white women from the base after all these decades. Of course Estella could understand their resentment toward Americans, though she truly had none against them. She was innocent; she had never plundered their land or enslaved them or denied them their human rights—even if she were symbolic of those who had. Then again there was always the possibility that they never gave her a second thought, despite their knowing looks toward her and then back to their own kind. Was it foolish to feel so vaguely threatened? Whatever I am, so Estella told herself, I am no bigot—but I will forever be a stranger to them, just as they are strange to me. Perhaps not surprisingly, Kate's thoughts were not so far removed from Estella's: She, too, felt a confused flurry of pity and defensiveness and regret—though she was just enough younger and had been raised in just different enough of an era to feel an even greater sense of shame for thinking these things than Estella did.

Such vibrant, such alive people! Kate wanted to say aloud, to make up for some of her more uncharitable and less "inclusive" (a word popular in the schools where she had taught) private sentiments. But how might Estella, who was definitely more acculturated, if that was the right word, take such baldly calculated exclamations? She had been told already that Estella's husband's father had been born here, though with a name like "Weir" he had probably also been a gringo (was that even the right epithet, this far from Mexico?). Then again, she had also heard that Douglas and Estella Weir's only child was engaged to a native boy she'd met while they were stationed somewhere in the Far East. So this mixing of races and ethnicities must be nothing new to Estella, who would have known the nineteen-sixties like her aunts and might have once been a free-loving do-what-you-like hippie herself. (Glancing at her again, in those clothes, Kate canceled out that idea.) Best to remain neutral, the simple tourist: "Is that a historical plaque across the street?" Kate asked. There, that would make her guide feel needed.

"That—oh, that's just a grate or something," Estella said, lowering her hat brim and trying to focus. (She should have worn her prescription lenses.) Kate laughed her purling, girlish laugh again, and gave Estella a little pat on her flowery shoulder. Why does this girl, this giggling girl, Estella asked herself, make me feel like a foolish Navy bride, new not only to protocol and customs but to the whole of life? This girl young enough to be my own daughter. That was it: Children always make the worst fools of you.

Nevertheless, Estella tried again to be more helpful. "But over there, behind that pile of rubble, next to that old water tower—do you see?—the little squat building," she pointed out, and went on like a professor glad to discourse on a subject once it's been brought up. "A customs house or something of the sort. Very unique. It's made entirely of stone from the original Spanish fort—I'm sure you've seen its foundations near the harbor. Probably the oldest building still standing in this city—or the whole country."

"My. You do know a lot."

"And we're right near where the famous rout of what year? 1550 or 1560? took place, the one with the Portuguese, I think, when all the galleons filled with Incan and Aztec gold and jewels sank into the bay... And I'm sure Balboa must have slept with his mules under one of those palms." Estella laughed, pleased to make her own joke (and, seeing it was a joke, Kate laughed, too). Be light, she told herself the way Kent had told her just yesterday, that relaxes people.

A blur of bright shadows on the sidewalk cut short both women's thoughts: It was a small tea-colored child with closely cropped hair, so short her scalp shone through, wearing a red rag of a dress; she skipped before them and into the trash-heaped courtyard between a row of dismal cement-block apartments. "Would you just look at that poor little darling?" Estella said to Kate before the fairy danced out of sight. "I feel like running and snatching her up and carrying her back to my bungalow."

"So do I," said Kate. Neither woman attempted to move from her spot on the sidewalk. "So do I, I've felt that way many times before. Even though we never wanted children, Kent and I came very close to adopting in the Philippines... Not so easy. Well, you can give and give to all those organizations you see on TV, and still..." There was probably a look of genuine sympathy in Kate's eyes, if only Estella could see them and not twin images of her own pale, strained face in the younger woman's sunglasses. "And did you notice her hair? I know, I know, because of the lice. Oh, it's a happy country!"

A little shiver ran through Estella despite the temperature. "I suppose I always have a way of misinterpreting or ignoring what I see off-base, I suppose this is always happening everywhere. But what can one do, really?" Estella blotted her face with the ready neckerchief she kept not around her neck, but loosely knotted under her blouse's sleeve. "After all," she went on, walking along the broken road again with Kate, "the Yanks have given them schools and hospitals and vaccinations. I wish I could think of other ways to help, but priests and politicians have failed before us, I suppose. The other wives and I sometimes try organizing committees..." She shoved her hat back from her itchy forehead. "Oh, but surely one could do something." Even as she said these things she was embarrassed by her words, sure she sounded as naive as a beauty pageant contestant.

"Naturally, but nothing happens overnight or—" Kate shook her head and shook her purse as they walked— "over five-hundred years. And who can you blame? You'd have to go all the way back to the Spanish, their slaves. And the slaves of the Aztecs, too. And further, the Mayans, or Olmecs, I suppose, everyone is at fault..."

"I just wish..." Estella began to say, but Kate was tugging solicitously at her elbow and leading her on. They had suddenly come upon that outdoor theater done up as a marketplace, actually merely a makeshift arena barely held together with rusted chicken wire, corrugated tin, twine, rope, cables, and splintered wooden planks—Estella explained how the old mercado, a huge colonial meeting hall, architecturally important but in great disrepair, had recently been razed, supposedly for yet another luxury hotel, though a spate of inept terrorist attacks on the coastal resorts had damaged the tourist trade, and who knows what would happen now. No more permanent location had been decided upon for a new marketplace in this neighborhood than a cross-town barricade between the "old" and "new" sections of the city (which were, Estella came close to thinking but could not quite express, a little like Siamese twins trying to have as little to do with one another as possible).

"So much activity!" Kate remarked to Estella as they revolved with the crowd around the uneven block of shacks and stalls and stands. "I'll never be able to decide what to buy anyone now."

"Well, if you can't find anything here, there is the newer retail zone I was talking about before," Estella said hastily, with a tidy tug at her blouse, "over by the old imperial palace, on the Calle de los Reyes—Royal Road, you know, diplomats and diamonds—so now you see why I didn't want to—"

"Yes," Kate interrupted, pinching her hair under a copper band she had until then been wearing twisted around her upper arm. "I've done my Berlitz and lived near Manila. Calle de Reyes, 'Street of Kings.' But Mr. Shockley—"

"Of course, your promise. Very good, but we should be as quick as we can so we have time to get to a nicer, quieter part of—"

"Just for a moment? I think I see something I like." The truth was Kate wanted to get under some of the makeshift shade for a moment or two. Despite her appearance to Estella, as cold to the touch as the metal she wore, she felt as if she were dripping like a hot candle, and even beginning to feel a bit dizzy, not having been out of air-conditioned schoolrooms and government buildings and airports for this long in weeks. Still, she didn't want Estella to think she couldn't easily handle this place or the press of the crowd.

"Naturally, do what you must, Kate," Estella complied, sounding disappointed nonetheless. "But please don't touch the fresh fruit. If only someone had told me about that when I first came here..."

"Bueno, muy bueno!" Kate replied, using one of her readiest Spanish expressions, just to show Estella she hadn't been entirely bluffing. The truth was she hadn't ever gotten around to learning any Spanish until the past few weeks. No one required it at the international schools, especially in an elementary music teacher. Everyone everywhere knew English these days. Well, and so... The booth she sought shelter under sold boxes of Japanese candies, shoddy plastic gadgets made in Taiwan, and assorted gewgaws and knickknacks (were there Spanish equivalents for such awful words? she wondered); a row of several dozen small novelty mirrors hung in the shadows along the back wall, reflecting and dissecting various parts of her face and body and the jet-blue sky behind her the way small puddles might after a rain. Estella bent nearer, lower, and looked into these mirrors, too. Much like the shop windows before, they showed her too white, too plump, especially next to her too-thin companion, skin so tan and hair bleached almost platinum from the sun. Was I ever really that blonde and pretty, too? Estella asked herself. A long time ago when I first came to San Diego after the honeymoon? Would Kate end up looking like me if she stuck around here, shrinking from the sun, expanding in the rain, long enough? The girl was having a hard time finding something she liked, after all (in fact, was on the point of exposing Mr. Shockley as a fake and a liar), everything was so chintzy and nasty and nothing was native, so Estella thought it might hurry the proceedings if she bought something instead. "I do need a lipstick mirror," she told Kate apologetically, referring to one she had dropped and smashed a few days ago at the dance.

"Please, let me buy it for you," Kate said eagerly, waving Estella back and stepping up to the plywood counter. The slim dark youth behind the counter most likely knew at least enough English to broker transactions with rich and highly fleeceable vacationers, but Kate decided to demonstrate some of the Spanish she could command—for Estella's benefit, of course; the boy also appeared young and self-conscious enough not to bother parodying her. She said buenos días to him, and he smiled nicely and butterflied his hands along the rows of his merchandise. He had delicate feminine mannerisms but that common adolescent cockiness she recognized and was amused by. Unfortunately, he spoke much faster than her language tapes ever did, and soon their bargaining faltered and fell flat altogether. The boy smiled all the while, seemingly satisfied with having reduced her to sounding like a simpleton. Then Estella interrupted, and in Spanish so rapid-fire it might have been parakeet chatter she managed simultaneously to procure a mirror at a low price and politely if curtly put the child in his place.

"I am impressed! You speak like a native," Kate told Estella as they exited the booth, though in truth she was a little taken aback with the superior manner the woman had acquired in speaking to the boy; she was almost embarrassed for him, though they left him smiling just as widely as when they had first approached.

After glancing at her pasty face in the mirror before locking the tacky daisy-shaped thing in her handbag, Estella wiped her brow and cheeks again thoroughly with her neckerchief. She felt ashamed, too, for having shown off; the Spanish she could handle was strictly restricted to shops and restaurants; she wouldn't dare attempt it any elsewhere, even with Miguel.

"I'll never be able to talk like that," Kate told Estella. "I admit it now, I'm close to being a monolingual idiot, I'm afraid." In fact, she knew enough college French and musician's Italian to get by. Kent had recently bought her the unrequested language tapes as a present, as if they compensated for being uprooted yet again.

"I manage when I have to. When you're here as long as I've been," Estella was saying.

"Oh, but you can't have been here that long... I mean, you're not so, so—"

"Old?" Estella completed her sentence by turning it into a question. "Yes, I suppose fifty-six does seem old to a girl of your age."

Kate again readily demonstrated her musical, tinkling laugh. "Girl? I'll be thirty-seven any minute now."

"I'd have guessed you were barely out of your teens." Estella thought of Dawn, who would be twenty-four in two weeks. "Which reminds me, I must find my daughter a birthday present—she's crazy about handmade things, you know, ethnic and all that, something you and Mr. Shockley must understand better than I do." Already she was gravitating toward a booth that housed a menagerie of large particolored piñatas in animal and monster and cartoon shapes. She immediately heard Kate behind her back: a rapid stream of apologies.

"You don't have to do this for my sake, Estella. I've learned my lesson. I won't come here again. We'll hurry on. You were so right. And later I'll give Shockley a piece of my mind. I'm sorry if—"

Estella tapped Kate as if somewhere between her shoulder blades one might hit an "off" switch. "Don't worry," she said, "my daughter would also love something funny and fake-Latino. It's her sense of humor. And those piñatas look splendido. Probably made in Korea!"

Under the torn awnings Kate had taken off her sunglasses, and now her eyes looked small and meeker and paler than Estella had remembered. "Well, then, this time," Kate asked, "could I attempt my Spanish again—if you have the patience?"

"Of course, go ahead, try it out. The only way to really learn."

"Well, if I can..."

"What you want, ladies?" a voice chirped from the back of the booth, and they saw an elderly olive-skinned man, clean-shaven and bald as one of those sugar skulls they sold in the pastry shops here, rising from his stool in the corner. His vacant smile—he had no teeth—gave her a start, but Kate tried once more.

"Ah—por favor, cuanto cuesta?" she intoned slowly and forcefully, hoping to retain control of this conversation by any means.

"We got a lot, pretty lady," the old man said, his syrupy smile not once leaving his face; he waved away the flies from his eyes with a pass of a hand whose long, arthritic fingers held a burnt-out yellowish cigarette. "What you want?" He really did chirp, Kate thought; like so many people here, he had a high, childlike intonation—men's voices seldom matched the macho swagger of their demeanor. And which one did Estella want?

Estella pointed to a large red and green macaw. "Oh, dear," Kate said to her. The man leered at her, and she wouldn't have been surprised if he were to lean over the counter and caress her almost colorless hair. "Is there a word for 'parrot'?" she asked in an aside to her translator.

"Muy hermosa," the vendor said. "That mean 'very handsome,' dear ladies. Cost twenty conquistas. Very well-make bird." He took a futile drag from his burnt-out cigarette while the price sank in.

"Let me see," Kate said, trying to calculate the current exchange rates in her head, trying to determine how much the parrot was worth and would cost in real money, not these Monopoly bills stuffed in her wallet. Then she remembered it was Estella who was buying—she was already diving into her own bag—so this bargaining really didn't matter.

"Offer him ten," Estella said, obviously not caring if she were overheard. "My daughter loves parrots."

"But do you really want—" Kate began to ask, then turned back to the old man. "Ten. Diez," Kate stated more firmly than she had meant to. "For the ah... por el ave, the bird."

"Diez y ocho. Eighteen," the man countered, wearily smacking a fly with his palm. It was as if they had already played this scene a dozen times.

"Fifteen, then—quince—or is it catorce?"

"Quince," Mrs.Weir prompted, withdrawing a little vinyl coin-purse from her bag.

"Mrs. Weir, you know—" Kate said too late. "You should also think about—" But she saw that she must move aside as Estella stepped around her to a high table in front of the man. A chipped glass jar sitting there acted as his cash register.

"Fifteen, five-and-ten does good," the vendor said, already reaching for the coins Estella had dumped from her purse and was spreading before her on the table in an attempt to get the denominations straight. She had American mixed with the local and even a fifty-franc piece from last year's splurge. After all these years, she could still get confused when she felt rushed, and hated Kate seeing this confusion. She, who supposedly was such an old hand at all this. (So embarrassing for a math teacher!) The man swiftly slid a few coins away from her and lowered the oversize parrot from its hook above him.

"Oh, but I was hoping—I was hoping you might deliver," Estella said, putting coins back in her purse and then the purse back in her bag.

"You crazy, lady?" he said, at last stubbing out his cold cigarette on the table.

"Well, of course, I should have known," Estella said, hoisting the bird under her left arm, already feeling a tad ridiculous. "I should have been thinking, of course you don't deliver. Will I never learn? I am crazy, loco, I mean loca—but thank you. Gracias."

"De nada." And the old grinning man went back to his stool in the corner. "Muchas gracias, kind ladies. Muchas gracias, that mean 'thank you very very much.'" Estella watched his grin burst into a wild, idiotic, toothless smile and felt once again that she had been denied knowledge of a universal secret.

The women returned to the street and the sun (which stood alone in the sky but for a few distant clouds), the air above the hot white sidewalk discolored by smoke from piles of refuse burning in the gutters. The stench of rotten meat—worse than that, the stench of rotten meat frying in rancid oil—reached their noses and settled heavily in their stomachs. "You should have stopped me," Estella smilingly reprimanded Kate. "I didn't even think about having to carry this albatross around. It's grotesque. I must look a sight. Look at me—that old-time mariner's wife!"

"Why don't you let me?" Kate offered.

"No, no. It's actually not heavy at all—it's only made of tissue paper, after all, just a little awkward. I don't know how I'll ever mail it... My, there's another beautiful little child, poor thing."

A girl of about twelve with exceptionally long glistening hair was dashing toward them, holding out tiny straw objects she took from a sack slung over her bare brown shoulder. "You like? You like?" she cried. "Solo una conquista!" Something in her manner was reminiscent of a student actress making a promising debut; even the unnatural tilt of her chin toward the women suggested more of a girl portraying a homeless waif than the real thing. Kate decided the child was worth the money for her talent alone and pressed a coin of unknown value into her cool, ready palm. The miniature bouquet of straw daisies—yes, that would do—she pinned to her shirt with great pleasure, as one might a brooch on an evening gown.

"Really, you shouldn't," Estella said. "Marks the target."

"But you were right, she was so darling—and who knows? That coin might buy her a gallon of milk."

"Or a Cartier... Tsk, tsk, too late. The fleet has landed. Doesn't take long to spot a soft touch."

As Estella spoke, a small troupe of urchins, as if called from offstage ("Flies to honey," the older woman added), clamored to meet them with cries of "You like? You want? You buy?" Barefoot and dirty, they expertly acted the parts of street scamps: These were professionals, Estella realized, like those gypsy children who accost you at railway stations in Europe, and so she thought it necessary to appease them. Children here, she knew, were absolutely mercenary, even if it might not be their own fault. Once she had posed a tiny girl at the airport on Douglas's knee for a photograph and immediately the child had demanded an American dollar (none of the doubtful native coins for her). At least the children on this street offered little clay pots and braided fobs to legitimize their beggary; the smallest ones, big-bellied infants, really, just out of mother's reach, held up polished rocks and crystal-flecked gravel (which some of them were just now picking up from the pavement). Estella knew she must not appear miserly or mean herself, with Kate watching and unconsciously holding her own purse closer. Dutifully and democratically Estella took over and began to distribute small amounts of money among the children, though this promptly led to in-fighting (bad acting there), and she was relieved when Kate seized her elbow again and, like a swift ship towing a slower one, maneuvered her out of the ring of children, all squawking and squabbling like a flock of jays. The play-acting had turned into real scrounging, and Kate's initial delight (as she might have predicted) quickly soured into dismay. "But I do love children so," she said by way of an excuse, "probably because we never had any."

They had to walk briskly and suffer another flurry or two of clinging boys and girls before they managed to break free and relieved into open space. Estella observed the sky, mindful of miracles. A few heavy, rust-tinted clouds had cunningly moved across the sky to conceal the sun for a moment, but the sun had rapidly burned a hole through their center and now glared down on the earth all the more harshly. She could imagine the newly transplanted hybrid damask roses wilting in her garden, and she looked down upon her hands, almost fearing they, too, were turning brown and withering. No, her hands and arms were still white and fleshy, only faintly mottled.

They walked swiftly for a few minutes between blocks of demolished buildings and empty, half-burned lots—all ready for the renovation or reconstruction that would probably never come. Silence had once again descended upon the two women and the neighborhood itself. It was strange, Kate thought; one doesn't expect to see so much degeneration in a place that still seems unfinished in the first place... Estella was thinking now only of a nice, clean spot in the historical district (the first café she spotted would do) and a tall glass of agua de limon with maybe a kick of rum in it. And the silly piñata was still impossible to manage; it looked up and jeered at her with its outlandish bird-beak and glass-bead eyes. She wasn't about to force it on Kate (that would admit a kind of defeat), who strode along two or three feet ahead of her, neither sweating nor smiling, and she herself could not be bothered anymore to point out that over there Cortez had once once crossed with his caravans through what was now a lost tangle of banyans or that Pizarro had once rung up his Indian mistress at a broken door swinging into space. Even if those things might be true.

The ditch-weeds gave way to bougainvillea in the very next block, however, and both women were perplexed to find themselves so quickly on a quite charming little street—charming in a quaint faded way—walking past hole-in-the-wall gift shops and the grimy windows of cantinas. The people they passed now, couples holding hands and occasionally whole well-dressed families, seemed less interested in these two light-skinned intruders, busy as they were in conversations that might only be everyday business but had the lilt of flirtation or jollity. "How enchanting," Kate said to Estella, meaning nothing in particular. The rank smell of some unidentifiable offal, industrial antiseptics, and sewage in the barrio had, best of all, given way to a scent just as strong but pleasanter, of fried tortillas and tobacco and fresh donkey manure. Nervous yet cheerful music was playing on radios in doorways everywhere. Kate felt much better, on Estella's behalf. Touching her guide's arm, she said, gesturing, "Such nice flowers for a change."

"Plastic, of course," Estella said.

Kate swallowed a mouthful of air that tasted of cigars and perfume and peered closer at a window-box. "I must need glasses," she said, frowning at the artificially vivid orchids. "But even so, it's a thought. Just don't let anyone place artificial lilies on my tomb!" Immediately she regretted bringing up the subject of death, however obliquely. She watched Estella's eyes carefully.

"The real ones die so soon here," Estella said almost gaily—it was not the thought which enticed her, apparently, but a hand-loomed peasant dress with emerald-green quetzal birds embroidered on its sleeves, which she was now admiring in a smudgy storefront. Now, that was something Dawn might really like and wear. "Eighteen-hundred conquistas!" she said, and sighed. "Outrageous!"

Kate wasn't sure if Estella meant it was outrageously high or outrageously low and did not want to demonstrate her ignorance by asking. For her part, Estella would pass on the dress for the time being, but was feeling more energetic now that it was apparent they were getting nearer to the better shops. Maybe if she continued to go along with Kate's whims, really got to know and be friends with her, and learned what was considered "fun" by the younger women here, it wouldn't be so long before she, too, could start a new life in retirement and maybe even one day join that happy gang at the beach. Possibly with a younger generation around her she could regain some of the youth which had been drained since the bad and worse times with Douglas. Then again, Kate had said she didn't like beaches...

Striving to appear discriminating as well as open-minded, Kate slowed to peer into the windows of numerous shops and restaurants, but saw more of her own reflected face, lip-gloss dissolved and cheek-blush melting, than what was actually going on inside their secretive interiors. Both women passed, then paused beneath the series of archways leading to a prettily painted cantina, to decide if it might be an acceptable place for lunch—but there was no menu posted and the interior was so dark it might not be in operation; it might even be abandoned, despite the smell of something sweet frying within. The next open restaurant similarly revealed little to the casual onlooker. Perhaps it was too early or too late for lunch now. When did siesta begin, after all? As they walked in compatible silence Kate was also still wondering how she might approach the subject of Estella's husband's death. Obviously it was something she needed to talk about; the woman seemed to be in a kind of upheaval, and strangers (or near-strangers), she knew, could often coax emotions from those grieving or in a state of denial that would never be divulged to friends or relatives. Mr. Weir had been much older, she had heard, and probably no more attuned to his wife's temperament than most military men she had ever met. She was just about to ask if Mr. Weir still had in-laws here when her thoughts were intruded upon by her companion.

"Ignore them, if you can, dear," Estella said matter-of-factly before, lost in her plans for piercing the suppressed rage or sorrow of the widow, Kate saw what it was she was supposed to ignore: They had just turned a busy corner and there, reaching out of a window-well set in a basement only half below street-level was a thin dark arm, the wrist bent and twisted to display a wide white palm, like an exotic vine with a single pale bloom. It was an oddly elegant arm, at that, with its rhinestone rosary dangling from the crook of the elbow and an emerald-bright fly tracing its way down a golden vein, and it was a second or two before Kate, too, looked down into the well and saw the woman: wasted, anemic, gap-toothed, wrinkled, wrapped in a frayed serape and mindless of the naked baby squalling and clutching at her neck and breasts like a blind and newborn bird. The woman looked almost old enough to be the child's grandmother; even so, her hair was glossy indigo-black and she had a delicately featured, aristocratic face that neither pleaded nor asked; in fact, this begging seemed to be all the arm's doing while the woman herself remained indifferent, impassive. The child's eyes Kate had seen before, in a cowering spaniel's—she could almost not bear them, but the woman's dark unblinking impassive eyes were worse; it was as if she and this woman had shared a lifetime, that this woman had witnessed Kate's most shameful acts.

Estella stood a few feet back, arms crossed, chin in one hand. "It was unavoidable," she said, shaking her head. "I don't mean to sound cruel, but really, Kate, you've got to learn to pass them by. Otherwise it becomes a habit—when nine times out of ten you're supporting their habit. Believe me, when I first got here I thought I could save the country by doling out dimes, but it just doesn't work that way. If I were you..."

Kate was not listening anymore; she had already handed the woman an American five-dollar bill she'd found stashed in her pocket. Estella saw again that she must not appear unsympathetic or tightfisted to the newcomer. Before Kate could turn away, feeling that first flush of satisfaction the do-gooder feels (before one is again a little ashamed), Estella had settled the awful parrot at her feet (its side, she noticed, had been bashed in by the children) and was unbuckling her handbag. Kate seemed to be prompting her with loaded words: "To think what mothers have to do! All this overseas money going who knows where. I never saw anything like it, even in the worst barrios of the Philippines. Mothers and their children, their babies—I had no idea you had beggars like this here." Something inside Kate seemed to have broken loose and wantonly free in this new heat both women felt beating all around them.

Estella did what she could to protest and defuse. "Yes, you're right, but so does New York City. Or Des Moines, for that matter."

"But not mothers, not mothers with babes in arm, not in rags. Mr. Shockley or Kent or someone at customs should have prepared me. I guess like I said before it's just my soft spot, Kent and I never having been—having any of our own. My, my, I shouldn't be telling you that, should I? But you have a daughter, you must understand what I mean, what I feel."

"I do, I do, dear." The woman with the child (at last it was suckling quietly at an unquestionably dry breast) spat and turned her head from the women, watching the glittering green flies as they probed the child's ears and scalp. The woman did not attempt to shoo away the flies. She uttered not a thing. Her arm remained at attention, as if petrified that way: There had been fakirs at a stopover in Delhi with frozen, wizened limbs like that—or, Estella wondered, was she only remembering what she had seen a picture of in a book?

"Hasn't someone around here tried to do something about this sort of thing?" Kate asked, realizing how ridiculous she sounded, bad as Marie Antoinette. "Haven't they got somewhere to go?"

"All sorts of places. Missions and charities and the like. But these people like their freedom, like anyone else. And the shelters that do exist are probably more dangerous and depressing than living on the streets. Most of these people are insane or strung out on drugs or too sick to think straight or all three. They probably wouldn't want to—"

Kate was suddenly whispering. "Shh... I wonder if she understands English."

Estella decided to act nobly solicitous as well, if only in memory of Douglas, who had always been more susceptible if not more gullible than she had ever previously been (blame her mother's Puritan ancestry again). Douglas could easily give away over fifty dollars in a day if set free on these boulevards. In memory. That, and setting an example. "I know it'll never mean a thing five months from now or even five hours from now, but see you've convinced me I might remember it five years from now," Estella explained more than Kate thought necessary. Handbag open, Estella was rummaging inside for the small vinyl coin purse. Her fingers rifled through the bag, feeling and identifying each item instantly by shape and texture, but after a furious twenty seconds she withdrew her hand and began to shake—the purse was not there, and the coins and bills could not be found, either. "Oh, for Christ's sake!" she exclaimed, looking at her ridiculous gesticulating twins in Kate's sunglasses. That was not an interjection she normally used, and she feared how Kate with her church-going ways might react; maybe that was why her unconscious had chosen those words. Estella beat her fist against her thigh helplessly. "Something's happened to my money—it was all in my purse, I know that for a fact... and now it's completely gone!" She was tearing at the handbag violently now, turning it upside down, inside out, spilling the contents onto the sidewalk: lipstick, pills, pens, aspirin, address book, silk headscarf, extra hankies, tissues, safety pins, paperclips, more pills...

"Your new mirror." Kate stooped to pick up its broken shards (which she absently placed into Estella's hand) and deposited most of the rest of the things back into the handbag. "I'm so sorry. Please don't get upset, Mrs. Weir. It was just one of those children, obviously. It's all my fault for stopping. Thinking I'm Mother Teresa, getting myself all worked up. Some kind of vanity, really. I was afraid of looking—"

"Those children! Those grubby little lovelies. You mean to say you think they stole my money? I don't believe it. How could they? Well, I should have known they would." Estella retrieved a runaway tube of lipstick. God damn this place, a shrill unexpected voice inside her suddenly said. God damn this whole backward, stinking place where I've lived far too long. This place that killed my Douglas. My dear Douglas. She recognized whose voice it was immediately—it was the chirping, teasing voice of the bitter old man who had sold her the raggedy piñata. It was as if a ventriloquist were projecting his twittering voice into her brain; she knew it wasn't real, that she really didn't think it could be, yet the voice's parotting insistence shocked her. Maybe, Estella considered for a moment, I am going crazy, maybe it's the only way to escape from my fate as an old, unwanted widow in a forgotten land. Here I am crawling on the sidewalk of this city which I have known long enough not to be tricked by, crawling like a madwoman, searching for small change, my skirt hiked up and my hair a mess. Still on her hands and knees she saw through Kate's long legs two other obviously North American women across the street, at first glance so much like herself and Kate she wouldn't have been surprised if it were a reflection in another shop window. One of the women was younger and stouter, but they both wore ridiculous matching sombreros—certainly they weren't service wives or residents. The stouter one fished something out of her big shoulder bag and quickly, quite surprisingly, and to Estella's unbearable horror, half-squatted and snapped a picture of the two women opposite.

No sooner had the camera clicked than she could imagine herself projected onto a suburban living-room wall a week or two from then, the tipsy young hostess laughing with her guests at the overweight lady down on all fours next to a monstrous papier-mâché parrot. The sights one sees, the things people do in uninhibited foreign countries! Unbearable. Did people still give slide-shows like that? But for now the women across the street waved (could they know Kate?) and withdrew into the crowd like extras in a movie whose duty it is to perform some trifling yet significant function before retreating into anonymity. Estella felt like screaming at them, charging like a rhinoceros into their bellies, knowing how primitives who fear their souls' capture on film feel. And she felt like crying.

Instead, she remembered where she was and rose demurely to her feet; Kate made as to seem to have noticed nothing and was already a few feet down the broad sidewalk, carrying her guest's bag as bait.

"Don't worry. Here's your bag, let me carry it a while, I insist. But we really must make good time now, I'm afraid, if we're to get to that stupid party, Mrs. Weir, I mean, Estella," she said, fluttering the tips of her free hand's fingers. Kate realized she was rattling on, talking faster and faster to make up for the lingering awkwardness of what had just happened. "Oh, but don't tell anyone I think parties like that are stupid. Maybe it will be educational, even fun... Which cathedral did you say you wanted to take me to? And then there's the question of lunch. No sense doing any more shopping now—no time, anyhow. I can buy souvenirs any time. That damn party—you know better than I how those military wives are more punctual than their husbands..." Rattle, rattle, rattle. "But then you must know how boring these affairs always are. I'll admit it—boring. Boring! As boring as I am!" Beyond Kate's tall slim figure, above the trees and buildings, Estella (who could only hear a string of words as senseless as birdsong) saw that the clouds she had noticed gathering forces earlier seemed to have oxidized right through and were already threatening to rain rusty reddish flakes upon their heads. But she could still see the hateful sun, shining weakly like a dull gold coin—unknowable currency—through the shifting cumulus layers.

"I still can't believe it was those children—I must have dropped the purse myself, stupid me, I'm always dropping things," Estella said loud enough only for herself to really hear, and yet not really believing her own words. She had bought the piñata, given that awful man his money, walked away... "Yes, let's see," she went on a bit louder. "I was counting my coins and I know I had something like thirty dollars' worth of American money left, though it's so hard to tell sometimes and I'm so stupid, stupid, stupid. Was it forty conquistas or forty coronas?"

"You're not stupid, Mrs. Weir, and if you'd like we can report it to the police or even the MP's. But we can guess how much good that would do." Kate simply wanted to forget the whole matter and have a large fattening lunch and maybe while away the siesta hours the way everyone else here did. But Estella could not yet halt her self-recriminations.

"I remember getting ready to put my purse back into my bag when those children came running up. I was about to, I was about to, but then I started handing out coins, then I, then I don't exactly remember..." Did she remember? Did she remember a small agile hand squeezing the soft vinyl purse, snatching it from her own hand with so little pressure as to be unnoticed? Or was she just imagining it, giving into the more popular, jaded scheme of things? Was she a bigot?

"Well, it's not the first time it's happened," Kate was agreeing, wishing they could just say one or two last incontrovertible things and then forget it all. "And it won't be the last. I am honestly sorry—I shouldn't have taken you off course, it's partly my fault, I shouldn't have tried to act like Jesus with the loaves... Please don't take it too hard. Or too personally. We all just naturally learn you can't even wear a decent watch in some parts of this godforsaken world. Once in Manila..." Kate, her golden hair and glasses glinting even in the subdued sunlight, put as little value in her words as her companion did in listening to them. And she wondered why she should be lecturing this older and more experienced woman. Estella looked respectfully, even reverently, upon Kate, nonetheless. The younger woman shone before Estella like some gleaming trophy representing hope and future and change, and Estella wondered why she had this sudden intense desire to run screaming from Kate's image as fast as she could.

And around and around in her brain, culled from some forgotten movie or play, whirled and chirped and chirruped a high-pitched phrase so hateful and tainted and alien to her she knew it could not be her own: Like dogs, like dogs, like filthy dogs...

She told herself she must stop it.

"And even if we went back now—" Kate was droning on as if from a great distance, as if from those thickening clouds— "where would we look? Who would we accuse? It's got to be all spent by now, no matter whose hands it's in... You see, they can't help but look upon us just like so many of the Filipinos I've met, as the evil American imperialists who replaced the evil Spanish imperialists, and they're right, but when you're—"

Like dogs, like dogs—Stop! Estella told herself.

Looking down at her left hand, she saw as if through another being's eyes that it was bleeding. She unclenched her fist and shook the pieces of mirror onto the ground. The cuts were not deep, but she had bled a fair amount, and now she was conscious of a new kind of pain. Thankfully Kate had not seen, so she was able to discreetly wrap her palm with her kerchief.

"And it could have been so much more," Kate went on from her faraway clouds. "It could have been—"

"Please, you're right, and I'd just as soon not think about it anymore," Estella told the girl—the young woman—while hiding her wounded hand behind her back. A change had come upon her like this fresher breeze blowing in from the sea. Curiously enough, her mind was now refreshingly blank, free, and she felt more than a little assuaged, even absolved, as if the sting and blood from the broken glass had washed away all her anger.

"Good," Kate punctuated her thoughts. "Spilt milk and all that."

Only then, just as it began to gently rain (it was not hot reddish flakes and neither was it ash and cinders after all, but big cold drops) and their ambling gait turned into a trot, did Estella remember the parrot left several blocks behind: She pictured the fringed-paper feathers unfurling—red running into green, the beak curling under, the glass-bead eyes coming unglued, and ultimately the street children who would come to break the clay pot inside and gobble up the candies, like ants at a picnic. (And where had she left her hat—back there among those gimcrack mirrors?) It all seemed so sad, and yet it was funny, really. That absurd macaw, melting into the rain, the singing children, the shiny taffies scattered about...

"Good to see you smile again," Kate said as they waited for a donkey cart, seemingly semitransparent and mirage-like in the drizzle, to cross the road. Kate had taken off her sunglasses for good, and her near-sighted blue-gray eyes were after all sympathetic, were after all just a young girl's. With her snubby nose and bobbed hair tousled by the wind and rain, she again looked to Estella too young to be a government engineer's wife, more like a giggly twelve-year-old romp of a girl. She said something about raincoats and memory, but half her words were lost in the increasing downpour—and Estella wasn't really listening, anyway.

"Sorry for acting like a fool, a complete fool," Estella shouted to Kate as they hugged closer to the buildings lining the street to avoid the worst of the weather. "Do you think it could be just the labor of having to start over again, doing things on my own, do you think maybe that's it?" She needn't explain to Kate what she meant by "starting over again." No question she had heard.

Kate missed some of what Estella was implying. She had her own story of struggle to tell. "Of course. I was a wreck when I first came to Guam, hardly went off the base my first year. I cried whenever I saw a bug I thought wanted to eat me. And I despised seeing a military uniform. I hated everything, especially the United States outside of the United States. Kent—well, Kent didn't see things that way. But he always did treat me like a child then, when he was still young and I was younger. I missed home. I missed my mother. But I had my classes and my music, to forget—" For the first moment all day, Estella saw Kate lose some of her luster, expose parts of her own self that were just as tarnished as anyone else. "Let me tell you something, Estella," she went on, as the rain began to trickle down from the eaves above them. "First, do you think it's wrong to tell someone what your prayers are, or who they're for? Not that I'm superstitious or even that religious. Well, you know, when we were back at the church..."

"Pray for that child," Estella had to interrupt the girl, not wanting her to rub off any more of her shine— "if you pray at all. Pray for what's to be done, not for what was. Or who someone once was." She took Kate's hand on a dry doorstep and held it for a moment. In another moment they would be back out under the torrent. "I've been thinking and praying in my own way for a lot of things myself—this place, the rain, you, my garden... Too much on my mind. And you've been such a splendid person to show around, while I've been such a burden, such a bore—"

"No, no, I'm the—oh, dear, when did you lose your hat? I should have noticed sooner."

"Tell me, do you garden? No? Then let me teach you! Please. My own daughter would never—a strong young woman like you... This rain will revive everything, you wait and see. It's wonderful! Oh, it's all too much, too, too..."

Once again Estella felt like crying, though exactly why or for what this time she didn't know. She wiped the rain from her eyes with the back of her swaddled hand. They had been hurrying through muddy, deserted streets, hopping puddles and ruining their shoes, and now they were all at once in a small park with an old fountain filled with marble children, children with wings—they could fly far away from here, she thought must be their lesson, but can't because they are made of stone. And then there was a tree laden with orange and scarlet blossoms, what is called a flamboyant, its branches spreading over the mist rising from the fountain's pool, the most beautiful tree she had ever seen; it flared up before them like a torch as they ran, and the rain was like a healing salve.

"I see Royal Road to our left!" Kate exclaimed above the downpour, pausing to cinch her sandals. "It'll lead us straight back to the base if you want. We can do the rest another time. God, we'll look a mess. Oh, this rain—why didn't I at least think of umbrellas? Why—but Estella, what on earth happened to your hand?"

"Yes!" Estella shouted, moving on ahead of Kate. "The rain! The rain!" She walked on through the cool overhanging leaves of the orange and scarlet tree as if she were walking through fire.
Hic et Nunc

They had always been the closest of friends, as much alike as true friends can be, yet worlds apart in various unpredictable ways. When they were very young their similarities and mutual interests had naturally enough excited them, but as they grew older differences became a little more important, more compelling. Growing up together is a kind of marriage, though old friends know certain things about one another—secrets, if you like—that even future spouses may never learn or understand. Errol for instance knew what the faint scar like a lightning-stroke tattoo running down the length of Kurt's left hip meant—he had been there at the quarry when they were both eleven, when the rock-ledge and the pain and the blood had blurred into one in his own mind, as well; in not too dissimilar a manner Kurt knew how the name of Errol's first girlfriend (a reckless redhead from their eighth-grade homeroom) must never be mentioned, for she had branded his heart and left him to die. Anyone could have guessed, if anyone had wanted to, that Kurt revealed to Errol the shape and size of every fear he'd ever invented or encountered, from the spooks little boys see just outside their bedroom windows to more grievous insecurities he had about his adolescent longings, and Errol had never questioned the reality of those fears or Kurt's sincerity. Kurt was tall even as a child, rangy, gangly, hopeless at sports; Errol had the bulldog physique of a rugby player but preferred books and music. Consequently neither boy was the among the most popular in their small school—such honors always go to athletes and comics—but neither were they disliked; they were always simply "those two," indivisible. Their lives were as merged as tide with ocean, and the memories of one were the memories of the other. Together they had huddled under a dinghy on Stark's Point during the greatest hurricane of their youth and lived to tell, together they had discovered the greatest possible earthly joy in junior varsity orchestra, together they had gone to Paris on the senior-year trip and gotten drunk on the banks of the Seine and had sworn they'd never ever come home again, and together they constantly argued about the meaning of life and somewhat more trivial things, sometimes to the point of not speaking to each other for an entire half a day. Their families too thought of them as inseparable as brothers, almost like twins who looked nothing alike; their other friends were often jealous; their few rivals or enemies (those who did not win debating awards or missed the Honor Roll) denigrated them equally, as if they were one being—which even they sometimes believed they might be, in a sense. They had never failed one another, and yet ... even the best of friends invariably grow older and start to drift apart. Sometimes it is true that such friends may only become closer given a few years and a few parallel struggles, along with the chance to explore the world and other relationships awhile, on their own—even if experience teaches us that more often than not those boats keep drifting, over the horizon, toward opposite hemispheres. But Kurt and Errol promised each other when they went off with great misgiving to separate colleges (one for mathematics, one for English) that they would never neglect each other: No matter what, no matter where they roamed, they would remain bosom buddies forever, only a letter or phone call or email apart. Life was long and they had many decades ahead of them to keep fanning what they hoped would be the bright and eternal flame of their friendship. It was that kind of profoundly platonic love.

So here they were, both of them twenty-three. Errol was out of college, a cub reporter on a family-run weekly newspaper far up in easternmost Maine; and Kurt, who had suddenly dropped out of Amherst just weeks before he would have graduated, was back home on the Cape, washing dishes at his aunt's diner in the village until he knew what he wanted to do next. It was late winter now, still quite cold but almost spring, and Errol was visiting his family for a three-day weekend; he hadn't seen Kurt since Christmas, when Kurt had seemed happy again and it felt almost like old times. They had stayed up all night then talking and philosophizing and often laughing, listening to music and playing peculiar duets for trumpet and bassoon (both of them badly out of practice), parting only when a clock-alarm went off somewhere and Kurt's mother came down to the basement rec room to tell them they'd kept the whole family awake for hours. But she seemed somehow glad for that and gave Errol a special kiss on his cheek when he left at last. That was over two months ago now, and there had been only one exchange of old-fashioned handwritten letters and no electronic messages or phone calls, for one reason or other, since. (Long post-holiday missives like the most recent ones were becoming a tradition with them; the rest of the year they most often sent each other postcards between short letters, Errol's cards usually of vintage views of subjects such as sunrise on Mount Katahdin, carefully selected from collections in used bookstores, while Kurt's were invariably kitschy scenes of their hometown, designed for tourists and bought in local tourist shops.) There had been several such silent periods like this one in the recent past, however, when both of the young men had been very busy with this or that, and so the silence had not seemed so unusual—although this time it had lasted twice as long as any before.

It's happening again, Errol remembered that last handwritten letter from Kurt began; as usual Kurt dispensed with salutations, jotting only the date and place he wrote from at the top of the yellow lined legal paper. When it came to correspondence, the two had agreed at Christmas-time that they were becoming as old-fashioned as their grandparents, eschewing computers when they were so readily available, with no implied hurry to shoot off an answer immediately—although Kurt's failure to respond after two months to Errol's heartfelt last letter had been just a little upsetting (Errol and his new girlfriend had been going through a rough patch, and he could have used the support and encouragement of an old friend). But never mind that; Errol knew it would be better to talk in person after so long, that Kurt most likely would seem like his old cantankerous self once the two young men sat apart from one another, mugs of hot chocolate warming their hands on a cold morning, just like old times, just like things had always been.

It's getting harder and harder for me to stay in the so-called "hic et nunc," Kurt's letter had continued (Errol hadn't memorized it, but thoughtfully kept the letter, as he did all his friends' correspondence, and even brought it with him down from Lubec). You know what I mean, hic et nunc, something something in Adorno, Wittgenstein maybe, sounds so much more eternal you might say than just 'here and now,' because it's all about really existing in my present indicative tense, I think you'd tell me. Remember Barny, second semester French? Anyhow somebody said something smart somewhere about finding this stillness within you, outside time and space. But finding it or trying to find it means you get kind of out-of-touch. Like, I look at my mother and she asks me something simple, no hidden modus operandi, you know, maybe just pass the chowder, and I answer back "ok" but feel like I'm answering back from a long time ago already. Or did answer, already answered. Is that confusing? Maybe because I've done it so many times before. Maybe because she doesn't even need an answer. But it's deeper than just that, this feeling that I'm not really right here, right now, that I'm watching what's come and gone as well as what's about to happen. And nothing seems to be part of what's really happening at this very moment, you know what I mean? When you were here last I just couldn't help thinking, he's already out the door and driving back north in that rickety car with no heat, already asleep in his bed far away, already at your monitor in that little office they gave you—even when you were talking and I could see you right in front of me—there's no way I can stop time and yet I'm no longer here talking to him, either. To put it another way, I feel like time is moving so fast that once I notice something it's already part of the irreversible past and it's only the ghost of me thinking this or seeing the ghost of that other person who's left the me who is me behind. I know I'm not making much sense to you with your new analytical journalistic mind, but this is why I can't really concentrate now on books or advanced quantum equations or dialectical materialism or the news of the world or anything else. Except maybe still music since it exists kind of outside of time, you can't physically or mentally divide or hold it in your mind as a whole, either, if you think about it. It's like putting mercury under a microscope and my mind feels liquid like mercury these days. I just can't get down to the final essence or solution. Zeno's arrow, right? Divisible, indivisible, invisible. It's not that I'm muddled up, though I know I'm sounding like it and I've had way too much caffeine tonight—and I've just been trying these new pills that quack down in Cambridge prescribed for "your mid-level depression." My mother is relieved to give it a name. She's seen it in commercials. Side-effects include... But I've never felt what you might call depressed, believe me. I'm thinking of flushing the rest...

A little later on the letter became even more disturbing:

It's not like when that German poet, remember, what's-his-name, saw himself ahead of himself up on the road on horseback or at his future wife's window, though, and I don't think I've been or anyone else has been replaced by an impostor, though I've considered that. That's got a name, you know? I mean, I don't believe in doubles or even fake doubles. It's more like I'm haunted by myself. That's fucked up, I know, and you can call me that. But I look in the mirror sometimes and I'm afraid what I might say to that person I see who's already turned from the mirror and just left this ghost-image behind. Or closer to what I imagine, what that person in the mirror might say to me. You see, the speed of light isn't as fast as time, and whatever we see, whatever hits our retinas, has already existed, already passed. Just because of our slow bio-mechanical makeup we can't keep up with time any more than light can. It's a losing battle. Every morning when I open my eyes I think to myself, "This moment has already come and gone. And I may as well already be dead, because I can't travel any faster than this light to meet my future self, who might even be dead already. In fact, has to be dead." Please don't think I'm crazy too or anything like suicidal, Err, because once you think enough about it you'll see what I mean: the present moment is an illusion (I'm not getting all New Age bullshitty on you) and everything we pretend to know is just based on things that have already happened, like the shadow that just moved across my arm, the yellow light tickling the hairs there, and that clock in the hall that just chimed, none of it can be changed. I'm getting old, older with each second. I've got to get outside myself somehow...

Late in the afternoon of his last day back home, at the windblown ragged edge of the woods, Errol paused to listen to music that seemed to be inhabiting like muffled birdsong the darkening pines amid the snowdrifts. So faint the sounds could almost be his own imagination—for what shape did those rising chords take, and where was the resolution? Notes seemed to rise with the wind and then sink into deep drifts. Errol almost hesitated to walk any further, both because he knew he would be surprising Kurt perhaps unfairly, and also because the invisible orchestra, the silhouetted trees, the black granite outcroppings, the snow, the gathering soft gray light of dusk in early March and the silver-gold rectangle of light before him seemed all of a piece, a small perfection it would perhaps be wrong to disturb. To proceed any further would be like throwing a pebble into a still pond. In a few minutes Errol would find out that it was Debussy's Images—the beginning of the long "Iberia" section, to be precise—that had been playing when he knocked on the door of Grandfather Kerela's little stone hideaway deep in the woods behind the family's house. The old man, a Sunday painter who boasted that he had never been as far south as Boston, had left his old console stereo in the studio (once one of the many saunas erected on the Cape by Finnish masons a hundred or more years ago), along with piles of slightly warped phonograph albums—things no one else had seen any value in when they divvied up the legacy. Kurt had soon fixed the old place up, painting and insulating it and replacing the wood stove with an electric heater. He had even located a new stylus for the console. Walking down the Kerelas' lane a bit earlier (after a mixup at work meant that he would have to leave too early the next morning for a visit then), Errol had thought about how Kurt always used to like to study during semester breaks out in that hut among the scrub oaks and stunted pines, with a view through the grimy mullions toward the quarry they always obliquely called "Mecca" because it was bent between steep granite cliffs like a crescent. Inside was a daybed, a large desk and mini-fridge as well, and a primitive outhouse attached to an ell in the back; sometimes the rest of the large Kerela clan wouldn't see Kurt for days when he disappeared into his theoretical physics and trigonometry textbooks. So Errol had not been surprised to hear the wavering, drifty music and was glad at least that Kurt was back to his old happy habits.

This afternoon Errol came bearing a bag of junk food from the local Mini Mart and a jug of microbrew ale he'd brought from "Down East," and Kurt seemed neither surprised nor to mind the interruption; he hugged the friend he hadn't seen in far too long and swiftly poured them both tumblers as the skittish strings sought their peace with the more restive woodwinds, now at a lower volume. They uttered the customary friendly insults and laughed when some ale frothed over and were glad just to look each other in the eyes again. It had been too long. Errol had new "shy scientist" glasses and a week's worth of scruffy beard he was thinking of keeping, while Kurt had buzzed off most of his coarse blonde curls so he wouldn't sweat so much in the hot little diner. They looked different, but they seemed the same; everything around the "island"—what townies called this storm-battered cape barely connected to the mainland—was virtually unchanged, they agreed, munching more broken pretzels and washing it down with the somewhat cidery ale. True enough, next summer repairs on the bridge to the "other world" (everything that lay beyond the causeway) would commence, and old Loblolly Cove High might be turned into a charter school. Some off-islanders had begun building huge brick monstrosities along the rocky coast, where humble wood-frame cabins and cottages had stood for three-hundred years. Jodie Benson's father had died unexpectedly and someone had broken into the Atwoods' house, but everything else was basically the same as it had been in December and every other December they could recall. Kurt talked about how Manny still did his "lobster dance" slow days at the diner and how the midwinter blizzard knocked out the power long enough for everything in the big freezer to spoil despite the cold. That, and his mother was still pestering him about this or that and why didn't he go back to school. But he liked the slow pace of the diner in the off-season, he said, because it allowed him to think. Errol recounted a long complicated story about a millworkers' strike and how his bosses, the old married couple, had almost come to blows when they took opposing editorial sides; he'd already told the details to half a dozen people before and so he was paying less attention to his own words than to Kurt's reactions. Was there anything different about his friend? Were his self-conscious blue-gray eyes a little more distant or his hands fidgeting a little too much on his desktop? It was all so hard to tell—with his blue skater-boy flannel shirt and newly shorn head he looked more innocently lamblike, maybe, and nothing more. Eventually his account tapered off and Errol found himself just looking at Kurt, the fatal awkward pause filling up the shack just as the music, which had accelerated in fantastic rhythms and then died, paused between tracks, too. It appeared Kurt had not been listening to Errol at all; at least he had no response to make this time.

Errol was good at filling such empty spaces with observations about the weather and international politics. This time he found something to say about the new president and the old, unlamented one. What would Congress be up to and would the wars ever cease? In a minute or two they were both grinning and guffawing again despite the sobering subject matter, the piano played a curiously elusive counter-melody to their laughter, and it was as if neither of them had ever stared into the awful void of that momentary silence. "And what about that girl, Elise?" Kurt asked carefully when the record eventually hurled itself into the ineffable (Errol had really only noticed the music again when it stopped.) "Is she still covering the courtroom beat with you? You still like her?" It was as if he hadn't even looked at Errol's last letter.

"Oh, sure, sure," Errol said rapidly, not wanting to get into that again just yet—it would still be better to sound out Kurt's own pensive desires. He collapsed back into the mildewed cushions on the daybed with a sigh, while Kurt sat opposite him in the one chair, though it wasn't clear if it was the metal seat that made his posture so unnaturally stiff, at such an oblique angle. Errol tried to explain: "She's pretty and smart and a lot of fun, but she's always, you know .... She wants to maybe go back to school now because she says papers are dying. Once in a while she stays over, but I don't think it'll ever be anything too heavy duty. I mean, she's always—" and then he brought himself up short. The room waited, intent. I don't want Kurt to sidetrack me, Errol thought as he watched his friend jump up and then gently lift the record from its spindle, flip it, and put the needle down just as gently on the other side. This day he had promised himself to fathom just how bad things really were with Kurt, his oldest and best friend. "I suppose Maine is full of other possibilities. What about Amherst?" he asked, changing the subject as subtly as he could, which was not much, fearing all the answers would be the same as last time. "Are you thinking any the more of maybe taking a summer course or something, just so you keep your mind active, you know, until you go back? If you go back, I mean. I don't want to sound like your mother or older sisters."

Kurt gestured toward the stacks of notebooks on the corroded steel office desk below the window and the books in the makeshift shelves opposite and shrugged. There were a lot of facts and figures crowding his head, he told his friend, too many ideas and too many mutable issues to think straight just yet. He pronounced "mutable" very distinctly, like a word he had just picked up. There were matters like the curvature of space or the changing speed of light or even the hypothetical solidity and permanence of sound, like the very music they were now hearing—it was all very post-Einsteinian and really old-hat, the philosophy too, but he had to figure it out first before moving on. Brane cosmology, too, the four-dimensional universe. "Brain? Like, it's all just inside our brains?" asked Errol, nearly flummoxed. "No, brane, membrane, you brain," Kurt countered in that purposefully absurdist way he'd perfected as he'd grown older, and drove his discourse onward. Scientists were saying now that when we die we might just relive our lives all over again, though it's not that either, it's not reincarnation, because time is naturally only a human concept, just another false dimension, really. Hadn't Errol ever felt that way about it, too? The question is could we, in a counter-empirical sense, walk around in our past life looking into various years or hours like different rooms and spooking our former selves, or is the consciousness forever trapped in the prison it has already made of time? Errol smiled, trying to be amused and as usual not certain how seriously Kurt wanted to be taken. Ever since they were kindergartners Kurt had liked to imagine wild, iconoclastic things happening and then try to prove there was no logical reason such things couldn't be so. He had once convinced Errol for a full weekend that aliens were already on earth, and they were called humans. At the moment Kurt was no longer looking at Errol or anything else in the room. Instead, his eyes were fixed, it seemed, at some invisible point in the distance beyond that one wide north-facing window. He might have also been humming one of the unhummable phrases from this side of Debussy. "It's all too much to process! Man, I could use some air," Kurt said, standing up and halting his own abstractions, as well as Errol's sidelong observations. All at once Kurt was his old fairly rational self again. "Want to go for a walk before it gets too dark?" It was only then that Errol realized how dimly lit the little room had grown and wondered why neither of them had thought to turn on the spring-armed architect's lamp.

"Oh, it might do us both good, I suppose," Errol said, reluctant anyhow to leave his unfinished drink and the warmth and comfort of Grandfather Kerela's soft, sagging daybed.

A new expression came over Kurt, something more benign and what might even be called charming, which he could still be. And yet his following words seemed to Errol a bit calculated, a bit disingenuous. "That's exactly what I was hoping we could do, Err. There's something I've really been needing to show you. Something you'll know what to think about better than I can. I hope it's still light enough. I'll bring a flashlight, in case." Towering over him, Kurt looked to Errol again like something big, awkward, and yet childlike—with that haircut and his dirty corduroys and the crooked grin he'd known for so long. Kurt was already pushing his way into his parka, and on the way out the door grabbed a king-size windup flashlight from the windowsill. Errol still had on his plaid hunter's jacket with the quilted lining, so he followed right behind, a little disappointed they hadn't talked about books and listened to some more music first before getting around to more of what was truly troubling his friend. Still, he wanted to give Kurt the space and time Kurt needed to prove he was one thing or another; anything more specific than that, Errol could not yet say.

It seemed to have grown much colder in the short time they had been talking, but a break in the clouds and the low slant of the sun through the trees now actually made the world somehow brighter, the shining snow ablaze with those diffused rays. A path—still visible in ground that had frozen, melted, and refrozen—led from the hut toward the inner wilderness of the island; and along it a chain of small abandoned quarries, each now layered with greenish ice, meant that the rocky way must rise and fall and bend and twist to make the passage possible. At points there were frozen rivulets to cross and fallen limbs to either duck under or surmount. Both young men knew the path very well and probably could have negotiated it even at midnight, though there was always the danger of slipping and falling, and hence their progress was slow. First they walked along and past "Mecca," now an obscure oblong of broken floes between gray shoulders, and then higher up to where a stand of silver-barked beeches stood like a frozen corps of shivering dancers clinging to the last of their fraying leaves. When the trail grew fainter and more indeterminate, Kurt switched on his flashlight, though sundown's radiance had yet to fade and their footing was still secure. Errol wanted to talk, wanted to say anything to divert or calm Kurt's quick-darting mind, but could not think of a thing to say that would not sound misdirected and irrelevant in these somber and darkly beautiful surroundings. If only he could plant just the right word like a camouflaged device, wait, and watch Kurt acquit himself of whatever scared them both, or else... The young men's boots scrunched in the dirty snow, while with screams and hurrahs a flock of crows was settling for the night into a copse of black hemlocks, those same quaking beech leaves sounded afar like muted chimes in the wind, the not-so-distant waves could be more felt than heard as they heaved against this granite-bound island and sounded its anchored bells, and still no words were said. For a lingering moment Errol wanted to draw Kurt close and halt the frightening future from approaching any nearer. He wanted Kurt to know he loved and believed in him, always would, and always would remember this, remember everything. Instead of speaking or moving nearer, he followed Kurt around another bend, through groves of twisted sumac with their velvety antlers raised high and across thorny webbings of catbriar briefly set afire like the snow by the sunset's flickering afterglow.

The stone outcroppings ahead were so steep and so close on either side it was like entering an unchartable canyon. In the daylight, in summer, Errol would have recognized this place and known well the contour of every fractured boulder, but now it was as if they had trespassed into a strange and foreign land. The trees, towering wolf pines that might have outlasted both Pilgrims and patriots, grew so close together that it was hard passing between the boughs that swept almost to the ground and tickled their necks with icy fingers. Snow could not penetrate beneath, so here lay exposed the thick, spongy mattress of moss and pine needles that always made Errol think of frog princes and lost princesses in fairy tales. In that dark hushed place, in that evergreen even-gloom, Kurt switched on his flashlight at last. Once out of the old-growth forest the hikers ascended still higher, back into the half-light and through successive geological ages. Soon they were on a barren ridge that looked down into a valley like a bowl, holding a nearly round "motion," one of those quarries that had been tentatively excavated and soon abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century. You could still see marks of the chisels and holes once drilled for dynamite sticks in the granite underfoot. The sides of the bowl were sheer acclivities of icy steps, dangerous if not impossible to descend. Errol was glad that Kurt now signaled them to stop and balanced himself against a tree stump, training his flashlight on the scene below like a hunter fixing his aim. "Look close," Kurt whispered, and Errol crouched on the cold ground, among pebbles where the snow had drifted and where alpine flowers would bloom in the coming spring. "See him?"

At first Errol couldn't understand what he was meant to see—was this the kind of game they used to play as boys? The narrow, nervous beam reflecting off the rock-face did not help much, for night was nearly upon them. The clouds seemed to have at last absorbed most of the light reflected from the snowy earth. Winter's quietude had once again filled the landscape, no birdsong of course, not even a crow or gull. It was hard to see much more than grayish shadows against a grayer backdrop of stone and pine and ice. Then Kurt got his sights set more steadily, and Errol saw something vivid yet pale flicker against a scrub-covered outcropping, like a large white fluffy moth. "What is it?" Errol whispered, the way Kurt had. So as not to disturb the silence or not to alert the one living thing below?

From a pocket inside his coat Kurt produced field glasses that Errol knew were vintage Korean war, Grandfather Kerela's. Errol took them, removed his own misted-over glasses, and pinched up his eyes to look into the lenses, yet still could not make out much but two shifting monochromatic circles; with numb fingers he adjusted the glasses until the circles merged, and the scene presented itself: flapping clumsily from ledge to ledge above the quarry seemed to be a large white bird. "An albatross of some kind?" asked Errol, who despite all his learning did not know much about birds and their habitats or habits.

Kurt chuckled to himself and sniffled, and at the same time Errol noticed their clouds of frozen breath. "It's a snowy owl, Boy Genius," he said, "not something for the Ancient Mariner to wear. They come down from the Canadian tundra when it's cold enough, you know, and when they're good and hungry." He was winding the flashlight as he talked, then he thrust it into his friend's free hand, to juggle with the binoculars. Pure bright rays of LED light bounced across the rocky arena.

Errol redoubled his efforts to see clearly the movements of the bird as it hopped upwards and then downwards, sideways in one direction and then the other. "What's it doing way down there? Catching field mice?"

"Look closer. No, closer. See its wing?"

With concentration Errol was able to see that the bird was dragging one wing as it beat its heavy body against the slippery cliffside in an apparent attempt to lift itself up and out of the pit. It was at least a hundred feet away, most of the distance downhill. With even more concentration, or more imagination, Errol was able to perceive a black spot, most likely dried blood, on the wounded wing that thrashed uselessly at its side. "How long has it been like this?" he wondered.

Kurt was sitting on the stump, stamping his feet and warming his fingers in his pockets. His rabbitlike sniffling had become a constant. Always too thin and scrawny for the cold. "I first saw it morning before last when I was cutting through here on the way to the east harbor. I don't know how long it was here before that, but I figure it broke its wing diving after something on the surface of the quarry—maybe its own reflection in the ice."

"It's survived that long? With this freezing weather?"

"Well, they are arctic birds. Maybe it managed to find something to eat down there and keep its body temperature up. I threw it some hamburger this morning but I don't think it was too interested or could reach it. Man, I'd really like to go down there and rescue it, but the slopes are just too steep and icy. Even someone from the fire department or the humane officer wouldn't be able to reach it with a net, not as though they'd care." Kurt had his chin in his hands now and from what Errol could see of his face he was not crying, though his nose was running and his features were growing flushed and contorted. Maybe just from the cold.

"It's pretty awful," Errol said, still watching the bird as it raised itself a few inches up the rock-face, only to slide downwards again, its useless wing trailing behind. It didn't make a hoot, but then Errol could recall that eerie feeling a great horned owl will give you when flying straight over your head without so much as a whistle in the wind. For a few minutes they both watched the bird wandering in and out of the spotlight afforded by the flashlight's unsteady beam, though seemingly oblivious of it. Once in a while the enormous unblinking eyes flashed like headlamps. "They're such beautiful birds." In his mind, as in a colorplate by Audubon, Errol saw a snowy owl up close and whole—the almost human eyes, which would be amber, would flash golden, the impeccably pure white feathers with a few flecks of black, the perfectly machined and powerful talons and beak muffled in white down. Few things in the wild could look so haughty or invincible and yet here one was, wounded and most likely dying.

"Once," Errol said, crouching lower and in a low voice, perhaps more to himself than Kurt, "I saw a cormorant over in Folly Pond that couldn't take off. You weren't with me, it must have been five years or more ago. It kept splashing and honking, but it must have been too old or tired to lift its body out of the water and fly back to the cove. I was in a hurry to Kelly's house, so I didn't stop long. Who knows what ever happened to it." He waited for a response, an acknowledgment, from Kurt huddled on his stump, but he really did not seem to have heard. Errol fiddled with the binoculars, tried them with his own bone-cold plastic horn-rims both on and off, and then switched off the flashlight for a few seconds. A few stars like the lights of lost buoys were already bobbing in the eastern sky. A wind that smelled of the salt sea curled over the ridge, blowing ice crystals in its wake. And down below the owl dragged its wing and seemed to thrash against death itself.

"It's a symbol, Errol, a symbol," Kurt said solemnly but with a hint of malice, "you can't miss it—another goddamn symbol."

"A symbol?" Errol was growing more and more aware of how cold he was, and how cramped he was standing up against the hard, frozen earth. What must that bird feel like?

Then Kurt laughed, a stagey sort of laugh, though for Errol's benefit alone. "Don't you see," he said, "how Mrs. Natti would love it?"

Then Errol got it and had to laugh a little, too, even if it might frighten the bird who instinctively knew they were onlookers at its trial. Mrs. Natti was their junior year English teacher, the sort who saw all-important symbols in everything and interpreted every piece of writing her classes studied accordingly. She struck gold in Hawthorne and The Great Gatsby, but had a bit more difficult time with Beloved and Salinger. Errol had always given her a hard time and claimed if he were ever an author he would set up false symbols like traps just to fool people. They liked poor fat sad Mrs. Natti but felt a little superior to her, too. College had taught them both that literature, like life, was indeed a little more complex than she liked to think, but it was not a victory they could much enjoy.

Errol lowered the field glasses one more time and looked again at Kurt as closely as he could. He would have liked it better if Kurt had cried instead of rocking on his stump, creating tiny puffs of white clouds in the night air with his almost inaudible, mirthless laughter. "It's going to die down there, cold as it is and caught in a funnel like that," Kurt said between gasps, "a symbol, or not. And nobody can do anything about it, not you, me, or Mrs. Natti."

"Let's go," Errol said, abruptly rising and handing Kurt back the glasses. He didn't wish to carry this conversation any further and he didn't like this talk of symbols, living or imagined. Not for the first time did he he wish they had stayed back at the studio to finish off that ale instead of venturing out here in the cold and dark. But maybe Kurt had already simply had far too much. That was an easy way to explain everything.

Kurt shone the flashlight for a second or two in Errol's face; he had yet to replace his eyeglasses for good and knew that he must look his old self again to Kurt. "Cut it out," Errol said, genuinely irritated and more than ready to leave. "You know I'm half blind and you'll blind me further and I'll never find my way back."

"Sorry, I shouldn't have brought you out this far in freezing weather," Kurt said, sounding genuinely contrite as they turned to go, back through the twilight and the saplings. "It was just something I thought you had to witness, I guess. It's not often you see a snowy owl hereabouts." They were both walking briskly, at the risk of slipping, and Kurt soon quickened the pace still more as if in a greater hurry to leave than Errol had been. "Funny, but it's been making me sick and sad these past two days and I wanted you to see. Like that would somehow make me feel better. Not the bird. I didn't know if you could understand why because I don't know if I can."

Errol was once more following the tall thin figure as it dipped down slopes and cut back up switchbacks, visible for a few seconds at a time in the ever darker woods and then invisible. "Yeah, I can understand why," he shouted up to Kurt at first, and in another moment, "No, I guess I can't understand, either," though he didn't want to talk about the owl or anything else anymore, merely wanted to get out of these woods and back to his parents' house. Home and warm. The next day would be a long and lonely drive. Was Maine home, now? He was scheduled to take over an important lead from an ailing colleague. And there was Elise. "Careful you don't fall!" he cried out toward the figure too fast retreating ahead. Maybe Kurt could no longer hear him as he strode ahead over twisting paths he was more familiar with nowadays than Errol. It will be good to eat supper at the old table again, Errol thought; next day would be a long drive indeed. A long drive, a long drive... and it became the rhythm of his walk.

More than three years later Errol was cleaning out his desk in the snug office that would never more be his, at the newspaper in Maine that would never more be publishing once a week, or probably ever again. He had already put all the photographs, postcards, awards, announcements, and mementos he'd long been tacking onto the bulletin board above his desk into cardboard boxes and milk crates, or the trash, along with several folders full of clippings, the various tchotchkes and humorous mugs that populate every journalist's desk, and armloads of notebooks and style manuals. Any sadness or regret he might have felt previously had been worn away by months of preparations to move elsewhere, where thankfully another job, with a small marketing firm outside Hartford, awaited him. It wouldn't be quite so interesting as this job had been and he doubted very much if his new coworkers would ever seem such a family like the one he had gradually assembled here, but it would be something new and more lucrative, and life was all about change, wasn't it? He still hoped he would find time to write for himself some day—though what it was he might write, or how it might be intended to affect people, he never could say. Never mind, he was still quite young. This would undoubtedly be only the first of several such moves.

Retrieving a broken cassette recorder—the kind of machine no one used anymore—from the back of a lower desk drawer, he felt an errant piece of paper stuck in the space between the back end of the sliding frame and the inner panel of the desk, this same ink-stained and penknife-notched old desk he'd been using since he had first been hired by Mr. and Mrs. Ogilvie. How long ago that seemed now. Curious, he pulled the paper out from where it was lodged and lay it before him on the desktop: a single sheet of wrinkled yellow legal-sized paper, totally nondescript except that the bottom edge of the paper, probably no more than inch or two, had been unevenly but completely torn off. Thinking it was only some forgotten notes from one of his various former beats, shoved to the back of one drawer only to fall into the drawer below, he nearly wadded up the page and threw it into the wastebasket before noticing that the handwriting, small and with the words tightly spaced, was not his own. Seeing whose it was brought on a tight, tense ache as he read a few of the painful lines:

My mother says—get ready for the cliché—it's "all for the best," that I'm going to be happier now. And I guess I don't mind, because how long could it be—and what's time, after all? Thanks to our brains we can move around in what we call time as much as we like, even into the future, I'm convinced, because it's all something like a circle or spiral or most of all an expanding sphere, our consciousness can drop into it at any angle and still be the same distance from point A to point B as point C is to point D and back again through point A. You know how a hologram works. Well, you were never too great at math, so I doubt if you can follow me. Distance you see is time but time only exists as long as we're observing it—and then you can't divide that time any more than you can divide the human soul. Zeno's arrow again. Except you get way way way down to the final possible measurement, and there's your leap of faith.

Like everyone else now you're thinking I'm "disturbed" or something, but it doesn't bother me because it's like I'm at long last starting to understand things better and most people just aren't going to have the mental capacity or bravery to take that ultimate plunge. You're thinking I must be sitting here in this little dark room feeling sorry for myself when actually only part of me is here—there's a lot of me in the past and I can go there when I want. I can go out walking where I want and see the people I want and feel the things I like to feel. I spend a lot of my time walking in the woods, in the past. It's safe there, I know all the trails, I know things aren't going to change too much. I can walk with you in the woods on the Island whenever I like—and I was just back there that day we went looking for the snowy owl. Mrs. Natti's grand Symbol of something or other, remember? I never saw it again after that evening—I suppose some coyote or fisher cat got it—but it's still alive, too, in a sense, and I'm there with you and we're both just us and we're both just really really happy and content. You probably don't even remember that moment and yet it exists forever now, maybe it always has existed—I'll know if some day I get my calculations right. I can see you with my granddad's army binocs up to your eyes and I can see you're watching that owl as it struggles to escape that granite motion. I'm about to come down with a killer of a cold. You tell me we've got to go because you're tired but I can stop time now and we can stay there as long as we like, and that bird can live forever that way. In the present I know I can't be divided and neither can the world. I can pretend to believe the present can be pinned down, pretend like everyone else, or I can jump into the future, what's called the future, even though it exists already just as certain as the past, and I can see myself somewhere on the road ahead, not on horseback like Nietzsche I think it was, but I'm smiling and I'm happy again, too and don't y—

But anything after that point was missing. Maybe because what came next was even more painful? Was it Kurt who had hastily torn off the last few lines, or had the reader, or was the rest caught in the drawer? Errol couldn't remember. Maybe he should look...

Miriam was at the door: tall, slender, regal, lissom, a vision in a diaphanous white dress, and Denton lay slumbering soundly in his baby pouch, side-saddle on her hip. When Errol looked up, aware of her silent, almost spectral, presence, she put fingers to her lips and in an elaborate series of hand gestures they both were virtuosos at translating, signaled that she would be waiting for him in the car, but that he should hurry up because people were waiting for them at the goodbye lunch at Kelsey's. Errol nodded understandingly and signaled wordlessly that he would be down very soon with the last of his boxes. Glancing up at her, taken by surprise like that, he had been a bit shaken by discontinuities in time himself—how had he suddenly acquired such a lovely understanding woman and a perfect child? If he blinked, would they disappear, too? Sometimes he had to remind himself that here he was twenty-six going on twenty-seven, an educated man with a promising career and so much happiness it sometimes threatened to elevate him aloft like a strong wind into the clouds. I am in love, he told himself, and not just with my wife and child.

He noticed he was still holding Kurt's last semi-coherent message to him in his hand. He guessed that after opening the envelope, he had added the page (or pages?) within to the always-shifting pile of loose papers in his top drawer, though oddly enough he also couldn't remember if he had ever even tried to answer the letter. Certainly he must have read it at least a half-dozen times and written many possible responses in his head, the way he often did when delaying an answer, sometimes indefinitely, but he honestly did not know if he had been as kind and generous as he should have been. He did not recall if he had found the right words.

The basket next to his desk hadn't yet reached it limit; Errol knew he could make it easier on himself by throwing out the ripped and creased remnant of a letter, but reconsidered and instead added it to his already bulging "correspondence of interest" folder. Maybe eventually he would write to Kurt's mother again.
Memoranda Regarding Our Most Preeminent Collectors of Ephemera

not forgetting

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (1865-1931),

proprietor of the Snowflake Museum, Jericho, Vermont

Topic for discussion:‭ ‬It is perhaps improper and possibly a little dangerous to speak too glibly of this topmost echelon of long-venerated but perhaps least understood connoisseurs and collectors,‭ ‬simply because they are, first to last, society's most blessed of breeds,‭ ‬those who strive simply and purely to capture and retain that which, like time itself, is always fast fleeting;‭ ‬and because they, above all others, are respected amongst fellow experts in the field for their daring and seemingly impossible feats.‭ ‬Not for them is the vulgar assemblage of old masters, heirloom furniture, or antiquarian objects, or the crass hoarding of similar cultural artifacts until their value has risen high enough to divest of the lot—exchanged, one supposes, for bullion or bonds or other bounties less frangible. Neither would they, these same finicky curators of the fragile and fugacious, stoop to pin a powdery forewing to corkboard or gratuitously collate tooled and embossed calfskin spines along hygienic and climate-controlled shelves. (I will stop myself short and refrain from even more woefully insufficient comparisons.) Look at them, yes, admire them, certainly, such noble and superfine seraphim amidst the baseborn masses—but beware their extreme sensitivity to slights, snubs, snickers, or sniping. What you say in public,‭ ‬or in private to the wrong sort of person,‭ ‬might,‭ ‬just might,‭ ‬get back to them.‭ ‬The consequences could be—well, not necessarily dire, as the cliché insists—but certainly you could at some unforeseen juncture in the future run into certain, let us say, complications or difficulties, for those of whom we speak do evidence certain clandestine alliances and powers that humble folk such as you and I could never begin to penetrate. Not being (as of yet, anyway) such a heavily laureled and lauded conservator extraordinaire yourself,‭ ‬this probably shouldn't matter, except that these more experienced rivals, so adept at handling petty feuds and civil libels, could very well curtail your prospective activities,‭ ‬should you have the temerity to actually attempt to become one of them yourself,‭ ‬some fine day.‭ ‬Such presumption on your part is absurd,‭ moreover, ‬for theirs is an exclusive club, invitation only, and so on and so forth...

Wait! One never can tell, you're thinking, despite my well-intentioned warnings: But certainly vacancies have been known to become available from time to time...

‭They would only answer, if they deigned to speak to you or me at all: Surely, you must be jesting. (It is an outrage, of course, that I should make so bold as to speak on their behalf.) For one thing,‭ ‬those foxy fog-fanciers, these maestros of mists we have long admired and envied, all know one another intimately,‭ ‬and have known each other for ever and ever, so it would seem.‭ (‬But you do not know a one of them,‭ ‬do you, have merely bumped into them now and again at a forum you surely got invited to by mistake or have seen them at a distance berating ticket agents at the terminal, their characteristically fat and dampish leather baggage, resembling nothing so much as a sad heap of giant salamanders, barricaded around them.) Stop, I say! Exhale slowly, pause, loosen your grip on the pen before additional parentheses. (Letters have been written, in fact many letters, forwarded with necessary credentials, but these have always, always, always been ignored.) To go on: ‬The authorities of whom we speak are indeed the best of friends,‭ ‬at least when they are not the worst of enemies—and sometimes they can be both at the same time to each other and maybe not even realize it.‭ ‬That's what being famous for this sort of thing is like‭; ‬it puts you on edge,‭ ‬or so they say about all those who are likewise famous if not well on their way to becoming infamous. It is easy to surmise, so they say (who are "they" and how do they know?), that the individuals in question might very well feel as if they are being slowly asphyxiated within a swarm of loathsome gnats, besieged as often as they are for inside information, the secrets of the ages, the myrrh-scented breath of divine afflatus, perhaps, if only to experience proximity to true genius and all that sort of hooey; indeed, the objects of our interest must be constantly washing the hems of garments so often sullied.

‭‬Point:‭ ‬These aggregators of transitory substances whom we are concerned with here are not necessarily the most popular or, to be more accurate, popularized of all such collectors,‭ ‬though some may in fact be—much more importantly,‭ ‬they are all, outside a few wild cards, deliriously celebrated and ecstatically regarded, rewarded, and respected not just by the untutored hoi polloi, but by both their professional peers and a multitude of pedigreed practitioners of correspondent vocations.‭ ‬All honors, honoraria, and honorifics are or shall become theirs—cue fanfare—by universal decree.‭ ‬As is the custom, random letters trail from their names like Cymric syllables, and some at the peak of their renown are invested with knighthoods and lordships, even endowed chairmanships at the largest universities and corporations. (This is something I must investigate further: what are their titles, exactly? Who precisely decides and bestows? Who knows?) Most of them are men, I have determined without the need for further inquisition, and most are in their declining years,‭ ‬though as usual there are exceptions.‭ ‬A few women number among them,‭ ‬it cannot be denied,‭ ‬those sexless few taken as seriously as their male counterparts if they are not too beautiful (distracting!) or too distinguished in other careers; and one also may number even a few younger ephemerati (as they are inclined to call themselves) of either sex,‭ ‬often of more interesting ethnicities and social classes than the usual pasty well-bred Euro-Americans in the upper ranks—‬but such upstarts may be mere tokens of these inhomogeneous times, and they will not matter much in my argument.‭ ‬If you must know, it helps to be opposite-sexual,‭ ‬because some same-sexuals—excepting perhaps the occasional tribade—can be seen as too frivolous or too archly ironical about these occasionally if ignorantly derided matters‭. (Agreed, these are stereotypes, but I am neither first nor last to perpetuate them.) No,‭ ‬these people you and I first think of when we hear the words‭ "‬esteemed collectors of such-and-such" ‬are,‭ ‬it can't be helped,‭ ‬mostly the same old soon-enough dead white straight men we read about in books:‭ ‬and so they are—despite looking, with crackling bourbon over ice in one hand and goose-liver pâté in the other, very chipper and waggish at their assemblies and debates and panel discussions—an endangered species. You can rest assured that I have put much thought into this. If it's any consolation, I despise them, too.

‭‬Point to tie in with other points to follow:‭ Here I may begin in just a teeny-tiny way to indulge in pure conjecture, albeit in my own rather guarded manner. The most seasoned members of the collective of whom I have been speaking all invariably knew each other at university,‭ ‬or when they were activists,‭ ‬or newspapermen,‭ or bankers, ‬or from when they met in Marrakesh or Bhutan or Taos (before those haunts were spoiled by cheap airfare) in the mid-sixties or early nineteen-seventies.‭ ‬They surprisingly or not are never ever mere poetasters or recreational dilettantes or weekend weathermen of the usual métiers. The corners of their eyes are watery and mildly inflamed, their hairlines are at high tide, and their soles are prone to insults, it is true, but their manicures are perfect, their profiles senatorial. If you listen closely, as if to a conch-shell, you may hear a faint wheezing as they solemnly inhale before making one of their sententious pronouncements, and this lugubrious undertone might be likened to a burst of catarrhal wind passing over a vast frozen firth. I know because I have heard our friends countless times, over the airwaves and in athenaeums and lecture halls and at hotel conventions of their own tribe (no, that last one is mostly a lie, because I would not regularly be admitted to such places), and they are every one alike in tone and temperament. They speak—and they are quite glad to speak at the smallest provocation—with full-blooded Eastern Seaboard or Pan-Continental accents,‭ ‬in precisely modulated and sculptured sentences—unless their point is not to deliberate with habitual boarding-school precision, but to set sail on flights of fancy in a more contrived and‭ "‬current‭" ‬lingo.‭ ‬It is difficult to find fault in their style or what one might deem their characteristic epicurean pose,‭ ‬phrase by phrase or even apostrophe by apostrophe, any more than it is difficult to find fault in their choice of ascots or brogans.‭ ‬They invariably have highly fastidious tastes in everything from aftershave to Pantone palettes to wives. This might be due to natural-born talents or to the empathetic eyes and ears of expensive tailors and veteran art-dealers (possibly the only tradespeople they won't quibble with), ‬depending on how generous you're feeling or which consultant you ask.‭ (Be careful who or what certified official you ask.) ‬The more pedantic may often castigate them or resent them,‭ ‬but the important thing is no critic worth his or her celery salt will ever overlook them,‭ ‬our so-important well-established seekers of the curiously anomalous—which is the usual symbiotic form these often irksome relationships take.

‭‬Point:‭ ‬These beatified gentlemen‭ (‬and a few ladies‭) ‬sometimes toss off what is known colloquially as a‭ "‬skit" ‬or‭ "‬turn" when amongst others of their ilk (I have it on good authority), though when talking to "outsiders" they are most often deadly if not sanctimoniously serious,‭ ‬especially when among fawning journalists or scrapbook-carrying "groupies" of the sort you and I will never be, or when they are lobbing rejoinders once the first round of giddy applause at the latest awards ceremony has died down.‭ ‬They can drone on for hours about the innumerable differences (discernible only to cognoscenti) between a fine apricot-colored mizzle from circumboreal uplands and the much commoner and thicker miasma endemic to riparian lowlands. However,‭ ‬when they are drunk,‭ ‬ideally drunk,‭ ‬afterward at the black-tie dinner,‭ ‬they can be uproariously funny,‭ ‬at least one to another,‭ ‬if often rude and sometimes nasty to an extreme.‭ ‬They have the memories of pachyderms and the forked tongues of vipers.‭ ‬Our noted ephemerologists often have well-publicized tiffs or little recurring "scenes" with one another,‭ ‬and these may repeat themselves with subtle variations for decades,‭ ‬with the rifts very seldom truly healed,‭ ‬especially by the time the‭ (‬some say premature‭) ‬valedictory addresses are delivered,‭ ‬often in hoarse and choking voices that dare to defy any encroaching scythes, whilst holding back the heavy sobs.

‭‬Perhaps pointless point:‭ ‬Our heroes like to eat well, but not at restaurants that may be too fashionable and hence too crowded with fans who are apt to interrupt one anywhere between the‭ ‬amuse-bouche and the last demitasse.‭ ‬Like those other ever-questing,‭ ‬innovative artists teetering on the exploratory vanguard, indigenous to every major cosmopolis,‭ ‬these hungry men‭ (‬and a few women‭) ‬enjoy getting to little out-of-the-way spots with excellent eclectic cuisines (or whatever it is this month) before the well-known food columnists have whistled to the masses.‭ ‬Our subjects are skeptical and a bit fussy, of course. They cut their meat,‭ ‬when they are not gluten-free lactose-intolerant vegetarians,‭ ‬into tiny pieces all an identical size and spread them across their porcelain plates in rich,‭ ‬tongue-tingling,‭ ‬enticingly aromatic sauces, not unlike, someone has noted, bored people fiddling with pieces of jigsaw puzzles.‭ ‬Despite yearly lettings-out, they seldom listen to their doctors regarding diets.‭ ‬They know their vintages and they know their terroirs, and they know how to put down a sommelier or would-be oenophile with just the right mixture of condescension and wit.‭ ‬Oh,‭ ‬they are witty,‭ ‬these discriminating voluptuaries of what to most of us seems tantamount to nothing, or next to it—for they have always lived by their wits.

‭‬Another point‭ (‬to reconsider‭)‬:‭ ‬The attentive listener is of course thinking right about now:‭ ‬here's someone really,‭ ‬really jealous of these wonderfully wise and percipient and endlessly fascinating people; and that might be correct—but, again, you want to be one of them,‭ ‬too,‭ ‬correct me if I am wrong. The specialist who can deftly net low-elevation cloudlets with a cleverly designed aluminum and muslin apparatus, or funnel noxious evening vapors into a specially chilled flask, or scrape gemlike dew from the petals of newly opened oleander blossoms with surgical precision, or bottle warm bubbling spume from a tropical waterspout, is the epitome of glamor and cultivation in today's coarsened and commonplace world. We are all filled with hateful envy, so much of the time, ‬from toenails to topknot, and that in part is why they continue to be, in the right habitat among the right people, so disturbingly favored by fate.

‭‬Point:‭ ‬Ephemeraphiles,‭ ‬the vast majority who are red-blooded he-men,‭ ‬as we have noted,‭ ‬have always had a certain way with the so-called more decorous sex,‭ ‬though as regards feminine entities they can be‭ (‬to euphemi‭ze) ‬terribly mired in the past,‭ ‬if not hip-deep in their beloved hoarfrost, our most senior and noble seigneurs—at least the more rapscallionesque of them—and they are never on anything less than a second or third marriage by the time the press catches up.‭ ‬Some of the offspring of these misjudged conjugal arrangements, when old enough and out from under the proverbial paternal wing, lash out at anyone passing by who might be carrying a camera or notepad, detailing just how much they were neglected or verbally abused or simply pushed too hard to excel by elderly fathers who seemed to care more about their rain-gauges and spirit levels than their families.‭ ‬These heirs and heiresses, without exception, secretly wish they were praised and pampered accumulators of things as short-lived and highly sought-after as monochrome rainbows or moss-green sunsets, like their fathers‭ (‬and sometimes mothers‭), ‬so they too could get back at the world as easily and apparently artlessly as blowing smoke-rings of technical-sounding jargon into the clear blue wholly indifferent ether. Every so often a poor old gent is found fossilized in a snowdrift (to give just one example of many on file), a glittering array of shattered petri dishes and test-tubes scattered about him, footprints long eradicated by the wind... how odd that he was clad only in robe and slippers—ah, but you know their passion for the sport, going out in all weathers at any hour of the day... still and all, you couldn't blame the lad even if there is no alibi.

‭‬Somewhat too pointed point:‭ ‬Their women,‭ ‬by the way,‭ ‬are in fact not only gorgeously and scientifically preserved, but smart and creative themselves‭ (‬admire their handsome handmade jewelry,‭ ‬their letterpress invitations, their bel canto impromptus and Raku pottery and sculpture gardens‭!), and most notably—for it is perhaps their single most distinguishing feature—they too are nothing less than what is known as redoubtable, and regarding their menfolk's many foibles, almost supernaturally simpatico.‭ ‬Those sudden necessary departures from the connubial couch in the dead of the night; the inscrutable tantrums before rain-bespattered windows; the nearly total neglect of birthdays, anniversaries, and a woman's primordial needs: all may be forgiven when The Pursuit is paramount. Such females know that genius can be inconstant and perhaps therefore also in need of constant coddling and‭ reassurance.‭ ‬It is crucial for them to be eternally studying new lovemaking maneuvers and adjusting therapeutic dosages with seismic sensitivity to their partners‭' ‬moods.‭ ‬They will be delighted to accompany their husbands or inamorati whenever a media engagement or on-the-spot publicity opportunity arises.‭ ‬Yes, dear, that extremely rare opalescent sleet in your traveling valise is seeping onto the bokhara, but never mind. Ever-suffering, but as impervious to distress as the faithful wives of politicians caught in sex scandals, these women instinctively know that nurturing great talent is in itself a great talent....

‭‬Shut up, you,‭ ‬it is not mere childish jealousy, not at all; ‬that is not the word‭—‬covetousness might be a bit more appropriate,‭ ‬or a sort of base cupidity for ultimately immaterial accolades, though that is still not close; better if there were an obscure adjective in antique French or multi-phonemic German.‭ The waxings and wanings of my conflicted mental currents are quite complex, to state it plain, your Holiness, your Supreme Eminence. (‬Oh,‭ ‬do be quiet, really!)‭ ‬To be honest, they are pathetic,‭ ‬those over-esteemed gatherers of stuff as flimsy as mayfly frass and as temporal and weightless as a cough or sigh; as I always tell cohorts or anyone else nearby, ‬these people are hacks and flacks elevated into idols,‭ ‬always complaining about faulty precipitation reports and unexpected detours and cretinous booking-agents and those circling vultures who'd like to appropriate their garlands—so why should I want to be one of their coterie‭? (‬Never mind that I am assaying the mettle of this monologue before an open attic casement,‭ ‬high up enough for suicide, but with countless adoring admirers in the invisible piazza below.‭) ‬Why should I want my latest edicts and enunciations about the "art" (you said it) of ephemeral phenomena to be so well-attended while those bastards' questionable if highly documented studies of several decades previous become old standbys in college curricula,‭ ‬long after they have ceased to be truly relevant‭? No, not a one of those-whom-we-speak stole my girlfriend, my possessions, or my ideas. The only thing they stole, and this I might allow you to argue on my own behalf, was my future identity, that person I thought I could become if only these persnickety eccentrics would all vanish from my thoughts and my world as surely as their beloved illusory rime evaporates into wholesome sunlight. ‬Now you are insinuating that behind my back they are burlesquing me and my mannerisms. I must find a way to convince every one of you that I am not taking any of this personally,‭ ‬that I wish only to project an instructional slide-show against the lampblack-smeared walls of our platonic cavern,‭ ‬that I merely want to confirm with a well-placed stethoscope that suspicious murmur already trembling inside you....‭

Another point, if my auditors insist:‭ ‬All persons herein discussed are brimming fonts of inside jokes and self-referential asides, which are bound to get into the humorous marginalia of scholarly anthologies and later be repeated in inappropriate magazine articles, illustrated with whimsical caricatures of whiskered old geezers kayaking down arabesques of aquarelle jet-streams.‭ Despite appearances to the contrary, these good people take gravity as a moral imperative, not as just another natural law. Let them assert vociferously that their ambitions have more to do with eternity than evanescence. My God, let them clatter and combust.‭ ‬Free them also to inscribe their drooling screeds on tear-stained or sweat-soaked parchment and amass their precious treasures and try on falsely eschatological personae like overcoats they'll discard in better seasons.‭ ‬They pretend to trifle with extinction while smoking cigars worth half my weekly salary, they like‭ the "‬manly sport" of ambushing those flirtatious curlicues of perfumed spray we often see purling over pretty cataracts, to name one of many predatory practices I have enumerated, ‬and they're always in for a little sham-philogical espionage played upon the benighted masses.‭ ‬One collector will stoop to saying of a colleague's lengthy published excursions about his trophies and near-misses:‭ ‬Yes,‭ ‬he does surfaces so amazingly well,‭ ‬his insights into sea-foam are exactly like those minuscule mercury-like droplets of water on the surface of a brushed-titanium briefcase convexly reflecting a violently blue sky; ‬while I'm into more sombre depths,‭ ‬I guess you'd say, able to extract from my tender back-story memories of those incomparable "ice flowers" on the sunny southern slopes of Denali, six-pointed stars that remind one of the frozen teardrops of a conflicted chief surgeon tragically unable to save his drowning son from an glacier-locked fjord.‭ ‬It is as if they are speaking not of wholly notional things,‭ ‬fictions or fancies,‭ ‬but of fully realized lives that exist far above this irredeemably plebeian plane the rest of us share.‭ ‬Another (excuse me for expounding like this) will talk about how he has spent fruitless years observing and researching the way certain ambient elements coalesce tediously above gaseous marshes, just about ready to consign the so-called will-o'-the-wisp or ignis fatuus to the realm of folklore, before unexpectedly, on a very overcast day, actually capturing a live one with an improvised breast pocket napkin and a matchbook; while another will slyly admit to the tiny suspiciously color-coded cahier he always carries in his hip-pocket—and yet when inspiration strikes, said-same suspect claims he can never find a pen or ruler to document to satisfaction the absolutely amazing dodecagonal hailstone that just ricocheted off his sebaceous pate.‭ ‬It's all very collegial when the best of collectors get together,‭ ‬schmoozing like this‭; ‬and they are constantly out to luncheons,‭ ‬or running into each other at gymkhanas and regattas, or telethons and symposia,‭ or within the mentholated saunas of a communal spa, or else going on brisk hikes together through the latest‭ ‬breathtakingly photogenic geographical discoveries,‭ ‬or same-wise, sitting in first-class seats opposite one another chummily clinking goblets across the aisle.‭ ‬Point taken.

‭‬And again,

Key point:‭ ‬Perhaps it is time to emphasize that it is mostly the more theatrical shadow-chasers and moonshine-reapers we are occupied with here—those extravagant ones with effluvia dripping from their pockets and sunbeams caught in the spokes of their bumbershoots—although there are always those additional self-selected elitists who specialize in presenting elaborately concocted anecdotes about their specimen-collecting adventures in the most austere and understated manner; for even those occasional extemporists ‬known to be as swift with their sallies as they are to take offense, our chinbeard-stroking poets of the podium (probably next in line for a major prize or government-minted medal)‭, ‬also deserve their busts in the pantheon.‭ ‬As indicated above,‭ ‬it is seldom that one will encounter such superlunary gods (and goddesses) within the social circles where the rest of us gyre in the wabe,‭ ‬but there is always the chance that some day you or I might cross paths with a rather disheveled ephemerist hurrying toward the comfort stations at an exclusive gallery opening, or wind up ceremoniously trading hats with one of them in the coatroom of a large natural history museum.‭ ‬A passing acknowledgment might be appropriate,‭ ‬as would one seasoned fellow traveler to another,‭ ‬but don't let on that this is anything but something quite ordinary in the natural course of events for you‭; ‬persons of the divinely appointed elect like to be thought of as being able to blend successfully with‭ the rank and file, and much as they love praise from just about any quarter,‭ ‬would prefer it not occur during any situation in which they might be compelled to stand in an echoing alcove and talk about the craft and technique of compiling a respectable portfolio of parhelia (sundogs) and other elemental aureoloes (moondogs, or the related "elves" and "sprites" of your average meteorologist's parlance) when they are simply impatient to relieve themselves and go home.

‭‬Point to explore more fully,‭ ‬if I possibly can:‭ ‬The origins of our acclaimed pursuers of the utmost in perishable and physically nearly nonexistent trade goods are either beguilingly ambiguous or blandly, blatantly clear—this one might suddenly just seem to have been there all along,‭ ‬with half a dozen or more circuit-tours espousing exclusive methodology to his credit,‭ ‬all his talking points well-received but none well-remembered;‭ ‬or that one may have been plotting his fame for years,‭ ‬choosing just the right time to spring a surprise as effective as a deadly "silver storm" on a scientific establishment that, to willfully force my figure of speech, may majestically freeze in unalloyed astonishment.‭ ‬Oftentimes it is a friendly critic—even oftener,‭ ‬a critic who is a friend—who‭ "‬discovers‭" ‬a promising stalker of the nebulous, transient, or volatile and makes him at once acceptable to an eagerly awaiting audience.‭ ‬Here is your throne, sir, here is your sacred sceptre, mind the altar-step. Anticipation,‭ ‬celebration,‭ ‬veneration:‭ ‬such is the order of their immeasurable adulation.

‭‬Points:‭ ‬Famous ephemerati are smug.‭ ‬Or they are‭ ‬not smug,‭ ‬but gracious when about their inferiors.‭ ‬Or they are both smug and gracious.‭ ‬They may be pretentious but speak unpretentiously, or they may be unpretentious and speak pretentiously, or I may be completely wrong.‭ ‬They are predictable and yet they are unpredictable,‭ ‬or maybe predictably unpredictable,‭ ‬that sort of palindromic personality profile, one imagines.‭ They attract attention,‭ ‬both the men and women,‭ ‬and dress well,‭ ‬dress expensively,‭ ‬unless in the comforts of their success they have cultivated the appearance of a slob,‭ ‬wearing old sports-team sweatshirts and disintegrating jogging shoes and invariably some disreputable ball-cap.‭ (Oh, how charming they are when not "performing"!) Their flabby palms are invariably humid, their breath and their very words laced with anise or sassafras and as wickedly astringent as witch hazel. They are not in general exceedingly wealthy,‭ ‬but they are well-off or at least have profitable tenures at small but prestigious private liberal-arts schools,‭ ‬where they are frequently on sabbatical or simply and mysteriously absent from the lecture hall.‭ ‬No one cares, when it's a matter of fame.‭ ‬In fact, they, the subjects of our little discourse, are so famous in their departments it is almost as if they are there at all times,‭ ‬like a ghost whose presence is always felt but seldom seen—and indeed even when attending to their duties our renowned collectors-cum-professors are rarely spotted,‭ ‬though their colleagues often mention the academic accomplishments and latest activities of their‭ "‬very close friend‭" ‬in their cringing intramural conversations or secret diary pages. Oh, the pathetic dupes; I was never one of those, whatever you may think.

‭‬Point:‭ ‬The erudite sophisticates who are firmly bracketed in the top tier of the uppermost drawer of the towering pyramid of our prestigious hierarchy are as busy as the saints of old,‭ ‬busy with their charities,‭ ‬their fundraisers,‭ ‬their magazines,‭ ‬their inaugurations and jubilees, their spoken recordings and public speeches, their start-ups and business enterprises,‭ ‬their apps and websites,‭ ‬their promotional considerations and product endorsements, their love affairs (to ignite or extinguish?),‭ ‬their easy ongoing dosey-do and dip-and-glide with one another.‭ ‬So much has so little to do with what they actually became celebrated for. They are in rock or "roots" bands and staged performances‭ and holiday pageants or puppet parades; ‬they play themselves or their mirror-twins in movies or television,‭ ‬in cameos‭, in guest-spots, in extra deleted footage; ‬they intone‭ "‬A Christmas Carol‭" ‬to rapt assemblages at yuletide‭; ‬they narrate‭ "‬Peter and the Wolf‭" ‬or‭ "‬Carnival of the Animals‭" ‬before symphony orchestras‭; ‬they‭ provide DVD commentary on film classics‭; ‬they supply ready quips to the media about incidental political upheavals or cultural irruptions that grip the press; ‬and because most are so brilliant at the sport of interviewing, they are very often on the radio,‭ ‬or on cable talk-shows, or streaming podcasts, discussing many many things,‭ ‬maybe why moonlit spindrift is so hard to categorize, or at what exact longitude and latitude one can observe a genuine fata morgana or the classically best geyser smoke, but above all discussing themselves. Always and perpetually themselves. You may well ask if I am exaggerating!

‭‬Most revelatory point:‭ ‬Our celebrated aesthetes of the atmospherical read the obituaries with a mixture of dread and expectancy each and every morning.‭ ‬(They all subscribe to at least three newspapers and innumerable periodicals.) To them,‭ ‬the back-pages of the dailies are dense,‭ ‬granite-gray graveyards.‭ ‬An expert on ephemerata who dies at the right time is likely to be ripe for reappraisal or at least belated mercy—or one could die at the wrong time,‭ ‬before the speaking tour or forum series is completed,‭ ‬or before the pundits have forgotten your latest misquoted quotations about the haze seen over rotunda and dome last election-eve or why we can blame a certain segment of humanity for the recent reduction in really impressive icicles—and such an ignoble fate might lie ahead for themselves if they are not too careful.‭ ‬Virtuosos in their field invariably have a highly developed sense of‭ ‬the ol' schadenfreude,‭ ‬but this is always tempered by fears that they themselves are as umbriferous as the umbras they pursue.‭ ‬The most trusted archivists of the impermanent,‭ ‬so they themselves often aver,‭ ‬don't really care about popularity,‭ ‬at least once they are popular,‭ ‬but like most of us need to be frequently reassured that they are truly popular, if not generally beloved.

‭‬And,‭ ipso facto,‭ ‬hardworking aficionados of the ephemeral often trick themselves (at least now and then) into believing, despite their occasional fear of sudden death, that they will be the ones to beat the odds, to live—again like the incorruptible saints of old—forever; ‬their thoughts and intonations,‭ ‬their facial expressions,‭ ‬their sardonic but passionate gestures,‭ ‬even their pauses for effect and for air,‭ ‬will never and can never die—this can be taken for granted,‭ ‬but even more certainly than that,‭ ‬their personalities will live on in an infinite number of memoirs,‭ ‬biographies,‭ ‬tell-alls,‭ ‬academic dissections,‭ ‬posthumous tributes,‭ ‬festschriften,‭ ‬encyclical appreciations, and adaptations for stage and screen.‭ ‬So though they dread the irreversible severance of death like the rest of us,‭ ‬they can also look forward to their demise as others do to the comforts of a blazing hearth and a bracing restorative,‭ ‬for only death may ultimately justify their maddening talents and their destructive excesses and their cruel demands upon those merely mortal—their spouses or lovers,‭ ‬their always-alert retinues,‭ ‬their critics,‭ ‬their sycophants, their faithful fans and followers—you and I.

Do they ever awake to the softly distant knell of thunder in some obscenely dark gulf of the night and wonder to themselves, am I merely trying to stop time? Has all my life been only a futile sieving of spider-silk on the wind, a foolish grasping at the tragically intangible, a desperate attempt to bail water from a slowly sinking rowboat? Am I just as here-today-gone-tomorrow as that which for more mundane collectors would be a lusty dispatch, a simple procedure involving chloroform and taxidermy? Is it my own chalky white death-mask that I see in the moon?

Ha! Am I supposed to feel pity for all these foolish, naked emperors?

‭‬Point to self:‭ ‬Therefore,‭ ‬I would love to say to any meager, slightly bemused gathering I could hope to encage or engage,‭ maybe enrage, ‬let us put an end to the anxiety.‭ ‬Go now,‭ ‬seek out these fine and pontifical ephemeromaniacs and murder them one and all.‭ ‬Why‭? ‬you would ask more in confusion than horror.‭ ‬Why,‭ ‬indeed:‭ ‬Their time of reckoning has come,‭ ‬or is coming soon,‭ ‬history must begin anew, and if necessary, we must quicken the process a bit.‭ ‬You can do it all with your own fevered and felonious imagination. Smother them amongst their eiderdown,‭ ‬topple them from their glass towers and push them from their pedestals,‭ ‬shoot them at close range when they are out boar-hunting in Montana,‭ ‬drown them off their private lakeside docks,‭ ‬bomb their enclaves, cut their parachute cords,‭ ‬tamper with their brakes,‭ ‬drop a house or two or a bookcase on them,‭ ‬chase them down rabbit-holes or up beanstalks,‭ through fire and ice, ‬cut their mikes,‭ ‬switch off the video,‭ ‬open the trap-doors,‭ ‬defy and backspace and undo them.

(‬Here I should hitch up my pantaloons and make the harlequin's clumsy bow,‭ ‬gape like an ape and spit into the looking-glass.‭)

But it's no joke‭! ‬I long to declare:‭ ‬Annihilate our rivals one and all,‭ ‬friends,‭ ‬and let no one but the obscure and the iconoclast and the outsider take their place.‭ Time is ours, not theirs. You do know what I'm talking about‭? ‬You feel the same‭? ‬Then,‭ ‬arise‭!

"‬Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana...‭"

—Sir Thomas Browne
Metasequoia glyptostroboides, albino variant: The Ghost Tree

Almost as soon as I had coasted down into the last valley of my long day, the increasingly inhospitable skies, bled of all blue, began to sputter and then spot the tarry macadam fast unrolling before my wheels. This wasn't the listless, indecisive mixture of rain and fog I'd been biking through on and off for hours, for that is just what one expects of this corner of northeastern England, but a real torrent that left me drenched in a matter of seconds despite my vinyl poncho. My borrowed touring bicycle was a clumsy, tempestuous thing, and its thick old-fashioned tires (excuse me, tyres), weighted down by myself and the canvas panniers, sank in some puddles halfway to the axles; I could soon see there was no use trying to go much further down this road as it zigzagged dangerously through the wind-lashed furze. The waterproof Ordnance Survey fastened to my handlebars had, as it happened, been considerate enough to point out a tourist information center for the national park at the edge of a tiny settlement not far ahead. Inspired, I heroically forded a trout stream waggishly yclept the Syllababb River and took my bearings. It wasn't enough of a village to remember its own name (not a single shop, petrol station, or hostel) and it wasn't much of a center for such a large designated wilderness area. But the old saffron-bearded gent behind the counter was friendly and helpful with his kiosk and internetted database of guest accommodations and restaurant recommendations. Unfortunately, all of those conveniences were at least five miles distant, and with the rain and the fast-approaching dusk, things did not look good for me. I was about to give up hope and resign myself to settling in for the night among the toppled tombstones of a churchyard I'd spotted just across the one-lane road, when the man, taking pity on me, gathered up the brochures fanned between us on the counter and with a barely concealed snarl said, in a heavy regional accent I would have been hard-pressed to differentiate from all the other accents I'd encountered that week, "Well, there's always the de la Moigne place, if his lordship is still taking in the occasional guest this late in the holidays. Bit dear, though, abandon all hope, I have warned you, so you can tell them all in the bye and bye."

"Please," I said, precipitously hoisting up the backpack that been leaking onto the tile floor as we spoke, "anything! But," I added quickly, "maybe you're right about those National Trust places."

The man grinned gnomishly though his beard and shot me a look with alert glass-green eyes. "Oh, that's just meself taking the piss," he said. "Feller runs the place is sorter lah-di-dah, if you catch my drift. Even being it's on the distaff side you might say he's hoist by his own petard."

I stood before him on the other side of the counter, shifting the burden of my pack from one hip to the other. "At this point I'm willing to pay a lot more than I'm used to," I said, thinking of the expenses I'd soon be incurring here in my first semester abroad. "Just tell me how to get there, and I'll try to work my wiles."

The ranger—if that's what they call them—went back to his antiquated computer screen, dum-dum-deeing under his breath. Why he should need to consult his files I couldn't say, because the place obviously must be close by and known well by him. Next he turned to me with a conclusive sigh. "Well, he's still there," he said, taking a pen and beginning to mark on the back of one of the tourist handouts. "I mean, we haven't taken him off. Yet. If it were my decision..."

"Look," I interrupted him, "I'm not expecting much in the way of maintenance, just a warm bed. Is there something I should know?"

He sighed again and flicked his wrist toward his downturned mouth in that perhaps universal gesture of lifting a glass or bottle to the lips. "I'm not saying it's just the occasional indiscretion. We of the village board can and do overlook such things. His wife's family, local notables, in the peerage, I don't know if it ever mattered to them... It's just his attitude, if you don't mind my editorializing, could be a bit off-putting. Not from anywheres around The Marches, him. Nothing personal, just never liked the geezer. Still, some folks do and it's a right decent place and he's been known to take in lost young strays. Here's the address, take your chances." And he drew a line up the road on the page that showed the place couldn't be more than a half-mile away. "You go this way and that, past the kirk over there, crost a livestock grate or two, round the bend a ways. Look for the chimbleys on the other side of the stone wall and the tops of some big bosomy trees. You're not going to have any troubles finding it amongst our lesser hovels." He chuckled to himself and winked at me. I turned to go. "Mind," he called after me, "you may not find his Highness at home. He may well be down in Alnwick or Newcastle-on-Tyne again, helling about."

The rain had lessened considerably by the time I got back to my bike, although it was getting so near nighttime I would soon have to put on my untrustworthy headlamp. There was no traffic and no sound but the steady plish-plosh of raindrops drizzling from overarching elms into potholes. The road that led me through the village was now little more than a track through a bog, and so like someone guiding auntie down the strand, I led my rattling old Raleigh along, searching on either side for any sign of high brick chimneys peering over a wall. But these dwellings were all squat and nondescript "holiday lets." Behind me was the church, here a little stone bridge my guide had failed to mention, then the grates, and then hedgerows but no walls, at least as far as I could see in the dusk and the diminishing rain. In a short while I turned back, knowing I must have gone too far. But out of the storied Northumbrian gloaming came two people walking under cover of a single yellow umbrella; they each had on Stetsons and matching "county" tweeds and wellies, so in the near-night it was hard to distinguish if they were male or female or one of each.

"'Excuse me," I said to them collectively, "could you possibly tell me where the de la Moigne Guesthouse is?"

They paused a few feet from me but said nothing at first. Could it be my accent? Did they dislike Americans, too?

They seemed to consult one another within the darkly golden obscurity of their brolly, and then one of them spoke. It was such a raspy, unlikely voice that again I couldn't quite tell if it was male or female. "De la Moigne? Oh, of course, you must mean Idlewild's; you just passed it back there. Look you down that bitty lane between the bull-breaks, see, and do what the sign I think it's to the left says." Before I could ask any more, the two of them had already mucked off down the road in their oversized boots.

This time I looked more carefully, training my dying high beam about, checking the driveways and skinny alleys between the tall dripping trees. Shortly I saw how I'd made my mistake; a previously unseen fork in the road led nearly immediately down a bushy passageway diagonal to the road I'd been walking. The man at the tourist center should have been clearer, but I know myself how difficult it can be to overlook things that seem perfectly obvious to one who has lived so long in one place that one hardly notices distinguishing landmarks anymore. This was my first trip abroad, after a lifetime in one small college town, and I was already going on twenty-four. I looked for the high chimneys, and now there was no mistaking the monstrous granite wall, glistening with ivy that looked false as plastic in the rain. Affixed near a slatted wooden gate in the wall was a modest and easily overlooked blue tin plate with quaintly scripted letters: Idlewild. The plate looked new despite its attempt to pass itself off as "authentic," as if this were the birthplace of a minor poet of the Scottish Marches. Such a small name, too, for what looked to be such a large place. Underneath the sign was a notice hand-painted on a small shingle, in pinched letters like an afterthought: Serious Enquiries Ring In Rear No Solicitors. (This was not particularly unusual; I had grown used to bed-and-breakfast signage in the most out-of-the-way places. But it was difficult to tell if this place was advertising itself or trying to keep its secret.) Still not quite sure if I were about to intrude on someone's privacy, which I naturally heard in my head as "priv-acy," I leaned my bike against the wall and searched for a bell-push or knocker next to or on the gate. Finding neither, I gave a few tentative raps with a cold knuckle upon the gate, and it swung open in a spasm of exasperation on squeaking hinges.

Just beyond, a jagged and slippery stone path sneaked between thick clusters of sopping wet rosebushes to what I would soon discover, hulking above the thick plantings, was a conservatory-like porch with leaded glass panes and gone-to-green copper drainpipes. A few of the panes were cracked and the heavy weed-festooned gutters sagged quite precariously in places. Perpendicular to this porch was the main house itself, or as much as I could see of it given the greenery and the gray air, three or four of its many vaguely ecclesiastical windows half-awake with blinking firelight, from unseen hearths, while other windows, higher up, were fully dark and blind. It seemed a dour and not particularly distinctive "stately home" of the smaller sort (to be confirmed in the morning), one like many I'd seen but not visited over the past week while riding through the autumnal hills and valleys demarcating the porous border of England and Scotland: sand-colored stucco above stone, boxy, porticoed, strangulated with vines; a mossy slate roof and unevenly raked roofline with crow-stepped gables above; below, iron trellises and window-planters and ornamental urns, and surrounding it all an expansive semiformal garden—one of those gardens built on a borrowed eighteenth-century French plan that had succumbed to generations of British country neglect. Such was the order of things my erudite guidebooks had led me to expect. Maybe I am recalling the scene somewhat incorrectly, but it seemed to me at the time not a very charming or inviting place for a guesthouse, though perfectly proper and "decent," as the man had said. Maybe, too, it was my dyspeptic mood acquired from the combination of pasties for lunch and cold precipitation and that idiosyncratically early onset of nightfall at this northern latitude, which I should have been used to by this point, that made me almost want to turn back and recklessly press my luck somewhere much farther down the road. But then I thought again of how unpleasant sleeping under my clammy tarpulin might be and how warm the coal fires beyond those windows promised to be. So, when I rounded the last twist of the long unhurried path and found the door to the conservatory or porch, I rang the stubbornly hard-to-push bell that had almost eluded my efforts to locate it amid the densely hanging Virginia creeper.

Although I hadn't expected anything of the sort, the door was in fact opened almost immediately, as if whoever opened it had been waiting right behind the door, in the dark, for my approach. (Or was the proprietor somehow in cahoots with the jolly man back at the tourist center? No, I could easily dismiss that proposition as too Miss Marple-ish.) As the door was pulled back a light above the lintel flared up, there was a feline yowl from somewhere within, and I saw the man for the first time. That sounds perhaps unnecessarily dramatic, as he really wasn't at first sight an extraordinary-looking man, for his face was rather ordinary, set in that expressionless look anyone opening a door to a stranger at nightfall in the midst of the countryside might wear.

"I hate to disappoint you, mate," he said, as soon as he peered around the door-jamb and looked me and my backpack over in the half-light where I stood on the wet flagstones, "but we are no longer taking guests since the summer's nearly ended. At least not during the week. One must apologize and wish you luck on your journey. Ta for now and sorry again." The lines were well-rehearsed. Already I could tell why the man back at the center didn't like him—his voice was "cultured," BBC-1 cool, standard Queen's, nothing like what the more elderly locals spoke. He began to close the door while kicking back an overfed marmalade-orange cat with his foot.

"Sorry to have disturbed you, then," I said, a trifle too curtly, before he could close the door all the way. I was adjusting my backpack upon my shoulders with a weary sigh I hoped would make its point, and stepped carefully backwards. He was still regarding me as he tried to keep the cat from getting caught in the doorway. Before I descended the stoop I glanced backwards across the side garden and porch and said, "If you happen to know of any other place..."

It was then that the man flung the door all the way open, smiling as he appraised me. The fat mouser (or moggie) shot across my feet in a marmalade blur. I saw then that he was a tallish blond man, lean and youngish but someone who I instantly sensed was not as young as he probably made himself out to be. "Oh, say, American or Canadian?" he called after me as I was departing down the path.

I halted and turned back to him, a bit puzzled. He was standing there on the doorstep now, and I saw that he was wearing bottle-green corduroy trousers worn to gray at the knees and a ratty cable-neck sweater over a plaid shirt whose collar had not been turned down. "Uh... American," I said, as if I'd had to consider my nationality before answering. "Sorry about that."

But before I turned back again, I heard his laugh, one of those rolling deep cadenzas that can seem twice the size of one's instrument. "No, no, that's wonderful," he said. "One grows so weary of dealing with over-polite Canadians and other misguided colonials."

"Sometimes I wish I could pass for Canadian in this country," I said sheepishly, feeling at last that my luck had turned. "You never know what people's politics are, and wars still going on."

"Oh, screw the bloody Canucks," he said, thrusting his hands into his hip pockets. I do believe he was the first and only English person I'd met so far who used the word "bloody." "Bunch of cowards," he said, rocking back on his heels with another laugh erupting inside him. Before he fully burst out laughing again, however, he told me, "Don't just stand there, then, young man, come on in. One is offering you bed and board." This he said as if the concept of giving a lodger either or both in this country were an unusual proposition.

Before I did step inside, I had to consider my miserly student stipend and ask: "But how much will it be?"

He laughed again, giving me a pat on the back that was almost a shove, and the idea came to me that maybe he'd had a drink or two with his dinner—although at first it was only mint jelly I smelled on his breath. "Is thirty too much? Twenty-five? Student discount. Bit more if you want supper. Don't worry about it, we'll talk it over in the morning. Come in, now, and you can help me finish up my monkish meal."

All at once I was ushered into the unheated porch, or foyer, or entrance hall, whatever the Brits call it, and surveyed in rapid succession the mange-afflicted badger skin, the stuffed hummingbirds under a cracked bell-jar, the gorgon-like mounted boar's head, the rusted rifles and Zulu assegais, the engravings of grouse hunts, the battered brass umbrella stand filled with more croquet mallets than umbrellas, the curious barometer (too shy to tell anyone anything), the mud-splashed Gannex raincoats and scarves depending from a stag's ten-point rack, the boot-scrape disguised as a hedgehog, and another cat, a flabby tabby who slumbered atop a pile of faded copies of what could only be Punch and Country Life. It was all too perfectly shabby-English-squire, meant to impress impressionable Midlands honeymooners, but despite the chill it was cheering and cozy in a village-pub way and I knew there was no turning back, no matter how much I might be gouged in the pocketbook. Although my attentive landlord said it was fine, I insisted that I remove my soggy walking shoes and leave my rain poncho on a hook near the door. Before I could take in much more, I found myself treading across the icy brick floor in stocking feet, following the older man down a short unlit passage toward light and space. "Very nice place," I said, lying only a little; I didn't like the invasive damp I felt in the air and even at my age I didn't much care for the affectedly aristocratic dirt and disorder, but who was I to be picky?

"It's all the wife's family's doings, right down to the ghastly lino," the man said, leading me into a kitchen that seemed vast because the far end lay in shadows, while the near end contained an impressively sepulchral and glossy black Rayburn range-cooker, next an equally large soapstone sink, and over there an enormous smut-blackened fieldstone hearth; incongruously, modern track-lights illuminated everything from stove to hearth, as if to say: "Here is where you could get warm, if we had but the fuel." The man looked back at me, as if realizing what I was thinking. "I'm afraid with the wife gone, and at the demise of the season, one tends to let things... diminish. I use the microwave and percolator and crockpot, mostly, and shut down the dining room."

Diminish: an odd word to use, but I think I understood what he meant, and with an expansive gesture he motioned me to sit at a table of baronial length that stood in the middle of the low-raftered, oak-timbered room. There were more of those hunting scenes about, even a stuffed fox frozen in a gesture of submission on a sideboard; and lots more bric-a-brac, consisting of a good deal of crockery and glassware that might have been valuable heirlooms or might have been stuff picked up on the cheap from the nearest hospice shop; and I must not overlook the mismatched chairs, hard and soft, and various other unremarkable sticks of furniture and smatterings of decor that I should have taken more notice of then so I could describe it all now. At that time I could already tell the owner—was he a de la Moigne or his wife?—seemed pleased as one of the house cats about his comfy circumstances, despite his dismissive attitude concerning this atmosphere of casual decrepitude, as if these environs proved he was of a nobler level of society who cared nothing for putting on airs. And yet I realized, perhaps like the man at the tourist center, that this might be just another way of putting on airs. Another thing: I'd already noticed how often he studiously substituted "one" for the first-person singular, as if to include his whole class. Or maybe, if I were to dole out a little charity, merely to self-consciously efface himself. He also smelled far too strongly of that mint jelly, and I saw no sign of lamb about. (Maybe it was Chartreuse.) Even so, for all these peculiarities, I was starting to like him a little.

I noticed that one corner of the table was laid out with a Wedgwood plate and tarnished cutlery, and a few bites of pork cutlets and greens remained there, certainly cold by now. It was a single man's frugal repast, indeed, although he had cheered it with a pair of taper-ends planted inside pewter napkin rings. "I didn't mean to interrupt your, your—" I began. Before I could decide between "tea" and "supper" and "dinner," he had swiftly placed another plate near his, heaped with food from the aforementioned crockpot and microwave. Just as swiftly he removed his plate and dumped the remains into the sink.

"Oh, really," I said when next he set a goblet before me and into it spilled some red wine from a bottle with an elaborate label—and then filled his own goblet, which I'd noticed had been lamentably empty up to then. It was a rare thing for me to drink while dining. "I don't know if I really—"

"Rehabilitate yourself," he interjected, clinking his glass against mine before sitting down diagonally across from me. "Looks like you've been out in the elements for ages. Here, drink to the bitter lees. In a little while we'll draw you a nice warm bath. You stateside fellows always like piping hot baths, don't you?" as if I represented the tastes of all my countrymen and not a one of us could stomach the no-doubt freezing cold showers UK poly and public school graduates alike take every morning. "In the meantime," he said between gulps, "let us talk and get to know one another. There are so few people I meet out here in the wilds that I care to converse with." With that he took another immodest swallow, followed by a contented belch, shiny eyes all the while smiling and alert to my every move.

I sipped my own wine like a sacrament. "No, no!" he reproved me. "Feast and be merry, boy. There's much more to the larders."

Compelled as I was to be convivial, I took another lap at the somewhat vinegary wine and tried to fix what he might consider a merry expression upon my face. "That would be brilliant," I said, already aware that my appropriation of a British pleasantry only sounded contrived coming from my lips. Nevertheless, I began to feel partially restored as the effects of the wine took place in my empty stomach and the corned beef or whatever it was from the crockpot began to warm me. In a moment or two I found myself smiling, as well. The food was good, the wine tasting better all the time. It wasn't long before the man splashed some more into both our glasses. Even though I still didn't know his name and he hadn't asked mine, I was liking him more and more. His hair was as much white as it was blond, thistly thin at the vertex, and swept back like wings from the temples, and his skin was quite pink, quite glossy, quite pale, with the last faded sun-spots of youth splashed across his nose and cheekbones. His eyes were blue-black in the candlelight, inquisitive and glittering, like a highly intelligent weasel's—or, I should say, since again this was England—a stoat's.

"The name's Idlewild, Jonathan Idlewild, and although I was born and bred south of the Thames, my mother's family were once lowland Scots, from a murderous clan of Reivers, in fact, so bless them all if they think one is some sort of toffy-nosed outsider," he was saying once I realized I was not just looking but listening also; he was going on at such a rapid clip there was no time to interject any questions or even give him my own name. This Jonathan Idlewild had folded his arms upon the table, and I saw that his plaid shirt stuck through the large holes in the frayed elbows of his wool sweater. This new sort of poverty enchanted me. He hadn't seemed to have shaved for a day or so, although being so fair of skin and hair, that, like his age, was hard to tell. Obviously, "with the wife gone," he'd done a bit of backsliding. (Hadn't the man at the tourist center mentioned something?) Moreover, there was a serious nick above his thin upper lip that looked purplish and raw—a recent razor cut or an old scar made florid by his drinking? But I'm neglecting what else he was telling me as he stared down the groaning board, watching me scumble the last of my portions across the plate.

"Oh, I do very much like Americans!" he was exclaiming. "One really must! Our friends the Americans—and you know they really were true friends in those days. They were wonderful in the war; I'll never forget those lads."

I was reluctant to ask which war—there had been so many—but he kindly filled me in while pouring yet more wine into the glass I'd still barely begun emptying. "In Viet Nam," he said, squeezing my forearm across the table, "on my first assignment as a combat photographer. I was months on end in the swampy Mekong, with regular flights up through the DMZ and back again to Da Nang. Turbulent times, but I'd never forfeit the memory. The Americans, I loved them, while Canadians were as bad as the French, and they all smoked too much cannabis, but the Americans I tell you were friends for life, they were as young as I was and never afraid to express their fears. But they were brave—truly brave! Honest, to tell you the truth, is what I'm getting at. And innocent, you Americans have this innocence about you I find very appealing. You are innocent, aren't you?"

I looked at my glass, still full almost to the brim, and saw the light swimming in it. Was it innocent of me to drink so much more slowly than he did? Thinking better of it, I took an extravagant swig, with a chaser of irresolution when I weakly replied, "Not so much as I feel I once was."

For some reason he found that very amusing. "In a bit you absolutely must come meet my mother. A few years ago we added a granny suite just for her. She loves Yanks, too! She served alongside them in the North African Campaign, in the Second, you know. Wait until you hear some of her stories." And then his attention swerved. "I do hope the sheets in your room are still clean," he added with a sudden look of anguish.

"At this point," I said, "it makes little difference to me."

He was obviously not listening to whatever I had to say, because he had risen to procure another ready bottle from the cabinets behind him while explaining, "Many of my compatriots, you know, such as one's very own wife, don't much care for your countrymen, even when they've never been to the States. More fool they. Me, I remember going to the United Nations with my father in 1961. We went to hear Nehru, and I took some photos of him and Dad with my little ivory enameled Ilford Advocate, how I loved her, my first real camera. My father was old schoolmates with Mountbatten, you know. When I was a tyke we used on occasion to visit Sandringham House and I'd hide behind the Chinese urns when the equerries pranced by. Back then, however, I was only interested in sailing the Seven Seas like the kids in Swallows and Amazons." It could be I was misunderstanding some of what he was saying, partly because of his accent—which I could no longer place, for it seemed to alter the longer he talked, but now can attest that it maybe exists only upon the stage or page—and partly because he was already slurring certain vowels, although like all habitual drunks he was taking great pains to appear erect and sober. He was being a bit too friendly, like a drunk, too, and that kind of attitude always only makes me more circumspect. In just over a week's travels I already knew what it was like with innkeepers who treat you like a long-lost friend as soon as they meet you (and then like a stranger the moment after you pay them in the morning). Above my glass I watched Mr. Idlewild with heavy, aching eyes. He had left my side and was bustling about the kitchen now, sopping up spills up while creating new messes with a carelessly handled dish-mop and opened tubs of cleansers and condiments he seemed to be confusing with one another. Despite his mercurial maneuvers, I could tell he was the sort to wish to assert firm control over his surroundings, as grimy or crowded as they might be, and would not have liked it had I offered any help. I was beginning to wonder when I might be able to see my room.

"What time would you care to have breakfast?" he asked, not waiting for an answer. "You could have it at seven or eight, or even later if you prefer, please sleep as late as you like, you're a growing boy. Don't expect anything lavish, this is a country establishment. However, we have lovely fresh eggs from the yard and there still may be a bit of orange pulp left. And after breakfast we can settle up the bill, but as I said don't mind about that now. In the meantime, washing up to do. This time of year I let all the help go except a once-a-weekly char and the girl who looks after the mater days. Pinching pennies and pounds, we are." While he was saying all this he was tying on a voluminous apron that fell to his knees, and next he squeaked on long pink rubber gloves that reached all the way up to his elbows, so that he suggested someone halfway between a lady going to a dance and a butcher at an abattoir. For a while we were both silent as he sloshed about in sudsy water and clacked plates and glasses into random heaps—apparently he had not washed dishes for quite a few meals.

The tapers on the table were starting to gutter, so he abandoned his labors at the sink with a great sigh as if he had thoroughly exhausted himself and began to light a cluster of candles in little jewel-glass jam-jars, while placing them here and there throughout the room in a profligate manner. They flickered green and gold and crimson upon his pale face—and mine, I suppose, too. "A little mood," he said, cupping his hands around a flame so that his fingers seemed to glow pink from within. Somehow I liked the effect this gave him of being more than waxen himself, artificial, almost translucent. "Tourists like all the frippery, don't you agree? For you, dear boy, I daren't scrimp. This house is eighteenth-century, you understand, and many of the furnishings are much older. Again, they are the wife's family's. Her older sisters don't want to have anything to do anymore with these grotty old Sheratons and Chippendales. They're married to stuffy old solicitors in the City and never come up here. I suppose it's me and all my jiggery-pokery, or so they say!" At that he laughed almost under his breath, so much so that it came out more like an embittered cough. "Tell me, do you Yanks still like next to nothing for your petit déjeuner? Not even porridge? Will you be sleeping late?" It was as if he had said nothing about breakfast already. "Suppose it's no to the Full British, then?"

Before I could reply, he answered himself. "I do know you all hate fried tomatoes and beans, so I shan't offer you any, even if I could find some. Oh, but skinny lads like you eat like horses, I know, or could eat a horse, is that the saying. I'll see what I can do. Did I tell you already about the eggs? Am I boring you, then? Did you say the name was Tom?"

I was getting a little tired and testy under this barrage. "I haven't had a chance to tell you," I replied, aware that I was risking being rude, but as usual he did not notice.

"Right. Listen, you must be a student. And I needn't ask if you're a good one, or you wouldn't be over here. And I bet it's English Literature—or is it English History? It's usually one or the other. But—oh!" He halted his course around the room and slapped the meat of his palm against the tabletop. Suddenly I was much more awake. "Oh, oh, oh! You simply must see the books in our library. They mean nothing to me, you know. See that gruesome portrait over there, above the settle? That's the old bastard in full glory of side-whiskers. That's him, by God. He collected them all, the wife's great-great-something-grandfather. House of Lords, eye-to-eye with Disraeli, or Gladstone, you've heard of those blokes. For my own part I could claim a title but... well, you know. It's the twenty-first century and all that. Who wants to be stuck indoors debating redistricting and badger culls? I spend most of my time in the garden these days—rather pathetic for one once used to a life of derring-do, I admit. We have champion rhodos. Do you know flowers? Yanks never do. Speak up!"

"Might I use the w.c.?" I said, uncertain what euphemism this household or class might prefer. The wine was winning and making me bolder all the time.

Mr. Idlewild snapped to attention. "Of course! I must draw your bath! Oh, you'll love the fixture, it's zinc-lined copper in the grand old style and rather long enough for the tallest American. Follow me."

I rose to do so, but at that very moment two figures came in from the shadows at the opposite end of the cavernous kitchen, still dismally dark despite all the candles. "Hallo, Jonno!" one of them shouted up into the room from a doorway I hadn't seen previously. "Oo, look at 'em pretty li'l fairy lights! Nice. Anyhow, Jonno, stay right there, don't move a pinkie, we just popped in to get that bag of booty from Tesco's to take up to Beck's. The chocs and champers, you know. Don't you fret, we'll still drain a drop or two with you later afore we nod off."

The figures approached a foot or two nearer, and although they remained half in darkness I saw what I was certain was the pair I'd encountered up in the middle of the village. They were still nearly indistinguishable, though they had now assumed the shapes of two women—early middle-aged, I guessed, somehow—one of them maybe a little older and rounder than the other. They were both still in their hats and slickers and boots. "These, son, are the irrepressible Jo and Stace," Mr. Idlewild at last said with an air of casual disdain, not even turning around as he whisked a tea towel in and out of glasses still wet from the wash. He made no motion to introduce me, even though I had stood up ready to shake hands—or something. I suppose he may have already forgotten what exactly I was doing here, which was just as well, since the women were now doing all the talking as they stood at a careful distance near the sideboard at the end of the room. Maybe they were afraid of tracking mud across the floor. "An American, here!" either Jo or Stace was saying (it wasn't the one with the throaty voice, at any rate; this one's ensuing tirade rang out high and clear in the contralto range). "Right. We saw him on the road. Hello again, you... But, listen, Jonno, Becs is in a complete state. We must beguile her with the sweets and Bolly." (It would take me awhile before I understood they must be talking about a girl named Rebecca, or Beccs as they called her, probably with no better idea as to how to spell it; at any rate, this Bex was apparently the daughter of one of the two. The woman was talking so loudly and at such a rate, running all her words together—sometimes close to tears and other times nearly hysterical with laughter—that I was inclined to run, but Mr. Idlewild's shoulders at the sink merely gave the occasional shrug. The shorter woman remained mute at her friend's side, arms akimbo in an oddly martial fashion and nodding automatically and enthusiastically at every third word.) "She locked herself first in the toilet," the taller woman went on, still standing in the doorway as if she and her companion might be abstracted completely from their own drama if they were to take one step further into the room, "and then he chased her into the greenhouse she says and god-damn Gordon is there right now with his snotty nose pressed against the glass, the prick, moaning like a mooncalf and threatening to burn down the stables if she doesn't give in, and he called me a cupid stunt, and no one's minding the brat but old Mrs. What's-Her-Arse, who's got to get back to the mister, she says, should have done hours ago. Both Becs and El Gordo must have been boozing it up and throwing things for days, so it's no wonder she wanted us to motor up. He gave her a black eye, she'd told us! The hooligan! No, he didn't hit her, exactly, just a china cup he threw at her with the hot tea still in it. Really, I was ready to call the constabulary, first thing, but the bruise don't look so bad, and she says it was her own fault and she doesn't want it making the headlines. Why is everything everyone else's business out here in the sticks? Honestly, Jonno, you know I was against it all from the beginning. Nige and I should never have let that brute take her away from us, I just knew it, but now there's the brat, and until someone grows the bollocks to go for an annulment, well there you are. I'm really just fit to be bound and gagged, and you know I'm having enough trouble with the estate agents as it is. Come on, Stace, get a move on, she'll come out of there once she sniffs the goods. See you in a bit, Jonno. Come on, Stace."

They were gone in a such a flash that for a second I wondered if they'd ever been there at all—certainly, Mr. Idlewild made no attempt to explain or excuse them. Were they old friends, paying guests, or just people staying with relatives elsewhere in the village? "They seem a little agitated," I said meekly into my still only half-empty glass. Instead of filling me in, my landlord tossed away his tea towel and (pausing only to down the remnants of his wine in one gulp) told me that I simply had to go see his mother before she went to bed. "The dear old gal's always out like a light by eight," he said, gesturing for me to follow him from the room. "And if she isn't, one just puts another Seconal in her pudding." I didn't know whether I was meant to laugh at that or not. We left through another door, neither the one from the porch nor the one from which Jo and Stace had delivered their lines, but one that led through three or four interior chambers, more or less, comfortably furnished and richly carpeted—what Americans like myself might call parlors or living rooms and here I think might be called "lounges" or "drawing rooms," although you usually wouldn't have one right after the other—and up a half-flight of steps to what seemed to be a separate little apartment attached to the back of the house, where a garage or carriage stables might otherwise have been. I should mention that all of the rooms we trespassed were almost dangerously dark, so it was really hard to tell exactly how shambly or chic each room might be; there was no illumination from beyond the windows, this being a village evidently without streetlights—and besides, the house was set back in the obscurity of tall trees, behind high walls. Mr. Idlewild had taken no notice of my stumblings around ottomans and settees and coffee-tables that were all obstacles to me but familiar guideposts to him, and he was up the steps before I had completely righted myself after stubbing my toe on something round and made of metal in the last room through which we had traveled. All at once the door on the landing was flung open, and a burst of light flooded the floral path before me. I looked back for an instant and saw something like an urn or cuspidor or maybe a severed head rolling across the hallway floor, away from me back into the darkness. "Evening, Mums, has she left for the night?" I heard Mr. Idlewild saying from inside the room. In a moment I entered the brightly lit and quite overheated sitting room of a very old lady; all was a glittering blur of chintz and cut flowers and porcelain figurines glowing within vitrines, so that it took a second or two before the woman with her plump blue-marbled legs propped upon a hassock before an electric hearth (set to the highest notch) came into focus. A tabby cat identical to the one I'd seen earlier (or the same one?) was purring compulsively upon her broad convex lap. The room smelled very strongly of eucalyptus and something unpleasantly medicinal. "Lookie here, no over here, lovey," my new friend was saying very loudly and slowly to her, "this young American in front of you is tramping all the way across country on foot!"

"Actually—" I began to say.

The old woman, who was squat and squarish in a puffy pink housecoat over a beribboned nightie with disreputable stains all down its bodice, set down the book of acrostics she'd been holding up to her nose and removed her reading glasses to size me up. I noticed then that there were a pair of steel leg-braces and a horn-handled walking stick leaning against her slump-bottomed armchair. Despite that, she looked reasonably fit for a woman her age. She had the same wispy tonsure as her son, and on second glance also the same prominent dental prostheses and skeptical eyebrows. Her skin was froggy and her bones snapped like buckram in an old book when she pulled herself straight to look me over. "Well, well," she greeted us in a surprisingly alert, almost girlish voice, "one of your Yankee Doodle Dandies, is it, Jonnie Boy? My, my, but he's tall. Come on over here, boy—care for a pastille? A cachou? Do you play bezique?" I shook my head and murmured negatives. She gave up, waved a plump hand in the air, and sneezed violently into a lace doily. Suddenly I had an idea of whom she reminded me—the dotty pepper-crazed duchess in Alice in Wonderland. I half expected her to hurl something at my head, if just in jest. Once she'd snuffled her last, she looked me over again, although I doubt if she saw much more than the vaguest outlines of myself. "Never mind, then... Oh, but Jonnie, wouldn't Cecily have a fit! Promise you two won't carry on all night, willn't you? A weary old woman needs her beauty rest, fellas." A coy moue transformed her wrinkled, unpainted lips into those of a chorus girl.

Her son grinned with all his teeth and picked up a glass with a gooey green residue in it from the side-table next to her lace-laden chair. Instantly upon entering the room he had seemed to sober up considerably; bending affectionately over his mother's balding head now, he looked a bit like a boy come to receive his benedictions before bedtime. "Tell him about the war, Mums," he cajoled her, at the same time motioning for me to sit in an adjacent Windsor chair. "Go on, tell him about the Sudan and then Tunisia and the terrible heat and those wonderful crewcutted WACs you could drink under the table. Remember the story about the camel on the cricket pitch. Or was that a mule, on our shores, with the WRAF?"

She grimaced as if her dentures hurt, while blindly patting about on the table alongside her for something—at last she found the pink lozenge and popped it into her mouth before addressing me without really looking at me. "He's a great one for spinning tales," she stated. "Don't believe the half he says. Always a dreamer! Hell, I spent the majority of the war in a grubby little canteen in the London Underground. That's where I met this one's da, just you imagine it! He came back one too many times for the brambleberry pie. Oh, but 'deedy-do, there was hordes of your Uncle Sam's lot as well, in those bygone days! Handsome blighters, and I could have had my pick, I don't mind telling you so. I almost did allow one to haul me off, but there was his da in his colonel's stripes and arsking for his brambleberry pie. Oh, and wasn't he ducky with his little Ronnie Colman mustache and his plummy el-o-cu-tion! Beau Geste! Will you be stopping long, love?"

That question was of course for me. "Uh—no," I answered. "Just a night."

"Oh, more's the pity. We've got the fête on Sat'day and I always get Jonnie to trundle me up there. I used to judge best needlework, now I don't trust me eyes. Tell me, are Yanks still always so very tall and good-looking? What kind of humbuggery does my dear son tell about his poor invalided old mother? Damn these pills, they always get stuck in one's throat."

Either her eyesight was indeed very poor, or she was humoring me, and I did not know how to respond except dumbly. As she spoke, Mr. Idlewild had stood there before us, all his teeth still prominently on display, like a stage director pleased that he had found two actors perfectly suited for their parts. Now he gestured to me, "Let's not incite the old bag, shall we?" He was talking even more loudly, playing up the role of his mother as a deaf and helpless old woman. "Listen, Mums," he roared, "I've got to show this one his room and then tuck you in. Early to bed, eh? Remember the vicar on the morrow. Give me just five, shall you?"

The old woman shook her pinkish jowls at him and said, "In the war, during the Siege of Tobruk, the Yanks had such manners! Not like the Aussies or our lowbred Limeys. Ah, and then when I was sent out to Sudan, you say... was I ever in the Sudan? I do remember roasting to death under a beastly sun and living on dates and pistachio ices. So I suppose it might just as well have been. Was that the Sudan? Jonnie? You needn't leave so soon! Be back in a jiff, darling, and boil up some water for me rubber bladder. The weather's turning now it's nearly October, you can just tell, I'll get the chilblains yet. How's that for a quaint old English bitch!"

Mr. Idlewild winked at me—a genuinely laddish wink with no malice to it—and led me to the door. "It was very nice meeting you, ma'am," I said. "Your son has been very kind to take me in at such short notice."

She wasn't listening, already back at her puzzle book, which she'd spread over the back of the uncomplaining feline. Through the door behind her chair I saw the corner of a bed with dirty pink chenille drooping over it and on the floor next to it what might have been an old-fashioned tole-painted chamberpot. I was glad to leave the small stifling room and follow Mr. Idlewild once again through the house, this time in the opposite direction from where we'd come from last. More cold shadowy rooms thickly settled with furniture, a sort of large granite-tiled reception hall with nothing but a tiny fireplace cowering within it, a long gallery with soaring multifaceted windows overlooking another side of the garden, and at last a lengthy staircase with oriental runners—after several twists and a landing or two, we entered another corridor, this one as hemmed-in as one within a ship, which led, at last, to the room where I was to spend the night. "It will do for you, I hope," Mr. Idlewild said, switching on a converted paraffin lamp on a table next to the door.

I gladly dropped my overstuffed backpack onto the bed and took a look around: bay window with upholstered seat, rose-trellis wallpaper, heavy mahogany dressers, prints torn out of ancient water-stained copies of the London Charivari, all the usual makings of a real British tea (electric kettle, sugar cubes, little pitchers and cups, teabags, biscuits in wrappers), and the bed itself: a massive four-poster with rudely carved pineapples atop muscular columns and a heavy oaken headboard, complete with an elaborately brocaded counterpane across it. It was quite the best room I was to occupy in the Kingdom, and absolutely the most impressive bed I'd ever had (and likely ever would have) the good fortune to sleep on. "Thank you, sir," I said, a little taken aback by what seemed to be too much splendor after an arduous day biking up and down the crags, pikes, and tors of the northern Cheviots and communing with no one but black-faced sheep, "but you must give me something smaller and cheaper."

Mr. Idlewild was fussing over the tea-things. "Nonsense. Besides, we only have two guest rooms and the other down the hall simply wouldn't do tonight. Mostly we have retired couples out for a romantic weekend getaway here, boring old suburban farts with molasses up their arses. Like as if this were the Quantocks, a package deal, drinks not included on the motorcoach from Basingstoke. Ah, so you see that's why it's so nice to have someone as charming as you, dear boy. By the way, that splendid bed was a gift to my wife's family from Mary the First. Mind you don't scratch your backside on a splinter and contract the plague." I couldn't tell if he was joking about the bed's provenance or not. "Now, let me go fetch you some fresh cream for your tea and meanwhile you can go take a bath—it's right through that door—no, not that one, that's the closet—that one, good, across the hall, the switch is on the left. Cheers, mate, have a good soak, use the Dead Sea salts, change your pants, and in two or three shakes we'll have a nightcap together. See you soon."

Before I could protest he was gone, and so, much relieved to be on my own after what seemed like hours, I drew my own bath (something I was glad he'd forgotten to do, since only I could know how hot I liked it) and was soon floating on my back as if I were in the Dead Sea itself, feeling like a character out of Wodehouse or Waugh, drifting into manor-house fantasies where I spent mornings pruning azaleas, afternoons playing lawn darts, and evenings knocking back pints at the local pub with fellow landowners. The copper-and-zinc tub was longer and wider than a good-sized coffin, with one of those complicated hose-and-faucet arrangements that always remind me of an antique telephone. The room had filled with aromatic steam—or was I back in the wet white haze of the highlands? Were those the ghosts of curly-horned rams I saw in the shaving-glass yonder? I might have been falling asleep when I opened my eyes to find Mr. Idlewild sitting on the wooden seat of the commode opposite me, sipping a miraculously regenerated glass of blood-red wine. He had discarded his sweater, and his disobedient hair seemed to have been slicked back with something oleaginous. It was also quite possible that he had sprinkled on a little eau de Burberry, if only to disguise his minty effluvia. After a little embarrassed splashing on my part, he told me he was sorry if he had surprised me, but really it was all just like back at school, among chums in the toshes at Rugby—that is, he explained, the communal baths; besides, he knew Americans are never modest—should he turn on the kettle for my tea while I dressed?

I sat hunched over in the fog, avoiding looking at him, nevertheless trying to appear both incorruptible and nonchalant. What would I do if he asked to scrub my back with the loofah, as boys probably did for one another in British boarding schools of his era? "It's only I was just about ready to kip off, or however you say it," I said, hoping I hadn't suggested to him just the wrong sort of thing. "Anyway, thanks, I will have a tipple of whatever you're having when I do come down. But now if you don't mind—"

"Marvelous! Wonderful!" he exclaimed in that way so many Brits have of making quite ordinary things sound nothing short of momentous, crossing his leg so that he revealed a stretch of very white and very hairless calf and ankle, before balancing his glass on the rim of the tub. "You know, this might seem strange to you, but I just felt this immediate bond the very moment we met. One fancies it's because Americans have such a tremendous way of making one feel accepted and embraced without prejudice. This is such a rare opportunity. When I was on the killing fields I forged the deepest and most intense friendships of my life with the recent recruits I met, and sometimes we hardly knew each other for more than twenty-four hours—and yet I'll never forget them. You remind me so much of one particular chap I met there from Kansas City, way out in your Wild West. He had your shy sensitivity, you see, and he was very interested in the hornbills he spotted in the jungle. Tell me, are you a birdwatcher? Oh, how one envies you young Yanks with all your energy, out to conquer the world through a perhaps naive but always genuinely democratic desire to be admired and loved! Don't believe people when they say all the British hate Americans these days. I adore them! Always have, always will..."

Mr. Idlewild talked on in this emphatic vein for some minutes as I tried to finish up my bath, all the while pretending to find nothing unusual in this audience. He didn't seem to notice me even when he addressed me most enthusiastically, but rather appeared to be trying to focus on the gold-stamped fleurs-de-lys on the wallpaper (little abstracted ram's heads, I saw now); still, I was glad to finish up and break in with a "Sorry, sir, but if you'll excuse me..."

He immediately rose to go, taking his wineglass with him. "Of course! Of course! Beg pardon. No tea, then? You Americans, never ones for the pekoe or Ceylon. I admit it, I drink the old black joe mostly, myself. Just come join me in our library when you're ready. We shall light a fresh fire and chase the dampness out of this dump. Here, take this towel—the finest Turkish, you understand, and we'll reconvene in a few. My, boy, I'd say you are rather sunburnt, aren't you."

After he had gone I unpacked my pack and in a spirit of attempted sophistication changed into what was left of my best and cleanest clothes—horribly mismatched, and my "no-press" shirt and hiking trews were shamefully wrinkled—but I reminded myself that the house was so dark nothing was likely to attract attention, and besides Mr. Idlewild was a far remove from finical. If there hadn't been still enough wine left over from supper in my system to make me thirst for more I might never have consented rejoining my landlord at this time of night—even though, with the short days and the high latitude, my sense of time was askew: it was probably no later than nine or ten.

Only on my way back down the hall did I consider that I didn't know where the library was in this house that seemed all the more darkly labyrinthine because of its typically English stinginess regarding electricity. A barely discernible glow around the corner encouraged me to turn that way—but obviously that was only the door to the other guest room; there was a thin bar of blueish light under the door, so although I heard no voices, I dared not take a peek within. Hadn't Mr. Idlewild said something about the other room not being available, for some reason? Daunted but undeterred in my main mission, I retraced my steps and more or less felt my way down the passage again, and then slowly down the now-familiar carpeted stair-steps. At the first landing I saw a series of low-wattage sconces shining down a perpendicular aisle, and I longed to follow them but didn't dare, for they might have guided me to the "family quarters" of the house, where I'd end up foundering among the private bedchambers and sitting rooms until I was wrecked amid the servants' quarters in the lost heights of the attics above. And who knew—maybe I would even have come across old Mrs. Idlewild crying like a madwoman, like Mrs. Havisham herself, behind one of the many locked doors. Instead of probing, therefore, I descended again to the ground floor and fumbled past the garden windows and through several barely visible rooms I may or may not have maneuvered my way through before, until I found a pair of double glass-paned doors swung half open, with a comparatively vigorous light coming from within. "Enter ye, enter ye," a voice called from beyond the portal, "and ponder but pity not my ravaged beauty." Mr. Idlewild seemed to be quoting poetry, or hoping I would assume he was. Drawing in my breath, steadying myself for another bout with what now could only be called destiny, I approached and entered what was obviously the library he had mentioned earlier—not a large one, but an unusual one, in that it was built along the lines of a small gothic chapel; most noticeable at first were the high bookshelves between thick arched columns and a nave-like walkway down the middle, with a substantive slab of a scholar's desk like an altar at one end. All of what looked like real cold steel or stone at first, proved when touched to be poured concrete and cement plaster, and all of it was weirdly illuminated by the fitful light of small bulbs in thuribles suspended from the barrel vaulting by chains, contributing even further to the room's medieval and (highly contrived) monastic effect. I tried hard to remember other things I'd learned from tour-guides and art classes—terms like "ogival" and "traceries" and "tympanum," and the differences between "classic revival" and "romantic revival," but that unreliable glossary known as memory failed me. Most of the space in the room was taken up by rows of those intricately carved bookcases, some of them glass-fronted "barrister's," some shuttered with iron grilles, others open-faced; the enclosed shelves were filled with sets of matching iodine- or mercurochrome-colored pigskin or calfskin (here I'm guessing again) consisting of what I could only assume were the "great books" from a couple of hundred years ago, and the open shelves were stacked with oversized atlases and art books and photograph albums—that is, where they weren't crowded with curious musical instruments (doubtless never played or even dusted) and rather ordinary objets d'art (at this date I have the leisure to guess or imagine the ubiquitous discus-thrower, the bust of a Roman senator, a tiny tribe of rhinos made of lead or ivory, ceramic netsuke of the Edo period, and blown-glass paperweights with kaleidoscopic kingdoms inside them). Also in abundance on the shelves were vases and jugs from Dresden or Meissen or some other revered German city (some of the receptacles bristling with dead or dried flowers and some jaunty with ostrich or peacock feathers), and (to my surprise) scattered stacks of cd and dvd cases. I only mention all these things and more to come because Mr. Idlewild was so conscientiously standing back by the altar-like desk with its green-shaded reading lamps and long-superseded globe, watching me and waiting for me to take in and absorb every detail and corner of this not overlarge yet somehow intellectually intimidating room. There was no light shining through the stained glass of the windows, though they did reflect the light within, and I suppose if the sun were up he could have pointed out the azures and gules of the heraldic crests and the whimsical allegories illumined in the leaded panes. Under his docent's eye I pretended to admire the room's multifarious trappings and, on the tapestried walls, the oil paintings of no particular distinction—turbid indistinct nineteenth-century seascapes and lake-scapes and mountain-scapes, that sort of thing. The rest of the room's furnishings consisted of heavy leather couches with matching ottomans and armchairs, in a concerted effort to soften the more ponderous elements and emulate a Victorian reading-room or gentleman's club, or something of that order, I assumed, having only seen such approximations in books and in model rooms of National Trust estates. The fireplace was much too small and there was no evidence of any other appurtenances related to heating, a major disappointment to me, since the benefit I'd received from my bath had already dissipated; still and all I think you could say that the candelabra the landlord had thoughtfully lit and placed atop one of the bookshelves did create an invitingly warm pool of light where the feeble light from the ceiling fixtures or dying fire did not reach.

"Being a candidate for an arts degree, I counted on your appreciation for our rather peculiar little library," Mr. Idlewild said, patting the couch opposite him to get me to sit down. "You might find signatures of Alfie Douglas or Georgie Grossmith or Hadrian the Seventh enclosed therein, or perhaps an early letter from Vita Sackville-West to her abortionist, but I couldn't begin to tell you where to look." Did I neglect to mention that once Mr. Idlewild had determined that I was suitably impressed, and after he lit the candlesticks, he had moved over to one of the chairs, and was now idly thumbing through a large illustrated biography of Princess Diana? He slapped the taut leather again and I did as I was ordered, sitting not close enough to signal that I was ready for furthering our intimacy and yet not so far as to seem unsympathetic. For a minute or two—which is a very long time if two people are practically strangers—neither of us spoke. At least he was no longer watching me, so intent was he on looking at a color-plate of Di cowering in the back of a limousine, but once he divorced himself from the book he motioned to the cut-glass decanter and goblets on the table between us. I shook my head but with no real vigor. "Please, please, young man," he insisted, taking up the decanter, "allow me to pour you a little of some of our finest. Why, might I remind you that you're my very special guest tonight! Enough with the cheap vino. No, no, I insist, take more than that." He poured himself some of the maroon-colored liquor as well. "Well, now," he said, chiming his glass against mine, "I am so glad to have you, my new friend, here with me alone at last. What an extraordinary event this is! Imagine, you just appearing out of the Scotch mist like that—like a welcome spirit, an American so far from home! Like my pals of old... Completely unexpected when I was expecting perhaps no more guests at all this autumn. We've had so few Americans here over the years, as well. After all, you must agree that we are bit far off the beaten path. It's a wonder we make the maps at all these days. Everyone's leaving the village, going to Edinburgh or Newcastle or even London for the work and the excitement, one supposes. Some day I'll be the last man standing. What do you think of this, by the way?" He raised his glass so the purple liquid caught the candlelight.

The liqueur had tasted of what might be currants, with a hint of trampled vine-leaves in it; I did not like it much, but it was sweet and so I had been drinking it up like a magic elixir as he spoke. When I set the glass down almost empty on the table between us, I assured him that what I'd seen of the village was pleasant—that quaint old churchyard, the forested lanes, the rippling stream with the funny name—and there was no way anyone wouldn't consider this rugged farmland lovely. It certainly was peaceful and quiet around here!

In one swift motion he tossed off his little glass and hopped from his seat to the cushion next to mine on the leather couch. "That's exactly what I hate about this place!" he exclaimed, slapping me on the knee as if were two old comrades. "Nothing to do and everyone poking noses in everyone else's business. Christ, you have no idea what it's like! This place, the garden I can't conquer, this damned creaky old house, it's all horrid. Horrid! I care about no one here, really. My world and the things I once loved are so far away. Half the people I once knew are dead. This place is no better than purgatory. Why, nowadays we have to drive a dozen miles to the nearest greengrocer."

I circumspectly shifted myself just a couple of well-upholstered inches further from him. "Couldn't you find someplace else to live, if you're so unhappy here?" I said, mindful of applying a cautiously disinterested aspect to my words and to the look on my face. What could I possibly know, after all, at my age? Yet, I was dismayed to find myself so emotionally removed.

He leant over me, and I smelled the sweetish-sourish mix of liquor and perspiration on his trembling breath and body. "Her royal majesty's family," he said, staring me in the face with his bloodshot-blue eyes, "has lived here for hundreds of years, or haven't I told you enough already. The land, the gardens, the fields, the farm, the furniture, these books for instance are all theirs. Look at all these useless moldy old books—I couldn't give a flying fig about them! Her esteemed ancestors were quite well known at the end of the next-to-last century for their extremely valuable collections of rare editions. Dons and deans from Cambridge or Oxford sometimes visit. Nasty old things, like bloated ticks ready to suck more blood. I'm not a reader; I barely recall my classics studies, and yet half these supposedly priceless books are in Latin or Ancient Greek. Take one or two if you like—no one would ever notice in a hundred years. Pawn them for pub money. You're a college man, you're one for edification, aren't you? I never went to college; my family had lost a great deal of money by then, and my brother with all the brains killed himself, but I learned my trade and I went overseas and I did well enough, considering. I was a good-looking, hard-working, straight-talking navvy, I was. Dug ditches when I had to and tried out the FCO, diplomatic service, you know, and I'll let you guess which was worse. Now my father has been dead for thirty years and our small estate in Devon is long gone and this around you is all one has in this godforsaken world. This house and my doddering old beldam of a mother, I should add. I'm under virtual house-arrest here—did I tell you that? Everyone wants to control me—me! One has scarcely enough allowance to keep up this b-fucking-b. No car since they took away my permit; I have to cadge rides when I can and if his blessed holiness with his high-church wizardry didn't come by to see Mother twice a week I'd never see anyone but her and the servants and the district nurse. Me and the vic, we talk horses and football, never the hereafter. The rest of the locals I simply have nothing to say to. A hell of a lot of fun they all are! While one—I, I mean... and she, she, she..." His words, which had been rising out of him faster and louder like a lit fuse approaching its bomb, suddenly faltered and fizzled, and I was left wondering again about his wife—was their separation because of death, divorce, or distance? His words had disintegrated into a trail of accusatory pronouns and he seemed to taste with disgust their effect on his tongue. He had his hand back on my knee and his face was closer than ever to mine; I smiled this time and tried to act as if the conversation had been as casual as that of two strangers disparaging the weather. Although I had seen or read many portrayals of maudlin, self-pitying alcoholics, I hadn't ever really dealt with one. Actually, I was beginning to wonder if Mr. Idlewild exaggerated his inebriation for show; in fact, another part of him seemed to have grown more graceful and surer of his both his gestures and convictions as he drank, and when he reached across my lap for the bottle on the table before us I noticed that his hands were very steady and his breathing once again quite regular. (Besides his plain gold wedding band he wore a large cat's-eye opal on the little finger of his left hand—it gave his otherwise fairly drab appearance a touch of the feminine or exotic, as if it signified membership in some mystic Asian society.) Aware that his shoulder was pressing against my chest as he stretched himself across my body to fill my own glass again, he winked at me, not a seductive wink, but a self-consciously impish one. Something in his sort of damn-them-all demeanor encouraged me to also knock back my second drink in two gulps—which stung my inexperienced throat on its way down—and I didn't protest when he tilted the vessel questioningly a third time over my fancy little goblet. After all, it had been a very long day and my mind as well as my body wanted to relax. "Cheers, mate," he said, filling my glass nearly to the brim. "But drink it more slow, more slow this time, that's precious stuff. Been around for decades in that damn cellar. Wife bought it." Having said so, he threw back his chin and consumed his entire glass in one swallow. "Good stuff, too," he said with a sigh of satisfaction. "Defeats the chill and inspires a good attitude."

"Well, I don't normally—" I began to say.

"Isn't this extraordinary!" he interrupted me yet again. "I mean to say, you—me—here, what an unlikely circumstance. An American come in from the rain! Soaked to the skin. I do hope you liked your hot bath and your room. Did I tell you that bed was given to my wife's family by Bloody Mary?" Much of what he said he repeated, and so I shall skip scads of what he told me that night, in that strange cold library crammed with books and curios and chairs. Besides, I was feeling the syrupy weight of the alcohol within me and growing sleepier by the minute. Maybe it was because Mr. Idlewild's words began to slur or fade away more and more or maybe because he veered acutely from subject to subject and emotion to emotion, but I could no longer really follow him, if I ever had that entire evening. He related quite a lot of his experiences and mishaps during the war, or wars (it was hard to tell), his round-the-world adventures as a photographer for the National Geographic and The Guardian and various newspaper syndicates, as well as meandering tales of his oat-sowing days, and his memories of New York City in the nineteen-sixties, his father's close relationships with diplomats and politicians, the gardening he enjoyed despite everything, his days of dressage and derbies, the fox-hunts he championed until they were totally unfairly despicably outlawed, and the continuing displeasures of running a high-end hostelry; and he spoke glancingly of the gossip in the village, but never of his wife except circumspectly—it was still impossible for me to determine if she were dead, dying, or alive. Therefore, I was surprised when he mentioned a daughter who'd gone off to live in Wales. Between his lines one might have gathered that this daughter was not on good terms with her father, that in fact they were barely on speaking terms, and she was doing nothing about his plight, stuck all alone and car-less with her elderly, infirm grandmother in remote rural England. Was there something physical—his eyesight, a medication, epileptic attacks, even—that prevented him from being able to drive, or had his license been revoked for certain violations, in all likelihood involving blood-levels? That of course, I could not ask; I could not ask a hundred things I wanted to ask, and even if I had, he probably would have chosen to ignore me. Sitting so close to him side by side on the creaking leather of that couch, it indeed would have been hard to say anything in the least bit contrary or provocative. Even at my callow age I was not so naive as to mistake his desperate desire for companionship, but of what kind I was not entirely sure; I did want to be "supportive," as people say we must be with troubled souls, but also felt it imperative to maintain some distance, despite an absurd element of attraction I myself felt for the fellow; after a fortnight on my own in a strange country, perhaps I was a bit lonesome myself. Our one-sided conversation dragged on for quite some time, during which, under the influence of the wicked drink, I entered a muzzy little zone where his nonstop words seemed to echo randomly from a great distance, with only a random phrase or splinter of opinion occasionally reaching my upper consciousness. I came to only when he seemed to be sizing up the situation in a parallel fashion to what I had last been ruminating about. "Forgive me for saying this to someone as young and vulnerable and far from home as you," he was saying, "but one must admit to you now rather than later that one is as much attracted as repelled by both men and women. It's just a rather unseemly quirk of my nature, I suppose, but I've known this for a very long time. Could be, at times one wants, one needs... Lord Almighty, mate, you know it's not easy saying this." As he was talking his right palm had lightly clapped my shoulder now and then for emphasis, and occasionally he squeezed a knee—again, for emphasis, one could always say—and left one hand or both on occasion lingering there. His hands were flat, thin, bloodless, bone-cold, etiolated things. I felt no passion in them. Nevertheless, when he declaimed once again how very understanding I was, a shiver like the shock of an electric current seemed to run through his hands and his thin, highly tensed body, a shiver which was communicated to me. I felt I had to say something at last.

"Thank you, no, that's quite all right," I reassured him, not quite sure what I considered all right or what he would consider all right; "I have to admit that I often have similar feelings myself. It's good much of the time to be alone, but it isn't always enough. Sometimes I don't know whether to run to people I admire or run away from them—that is, if they knew I admired them and wanted to be closer, I'm afraid they would want to run away—or I would." Even at the time I was aware that I wasn't making much sense, although my words did seem to comfort the older—dare I say old— man.

He seemed genuinely touched despite my incoherency and pulled me up from the couch without any remonstrances from myself; curiously, I had come on all over pliant and willing and no longer afraid of the pathos this man could exude. "Come see," he said, leading me by the hand to a corner by the altar-table with the globe and lamps, where there was a little brass-plated switch between stippled panels on the wall. "Being a foreigner, you're interested in our country's celebrated botanical prowess, are you not? And do you want to see the whole symbol of my wretched, unlovable life? Christ! That's what the wife always said—says. Said. Balls to her! It will make you laugh as much as I."

I did not know exactly what to say or think. There was so much alcohol in me by this time I did not know whether to trust everything I thought I heard or saw.

Mr. Idlewild flicked the switch and instantly a part of the far cement-stoned wall of the room, behind the table where I had seen nothing but shadows before, was lit up from without. Through the smudged panes of the wide French doors that had instantly appeared between the inside and the outside, and across a vacant expanse of bright emerald-green turf, I saw rising up a large ghostly white thing: a fir tree that appeared superimposed upon its surroundings, not part of them, not right somehow, like an incongruous item in a surrealistic painting; from below several small spotlights planted in the earth and aimed heavenward illuminated the hairy, coppery-red trunk against the rustling silhouettes of the garden beyond and delineated the stark-white fanlike needles on the tall very straight tree, of which I could only see the bottom twenty feet or so. It would have been a remarkably beautiful tree even if its boughs had not been so pale, but because they were it looked like an apparition out there, the living specter of a dead thing.

With an exhalation of breath meant to express sublime satisfaction, I asked the man, "Is it a trick of the light, or something? I've never seen a tree so white. Or so strange."

Again Mr. Idlewild laughed, one could almost say warmly, taking my hand in his, as one does before an awe-inspiring spectacle. "That tree, it's a vampire of sorts, drawing life from the trees around it. She was clever to compare me to it! Wasn't she? As always, so, so obvious of her." He seemed to sway against my side, as if trying to regain his balance.

"But... it's an anomaly, isn't it? Some type of albino plant? Lacking what-is-it-called? Is it——it couldn't be—dead?"

"Well, the know-it-all vicar has a Latin name for it, but I can never remember. Here we call them Wellingtonia, although people have told me it's more properly a dawn redwood from China. Or is it a sequoia? I really don't know, can't keep it straight, I'm no real botanist, but I always show it to my guests and they are always ever so delighted. Good thing we never have visitors in the winter, because then it's so bare you'd think it was dead. And yet every year the needles come back, isn't that something, a deciduous evergreen. Quite a contradiction in terms. An oxymoron, you know. So, there you have it. Once a visitor from Ottawa told me it was nothing but a swamp cypress! You can imagine how I treated him at breakfast. It was planted here by my wife's family a hundred and fifty-some years ago; later they even had the crest redesigned to include it. Go look at the ex libris plates in those books. It's not a trick, though, you're right, it has no more chlorophyll than a chanterelle. Most of them are green, you see, they don't have to depend so on others."

"We all have to depend on others," I said, not one very clever with aphorisms.

He dropped my hand and strode to the French doors. "One day," he said, his voice lowering, becoming menacing as he spoke against the glass, "I'm going to chop down that ghastly thing. Chop it down to the ground and use it for kindling for years to come. Because," he said, turning again to me, "it's rotten to the core with these awful Asiatic or African beetles we have here. The only way to stop them from spreading is to sacrifice the host-tree, so the forestry warden says. Ha! That would show my wife's family, wouldn't it? Well, it could just as well be lightning any day or a suitable windstorm. So may as well get out the ol' chainsaw and chop-chop."

Once more I had nothing to say. This time, I felt merely numbed by his anger and volatility. But I walked over to him at the window and stood alongside him again, not sure if I should pound him on his back to cheer him up or take him by the wrist. He had at some point rolled his plaid sleeves up above his elbows, which were badly abraded and scratched, maybe from trimming rose-bushes, and astoundingly tender and pink and vulnerable. How ridiculous of me to think that, I told myself even as I wanted to reach out and heal them.

Then I saw that his eyes were moist with tears and that he was stroking them around the red, enflamed lids, trying to prevent them from spilling over. Like most Englishmen (so I am constantly told), he was practiced at concealing his emotions, I could see, at least from strangers. "I'm just thinking of the war," he offered his excuse. "It all comes back to one at times, you know. One can't shake it. One was nearly destroyed, one was. Utterly, utterly destroyed."

"I imagine it was terrible," I said, weakly.

"Oh, I knew you'd understand completely, again! Americans are wonderful listeners, they listen and sympathize, not like us icy-veined monarchists. You are so very kind, my best new American friend. Home from the wars yourself. Why, I feel as if we have this very special—"

But at that moment we both heard what sounded like a whooping of violent laughter from some obscure corner of the house and, on the verge of something maybe neither of us could truly comprehend, we separated and looked around wildly, straining our ears, as if the house were being broken into. "Oh, it's only them," Mr. Idlewild said after a moment, breaking into laughter himself. Used to familiar ghosts knocking about, I surmised. Then, holding my eyes with his for possibly the very first time: "Oh, do give me a friendly hug right now and I'll go see what they need."

Without even thinking of it, I came up to him and hugged him as a son might his father, or what I thought was going to be just a quick conciliatory sort of hug, but he pressed me closer for a second or two longer and I felt his hollow chest heave under mine and smelled that half-alluring, half-repulsive odor again on his lips and body. Under his thin plaid half-unbuttoned shirt I felt his bones, and when I looked up from his shoulder his still wet blue-black eyes seemed to be imploring me to do or say something more. But I did not want Mr. Idlewild, I did not really want his arms around me, and I was glad that he shook himself free of me as quickly as he had embraced me. He was still laughing. "Thank you, my good friend," he said, turning toward the door. "Now I must attend to their needs for a while, but feel free to stay here as long as you like. Take a look at the books. Forge autographs. Scrawl dirty words in the margins. I'll pop back in later and we'll say goodnight before it's off to beddie-bye."

He closed the double doors to the main part of the house behind him, as if to seal me inside this mausoleum for good, but after a cautious minute I opened the doors a crack and peered as best I could through the dark adjoining rooms. A faint light in the distance revealed a corner of the kitchen, whose door at this end was half-open. I could make out a section of the long table I had eaten my dinner upon—how long ago that already seemed!—and also a bit of the bead-board cupboards and a chair or two. The shrill yattering and uproarious laughing Mr. Idlewild and I had been interrupted by reverberated against the high ceilings of the house—laughter and yatter grown nearly incessant—and while everyone was talking at once, slowly I gathered that there were several participants: the man's voice was easy to distinguish, and at least two more people were present, though they might as well have been twenty. Female voices? Yes, women, unquestionably the women I'd met earlier but still hadn't really had the opportunity to differentiate. At last curiosity got the better of me and I left the library behind, feeling my way through the twilit rooms (the same ones I had crossed earlier, so I could guess their layout better this time without stumbling) up to and across the cold tiles of the breakfast room that led directly to the kitchen. Crouching behind an incongruous camel-backed sofa there, feeling more than a little ridiculous, like a thief in a movie, I watched the doorway and listened. At this point I could see more of the table and more of the drainboard and cupboards and also part of the large and obviously very pricey brushed-steel refrigerator. A woman whose head seemed fresh from the hairdresser's, certainly the somewhat stouter of the two I had seen earlier, sat with her broad satin back to me on a high metal stool; her thick glossy calves, bare to just below the knee in that season's fashion (or maybe the last decade's, being that this was the forgotten North) swung against the rungs in a rhythm that kept pace with the monotonous regularity of her husky, almost mannish, voice. She appeared simultaneously or alternately both patient and impatient, depending on who else was speaking and what was being said. She was frequently raising a martini glass to her lips; apparently, someone had gone to all the trouble of making mixed drinks. There was the constant festive sound of ice being shaken, taps gushing, and spigots fizzing. As close as I was, I still could not make out all the participants' words, but I did hear again the name "Becs" repeatedly. And then the other two came within my sight and took seats opposite the woman with her back to me. Mr. Idlewild, of course, a martini glass in his hand as well, filled to the brim with something neon-blue, and a very very blonde woman with a strikingly overdone look for a supposedly impromptu excursion into the countryside—that is, her hair and dress and makeup all were meant for a night out in the big city, or, one might assume, to knock out a potential suitor. Even though I could not see the other woman's face, I could tell the blonde put her fatter friend's comparatively dumpy appearance to shame. She took a swig from her own glass and then tapped it noiselessly against Mr. Idlewild's, like two people sharing a secret—all the while scrunching up an upturned nose that looked the result of too much surgical intervention—and everybody hooted and beat a bongo rhythm on the table with be-ringed knuckles. "To us! To us!" they all cried, as if this were an old custom of theirs. And then Mr. Idlewild kissed them both—the elegant one sloppily on a corner of her wide cherry-red mouth and the other on the top of her frosted-and-bobbed head. More wild laughter and promiscuity of glasses colliding rim-to-rim ensued.

I was as much impressed as nonplussed by how rapidly Mr. Idlewild's entire demeanor had changed in the five or six minutes since he had very nearly spilled real tears at the sight of his totem tree. Had it all been only an act for my benefit? Was it just narcissistic manipulation of my captive position? No, that would be inconsiderate if not cruel of me, for he obviously needed someone to talk to in his isolation, but for some reason I felt madly envious of these two gossipy women, of questionable class, each old enough to be my own mother; I felt they had intruded upon the privacy and privilege I had sheerly by chance obtained from the squire of this demesne and vanquished the spirit of this intimacy with their coarser kind of inebriated inanity.

I sat on my haunches behind the sofa in the dark, all ears. The more tightly corseted and shriller of the two women, the one with all the piled-up platinum blonde hair and circus makeup, I mean, had launched into a long story about what was happening up the road at "the old grange," where apparently this rebellious girl Becs lived with her infant and her new and difficult husband, who had some kind of connection with the livestock barns or maybe a riding school. "Go on, tell him the rest, darling," the other woman kept goading her on. It took me a while to understand that Becs was the daughter of the done-up woman and that the other woman was a family friend; how Jonathan Idlewild figured into all this, besides being an abutter, remained unclear to me, although it became more and more apparent that his relationship with these two women dated back to at least the time when the young Becs came to live in these parts. "Becs has simply always been like this, you know," the blonde said, apparently for the man's benefit, "always wanting everything now, now, now. When Tony and I were still together she was always, always, always playing us against each other—what she couldn't get from me, she managed to get in time from him. There was that time at the dressmaker's, remember, Stace, darling, she was just a kiddie but she nearly ripped that shopgirl and her sequinned leggings into pieces—I tell you, it left me in sheer tears. And that was only the start. I just never could handle her. And when she was old enough, the boys she'd have racing their fricking scoots up and down the close! Once, when I caught her in the shed with her knickers down, well you know I had to send her to my mum's until I could get myself back together again. You know what happened because of that, Stace. Oh, really, Jonno, this is what I get for having had her so young. Don't smirk, darling, you know I was barely more than a child. But look at your daughter, Jonno, how well she's done because you and Cecily waited all those years and gave her a proper upbringing. I know, I know, I know—but it's no semidetached in some Carmarthenshire slum, I tell you, it's a proper villa, you said? You know who's the victim here—me! I'm the one being abused. My fault, I suppose, for always being too indulgent—but tell me, Jonno, mate, tell me, do I really deserve to be a grandmother at my age?"

"Of course not, Josie Jo, of course not," the other woman commiserated. Her heels were banging against the rungs of the stool with real gusto now. "Christ Jesus! Now my Mandy's got one in the hopper, I prolly shouldn't be saying that, eh?" She brayed at the idea and I realized then that she was most likely drunker by far than the other two. She was heaving on her stool and beating on the table with furious fists, trying to get the kind of attention a real drunken person craves. But the others weren't paying much attention to her, and even though my view from behind the camel's hump was limited and the still considerable distance prevented me from catching every word, especially the mumbled or slurred ones, I could sense a tacit pact between Jo and Jonno, in the way they glanced sidewise at each other, in the way the man only touched the stouter woman after he had caressed the energetic Jo, as if to make up for any apparent inequity of pats and rubs, and in the way Jo subtly addressed certain phrases only to Jonno ("Some people have been so simpatico!" "You'd have to have suffered, too, to understand!") right in front of the increasingly oblivious Stace. "I'm telling only you, Jonno, dearest, in the most sincere confidence," Jo said in a suddenly very thespian tone, bringing the abridged biography of her daugher to a shattering conclusion, "tomorrow I'm calling my solicitors Newhouse and Newman and I'll have them draw up the papers whether she bleeding well likes it or not, and then if I have to I'll drag her and that brat by the hair out of that goddamn hell-hole." She took advantage of a dramatic pause to fumble for the cocktail shaker, which was apparently down at the end of the table where I couldn't see. For a moment I could only hear her feet stomping and the ice rattling threateningly. "Mark my words, if that slimy slope-browed tattooed chav tries to lay a finger on my daughter again I'll kick him to death with these murderous heels, I... I tell you I'll destroy these very expensive Pradas just to, to... to have at him, to castrate him."

"Brava, Joanna!" Stace said, applauding her friend's soliloquy. "Then we can get out of this blasted boggy bump in the road and back to civilization where we all belong, thank Christ. Here, be a nice girl and pour me some of that, too, darling. I tell you, I'm simply dying of thirst. What kind of stinking Blackpool saloon is this? Waiter!" And then she turned a bloated and empurpled profile to me to take a look at what I too saw was Mr. Idlewild's very flushed, stricken face. Fat or not, this Stace woman was beautiful and honest in her anguish. "Oh, I'm sorry, Jonno," she revised herself, "that was rude of little me. I don't mean to imply this whole village is nothing but a dump. Jo and I have always said what a swank establishment you've got here. You married right, didn't you? Got what you wanted? Living the life? Well, class is as class does, as me pap always says. Don't hold back on the booze, Jose you bitch." She had been self-consciously inserting a lot of ironic quotation marks around her words. The other two weren't listening anymore, just looking back and forth at one another as if to disclaim any connection to their funny friend. In the end it was Stace who requested leave to go use "the ladies'," as she said with a concluding burst of self-satire. As soon as she had slid down from her stool and disappeared into regions my eyes could not penetrate I saw the other two move into each other as if it had all been prearranged—this fleeting tryst, this surreptitious encounter—and kiss, this time fully on each other's expectant mouth. And I saw her hand cup him far under the back pocket of his corduroys, something to which he responded with a rakishly raised eyebrow and a school-girlish whisper of "Naughty!" Well, actually I could not hear what he whispered, but whatever it was I knew I had to get out of there before this incomprehensible rage I felt rising within me caused me to do something embarrassing and regretful. Also, from the quantity of alcohol I myself had already consumed that evening—not a quarter as much as any of them, I'd guess, though being unused to it, it amounted to much more—I felt I might be "coming on sick." I needed to find my room fast and avail myself of the lav, if need be. So I stealthily worked my way out of the darkness I had inhabited for the last twenty minutes, crossed another lounge or sitting room, and went out the nearest door—which turned out to be not the one I had entered from, but was just as well because it led directly to the long row of high windows facing the garden and then the carpeted stairs that would lead me back to my room. This time, however, someone had switched on a light above one of the landings and I could see more of the scrolled wooden railings and newel posts and St. Michael's dragons in the design of the runner. Under the halogen lantern in a windowless alcove hung a large acrylic family portrait I hadn't notice before, depicting what was obviously a younger and less dissolute Jonathan Idlewild, noncommittally smiling, brown from the sun and casual in a casually rumpled suit minus tie; an attractive but somehow daunting woman of determined jaw and indistinctly colored hair in a tight chignon above a brow less serene than severe, wearing an indiscreet number of seed-pearls and sumptuous excrescences of anachronistic lace; and a preternaturally pale girl of about seven in a lumpy woolen jumper and a pleated plaid kilt that might have been a school uniform. She was sulking under taffeta bows and holding a small blue clay or plasticine glob (a Smurf or Smurf-like creature) in the palm of her hand, actually holding it out to the viewer for inspection, as if this were a pose caught by a candid photographer. One got the impression the child had insisted this favorite toy she had in all probability made herself be included in what essentially amounted to an awkward family snapshot. The most interesting thing about the painting was that none of the people in it seemed to want to have anything to do with the others, and none of them seemed related, whether by blood or in attitude or costume or facial expression; the half-careless and half-meticulous brushstrokes represented three people who had posed at different sessions at widely different times—possibly for different artists—and who could now only feel animosity for one another, trapped together for all time on linen stretched canvas. Halting there on the landing for just a minute, I wondered again about what had happened to the redoubtable Mrs. Idlewild—whether she would ever be back, whether she might even be back tonight. The private apartments of the big house would certainly be down the halls opposite, and luck had ensured that I could sneak into those rooms easily, with everyone preoccupied downstairs—I could imagine myself rifling through drawers, overturning expensive pillows, searching under beds and within sachet-scented wardrobes. Searching for what? That thought did not occur to me at that moment. Even if I had gathered the nerve, I didn't have an electric torch, and turning on any lights or bumping into things could easily draw unwelcome attention. Besides, what did I care? What did I care a fig about this trumped-up boarding-house proprietor whom I had not known existed just a few hours ago? He was obviously one to seize opportunities wherever he found them, and I didn't want to play any more into his recondite schemes. Nevertheless, part of me wanted to take the risk, to have an adventure, to at last have something to mark my transition from a shy bookworm to a sophisticated imago: that is, a man of the world. Or, maybe—bite off a piece of poison and inure oneself to future sorrows. Ha! I could rationalize it any way I might, but it would all still leave me feeling like a fool.

After availing myself of the toilet, though I was not quite as sick as I'd feared, I lay stunned and dizzy on the enormous bed (ridiculously proportioned at any rate for one person), falling down endless stairwells in my mind, revolving on unstoppable carousels, and ended up staring into the black facets of glass in the bay window; they reflected back only the greenish light from the fringed lampshade on the tea-table and an apparational figure sprawled upon a field of damask cabbage-roses. The elaborate plasterwork pargeting on the ceiling of the room was poised to drop upon me. The walls were closing in. He had bid me to come back for a nightcap in the library, if I desired. I was waiting for a sign from the universe, or at least this little rustic corner of it, to tell me that I should go. In vain I listened for voices below me—though lacking a compass or GPS, I estimated I must be approximately twelve feet above the kitchen—but heard nothing but the consumptive cough and rasp of water through Victorian drains. Of course, I could have taken off my clothes and gone to sleep—it was late enough for that, and also too late. Minutes passed, maybe an hour. Oh, well... Without fully wanting to I put on my shoes and allowed myself to be led by some capricious fate toward the library I had left so very long ago. On my way out and down I noticed that the other door down the hall of these guest quarters had been pulled open a few inches more than before, and there was an unsubtle smell of something feminine and seductive and not half cheap wafting from within. It only dawned on me then that of course that was where Jo and Stace must be spending the night; my bathroom adjoined theirs in the rear, and they too would hear whatever comings and goings were to be had.

All was perplexingly quiet on the floor beneath me, and once I came to the double doors of the library I hesitated for only a moment. I didn't expect to find the women lounging within, my innkeeper between them, but I did suppose they might have gone up to "the old grange" to try their luck one more time before calling it quits. There was still an amber ribbon between the partially cracked library doors, and probably candles still burning within. When I silently opened the doors, there he was, sunken deep in his leather club-chair again in the gothic gloom, paging idly through another glossy book within the light of a small reading lamp. It was as if he had never left and never toyed with those women and never kissed Jo. "There you are, lad, there you are," he said, not bothering to look up as he stopped on a photograph of sun-struck turrets and pinnacles rising above the fantasy froth of cotton-candy clouds. He hovered over the page like a priest consulting a sacred book. "The Lady D'Aubreville's chateau, Charles the Seventh or Eighth, duchy of Anjou, on the Mayenne, the Loire Valley," he recited, lost in a private incantation. "Helena. A friend of Debbo and Unity's. At one point, you know, she relied entirely upon my father to rescue her fortune. Née Helena Marie Worthingforth So-and-So. She kept painted terrapins in the fishponds. Had atrocious body odors. Slept with the tennis coach. You know, I think she was the only woman I ever really admired, and I wasn't quite fourteen." Only after a frozen minute of silence did he put down the book and extract himself from the chair's sure embrace. His intent expression changed, and it was as if only now was he truly and really seeing me at last. "There you are. There you are! Care for one more before nighty-night?" He had already evidently poured himself another glass—a substantially taller flute this time—of the cassis or whatever it was. Without waiting for an answer, he shoved an identical glass my way and waited for me to sit myself down again on the leather couch, after which he filled the flute almost to overflowing. "Drink up, it's good for growing youths," he said with mock solemnity. "And don't hold your nose this time." In fact, there was something almost malevolent in the way he was ordering me about, controlling the situation, whatever if any were the rules of the game.

I made myself comfortable with a couple of petit-point bolsters and accepted the tribute and his toast. Without really knowing why, I drank very fast, in great gorping swallows. Maybe I was only trying to play catch-up. I no longer tasted anything.

He gazed upon me half, it appeared, in admiration and half in unvocalized frustration. What did he want of me? I had to ask myself all over again. I did not ask myself what I wanted of him.

"Forgive me for saying this, but you remind me so much of this chap I knew from Kansas," he began telling me. "We became the greatest of chums, close as can be, how could you understand, how could you. He was nervous and thin, like you, not quite as reticent as you, quiet, intelligent, and Tom earnestly eager Tom was very very proud of his first mustache, what one might call a preliminary sketch. Not at all handsome but still. So young. How old did you say you were? This was 1967 or '68, near the blood-soaked beaches of Nha Trang. The blood-soaked beaches of, it's some old ballad— He couldn't have been more than twenty. A gunner. A gunner. He taught me how to play American-style poker and though one has never played it since, back then we'd have great runs of games that would last days. Do you think I exaggerate? Do you think I'm a liar, the way they do? Oh, Tom, so long ago! So, so long ago. You know, there's this love, this bond between soldiers, doubtless you've heard, that's like none you'll find anywhere else, and though one was an outsider, on assignment, one felt so very accepted. Accepted like one never has been before or since. Do you understand the kind of love I mean? A love of life! Men, together, life! Every day in the midst of war one feels so god-awful alive and so lucky to be alive! King of Kings! Whenever you hear those helicopters buzzing in like a million wasps from hell you gulp a sharp intake and smell the charred bodies and you're amazed your heart is still beating and the sky is still blue and you know every one of these boys around you would lay down his life for you. How old did you say you are? That boy was blinded. Good God in Heaven. A Chinese-made explosive device, shit flying everywhere. What do you know of it all, you sweet prat, you naive Yank, you're far too young, you and your mother weren't even born yet, what can you possibly fucking care?" His words kept rolling and rolling along, rolling out of him as he stooped over me to refill the glass which had magically gone empty, and I noticed then not for the first or last time how much he was shaking. Not in his hands, which were almost unnaturally steady and lifeless, but in his chest and across his bony shoulders under his plaid shirt I could almost feel across space the vibrations that shook him. His eyes had welled up once again.

I set my glass down upon the low table between us, too carefully, too mindfully, as a drunkard does, and tried to say something reasonable, something appropriate. "It must have been very hard for you," was the most I could come up with.

He was suddenly at my side on the couch, squeezing my upper arm with real unmitigated hatred. "Oh, don't take pity on me," he snarled. "You sound like the queen bitch herself. You sound like everyone else and yet... and yet I know you're not like everyone else. Tell me you're not. You—you're an American, for one thing." And then he grew more conciliatory and pulled me up from my seat the way he had before, until we were both standing side by side, between the overstuffed bookshelves, swaying a bit against each other but not quite touching. His eyes shone blue and black. Forcing oneself not to weep can be very painful; I felt his pain almost like a force in the room. Having concentrated so much upon my would-be confessor up to this moment, I hadn't really paid much attention to anything else around me, but in the silence then I became conscious again of the light from beyond, from the snow-white, dead-white tree outside the French doors that was still lit up by its spotlights, and it was this glow that filled the chapel-like room with light more than the candelabra or dim reading lamps did. A wind had come up, and the ferny white foliage waved about like the arms and fingers of dancers in a dream. The emblematic tree loomed as menacingly over the flowerbeds in the garden as an ancient idol carved of chalk. Mr. Idlewild was watching, too, by my side, entranced by the tree's ghostlike motion. His mood had changed once again. He spoke as if to a child. "Do you want to see what they did to me?" he asked, gently but with obviously no intention of having it any other way.

I stepped back a pace, as if he were going to break apart around me. His eyes did not plead; they only insisted. At that moment his eyes shining in the white shadows were the only living part of him; all the rest was nothing but a walking corpse. "We were ambushed," he said, "in the deepest jungle, in the middle of a hot night. They had bayonets. They had—they had explosive devices. Crude grenades, I suppose. Shrapnel. That boy Tom went blind, but he was luckier than many. Damn me and my camera and the money I had to make. Christ, he—he was only twenty. Younger than you. I ran away from him, from them all, and didn't look back. Not once did I drop my Leica. The beaches were soaked with gore. I ran, I ran, I ran. You think I'm lying? You think I'm a liar? Then, look!" And he tore open his plaid shirt-front, rapidly undid the top buttons of his trousers and pushed them down to the pubic bone. His flat thin chest gleamed in that supernatural light, and I saw that along the lower side of his right rib-cage, then diagonally across his hairless abdomen and down to his navel before disappearing into the obfuscations of hair below ran a long jagged scar, a good eight or nine inches long, like an evil brand, like a lightning stroke seared in flesh. "Feel it!" he begged of me and, grabbing my hand by the wrist, forced my fingers down the length of the scar. It was a fat white thread, a thick corrugated worm just under the moist flesh, and its slick and rubbery texture disgusted me. And still he forced my fingers down and down, until I just touched the frizzled hairs—and then he threw back my hand as if I had been the one to invade without permission his inviolate flesh. Our eyes met wildly, as I imagined two mad lovers' might. "You see what it's like to suffer," he said so softly I could barely hear him, although I was still half in his embrace. The glaring light from the albino tree made of his face a white mask with two dark sockets in it. "You see what it is to bear this reminder forever, to be like someone who must carry a cross forever, someone who's always dying but can't die."

Even in that extreme contrast of shadow and light played out across his face, I could tell that he was still holding back the tears that had welled up even more profusely than before. But I did not feel pity for him, he needn't fear that; I only abhorred him at that moment. I felt I had somehow been tricked, swindled. I knew I was drunker than I had ever been and I only wanted to sleep. I left him without another word. It would be the last time I ever saw him, a pale silhouette in the light from the garden, maundering and moaning, his shirt and trousers still undone, an obscenity, something like a broken shadow-puppet, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides.

But that is not the end of my story. Much later into that protracted night, after several fruitless hours spent rolling and tossing on my absurd bed, I summoned the energy at last to go to my private bathroom. Since I had to cross the hall, I looked once again toward the door of the room the two women apparently were sharing—for a night, for the week, a month, I still wasn't sure. This time it was securely shut and there was no light. However, far down the corridor in the opposite direction, across the landing and along the railed gallery, I saw pinpricks of light, wavering and coruscating, as though magnified figures turned to shadow were moving back and forth across candlelight cast upon a wall. This time, despite my fatigue and my lingering apprehension about the tragedy of my landlord, I could contain my curiosity no more and so I crept along the steps and up along the railings above and across the rose-garden windows, toward the house's innermost chambers—for I knew if I got close enough I would hear voices and perhaps another piece of the puzzle of this evening might fall into place. My instincts did not shortchange me, for once I pressed close around a corner I could hear them—two voices, male and female, laughing, moaning, cajoling, at ease with one another. No more than a whisper of well-guarded voices, and yet indisputably the sounds of lovemaking, or an approach to lovemaking. The light wavered, flared up, and was extinguished in an instant. And then only darkness, but still I waited freezing to death in the empty passageway that echoed my heart and listened, how long I couldn't say. I nearly shouted aloud when something furry leaped over my feet. Not a rat—a cat. More silence, then vibrations through the wall of perhaps a stealthy argument, perhaps a bout of barely controlled passion, but still the voices were muffled and indistinct. At one point I thought I heard a slap followed by a stifled cry, by which point I hurried back to bed and actually did succumb to a heavy if unrefreshing sleep.

In the morning the house was filled with birdsong from within and without the surrounding shrubbery, but I heard no voices or movement inside the house, at least at my end of it. After I had dressed and packed I went as quietly as I could down the carpets, well knowing it was very late but nevertheless not wanting to risk waking anyone. There was a mottled and molting gray tabby—evidently the same one as before—lazing in the dawnlight slanting across the bottom of the first-floor stairs. I stepped over the beast, ready to make a quick exit. Stace, however, was in the kitchen, back on her throne-like stool, huddled over a steaming cup of coffee that smelled very black and slightly burnt, almost like the bitumen on the road that had taken me, for better or not, into this hamlet. When she saw me she took and raised up the coffee urn at her elbow like an offertory. Today she was dressed in ordinary jeans and blouse and looked none the worse for the wear. Her eyes, however, were half-hidden beneath a heavy highlighted fringe. "Don't worry," she said as I approached, "I'm not going to force any rotten fried love apples or blood pudding on you—I know you Americans don't go for that. However authentic you like things. Here, sit down, take your antidote, there's plenty of Devonshire if you like, this is dairy country, you know." Her voice was less husky and ingratiating now it was daylight, and she was sober as most nuns are.

I accepted the proffered mug and she seemed pleased in a motherly way. In the clear uncompromising autumn light coming from the eastern-facing windows I was surprised to see that she was actually quite a pretty woman, prettier and younger-looking than her friend, in fact, in a natural way the very carefully put-together Jo could likely not achieve without a great deal of effort. And she wasn't half so pudgy as I'd thought she was. Although she made a habit of chewing on her underlip between sentences, her smile was genuine when she looked me over. It did not stay on her pleasant but somewhat insipid face for long. She obviously had other things on her mind.

"Is anyone else around?" I asked in a needlessly tentative voice, looking up and down the kitchen that seemed so much more vacant in this revelatory light than it had the previous night. The coffee and cream tasted like nothing at all; I was too absorbed in her words to concentrate on anything else.

She was frowning even more deeply, and this made her look older but no wiser. "Mr. Leavell the vicar's backstairs with the dotty old twat," she told me in a conspiratorial tone. "Reads her the scriptures in high Latin, they say. Oh me oh my. Just like clergy—High Church twaddling!" She laughed a deep mean-spirited laugh all her own. "And Josie—Jo to you—is up the grange, trying to wrangle that hellion of hers. I bet she stumbled on her fuck-you heels the whole way, falling up to her fanny in the mud and sheep-shite. Ha ha! She might not make it back alive and it would serve her right for always snooping and meddling."

"And..." I began elliptically.

"Oh, his lordship, I presume you're wondering about?" She turned her back on me and went over to the sink to begin languidly rinsing saucers and plates, but continued talking, albeit a bit more clandestinely. "He's sleeping it off, as you might have guessed. Like to see him slip in some shit himself. Did he keep you a long time in the lending library last night? Telling tall tales? Oh, don't be surprised. He's a one, isn't he? Always been one, too. Tell me, did he carry on about all the injustices that have befallen him? Sing you 'Worried Man Blues Parts 1 to 29'? Like no one else ever had a right to a complaint."

I was a bit taken aback that she knew more of what had been going on in the house since I arrived than I had assumed. Probably more than anyone else. Could she have been listening at doors and under eaves in the same manner I had? "He mentioned the war," I said as off-handedly as I could.

"The war! Ha! There's another one for you! It's no wonder about Cecily—well, you never mind. Still, I bet you he kept you entertained, he's good for that and a larf, at least."

"He also showed me the tree," I told her.

"The tree? A tree? Oh—right, right, the tree. 'Course. I suppose he does like to show it off to foreigners who've never seen the like. I grant you, it's a nice tree, pretty, not many like it he says, like a Christmas tree in the snow. But it's gawdawful-looking once it drops those flocked fronds."

"He says he wants to have it taken down. He says it has, what is it, bag-worms or something."

She huffed out enough breath to disarrange the frosted shock falling over her forehead. "Isn't that just like him! Just because Cecily's not here. Chop that handsome thing down!"

For a second I came very close to asking where Cecily might be, but brought myself up short and asked instead, "Wasn't he a war photographer? It must have been harrowing."

"Oh, he's been so many things, who can keep track. It wouldn't be so bad if a one of what you might call his avocations or hobbyhorses had made him some decent poundage."

"But it's really too bad what happened to him, don't you think?"

"What? The crash, you mean? Did he tell you about he how he cracked up doing a ton on the M3 in his da's Porsche? Very nearly died before his majority. Had to piece him back together like Humpty. Well, that was London and that was then. Leastwise, he won't be driving no more these days." She stopped scrubbing for a moment, waiting for me to take all this jumbled information in, then went on. "Truth is, I felt sorta sorry for Cecily from the second I met her. One might say she was taken in. Right. Well, ask Joanna, it was her big sis knew Jonathan at the time, she was slutting around those Mayfair hippies back then. Oh, listen to me! Josie's the one who likes to tell whoppers and slag people off, she don't mind either, altering the truth to suit her purpose. But who's to say we don't always sometimes, young man?" Could it be that she actually winked at me, or was that the morning sun in her eye? "Right," she added quickly, her voice sinking almost to a whisper, "don't believe a word of what any one of us says—we all tell fibs in the end! But—sweet Jesus..."

"Oh," I said, as if I understood completely instead of not at all. And then I saw that despite her flippant tone she looked on the verge of tears. I seemed to have a way of bringing them on in this household.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to stir up anything."

She shot around the table and slapped a wet dishcloth down. Her round face was red, she'd bitten her lip white, her left fist was tightened around a butter knife she unconsciously wielded like a rapier. "What do you mean? You think I care what Jumping Josie does? You think I fugging care? Let her reap what she sows. I'm not her nursemaid, I'm not her bodyguard... Oh, but you bothersome Americans! See what you've made me let on. Come on, boy, don't shy away, my bite's not so bad as my bark. Needn't fret, I'm just a bit on the rag this morning. But, still, you Yanks. You Yanks. Look how you got me letting on. Everything's a reality show to you. Oprah and all that. You should know it's true what they say, we English aren't like that, we English are very very private people."

I saw this was probably as good a time as any to make my leave. "He said he wasn't sure if it was twenty-five or thirty I owe," I said, unsure if she had been deputized or not.

"It's thirty," she said definitively. "Same as us, even after all that's been said and done. I wouldn't take advantage of you, I told him. Ha! And neither will I let you off scot-free. You'll pay now, please, or I'll have to chase you and hold you down until you give it up." She stood there hands on hips before me, an ironic smirk on her face, wanting to be thought of as a comically coquettish figure, I supposed, or maybe a tragic one, or both at once. Someone who'd inadvertently exposed herself on one of those television shows.

I was fishing around in my wallet but couldn't find more than a twenty-pound note and some loose coins. Until I got to an ATM I would have to take my chances.

"Oh, all right, then, twenty-five," she said. "Might as well pocket it myself for all he'll know or remember. But don't tell anyone, you hear? Wink wink nudge nudge." And who could or would I tell? I thanked her more profusely than necessary and nearly would have hugged her like my own mother if she hadn't backed off in that reserved English way of which she spoke.

"Well, then," I said, handing her my empty mug at the sink. "I should be off."

"You should," she said, turning away from me again, humming tunelessly to herself, back to a sink full of suds and her own unresolved despair. Lest she should catch me thinking such thoughts, I hurried to the door, hoisting up my backpack—heavier this morning than it had ever been—over my shoulders. She did not say goodbye, not even a "ta."

The stuffed fox watched me traverse the timeworn bricks, and the mangy badger's head on the stretched and mounted skin stared at me coming as I left that oppressive kitchen and entered the light-filled porch for the last time. Out on the flags there the air was fresh and cold, and out in the garden the cold white sun hit me full in the face with what I suppose one might call its ever-renewing grace. The flowers in the garden, of too many varieties and too many colors for a not-very botanically-minded foreigner to comprehend, were bright and busy with bees. Butterfly bush, I knew that, and also clematis and maybe convolvulus. The weeds, too, grew vibrantly and unmolested among the cultivated plants. I saw a Roman or Tesco-era sundial, I saw trellises and arbors and raised beds and gazing-balls, but I did not linger to investigate.

Before the house with its unremarkable façade of stucco and stone disappeared behind its high granite wall, I glanced over my overweighted and imbalanced shoulder to appraise it one last time. It did not stare back at me with watchful windows for eyes as some great houses do, but just stood there sand-brown and inert and inoffensive. I wondered what ones were the windows behind which the master slept. The ragged, bristly topmost boughs of the albino sequoia (if that's what it truly was) loomed over the uneven roofline like an ancient giant's enormous hoary head, unbowed by the wind.

My borrowed vehicle was still leaning against the wall where I had abandoned it with panniers still full the evening before; its broad suede-covered saddle was still damp and the needlessly gaudy sun winked in the dew of its chromium headlamps and mirrors. The day promised to be a clear, dry one. I put on my helmet and wheeled my vehicle into the rutted lane and back across the cattle-grate. Before me I saw through the ash trees that the road dipped and swerved around a serpentine bend on its way to the red and yellow gorse-covered sheep-meadows of the valley below. Already I was forgetting elements of what had happened here, in this insignificant place, in that house, in the rather pretentious ancestral library where I had seen a man I hadn't known yesterday weep hopelessly without shedding tears. In my mind, Jonathan Idlewild was already melting away rather like a snowman. Did he, for instance, wear glasses; did he comb his hair straight back or to the left; were his eyes blue or black? Did he even spell his name with a terminal "e" or not? Had he in fact ever been interested in me in the least? In the future, when memory failed me more and more, I too would have to resort to elaboration or fabrication—and who doesn't.

That was that. With a heave I saddled the Raleigh and took off flying. My bicycle seemed to know its way west to Ingram and then across the gentle hills toward Bellingham.
The Knacker's Handsome Boy

Some things are real and some things are not, and some things may be neither. Sometimes it was hard, she had lately come to realize, to tell which was which. This hard mattress I lie upon, she might say to herself, is very real, and that nightmare I just woke from obviously not; that Jesus was a man is a fact, and this world is a terrible cruel place—that's also true, but Heaven or Hell, Hell or Heaven: if one exists, then how could the other? And how to explain the scene repeated once or twice a month in the alleyway below? In the middle of a dark and overcast night she knew it was easy to be deceived or bewildered, so at first she blamed only her so-called "wild imaginings." (Though from earliest childhood she had learned to bear up under such easy taunts.) In daylight, her head no longer fogbound, those nocturnal visitations sometimes felt no more real or substantial than pieces of dreams she sometimes recalled quite unexpectedly in the middle of her never-ending chores. But however intense those dreams or nightmares were and how often they might recur—flashes of herself kneeling among pews looking for a hymnal that kept breaking up and blowing away like milkweed floss, eating an entire walnut cake in a washtub, plucking fryers that turned on her with fangs like vipers, her father forcing her to curl up inside the wood-stove—they were fragmented and fleeting, while this ongoing torment was different; its time and place and intrinsic nature always remained as vivid as those visions were frustratingly vague. Cold moonless nights she had been stirred again and again from sleep, from the first frosts of autumn and continuing through the last frosts of spring: still and secretive nights they always were, nights often overcast and devoid of a single star, like a sarcophagus lid their black weight lowering over the earth after St. Ursula's had chimed its last. Only then did the long high-boarded cart with its two big iron-rimmed wheels grate and groan out from utter blind nothingness into reality, to make its lumbering way down the brick lane far beneath her drafty sill. Some things are real and some things not and some things neither.

Even on the darkest night, if one stares long enough and one thinks like a cat, it is still possible to see. If she tried hard enough she could even make out the fine print below the picture of a silhouetted Indian brave on the drugstore calendar upon the opposite wall. But—there! again!—one must first of all listen: heavy hooves echoing, a harness jingling, someone's throaty whistling and spitting, sometimes a whip snapping like a firecracker, or something large and heavy under the tarpaulin bonnet shifting and pitching the creaking cart. The riot of noises would be what drove her out of bed at last; unlike the rest of the household, it seemed, only she heard and only she could know, and so must go and press her forehead against the frost-flowers on the glass. Bearing witness, they would say back home in the chapel. A miracle, maybe, or an omen. (But everyone in this overspilling household would say, must say, it was only a sleepy teamster on his predawn rounds.) Below, miles below in that murk where by daylight alley met kitchen garden, sway-backed workhorse and leather-aproned driver would flicker into life for a moment within the tremulous blue-white naphtha halo of the lantern at the prow of their cart; horse and hooded, faceless driver might pause and exhale little clouds of steam just for a moment, as if in respect for her presence high above, and quickly dissipate into the invisible once more. A horse with its driver was a very common occurrence, at least during other hours of the day, but she had never seen ones like these two, however difficult it was to pinpoint exactly what made them so different, so odd and seemingly of another world. She could not get over the sensation that somehow the cart-driver was solely aware of her—that he sought to contact her. Now and then she convinced herself she heard an almost boyish laughter, another time a whisper pitched from the dark that nearly took the shape of her own name. (And who had told him? One of the others, to provoke her?) She should put match to wick, she scolded herself often enough, and read scripture as she used to do, until that opportunistic demon stirred from out the cobwebs was shamed into a nonentity. But crotchety old Miss Polk across the passageway might wake and see a shimmer of light under her door and accuse her again of overexcitement inspired by a "romance" foisted upon her by soft-minded old Mister Harding. Bad enough that the woman sometimes complained the girl was worse than a tribe of those Fox Sisters and a whole army of poltergeists, keeping her up late "with all that knocking and banging about with your hairbrush and commode." By dawn's unwelcome invasion, it is true, the girl would be left feeling both haggard and rattlepated, but knew instinctively that these occasional apparitions might appear no more believable to Miss Polk than a scene from a nickelodeon. Before she could even get around to what she had to say, older people always had a way of cutting her off mid-sentence, and given the chance to say anything at all, her ability to distinguish the real from the unreal would only be questioned, as usual. After two or three attempts to overcome being ignored in the halls and on the stairs, she gave up. To everyone here she was just "the girl," and she did not count, any more than Cinderella in the fairy tale had. "Go get the girl to mop it up." "Has anyone seen the girl? That room's a mess." This was in 1917 or 1918, when an insoluble war was raging in lands as foreign to her as the moon, beasts of burden still outnumbered tractors in much of the midwest, one naturally did what one was told or expected to do, available "help" far outnumbered available positions, and among those of her age and education and income level there was often little difference between servant and slave. However bad it might be here, her parents would forbid her to quit, and she was too afraid of this house to run away from it. As everyone repeated time and again, you had to earn your keep, you had to earn your keep. Therefore, she was too busy and too practical and too penurious for either worldly indulgences or otherworldly pipe-dreams, and went to bed every night so exhausted sleep was usually little more than a fathomless gap between eternal hours of drudgery and its even worse companion, boredom.

Her first two names were Ludmilla and Marien (no one ever bothered to learn to spell or pronounce the third and last, which was also Czech or something like that) and she worked as the maid-of-all-work at Mother Calhoun's Arms. Lucy, as she had always been known, was pulled from school when she was fifteen by her parents and sent to work here, near the summit of Allamakee's hills, in a high house perched on the steepest and windiest bluff above the wide Mississippi River and the hundreds of islands and sandbars she could see from the widow's walk above the topmost floor. The multistory structure seemed a palace to Lucy, though anyone else would have called it rundown, and the neighborhood was what is always called "formerly fashionable." Allamakee in general was a heathenish—meaning chiefly Catholic—place, with no outlet of her family's peculiar branch of latter-day Calvinism nearby; but if she prayed enough on her own, her parents concluded, well then, it would have to do... There was also no Mother Calhoun in town, or else she had died long ago. Nowadays the holding was overseen by a Mrs. Cavendish, who no longer lived on the premises, but rather in a good residential hotel downtown, and who was known generally to keep to her lonesome except when dealing with the law or when there was difficulty collecting past-all-excuses room-rent. Lucy caught glimpses of her now and then, usually from around corners or down a flight of stairs: she was a grandly obese woman with medallions upon her fallen but still vastly impressive bosom and a wide-brimmed picture hat with enough feathers on it for half a chicken coop. It was Miss Polk, a former schoolmistress of a rapidly graying age and no discernible figure under her shapeless black shirtwaist, who acted as Cavendish's ambassadress, arbitrator, executor, secretary, and all-round factotum. If the Lady of the House ever had to make any pronouncements or issue any bulls, it was through the mouthpiece of Miss Polk. Mrs. Cavendish of course never took the slightest notice of Lucy whenever she did happen to stop by, while Miss Polk couldn't seem to take her weasly, twitching eyes off the girl. However, like Jehovah, Mrs. Cavendish was perpetually waiting in the wings and could banish Lucy at any time, or so Miss Polk, who had placed the ad that had ensnared Lucy in the first place, repeatedly threatened. If Lucy ever touched a thing that wasn't hers, the woman histrionically swore as if to a large audience, she'd be packed off to a reformatory or something even worse. A fat old high-strung cook (Irish and called Cook, to keep things simple) was also very much in evidence on the premises, not to mention constantly changing laundresses and handymen and groundskeepers, as well as milkmen and icemen and coal-men and greengrocers' representatives who came and went with a lot of flurry and fuss. Lucy, who was from an unincorporated rag of a village three or four counties distant to the east in the Badger State, often felt she was in some sort of chaotic modern Babylon in Allamakee and that she was being made to suffer at Mother Calhoun's like a holy martyr. That is, the physical and emotional and spiritual demands upon her were without cease; prolonged peace if not to say solitude was very rarely to be found, and because she was always being called into question, some nebulous unpardonable sin of her own creation always seemed to be circling itself to nest in the corners she had neglected to dust. Only men, of all ages and strata of society, lived in this house, of course. Some of the tenants were well-enough-off itinerants—traveling clergy and land surveyors and government engineers and carnival agents who stayed a few weeks at most, but the majority of inhabitants were poorer and sadder sorts, however rich and happy they might once have been: disgraced bachelors and grieving widowers and recently divorced gentlemen who never seemed to leave or appear to wish to do so. The majority of them, especially the circuit preachers, drank, albeit surreptitiously, as there were certain house rules. Consequently, the building was a little more than a hotel and a little less than a proper boarding house, such as they might have in the center and not at the frayed ends of town. Women never came to stay and rarely even to visit, and it could very well be that other than employees they were banned from setting foot in the place, although Lucy had never been so informed. Once in a great while a dejected-looking sparrow or perhaps a draggle-winged mother hen might tippy-tap upon the front door's etched glass panes (the antiquated doorbell only thudded loud enough for itself to hear) and such a one might ask for Mr. What's-His-Name, but when summoned Miss Polk invariably claimed less knowledge of the suspect's whereabouts than a murderer's accomplice would. Lucy was to learn quickly that females—whether alleged to be "wives" or "daughters" or "sisters"—in or near such a place are almost always trouble. Even and especially those in wimples or nurse whites. Calhoun's Arms was not exactly advertised as a "Christian gentleman's retreat," though in this area it was as near as one might allow, and because or in spite of that it still remained barely profitable.

Lucy had many brothers and uncles and male cousins back home. The men she could handle. Miss Polk was another sort of sex altogether. Beneath the many shiny black buttons, winking like beetles all down the front of her black blouse, it seemed impossible that a commiserative feminine heart could be beating. Early in her tenure at Mother Calhoun's, when the girl once complained that Mr. Evans had pinched her in a spot she couldn't politely mention, Miss Polk had only stared at her with a frowning sort of smile, as if the new hireling had encouraged him. "Then, don't be wearing your bib-strings so tight," was all she said. After that Lucy made no mention of the tenants' frequent improprieties and instead learned what a sharp laugh and an even sharper slap could do to a man's ego. Still, not long after that memorable assault, she had overheard Miss Polk saying to the very same Mr. Evans, an old man of at least four decades, that "help these days being what it is, the girls we get is what you might call slow." Slow! She nearly came out from behind the pie safe to confront the woman. Certainly she was not overly clever and full of eggheaded nonsense like some of the girls she had known back at grammar school, but she was also not like those calf-eyed sluggards who sit quietly in corners drooling and unraveling their own hems. Although not one to boast, she had excelled in her peculiar denomination's catechism and could recite many gospel passages pretty much from memory. She was strong and not bucktoothed or walleyed and one day she supposed, if she ever thought about it, she would marry a rich and handsome farmer. She knew her McGuffey's and she could handle the Palmer Method passably well, whatever Miss Polk said.

When last September Lucy had first trudged up and down the relentlessly angular streets of Allamakee, pinched and blistered by her traveling shoes (old buckled slippers donated to her by an aunt with more delicate feet), she had been amazed to discover how dizzyingly tall the rows of brick and sandstone-faced buildings in the business district were—towering four or five stories, some of the storefronts, gargantuan as armories or fortresses she'd seen in illustrated almanacs in the schoolroom. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, she recited as she was obliged to and stopped there, forgetting for the first time ever the rest of the psalm. So this at last was what they called the "city." First there had been a long teary walk to the nearest depot with two older and drier-eyed sisters, then the train-ride through monotonous field after field after field until they reached Marquette on the other side of the river, then the indignity of an ox-cart going north, and then an electric streetcar, the likes of which she had never seen. The directions in her letter had told her to mount it, though doing so she felt as one with those poor passengers who had not so long ago boarded the Titanic. People shouted at and jostled her, she hadn't the least notion as to how to pay the conductor, she had to sit between a cigar and a Limburger sandwich, she dropped her clean handkerchief onto the disgraceful floor, a whirlwind through the window knocked off the straw-plaited sombrero she now saw marked her for a rube. Lucy was ejected peremptorily into the depths of the urban mayhem, among the usurers and whores of Gomorrah. It was a market town; at first glance all taverns and no temples. One simpering, show-offy cock-of-the-walk after another—astrut in form-fitting checked suits, marigolds in their buttonholes, pince-nez on their upraised snoots—elbowed past her. Smut-nosed, snot-nosed boys, newsboys, and shoeshine boys darted in and out of the traffic, nipping at buggy-wheels like curs. Fruit-sellers with comic accents hawked their waxy, exotic heaps of grapefruit and pawpaws and lemons on the sidewalks. Novel sights were simply everywhere. At one corner she saw a stout, elderly gentleman in a dyed sheepskin coat lighting the cigarette of someone who could not be mistaken for his wife, a wolfish woman buried up to her eyes in fox furs. At another corner she saw two tall wispy paper dolls arm-in-arm, in hobble skirts and swaying under fern-fronds and aigrettes they might have purchased in Paris, looking in those costumes, Lucy thought, a little like the potted palms she saw inside the windows of the fanciest restaurants here. Well, aren't I in the world now! she exclaimed aloud, surprised she knew a potted palm when she saw one, and hurried forth, forcing on herself a pretense of nonchalance, something she'd never even imagined doing before. Inside the acres of plate-glass fronting the restaurants and saloons she passed on her way to Mother Calhoun's, she glimpsed yet more girls who looked perfectly perfect, perfect as dress-forms, bedecked in the latest sewing-pattern creations (far more modish than anything back across the Great Divide in the feudal Wisconsin uplands) with their male companions—a few in khaki or naval serge—sleekly assured men who'd stepped out of war posters and shirt-collar advertisements, some of them sitting before overflowing tankards of black beer large enough to drown them and slices of custard-apple pie thick enough to choke them. Let them, then! These people—men and women, young and old—plump, greasy-lipped, balloon-cheeked, shiny-haired—looked every one enormously content and entirely self-satisfied. When I have worked so hard here that I can sleep on mattresses stuffed with dollar bills, she thought to herself as she hastened on as best she could with her heavy oil-cloth carryall—while feeling her stomach beg its pardon beneath her dusty scarecrow clothes—I will sit right up there at the polished counter just like one of them, and I will laugh at poor simple country girls passing by the window, too.

But weeks later, on a rare afternoon off or if she'd been sent into town to fetch more buttermilk or a mustard-plaster (delivery boys not always being available), she found she still could not enter a single emporium without feeling she might be turned out at once by a police officer—and even if she did happen to have a loose coin in her purse, everything on every menu or price-tag was far too expensive, anyway (and she could just hear her mother cursing in the language of her homeland if what came monthly in the mail from her daughter proved to be insufficient). So, in short order the town (for it was just a town, after all, and not a great city) lost most of its luster, and as much as she was overawed by Mother Calhoun's Arms, she found it harder and harder to leave the house's forbidding if familiar sanctuary. In effect, the more she made herself evident at almost any hour to do any sort of task, the less time she gave herself to bemoan her indentured state. She knew those proverbs about devils and idle hands and, conversely, rest for the wicked—which could only mean she was still very wicked, indeed. Not enough verses from the Old Testament or New or anything between or beyond could save her. Forever she would pay for having been born an impudent and intractable girl (in her parents' and God's eyes, at least); she already knew what anyone she complained to would say. It was all a matter of "getting used to," and so she must get used to. Only once in a while did some tiny amelioration seem to improve her lot, if only temporarily. For instance, when they saw after some weeks that their advances would get them nowhere, the lodgers began to treat her more like one might a small shy novitiate. So now and then, if a gentleman needed Lucy to go fetch some Havanas from the corner store (just down the street and not close enough to the hurly-burly of town to tempt her farther), or if a gentleman would like his good trousers pressed or merely a sock darned, he might tip her a little or share a piece of the mince-tart he was hoarding—and Miss Polk need know nothing about that.

Men being what they were, there was constant sweeping, mopping, washing, dusting, ironing, steaming, folding, polishing, and boot-blacking to do from basement preserve-shelves all the way up to the cedar-lined storage attics. Moreover, she was in much in demand at mealtimes to assist Cook in the serving and washing-up. It was no wonder she was so grotesquely fatigued that the stranger in his cart who disrupted her sleep filled her with almost as much rage as he did terror—if terror defined was something like fear heightened by a sort of maddening desire to seize hold of what was secret and forbidden, and therefore to Lucy as tantalizing as what the reverend doctor keeps in that deep-bottomed satchel produced only for exorcisms of the fundamentalist sort. ("We are not all snake-handlers!" she had wanted to tell a know-it-all disbarred lawyer who had entertained the supper table for three nights in a row.) With February gone and warmer weather on its way at last, midnight disturbances on the broken bricks three stories below her window seemed to come as regularly as the quarter-moon; though she told herself again that shadows mingling with fancy cannot be trusted, she was growing increasingly convinced that the elusive hooded figure driving the funereal vehicle was not only absolutely real, was neither phantom nor fantasy, but that he was instead a strong young man somehow trying to attract her attention, to communicate with her on some indecipherable level. It might be no more than an upward nod of his hood, or a flippant crack of his whip, else an almost amorously soft and guttural cough or sigh, that conveyed a need to be noticed—and here she wondered herself if it might be her famous wishful thinking—a need to be noticed and almost to be pitied. The horse and cart's steady voyage down the alley would never last more than five or ten minutes at most, and yet her sleep would be wrecked, her passions both innocent and ignoble enflamed, and she would next morning be as listless as a fish stunned and glassy-eyed upon a riverbank when Miss Polk called her attention to a garbage pail with a Hansel-and-Gretel trail of potato peelings behind it. "Child, you are forevermore not heeding my words," Miss Polk would interject in that schoolmarmish way she had, and Lucy might wince the way she had when preparing for the yardstick's blow against her shoulder blades back in the district schoolhouse. There was no way to find words, if words there were, to explain what sort of feeling had kept her awake all the long dark hours of morning after the unknown youth had gone his inexorable way.

But how was she so sure he was a stalwart young man, when it was only his two blue eyes she had seen flash like gas-jets from within that sheep-herder's cowl? Back in school, had she heard about a hero's eyes flashing like that in a poem? No, in any of those long tiresome ballads Miss Czesny would read, it would undoubtedly be stars instead, falling or implanted in the dome of heaven. Lucy felt if she were to remain strong she must doubt all. Maybe because she knew that mortal men's, or at least older men's, eyes do not flash like that... but then again, neither was their posture so erect or their balance and grace so evident as this capable young hero's seemed to be. She had watched him atop his high seat, deftly disentangling reins while holding tight the whip-hand controlling the blinkered draft-horse. (Blinkered? Why at night?) She had seen him leap almost as if he had bat-wings from his perch to the ground and seem to hover for a second over the trampled snow before he landed, while the horse took its monstrous portion from the old bathtub under the rainspout. Her mother had once told her children tales of supernatural creatures, back in the wicked empire her family had fled, who came in the night like that—she used idioms that had no parallel in English, but Lucy's imagination filled in the gaps. Unearthly and seductive, such creatures were able to work dark magic upon a young girl; they looked handsome and human, but were no better than devils. Was this what the cart-driver was, then? Much about him remained strange, what the books might even call ethereal, and yet... He was flesh and blood, he was! He had a heart and he had a pulse, which is something you couldn't say for sure about Miss Polk. Let him come to me then! When the nights are as warm as the days were now, Lucy predicted to herself in a mood borrowed from the King James version, he will lower that heavy leathern hood and I shall behold him at last, as did mighty Moses the burning bush or Ezekiel his wheel-within-a-wheel. Sigh would proceed upon sigh. Would he truly be handsome? Would he look anything like the handsome redheaded Jesus in the vestry of her hometown chapel? (The chromolithograph was old and His hair had faded from black to chestnut.) That she smiled at, for that was going too far.

"Don't smirk at me, girl," Miss Polk demanded, coming out of the dining room with a bundle of linen for her to iron and fold. "Why are you standing there with your pinny half-unfastened when there's an eternity of work to be done around here? You know Cook is waiting for you to help shine up the silver, too." Likewise she would be ordered to scour pots. Or fill washstand pitchers. Or water the Boston ferns. Or empty spittoons. Or beat rugs. Or pull weeds. Back in the last century, one or another of the older occupants informed Lucy, Mrs. Cavendish had hired three maids to do the work she now did solo. It was never-ending, the tasks she'd have to complete before she fell all but dead onto her frazzled quilt every night. And now she was never certain that she'd even be able to sleep through the entire night.

At most times, she felt surprisingly robust and wholesome, even now she was no longer having to go practically every other day to the chapel with her parents—although it might have been nice to take some spiritual comfort somewhere, Lucy supposed. Not that there had ever been much spiritual comfort within the flock of Doc Garfield, the pentecostalist autocrat of the Tabernacle of the Holy Ghost Exchange, as the chapel was called (its prominent sign featured a white dove entangled within the cords of a candlestick telephone). The good doctor had come from Azusa Street in California with his contrarian ideas some ten years or so before to buy a run-down old opera house and assemble his latest congregation, Lucy's father (who was just then becoming too subject to nervous fits to work) being one of the first to fall under the reverend's spell. In spite of his adherence to most of Leviticus and the Book of Deuteronomy, Doc Garfield had an uncontrollable attraction to modern technology and soon rigged up the building with a complicated electrical set-up, whereby there was a telephonic machine within every pew-box of his new chapel; the various lines were connected to a receiver atop the pulpit, so anyone too lame or meek or morally abashed to make it up the aisle for a holy audit merely had to lift the mouthpiece and call upon the altar, whether in proper Wisconsinian English, in a tongue he or she had spoken in Europe, or in the glossolalia of the spiritually possessed. Thereupon, the appointed oracle—once he had cleared his throat long enough to think—would translate for the audience's benefit. (Immediately the system proved very popular and was widely imitated throughout the land, so townsfolk said.) Fascinated by such innovations, the church soon became her father's virtual life project; he became a part-time sexton and took her mother and the rest of the family into the fold when Lucy was not yet five—most of their neighbors had debated if he was a lunatic or a zealot for doing so, before eventually converting themselves. Doc Garfield, who was a man with a powerful brain and a voice to match, told people what and how to think as well as act, within and without the walls of his Holy Ghost Exchange, and that made life somehow easier for all involved. Such was how things had been for Lucy as long as she could remember, and she couldn't have questioned anything about it if she had been able. In Allamakee, however, things were different, people did what they wanted. Lucy had never before been given the freedom, now that she was unobserved by anyone from her church, to believe or disbelieve. Gradually, over the past few months, whenever she stuck her head out a window and heard the bell-towers of St. Ursula's or St. Anne's patiently measuring Christian time or on Sundays the Lutheran church's carillon singing out like the sunrise made audible, she had begun to muse on finding or even founding a religion she could call her very own—one without so much passion bordering on violence, it should be hoped, one which would not demand either salvation or damnation. It might not even have a book setting down rules of conduct—imagine that!—it might be just a quiet place to sit and rest awhile with a head emptied of wearisome thought. If such a desire was the Devil's pricking, so be it; the Devil or Jesus or just plain old Doc Garfield, they were all just men vying for a soul she would gladly give away at this point.

Somehow, even though her chores had been equally strenuous if not actually worse in some ways on her parents' poultry farm, now that everyone was in the midst of spring cleaning, she had never felt more ruined by the end of the day. Perhaps it was because she had no reason to feel woebegone then, on the farm, amongst an ark-full of other people and animals, or to cry too much when she was smacked for doing something wrong—because despite it all she felt that her parents must love her, were required to love her. (She needed no proof, it was just what God said parents must do.) One could never say the same about Miss Polk, who had probably never loved so much as a living speck in her whole life. When Miss Polk, at her "wit's end," smacked her, she did it more lightly than her mother usually had, but the sting seemed to last much longer.

True and true again, Lucy did not miss home, despite her hardships here, for back home it had been a struggle just to fix on herself a desire to compete and live. She had often sympathized with those runners up bean-poles that, crowded by more vigorous vines, could never contort themselves high enough to reach the sun and therefore flower. Despite all the chickens and eggs on the farm, there never seemed to be enough to eat, for one thing, and her brothers and sisters had to fight like chicks at a dispenser to get fair share. Beatings at home for any infraction were regular as clock-windings. Sometimes she felt the smartest thing would be just to commit some small public atrocity weekly so as to get her thrashing over all the quicker. Almost no one at home or elsewhere ever went out of the way to be kind to her. Feisty girls, uppity girls spoofed her low-hipped almost bovine gait, her hesitancy in answering questions from the headmistress, her gullibility when older boys devised anatomy lessons or showed her naughty things in an effort to shock or frighten her, and—worst of all—her sorry rag-doll clothes and ditch-weed hair. Well, everyone wore hand-me-downs and no girl could keep her hair up in the winter wind, but somehow she always looked the worst. Maybe it was because she hadn't yet learned to employ a looking glass (there was only one in her parents' house, after all, for ten faces) or maybe she simply didn't feel a need to parade and peacock before the Lord. In a way, she was always contemptuous of her schoolmates and thought it best to keep her true intellect under a bushel. In her own mind she was very witty and quite a bit sarcastic—look at those silly goggle-eyed goslings, she would tell herself when her molesters approached, they think they can peck the life out of me! Once in the sixth or seventh grade, after examining a circus hoarding, Lucy had stolen a little red chalk from teacher's desk to rouge her lips and cheeks, consulting her reflection in a puddle, and when the girls saw her soon after they shrieked in absolute fury, held her down in the mud, and washed the stuff off her so roughly she was still bleeding when she got home. If a dogcart hadn't passed by just then, she was convinced, they would have ripped her apart and scattered her limbs down the cornrows.

Neither her mother, also rather cow-like and bottom-heavy (like most of her contemporaries thereabouts an Austro-Hungarian immigrant as illiterate as any cow) nor her father (who had gradually lost the use of his ever-trembling hands and most of his mind while gaining faith in the Savior) ever sent her so much as a picture postcard to see how she was faring in the big city of Allamakee, Iowa, population seven-thousand five-hundred, so far across the Father of Waters and so foreign to their way of life in that far-flung valley lately called New Zlin by the recently arrived Moravian communards. Once a sister-in-law from outside Prairie du Chien sent her a buckskin hunting jacket she'd grown tired of (or realized was wearing at the elbows) and once her favorite younger brother, Theodor, mailed her a photograph he'd had taken of himself at the county fair, but that was all. Even Lucy realized the oversized jacket would look as ridiculous worn about town as a ballet skirt might. However, she kept her brother's pasteboard-backed portrait stuck in the rim of the mirror above her plywood dresser (that, her bed, and a crippled little bent-backed chair the only sticks of furniture she could at least temporarily claim as her own), and every time she pinned up her hair before going to meet the day's challenges she'd gaze at the small serious oddly elderly boy sitting stiffly on a stool, cap in his hands and a rabbit-fur monkey he must have won at a tossing game limp across his knees like a hunting trophy. Tiny Teddy was perhaps the only thing she missed about home, for he had once loved to play jacks with her and allowed himself to be carried about as boneless in her arms as that monkey; she longed to send him some barley-sugar she might buy in town on one of her rare outings—but knew it would be devoured by his elders maybe even before he'd had a chance to reach into the box. With innumerable corrections from Miss Polk and so little recent practice on paper, she felt not much more capable of tackling the challenges of written English than her mother: so a month after arriving here (long ago now) she'd dictated a concise and mostly noncommittal letter to Mister Harding and mailed it back home with little hope and barely any more desire to hear anything back. (That tithing from her salary she had always sent home with no more than a note.) The greatest demand she could make in the letter was for the threadbare woolens she had left behind; it got very cold on top of their hill. She also asked how Teddy's cough was getting on. Maybe one of her older and smarter siblings would read the first real letter she'd ever composed and her favorite brother at least would know he was not forgotten.

Mister Harding—Professor Harding, actually—was different from all the others here. Men came and went at Mother Calhoun's Arms with the girl barely noticing even the young and healthy ones, she was so busy. Once in a while a good-looking traveler might return a stealthy glance, but Miss Polk said with conviction that all the short-term residents were drifters and deserters and to be trusted no more than beggars; even the ones who might elicit pity or sympathy, the ones who walked with a gimp or wore a patch over one eye, were faking it—because of types like them-such this war was lasting forever. They swaggered they did, and they flattered. To impress upon Lucy the dangers of these men even further, Miss Polk furthered her argument, lowering an invisible veil of respectability over her face: "The girl as we had here before you, Mrs. Cavendish was forced to turn out into the streets because of one of them." And so even the best-mannered, most well-manicured fellows faded from Lucy's sight. They tended to be stuck-up at heart, anyway. But Professor Harding, who lived in his queer little room within the turret, up among the secretive boughs of the big elms, had acted with exceeding frankness and kindness to her ever since she had come to the front door with just her hat and bag. It was true, he stank often of cheap port or corn whiskey—she soon found out that the normally temperance-minded cook often delivered the stuff to him for a small fee embellished with many promises to take the pledge before the next time—but he kept his natty but old-fashioned clothes creased and starched and his beard neatly rounded like Prince Albert's on the can, and he spoke in very distinguished tones indeed for an elderly unemployed bachelor residing in an undistinguished town in what he himself called the back of beyond. At the dinner table, when Professor Harding was "indisposed" in bed, which was frequent, there was much speculation as to what his origins had been. The assembly had all been told many times over that he had been a classics instructor at the state teachers' college, back in another century, and they had all guessed that he had left because of some sort of scandal, which was easily imagined—but they disagreed as to whether he was English, Scottish, Welsh, or even Manx. "Nonsense," said Cook one Sunday, lugging in a vast tureen of what she called mock-turtle soup, "he's dirty black Irish, same as meself. I know we're so common nowadays we hardly count, but there you go. Your 'professor' just puts on the airy-fairy, bless him—and curse his bally soul all at once." (Later, when she tasted her portion of lukewarm leftover soup in the pantry, Lucy decided it tasted like nothing so much as mutton that had turned—and that Cook just wanted to bring the old gent down a peg or two because he had offered her one too many unbidden suggestions on as how to improve her dishes. Maybe also the procurement of liquor was getting a bit too bothersome with all the temperance leagues upon their doorsteps.)

Lucy would knock on the professor's door sometimes when she felt most pursued by Miss Polk, for she knew without knowing why that he would always welcome her and never "interfere" with her as other men might; from her high window she'd seen him near the tumbledown stables with those coarse smart-mouthed boys who did yard-work, roughing their hair and offering them welcome sips from his flask, and she understood this only signified his innocuousness—while assuring her he should be the first one to fully confide in, if ever she truly must confide. (Her few outbursts before, so soon stopped, had been complaints about an interrupted night, not confessions.) And it was indeed Professor Harding whom she would seek when brought at last to the brink of madness by the stranger with his horse and cart—though that would not happen until a few days after she'd been forced to explain her lassitude to Miss Polk early one morning in April. As it turned out, by then the old gentleman had already as much as guessed.

Before that event, Lucy had come many a time to his quarters to sit within a kind of starched-lace heaven on his tidy canopied bed (she made up the room almost every day, after all) as he rocked in his rickety old rocker, not so much to talk as to rest, away from watchful eyes. The chair would tick-tock with the steady soothing rhythm of a metronome, like the one atop the pianola in the parlor below, and the world beyond his door diminish further with every new measure. She longed for a doting old relative like him, since most of her ancestors were forgotten in the battlegrounds and potters' fields of distant lands. (When they were alive they would all have been brutes and infidels and serfs, she could only surmise, who would have horse-whipped her as soundly as they had her parents and her parents' parents.) Presently, the professor would do quite nicely for a granddad. He called her "me girlie" and would always remark upon how brilliantly sun-shot her hair was and how dainty her hands. (She knew her hair was lackluster and her knuckles red and scabby, but liked hearing such blandishments nevertheless.) His room was tight with makeshift shelves crammed with books and a globe or two and what he called "classical" statuettes: many of the figures, upon closer inspection, proved shameful and many of the books bore library spines; when she opened one and out slipped the card that proclaimed the book to be six months overdue, Professor Harding confessed he was a little lax about returning "research materials," but that the local librarian—"the high-colored Hyacinthine type, half Attic and half Baltic, I'd venture"—was "quite accommodating, really very charming about it all." (He had a way of musing like that, as if taking mental notes instead of really addressing her. But at least it was better than being talked down to.) However much bewildering the books, the figurines, the rest of the welter of memorabilia, and his obscure allusions were, the young girl cherished every moment she spent under his tutelage. She felt transported to a more wondrous and genteel world (her mind borrowed more elements from what she'd heard of Camelot than another Golden Age) when he lit the skull of that funny gargoyle which was his carven seafoam pipe and leaned back dreamily in his rocker to read aloud from his strange thick books: longwinded tales of a warrior who travailed many years navigating the seven seas and meeting strange creatures while his wife back on land fought off men who sought to carry her away, or myths of gods—not God, but gods, imagine that!—who came to cavort among men and cause havoc in their lives, or poetry that sounded so pretty and was so full of arresting images (even when belaboring everyday subjects like bee-keeping or sheep-shearing). Once in a while, when he was surreptitiously drinking from the newly replenished receptacle in his side-pocket, the professor would depart from his beloved books and tell her about his childhood long ago, back in the Old Country. "Greece or is it Italy or one of those?" she asked during one of her earliest audiences with the old man, thinking of his stories. "Oh, no, my darling dunce!" he replied, slapping his balding poll. "Not so civilized, but so much nicer, I used to think." It was merely an island—albeit a magical island, he averred—filled not with gods and heroes but with friendly nixies and pixies and brownies and bluecaps and a hundred other sorts of sprites only small children can recognize and address. His high childlike forehead furrowed with sudden age. Then again, there were also hideous bogeys and banshees and kelpies and selkies and pookas and fetches and not least the besotted clurichaun (each type distinct from the others), which even adults claimed to fear or at least detest even if they couldn't quite see them. Lucy believed him unquestioningly, for foreign countries were just that—foreign—and hence anything could happen in them. Her own mother had often spoken in her idiot English (though who was to say if she would make any more sense in her native tongue?) about scar-faced hobgoblins who came out at night to spoil your milk and snatch boy-babes from cradles, and of snaggletoothed trolls who would suck your lifeblood given half a chance—not in an effort to entertain or educate her children, but to strongly discourage their misbehavior. (When her threats didn't work, how well they knew the power of her nose-tweaks and ear-twists!) It was the same way she had cautioned Lucy and her sisters when they were older about those supernatural beings who might destroy a girl's soul, or worse, her reputation—although their mother, they eventually realized, meant mainly gypsies and Jews. And what was her father's church but one fallen angel or demonic agent after another? Professor Harding's mystical homeland was both more picturesque and generally less malevolent than her parents', it was clear to Lucy. Cabbage roses and primroses grew there big as your head, he explained, the felty backs of rams were so broad whole families could sleep on them, mackerel fell from the sky into frying pans, and shiny streams of blackstrap molasses flowed though the mountain dales—one only had to dip a pail. Women boiled down rainbows to dye their clothes. Lads roped the moon so they could kiss their lasses behind it. Any ordinary cupboard-door might open onto a minuscule courtroom where the king and queen of field mice sat on tiny golden thrones. There was so much poetry in the air that cats spoke in limericks and dogs sang like the cherubim. And snakes—who ever heard of them there? Once upon a time they had heard a swineherd playing such terrible strange music upon his harp that, driven mad, they had all at once sprouted wings and flown far away. Professor Harding's birthplace was where Lucy felt she must belong, outlandish and unpredictable as it was. Somehow, hearing his tall tales made what happened in the shadows of the alley late at night seem (for a while, at least) not so foolish or frightening, but worth no more than a casual remark.

After they had had several long conversations and he could trust her as much as she now trusted him, the professor brought down a large satin-covered picture-book from a high shelf and, balancing it across their four knees, showed her a hand-tinted photograph of diaphanous fairies dancing hand-in-hand within a ring of curiously suggestive mushrooms. Ah, this kind of sprite she knew and loved! Another "authentic" full-color reproduction in the album depicted a tousle-haired imp whose upturned nose added to her saucy expression ("looks rather like you, dearie," he said), an imp wearing a daisy diadem, riding an enormous hop-toad like the Maid of Orleans upon her steed. Other pages depicted fairies feasting on enormous quinces and gooseberries, snuggling inside pea-pods, smooching under burdock leaves that served for umbrellas, that sort of thing. Lastly, once he had availed himself of a few more surreptitious swallows from what he called his "vade mecum," he thumbed to his favorite illustration in the extraordinary book: a tiny male "faerie" (he spelled out the difference for her) wearing no more than a scabbard, doing battle with a green locust that loomed over him like St. George's dragon. That one made them both laugh, it was so absurd, they agreed, though undoubtedly accurate. When he were just a wee lad, he swore to her, he would go out to the bottom of the garden at daybreak, in high summer, and, hidden amongst the buddleia, watch the fairies as they fluttered into their homes inside hollow oaks likes wasps into a hive, dizzy after a night spent waltzing and drinking dewdrop wine at one of their famous balls. If you are not good to the little people, he testified in a tone not entirely unlike her mother's, if you do not leave out bowls of cream for them as you might for a pussycat, they will likely come and tie impossible knots in your shoelaces and unravel your fishing nets as well. But, he added even more authoritatively, setting aside the album, some fairy fellows are as big and imposing as real men, and they keep their wings cunningly concealed "until they should whisk you away into the netherworld as quick as Mercury."

He took another swig, quite openly now. "Whenever I was fractious, me mam'd always tell me I must be a changeling left by the tinkers," he confided to her, and then had to explain what a changeling was. (Oh, there was a word with much the same meaning her mother used!) "Some day, my sooty little Aschenputtel, we'll have to start reading Willie Shakespeare together," he promised her. "And not Mr. Lamb or Mr. Bowdler's version, neither. Or we could even try out the mighty Spenser, and you can be my Queen." So what if he was a bit "cracked," as Cook said. Lucy loved hearing Professor Harding's fabulous personal accounts of his enchanted isle even more than learning about those magisterial gods in books who deftly turned into swans or heifers and slept with pretty shepherds or shepherdesses. In fact, she as much as admitted to him, she probably wouldn't mind being spirited away by an overgrown fairy into a different, possibly much better, world herself, whatever its own dangers. At least it would not be the heavily advertised Hell the evangelicals in her midst had always promised her. The more livid the old taleteller's lips grew from whatever was in his flask, the wilder his personal accounts became... and the harder anyone else would have had believing them—yet the more fanciful they were, the more she truly wanted to take his word for truth. It was the opposite of how she had felt about stories from the Bible (mass-murders or miracles, parables and prophecies, every one had hidden snares designed to trip the pilgrim); nevertheless, she had forever and ever been told it was a sin to doubt, or worse, deny the Lord's word. Deny—deny! Her father had always told everyone he had denied the holy spirit in every way, drinking and cursing and carousing with strumpets and streetwalkers all his prodigal life until he nearly died after drinking something awful he bought at a medicine show—and then of course Brother Jesus knocked on his door in just the nick of time. (But why didn't God stop him sooner? Lucy had always longed to ask. Her father blamed that medicine for his tremors, not God, who ought to get the blame, she figured, just as he gets credit, for everything in the end.) Her father had his good points and he might have his reasons—still, what therefore gave him or anyone else the right to judge and condemn? Was it also a sin to admit she was growing daily more horrified by such righteousness, by those stories in the Bible more farfetched than any of the professor's? Perhaps now that she was well away from home, she was at last able to look at those countless hours on pins-and-needles knees in the Tabernacle of the Holy Ghost Exchange with some small perspective. Maybe worst of all, the so-called Good Book bored her, at least when read out by a preacher who droned like a nest of horseflies. On the contrary, when the professor embarked with tipsy glee on a long narrative or reminiscence, she could have listened rapt and alert for hours. Listening gave her time to think. Even so, it was often hard to think, being perpetually weary from work. Sometimes however much enthralled she was, Lucy would slip in and out of sleep against the velveteen bolster as he read or recited in his raspy yet dulcet voice, a drone-string plucked rhythmically and steadily—and not fully wake until she sensed Miss Polk fuming on the landing below.

Maybe the nicest thing was, Professor Harding never demanded anything of her, never wanted to ask her the same old dreary questions of what it was like back among the lice-bitten old chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys and guinea hens, and best of all never had reason to discuss the fiery fate that lay in her future unless she watched or mended her ways—as it seemed everyone in her life who held authority or seniority over her always had. With the professor, there was only the past, no future or even present, and that was comforting. It was almost as if this well-versed old man had never believed in damnation or redemption, and maybe in neither the Destroyer nor the Creator, or anything at all conventional and accepted; though she knew his apostasy (her father's word) or philosophy (as her new mentor called it) was said to be terribly sinful, it was actually surprisingly restful, and his melodious phrases, for a while at least, would obliterate all her cares the way the greening of April does a gray and dingy landscape.

She was beginning to come to this refuge in the squared-off turret more and more often, despite fears of reprisal below-stairs. She would have liked to bring the professor her personal Bible and have him interpret those puzzling passages whose tiny type she had underlined. Instead she would often go directly to the picture-books, squat Indian-style right there on his frayed Turkish rug, and leaf through the large crackling pages far longer than she should have dared, while her "granddad," for a change of pace, might read from something really terribly sweet he'd dug up just for her, such as Heidi's Years of Learning and Travel or The Water Babies. One such afternoon, the afternoon in fact before she broke her silence with Miss Polk, Lucy climbed onto the window-seat cushions (causing a small avalanche of poets and other sages to tumble from there) and, no longer really paying attention, drifted into a waking dream of her own manufacture:

She could picture herself, fresh as a painting just framed, tripping lamblike down the hill toward Main Street, out for once not on an errand but simply a springtime spree. As in the old song, she wore scarlet ribbons in her hair (coiled up like a lady's and not braided like a handmaid's) and squeaky-new side-snapped shoes upon her feet, and all her pleats were in line, her stockings devoid of a single tear. No hat, just to be daring! Watch her coming, nose in the air and testing the pavement ahead of her with the ferrule of her frilly silk parasol the way she had seen blind people handle their canes. Step closer and you can smell her "hyacinthine" perfume. (Where had she heard that word lately?) No one knew it, but she owned the world, decided what was real in it and what not. She glided past ice cream parlors ornate as Chinese palaces and hotel saloons swanked out with candelabras and brocaded drapes, past chocolate shops and soda fountains and dress-makers and milliners and haberdashers and cathedral-like department stores with all the treasures of the planet hoarded up behind their crowded altars. Smarmy, white-gloved swells and their painted-up fiancées, monocles popping and runcible spoons dropping, watched her pass on the other side of the enormous windows with equal parts surprise and admiration—my, how they'd be ashamed of the way they had snubbed her before! Any of those men would gladly leave his lying hussy and ask her to marry him instead—although Lucy was obviously already on her way to meet... someone. But at this point in her girlishly naive musing—of a sort she'd never gone so far with before—a draft through a cracked pane attacked her drowse, and something went devastatingly wrong: fantasia was subsumed by memory, the actual memory of her most recent venture into town at Miss Polk's bidding.

Late yesterday morning. Lucy had been listlessly drying the breakfast dishes. She hadn't really wanted to go down the hill, safe as she was, after a fashion, at Mother Calhoun's. Over time, true, she had grown a little less daunted by the town: Although as large to her as the mythical cities of Athens or Rome, she could manage it well enough on a good day; in the sudden bright heat of the new season, however, with enough pollen and road-grit in her eyes to render her virtually sightless, she was once again overwhelmed almost into a fainting spell by the traffic and density of the business district. The unincorporated settlement nearest her parents' farm was not much more than a crossroads where post office faced feed store, but this town, the county seat, seemed still to be one unending unchartered maze; on the sidewalk below the towering brick buildings she felt herself a very insignificant being indeed, one of the meekest of fairy folk, under the broad tent-like awnings and high canopies of elm or ailanthus and those tall streetlights like iron lilies on giant stalks. No longer did oft-quoted statements of perseverance come easily to her. The clerks at all of the shops with their fancy window-dressings treated her as if she were a deaf-mute child, she thought, and invariably cheated her, or so she was sure to be convinced all over again when counting out coins later for Miss Polk. Speeding motorcars and slow-moving horse-cabs alike splashed her, and dukes or earls (for they had to be) in rakish caps and long silk scarves on the sidewalk blew cigar smoke into her face; fashion-plate countesses smirked at her simple gingham and her unadorned straw bonnet. Even the children, dauphins and heiresses all in their crinolines and sailor suits, had inscrutable looks upon their faces. No one was ordinary here. But, no, no, I must not give in yet, she told herself then—I must begin to think like a modern person and fear nothing. And I still have the Herald-Observer to pick up at McGreary's. Forgive me Jesus, but damn the paperboy for having caught the colic.

Someone had told Lucy about the new town library, and she found it quite by accident perpendicular to the courthouse: a philanthropist's sumptuous gift it was, all green-golden marble with stained-glass fables ornamenting the windows and Latin chiseled into the lintels as if it were one of those infidels' temples on bookplates tacked to Professor Harding's walls. This library did look like something fit to house those grand ancient gods and goddesses of his. A little taken in by the glamor of it all, Lucy was considering going up the broad steps to ask about a manual on the new science of home economics (Miss Polk had told her many times she was barely literate in the subject) when she couldn't help but find herself staring at a tall, hatless wavy-haired man leaning against a column outside the big front doors, taking in the sun: his brow was high and white and clear, and his black beard was of that clean geometrical sort she'd seen detectives wearing in Cook's police gazettes; over his shirt he wore a billowing smock like a shopkeeper's, so she assumed he must be the proprietor of the establishment. An encyclopedia volume was squeezed under either arm and he was busy huffing on a match to light an evil little brass pipe pursed in his lips—like fanning a fire in a bird's nest! she thought. She began to walk up to him, nearly giggling aloud, and then for a moment was struck still. At closer range she discovered he was enveloped in an absolutely oriental cloud of perfume. His eyes, though grimacing in the smoke, were alive with a quicksilver glint and following her own as avidly as a fox stalking a field mouse. Perhaps she came a little nearer. Oh, he was much too much like the handsome gentlemen poised so casually in their union suits in the Sears yearbooks! She tried moistening her lips to begin to ask him directions, but now that she was so very near he gave her such a long leering look with those molten questing hungry eyes, that she turned and swung her market-basket past almost in a panic, as if he were about to toss that match to set her aflame instead of his pipe. Had he said something especially insolent to her? Or was she indeed deaf? Flashing through her mind was back-of-the-outhouse hearsay regarding white-slavers and maidens tempted and trapped by such men, maidens innocent as herself who awoke much later to find themselves in a harem or opium den or worse. What yellow journalism called the criminal underworld. Only once a few yards down the block did she look back, and then it was to see a smart young flirt in a mannish derby rush up to embrace him so hard she knocked the pipe right out of his mouth, as might happen in the last panel of those Sunday comic strips the lodgers at the breakfast table guffawed over. Lucy could hear behind her the brass ring against cement, sharp as a gunshot. She winced. After all, she was still so young, and so many awful things were still to be discovered in the great wide world. (But what could any of it have to do with the boy in the alley after midnight, the boy whose name she longed to know but whose face she hadn't even seen? She had wanted to tell Professor Harding about him so many times, but still had not braced herself to that task. Reposed here upon these soft cushions, on this lazy afternoon she had stolen—yes, it felt just like stealing time from Miss Polk—Lucy had wanted to tell him about it all more than ever, but that moment had to wait, would not come in fact for a few more days.)

After leaving the library, Lucy had made it back up the hill with all the straight-backed statue-by-the-courthouse poise she could muster. There is absolutely no reason why the idea of such a man, no matter what he will dare say to me, should strike against me so hard, she told herself. It must be the pollen, the dust, the sun, this hot spring day. But as soon as she had dashed up the half-ruined front steps of Mother Calhoun's and through the half-unhinged double doors, she had upset the contents of her basket onto the hall-rug, breaking a small jar of apricot-brandy butter and nearly ruining her dress. In tears, she fell to trying to scoop up the sugary orange mess before Miss Polk should appear. (She couldn't very well eat it all, as deliciously forbidden as was its taste on her fingers.) All this fluster was ridiculous, she told herself, and it had nothing to do with the incident in front of the library: that was innocent enough, and to be certain she had experienced worse from the boys back at school. That man, with his flowery cologne and supercilious beard and know-it-all eyes, meant nothing. But something had broken in her then just as surely as this jam-jar, and she was no longer sure if she could carry on as she had done before.

Having thought through all this with the late April sun warm upon the window-seat, she heard Professor Harding clear his throat at last and say, "Lucy, dear girl? Tears? Are you all right? It wasn't little Tom the chimney sweep drowning, was it? Mr. Kingsley couldn't very well leave that out of the book..."

As usual, she pulled herself together.

That very night, the night before the devastating morning when she had broken her silence with Miss Polk at last, the cart-driver and his beast of burden woke her again, as if they had deviously intended to disturb her sleep at this period when she needed sleep more than ever—this time the un-greased axle and the wooden chassis groaning like a galleon lashed by a storm at sea, the naphtha lantern flashing like lightning, the whip cracking like thunder, the stamping of iron hooves and the hoarse breathing of the driver rose and crashed upon her eardrums like wind-tossed waves. Why, it occurred to her once again, gazing out her window in the sky and watching the cart's painfully slow progress over the crumbling bricks, had not the whole house woken to protest and hurry on the night travelers? Why did it seem she was the only one but those two awake in the entire world? Her head pounded, her fingers nearly tore her nightdress in two between her frustrated fingers. But then something totally unexpected happened: the heavy cart came to a ground-shaking halt, the driver leapt as if winged from his seat, and the horse lowed and snuffed as it was led to the rain-filled trough against the side of the stables; while the beast drank its fill in great shuddering swallows, the driver leaned back against the old hitching post, whistling something hollow and tuneless. He had indeed lowered his hood (it was warm enough for that now), but the shadows being what they were, she could not see his face, only imagine those flickering eyes, that strong jaw, the thick reddish curls. And it was then, at that very moment, that she came to the conclusion she hadn't yet arrived at when she'd been so distraught earlier: the realization, like ice cracking under your feet when you've walked too far out onto a frozen pond—that it was all too late, and this was why he kept her awake like this. She was in love. The self-revelation shamed and mortified her more than it made her happy. It was as if a hot brand were being pressed against her breast. Instantly she knew what fireside songs meant when they described lovesickness as a heartbreak and a lingering sorrow and yet still something somehow desirable. "Rather than never to have loved at all": the line came to Lucy from she knew not where, certainly not the Testaments. She was after all a young girl of almost sixteen and ripe for this sort of experience. Her elder sisters had married when they were not much older than she was now. Had they loved their awkward and uncouth suitors—those farmhands with fumbling sunburnt hands with a finger or thumb missing here and there from a combine or shredder—the way she now knew she loved the boy who drove that mysterious cart? There was no sense to it at all, she knew; she hadn't even seen his face (she reminded herself for the thousandth time), only felt his presence, as one might feel the warmth of the sun even when resting in the shade on a hot summer's day. Oh, there was a line from the Psalms for you! If she were like one of Professor Harding's poets or playwrights, maybe she could have expressed what was always merely incipient—jumbled as she would put it—in her mind. Lucy felt pretty certain—no, absolutely sure—that her beloved was gentle and handsome and good and meant to woo her and then carry her away to a better place, and that was what was killing her. It was all too much, and no wonder that she had begun to shed hot tears at six-thirty that morning, when Miss Polk berated her for being slow to carry some cartons of lye down to the laundry room.

"I can't help it!" Lucy exclaimed when the two met in the pantry: girl negligently barefoot and woman still in her bathing robe, her long graying braid not yet wound up. She looked so mousy, not quite so weasly, in all that flannel Lucy was no longer afraid of her. "It's that wagon-cart, Miss Polk, it's kept me up all night again!"

Miss Polk stared at Lucy, her hand poised to strike but herself too stupefied to complete its action. "What do you mean, wagon-cart? A cart or a wagon, and what for?"

Lucy stammered and sobbed. "Oh, you must know, you must know! It comes through here every few weeks, rumbling along and waking Heaven and you-know-what-else. How can I get the rest I sorely need? I didn't get two hours last night."

Miss Polk stood in the dawn-dark passageway, cinching the tasseled rope tighter around her long-starved waist. "As I'm a very light sleeper myself, I would have heard a contraption such as you're going on about. You've had a nightmare, is all. Either something at unrest in your stomach or in your conscience. Eh?"

Lucy dared to contradict her, too sleepy to consider the consequences. She was trying to keep her voice low to accommodate the sleepers on the floors above, but heard herself beginning to screech like a frightened child. "But there is such a cart, a kind of oxcart like as they've got back home, with a high-seated box for the driver, you know—it's got two huge wheels and it's big and long and low like a sort of casket with tarred canvas bowed over its sideboards, and it aggrieves me! It wasn't a dream! There's a tremendous big horse like a Belgian and that boy I can't explain who whistles and cracks his whip just for the fun of it. He's no more than twenty and smokes cigarettes sometimes and can spit a mile. Oh, yes, I've seen him. Once I think he threw a pebble at my window just to wake me. I do believe he's the red Devil himself. He's pestering me, I know it, and I hate him!" She was on the point of blathering and making even more things up, and this excited her with a new kind of passion she had never felt before, and though the suddenly dumbstruck Miss Polk remained astonished, Lucy was astonished at herself even more.

At this point, fortunately for the both of them, Cook came out of her lair quaking and shaking through her layers of flesh to voice her own opinion. Evidently she'd been woken by their argument, and her hairnet—which she apparently never removed—had slipped almost over her eyes. "I know what 'tis the gal's going all on about. Old Muswell the knacker over from New Albion used to come through these parts at such-same odd hours, for the water in our trough, aways back when I still had sand from Kilkee Beach between the toes, back before you come, Miss Polk, and before they improved the shortcut over to Brush Creek. A monstrous big old cart, all heavy laden-like with what he'd picked up all 'round the county. A sort of tumbril, as we used to know it, for picking up and dumping things. I imagine such as died and layed dying in the road and all. Ah, but that's been an awful long time now, Kittie, long before missy here was even born, I'd venture, and I ain't seen him since. You go and ask Mrs. Cavendish, she'll tell you the very same." She screwed up her round fat face, and the marbles of her eyes rolled back in her head like a celluloid doll's as she sought to think further. She was both jolly-fat and high-strung, a combination Lucy had seldom encountered. "Old man Muswell must've died, aye, that would be right, we had to have heard that... Still, he had sons, I know m'self for a fact, and I suppose grandsons or even great-grandsons, if this coachman's as young as she tells. She couldn't have dreamt up it all."

Miss Polk, who was city-raised and bred (and who would prefer that she never again be addressed in front of the girl by her nickname), knew nothing of knackers or their trade; it all sounded like a fairy tale to her, but she let it pass this time. "Hot milk," she said eventually, moving sharply away, "is what I find always puts me back to sleep in the dead of night. Now get on to working and forget this nonsense."

(Hot milk! And from whom was she to beg hot milk in the wee hours of the morning?)

After Miss Polk had whisked herself away like a black cloud, upstairs to her room, Cook took Lucy by the arm and led her into the great high-ceilinged kitchen of the house to make them both some strong coffee before she rang the breakfast-bell. It was hot in the room from the newfangled gas-powered oven with its biscuits already rising; fat Cook always was the sort to sweat, and sweating, her shiny skin looked even more like that of the cheap celluloid baby Lucy and her sisters had once fought over. Partly because of that resemblance, as endearing this morning as the first time she had noticed it, Lucy had grown to trust and admire the woman. Yes, she could nip and fret worse than a possum in a trap, but that was indubitably because she was forever busy feeding so many mouths; in general obesity inspires one to let down one's guard, and Lucy was no exception to this rule. What complaints she had so far been unable to express to Miss Polk (and which she knew would only either upset or bore sensitive old Prof Harding) she sometimes poured upon Cook, who always responded along the line of, "Don't you be worrying none, miss. Life's like that, you'll find out. Chin up!" Pat as those replies were, they were some small comfort—although it was clear Cook didn't have much time in her life for sitting back and listening; on the other hand, like many otherwise very busy people, she still had much time to draw at length from her inexhaustible well of personal opinions, past tribulations, and edifying triumphs. Testing to see what was on the woman's mind was easy: one had only to mention the weather or the hour of the day. Usually Cook was thinking about the situation overseas or local politics or the sorry state of Yankee manners. This morning, after installing Lucy on a stool and puttering with the gas-jets and percolator awhile, Cook (now she had had time to more fully consider the matter) told the girl what she knew of men such as Muswell and his sons. "It's a pity-poor business, but someone's got to do it, hasn't they?" she said, with a massive effort turning the stubborn handle of the bean-grinder. Lucy, though a product of the soil herself, and whose neighbors all her life had been dairymen and pig-breeders, knew no more about what knackers did than Miss Polk. Though she was intimately acquainted with death on the farm, from the kittens her mother drowned in a rain-barrel to the coonhound's starved runts she'd solemnly buried out past the windmill, to the roasters on the spit who'd lately been scratching in the dirt among their sister hens, what became of bigger animals that expired and yet one couldn't eat was something she'd never even considered. It was no wonder she didn't know more, if such collectors only collected under the cover of night. She knew old nags and broken-legged mules were "put out to pasture," but after that—what? "Why, just let me collect me wits and tell you," Cook explained in a newly sentimental tone as she was transported once more in memory back to her childhood in County Clare. Despite her size, she had a small, girlish voice, which because it was so small demanded one's attention. "Once me grandda, who they say was of that reviled breed called a bill-collector, on the way to taking me back home after a weekend in the country, stopped his buggy at the knackers' yard, a way out in the rocky Burren where I suppose people didn't mind so much the smell.

"He snapped the blinds shut as soon as we bumped across the cattle guard and told me to stop tight inside while he went out to deliver his dun, but being a right bullheaded girl-child I couldn't help but lift up the American cloth and take me a peek out to see what there was going on, such a hue and cry was all round and close about me. Ah, if only the Lord hadn't taken his eye off me just for a moment and allowed me to give in to such temptation! By everything merciful, I will never get the scene I encountered out of my blessed head. Tremendous sluiceways of blood there were along what I'd at first taken for an ordinary cow-byre—to make up puddings and sausages, and great heaping piles of—well, never you mind, but still no better or worse than the offal me mam'd spice herself, you know, and this being not long after the Great Famine when horse-meat wasn't above any of us, it shouldn't have come such a shock to me. But oh, everywhere grinning men with their awful long poleaxes and hooks and saws! To a child, no bloody difference, pardon me, between them and devils with pitchforks. A regular charnel house, me mam, who tended toward the more genteel side, told me it was later—such as your worst nightmares. Solid slabs of flesh I saw hanging there all aglitter with greenbottles, you know, putrid oozing flanks and shanks such as you'd avoid at the butcher-man's, and whole moldering carcasses, too, all covered in sores, with skeletons sticking through the hide—not to mention heaps of skulls and buckets of tallow for candles and soap, I suppose, and of course lots of marrow to render your glue and sizing." She explained a few more things with technical expertise, as well, darting about the room for supplies, but Lucy could not always keep pace. It was clear such a formative episode had been rehearsed and embellished with poetic detail many times in the woman's long life. Then Cook seemed to realize she was getting a bit carried away with her recollections, although she had lowered her voice to a whisper; taking a deep-sea diver's breath, she paused to draw the girl closer to her moistly quivering side while measuring out the last spoonfuls. The woman always carried a certain humidity about with her and smelled like everything she had ever broiled or fried. "Why be looking so quizzical, Lucy girl? Back in the old days people just knew about these things and it was time I had learnt. It's good to know these things... Still, I scarcely remember the smell people always talked of, I was so grievous struck by what I'd fixed mine own eyes on. I swear to you, and this could be the worst thing—some of those pitiable beasts I saw from behind that blind were still breathing. The knacker, they useter say he takes them dead or dying, like I told. Sweet Mother of Jesus, I can still hear them moaning and bellowing as their living throats was cut! Or maybe that part was just my childish imagination. It'd been nigh on fifty years, I 'spose." Then, having screwed down the percolator lid, she amended herself, half-probably feeling sorry if her monologue was scaring the girl. "Ah, but don't you be listening to me if you don't like it! Who knows how much I've polished my tale for the telling in all this time, and now I can't say entirely for sure, could you, don't rightly know m'self. Bad as Mister Harding, I am, with spinning the yarns. Lord, it makes me dizzy." The woman paused to suck in a deep breath as if from an inhaler and to consider what she'd just admitted before going on, the blue marbles of her eyes rolling sideways in her head again. The coffee began to burble over its high flame. Lucy was listening patiently, as if back in the pews; stories, edifying or horrific, gospel or apocryphal, fanciful or otherwise, always took a while for her to absorb. Cook continued. "But I can say for sure that when me grandda found me out of my mind with terror nothing he could do would clear my eyes, not that treacle he useter bring me, not those ribands for my hair, and I don't know as my da ever forgave him for being so negligent. Afterward I swore I would never eat meat again, and for the longest time I had m'self nightmares of being boiled down to neat oil and all me bones sent to the knife-makers'. But look at me now, braising and roasting up enough bloody flesh every week to feed Herod's court!

"So you mustn't blame the knackers, they're as necessary as undertakers and gravediggers. What's going to grease the batsman's bat—what's going to feed your cats? We kiddies knew us a rhyme or two in the schoolyard once... Still and all everyone's equal in the sight of the Lord, ain't they, even if it is the lowest of occupations He's parceled out. Is it any wonder then that they travel by night, picking up their carcasses by the side of the barn when no one's about? It's solid respectable pay, I 'magine, better than any I could hope for, but still... Listen you, next time you hear him, come double-quick to my room back there and crawl in under the bedclothes with me and I'll comb out your snarls in the morning. Now pass me that mug, dearie, and take your own." Cook leaned against the counter and took several long bestial drafts of the piping hot coffee she had poured somewhat precipitately from the pot before Lucy had a chance to taste her own. In a silent instant the immediate environment changed; revived and transformed by the coffee, Cook's cloak of intimacy fell from her. She looked up from her mug through the steam, as if if only now the girl on the stool had materialized to her. Lucy realized she had said and done nothing all the time Cook had been talking and bustling about. "Now," Cook said with finality, "let's step a little livelier, or Miss Polk will be on both our cases as soon as she's down and dressed." And then without further ado Cook shooed the girl out of the room with her apron, as if she were nothing but a horsefly. Lucy was glad enough to get away. "Remember," the woman called from the doorway, "today's Thursday, she'll be telling you not to be forgetting the beeswax on the banisters. Oh, Lordy, the biscuits!"

Now, such a young and impressionable and not overly intellectual girl (cerebration was a struggle to her, cogent only in retrospect), an unseasoned traveler, that is, just returned from that unholy region of the knacker's yard illustrated in grim detail by Cook, might have become afraid to shut the door or extinguish the bedside lamp in her room, lest once in the dark she'd find herself back on familiar blood-soaked ground. But Lucy did not at first frighten so easily, at least in the daylight; in fact, that night she slept easier after hearing the old Irishwoman's anecdote, for she was well-used to descriptions of hellfire, and now at last some things might make a mite more sense. She could even anticipate with interest the next visit from the cart-driver (who grew ever closer to her own age in newly inflamed imaginings), to see if any part of what she'd been told could be corroborated by her own eyes. Indeed, she slept again as deeply as would any other adolescent, with no sudden jolts upright or urge to fling off her covers—instead it was at first idle and then malicious visions that came to bait and abuse her in the daylight. For though she was initially surprised in no small part to have had the boy's occupation so baldly exposed to her, she now longed for nothing so much as to follow him to his charnel house, as Cook had termed it, as one might wish to witness those scenes of Hell—however loathsome—just to prove to oneself that such a thing can be believed. (Perhaps it was a bit worrisome, putting so much trust into a member of the pompous and corrupt Holy Roman Church, but Lucy had learned from Professor Harding that a person can discover useful information—call it truth, if you like—in the most unexpected places.) The girl was slower to admit something else to herself: It was not only the land where dead things disappear to that she wanted to see; she would like even more to witness bright eyes flashing and a well-favored face smiling, to feel a warm hand spread over her own hand and clasp it as tightly as a whip-handle. And yet he would be gentle, so gentle... Ah, one may call it torture, indeed!

Hard work and discipline did not dispel these self-inflicted torments, the way people always presume such labors will, and that night, as every night, Lucy went to bed as mentally exhausted as she was physically. Sleep seized her from the start and held her at bay for hours, but she woke abruptly just before dawn—bedsheets knotted around her ankles, pillow knocked to the floor, nightdress clammy—when a strained bleating sound penetrated her slumber: something distinctly like a horse's dying whinny. All was dark. Instinctively she felt her forehead, as her mother might; it was hot as a griddle. She explored beneath the sheet and then without thinking licked a finger—yes, and the cramps had begun, as well. The rust-water taste brought back all the worst of the fever dream to her. Horrific images filled her head, sudden and vivid, though they had been glimpsed long ago—ancient memories they seemed, memories of a time she had never lived. She saw them all: the blinded, emaciated animals kicked and beaten and then dragged bellowing and shrieking into the abattoir; broken-backed creatures with flowing wounds and suppurating ulcers upon their ribs and shoulders and bellies; headless horses and other beasts impaled upon pikes and lances; grimacing figures in long stained aprons, hooks for hands and skulls for heads; towering heaps of cadavers and entrails and bones and scattered teeth piled onto wagons and railway cars—all of it rank and rotting, all of it obscene, death like a spoiled piece of meat caught in the throat. The lime-pits and cesspools of Hell were exposed, as Revelations describes them, the blasted wastes and blackened barrens where all, even God made Man, must go to die: Hell that waits at the end of all time, though she recognized its foothills only once they began to fade in the first light of dawn. And then, thankfully, she regained some of her senses, and soon those visions vivid as those projected by a magic lantern were once again as unimaginable as the myriad oft-repeated prophecies of her father and brethren of his faith. Whether she truly believed or feared such damnations anymore, she could not know, did not want to know, for time and the future no longer mattered. Only her body and her blood existed, and only this room and this very moment could be real. When one is suddenly very sick, that is what it feels like. She made her way to the washstand and groped for the pitcher.

Miracles do happen, or some semblance of them: that much she could believe, for there was proof. Within an hour her stomach had settled and the fever broke, time resumed its course, and sure enough, being young and able, she recovered sufficiently by the end of her usual dashed-off mug of thin cold coffee in the pantry. It was turning into a day like any other, and she assured herself she could pretend to be as sound and sane as she ever had been, even if some of the lodgers had dared to insist they had lately noticed a subtle change in her, something more than her digestion upsetting and unsettling her, it had to be; however, not even the most astute could guess the cause was something midway between love and fear. She always managed to maintain a smile. Let them prattle on, let them chaff her, then, assume it was at most nothing more than her passing "feminine complaint." Undeterred, Lucy set about helping clear dishes while not bothering to fend off harsher than usual gibes from the resident wits ("Lucy's a bit pale again—but I don't dare ask if her stays are pinching her," "You been looking like murder, girl—should we alert the gendarmerie?"), for by the time Cook had chased them away, her thoughts had flown elsewhere; there were the soiled napkins and the hot-plates and the unappetizing leftovers and an expanding multitude of other things to tend to in the dining room alone. Later she would remember to wash and bleach her sheets in secret. Miss Polk barely noticed any slowing of her labors that morning, and Lucy for her part understood it had been, after all, just a fleeting nightmare brought on by the pain inside her, never associating the knacker's boy (for so she had begun to consider him) with those dreadful men who drain the blood and then carve up the flesh. As Cook or Miss Polk or indeed any other woman or man might say, it is surprising how the terrors of the night can be forgotten so quickly in the chilly air of day. Lucy went about her ceaseless work, scraping skillets or sponging up spills or lugging coal-buckets or making beds or any of ten-thousand other tasks for the ten-thousandth time, and she barely noticed what her hands and body were doing while her mind raced on, hatching plots wherein she and the boy would meet and embrace and fall into conversation as casually as if they lived in adjoining houses and had known one another since birth. Real boys of course she had always been afraid of, especially the rough and roust-about ones who were prone to mistreat her because of her perceived handicaps, but a boy she had never yet met, who some might say could not even exist, could naturally be seen as lacking in mortal flaws or human foibles. He was closer to something angelic, as unrequited loves so often go. She wanted to hear his sweet low voice in her ear, not just a whistle or hum at a distance in the dark, and she wanted to confess to him all sorts of notions she hadn't fully formulated in her innocent head. In her most fervid scenarios Lucy could picture him pulling back his hood and tilting his shaggy red head as he listened to her, somewhat in the same way she listened to old Professor Harding, and she felt certain he would agree with all she had to say and join her in condemning the world and its injustice. His eyes would turn serious but glow with love. He would come closer; he smelled like some kind of short-lived spring flower. She could feel his warm breath on her cool cheek. And then he might kiss her... but just once! Mostly, they would talk. He understood her. Who, after all, could be more compassionate than someone who daily witnessed the intolerable sufferings of dying animals and then, perhaps with the help of a hired man or two, hoisted their sad heavy bodies up onto his cart? (Cook had said they used a sort of winch and some were easier cut up first.) But the boy—oh, the boy... He would be kind to the dying. He would be a little like Jesus, suffering for their sake and allowing no one to impugn or harm the poor downtrodden blameless creatures of His Kingdom. Except one can't touch or kiss Jesus. No, she thought, opening her eyes, he wasn't and couldn't be the Son of God.

When old man Harding found her on her knees on the landing outside his turret early that afternoon, scrub-brush in hand and bucket of suds untouched beside her, although she had been suffering out there for a good ten minutes, he invited her in for a break. "And if Miss Polk should disturb us," he assured her, eyes darting down the passage, "I shall say you were helping to polish my bibelots." He led her briskly into his chamber, where the shutters were locked and all was strangely dark. Halfway to the nearest post of the bed, the rug played a prank on the poor gent and he would have fallen, had he not seized her by the waist to right himself first. "Aye, here's a solid wench!" he exclaimed, unshaken, and let forth a jolly belch. Shoulder to shoulder they staggered as one to the electric reading lamp, which, ceramic fob pulled, allowed an accusatory light to fall across the bed she had not yet made up for the day. She then saw his eyes were pink, his cheeks pinker. Shame, shame, it's barely past noon! she refrained from reproving him. For once she did not know if she could trust him, yet trust him she must. "Pardon me for saying so," he said, dropping her arm so he could take a better look at her as well, "but I do believe you haven't been quite tip-top—or is the correct American slang 'gung-ho'—these days. Back at the public the fellas would have said you've been looking a tad squiffy. I meant to say something weeks ago, but I shouldn't think you'd have heard me, you've been adrift in such a different world. That's all right—I'm a trifle mad myself! But come, now, what does ail ye, me girlie?" Whenever he was with her it seemed she drew all his quaintest ways of speaking out of him. Gingerly he led her over to his beloved rocker and insisted that this time she should sit while he stood at the center window, looking through the parted louvers down at the kitchen garden, where asparagus was sprouting and the apple tree was almost past its bloom.

Lucy sank into the rocker with a groan and rested her hot forehead in her hands. She was not so naive as to reveal all the impurities of her thoughts to even a man as old and harmless as he. Instead, she fibbed a little and avowed that she had not been sleeping well again, that it must be the troublesome spring breezes with all their pollen. True, her eyes were watery, he couldn't have missed that, and she seemed to be sniffling. But he did not pressure her to confess any more, for the moment. Instead, he flung apart the shutters at last and said, "I'm a light sleeper myself, though I suppose it's more natural in one my age. Anything at all can wake me—moths battering the screens, polecats tippy-toeing in the rafters, floorboards creaking in the corridor, wagon wheels in the alley..."

She raised her face, her wide-set brown eyes opening up to the sunlight spilling into the room. "You hear it, too, then?" she asked, a little breathlessly.

He made a sound like laughter and sat on the windowsill. "That infernal clanking clattering juggernaut, you must mean? Oh, yes, for years and years I have. The knackers, of course; they don't like to be seen by day, they upset people so..."

"That word again!" she shouted, rising from the rocker and setting it in motion as quick as her heartbeat. "Tell me, have you seen him? I mean, the driver of that cart? Is he as young and true and strong as I think? Does he have a name? I mean, do you know his name?"

He crossed his leg, produced his pipe from one of the many pockets of his uncharacteristically rumpled jacket and unbuttoned waistcoat, and rapped the meerschaum against his instep. "Well, let's see," he said, fishing for a matchbook in those many rattling pockets, "it's been quite a few years I've lived around these parts now, the drivers coming and going, some never to come back, but lo there's always another one. Sit down, sit down, will you." She continued to pace the room instead, having no patience to take another one of her usual places just yet. The old man had found some lucifers, as he curiously called matchsticks, but was repeatedly striking duds as he spoke. "Superstition dogs those lads and their employers, I suppose," he continued. "Remnants of the old ways, old attitudes cling among these hills. Used to be, people would even cross themselves and spit when they saw a hearse like that pass, as if it were some presage of doom, one of the Four Horsemen, might as well be! Curious, these customs, and people tend to avoid them just like they avoid morticians, even avoid talking about them, but I've always liked those young men when I chanced to meet up with them—which never happened more than seldom, I would estimate, even in decades gone by. Oh, they usually are young, and often they're fresh off Ellis Island and don't speak any civilized language. Yes, on occasion I suppose—as you must have intuited—it's been a bonny youth; they've a right need to be strong, of course, you have to be young and very fit. Once or twice I have even ventured down in nothing more than my nightshirt on a hot summer's night with ready lumps melting in my fists. Couldn't resist those eyes—the ones of a great tired-out Bucephalus, I mean, if it's a Shire or Percheron like before—since my country days, you understand, I've been a hippophile, a lover of draft horses especially; they always melt my heart just like those cubes of sugar held out on my palm. Such power, such size, such beauty! The youths may be every bit as beauteous, of course, I'll admit to that, but they never say much, and of course it's dark as Tartarus down there below the clouds and trees. Come to think of it, the last time I looked down and waved to him I saw it was a well-set-up lad I hadn't seen before, maybe the brother or cousin or even the son of the last one. Boys don't last too long at that type of job, you might well suppose, it gets to them, it would certainly get to you or me. Ah, but you see at my age and with my eyesight they all look so young and, as you might say, sturdy and stalwart or hale and hearty, at least to this septuagenarian's eyes. Who knows how old they really are—they might be ageless, deathless. They could be from the clan of Ancient Ones, the ones who live inside the Holy Mountain, it is a legend I have oft told you, I am sure."

"But this latest one," she interrupted, taking the pipe from his fumbling hands to ignite it with the flint lighter he'd overlooked on the nearby table, "this latest one, he couldn't more than just have come of his majority, as the preacher says, could he have, and he has bright blazing blue eyes and flaming red locks, I'm sure of it! Don't laugh at me. And don't feed me any more of your pish-posh. My mother, you know, always has things enough to say about redheads in her language, but I can only half-understand her."

"Oh, we all know about those rascally gingermen!" he said with an empathetic grin, accepting the return of his pipe. "But you know, I think you are right, I have perhaps glimpsed yours now and then, and I think once recently he did let his hood slip—they don't like to be recognized too well, you can understand—and I'll allow that he was that type, ruddy as ever there was a Scotsman. Muswell was from Inverness, you know, and this one is more like than not a descendant. But I think you must've had a longer look than I've been able to get."

She sat back down into the still-restless rocker and closed her eyes while the man took long meditative inhalations from the aromatic applewood tobacco blend in the bowl. "Oh, Professor," she said after they'd sat together for a few moments in silence, "I'm so tired these days I don't know when I'm dreaming and when I'm not. I think that God must hate me. If only there was a preacher here, a church I could go to again like back home, I might get some help. Forgive me if I've told you before, but my father says it's all loose-living papists 'round here and just to do my praying on my own. Isn't that something! Lately I don't know who I'm supposed to be praying to or for what...

"But you understand, don't you? You've seen him, too! I tell you, he frightens me, and yet when I hear him I can't help but look and want to know more." She was speaking now more to herself than to him. "I want to touch him just once to make certain he's got hot blood running in his veins. He can't be like the awful boys I've known, as terrible as his job is! You know I'm not slow like some people have always said, I just like taking my time to think before I speak or act. Maybe that is slow, but I tell you I'm not so stupid as to imagine every bit of it, the way Miss Polk makes me feel. That boy is real, you've proved it me now, and I can't thank you enough!" Struck by her passion, the old man lay down his pipe and, stepping toward her, halted the steady progress of the rocking chair. Then he knelt as far as his knees would permit and put a hand on her quaking shoulder; she knew by his touch that he was very happy, after so long, to be useful to someone else. By then she really was crying, and cried herself into a good nap until Miss Polk's harpy cry up into the heights brought her to life again.

Mollified as she was by the ex-professor's words, Lucy was soon to learn there were greater vexations around her than Miss Polk or knackers' wagons or interminable, mindless work. This was the year of the great plague blamed on Spain, a flame of fever that had rapidly burned its way from country to country and even across oceans, until at last an unstoppable holocaust surged across America, reaching as far as the deep valleys and steep hills of northeastern Iowa, taking with each fatal leap of its blazes greater numbers of the elderly and infirm, and then in its second fiery onslaught that summer and fall, the young and strong, as well. Even in her relative isolation, Lucy heard many nearly unbelievable things. Several businesses in lower Allamakee were boarded up, so people said, and others, whose owners were confined to their beds, bore such a taint of disease no one would handle their goods or eat their produce. The public library, the post office, and various government offices remained open only half their usual hours, to accommodate the decimation of their employees. The laundresses and delivery crews and yard-workers who visited Mother Calhoun's were necessarily out and about in the world, and they were full of stories and things they had seen with their own eyes. Lucy and the rest of the staff heard many reports, some controversial, some contradictory, often ridiculous. Word was a few citizens had locked themselves away like hermits or cloistered nuns, while others panicked and shot their whole families first, rather than see their members drop one by one, and many people simply died from fright more than anything else. Still others fled to the countryside for fresh air and uncontaminated food, but the skeletal fingers of Death found them hiding there, nevertheless, in something, it was claimed, as innocuous as a tin of wallpaper paste or a bouquet of tansies. Schoolchildren fell like flies in the schools and rest homes were emptied out. Conversely, the small county hospital was constantly overflowing with patients. Many were taken seriously ill and still survived, albeit so weakened they would remain in the dark behind closed doors for weeks, their relatives afraid to approach them for fear of contamination. Cook and Miss Polk had taken to carrying on, like everyone else, about the severity of the pandemic around them, though for most of the year Lucy was never much worried for herself, very seldom having reason or time to go down the hill into town and into that valley of the shadow of death—but if ever she must, like all those young and effortlessly healthy, she felt invulnerable. Rumors reached her that the residential hotel downtown where Mrs. Cavendish lived an idle and indulgent life had been swept clean by the lethal virus; however, none of the men at the dinner-table liked to talk about such things except obliquely. Lucy was therefore never quite sure if the formidable old woman had been one of those who had perished or not. As it was, the boarders around her had grown increasingly evasive, if not maddeningly deaf to her least inquiry. It was as if they had all agreed that hysteria has a way of traveling through a place where many people sleep under the same roof better than anywhere else, and so they must keep quiet as best they could. The whole town at large grew silent as a graveyard. Eventually Lucy was afraid to leave the safety of the block and thankfully was no longer asked to do so. Mother Calhoun's Arms on its high wooded bluff above the river became increasingly like a lofty medieval fortress sheltered from the Black Death, for despite all the service-people coming and going, no one inside got sick or even so much as came down with a cough; and soon every single room was occupied, some two to a bed, as single men fled homes with the mark of death upon them—and therefore Lucy was busier than she had ever been before, too worn down and wasted by the end of the day for even the manic whinnying of a thirsty nag to rouse her. Days and weeks and months passed not more slowly, as one might suppose for one so young, but with agonizing swiftness, for even if given eternity, there would never be enough time for her to get things done. The knacker's boy and his cart came to seem more and more like the hallucination of another season to her, and meanwhile summer blossomed for just a moment and then shed its petals just as fast, Lucy's sixteenth birthday came and went unnoticed, and though her love for the unknown boy did not fully wane, it began to feel a little like something splintered and yellowing you might find pasted in a scrapbook, or perhaps still more like a keepsake in a locket, always there hanging from your neck, yet no longer noticed. In the long-lasting drought that struck the area after the thunderstorms of early spring, the trough had run dry and her dearest beloved, she hypothesized, had to modify his route to find water elsewhere for his horse. The idea that the boy could have died along with so many others never once occurred to her, though there was at the back of her mind the somehow more disturbing possibility he had found another sweetheart or even married. After a few attempts, Lucy learned she could not discuss her agonizing doubts with either Cook, who would time and again shift the subject to anecdotes of her own, or Professor Harding, who would only lead her to overly mannered analogies in literature. At any rate, through the warmer months she no longer heard either horse or driver when she willed herself to stay awake and await their approach. In a way, she wanted to see him more than ever, and then again she was glad he kept away until she could decide what exactly to do. She would wait for another season, then, when rain fell plentifully once more and the cold drove the germs away. Crops failed that year, as if they too no longer had the desire to flourish, and herds starved in their dry pastures. With so much death and destruction in the air, Lucy began to feel it could very well be true that love in such an impersonal world is easily exposed as no more than "an adolescent affectation," as Professor Harding always described those vague past infatuations of his own that had met similar embarrassingly futile ends. "And in the first place never had a chance of going anywhere," he would conclude, shutting and silencing the book that had inspired his thoughts.

"Love," the man said one such afternoon in late August, waving away a smoke-ring, "is never anything more than a mere whimsy or passing fancy, is it? You shouldn't worry about it so, no one should." Her old friend had changed a great deal that summer, too. His back was more bent and his beard whiter and wilder. He wore a black armband now—but who was it for? She daren't ask. So many were perishing, all ages, everywhere... The untidy stack of unopened mail on his bed-table grew higher and higher. Sometimes he forgot to hide his bottles. Sometimes, looking up over his rimless spectacles, he expressed surprise to see that she was sitting upon his bed, and indeed had been there for a full forbidden hour unnoticed after he had ushered her in. He had in fact been reading aloud and voicing improvised footnotes to himself. Since that springtime, when he became her confessor, he had become by gradual turns morose and more snappish when she was around, if every bit still as loquacious—more frank and honest, perhaps, now that she had revealed her true self, and the works he read aloud to her, the fabulations of his own past, as well, were for the most part bitter tragedies. His magic garden had withered in an early freeze. The playful gods had fled. But he was right, Lucy had to agree at last. Love is no better and no deeper than what drives five-year-olds to kiss their china dolls. Indeed, she had never had much patience for the lovelorn before, and that included herself. Who exactly was that boy, anyway? A no one. What was he, after all? An impossibility. And she was very busy, shouldn't be taking valuable time to cheer up the old man or herself. Back home little Teddy and a great-aunt and a cousin or two had already died, but no one in her family yet possessed the strength to tell her. For all they knew, she was dead, too.

And then—maybe from something he caught from a sealed envelope he'd finally dared to open—the professor was struck down overnight, and the last Lucy saw was him being carried, still hacking and spitting, upon a stretcher to the waiting horse-drawn ambulance. She wanted to chase the conveyance down the street, but Miss Polk held her back as she sobbed, and for once the woman did not berate the girl for neglecting her duties and going off unannounced and unbidden to her room in the middle of the day. How was it possible, the girl wailed to herself, stretched out on the faded patchwork atop her cot and beating her fist so hard into her hard pillow that down-feathers flew, how was it conceivable that someone so good and kind should be taken in the wink of an eye like that? In her family's righteous but spiritually impoverished church, she had always been told that God the Father was vengeful and not one to shrink from sending plagues of boils and rains of frogs upon his chosen ones—but in modern times Jesus the Son of Man interceded, didn't He? Even so, the Savior had to account, ultimately, for those murky past scandals that had pursued Professor Harding like his own shadow—Lucy may or may not have seen him take so-called liberties with certain boys herself—and He might have figured those sins trumped the good this grandfather figure had done her. Also, the professor had been an unbeliever, he had once admitted to her, who hated submitting himself to just one god, rather than many or preferably none. Sometimes she did, too. What of all those other people dying out there in the world beyond this hilltop? Had they all, too, done sinful things, and does the sin originate from within the sinner or from somewhere without? Was she also at a violent God's mercy for such wicked thoughts? This renewed bout of religious doubt and attendant self-recriminations fatigued her as much as scrubbing incessant flights of stairs, and she collapsed early in the evening of the same day the ambulance collected the dying man and did not stir until she heard Miss Polk's infuriated pounding upon her door.

"Listen, missy, do you have any idea what time it is?" she was saying when the door fell away unexpectedly under her knuckles. "Cook covered for you at breakfast, saying you must be helping that seamstress I got to alter the drawing room drapes, but right when I needed you—" and abruptly the woman's words came to a halt, now that her eyes had adjusted to the unexpected burst of blinding light. Since the girl had not drawn the shade the previous nightfall, the full sun of morning was pouring upon her tumbled bed. For a breathless moment Lucy, half-awake yet struck blind as well, could use only her ears. Outside the window, St. Ursula's usually soft-spoken bells had raised their voices and rung out at least a dozen times—maybe a hundred—forewarning the girl of the resentments gathering their forces within the woman, who, though knocked off balance by this unforeseen blow, would quickly regain her powers. After the last reverberation of the last clang of iron against iron, the room was dead-silent, as if the woman too had for the present altogether suspended inhalation or exhalation. Maybe she never breathed; maybe the old woman was made of stone, as Lucy had long suspected. The girl rubbed her tired eyes in this cruel light and tried to see as best she could. The sound of her own heart, like the toll of those bells, filled her ears. With the bright window behind her, Miss Polk looked her usual bone-thin and black-clad self, thin and black as a shadow. Apparently she had been too shocked to move or speak for a good three-quarters of a minute, and then her outrage boiled over. "What on earth? Sleeping in your clothes! Such slatternly behavior—why, never in my life! Didn't even bother to take off your shoes and stockings. Dear god, what a shameless slugabed you are! I've seen no worse at the unwed mothers' mission. Hurry, get up, girl, wash your face, tie on your pinafore, net up your hair—Cook needs you at once in the kitchen."

But the girl found she could not even lift her chin. Little cold carnivorous minnows and tadpoles swam in her veins and she ached all over, maybe just from sleeping in such an unnatural position—though there was this new tingling sensation at loose inside her body, something not quite a fever and not quite a chill; she was shivering and sweating at the same time. All that, and there were scorpion pincers at her toes and bobcat's claws down her back. Miss Polk saw at once what was happening and was horrified to think what people would be saying about her establishment, should word get out that at first the oldest and then the youngest of the household were going to be vanquished by this pestilence that had been spawned upon some alien shore and thereafter spread upon hot winds across the globe. Swiftly and with no more sound than a sigh, Miss Polk drew the shade and curtains, closed the door, and went about undressing the girl and getting her under thick covers despite the Indian Summer heat of the attic room. With a hitherto unrealized maternal sensibility, she cooled the child's forehead with cotton wool dampened with witch hazel and later spooned into her slack mouth lukewarm broth brought up from the kitchen. Miss Polk would make certain to avoid even the cook and washerwoman on her rounds that day, for fear they should ask questions—and the lodgers, if they noticed anything amiss at all, would just assume the girl was busy in another corner of the large and crowded house. Nourished and warmed, Lucy lay still at last under her blankets, breathing heavily but regularly, inanimate but otherwise conscious of everything around her, from the glancing touch of Miss Polk's icy fingertips to the baritone and tenor voices she heard echoing from other more distant floors. She did not consider for a moment that she was sick in the same way Professor Harding had been, and from long experience with various childhood illnesses in her family, she just took it on faith that this indisposition would pass through her quickly and be gone the next day. It would be not much worse than those passing spells she sometimes went through at her time of the month, or like that sudden convulsion last spring, when she had had her last premonition of Hell. Miss Polk and anyone else might guess something else, but she was not asleep and could not get to sleep. Sleep just hid there in the dresser drawer, complaining to itself. For hours she contemplated mathematical problems in her head, outlandish sums like the ones she used to have to face down upon the chalkboard at school, numerals that multiplied and divided themselves over and over again in an infuriating way but at least served to dissociate her from the pain. Gradually it grew darker in the room and no one struck a match. Miss Polk appeared to have departed for good, but had not shut the door behind her. Hours later Lucy could hear the woman, felled at last by the demands of the day, upon the springs of her much larger and nicer bed in her much larger and nicer room across the way, and eventually the springs ceased their harp-like outcries and the ribbon of light under the door furled itself away, and Lucy found herself absolutely alone at last in that kind of Egyptian darkness described so well somewhere in the depths of her father's annotated Bible. Time stood stock-still, waiting for her to get worse or not, and it seemed she could hear every single mouse-murmur and pigeon-rustle from the cellar to the eaves of the entire house, taste every infinitesimal particle of roast duck and shaving soap afloat in the air, feel the vibrations of well more than a dozen snoring souls, faintly smell even that applewood shag spilled between the floorboards of Professor Harding's room. If this was sickness, it was a novel kind that gave her superhuman sensitivity, a different kind of strength to compensate the utter depletion of her body.

The drugstore calendar had failed to remind her it was the first night of the new moon, and so it first came as a surprise and then as a relief to hear the familiar far-off rumble of steadily rolling cart wheels and their overburdened axles. Of course, some remaining logical part of her mind insisted, it could be any cart or carriage, even as late at night as it was and as removed from the mainstream of town as was this hillside. But when the sound only grew in volume and intensity, she knew with certainty that it was her visitor of old, and she knew with as much certainty that this night, her last night on earth, must be the night she would descend to the leaf-strewn lawn below to meet the knacker's boy at last, lest something happen to him, too, while... she could not even finish that thought, for finishing that thought would only exile him from her. No, she must not think with her brain, but with what was left of her body; she must simply call upon her muscles one last time, so she could leave this room to go throw herself down in the middle of the alley, before the very wheels of the big high-sided cart, if that's what it would take to stop its inexorable progress.

But an unseen weight was pressing her farther and farther down into the lumpy kapok-stuffed mattress. The weight was warm, palpable, not altogether malignant, but tirelessly insistent. Try as she might she could lift no more than her head to turn to the window—there it remained, with the first white frost of the year inching up its four cold panes. Beyond the glass, beyond the screen, she could make out nothing in the colorless overcast night, though her senses remained alert, more than ever so, and she heard the cart crunching over the crumbling bricks and rolling to a halt alongside the stables, next to the water trough. She could picture the stage-set very clearly, well lit by the lantern's glow: last time they had come, if she remembered correctly, they had had to move on—hadn't they?—because the trough was dry. Except, no, that was no longer true; a couple of recent downpours had filled it several inches full with black mossy water, she remembered noticing the other day while emptying slops. She held her breath, already shallow and dry in her throat, so she could listen all the better. Boot heels upon wood, then brick, then gravel. The steady susurration of the burning white spirit-gas, the sharp metallic clank of a harness, the steely clonk of iron-shod hooves, a bugling neigh followed by a deep equine snort, a human cough, a sigh, a slap, then tender but insistent whispers—the private coaxing one gives an animal while leading it to water. And then the lusty slosh of water and the liquid music of its drip upon the ground and the great gulping swallows a large draft horse makes, and lastly the tuneless whistle and whispered praises of a satisfied handler. She could picture the youth holding the beaten-down old mare by its bridle with one big hand, the other warming in his overall pocket, his big heavy feet scuffling on the icy ground below, his breath coming in little white puffs in the frigid air. He wouldn't be chewing disgusting green-black tobacco like other boys, and his pocket kerchief would be clean and white, and in fact he'd be clean all over: nails trimmed, bright red hair neatly combed and pomaded and middle-parted, chin close-shaven, maybe even a touch of lilac water behind his ears.

There was someone else who had been not unlike that, once, someone just as fresh and good. She felt herself slipping back into sleep, remembering him with the leisure of a sick person who has all the time in the world, which at last she did have now. Just a year and a half ago (six months or so before she had come to Allamakee), a young circuit preacher had taken up residency at the Tabernacle of the Holy Ghost Exchange for a month; and though Rev Harrison's speeches raked even more brimstone than old Doc Garfield's, he spoke so earnestly, yet so charmingly, in a choir-boy voice barely past adolescence, he might have been describing not scimitar-wielding avenger-angels upon rabid chargers, but the infantile, zither-playing kind whose pictures one sees in children's editions of the Bible. With such a youth interceding from the pulpit on her behalf, Lucy felt less afraid of the wrath of the Lord God and more willing to subjugate her soul. Though her parents had long urged her, Lucy had never before dared to give a public testimonial through the holy telephone; that hot summer Sunday, when she had dialed and almost instantaneously the mellifluous alto of the preacher came singing down the wires, she nearly fainted, as if she were speaking to Jesus Himself. But then, alas, she could say—nothing. She merely breathed into the device, cupping it in her palms so no one could tell how speechless she was. Although her family was on all sides of her, they only assumed she was whispering too low to hear. It was the heat that stifled her tongue, she would excuse herself later. But at the time it happened, the new man remained unabashed; he told the assembly that the young lady had asked if he would please read from that instructive chapter about the rich sick man, and that he would be glad to oblige—which he did for quite some time. Assuming the trembling, fairground barker's voice of the earthly Messiah (and who was to say this was not what Jesus indeed sounded like?) he spoke to Lucy as if she herself were Mary or Martha, one of the grieving sisters of their dying brother Lazarus: "Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Any person who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for one sees by this world's light. It is when a person walks at night that one stumbles, bereft of light." It was as if the young preacher knew all about those midnights when Lucy found herself pacing the bedroom she shared with her sisters, unable to sleep, wracked with guilt for something she had never done. In her family's crowded pew and several yards from the man at the pulpit, she imagined she could smell the walnut-oil pomade in his hair and feel the warmth of his virile breath on her well-laced bosom. That zealous student-preacher, Lucy only now recalled, also possessed red hair—bright red hair. Wasn't that odd? When he shook her shaking hands after the sermon, the youth gave her a wink quick enough for anyone else to miss, and she was gratified to find his palm as smooth and soft and devoid of calluses as she had expected. The perfume of his lustrous hair-oil filled her nostrils—then and it seemed now, as well. Such had been almost the full extent of Lucy's physical experience with the opposite sex. But somehow she was confident that the cart-driver's hands, despite his occupation, would be just as soft, just as warm, as the reverend's had been, and his scent...

How long she had been sleeping, maybe dreaming, she couldn't say, for the room was bright again with the unforgiving light of noon when she was next aware that Miss Polk was bending over her, pressing another cold compress to her fiery forehead and grouching disconsolately about how much extra work she had to do now. "So, there you are again," she said when Lucy opened her sun-blinded eyes, as if the girl had gone away bodily and come back after another short trip into town to fetch supplies. There was not an ounce of sympathy in her appraisal of the girl's current state of being. The woman was dressed in her usual funeral finery (that is, she always seemed to be dressed for a burial) and had yet to take off that squashed toad of a hat she reserved for holidays and other special occasions. "You're still hot as a hearthrug," Miss Polk was saying, "and you threw up your supper all over your bedclothes—and Lord if I have to empty that bedpan once more! Here now, try to sit up." But Lucy couldn't, or wouldn't, and only wanted the tiresome woman to go away. Miss Polk instead remained there nervously fidgeting around Lucy's prostrate body in the merciless light like a turkey buzzard circling, exhaling the girl's gamey odor and sniffing fierce sniffs. Sizing me up, Lucy thought, to see if I'm still sick or just being lazy. When it came time to furl up Lazarus in his winding sheet... "Thank heavens I had the ague several times when I was growing up back in swampy old St. Louie," the woman was saying, "so I must be naturally immunized, as these medical doctors say. Nothing knocks me down! Now lift up your head and drink some of what Cook's prepared you. Oh, yes, don't look so—she's invested in your welfare and sends her regards, but can't make it up all these steps, of course. Well, now, we've got to get you back on your feet or it's this job's going to kill me, nothing else." With that, she pulled the girl up and raised an enameled tin mug to her lips. The broth drained into mouth and down her dry esophagus like water flushing through a pipe, no effort of swallowing and no sensation of taste, just a scalding sort of relief.

In a minute or so Lucy managed to speak, although her throat tightened around the words and she realized half of what she said must be unintelligible. "He, he—I mean, Mister—the professor," she gasped, "is he any better?"

"What's that, girl?" There was a certain kind of expectant stillness in the room as the woman seemed to be deciphering the pained question and formulating her answer. Then she moved away from the bed at last and set about tidying a few things in the corners that Lucy could not see. "Oh, sure as shootin' he's doing fine. He's a tough old piece of hardtack, you and I both know, he'll be back quicker than you can say Jack Robin. Now I've got to skedaddle, or this whole place is going to fall down around my ears. Might as well get back to sleep, you." And then there was the sound of her squeaky old high-buttoned boots darting out of the room. The door flew shut. As usual, Miss Polk left a gust, an actual chill, in her blacker-than-black wake. For a moment Lucy considered the possibility that the woman might have been crying, but then decided that was beyond the realm of possibility.

At least her seemingly immortal enemy, who besides Cook might now be her only mortal friend, had pulled the window blind so that the room was mercifully darkened, though the shapes if not the colors of things were still evident. Only able to turn her neck a little, she surveyed what she could see of the meager contents of this apartment hemmed in by four close walls: the small and somehow malevolent white-gas lamp atop the rickety bedside table (one of its legs was either slightly too short or too long), the tarnished knobs of the bronze bedstead that always took on the appearance of a row of crusaders' helmets when she was falling asleep, the shabby dog's-bed quilt she'd pushed again down to her feet, and beyond that the sad little rail-back chair and the three-drawer pine dresser (how much she longed for a towering wardrobe such as many of the other rooms contained, or even a closet!), the dresser-top crowded with pitcher and washbasin, pitifully cheap tooth-powders and elbow-unguents in lurid vials that had sparkled in the drugstore window like oriental jewels, and the speckled mirror with the picture of her stern-faced little brother still tucked into its frame. The mirror, from her oblique angle on the bed, reflected part of the blue-painted ceiling with its remnants of water-leaks and flaking calcimine patches, like a bright spring sky with tiny clouds either fading or just forming, and additionally a few cobwebs she had missed while cleaning, with just a corner of the peeling hyacinth-scattered wallpaper showing below. As she had remarked to herself many times before, it was peculiar how much more interesting the world looks within the frame of any old mirror than it does in real life. Nothing can really ever touch or hurt those images on the other side. I am totally alone, in a way I've never been so alone and undisturbed in this place, she told that other sort of consciousness within herself, but there I am too on the opposite horizon of the silvery mirror, safe and protected; my brain is working remarkably well, and yet I have this disease—if that's what it is—to keep me company. And so I am not really alone. The little spring clouds seemed to be winking at her, the flowers to be inviting themselves to be picked from their one-dimensional meadow. A fool's fancy! Suddenly she was as good as deaf; she could hear almost nothing but her own heartbeat distant and far-away as if from down a long corridor in this huge echoing building. The longer she stared and listened, the darker and quieter this room, her world inside and outside the mirror, became.

It was pitch-dark when she next realized she was still herself and not just this inert mass upon a mattress no wider than a pauper's casket. That is, she knew she was a being with a name and a history, however short and unhappy, and she was alive. In fact, she felt much better, although the weight still pressed down upon her breast like one of those demons she'd been told about by her mother, the species that likes to straddle and smother sleepyheads just for the sport of it. What was it that had woken her? Oh, no, oh, yes, couldn't miss it, that familiar sound—it was making its presence known to her again. Out there in the dark beyond these walls, in the great wide starry universe, a heavy-laded cart, nearly as high-backed and long as a Conestoga, was approaching; its axles were grating and its aged timbers groaning. Heartbeat became hoofbeats, and the knacker's lonesome cart grew ever nearer. For two nights in a row now the cart had come. It had traveled a long way, picking up its quota of discarded bodies, the dead farm animals fit neither for eating nor Christian burial, unlucky beasts killed upon the road perhaps, miserable animals already hacked into bits to make them more convenient for transport. "To the glue factory with you!": she must have heard that threat many times before, from exasperated farmers beating tired workhorses and dogcatchers collecting for the town pound, even children cursing pets that had bitten them. Only this night did she fully comprehend what role the cart's driver, her unknown lover, had in this horror-show. She must go to him as she hadn't been able to the night before, to convince him that he must leave such an awful and demeaning career behind. He must not sully his flesh, as the preacher would say, he must rise above this mean and earthly sin. Like Lazarus he must leave behind the dirt and sin of the death-pit.

With a greater effort than it had ever taken to haul a heaping barrow of coal to the boiler room, or to drag a heavy oak credenza out from a corner so she could sweep behind it, she forced her body upright and onto its feet. She was surprised to find that she had been dressed already in her nightgown, and now she need only pull on the tattered and half-buttonless coat, the only one she owned, from its hook on the wall. Her muscles ached as she forced her arms through the tight sleeves, and it seemed a knife stabbed her in the gut when she knotted the sash. Clearly it would be too arduous to lace her shoes; at least she still had her stockings, albeit ones with holes in the heels. As she groped her way along the walls she strained her ears to ascertain that the cart and its driver hadn't yet left the yard. Thankfully, there were enough crackings and creakings from the garden below to assure her that the driver had still not led his steed to the trough—nevertheless, she must hurry to her task, all while passing through the house undetected. She would be quiet and she would be swift. After a few footsteps, Lucy was surprised to find the remnants of a kind of energy rising from her embattled bowels.

Halfway down the length of the attic was the servants' narrow twisty stairwell, so narrow and twisty in fact, she negotiated it as deftly in the dark with elbows and fingertips and toes as a terrier using its whiskers within a long gopher-hole. Lucy did not fear falling, as steep as the steps were. After all, she had made this descent hundreds of times before and not slipped yet. At the bottom, in a remarkably more frigid temperate zone, she paused to catch what remained of her breath and began creeping down the slippery tiles that led to the back door. She had polished this floor herself! And what if Miss Polk were to surprise her? How would she explain herself, sick as she was supposed to be? All around her she heard the sound of restlessly sleeping men—an out-of-tune orchestration of rasps and gasps and snorts and snores and gargles and gurgles. A hyper-masculine, unpleasant stench, a mixture of stale colognes and talcum and salves and body odors and worse, had descended from the bedrooms and shared bathrooms and collected in the close space of the hallway. At once the thought struck her more fully than ever before: how very much she hated Mother Calhoun's Arms! She had hated it from the moment she had stepped up the broad front steps, pathetic baggage in one hand and letter of introduction in the other. She had hated it with all her heart and soul, and still there was room inside her for the hate to keep on growing. If she hurried away tonight she would never come back, never regret departing; she could go as naked as this and not miss a thing left behind—except that fair-day photograph of her brother, a few of her clothes, and maybe Cook's buttery biscuits. Professor Harding, her only true ally in the world (for Cook didn't really count) was most likely dead, despite whatever Miss Polk had said to spare her feelings. Lucy swore then, stepping carefully from one checkerboard square of the tiles to the next, never to go back to her family, either—why, when they had forgotten her completely and hadn't even sent her a birthday card, yet alone a present last Christmas? That strong young man, the knacker's son, would take her away—she hadn't even realized until this moment that such, in actuality, was her plan. He would take her away, far away! As in the Bible, they would come to know one another and they would marry. In time they would live in a house together. Maybe even have a child of their own. Nothing could be simpler. Of course he would be pleased to meet her, even if he did not yet love her as fiercely as she did him; true, at the start he would not find her so very beautiful, but then again she wasn't so plain as all that; and she was strong from all the lifting and climbing and hauling and dragging she did—so certainly he would welcome someone so eager to alleviate his own considerable duties and burdens. What matrimonial burdens entail, in particular, might have made Lucy shudder and stumble, if she were any other inexperienced girl, but instead she redoubled her efforts to make it stealthily as a spider through the building, telling herself she was brave and determined and that such burdens were likely the fate of every married woman.

The house was large and labyrinthine and would take skill and patience for the craftiest of spiders to navigate and traverse. Lucy was very tired and very sick, but she told herself time and again, stealing down the last mile of the long back passage, that there was no alternative now, she must make it to the exit. The tiles turned to worn linoleum and the linoleum to bare wood. Her unshod feet grew colder, the world between the walls narrow as a trap and darker. Professor Harding had told her a tale once, about a maiden and a maze and a ball of yarn, but she couldn't remember the rest. With a little relief she became aware of a flicker of feeble light up ahead, a beacon that signaled from the kitchen—but could it actually be possible that Cook was stoking the stove this early, baking her biscuits or soda bread? (No, Lucy reminded herself, it was gas, not wood like the one at home, and she had heard Cook snoring several doors back.) Even in the obscurity and even if the floorboards did not squeak, there would still be no other way to get past and outside unseen or unheard, unless she were to retrace her steps all the way upstairs again and then down the main staircase with its three complicated landings: certainly someone would hear her then, even on the soft if well- shredded Turkish carpeting—and besides she hadn't enough physical strength left, really, for all that. Lucy decided she must risk being seen, this unforeseen urge to get outside the house and into the backyard was so powerful. She set her shoulders and quickened her pace, but at the threshold of the kitchen was suddenly swept into the room by a large and powerful hand that seized both of her own.

It was Mrs. Cavendish—Mrs. Cavendish the long-feared proprietress of this house, who almost seemed to have been lying in wait for her. Imperiously the huge woman swept her employee into the room, lit by just the struggling greenish jets within the open cook-stove, but lit well enough, and propped the girl on a stool before the soapstone double-sink—all before the girl had time to collect what remained of her wits. No matter what people may or may not have said, the old dame was not even remotely dead, however corpse-green she looked in this light, and furthermore she seemed every bit as physically daunting as ever, larger even than Cook, yet strangely not as solid-looking, as if she were pumped with air, not plump with fat. She was dressed in her usual style right down to the numerous cameo or quartz pendants and her famous leghorn hat (although this time, probably following a certain current trend, there was not an entire aviary upon it, but instead just two uplifted hoot-owl's wings, affixed like those on the headgear of that lead-iron statuette of the buck-naked youth—a messenger of the underworld, as Lucy understood it—on one of the professor's shelves). Once Lucy was properly seated, Mrs. Cavendish collapsed with a gargantuan rattle and brattling of jewelry and old joints into the wing-backed armchair (one obviously pastured here after more opulent days in the parlor) next to the still-warm oven, the same overstuffed chair where Cook often took little forbidden catnaps. "Looking like you've seen a spook—you must have thought I died, too," Mrs. Cavendish said cheerfully, as if all of this was quite ordinary. Maybe it was, for her.

Her charge just stared and fidgeted, wanting to get away. Nothing o'clock, the blank bakelite face of the timer atop the stove said. Cook used her instincts instead of mechanics; in the kitchen it was always any old time but the right time, whether one liked it or not.

Mrs. Cavendish shook Lucy's shoulder vigorously. (Had her victim been falling back to sleep already?) "See here, sweetie, nothing can kill me, nothing, not even dieting!" To prove her heartiness, Mrs. Cavendish next thumped the watered silk taut over her belly as one might a cushion for the fluffing. Every movement the woman made was vigorous, if not violent. Her voice, too, and it was as big as Cook's was small. "Oh, I did nearly pass on out of this world into the next, nearly—but I'm quite all right now—fit as a fiddle. You might say sturdy as a Stradivarius!" And the preposterous old person fell back against the antimacassar, drumming on the armrests and braying out loud enough to wake the whole blessed house. The upholstery was a kind of sun-faded watered silk, as well, Lucy noticed through bleary eyes—strange that the textiles should so nearly match, both be such an outdated mauve. "Don't be looking so astonished, darling-dear. I often like coming up here late of a night, when no one can disturb me, just to remain acquainted with this old pile of bricks and boards."

Again, Lucy just stared, her whole body aching from the soles of her feet to her scalp. If she didn't leave here soon, she told herself, she would either scream or pass out. She had to get to the boy before he left. But she couldn't seem to catch a breath in the overheated air. And if she did move, that monstrous palm would only press her down again.

Mrs. Cavendish seemed to be reading her, through and through, but dispassionately, as if Lucy were no more than a weatherglass on the wall to consult. This was the first interview she'd ever had with the girl. What was her level? Was she to be trusted while the storm raged all about? "Breathe," she advised Lucy, "and you'll live. I find that always works out for me. Just take deep breaths and keep on breathing. That's how I get through a scare."

"If I didn't breathe, I wouldn't think I could live," came Lucy's retort—and Mrs. Cavendish roared at that, which was better than getting angry, as Miss Polk would, had Lucy been so bold with her. "But who says I'm frightened? I'm just not feeling very well, you know," she added. "I was really only on my way to get some milk and then back into bed..."

"Certainly you were, certainly!" the old woman cried out, the mirth in her voice becoming far too much for Lucy. "Milk! I wondered what his name is."

"Really," Lucy protested. "I am a good girl, I am, I don't care what Miss Polk says."

Mrs. Cavendish waved her puffy bejeweled hands dismissively and then wiped them down her great broad bosom. "Whoever listens to that bag of bones! She's never loved a thing in her life. If you could call it a life. But you can have your little romances, that's allowed, sweetie, I always did..." She leaned back with a crepitation of silk and whalebone and closed her mauve-colored eyelids to reminisce, while Lucy beat her all-but-bare heels against the stool's rungs. Please, Lord, please let her stop! "Listen," Mrs. Cavendish said, trying out a new dreamy voice, "I know what it's like for lonesome gals like you and me. When I was just fourteen my parents died and I was sent out here to work like a darky for a riverboat pilot and his family. Yes, I know what it is all about for girls without a buffalo nickel to their name. Girls like us takes what we can get, eh?" As tired and impatient as she was, Lucy enjoyed neither the confidentiality nor the classification, and raised herself as haughtily as she could on her teetering stool; the woman, however, was taking no more mind of her, slumping further down into the armchair like a very large and contented house cat. Her face, made up as only a very old lady—or a very young one—at that time might dare, with its heavy rouge and blood-colored lipstick, looked cold and waxen and ready to be embalmed, Lucy thought, shocked a little by her own insensitivity, yet finding there was no way anymore to control the wildest ideas inside her mind. Oh, why would the woman not let her go? She was instead screaking on like a heavy wheeled machine once launched downhill that cannot stop. ".... So, you see, I had no friends or family to help me, either. My father died in the wreck of the Old 309—a locomotive, deario—and my mother died of the typhoid, all in the same year. Our home was outside Philadelphia, and my only relatives are all Bolshies and Boches somewhere over in Krautland, and so I had no choice but to go stay with that awful man and his awful wife and awful Kinder, and how I hated it! Never no end to all the work. Never enough sleep. Never enough food. We know how it is, don't we, darling? But most of all I hated that man—his piggy hands and all his little 'interferences,' as the coppers say. Backed into a closet. Chased around the bed. Caught up there on the widow's walk with him. Oh, how I hated his very smell, Sloan's he said, but it was more like pony liniment. The worst thing of all, I ended up telling him I loved him, and vice-versa. How do you like that!

".... And then I had to leave that perfect little life when I started to go up dress-sizes. Oh, I was ready to fling myself on the CB&Q tracks, I tell you! I gave it up to the orphanage, you know. Boy or girl, I don't even remember. Whatever, the brat's middle name should've been 'Indiscretion,' and so's mine... And then one day, what do you know, on a crowded trolley I met Mr. Cavendish. Oh, he had handsome chin-whiskers like an admiral's and the most endearing speech impediment and was very shy, so shy I liked him. Mr. Cavendish was in medical supplies, you know, made quite a bit of money for the time, I don't dispute it. We had us a nice new place right up the block over there and a little bulldog called Pussums, isn't that funny, but we never did have a kid..."

Lucy was growing ever more tired, ever more bored, and struggled not to fall right off the stool and onto Mrs. Cavendish's ample lap. After having been so cold, she was more than warm from the stove-jets—or else it was the fever conquering her body. Her eyes would not remain open, anyhow; her arms and legs tingled, went limp and leaden. Everything that wasn't numb hurt. But a small part of her consciousness remained alert: outside she heard the horse still stomping its hooves against the bricks, eager to leave, as well. As she spoke and spoke and spoke, Mrs. Cavendish's gin-soaked voice was failing her at last, winding down like a pianola reel, growing fainter, slower, fainter... Lucy opened her eyes. A new and sudden realization had declared itself to her. After all, Mrs. Cavendish was only a ghost! A phantom! Nothing but ether and ectoplasm. It would only take a hatpin to see the air rush out from the woman's body and leave her no more than a rubber balloon, burst. Either the aged landlady refused to face the fact that she was no longer among the living or she had purposely tricked the girl. Charitably or not, Lucy chose the former option. She's so stubborn she won't even admit she died of the 'flu! Indeed, it was true—a lengthy obituary had been in the newspaper, Cook had mentioned it one morning recently, the girl could swear she had. But what was a surety, now, in the middle of the night, at nothing o'clock, feeling so very sick and ill as she did? The woman's voice was no longer strong enough to be heard; her sibilant voice was only the hissing of the gas-jets. Although Lucy's eyes remained fully open, she viewed the scene as if through the driving flurries of a snowstorm, and, watching the armchair, she could only half-see or altogether imagine Mrs. Cavendish sinking deeper and deeper into the bulging upholstery, disappearing despite her bulk, merging into the faded shadowy purplish watered-silk fabric... and eventually the woman wasn't there at all, she wasn't even the ghost of a ghost. There stood an empty chair. Lucy saw her opportunity to break free. She slipped noiselessly off the stool, back onto the cold bare floor, right out of the warm kitchen, and down the passageway once more.

The back door was not heavy and did not need to be shouldered while twisting the cracked crystal knob the way the front doors of Mother Calhoun's always must; it swung so easily away from her on its well-oiled hinges (again, her work) she had to be careful not to let it bang back and arouse anyone inside or out. Immediately on the granite stoop Lucy felt the cold condensation through the holes of her stockings. But that was good, and the cold good, too, for the sensation served to waken her further, as well as abstract her from the unquenchable fire—as if she were inhaling hot soot from a burning campfire—she'd felt growing fiercer in her fragile lungs since yesterday morning. Out on the icy, stony path she once again paused to listen in the hushed darkness, which wasn't so dark anymore, but had the softly gray and nacreous semi-luminescence of early dawn about it, even though her inner senses told her it was still the middle of the night. Perhaps it was merely the reflected and refracted glow of the street-lamps across the broad lawn, along the distant front sidewalk, their dim light amplified in the chill fog-like mist as a milk-glass sphere magnifies the flame of a paraffin lamp. It was only the end of September, but already the landscape seemed to be blanketed with snow, and the broad leaves of the elms and sycamore trees were an almost silvery white, the stucco sides of the house whiter still, the twilit grass light gray where it had been green, the last of the garden's flowers tremulous and pale, oddly mothlike. She shivered in this new kind of cold that seemed to be fighting the fire within her. Her hot brow was seared with the frozen air, and that also felt good. Past the vegetable plots and cutting beds, around trellises and fencing and a falling-in corner of the stables, she predicted, she sensed, she knew that the workhorse was now drinking, and the cart-driver would be holding the reins in his hands as his high-topped steel-heeled Hessians rang on the black hard frozen earth.

She went to them now, and though she felt at first as if she were floating, then falling, it was all just as she had arranged it in her conscious mind: the grizzled beast lifting its dripping muzzle from the trough-water, its eyes unblinkered and aggie-shiny and its broad black flanks glistening in the phantasmal half-light; the sputtering lantern with its odor of fresh ozone; the silhouette of the humpbacked cart almost invisible within the shadow of Calhoun's Arms; the night pressing all around... and boldly, brightly, the youth, whose noble head was now bared, free of its hood, brow clear and hair aflame in the lamplight—for he was not so pale and effete as Jesus on the chapel wall back home; he was so much more magnificent—yes, as only a person of flesh and blood can be, not like one who exists only on paper as mere wishful thinking from ancient prophecies, or again, not like those gods Professor Harding had half-convinced her once had lived and would live again. This humble boy was pure and simple and good as sunlight itself. Such unutterable phrases she had in her head, and yet the boy was real! He turned to her as she approached, hesitantly, almost limping in her stocking feet, nearly stumbling at times, moaning a little, across the sharp gravel and then the smooth hard bricks, until she fell light and insubstantial as a leaf, as a dead thing, against his body—for now it seemed she was the imagined object, that she had ceased to exist in this world, while the boy was solid as a pillar of salt. Without a word between them, without any real intent, she had collapsed into the embrace and obliteration of his enfolding arms. He thinks I am dead, or at least dying, Lucy told herself. Call it either a condemnation or a release. However it might be, I have cheated him, she rebuked herself as she looked up into his ice-blue glass-blue eyes; he was expecting life and will get none from me. But he seemed to take her for anything but dead. He gripped her sides like the jaws of a wolverine-trap, he tore at her nightdress; he could squeeze any remaining life out of her if he chose. Lucy could no more blame him than she could blame the sun for shining. Happiness, misery, fear, joy: in the end, fate makes so little difference between them. Oh, what a young, stupid girl I am, with so much to learn, after all! she admonished herself, giving in further, sinking against his heaving chest, opening herself up. But it is fate, and nothing could be otherwise...

They did not kiss, at least not yet; that would have been superfluous. He held her, that was all, and they dropped to their knees alongside the cart together. The tired horse just stood there and breathed in and out, ignoring them. It did not care one way or the other what the boy and girl did. Nothing at all in my life has ever happened before now, Lucy thought to herself, and nothing can happen after this. Looked back upon from the grave, life seems to have passed very quickly, so they say. "My name is Ludmilla, but they call me Lucy," she told the boy quickly, before it might be all over. In return he murmured something unintelligible—maybe he did not even speak English—and turned his head away to spit. It was an awful sound. His hands left her and groped in the grass around them for something; then with an abrupt jerk he rose to his feet, whip in hand. Was he angry at her for revealing herself this way? She remained kneeling powerless before him, wondering if she could summon the strength to kick and scream before he forced her around back, the way those dying animals had been forced in that nightmare of the knacker's yard. Was she, then, just another dead creature to be disposed of in that awful cart? Should she allow herself to be treated so? Stifling her cry of anguish with the fingers of his leather glove, which she bit hard down onto, he went on to press his lips roughly against the crown of her head, and next, instead of carrying her around back, lifted her up into his strong arms again. She was sobbing. With a grunt he pulled her up effortlessly onto the buckboard, and then he set her in place beside him on the burlap-covered seat. Silenced so efficiently and feeling better already, she looked up into those eyes blue as hyacinths—for that was the only comparison she could make in the end—and struggled to say something, anything at all. But he shushed her again and drew her closer to his side. Most peculiarly, there was no smell from the cloth-covered cart behind, as she had feared, not even a whiff; perhaps the bodies were kept frozen on ice the way Cook kept butter in the icebox. Perhaps again nothing had been picked up yet that night. In another moment the driver took up his reins and gave the nag a quick taste of the whip. "Oh, please don't!" Lucy wanted to say, but the animal, so old and so used to it, did not seem to mind. They soon left the uneven bricks of the alleyway and glided out soundlessly onto smooth new paving stones. Another lash and the horse assented, equally eager to get away from this place. At such a time of night, hours before dawn, no one would see them pass, going at such a clip. The wind beat wickedly against them, so cold the girl had to hide her face behind the boy's heaving shoulder, and yet with every block downhill they went faster. At any moment it seemed they might hit a curbstone or tree and spill helter-skelter across the road. Even so, it was thrilling. The cart was being swept gently, infinitely onward, like a raft caught in a strong current, and Lucy could see no way they would ever be able to stop.
City of Somnambulists

You, you the reader, like so many of us I suppose, like myself, must have reached that irresolute or apprehensive stage of life when you no longer meet sleep like a silent coach fulfilling its routine appointment: a short well-cushioned commute, and you are dropped off in pleasant if unmemorable dreams. Lately, you have been distressed to discover that your once-reliable transport never arrives, the itinerary seems to have changed, and each night spent waiting at the corner is bleak and seemingly interminable. This period of unrest is usually transient, though it may in extreme cases endure and scourge one for years. Perhaps it is because one is no longer in the full flush of life, or because of financial burdens or romantic distress, or simply because our days can be so fraught with mental or physical activity that even long after midnight the mind stirs with relentless worries or restless excitements, hence the body thrashes and rolls as if on a spit; divided in allegiance to mind and body, the tortured soul considers rising from the unforgiving bed, searching for a degree of solace more congenial than fickle, untrustworthy sleep—where that might be found or how that could be arranged may well seem both alluring and terrifying. In the reader's very earliest years, he or she, like myself, may also have thought of the familiar pillow as a sort of softly dissolving portal, a door the ear presses upon nightly and opens effortlessly into another realm. Down dusky galleries and unlit alleyways the dreaming boy or girl can venture, seldom afraid (at least at first), always curious about this parallel life that nightly seems almost as material as that which one has just departed from, yet which appears and disappears as instantly, as frustratingly, as a fleeting recollection or infantile wish. That was childhood, left long ago, and the reader, again, like myself, must have come to that maddening point where one lies every night with burning eyes fully open, for a week, for a month, perhaps even longer, not admitted to that benign sanctum, or admitted only sporadically; and what one has done to be so denied is either obvious or unresolvable, but always painful. You feel like an outcast, an outlaw, seeking only to make amends with unknown entities; this is a punishment that feels merciless and unalterable, though one may never know for what crime one has been excommunicated. Ultimately, it does not matter how one—I or you—may come to this pass, or why sleep now seems something elusive and strange and yet more desirable than all the beauties and riches of the earth; what a refugee from these aforesaid nightly skirmishes might do or discover, finding himself or herself stranded in foreign territory without currency or guidebook, is our concern here.

And so, this is my account, your report, our story ....

At last, during this prolonged period of sleeplessness, there comes a protracted evening hour when the subject, you or someone like myself, does tear this heavy body (heavier than anything has ever felt before) from the sheets and with an enormous sigh sit up and wave the white pillowcase of surrender. Something snaps and instantly one is lighter. There is nothing to do now but dress, put on one's shoes, and hurry like one pursued—hurry from this house of creeping dread and inquisitorial shadows (those forms an inexpressible horror takes); otherwise, back in that bed, you feel you simply might die. And so .... We descend the steps with another purpose in mind: If sleep will no longer come to you, you must go and seek where sleep abides.

The nighttime world to the insomniac is not merely the inverse of the daytime world, it is a counterfeit of it. The streetlights' illumination is that of a black sun, or a sun in eclipse; even when there is an almost full moon like tonight, the earth is lit by mere stage lights, artificial and distorting, creating even more shadows than a wholly moonless night. There is ordinary black, and there is the void. A depthless cavern or an abyss of the sea could not seem more full of such unexplored darkness, if one were to search the chambers of either with torches and flares. This night we speak of here was such a night, and it was high summer, and it was perhaps too humid for anyone to sleep, anyway. Wide awake and very alert, yet increasingly insensitive to the real density and heft of your body—a shadow among shadows yourself—in the stairway with its little negligible light you paused and began to breathe more evenly, but soon enough the hallway rushed you along as though down an invisible tunnel into another dimension. You were hurtled into the entryway with its little table and its little vase with one wilted daisy, the likes of which you had seen a thousand times before, but which now were things wholly novel and strange. Once you shut the immensely heavy front door you sensed a further disruption in gravity; your bones melted and you were soon gliding down the pale blue sidewalk; you were indeed practically incorporeal, a ghost, though without, one presumes, the ghost's elevated sense of liberation and irresponsibility. Often when one despairs the world is a sort of prison, a boundless prison, but a prison nevertheless; even weightless and empty of other desires one still cannot escape the earth's perimeters until one meets sleep face to face, like an old enemy met in the mirror, as it were, and one or the other succumbs to the final assault. Therefore you kept moving: past the predatory houses on your block that had all been transformed like things bewitched into things strange and rare, through unfamiliar neighborhoods once so familiar, past bright trees and dark gardens, down the hills with their theatrical lights on the porticoes and dazed façades of what block after block seemed like innumerable buildings of incomprehensible function, into the floodlit, moonlit city streets below. Everything beyond range of the blinding municipal lights was absolutely utterly black, unfathomable and frightening—but it was into the heart of this terra incognita you needed to venture. It was there, in the hypnotic blackness, that you knew you must, in a fashion (for we are still shaping this allegory), confront an implacable god and negotiate a deal.

This new city so unlike the old city you once thought you could navigate so well and so easily was not different merely because daylight was so fantastically imitated or inverted here, but because it was so lifeless—no traffic, no people, no birds or bats or moths even; the monuments and tower-blocks and hotels and cafés and kiosks, and especially the parked buses and streetcars, all seemed to be giant, sleeping, sentient beings—maybe they had absorbed all the summer's slumber from the sky and stars; maybe, ludicrous as it sounds, they had stolen what you had lost. On this night, the city appeared limitless (though in truth it is a small one), and any road, to be certain, must stretch on forever through districts and suburbs one has never explored during waking hours. This was part of the reason you were compelled to keep walking, walking, walking, although the body (it must be admitted) would have liked to just float away like a balloon, or contract into nothingness. The tallest buildings reached up into the heavens, their tops in the Milky Way like mountain peaks obscured by clouds; they too were endless and endlessly forbidding, fortresses and towers and citadels that even the bravest traveler would be loth to assail. It was best not to look up, not be blinded by security lights and then confused by shadows, but to keep eyes on paving stones and curbs, or at most at the level of shopfronts, where someone—that is you—was reflected in the windows like a transparent copy of someone else.

Odd that in the waking world, a world that now seemed as outlandish and mythological as this one would inevitably seem in the morning, you never noticed how this city's streets and plots are arranged like a series of intersecting wagon wheels; at the axis of each wheel is an illuminated fountain or memorial object (obelisks and cenotaphs, menhirs or inuksuit), out of which numerous thoroughfares emerge, then merge again after a certain distance with the spokes of other wheels with their own water-jets and monuments. Beyond the circular or oblong wheels are ancillary avenues funneling into side streets and parallel alleys, sometimes culminating in squares and parks and pedestrian malls resembling, at this hour, abandoned courtyards and ruined agorae. In the daytime none of this might be apparent or of any particular interest except to tourists, but with keen night vision and with rows of streetlights and traffic lights outlining each and every roadway, this design became clear, and it was as if you the walker needed only to trace the lines and curves of a well-marked and color-coded streetmap. Even changes in altitude are delineated with incandescent contours, and bridges and waterways and railway lines criss-cross the byways with their own system of gleaming trails and alternative routes. The plan is, you saw then, overwhelmingly intricate and delusory, while yet appealing, each and every winding street promising new vistas and new lands where long-kept secrets might be revealed and treasures unveiled, or else provide an escape into all those uncharted possibilities well off the margins of the map—for there, too, sleep might lurk like those fabulous beasts inked in by the cartographers of old.

No use trying to traverse all of our humble planet in one night, or walking like a window-shopper in a trance forever... so at last your body, though resistant to gravity, was pulled by sheer telekinetic force down toward the misty circumference of one of the region's many neoclassical fountains, on a flagstone plaza in the very center of our dreaming city. You looked around, overawed by the solidity of this world, like someone who has descended from unbelievable heights—for it well could be you had. The marmoreal apparitions in the middle of their lagoon were neither dead nor alive, petrified gods and goddesses lit by hallucinatory lights posed ingeniously beneath the surface of their pool, so that in turn the deities' bulks were deeply stained, scarlet and indigo and amber ( "red, blue, and yellow" being terms too weak and pale), and the water the demiurges half-hide in for all eternity was every color the commissioner of public works can command. But even so all this was not an inviting sight at such an hour; there was something ominous and dire in the immobile expressions and the false life of the shifting hues. Their gestures—outstretched arms and accusatory fingers—seemed to be calling down thunderbolts and damnation. Still, one's physical body itself demands rest, so there you or I, as awake as ever, rested on a cool marble bench (one of a host) and felt the revitalizing spray on your cheeks and brow. The tea-like scent of municipal roses surrounded you. Here, where water and light played tricks on each other, time was stopped. For a moment.

And in that moment, the aimless meandering of this highly irregular night might be traced like that thread unwound by the daughter of Minos to its inspiration, for it seemed that it was to this very spot we were meant to be led, all along. Hadn't a figure (or two figures, hard at first to verify) materialized out of the violet fog on the opposite side of the fountain, as silent and mystifying as another sleep-deprived soul lost in this dream-world? You wondered if you should rise and go, even run from this mirage, because it was nearing with the sure direction and strength of a gale-force wind—but too late, the figure and (yes, it had a dark companion) had already rounded the fountain's gigantic basin, just as quickly swept across to the other side of the plaza, and then begun diminishing into the near distance. Relieved, though your whole body and mind had tensed almost to the point of panic, you breathed out again while watching the shadowy figures' retreat into nonexistence. Only a few seconds had elapsed so far. Your appraisal would take much longer. In perspective, and in hindsight, they hadn't seemed to be walking so fast or threateningly, this lady and her dog—for that is all they were, something as unremarkable as a woman walking a dog who had scratched and whimpered to be let out into the night. Yet there was something uncanny about what you thought you saw as your eyes followed that person, the only person you had seen since you slipped through your bedroom door so long ago already, it seemed, that same evening. It might have been just an illusion of watery light and dancing shadows here, but the woman definitely seemed not to have opened her own eyes even once as she passed. You were certain, when contemplating it all later, that you had seen her somewhat imperious, violet-tinged face quite distinctly, right down to the black pearls in her ears. Her dog, an Italian greyhound (that most attenuated and wraithlike of all beasts), was leading her, but it was not the sort to normally be employed as a seeing-eye dog, and regardless it was leading her much faster than any such dog would dare. Still, if she was not blind, her lids were certainly shut tight, and there was a particularly beatific expression on her face that did not strike you as being the expression of a blind person led out into the middle of a sleeping metropolis by a pet. It was the unruffled expression, you would swear, of a person soundly sleeping—and indeed, she had been attired in nothing but a gauzy nightdress: not the sort of thing one woken abruptly at such a late hour would insouciantly wear into the depths of what innocent or ignorant people would assume was a dark and dangerous locale. Already, with the memory of her image flickering in and out of each aureole of lamplight still fresh in your brain, you began to question what sort of person you had glimpsed when closer to her: Was she emaciated and brittle, or neat and supple as a gymnast? Was she tall, and did she have hair piled atop her head in some sort of glittering net? Did she even sense another person nearby? Presumably, blind people are more sensitive to the unseen presence of others than anyone else. The dog, you were almost positive, had turned to mutely note this wide-eyed human sitting on the bench not five feet away, just for a second as it and its mistress blew by.

After the dogwalker had faded from sight, you stretched yourself along the bench like one of those recumbent gods in the fountain and exhaled the last of the stale bedroom air that had remained in your throat and lungs. The moon directly overhead quivered through the moist multicolored haze, a moon fractured and crystalline like something seen through a kaleidoscope. It would be good to drowse here, where it was so cool and the babble of the water and the vapor of the roses was so soothing, so soporific. Sleep could still overcome you, after all. There was nothing to stop you from achieving your necessary staple on that cold stone bench. But you did not sleep. No, you did not, and for a reason. It was related above that the real story of you and the night begins with the ethereal woman, but our chronicle might begin more precisely with the interruption of another stranger—this time from behind, from the direction of another cluster of benches and rosebushes. Again the approach had been silent and swift, but this time the other figure did not keep on walking without acknowledgment of another—yourself. That lone silvery silhouette, a man's, apparently formed from the fountain's foaming essence, made his presence known with a deft clearing of his throat, obviously to inform you of his presence without too much alarm. Only part of your half-conscious brain had been paying a sort of peripheral attention to this new entity, up to that moment. Still reclining with one hand shading your eyes, the woman's haunting expression foremost in your thoughts, you shuddered in surprise at what you suddenly heard, then, wider awake, you bolted upright—was it possible that for only five seconds you really had fallen asleep? The newcomer had taken a seat on his own bench, facing you not more than twenty feet away. Yes, it was just a man, though definitely one sprung up here like a spirit from the waters, and you considered the risks again for a moment—naturally there must be thieves in the night, or murderers, or worse. Should you run or attempt to run on your drunken sailor's legs? But the man in the shining mist made that decision for you.

"Ahoy there! It would not insult me, were you to depart my company," came the old man's statement (immediately a falsetto quaver in his voice, robust as it was, told you he was old enough to make even you feel young) and he added, standing up himself but not coming any nearer, "since you do not know me, and I can see that you are a novice to the night. This alchemy of light and liquid notwithstanding, everything here is splendidly illumined, and because you are so much younger than I am, you can get up and leave in an instant if you are in any way hesitant to speak to me, a perfect stranger and probably a particularly odd or even threatening one. But I assure you I mean no harm." Curious, you edged a bit nearer, as he continued his roundabout introduction. "Then again, you are a perfect stranger to me, as well, and if I didn't know better about such things, it is I who should be frightened, not you. This is an unusual world and an unusual night, as you have beyond all doubt previously noticed. I believe it is the waxing moon and the summer's brilliant haze that heightens the sense of irreality and draws more than the expected number of inquisitive visitors from our diurnal world. This city bears little or no relation to the city you would usually experience under the cursed blue sky and in the often unwelcome company of so many others. It is a fantastical, chimerical creation, but every last pin and pennyweight is as believable as that which so-called ordinary people like you inhabit." His voice was friendly and reassuring, if a trifle strained, as any man's will become when he has to shout over a cataract; his words were just a little quaint, his phrases a little too formal and his delivery too obviously rehearsed to be even vaguely disturbing—this man had the well-practiced steadiness of a museum docent or professor emeritus. Or maybe it was just careful stage direction. What did he mean about being "ordinary," when you knew that it was anything but ordinary to be here alone at this time and place?

Because you offered no objections, the man had stepped nearer as he spoke and shown himself as fully in the illusory light as the competing shadows would allow. He was indeed very old, astonishingly old, though not apparently frail or infirm in any way; his back was not stooped and his posture (you would soon see) was impeccable; he was of more than normal height and very likely was once quite a dashing fellow—and still was despite lines embossed in his face from weather or worry; though he wielded a stainless steel cane, it seldom touched the ground; you would come to see that he more often swung it casually like a pendulum from one ankle to the other, in rhythm with his speech, or italicized certain words in the air with it. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this old man was that he was entirely made up of shades of gray: silver-gray hair and mustache, pale grayish skin, gun-metal gray spectacles that matched his cane, a greenish-gray cardigan over a seashell-gray shirt, slate-gray trousers, mouse-gray moccasins. Even his voice could be described as grayish in tone. He was not however ethereal like the purple and gray lady who had so recently passed by, nor was he invested with sinister mannerisms or false pretences; he seemed more physically real than you felt yourself, and his demeanor, you could already tell, was kindly and grandfatherly, more authoritative than authoritarian. In the daylight he might well be taken for a scholar who has retired for life into his library, or a former clergyman who now lives for his sherry and pipe. He meant no harm, he was merely eager to talk to someone, as so many aged but still mentally active people are. It did not feel at all unpleasant or domineering when he placed a cool dry palm upon your shoulder, now that he was so close, to emphasize a point or to diminish any fears.

As he assembled his grayer-than-gray self in your mind, he was still talking, still nearly lecturing at times, still talking and lecturing as the diamond drips fell around you both, in the dense heat of this bright night. It seemed possible that he had not talked like this to anyone for years, years and years and years, so you listened and you learned, and gladly followed him across the wet flagstones and away from the plaza as he explained himself, his queer philosophical ideas, and his way of life:

"You looked quite startled when I perhaps too brashly distinguished you as an 'ordinary' person—however, even at a considerable distance and with my rather poor eyesight, I could see in an instant that you are not of this occult realm my friends and I inhabit. Forgive me for being so forward, but it is not often that I meet others of such sheer normalcy in my line of research. Comparatively speaking, of course." He had gone so far as to take you by his knobby-knuckled hand—forward of him perhaps, though the feathery touch of his fingertips against your own was so gentle, so reassuring, not even an elderly spinster could have objected. The old man was like a drayhorse who with a very gentle pull on a cart is able to draw it effortlessly around corners and up steep inclines, and so you went unhesitatingly with him. All the while, he spoke to you, cajoled you in that soft, silvern voice. "Would it have been better, were it Somnus instead of me taking you by the hand tonight? Child, I can tell that you cannot sleep, and maybe even that you have not slept for a long time, but we both know this is not a permanent condition. Nothing is in our ephemeral lives, is it? Your eyes may as well be painted open like a mannequin's, and your pace is earthbound and steady. Not, you will remember, at all like that belle we both saw hasten by without even a nod or fare-thee-well. Aye, you did not imagine her, for I saw, too. You must understand, my new friend, that these manifestations about you are not the usual work of nature, or at least not like the ones you think you know, you who have undoubtedly rarely seen the city at such a time, and then probably only on your own hurried way from a late meeting or party to your warm bed."

When your companion slowed to step stiffly off the curb and onto the crosswalk, you examined him again, though everything else in this peculiar old man's purview demanded your attention, as well. Even with that cane he seemed harmless, and so far he had acted fairly sane. Fairly sane—or a bit daft, you thought. If he had not had something of an antiquated charm—the charm of a well-crafted if somewhat outdated family heirloom—you might not have followed him even this far. "By this point," he was saying, taking you by the wrist once more, "formal introductions must be made. Not by you—that doesn't matter—but myself. You see, I am a kind of self-made, ersatz scientist. In so-called 'real' life I was something not very interesting at all. In this life, you can be whoever you want to be. My field of endeavor is the entire nightworld, in general and specifically, and my name, even though names are not really necessary here, is Huntly, Edgar Arthur Huntly—an inauspicious name, I've always thought, but one with amusing connotations, you may some day discover in your bedside reading. Mister Huntly, most younger people I meet seem to prefer, as if to demonstrate some primitive vestige of manners. Alas, of late nearly everyone is younger. I miss the days of plain old Ed. Now that I am in what is not too kindly called my dotage, I can sleep whenever I like and observe this peculiar sort of netherland all night. I call my work noctology, the study of nightlife and the sleeping universe, though that is not what others might call it, I suppose. Then again I do not study it for the same reasons or from the same perspective as my more academically trained colleagues, whom I have never met...

"Step this way, please. Mind that manhole... Perhaps now that you are here you can understand how incredible it was to me, as well, to realize that until I experienced an insomniacal phase such as one is highly liable to experience upon reaching a certain age, I never imagined that such an underworld could exist so unnoticed and unremarked upon. Oh, I've made many friends here although I've rarely ever spoken to a soul, and then only to the very occasional interloper such as yourself. The inmates of this world, you see, are usually blissfully ignorant of my presence or almost anyone else's. Though that woman you saw is hardly what one would call truly alone. (Oh, did she upset you? Probably her speed seems excessive only to one just sitting there and gaping. Here, time and motion play tricks.) Let me assure you, that pretty lady is neither a lunatic nor an unhappy widow. Yet when the weather is fine she walks her dog here almost every night, one of a silent swarm that is only now descending the hills beyond from their domiciles."

This odd fellow Huntly and you were soon strolling down one of the main thoroughfares of the town, and on either side were windows displaying brightly lit goods and advertisements (infinitely more garish at night than during the day), as well as windows peopled by haughty showroom dummies in various states of dress and repose; there were throbbing neon logos and other signs lit with incandescence or fluorescence, and tricolored traffic lights blinked, and blue-tinged magnesium or orange-tinted sodium bulbs blazed above. It was a world made for consumers and clerks and cab-drivers and police officers and office workers and tradesmen and sundry mundanely terrestrial taxpayers and also of course tourists, who were not there (though you might count yourself one). While at first these streets appeared totally bereft of life indeed, after two or three blocks you became more and more aware of a creeping, uneasy feeling that unseen beings might be lurking behind mailboxes or flitting amid those mannequins, from one murky reflection to the other in the department-store windows; as might be hoped, the old man had much more to elucidate about who one was almost certain to meet here. "Sensing things you're not quite convinced are really there, eh? Uncertain if all those figures you see behind glass are merely wax or fiberglass? If not, you may very well wonder where are the rest of the usual denizens one finds in most cities after the sun goes down," he said, conjuring those invisible legions with his cane. "The factory workers on the third shift, the night watchmen and night nurses, the cop on the beat, the scarlet lady evading him, the prospective client seeking her, the theater or movie crowds after the last show, the drunks staggering home with heads awhirl, the bakers with heads full of sawdust and flour, the concierges with heads full of sleep, the tired janitors, the weary press operators... None of these exist in this quiet community, at least in the dimension we walk. Ours is a startlingly deceptive city, you'll find; like a living organism it undergoes a complete metamorphosis at night; as you have seen with your eyes already and as I indicated previously, this is a world unknown to sound sleepers, the just and upright citizens of our blessed world. But at night it is not an uninhabited world, as I think you can already tell." As he spoke, you and he crossed empty street after empty street, linked elbow by elbow. It was beginning to feel as if you two were old friends. At least, you felt you could trust him implicitly. Bringing you to a halt before an office tower ensnared like a monstrous creature with nets and scaffoldings and ladders, Mr. Huntly pointed with his cane at something up ahead at a lividly pulsating corner. A lone figure suddenly strode out of the pink and blue gloom between harshly illuminated frontages and aimed for you both, unswerving and with sure foot. You gasped an involuntary gasp, pulling the old man closer to your side, but Mr. Huntly was not deterred, and in fact politely shook free to hail the stranger. "Hark, it is my old friend Samuel," he shouted, either to you or to Samuel himself.

With something of a grunt the man called Samuel stopped, as if listening, though his eyes were closed—not tightly like one avoiding the truth, but in repose, like a dreamer's—while seeming to be entirely unconscious of the city around him. He was another elderly gentleman, but not so grayly elegant as Mr. Huntly; he was only another of that sort of plump superannuated person one might pass a dozen times a day and never notice. But he was noticeable, dressed as outlandishly as he was, here in public (if you could call it that). This old friend Samuel was wearing an archaic white nightshirt, the kind one might never see these days except perhaps in a comic strip or within the walls of a mental institution. He was sporting long striped stockings to complete the effect, though he lacked the customary matching nightcap.

"Why, Mr. Samuel Hall," Mr. Huntly further accosted the funny little man, "I haven't seen you for simply ages, and it is a supreme pleasure to see you looking so very fit."

The other man may have been listening, but he responded in no discernible way, and neither did he move from his spot on the well-lit corner. You observed, however, that Mr. Hall's toes were wriggling inside his cartoonish stockings, as if he wanted to start walking again as soon as he was no longer caught in Mr. Huntly's spell. Samuel's fat face was ineffably placid, just the suggestion of a seraphic smile upon his lips, the kind of expression rarely accomplished without assistance from an embalmer.

Mr. Huntly whispered to you, as if not wanting Mr. Hall to overhear: "I don't know if his given name is Samuel, though I have found he does respond to that. Truth be told, I don't actually know Samuel in the waking world, and I doubt if we ever did chance to meet there we would be friends or even passing acquaintances. For all I know he is a defrocked priest or a disbarred attorney. Or a celebrated author of books for children. But in this world, we are all equals—or they are—and what a person does or did do in the other world makes little or no difference here." He was looking squint-eyed into Samuel's face as one might into a magnifying glass, as if counting pores or the number of hairs in each mole.

"Samuel, sir," Mr. Huntly said, much more volubly, as if to one half-deaf, "I can tell I am detaining you and you have much more territory to cover yet tonight. So I bid you adieu and happy wanderings. I trust I shall see you again at some pleasant evenfall ere long."

In a flash Samuel was off down the sidewalk, shambling along with the rapid but unsteady gait of a nervous octogenarian, though only a little less competently as he would have done if his eyes were wide open and he could see every obstacle ahead of him as clearly as anyone walking under the sun could. By this time you were convinced beyond the faintest doubt that the two walkers you had met so far were somehow sleeping soundly as babes as they negotiated the difficult terrain of this illusory night and time. Were there truly many more like them, and were they all so agile, all so seemingly motivated by unutterable urges? Or were they merely heeding the invisible guideposts of their dreams?

"But what if one of them were to accidentally awaken whilst they were ambling and shambling around this arcane city that for them must be only blacknesses upon blacknesses?" you queried the old man, falling without intent into the peculiar words and rhythms of his semi-anachronistic speech. "Isn't it like what people say, that they put themselves into unduly hazardous or precarious positions? That they fall out of windows or into mine shafts or wake up in strange rooms? That they might be a little, you might say, mad, as well?"

Mr. Huntly's swordlike cane stabbed in the direction of the fast-retreating Samuel Hall. "Mad they are not, and I've never seen any of those aforesaid things happen, despite all the unfounded rumors," he said with more than a hint of indignation, as if he did not like to hear of others presuming to understand what he had long so diligently studied. "I can verily guarantee you that these people you have met and will ineludibly meet never put themselves in harm's way, except of course in extremely rare and tragic cases, when such a result may be intended. Otherwise we would be hearing all the time of sleepwalkers waking in strangers' beds or found terrified at the end of long piers. Or even committing murders they could never comprehend, as the talking pictures would have you believe. No, I believe for the vast majority of them this is a very peaceful and restorative physical as well as mental activity. A therapy, to use the modern sense. You may by chance witness evidence to the contrary, but I will stand by what I have observed over many many years. These people can navigate so well because their bodies and feet remember what the eyes cannot see; most sleepwalkers make even the most well-adjusted blind person look clumsy. That might sound rather cruel, but it is the plain truth. I never fear for them—they seem to always know exactly where to place their next foot, unlike myself." While talking he had almost stumbled against your shoulder, as if to make his point, but immediately righted himself and led you with quickened step through a small green with well-trimmed flowerbeds pointing in the directions of the compass. He chose west and so you both headed for the governmental precinct, where the columns of the courthouse and city hall and main post office commanded awe in the melodramatic moonlight like the towering ruins of a forgotten civilization. Along the way you had begun to notice other figures in the near or far distances, sometimes fully formed shadows, sometimes insubstantial as quivering thermals on a summer's day, all of them seemingly set upon their own determined and disparate courses. Once in a while a blank face lifted its chin or lowered its brow, turned this way or that way, caught in the glancing light—each and every visage was always shut-eyed, always serene—and was soon enmeshed with the rest of the body in a greater darkness. All those moony white faces revealing themselves for just a second or two like quick blind bursts of pure hot flame, you thought, then just as quickly burning away... They looked at peace, these sleepwalkers, but their cumulative effect was to make you tense with a mounting discontent, as if you were in danger of becoming trapped here in the kingdom of the undead.

"My humble theory—and perhaps it is not my theory alone—is that this is how the venerable legend of the vampyr began." Mr. Huntly had already begun speaking, as if cognizant of your very own thoughts. "Creatures who arise at dusk and disappear at dawn. The ancient brute could only attribute evils and a sort of contagious bloodletting to these poor exiles of the otherworld. Though I myself dramatize. There is nothing unwholesome or unseemly about this world; it is merely different from the one you and I are used to. You needn't fear. I think for most of these denizens their noctambulations are no more disturbing for them than a walk through the park on a sunny afternoon would be for you or me—or at least was for me before I too renounced the daylight. In fact, it does them wonders, I have long since deduced. Though there is something in their faces I often find uncanny, for lack of a better word—a bit daunting or distressing. The look of fallen angels or mystic saints. Even those comic ones wearing eye-masks and earplugs. At times I don't know if I am the one haunted or they are. Nevertheless, they are simply mortals, after all, and they might deplete themselves during the day—those who still follow the routines of a normal waking life—but they are otherwise healthier and happier, I can testify, than many who do not walk. They never remember these wanderings, of that I am sure, never more than a glimmer of their wanderings, but it is in their peregrinations that they work out their problems and face the truths they must face in order to live and thrive as other humans do. Walking is a nourishing tonic for anyone, the dreamer and the day-dweller.

"Look at that dainty little thing over there," he interrupted himself, and pointed to a very young woman in nylon negligee at the culmination of a low herbaceous border. She had paused to adjust the dirty pink satin slippers she wore and also, one might think, to bend closer to the sweet-scented faces of the pansies. "She might be restless because a lover has just left her and she doesn't know if she will ever be happy again. Alas, dolorous mistress, quelle tristesse! Or she might be the sleeping beauty who left her spurned knave behind on sweat-soaked sheets. I have never seen her before—she must be a new recruit. I'll have to call her something simple like Mary because all my subjects need to be identified (I have a system and I have color-coded index cards) and she might be so enchanted by this slumberland that she becomes a regular; just as likely she will find another lover and not return here until she is an elderly and dissatisfied woman. And that will be my loss.

"Over yonder," he added, tapping his cane in the direction of the imposing portico of the courthouse, "there is a stalwart young man I see every then and now. I call him Peter for some reason. See him, leaning against the second column? Sometimes, please understand, even sleepwalkers have to rest. Also note that Peter is unshaven and rather disheveled, yet fully dressed, right down to his unraveled necktie. Once again I see that he must have fallen asleep trying to keep up with the demands of his desk. I figure he is a city clerk or junior accountant of the most overtaxed and underpaid kind. It is only in these nighttime walks that he can clear his head of facts and figures and consider again the eternal movements of the planets and of the earth and our hearts. Maybe to fantasize about that lover who passes so near and yet unseen, sniffing now the narcotic lavender. In any case, I can see this young man is drawn here because that pretty little miss is so near. Mary must sense Peter's proximity, as well. You see how they look as if they were made for one another? Love is not unknown to this world, you shall see. The passions transcend any workaday habits or strictures. Again, you shall see."

As if to demonstrate his point, there emerged from an overarching evergreen hedge two more youths, hair mussed and buttons undone, fast asleep, yet hand in hand. She wore the top of a pair of flirtatious paisley pajamas, and he the bottom. Their flushed, exposed flesh was lustrous with perspiration under the hot city lights. You admired their youth and neither-god-nor-the-devil-may-care attitude. They walked considerably slower than the others you had seen, and a bit more mindless of the impediments in their way; she nearly tripped over a garden nozzle—and he stubbed his toe on an outstretched rainspout. Even lovers wide awake at noon might do that! At one point they turned to blindly kiss and fondle one another. Mr. Huntly explained: "It is unusual to see sweethearts bound together like this, but it is not unheard of. One need not be surprised to see that, having fallen asleep at the height of lovemaking, these twosomes and sometimes threesomes have left their mutual bed together, troubled perhaps by what they have done—or haven't done. Their movement is unsteady either because they are new at this or new to one another. I wonder what aliases I should give this couple—is Adam and Eve too obvious? Paolo and Francesca? How about we make it Lou and Lily?"

On the same block where you watched the young lovers wander by, our shabby and ill-funded public athenaeum sits, even so, imperious and regal as a Hanoverian palace, at least by night. Under the pigeon-infested pediments and crumbling stone arches encircling the building's central rotunda, seven or eight or nine sleepers had congregated, pacing up and down the uneven steps, not seeming to want to go anywhere else but revolve here like early arrivers waiting for the doors to open. These patrons were in all manner of dress and undress, bed-wrinkled as well as neatly pressed, young and old and several ages in between. Some might have been either snoring or mumbling to themselves—quotations and commentary, their vocalizations resembled—and others were open-mouthed, drooling but voiceless. All of them carried books, a few of them with fingers still holding place. Now and then one of them would sit down upon a step, open his or her volume, and run fingertips down the pages as if reading Braille. Others reclined like fallen statuary. But these same people were just as apt to get up again with a jerk and start pacing once more amidst discarded newspapers and swollen or disemboweled garbage bags. This place had long been largely neglected by street cleaners and trash collectors. You seldom came here by day.

"These are some of our most restive occupants of the night," Mr. Huntly explained with a sigh, and took a seat on a broken balustrade, inviting you to join him. "Though they are not unhappy. It is just that they fell asleep at the end of a good book, or in the middle of a bad one, and part of them wants to walk and part of them wants to read. I suppose they come here because a library is one of the few civic places meant for dreamers, a place where someone can fall asleep and not usually be persuaded to move on immediately—and they feel drawn to what they know and where they will feel safe, just themselves and a compelling story. Some of them also strive in vain to finish or reread their books, but the eyes cannot see and the sleeping mind cannot admit any further fantasies but those of its own making. This is all conjecture, mind you. Who could pretend to know what any of these minds is thinking, really? Sleep may be a form of temporary insanity, say some, which makes all these people inmates of an asylum without grates or gates! But as I said before, the problem is really that they are altogether too sane, or on their way back to sanity.

"Howbeit, albeit, it is miraculous that they never stumble into one another; still, I suppose all our subjects have a sort of ultrasensory facility like bats or maybe cats, outside what their minds can retrace from the daylight world. Once in a while they do brush up against one another, but the contact is seldom acknowledged, yet alone acted upon—at least in this communal area. Those in our foreground are avid readers, in addition, glad to be left alone in their own little worlds. I imagine that some of them might be reliving scenes from the novels or short stories they are reading or have just read, following in the footsteps, as it were, of the characters involved, but that still does not explain all this anxious energy. A conundrum, that. Some of those books are only mathematics or economics textbooks, as you could tell if you looked closer, and a few readers may feel more chained to their editions than set free. I only wish I could comprehend why all this is so—books keep myself awake, and I might have books to blame for my lonesome lucubrations, for leading me down these picturesque if esoteric by-and-byways."

You and your guide left the trash-strewn grounds of the library and its confused patrons, heading as if agreed upon previously for the financial district nearby. Mr. Huntly was walking even more briskly than before under electric light that seemed to be growing harsher, leaving you little time to take in the faces and shapes you passed or to guess what thoughts occupied these peripatetic people. "I've seen children as young as five here," your cicerone was telling the pavement, "and gentlemen and ladies older than I am. I've seen women knitting as they walked, trailing long woolen scarves in the dust. Others bring along tabloids and half-eaten sandwiches. I've seen musicians lugging violoncellos and flugelhorns, sheet-music scattering down the sidewalks. Still others might carry a pillow under one arm and a radio set playing nocturnes under the other. Once I saw a damsel on horseback, although I do not recall if the horse was asleep, as well. Some roll along in wheelchairs, or hobble along on walkers, or stagger on crutches—it seems nothing will keep some people from leaving the supposed safety of their beds. You will not believe me, but sometimes I see them naked on their backs in our city's fountains and pools, just drifting along, sawing wood under the merciful moon." His steely laugh was like a sharp scimitar slicing the air, a smiling sort of simile he was just begging you to conceive, and you wondered again how serious he was actually being.

You were now in a small arena of metal, glass, and stone; ornamental plantings severe and almost too restrained were carefully spaced along neatly confined plots of white pebbles or cacti-studded rock gardens between the judicial and mercantile headquarters—as formal as Louis the Fifteenth could be when in a classical mood, and every bit as cold, this principality was as fiercely anonymous as the architects had designed it to be. Several pieces of sculpture, also in the antiquarian style, stood at precise intervals outside the expansive lobbies and foyers of their respective skyscrapers, even if not all the statuary, you would soon see, was made of bronze or stone. Some statues were living people instead (you had to look twice, and then again) though nearly as immobile as those gods back in the central fountain. Cleverly placed, revolving spotlights sunken amid the pebbles and cacti lit the figures in such an animated way that even the carven torsos seemed to breathe. The longer you looked, the more difficult it was to distinguish flesh from stone. Dressed for the part, the human sleepers' garments (for of course all these citizens were fast asleep) were flowing, toga-like—the women, at least—when they were dressed at all, for a couple of these living sculptures were nude, or nearly so. The sight was so foreign to you, this haphazard phalanx of figures who stood stock-still and marble-like in the moonlight, that Mr. Huntly was obviously hard-pressed to offer a solution to the enigma: "Ah, I neglected to prepare you for this vexing display. I hesitate to even call them sleepwalkers, my friend, because once they arrive here they do very little walking. Nevertheless, that is the only category where the investigator can reasonably place them in such an environment.

"Occasionally I have followed a solitary stroller or two from the residential neighborhoods to this area of impersonal edifices and pretentious frontispieces—I can always spot such individuals, not least because they are usually so sparsely attired, if attired at all. Remember those two lovebirds we observed a few blocks back? Most likely, they were on their way here. My best surmise is that some people, singly or in couples, leave their chambers before their beds or their bodies have cooled down—those who fall asleep while in the immortal act or shortly thereafter—and they come here to quench the flames still burning in their bosoms within these sempiternal marble glades of classical purity, or the nearest thing to what we have of that in this oh-so-modern world. It is ironic indeed that only among banks and stock exchanges and such-wise capitalist institutions do these romantic misfits come to rest, as if money and greed heed the same immortal line as does beauty. Don't think I am some kind of navel-gazing poetaster or castle-in-the-clouds revolutionary trying to see an allegory in any of this—I don't believe in such simpleminded explanations, though our walkers might often appear to make all of it seem easily explicable. I don't know who these people are, really. Some meet here, others separate here. None but the bravest of them touch, though it looks as though many of them would like to. The majority of them are young, as the most perfervid lovers will usually be, and some of them are as comely as a common Venus or ordinary Apollo. At any rate, they only come out on the balmiest nights, such as tonight, and they are the soundest sleepers of all these noctambulists. It is a little incongruous to hear a living goddess snoring amongst these cypresses and lotus pools, while she is posing here, and especially when one guesses she might be a slatternly schoolgirl or virginal waitress by day—or that the musclebound companion kneeling before her might otherwise be a timid priest or schoolteacher, afraid to tread on her shadow when the sun is up. I admit I may now and then find one of these more felicitously formed life-study models enticing enough to cause me to linger here more often than I should, but then I am an old old man and deserve my little peccadilloes—no harm done, and so forth. But I enjoin you not to look too long, or you'll go blind, too! (That was not a gnat in my eye, that was a wink.) No, my friend, my child, I think it is time we quit this district and I take you to where we'll find another sort of sleepwalker altogether. They are of a species that has garnered my most inquisitive, you might say avaricious, attentions and yet who consistently manage to evade my mental microscope. I must with some reluctance advise you that what you will see in a little while is not for the faint of heart, unless you care to haul along a fainting couch, ha ha, so if you want to turn back now, I will not shame or blame you. Then again, you do not seem too green or callow, so I think you may be ready. And dare I say willing?" Mr. Huntly chuckled, twisting his mustache with one hand while twirling his cane with the other; he might have gone on to tweak your cheek, as well, since it was obvious he enjoyed assuming the role of a sort of carnival ringleader or nightclub impresario—and expected such hamminess to be counted among his most endearing quirks.

Your curiosity whetted further, he took your hand again and the two of you entered a darker, narrower, more dubious street or alley, lit not so much by lamplight as by moonlight and winding gradually uphill, under increasing numbers of ever-taller trees and past smaller and smaller buildings. "There is so much I wish you could clarify for me," you implored Mr. Huntly, struggling now to keep up with the old man's nimble step, quickening again despite the crooked climb and oblique slopes. "You said, I think, that they need to do this to become healthier or less confused people. But why isn't a good night's sleep in their own homes enough for them, as it is for almost everyone else? And if they can't sleep because they are troubled, why aren't they open-eyed and sleepless instead of being so... That is, why aren't they so grievously wracked by their problems that they are too utterly exhausted to do anything but gyrate between the bedclothes? I can understand the need to get up and walk when, say, one's legs feel itchy or cramped, but why—why so far afield when they could measure with the soles of their feet the known, the known and safer, one might say, territories of their own rooms and hallways instead?" As you formed your queries, you became aware that a bit more of the old man's locution had entered your own confused sentences. Mr. Huntly paused in your mutual ascent to wipe his lenses and sigh benevolently over this rather dense new student of his. His eyes, too, of course, were another shade of gray.

"I have my objective analyses, being a scientist, if but a self-made one," Mr. Huntly said, twisting the wire arms of his spectacles back over his befuzzed ears. "Not many would agree with me, or will, if I ever fully formulate and publish my findings. It is a highly complicated matter and my research has yielded often contradictory conclusions; my tentative thesis has been difficult to articulate, and would be even for one with several degrees in widely disparate fields. My diplomas, alas, are imaginary. I hope you will be patient with me. But first take a look back over our city before we go any further. Picture it full of walkers such as the few we have met, which it is, and consider as I have done so often what this umbral universe holds for them, other than innumerable meanders and disorienting diversions and plenary delights."

Upon a public terrace perched high enough above the center of the city to afford a generous vista of the bluffs and ridges opposite, you stood together and scanned the faintly phosphoric horizon: It was crowded with rooftops and steeples and spires and a few high-rise apartment buildings, wherein a thousand windows or more mirrored the wakeful eye of the three-quarters moon. Closer by it was hard to see more than leafy branches and silver-green lawns running down into the ostensibly impenetrable valley that lay between you both and the city proper—the dewy grass mottled with moonlight where the rays struck the lawns between trees, and black as black where more close-growing trees obscured all light. One could now hear the stridulation of crickets, ensemble with innumerable tree-frogs and—just there, there—in the apex of the firmament, the almost supersonic, booming cry of nighthawk summoning nighthawk. Elsewhere water was flowing, a small cascade in a cleft of rock or a mossy hillside stream. The scene, with its contrast of the manmade and natural, was too unintentional, too imbalanced to be admired like a painting, but it was just the sort of tranquil nightscape that would seem to be capable of lulling all but the most despondent of insomniacs. Certainly you would have liked to throw yourself down there and then on the cool damp clover and try once more for admission into sleep's sweet obliteration. However, Mr. Huntly had rested himself sufficiently to resume his speech.

"You ask me why they can't do the easier thing, the thing that brings succor to the average person, and why they must wander so far and for so long, these piteous nocturnal nomads. For surely you can guess that greater numbers of sleepwalkers never leave their house or yard or even room than do. Isn't that as much as you've intimated to me? I suspect this malady, if we can call it that, is much more common than we ever suppose. Who does not have a tale of some relative or friend who was found in the morning asleep in the bathtub or stretched out snoring amid the ravaged primroses? Such instances are most often treated as comical, or if they are more chronic, ministered to with pills and dietary regimens. Sometimes spouses or lovers will be enlisted to watch like wardens the presumed sleepwalker, if only to keep her or him away from those lofty heights and yawning crevasses you yourself have been told are among the gravest of hazards. It would be better, I say, to let them roam—indeed, to open doorways and gateways wide for them, so they can stroll the streets in search of the solitude and peace they so dearly, so desperately need.

"As I may have informed you earlier, I believe somnambulists need to walk in order to cast off their weariness and unhappiness. If they don't walk, I fear, they may, in a manner of speaking, die—at least their spirits will. Here is more of what I think: that for most people, life is a matter of trying to remember things: remembering what it is one must do next, remembering dates and names and figures, remembering other people and their problems, remembering everything from the edicts of Jehovah to the grocery list. Memory is never trusted, memory unavoidably fails with age, memory is a blessing that is also a burden. There is always much we would like to forget. We are who we are because we remember who we are, day by day and second by second. You remember who you are almost every moment while you are awake, unless you lose yourself by accident in extraneous occupations or on purpose in prayer or art, which may be the same thing, and I also remember who I am—though it is often rather a task at my age. A small task but a constant one, remembering to be who we are and not content just to exist like a rock or a flower." To make his point, he plucked a generic dandelion from its hold between paving stones and handed it to you, who took it in your hands and marveled at this new, possibly sensate being. In this light, it was blue, yet you knew it was yellow, or else it was both at once—wasn't that a marvel, too?

"You see, the petals hold together without any self-awareness and if left alone the flower will turn to seed, no memory required. But humans, and I suppose some higher animals, are different. The older we grow the more our memories must grow—but who is say that the storerooms are not limited in capacity? At one point are we in danger of cracking our skulls? That is a parallelism, friend, but not too far from what it must feel like. This all leads me to our beautiful, sad sleepwalkers. Their ailment is not their ability to remember, but their inability to forget. Reflect upon how logical this is. They remember all too well, those blind and mute pilgrims, and some deformity of the brain will not let them forget. Some emotional shock or some mental anguish has caused their minds to start working in a fashion the reverse of yours or mine. That is the chief difference between your everyday insomniac and a sleepwalker: the one who lies awake at night in bed is trying too hard to remember certain things, and the one wearing a furrow into the floorboards or wandering down the highway with eyes tight shut is deliriously trying to forget. At least that is what I, not really a psychologist or medical man, mind you, think. Memory can almost be measured in volume, not weight, can it not? Maybe as I said the cranium has limited mental space and maybe it does not, but certainly once one starts cramming those storerooms of memory too full too fast we make ourselves sick or even go insane. The conscience, as we all know, is a finely tuned and finely balanced thing, and usually it is sleep that helps to loosen a string here or shift a balance there, or perhaps I stretch my double metaphor too far. We all forget things in our nightly dip into the shallow end of amnesia, but we are also using those unconscious caesurae or respites to recall and order what is necessary, as well. Dreams are only traces of what we endeavor to re-envision but rapidly, far too rapidly, forget. We, most of us, are much too good at forgetting. The sleepwalker should be so fortunate. The sleepwalker labors only to forget, lest he or she remember every painful thing—and even a good number of those happy memories that are best forgotten in times of sorrow. Quite possibly it is more important to forget such happy moments than anything else, or else all of life will fail to meet the standards of those sunshiny hours. Even tiny, inconsequential things—say, what you ate when you broke your fast three days ago or how long it took you to wait to buy a newspaper yesterday afternoon—are best forgotten, lest nothing appear in relief, no one thing seem more important than the other.

"So our subjects, for I dare not call them simply sufferers and certainly not victims, are best not contained within their own all-too familiar domains; better are they set loose to wander the great wide world, where there is too much to see and experience to possibly begin—or try to begin—to memorize it all. A landscape is a kind of dictionary, but the entries are unlimited; one can make a new thing or a new life for oneself by adjusting one's gait or route every day or, if one is very troubled, by setting out on longer and longer hikes, as do some of these sincerest of nonconformists. So much novelty and variety in the world ensures that there is always more to forget than to remember—and that is healthy and necessary. The noctambulant initially wades with trepidation into the waters of Lethe and then gleefully drinks up. Night-walking, you have already observed and realized, is a positive cure. A curative, a tonic, a restorative. To walk is to forget—oneself or the world—and, forgetting, we can relieve ourselves of our angst as practicably as we can draw infection from a wound. As long as you can walk, are allowed to walk, or can roll in your chair or hobble on your canes or limp along in your braces, you can heal yourself. But I have spoken too much when we still have to walk a little more tonight ourselves."

You and Mr. Huntly stood and stretched your limbs before resuming the climb; and the climb was steeper still, with Mr. Huntly prodding and cajoling you along despite your increasing fatigue. Had these murderous altitudes ever seemed so steep and long at ten in the morning or seven in the evening? The old man's long speech had made you even sleepier than before. In contrast, he seemed to have greatly renewed his strength, and the tapping of his cane testing the pavement before him was steady as a metronome. Houses grew fewer, the yards or gardens encircling them larger. The sidewalk became rougher and in places broken; at last the crumbling pavement dissolved into a grassy walkway that ran along rows of yew-bush and yarrow, around muddy pastures and across ditches, eventually leading to the outskirts of one of the more isolated and forgotten city parks. In fact, you didn't recall ever having been in the place before. The crenelated limestone gateposts, little fairy-tale towers, flanking the main entrance were strangled and split by the heavy wistaria and flowering creepers clinging to them, and the cinder-block sentry box attached to the remains of the high wrought-iron gateway was half in ruins. On either side of the broad ash-strewn bridal path, glass globes on rusted iron stalks emitted a frail light that fluctuated and grew fainter globe by globe into the dim distance—farther down the path, deeper into the sinisterly gesturing woods, half of them were burnt out, and had probably been that way for who knew how many decades. Other paths diverged from this main promenade, disappearing into the utter darkness of hemlock groves and thick gone-to-wild plantings of laurel and lupines. In the faltering light you became aware that there were more sleepwalkers here, some quietly exiting, others just as quietly entering, more standing under pavilions and trees looking lost and forlorn. When you listened intently, you were certain you heard a rustling of leaves and a subterranean sound something like whispering coming from the leafy green blackness of the park's interior, where even the moonlight did not seem to penetrate.

Mr. Huntly spoke. "As I told you, they walk to forget." He frowned in a rather gnostical way and with firm grip pivoted your shoulder around to direct you more slowly and carefully down one of the more-traveled footpaths into the depths of the park. "And it is here, or within out-of-the-way enclaves like this, that our silent and sightless explorers, I have come to believe, struggle to forget the most painful elements of their waking lives. Something about all-comforting nature—the soothing chill of the grass, the embracing leaves, the salubrious breezes to be found here above the city—draws them here, offers a spiritual emollient or defervescent palliative one rarely finds in life, at least around these parts. It is in this, the most tenebrous hour before sunrise, that one finds assembled the greatest numbers of sleepy-time wayfarers, both because they have traveled farther to reach this place, and possibly because they rose most latterly from their dreams, and this only after hours of trying to sort out their problems in their own beds. For it is here that they meet one another, almost seem to recognize one another, and indulge in the physical abandon that they denied themselves during the day—after reluctant acquiescence to what some call the baser desires, once they have toppled from their pedestals, they too can now forget their sorrows or mistakes, lose them in mutual and manifold caressings and fondlings and dandlings—much in the same manner, I suppose, all creatures lose consciousness of themselves when likewise energetically and venereally engaged. And why not, for right ahead there's a pretty and isolated spot, suffused with the scent of night-blooming flowers, perfect for just that sort of behavior. You'll find it a quite painterly version of Cythera for the dazed worshippers of Selene." He sounded a gruff, goatlike "baaa!" as he unwound a thorny tendril that had engaged itself with his sleeve, while you impatiently tried to move ahead to see what this was all about. But he held you back. "I am fully aware that your ears attend not half my words, but what you imagine you hear in the undergrowth. And why shouldn't your mind be anxious for some explanation by this point? I have bored you, my language is a bit too recondite even for myself at times, and too many wonders in one night may dull the senses. All right, then, let's proceed. Tell me, you are not the prudish sort, are you? You don't seem to be, or I would not have led you here in the first place. Follow me now just a little farther, then, through this bothersome brush and up to that meadow where yon moon has kindly made possible more accurate examination. But whatever you do, Ne pas toucher! as they say in the Louvre. No matter how much you might be tempted to cut in, don't. Who knows what might happen if you did."

Your stomach tightening like a fist, you entered the clearing in Mr. Huntly's wake, where though the moon-rays were indeed brighter, it was hard to distinguish at first the shadows of saplings and wild sunflowers from the shadows of sleepwalkers. That still unformed, nearly inaudible sound you had noted before was a more distinct presence here at first than what your eyes could make out—your ears caught that quiet susurration, seemingly of leaves or lips, and a very faint murmuring like a river flowing deep underground or insects high in faraway treetops. You saw or thought you saw hands shifting among the branches, hands sometimes like wings and sometimes like claws, furtively meeting around a tree-trunk, touching, evaluating, then swiftly clasping in the half-light or withdrawing just as quickly. Maybe there a bare foot followed by a bare leg flashing in the weeds and there an exposed breast and there—over there—pale buttocks stroked by curling ferns or maybe fingertips that quickly flickered away. Gradually the forms of the intruders here (though maybe you and Mr. Huntly were the only real intruders) took shape; in a few more moments you could see clearly those starlit, pallid limbs and faces of every race, eyes as ever tightly shut, movements fluid and stylized, like mesmerized dancers in the corps of a dream. Indeed, for a minute or more you wondered again if you were the one dreaming, not them. The shifting tableau before you was just as your guide had insinuated: the people here did seem to know one another, or at least to sense one another, as they had not in the city below, and they moved slowly and cautiously around each other's bodies, touching lightly, often touching again, and then with few other preliminaries, pressing close and closer still. You saw to your surprise that there were many other sleepers crushing the mushrooms and wildflowers here, rolling on the spongy ground, astride each other or side-by-side, back to front, front to front, top to bottom, bottom to top. Did they move so slowly to prolong the sensations, or was it because time proceeded at a different rate for them? Though their actions were languid and disconnected from either form or function, the sensual revelry going on in this open but secluded place did not seem quite anonymous or at all impersonal. In fact, the ritual (to call it something, anything) scarcely seemed physical, at least in the normal sense. It was as if they were all made of nothing more corporeal than moonshine or mist. There also seemed nothing entirely random or indiscriminate about the partners who chose each other with unseeing eyes but educated fingers; suppressed desires were acted upon, yes, but the more you witnessed the more you could tell some things and some persons were rejected while others were preferred, though not for any obvious or superficial reasons. If you were to be asked later if the participants felt any pleasure in such apparent licentiousness, the answer would be unqualifiably affirmative, but at the time that opinion simply did not occur to you. Again, there was something diaphanous and somehow translucent about even the slowest and most earthbound bodies, something here to do more with joy than crude gratification. Sexes were hard to differentiate in the bodies merged upon the sod, but elsewhere one could make out couplings of any and every kind—sometimes three or four participants, all of them in much less dress than the first walkers you had seen, so very much earlier, that night. Bedtime attire was discarded, underthings lay scattered on the grass, quite a few of these lovers were naked or nearly so. Their inflamed flesh glimmered coldly, radiant under the heavens' distant interstellar nebulae. Not auroral that flesh, not kindled like that of conscious lovers, but cold, yes—as a scientist like Mr. Huntly might say, bioluminescent. You thought of fungi that glow in the dark and fish that provide their own light deep under the sea, and you wondered, perhaps absurdly, how all these ecstatic souls found their right garments again when they left this place. But this, moreover, was not the chaste formality and posturing you had witnessed in the financial district: here the breathing was rapid, actual words were spoken (though you could not make out a single one—perhaps sleepwalkers have their own language) though some cried out wordlessly—and it seemed that here and there a solitary figure, removed from the couplings, was weeping. Later, all of this might sound to you like a barbaric orgy, or bacchanalian rite, but in the actual moment this gathering had little if none of the crudity or carnality of those mythic events; then, now, it seemed the slimmest of bodies might float right into the stars, and even the wildest kissing and embracing had a stylized insubstantiality, as if this were more a balletic depiction of sexual abandon than the real thing. Once more you thought of dancers, and even of children at play, or animals cavorting innocently in the wild. Whatever relief these lovers found in their activities might be profound, but it must also be light and short-lived, nothing to keep them from returning to their rightful beds before dawn.

"Not all of them make it home before the dawn chorus begins its rehearsal," Mr. Huntly said softly, answering your unasked question. "Once in a while, as I myself aim homeward in the early light, I espy one of these revelers—I might call them elven because there is a little of the eldritch underworld about them—one of these elven revelers sitting abandoned upon a boulder or park bench, clothing torn and groggy eyes just blinking open, looking very much confused. I don't think a single one of them even notices me as I creep by, because they have left their real selves if not their bodies back there in a jungle of leaves and sweat-soaked desires, or in places like this moon-dappled and dew-spangled dell, engaged in something they could never comprehend. For two-thirds of their lives, you see, they are wholly ordinary, and one might wrongly or rightfully suppose, wholly unimaginative citizens. They probably feel no real shame—because dreams give us all license to do whatever we like, with no responsibilities, and what the sleepwalker experiences or does during the night is no more real than a dream. And no less; these escapades perhaps have made them forget far too much—maybe their own names and addresses! Oh, isn't it rich!" He giggled the way only a very aged man or woman who has been caught saying or doing something a little bit naughty can, and both of you rose from where you'd been sitting on the dew-dampened ground. "Let us leave them to their own amatory devices, if the old turn of phrase can be altered to fit the circumstances," he whispered to no one in particular, "for who is to say that they aren't enjoying themselves every bit as much, and most likely more, than we can in our most uninhibited dreams? It is a wonder only that none of them ever wake at that celebrated moment of peak pleasure, for I have never seen that happen. Tell me, am I a voyeur? Do such scenes titillate me, a celibate and ascetic lifelong bachelor? Sometimes, though it would be the worst thing a noctologist could do, I admit I do want to jostle one or two of them myself, to see what would happen! Back in the Financial District, if I were ever to disturb one of those living statues, I'd venture to guess it'd be no worse than Pygmalion animizing Galatea. But what if here, in this secluded place, a pair of them were indeed to wake somehow on their own? How horrid if they consciously encountered me here, like this, in their state. Still... it could very well be instructive to see a couple of dream-lovers like these come to their senses—in a manner of speaking—in each other's arms, the wrong match in age, or possibly in sex or inclination. That might be unfortunate but also amusing. What would one later tell one's solidly diurnal wife or husband or lover? How to explain coming home at six in the morning, in such a state of undress and with dirt under one's nails, cowslips in one's hair?" His giggles burst into full-lunged laughter, which you echoed, before he hushed himself with a finger to his lips and then yours, lest you really did awaken someone, and the two moved on—around and between these writhing bodies but never too close—in order to reach the other side of this particular open-air chapel of desire. Unlike Mr. Huntly, whose intense interest actually did give off a whiff of the prurient, you tried not to look too closely as you passed these lovers who knew not one another's names nor what each looked like.

Beyond the trampled common was another footpath no wider than a deer trail, and possibly another gathering place under the planets and stars lay around the bend—for you thought you heard sighs or groans and smelled a musty musk like that of the female gingko—though soon the thickening canopy of trees blocked all light once more and a fringe of close-set boxwoods stopped any further ingress from the direction you and Mr. Huntly had come. It seemed one must be blind to blindly but adroitly find easy passage through such a wilderness. The gaunt gray figure in front of you turned left. Still another passage funneled through the undergrowth back toward that central path once meant for horses and carriages, but before you reversed direction you hesitated amid the bushes as Mr. Huntly bustled ahead, unaware for the moment that you had not immediately followed him. It seemed that you heard something new in the darkness—not the subtle sounds of quiet lovemaking, but something a touch more acute though less steady, a sound like the high wailing of a beaten dog or a child screaming, subsiding now and again into a thick, mournful sobbing. Neither quite a drone or throb, the sound was nevertheless so faint it might have originated far away, echoing from a distant valley, and yet was as shrill and close, in fits and starts, as the mosquitoes in your ears. The night can alter one's hearing that way. The pulsating, uneven sound could be nothing short of human, after all, and yet it was something greater, too—it was the worst, most pitiable sound you had ever heard. You were certain for a moment that it was the pure, unmodulated sound of the eternally damned. Nevertheless, it was so nearly subliminal it might be that you heard only the shifting wind, increased tenfold by your fears. Otherwise there was only the rustling you had heard before, back amidst the moonstruck saturnalia Mr. Huntly had led you to, and only what sounded like bare feet on soft earth... though you could sense nothing but varying densities of degree in the weight of the shadows.

At last Mr. Huntly had to pull you away, with some force—or who knows how long you might have remained transfixed there, fascinated, horrified? "Some of them walk in circles, all night long!" he hissed in your ear, as if angry at you (or just because whispers too close sound too harsh), and chastised you gently in the ribs with his cane. In a minute you were back again on the ash-strewn path, under another row of globes aglow with the feeblest of light. Once more you and your guardian shoved on, back again through the hemlocks and past the derelict gazebos and haunted carousels of that park, but you knew something had changed between the two of you, or in the night itself.

Returning down the central pathway (how faded the signs, how terribly in shreds the awnings of the kiosks, how weedy even this main thoroughfare!), you were silent with one another, silent for the first time since you had rested at that lookout on the terrace over an hour before. You had much to think about, and Mr. Huntly looked pensive and even a little melancholy. Maybe he was thinking of his youth and lovers who now were dead, or maybe he was worried that he had shown you too much too soon. After all, how could he trust that you would not now tell everyone you met about the observable characteristics of this nocturnal world, before he published his own results? (If he had been in earnest when he said he would like to.) How did he know for sure that such knowledge might not be too dumbfounding for you? Would the disquieting revelations of this night lead to further unrest of your own? Lying in bed wide-eyed at midnight, lying in bed cursing the clock, would you simply give up on living a naturally ordered life? Would you become a truly chronic insomniac, or might you become one of these lost and unfortunate souls yourself? Their behavior might in some fashion be contagious, and you might become addicted to the night just like them. Finally, would that be better or not...

You are not an otherwise unhappy person, you reminded yourself, and in your life you do not feel there was more for you to forget than remember. Indeed, your memory is far from perfect. Until recently you had generally always slept reasonably soundly and had no great fear that this period of disturbance, this turbulence in the transitory clouds of your day-to-day existence, as it were, would become any more permanent than those thunderstorms that come and go on a summer's eve. And yet, even if you were to join these legions of the Unawake, would it really be so awful? Is the society of such revenants really all that much worse than the social life you know as one of the oblivious Awake? Often one grows bored of the same old friends and a life that no longer holds, at your age, many surprises. Could you not, also, find and enjoy unknown pleasures in sylvan surroundings such as this park—isn't life too short, you asked yourself, not to submit to wanton passions in the company of sympathetic strangers? Might you find here the friend or lover who understands you best?

Your reveries were cut short by the bell-like ringing of steel against iron. It was still night, still dark, though instantly you sensed something almost imperceptible had loosened its hold on the heavens. You had not even noticed that you seemed to have left the park some time ago and were already nearly halfway down the slopes that shouldered their way into the center of the city—in fact, you were about to step over a ledge overhanging a bald rottenstone escarpment. "Wake up!" Mr. Huntly ordered, striking his cane against the cast-iron fencing again. "Or you might not make it home yet tonight."

"I wasn't asleep at all," you protested, suddenly not so sure of that. "And certainly I can't walk while unconscious the way your subjects can. Really! I'm not like one of them, you won't get me to join their hellish troops." In the midst of your outcry, you became aware that you were sounding a bit peevish or testy, the way one awakened from deep sleep very well might sound. Best make amends. "Sorry, sir—but did you ever give me a fright! I was just a little—preoccupied. Forgive me, please, I promise to pay more attention from now on and quit daydreaming—I mean, night-dreaming."

Mr. Huntly regarded you for several instants, his hand on a curlicue of railing, at the top of a series of stepped gratings leading to the edge of one of the canals that drain down into the city's fountains and then into culverts and sewers that in turn drain into the river harbor and lake a few miles away. You avoided the man's gaze and regarded the waterway below instead. How was it possible that you both had come so far from the hilltop park in such a short time? "Don't think I haven't considered the advantages of becoming one of them, too," he was saying, also turning to look down at the dazzling black water coursing through the channel. "In some respects, it is an appealing life, or so it might seem at first to an outsider. If you have the means, you can rest your feet all day after your nightly excursions. Even those who labor hardest during daylight hours, however, seem refreshed by what you may rhapsodically regard as their vespertine perambulations. I cannot really explain it, but the exercise not only helps them to forget but also appears to make their bodies stronger and less inclined toward enervation. Is it the essence of diablerie or a gift from the angels? Some day I may find out. I can testify tonight that walking so very much almost every evening to observe my case studies in the wild, as it were, has made me a fitter man. Look at me, I can gallivant up and down these relentless hills like a lad of twenty and two. But I would never want to be one of them, these mere shades of their daytime selves. I understand that an extended period of insomnia can feel like a kind of purgatory, but the purgatory of the sleepwalker is probably, if visited too often for too long, far worse. One I suppose comes to believe that this lunar landscape, this netherworld or never-world, is more real than the one of sunshine and quotidian obligations; here one might eventually capitulate to a state of permanent dislocation or dysfunction. One might forget to eat or bathe. In the end, such a rarefied indulgence might take on the habiliments of insanity. Think of how you feel when trying to wake from that most insidious of all naps we surrender to once in a great long while, I suppose, most likely whilst drifting upon the halcyon currents of a summer's afternoon, maybe a little drunk since it is one's vacation, after all, when one might sway for hours half-wake in a hammock, a being half-dead but happy, relieved of any duties that must be done any time soon... And so one gladly swoons back minute after unbroken minute into the strong and comforting arms of Morpheus. Ah, what bliss, what heaven! Such sleep though acts like the worst distillation of drug. Imagine if this happened day after day, night after night. Sleep becomes a substitute for love, sleep becomes one's only real lover. If we are not careful, we might never want to heed the chariot of Helios again. Our lives would simply be blown to the winds like thistle. To go back to that logically impossible perfect afternoon, by the time one does manage to rouse oneself, dreams are as heavy as a succubus on the chest, so one—you, I—must resort to coffee or a quick brisk swim to reset the mind as one would a clock—and sleep that night will unquestionably be tenuous as summer's lightest cirrus cloud.

"So imagine how it must become with some of our unfortunate umbrae, the ones so enchanted by this parallel world that they are as ones ensorcelled. The walking that has nourished them becomes a Stygian raft-ride toward a hell they do not recognize and of whose true dangers they have never been apprised. What a waste. Maybe I am sounding overly old-fashioned and even needlessly arcane, but I have just seen something down there that is a serious object lesson for you to reflect upon—not now, not tonight, but later, possibly much later, after you have forgotten all else of this immortal night." His hold on your hand was now an icy clench; he was pulling you down the series of grated flights with the strength of a man decades younger. Why was he rushing you so? There was as yet no tinge of blossom-pink in the eastern sky, and the moon, though considerably lower than you had last remembered it, was still bright and white in the west, harpooned as it was on a steeple and slowly being hauled down to earth. The railing was taut and cold and slick. You could taste its iron in your mouth, feel its iron vibrate with your quickening footsteps. The torrent of water rushing in the canal would soon make it hard to hear what else Mr. Huntly had to say.

He pulled you up short at the steep granite-paved bank and pointed with his trusty cane at something limp and colorless a number of yards along the canal. Rows of street-lamps lit the broad promenade on either side, their illumination here neither bright nor blinding—and so the shadows were rendered flat and gray, not obfuscating. Together, you stepped a few feet farther along the smooth flat stones. A recent drought had lingered for weeks; the water here was noisy on the river rocks but not deep, and the tops of waving grasses or seaweed that clung profusely to the channel bottom glistened like the proverbial hair of mermaids or mermen swimming just below the surface. But it was not the rubbery, undulate fronds that Mr. Huntly wanted to draw your attention to; it was the figure sprawled on its back among them, half hidden by a clump of cattails and half in the rippling water itself. Mr. Huntly was silent, but you felt dizzy enough to seize his wrist and steady yourself—or else you might have tripped over the bank into the canal, headfirst. The age-old question: did he fall or did he jump? remained unsaid, so Mr. Huntly answered it:

"All evidence to the contrary, he was neither a suicide nor exactly the victim of an accident. That lad below was simply a sleepwalker who got tired of walking," he summarized, gently extracting his wrist from your fingers and then squeezing your fingers within his own now-warmed hand, as one offering a good friend something precious. By this time you were both kneeling over the slippery embankment, looking down into the sparkling water. A pretty scene, the roiling water and the weeds. The body was no more than a dozen feet away. "This happens from time to time, but thankfully not often. How do I know he is a sleepwalker? Look at his pajamas. Tattered cuffs and worn knees one would never show in public. And barefoot. Even the most determined suicide of the normal category would put on some shoes and street clothes—at least a robe—before coming all the way down the slopes in the middle of the night to throw himself in here—and in that case, he would continue on to the harbor, where it would be a more private and surer death in the lake. No, see, look even closer and appraise his face. There, regard well his countenance under the water, against the black rocks, like a drowned white flower—or a sleeping doll's? Alas, there are no new or useful metaphors I can use. He is merely what he is, an unremarkable, anonymous young man who died in dire poverty, judging from those disgraceful pajamas. His eyes are just as I suspected, though: closed. When those who are otherwise awake die, their eyes are always open. I have an old friend who is an undertaker, and he has assured me of that. This tragic youth's sleeping body knew its way down this tangled array of hillsides and pathways to just the right place to slip gently in, where the water is a bit deeper and swifter than upstream—for the sleeper does not care like the regular suicide that his body will be found this way, tossed by the current into the bullrushes, looking frightfully ridiculous half in and half out. Like a lunatic scarecrow. It is easier to drown in such a manner when one is sleeping, when one does not wish to hide one's own corpse. It is also I will venture excruciatingly sorrowful, but forgive me for not weeping. I have seen this before. Not often, as I said, but often enough."

The two of you rose to your feet simultaneously, and though part of you wanted to run from this place, together you retired briefly to a park bench a short way above the canal. Mr. Huntly was lecturing the whole while, as if to deflect your attentions and keep you from staring at the suicide. "My conclusion is that for an uncommon few walking alone is not enough. The soles grow blistered, the ankles sore, the legs cramped, and still the unforgiving brain cannot let bygones be gone-by. Each night becomes another anguished hegira into an unknown desert-scape, and nothing, no oasis, no emerald emirate brings relief. Such a suicide is as much an action of the body as the mind. Maybe more. The body simply cannot force itself onward any longer—it tires itself by day and at night completely exhausts its bones in this eternal, quite possibly pointless, odyssey. Some sleepers end up pacing in circles until they drop, as you might have guessed up there in the public park, and others seek a quicker means to a more satisfying denouement. And sadly in the end, it could be that nothing has been forgotten at all. If there is damnation for such misfortunate creatures—and I don't believe even the gods are cruel enough to inflect such an afterlife on anyone—it would be one where every moment of one's miserable life is as unforgettable as those few joyous moments ordinary people like you and me remember and cherish and would do anything not to forget.

"Were you able to distinguish the look on that sweet youth's face? He has the pretty countenance of a Renaissance poet, though he might have been nothing more than a vagrant or migrant worker. Who knows how many years he had on this planet? Such cold water can make someone look younger than he really is. I've discovered that to be true—that the recently drowned, even the elderly, look as if they fell into the fountain of youth. Ha! Ha, you say? Sorry, that is a conundrum as old as it is infirm. Still, there the piteous rascal is, whole and apparently healthy. Going for a little splash late at night. My, I do sound macabre when I most do not wish to. But you too saw that red rivulet spiraling out of his lubriciously androgynous mouth—you too saw his blood washed into the water? He is not coming back to rejoin the waking world, as both of us and the rest of them will. He has come to the end of his travels in the land of the blind. We can pity him, but in a way I can envy him. Oh, not his youth! But merely because he has come at last to a rest. He is at peace, as the best of graveyard sextons will tell you. I am an old man, an ancient, outdated man, and sometimes I would like not to have to wander these streets every night, but to sleep so soundly, as well."

He turned to you, and in the liquid light reflected in his moon-gray eyes you saw that he was amused with himself, not maudlin. He was at heart a joyful man, Mr. Huntly, you could tell that almost from the second you had first seen him earlier this evening. Gladly you left the bench and followed close on his heels once more, and told yourself you would follow him forever. But that would not do, could not be, of course, and it is only very late upon a night that such phrases of devotion sound appropriate, yet alone plausible. As if a match had been struck to a wick something inside you was now more alive, more awake than ever. For a hasty moment or two, you wondered if the next day you would dismiss this kind man as a phantasm, or if you had stumbled into someone else's nightmares; at the moment, however, you guessed those ideas might be as ridiculous as wanting to never depart his side. You would have liked to stay along the cool stone embankment for a while longer, for it was peaceful, even preferable to your own bed, in spite of or maybe because of the drowned sleepwalker—but this time Mr. Huntly had darted away with unforeseen speed and with no further ado. Was he trying to lose you, or was he just absent-minded?

You were breathless when you caught up with him, at the humpbacked bridge over the channel, at a place where the sidewalk on the other side led straight into the boulevard that shot across the center of town, then rose up and disappeared around the curve of the hill closely opposite, in the vicinity of the neighborhood where you suddenly remembered you had lived a long time ago, at the beginning of this night. "Where next?" you gasped, but Mr. Huntly did not answer, craning his neck instead toward the acrostical constellations. You saw then that the unfinished moon had eventually set, or been wholly consumed by clouds, and though the glistering galaxies whorled brighter, there was now on the eastern horizon a barely perceptible band of another color than the color of the firmament directly overhead. Hard to say if this new color in the east was any lighter or darker than the surrounding sky, but it was indeed different and signaled a fresh change in or a challenge to the rule of night itself. In the distance, from the top of the bridge, you saw or thought you saw a couple of figures retreating from your sight with the fleet feet of phantoms; you were about to mention this to Mr. Huntly when another figure, a woman of no particular age, handsome but so thin she looked emaciated, brushed past you both on the bridge, her legs guiding her where her eyes beneath heavy eyelids could not. You sensed something like a hot breath on your neck and then the gust from her flapping dressing gown as she rushed along; her perfume lingered like a congealed substance in the air, oily and overripe, the carrion-like odor of arum lilies kept too long in their box. You thought once again of specters fleeing mirrors or the morning sun and of the damned locked outside their crypts at cockcrow. Then again, you could imagine the sleepwalkers in more prosaic domestic circumstances, slipping into their houses and apartments before anyone else has risen, wiping mud or dust on the hall carpet, stealthily ascending stairs or tiptoeing down hallways, opening bedroom doors that invariably creak, and folding themselves into their single beds or drawing the covers over their half of the mattress, just as there is a suspicious stirring on the other side. Soon you would have to do much the same. Your faithful bed lay anchored like a moored boat somewhere up that dark mount, waiting for you, and maybe by dawn you would conclusively bow down and succumb to sleep—or else conquer your exhaustion and join the rest of the workaday world as it awoke. This city that had been exposed to you tonight, however interesting, was, after all, not one you would want to revisit for a long time, if ever again. No wonder then that interlopers like Mr. Huntly were few; for all you knew, he might be the only one of the Awake who had made this esoteric and forbidding imperium of somnambulants his study. Though you would probably not call this place a nightmare, after concentrated if futile consideration—it was too real for that—it had ultimately left you with something of a feeling of intense regret or repulsion, that same feeling left over from unpleasant dreams that one can't remember but wishes one could completely forget even as they torment the hours recorded by sundial and workroom clock.

Strangely enough, you found that you were both still walking in silence, and had walked halfway through the city before you remembered that you were still awake and that Mr. Huntly had never slowed his step. It simply was not possible, was it, that a half-hour before, a half-hour before this renewed moment of awareness, you had fallen asleep again, even as you and he advanced together down the sidewalks, past shuttered storefronts and past bright, unlifelike, cynical window displays? You opened your eyes wider—had they been closed?—and saw as before two transparent figures reflected in the glass, but were taken back a bit by the odd expression on your face. A little of that supremely impassive and impenetrable look, that blank look of a portrait carved into a cameo, and which you had seen so many times tonight, seemed to be mimicked in the underthrust of your lower lip and the tilt of your eyebrows—though you assured yourself that it was so chiefly because you were so very weary, and this night you and Mr. Huntly had walked so very far. You had a wispy inkling that for the past several minutes many others had passed you soundlessly on the streets and sidewalks, a dusky regiment of somnolent men and women who now walked more measuredly than they had when the moon was higher, their heads bowed and their minds emptied, wending their way home like vacationers who don't want to leave the exotic shore behind but still miss their familiar bolsters and mattresses, and possibly even the ones they sleep alongside. Would they truly, as Mr. Huntly had extrapolated from his observations, remember nothing in the morning? Would vague, discorporate sensations, as insignificant as a fountain's cooling spray or the feel of warm bricks under bare feet—or more disturbing memories of bodies heaving and moaning in a clearing in the woods, a place they had never knowingly visited—brush these people like a strange, seductive breeze at some point during the day? Only the walkers could know for sure; you passed through hordes of them, or thought you must have passed through them, while they fluttered around you unperturbed as a blizzard of moths wheeling under a streetlight. Maybe your imagination multiplied their numbers or maybe the reflections in so many specular windows swelled their ranks, for you had not the alert faculties to even begin to count them. Yes, yes, you must have fallen asleep while walking with dove-gray, mouse-gray, pearl-gray Mr. Huntly, you could not deny it again. Fortunately he hadn't seemed to notice your lapse this time, for he was in the middle of another voluble discourse:

"My life's journey will not transport me down these side-streets much longer, but I know so long as I can move a muscle, I will be compelled to walk with these gentle and accommodating people. Truth be told, I often think that is the main reason I stay alive when so many of my old comrades and cohorts are now long gone. Did I say something of the same sort earlier tonight? You must forgive a funny old man his repetitions and obscurities. And I must thank you in turn for being such an agreeable guest, as incommunicative as you are, for my talking to someone like this helps me formulate what I have halfway deduced but heretofore not put into words. Oh, I have stacks and stacks of coffee-stained and tobacco-strewn notebooks on my desk, but I seldom feel motivated to put them into any kind of order. Perhaps now it is too late and I have time only for a few further calculations and hastily scribbled notes. I wish I could meet you again some night, but I can tell already that would be too much for you. In this delusional city of the night, you are still an innocent. I would not like to be the one to corrupt you any further. You are not yet jaded enough by life to be able to look any further without making your own self worse off—or else you'd become utterly deranged in the end, just like me!

"That is your street around the corner, is it not? Oh, I know these things, I know almost everything that happens after sundown around here. Also, I have noticed how your shoes seem to be leading you in that direction, whether your mind has noticed yet or not. You see, that is how the sleepwalking begins, I have decided—bit by bit, without the walker himself noticing how he is becoming transformed, made into something wholly different. You have found yourself asleep at your job during working hours once a while, have you not? It is like that. You find yourself falling asleep other times, at inappropriate times. Lapses in judgment, you'll call them. Embarrassments will henceforth ensue. Apologies must be made. You are off with friends, say, at a party or a dinner, and find that you occasionally cannot account for whole hours of your existence. Is it mere forgetfulness or a loosening grasp on what we call the here and now? Perhaps it was the wine or perhaps it was because you were indeed catching forty winks, short spasms of sleep or longer bouts of narcolepsy, genuine if fleeting absences of consciousness. No, I do not think that because of such things you are necessarily in any pending danger of becoming a sleepwalker yourself. Still, such a pattern of losing one's foothold in the waking world is probably not too far from how the inescapable descent might have started for at least a few of these walkers, and that is why I give you this gentle remonstration.

"That woman back there—I saw how you looked at her. I wondered for a moment if you might turn and pursue her, if just for a few feet. You have questions to ask her, of course. But again I must strongly caution you. From certain angles this sort of life might seem appealing. Every sleeper is in his or her own way beautiful. There is a certain artfulness to their way of life. At times I too want to be one of them, to join them, instead of simply watching them. A little in the way the birdwatcher wishes he might have the wings of a bird, you know what I mean? It might be an easier, gentler mode of existence; this idea of needing to forget might be only my invention, to account for such wonders. But then I know I am happier because, being awake, I can best appreciate the short time I have left to me. If I were to sleep, and to walk, I would be inhaling those hallucinatory fumes that rise from the censers of certain oracles who lose themselves in sweet-scented oblivion. Howsoever, oblivion is a happy state only to those who know no better. It does not give you immortality, it only dissolves you. Beyond death, beyond desire, there is beyond all supposition a kind of peace, one must allow. Dear one, my dear child, all the more or none the less, if sleep is endless, there is no reason to ever have existed...

"Look back once more now upon the city behind you. It is lovely, indeed, the way those quicksilver lights gleam in a way they never could under a relentless sun or lackluster clouds. A sham world, a simulacrum, so much more attractive than the 'real' one, in the way a wax dummy can beguile more than a real woman or an ordinary dollhouse promises a miniature paradise, if you could only but enter, while life-sized houses of much greater beauty go unnoticed; or consider how a trompe l'oeil mural can show you an illusory world you'd very much like to lose yourself in forever when this dreary, bleary world has lost interest. Even what we see in an ordinary looking glass always promises to be much more exciting than what is reflected, if only we could see beyond that wooden frame. But do not be led astray by such temptations; a soul needs its rest. Forgive me, I have talked far too long. And you need your bed. Up there, at the end of the block, isn't that is your house?"

That was it indeed, and never before had your dull, quotidian block looked so unreal, so insubstantial. The houses were as one-dimensional as stage flats and the oddly half-congealed light you saw them through as milky as the water in a neglected aquarium. Yet you must walk through that swinging gate and down the front path, open the door you had left unlocked, and climb elevations you had climbed a thousand times and more before: and at the top you are certain you'll find nothing more than an ordinary room, an ordinary house, an ordinary world. Your bed like a boat, the safe harbor of your darkened room, the pillows and sheets and blankets that make up such an integral element and regimen of your life, of almost any life.

At the end of the block, at the corner opposite this house that never before looked so much a sleeping thing itself—for the trees were asleep, and the flowers in their beds were asleep, and the grass was asleep, and the very air was asleep—you stood and forced yourself awake long enough to gather the necessary energy to assail this sleeping world. Yes, certainly, you were very, very tired, and restful uninterrupted sleep would now come easily, no doubt about it. In the morning, the inevitable incorruptible morning, you would be renewed, just as they say you are after a trip to another country or a day spent in a museum you have never visited before. You turned to kindly Mr. Huntly, to express your sincerest gratitude for his being such a thoughtful and patient guide, to thank him over and over again for taking you into a dimension maybe only he could truly understand and command, and most of all for bringing you back safely. You turned to him, but he was gone.
That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do

"My own heart let me have more pity on...."

G. M. H.

Sometimes late in the evening, waiting in the airless ticket booth for the last lingering patrons to reluctantly depart the theater, I would do nothing more than sit there, looking out beyond the glass partition toward the lamplit façades of the buildings on the other side of the street, where the only movement was of beetles or mayflies bombarding the mirrorlike shop windows. What I was hoping to see, for whom I might be looking, I wouldn't have been able to say. After nine there would be next to no traffic in my easily overlooked little hometown, and no people on the sidewalks at all. On such nights I would just wait and stare vacantly, but, thus preoccupied, and worn out from my labors, I remember once bolting up from the stool when it seemed I'd felt a cold breath on the nape of my neck. Others might say "a shiver went down my spine" and leave it at that, but I know now it's because as this is written I am, in a sense, standing like a spirit of the dead directly behind my former self, watching me watch nighttime descend and deepen across the silent business district, protective of my memories of this seventeen-year-old boy for whom such complete isolation was as desirable as it was rare. This doubling of myself is not so strange as it might sound; in a sense, memory allows all of us to be in two places at once, at any time. As the middle child of a large disorderly family, I longed for such moments when I could be truly alone—present company excepted—with my thoughts, thrillingly adrift in the dark and keenly aware, so I imagined, of the newfound and nocturnal mysteries of life. New to me, at least. Before this person I used to be lay a cheap "college-ruled" tablet, upon its flecked gray pages a flurry of words written in the small fussy hand I employed then, a considerable number of those words crossed out or superimposed over less desirable words. Need I even add that like many other bookish and easily susceptible teenagers I wrote poetry, in those far-off days? Pretentious and formless, but a sort of poetry nonetheless. When I paused with Flair felt-tip pen in midair, it was as if I were willing the person I wished to become—much wittier and better educated than I could ever hope to be at the time—to hand me the right word or phrase from that more erudite plane where, if fortune served me well, I might eventually reside, after many more long years of school and ever-more valiant forays into what used to be called a career in letters. If I were to stumble across what in my mind then was the perfect word or phrase, it was tantamount to receiving a godsend from this great and scarcely obtainable beyond. It is possible to haunt oneself, I sincerely believe, and back then I was certainly "sensitive" enough to feel my future literally or metaphorically breathing down my neck. In those days it seemed I must hurry myself if I were ever to be counted among the greats, although outside a few obvious names I had little idea who the "greats" were. Ah, well.

Quite a long time has passed, so I would like to look around this theater as my callow teenaged self writes, or tries to, and see it as he saw it: An old enterprise in an older building, even then outmoded and a trifle decrepit—an unfortunate Fifties remodeling subsuming an earlier Art Deco interior; over there the cheerfully lit concession stand with its large ornate popcorn-popper that belonged to another century, alongside it the enormous cast-iron cash-register with its typewriter keys and pop-up numerals on tin tabs, and below it on the glass counter the shelves with their lurid displays of Clark milk chocolate bars and Sno-Cap nonpareils and Red Vines licorice; the heavy velour ropes with clasp-ends affixed to rusting metal stanchions, meant to queue and corral moviegoers; the organ-pipe receptacle with a mouthlike slot for depositing torn ticket stubs; the enormous eye-popping posters advertising what was "now showing" as well as "coming attractions," most of which prominently featured sexy actresses in skimpy attire and similarly sex-suffused actors bearing firearms; the frayed and sticky wall-to-wall carpeting with its dizzy interlocking boomerang pattern; the corroded chrome ashtray-stands and water fountain and humming cigarette machine; and the glowing "entrance" and "exit" signs above the insulated interior doors—doors almost as wide as a cathedral's. Everything about the place was tired and tawdry, a profane shrine to the patently ersatz and fraudulent, and I loved it. Here was the realm I ruled when I was seventeen and eighteen, for I was both the head doorman, in charge of a cadre of ushers only a tad younger than myself, and chief projectionist. My wages were a dollar-fifty-five an hour, which was adequate, even enviable considering I got to see every feature that came to town for free; although my family was far from rich, I did not want for much in that age before, it seems, so many of us had so many material needs. The Arion was part of a large middle-western franchise, which meant that our boss, Mr. Moore, may have owned the premises but was subject to the whims of those who distributed the films we were obligated to show, purely on a profit motive, so we could hardly be called a temple of culture. (Not that any of this was much of an encumbrance to me or my young coworkers.) By the mid-1970s, when I was hired, it was the only theater left in a town swiftly dwindling due to depopulation and a damaged farm economy. In another year I would go away to college and leave it all behind me for good.

After the last two patrons wafted past me on the theater's air-conditioned breezes and out again into the world, murmuring in that hushed intimate way such couples always practiced at that hour (usually a couple, though occasionally we would have a loner who would stay through the final credits and sometimes have to be roused from his seat), it was my duty to check all the entrances and exits (which were locked as soon as the final ticket was sold and the other employees had gone for the night) and then, in a corner upstairs, divide the velvet mantle concealing a secret doorway and mount a short series of steps to the projection booth. There I would rewind the film onto steel platters large as car wheels and rethread it into the teeth of a complicated construction of levers and springs and rollers, or put the reels back into their heavy cases when it was time to return them to the distributors, next check the bulb and the gears and the coils and various other working parts, and shut down the monstrous mechanism for the night. Watching myself do this, it all comes back to me, although I could never perform these actions so freely and fluidly today. (Not to mention be able once again to splice a broken film back together before the crowd below began to hoot and stamp its feet—how well I recall those horrifying moments of sudden cataclysmic silence followed by a rapidly accelerating shaking of popcorn cartons and rustling of candy wrappers!) Whenever I snapped off the overhead in the room behind me I would breathe easier, now that what was usually the hardest part of my work-shift was accomplished. Thursday nights I would often have to scurry up a shaky stepladder to the marquee, where with a long-handled claw I exchanged or reshuffled red and blue plastic letters to spell out Friday's impending offering. (Once, on a particularly cold night when I was in a rush, I accidentally wrote "Coming Son" and didn't notice my mistake until I was informed the next afternoon.) Other nights I might have to replace burnt-out bulbs around the perimeter of the overhanging sign; though not short, I was barely tall enough even on the top rung of the ladder to reach some of the uppermost bulbs. This particular midsummer evening, however, I would have only to search the seats on the main floor and in the balcony for missing items, tidy the bathrooms, restock candies and cleaning supplies from the basement storerooms, and deal with litter and any sweeping the ushers might have neglected. Four times a week after school, sometimes five during vacations, and an occasional Sunday afternoon I did these things. Tucking the theater into bed for the night was all a fairly lengthy procedure it had taken me weeks to get down pat, and I disliked having to do it right when I had some pertinent images or lines of a poem in my head that I wanted to commit to paper before they were forgotten. I would rather have stayed in the stuffy ticket booth and fallen asleep over my hard-fought and often abandoned poems.

There is a stillness in a theater after the soundtrack has been subsumed into the whirr of spinning spools and everyone has gone away that is unlike any I have known, and although a little spooky it was a silence that allowed my mind a new kind of independence I'd never expected to find before. Often it would be another hour before I capped my pen and left the Arion. But on this date I remembered—not that I could have ever forgotten—why I couldn't delay my departure. This special night on which I have chosen to step over that invisible line that separates me from you and both of us from the past (more like a psychic sidestep than time travel) was an important one, for I had promised to have a late dessert with Mrs. Schwann—something I had done often enough recently—and also with her grand-nephew, who I had already been told with some pride was a seminary student come to spend the remainder of his summer vacation with her. My experience with clergy outside of church was extremely limited. Catholics were an even greater curiosity. My interests had been piqued and so I supposed I had to look my neatest; I combed my recently barbered hair (still so much longer than it is today!) and straightened my tie and uniform jacket, using my transparent reflection in the window of the little control-room overlooking the upholstered seats below (for a moment I may have shuddered, seeing myself for a split-second as I am now, but leaning in closer I lost focus and saw beyond our merged images to the blank and mute movie screen opposite). Then I switched off the overhead as usual and switched on my usher's flashlight before heading back below deck, as it were, to rush through the rest of my routine, extinguishing the rest of the lights as I went, and lastly gathering my things (pen, tablet, Hart Crane) into my backpack to go. Whenever I shut the heavy front doors and paused for a moment under the dimmed marquee, I could see the red letters of the safety signs still glowing within the dark lobby, and one faithful yellow bulb inside the popcorn machine, which, like an eternal flame, never went out. Once more I felt what might be an almost subliminal rush of air against my freshly shorn nape; I suppose I (the adult) might be standing too close to the boy, though I want to look inside, too.

Outside the artificial weather of the theater, the night felt much sultrier at first than it actually was at this hour—too bad I had to keep on my jacket and tie, though I wouldn't have far to go. On the sidewalk I admired the Hollywood stars pictured life-size on placards within their own illuminated windows, like candlelit ikons of saints in Orthodox churches, I imagined; a few flies or wasps were always trapped under the glass, and the soulful eyes of the heroine were, upon closer inspection, nothing but ben-day dots. A streetlamp was flickering a few yards away from me, preparing to die. Only two or three automobiles, for some reason abandoned overnight by their owners on this downtown block, were parked before the humble row of brick or stone commercial buildings; the sheen of condensation on their hoods reflected in multiple jewel-like aspects the green neon calligraphy of Kneipe Drugstore's sign next door. The whole world was of course without sound, like a movie whose volume I'd forgotten to turn up. Why did such scenes always strike me as unaccountably sad, sadder than the last goodbye of cowboy to sidekick or gangster to girlfriend at the end of the feature film currently playing? If only I could put how I feel about such things into a poem, I recall telling myself on such summer nights, then I might succeed in capturing and never forgetting this moment and this place and my presence within both. What do I have in common with this naive youth? Nothing it often seems, except for the continuity with him I feel inside my body and brain.

Mrs. Schwann lived only four or five buildings down the avenue, at the corner diagonally, in the penthouse apartment above the sizable department store that still bore her and her dead husband's name, although "penthouse" makes sound rather grandiose a not especially grand maze of rooms and aerial terraces only five stories above the street. Still, it was the second-highest building in town (after the seven-story hotel), and the apartment's windows afforded a panoramic vista of the river and islands and hills, retreating into dark blue bluffs and darker farm-fields that faded ever farther from sight as one looked up and down the Mississippi. That view was perhaps the chief reason I liked visiting Mrs. Schwann, even though I liked her and her funny accent quite a lot, too; and the poetry she asked me to recite and the odd but rich "puddings" (as she called them in the English manner) she liked serving me so late—eleven o' clock at night!—seemed a very sophisticated and European thing to do in our little uncultured by-way. My grandmother, who was an old but not close friend of hers, had told me long before I ever met her that the department store proprietress who lived downtown was a refugee of the second world war—"a Jewess," as some older townspeople put it—though I don't believe it ever counted much against her in my own populist-progressive German-Irish town. There was both a synagogue and a "Zionist" cemetery in the county seat not so many miles away, so I suppose she was far from the only Jew around, though at that time I knew almost no others. So it seemed doubly strange that she had a relative who was of the Church of Rome (like the rest of my family, I was only nominally Episcopalian and personally I had decided that God had died a year before without informing me first of His intentions) and that this relative was from near Philadelphia, a place that seemed almost as exotic and improbable to me as her Mitteleuropa. But my grandmother (who knew all things) had explained that, too: this novitiate in his third year at a Jesuit seminary on the outskirts of the city was the son of the son of Mrs. Schwann's late German-Jewish husband's brother, and that much older brother's wife was from a now well-to-do German Catholic family who, once little more than peasants, had emigrated to this country a hundred years ago. Everyone on that side of Mrs. Schwann's in-law's family, from that generation on, I gathered, was both rich and devoutly Roman Catholic. I think that's how it all worked out in my grandmother's estimation, but I wish I could somehow ask for more details from this boy who I was following down the empty street, an hour from midnight once upon a July decades ago.

The reason I was usually asked over to Mrs. Schwann's was to read poetry—not mine, thank goodness, but chiefly the major Victorian poets—Tennyson, Browning, Stevenson, and so forth—she said she loved and had studied at her boarding school in Paris but could not properly hear in her silly foreign head unless they were read aloud to her by a real English-speaking American. This despite the fact (I was to glean from many fragmented anecdotes) that for a short while she had taught conversational English to bored young diplomats' daughters in Vienna. Oh, Mrs. Schwann! I'd almost forgotten that I will meet her again tonight, as well. She quickly became a central figure in my life, this year when I was to turn eighteen. Now I understand I will have to follow this particular path from my past to its regrettable end. (Maybe this is the main reason why I have come back to haunt myself, although of course it is too late to make amends.) While I had heard of the owner-managers of the town's only department store for years, I did not come to know Mrs. Schwann until I won a small school-sponsored contest that had long before been endowed by her husband, the prosperous tradesman, as a gesture of civic magnanimity on behalf of a precocious sister who had died young and had (like so many ex-Germans) loved the arts, especially poetry. The poem I was rewarded twenty-five dollars for by my teachers I have fortunately forgotten (I won't dare look too closely into that boy's notebooks), but I do remember that the required theme was "Peace," and it had to be at least twenty lines long but not more than fifty. Perhaps because I was the first prize-winner since her husband had died, Mrs. Schwann had personally invited me up to her place one Saturday afternoon the previous April to hand me the check—an enormous amount to me at the time!—and then to ask me to read it aloud to herself and three other lady friends who were present. Well, I did my best. When I finished she turned to me with a mouth set at such an angle I was sure from one side it looked like a smile and from the other a frown. "And so do tell me, young man," she began, with an Old-World intonation gentler and much more lilting than the way a comic on television might imitate it, "this is about the fall of Saigon, is it not? 'The sound of rockets falling like stars in the night,' I think you say. 'Rivers of napalm'? Ach! You are then one of these barefeet protesters?" With that she bit into one of the hard little yellow cookies from a plate on a silver trolley a grunting maid had wheeled before us.

Reading that poem aloud—a poem I disavowed almost as soon as I mailed it to the judges—had almost completely shattered me, but I hugged my typewritten manuscript to my chest like a shield and miraculously held myself together. A tugboat was sounding its bullfrog horn far below. I decided I must be strong but not sound too defensive. After all, I was a head doorman and lately used to handling all sorts of problematic people. "I hadn't thought of that, I guess," I said somewhat evasively, although it probably was the truth. "But I suppose it all being in the news must've been on my mind. When I was a kid I went to the big moratorium march in Iowa City with my older sisters."

Mrs. Schwann held her ground, staring at me unabashedly. Like many attractive women, her head appeared a trifle too large for her body, for she was slender of build, and the dimity lace at her cuffs and throat only emphasized her doll-like size. "Très interéssant, my good curly-headed fellow, but I think a little off to the point?" she said, still taking me in. (Her German, I should note, must have been impeccable, her glorified finishing school French suitable, and her English serviceable at best. I am sometimes kind here in my transcriptions, and bound to be inaccurate. However, it was clear to me from the beginning that she understood the English spoken to her perfectly well.) Meanwhile, the three elderly women opposite me with their stiff bouffants and carefully matched getups (nothing like anything my own grandmothers might wear) all studied what might have been either tea-leaves or their own reflections at the bottom of their Dresden-ware cups. Unlike Mrs. Schwann, who wore bright vermillion lipstick and had loops of heavy Navajo turquoise around her neck and in her ears, they wore almost no makeup or jewelry. They might have voted for Nixon twice each for all I knew—they looked to me like elder sisters of Pat—and part of me hated their white-glove wealth and unnatural country-club postures. (Now, having examined the real thing in enclaves of the truly rich, I would say these women with their unpainted and submissive eyes had to have been another, meeker and more elusive, kind of creature altogether.) Obviously, I concluded, even though I wasn't too happy with the poem, either, my work was just a little too avant-garde for their pedestrian, small-town tastes. Gazing back upon those women clustered on shaky rail-back chairs opposite the nervous boy standing before them, I can almost forgive his mixed disdain and false humility. I chose not to recognize then that the women might be as embarrassed at putting me on the spot as I was having to explain myself. Wearing their cashmere cardigans clasped at the neck with a cameo or a jeweled stickpin, in their beige nylons and their low-heeled pumps with girlishly coquettish ribbons on them, they would look surprisingly frumpy and even a little pathetic to me now, should I meet them again on the street, unchanged after almost forty years. (Almost everyone over the age of forty at the time of this story must be dead by now, of course.) Mrs. Schwann was considerably less parochial and not at all pathetic, but she was still only an upper-middle-class shopkeeper in a middle-western town. I can easily summon up a bit of pity for each of them at present, but back then I felt my face growing hot with anger and shame. Soon I would make my excuses and slink away like an abused dog. On my way home I invented at least ten witheringly scornful ripostes I should have used on them all before my departure. Certain I had been a disaster, I was very surprised as well as pleased when I got a message from my grandmother the next day relaying a message to me from her old friend to come back to the top of Schwann's department store the following weekend.

The next visit I found myself the only guest, although the tea-caddy was even more crowded with elaborate little cakes and eclairs and tortes and sugared things I couldn't name, all of a sort she couldn't possibly have obtained in our town. The fat grumbling maid was nowhere in sight, probably because it was a Sunday. (Later I was to learn she was also the cook and housekeeper and only came in twice a week. Wealthy as Mrs. Schwann was compared to most people in town, she always liked to economize where and when she could.) My hostess encouraged me to eat, since I was a growing boy (do old ladies ever have anything else to say?) and stated that she couldn't exactly complain about the quality of my voice—its vigorous volume, at least, if not quite its adenoidal immaturity—and my enthusiastic approach to reading a poem, and therefore wished me to come often to read from the books she kept inside a tall glass-fronted case in this large sun-splashed room anyone else I knew would have called a living room, but she called a salon. It seemed I had no choice. (Perhaps she would do this regularly for winners of the poetry contest; I was never to find out.) Then she illustrated for me in highly encapsulated form certain particulars derived from her personal chronicles—how, for instance, she had been a homely, book-besotted Fräulein in a "very smart lyceum" in Paris and how she had once even considered becoming a poetess or at least a belle lettriste herself, when she grew sick of teaching those jaded diplomats' daughters back home in Vienna; but all her best-laid plans had become rather tenuous due to rising insecurities and events I couldn't comprehend then and can only speculate upon now. Ah, Wien! She often made a point of emphasizing that she was born and bred Austrian, not German like her late husband, though both ethnicities seemed precisely the same to me. In the many years since her schooling she often reread—or tried to reread—favorite passages from the weighty anthologies over in that bookcase, but even with German or French translations parallel, she knew she was missing the music, as she put it, as you should know the most important part of a poem (a new concept to me). When I had finished off the last of the flaky pastries and washed it down with seriously strong black tea, she handed me one of the volumes she claimed she treasured the most. The type was tiny and the pages tissue-thin but still the book was as heavy in my hands as an iron doorstop. I hesitated, not very convincingly, because the flattery, small as it was, had gone to my head like the caffeine in the tea and I was eager to test my abilities. After a minute of deliberation she began me with The Lady of Shalott, and I attacked it with a great deal of adolescent energy; but soon she grew restless with my rather sing-songy rendition of the relentless rhymes and asked me to turn to The Lotos-Eaters. Although I slowed down as she had requested and did marginally better, I am afraid I stammered and stumbled more than I sailed smoothly along. In truth, I thought the language of both poems exceedingly antiquated and the lines often difficult to scan from one iambic to the other. (When I read more modern poetry I understood even less, in all honesty, but then I thought I wasn't supposed to quite get it.) Like a good debate coach, Mrs. Schwann had me repeat a few of the stanzas once or twice for my benefit more than hers. "For, you see, Dennis, if I may call you that," she stated, "one does not even begin to understand a poem until one has read it, yes, at least three times. Even thirty times is often not enough, when the poem excels."

"But whoever heard of some of these old words, like 'gal-in-gale'? And couldn't he say it plainer, stuff like 'the folded leaf is wooed from out the bud/With winds upon the branch'?" I begged her, giving up far too easily and looking out the windows toward where the sky seemed to take on a deeper shade of indigo blue above the wide wind-rippled river. "I could read some of the lines a hundred times and not understand them!"

"O la la, my new friend, you must read it then one and a hundred times. This you should know already, and yet you call yourself a poet. Mon dieu!" Although I wanted to protest that I never claimed to be a poet (flattered as I was to be classified as one, in a backhanded way), I saw then that she would indeed have made a good classroom teacher, even while she remained careful not to turn these sessions into instructional periods. She had her ways of making me laugh and not taking her judgment of my ineptitude too much to heart. (How I wish I could reproduce the sensibility of her self-satirizing jokes, but I find her sly jeux d'esprit almost impossible to imitate.) It was as if she recognized that after a day spent in schoolrooms I didn't want any more lecturing, at least not of the sort I was used to. And yet I did want the experience. Mostly, as I have meant to say, after our first afternoon together I just read and she just listened, until she had something truly important or useful—or at least humorous—to say.

Before I put down The Lotos-Eaters, I was asked to read from its celebrated "choric" section again (and I only know what I have read). " 'What is it that can last?/All things are taken from us, and become/Portions or parcels of the dreaded past,' " she echoed me without a moment's pause, her memory sufficiently refreshed. "You cannot understand this, you think. But listen, bitte: the queen's chosen poet means we must then live for today, non? For we all end up in the urns of brass... some done in by the poison gas. Ha!" She chuckled at her own morbid, unpremeditated rhyme, although I was horrified. She was so much nearer to both the atrocities of the past and her own demise than I—how could I possibly laugh? "You must then read those lines yet again," she commanded me.

Although that first time we had been alone together was a Sunday afternoon, when she learned I was working regular hours almost next door, she made it clear she was a night owl too and could always use the company when I got off around ten-thirty or eleven, if I did not mind going home just a bit later. (Mind? Even at that age I found sleep a challenge and welcomed delaying bedtime.) "There are so many poems, so many, you see, in these books I have had," she explained. "You will come at least once a week, and if your family must ask you, explain that you are entertaining a bekloppt old hausfrau." If she hadn't always been able to parody herself so willingly, I doubt I would have come back a third time, but already I knew she could be as witty as she was forceful, and I felt somehow I had to work a little harder to have truly earned that twenty-five dollars. And I liked the desserts.

My next visit, after I had put the sleepy Arion Theater to bed, we dropped Tennyson and auditioned Swinburne: "Laus Veneris," of all things! Perhaps she thought its content louche enough to keep me well alert that first late night. " 'But though my lips shut sucking on the place,' " I read, somewhat shocked indeed, more because someone I considered a fairly old woman wanted to hear a song of praise so ripe with sensuality. At any rate, I gave the opening pages of the poem a more melodious recitation than the last ones I had attempted. When Mrs. Schwann had me stop, she told me she could still recall hearing it read by a handsome young teacher "with coal-black sideburns," all the windows in his lecture hall open to the Parisian arrondissements on a sweltering morning in May, the roomful of girls nearly swooning—partly because of the heat but mostly, she declared, because of the passion—the passion!

Perhaps sensing my discomfort, she told me the poem was much too long despite her enthusiasm and I should next read Mr. Browning's "My Last Duchess." This one came as a relief, since we had read it in Junior Honors English, so at least its difficulties were familiar. When I had finished I saw that her eyes were closed and her breast was heaving. "Fantastisch," she uttered several times. "Incroyable! Not your rendition of it, that was just adequate. I speak of this poem. Such brutal invective, but très évocateur, don't you agree? Our teacher was right: I can hear the very echoes of angry boots on the cobblestones of Ferrara. How I despise that blackguard, that cutthroat! Ja, ja, I think you shall fare better with such dramatisch monologue."

Although I knew in part she was just trying to make me feel a little better without admitting it to either of us, I felt pleased with myself, even so. I looked around the room as she browsed through her books for an encore. By night the "salon" seemed smaller, still formal but somehow cozier, in what I should have guessed, had I read more widely, was an altered approximation of the more domestic side of Viennese Secessionist style, circa 1899. Let's look around as before, shall we? Besides the usual Klimt or Kokoschka repros and Wiener Werkstätte ashtrays and cabinets, much older paintings of dubious ancestors and predictably nostalgic scenes (waysides, windmills, waterfalls) hung over the medallion-patterned wallpaper, the bare tile floor as well as an ottoman or two were scattered with Art Nouveau-inspired rugs and tapestries, and frosted-glass globes or sinuously stenciled shades covered the lamps, casting a creamy light across the geometrically embroidered cushions and chair-seats that was reflected in the many floor-to-ceiling windows. Further bits of that kitsch born of Bavarian beerhalls had crept in, for in old age sentimentality always gains the whip hand, and this was most evident in the clocks and chronometers Herr Schwann had loved: a cuckoo's cabin whose feathered occupant never but once appeared during my visits and yet who I always presumed spoke only good High German, another timepiece set within the spreading antlers of a majestic flint-stone stag, a delicate alarm-keeper something like a miniature globe within a cut-glass egg, a handsome and muscular Grossvater with creaking chains and a metronomic pendulum standing at attention in a far corner, and still other clockwork contraptions made of horn or alabaster or Black Forest pine—the place was alive with the subtle ticking away of time, but it was the time of another century. Later Mrs. Schwann was to tell me this mismatched décor wasn't her style at all, at least the way it had all turned out; she preferred Bauhaus to Biedermeier or the old Berlin, and though she had fought on the side of Gropius and Moholy-Nagy, her salon had increasingly become her late husband's retreat into his distant boyhood in merchant-class suburbs west of the Brandenburg Gate; soon, she predicted, she would strip the entire apartment to its bare bones. In her study (which I was never to see) she claimed she had a Noguchi desk and a Bridget Riley op-art painting and little else.

I was never to learn too much more about Mrs. Schwann's personal or romantic life before she came to America, although she sometimes allowed me disconnected but tantalizing glimpses of prewar Vienna. Once I was in the middle of reading some of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" when I paused and saw that she was dabbing at the corner of an eye with one of the tissues she usually kept at ready in her unwithered cleavage. At her side was an emptied tumbler of Campari—she had offered me some, as usual, and as usual, I had declined as I had since the first tasting its bitter potency. "Sorry," I said, feeling a little at a loss, although I knew the poems she chose for me to read to her often elicited little sighs of sorrow or regret, or the occasional sob she managed to catch in the back of her throat before she might possibly burst into tears. This time the words expressing unfathomable love seemed to have discommoded her even more than usual. "I was probably doing a crummy job," I reproached myself, taking a step further back from her and looking tactfully out the window, where the searchlight of a barge heading upriver was piercing the depthless darkness below.

"Don't be foolish, Dennis. It is not you, but the words," she explained. "They take me back I don't know for how to when I had left my studies and was once again entre ma famille on Hasenauerstrasse near the Türkenschanzpark. Those names mean I know nothing to you. Still, it was a lovely boulevard with lindens on either side and down some way all sorts of charcuteries and restaurants that smelt oh so wunderbar around every corner—the sausage and the schnitzels and the sauerbraten! Things the lower classes ate. Why do I associate such foolish carnal things with Miss Barrett? Ah, but old Wien was so very lively, so charmant in that era—I would tell you you must go and see for yourself some day, but I fear it must have changed greatly. But, hélas, did I really notice its beauty then? I was such a terrible, moody, profligate child. A girl, that is—soon enough a young woman, with not graying but glossy and chestnut-brown bobbed hair and smoking black cigarettes in my room amongst my little library of naughty Chatto and Windus editions I asked an old governess to send me time to time from England. All day long I did nothing but mope and dream about the one who would bring me romance and roses, and I too wrote verse—a little like yourself, perhaps? But do not be so much serious as I was then, Dennis, do not, I pray you. Learn to laugh and love as I did too late. Ah, me! You are from a trivial generation, I think, you may as well join in.

"But who am I to preach? You should indeed have seen me then. Other girls of my age and clique had no interests in anything but balls and ball-gowns, while I was one to stay at home reading, or pretending I could read, Temps Perdu and Lewis or Lawrence in translation but a long time first Schiller and Hölderlin in the original. Sturm und Drang—you do know this phrase, I expect, from your lessons? A little worn away, but every cliché has an element of truth in it, n'est ce pas? I might have been hübsch, pretty, that is—once—but I wasted so much of my youth and then it was gone, stolen from me by the whims of wartime. Mein Vater was in the government, you see, and Mutti had died of the Spaniard influenza at the end of the Great War. I was far too much alone with Oma Schneider, the one with the twisted leg, who lived only for music. With the inflation we had in time not too much money."

She paused to pour herself just a little more of the ruby-red Campari. "You see, my mother's mother had played the violin, poorly she said, as a Mädchen, once even at the Konzerthaus. She would take me to hear orchestras and the opera. Once I saw Strauss himself conducting Salome, but I never took to the hysteria of it all. I hated the pretty plump sopranos most. Maybe I was just a little jealous of how die Herren in those days talked of nothing but the size of their voices and their bosoms, as if there must be a what-is-it, a correlation. Sprechstimme left me cold—nein danke—but the orchestras! Mein Gott! How I miss them here in America where there is no real music. The symphonies I adored—Bruno Walter at the podium, or Krauss, or I forget who, at the Wiener Musikverein, so sumptuous the sound I felt I could die there happy. Beethoven, Liszt, Scheherazade, Berg, Bruckner, Mahler's Lied von der Erde! Every note tore at my soul. I wished that I might feel such passion here, here in my heart, but it seemed the music only filled an emptiness I sensed where my heart should be, this it cannot be denied.

"My father lost his position and had to work with his brother in the ghetto, which is not how you picture it, and the drums of war began to beat—leider Gottes, our troubles were only just to begin. But around that time I discovered in Papa's den an old edition of the Rossettis' art and poetry—you must know them, eh?—and the little English I had learned at school in France and from my governess helped me understand. (I daresay I understand the language more than I can write or speak it still.) There was a lightness, a levity you may say in the late Victorian poets I had not found in my stormy Romantics—you might think I am exaggerating, for you say it is so hard for you, but after so many rainclouds these English ladies and gentlemen seemed like rays of laughing sunshine. And from the Rossettis I went on even to the Sitwells." This was the most expansive Mrs. Schwann had been up to that point, and although half the names and places she purposefully dropped were no more to me than Adam or the man in the moon, I liked her self-aware theatricality so much I hadn't even noticed that I was sitting now and my chair had crept closer to hers. I was so close I could smell her perfume and her talc and see where her dyed hair met its white roots. "To help us make ends meet," she continued, "that is when I began to tutor, and just before things got too bad with the Krauts breathing down our necks, I was teaching at the école des jeunes filles I have told you about. I was saving money already to leave for London or Leeds. Meine Grossmutter, Oma like them all she is called, told me I must get away, I must leave. My poor father, bless him, wanted me to stay, marry a rabbi's grandson he knew who had been converted, so it might be safer, but better I thought to get a job teaching in the land of Shakespeare and Chaucer. Little did I know I would meet soon the man who would bring me across seas to the land of the setting sun, where at first I feared I might be abducted by those Red Indianer Herr May had told us so much about in his Wild West books!"

I had no idea who or exactly what she was talking about, but I liked hearing her rhapsodize the way she did, in an accent that grew stronger the longer she talked and that made her descriptions seem doubly entrancing. Never again, I suspected, would I hear so much about her years in Europe. "Then, then—" I began, unsure if I should proceed, but wanting so much to know more. "Your father and grandmother, did they come here once you settled down with Mr. Schwann in Iowa?"

Mrs. Schwann stuffed her tissue back into her cleavage and raised herself up from her cushions, setting firm her back and chin, staring at but not seeing me. It is clear to me now that she had suddenly realized she had exhumed too much of this past she wished to remain buried. "No, child, they never did, they never did," was all she said. "Now let us think of happier things, bitte? You shall read me some of the clever Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát, s'il vous plait. As the expression goes, he always sets the weary heart at ease, the way Ludwig's moonlight once calmed me so."

My chance had been lost; I was, as I had feared, to learn almost nothing more about her family then or henceforth. She handed me a large but limp suede-covered volume from the little stack of books she kept on the table between us, beneath the rainbow glow of an imitation Tiffany lamp (ones just like it were sold on the floors below). I rifled through the book's well-thumbed pages until I found a poem that began intriguingly: "The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on..." I cleared my throat and began to read.

When I think back on her now, I am a little surprised by how relatively young Mrs. Schwann was—so much younger than I ever gave her credit for back then. Have I failed to describe her sufficiently? Although I never knew her true age, she might have been not much over seventy when I first met her that year, and therefore probably was only in her mid-thirties at most when she fled Austria. A young woman, then, although by the time I got to know her she had taken on another four decades and should have seemed as impossibly old as my grandparents, but for many reasons didn't. (She even confided in me once that she'd had "a little lift.") I can see her quite clearly now, a tiny woman who must have grown tinier with age, while maintaining her embonpoint in all the right places, with come-hither lips and just-you-dare eyes that must have won her more suitors in her time than her braininess should have. Being the sole owner of the town's largest store she was of course always stylishly dressed, or as stylishly as a woman of her years dares to dress so far from metropolitan life, and compared to some of the other ladies of her social scene (which must have been extremely small and limited in that place) she never seemed to be trying too hard or out to impress anybody, although of course she did. I realized soon after I met her that her wardrobe and expensive costume jewelry had very little to do with it. Maybe it was her accent, but I can better appreciate now that it was not her ethnic heritage but her half-sentimental and half-cynical mental perspicacity, that more probably made her always an outsider in our community, albeit a provocatively beguiling one. So it is not difficult for me to understand why the boy kept coming back to her to read poems he didn't particularly like, at least at first. What is a little harder to admit is that the boy also felt a little ashamed, being an old lady's pet and plaything (untrue, anyway, and an opinion of which he never fully became conscious), and therefore said almost nothing to his parents about Mrs. Schwann's household, but let them and his few remaining friends remain oblivious. If anyone had asked he would not have lied, I would like to think, but it was better for them to think his very late hours were spent doing homework or jotting up accounts in the ticket booth after the theater closed and not high in the sky discussing balladic imagery with an eccentric old refugee.

Which leads us at last to the brief elevator ride up to the top of Schwann's "Everything in One Place" Department Store on that fateful July night, where and when I have been ever-so-stealthily stalking the morose and unsure adolescent I used to be. There were few elevators in the whole county, so (unremarkable as such transportation seems to me now) I always experienced a childlike excitement rocketing to the top of a building; sometimes I'd even hop a little just to feel my feet hitting the floor faster than they anticipated. (That was just another trite way to jar my everyday perceptions and stir up the new sensations I thought an artist should cultivate, like writing with the shadow-twin personality of my left hand or standing on my head or dancing too fast just to watch the world keep spinning after I stopped. I was too afraid to take pills or smoke weed like so many kids I knew did to achieve similar effects.) But this night I was feeling surprisingly mature and inclined at first to merely watch the antiquated car's buttons flashing as it slowly and shrilly achieved liftoff. As I grew nearer to the heavens I practiced a way of standing and holding my head slightly to one side that I hoped would convey to Mrs. Schwann's big-city nephew that like a true poet I was somewhat aloof and above worldly affairs, but also full of secrets of the sort he would love to draw out in a confessional. Maybe it was the tilt of one's chin, maybe it would be the way I would invent a witticism; I do know this little knotty pine-paneled elevator car is beginning to feel a bit crowded for myself and my young ego, so I am glad when it lurches to a halt and the door swings open into the penthouse's expansive foyer, with its now-familiar phony philodendrons and exiled kitchen chairs and magazine rack full of back issues of Redbook and Harper's. "Hello—it's Dennis!" I shouted in the most dignified way I could muster into the dim depths of the apartment (recessed lighting was new to me, and this abhorrence of fluorescence), and Mrs. Schwann hallooed back that she was in the salon and it was about time I was there.

Down the bend in the flock-papered hallway I saw for the first of what would be many times the three of them ensemble, as someone more erudite than myself might have thought or said: Mrs. Schwann, of course, sitting deep within the huge suede-upholstered armchair that made her seem even smaller than she actually was, and two young people in the unforgivingly rigid formal chairs where her elderly friends had sat the first day I'd come here. Let me stop time and take a good look at them, these strangers, for many years have passed since I last set eyes upon them: The great-nephew, I am surprised to see, looked not like the somewhat intimidating grown-up man I had first thought he would be, but was a black-haired cherub-cheeked youth not much older than I was at the time; in fact, he was only twenty-two or -three, and as I can see now, his beard was still the merest shadow even though it was long after five o'clock, and his physique was broader and more solid than my slim-boned one but obviously had a way to go before it would fully fill out the cut of his well-pressed casual clothes (had I really expected to find him wearing a dog-collar, with a rosary around his waist?). He was wearing a black but not very priestly open-necked golf shirt and Sta-Prest slacks, sockless feet in moccasins, more prep school than seminarian, although I would have had no idea what "prep" meant at the time; he just looked like a throwback to me, and his short back-and-sides, sleeked-back hair and horn-rim glasses made him almost a caricature in those very modern Seventies. But he had a good-looking, friendly face, and I am interested to see that he alone of this new ménage shot up to go shake my hand as soon as I entered the room. "August Schwann," he said in a voice that I was soon to learn wavered between baritone and tenor, "but please don't call me Gus, Dennis—it is Dennis?—I hate that name, Gus. My family calls me Auggie, I'm afraid. But only when I'm good." Still holding my hand in his larger and hairier and oilier one, he took a breath and looked me over. "I'm so happy to meet our great-aunt's young friend I've heard so much about." I disliked being called "young friend" by him, when he was barely an adult himself, so while my younger doppelgänger stews over that a moment, I'll concentrate on the girl in the chair next to the one August had just vacated.

She was not exactly a great beauty, as my mother might have said, but more than handsome enough for a boy my age, with wide-set olive-green eyes and conspicuous cheekbones splotched with a healthy pinkness and an assertive, bluntly arched nose that might have looked wrong on someone else but looked just right on her; once I was nearer to her I revised my original split-second impressions and decided that she was quite pretty, in fact quite "fetching" (as they used to say about such girls) in her own way, and she had the sort of dark and mellow complexion and sun-bleached—maybe just bottle-bleached—hair that I never would have associated with that foreign land known as Pennsylvania. The girl was dressed more carelessly than her brother, though it was a carefully thought-out kind of carelessness, and I am a little amused now to realize girls from that era have changed less, it seems, than their male coevals. That is, she looked like she could walk into the room where I sit now and nothing about her would strike me as anachronistic: She wore a man's button-down Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up, and raffishly short cut-off denims, with "earth-heeled" cork-soled sandals, all quite similar to what a somewhat sporty girl of her type might wear today, except maybe for the dangly beaded earrings, and even those would probably pass in certain circles. I suppose she was rather small-breasted, but I never noticed those sorts of things. Her hair was as straight as my own sisters' would have been then had they not permed their own, but straight as it was, there was something a little wilder and more glamorous about it, maybe in the way it was calculated to fall with barely a nod of her head over her eyes and brush her shoulders just-so. Unlike August she did not greet me and in fact had scarcely seemed to notice me when I first came into sight; instead, she was obviously waiting for me to turn from August to her; there was something in that, in her languid posture and air of generally being used to having people wait on her that both disarmed me and left me at a greater loss for words than I had already become. So much for my artistic aloofness. An older man such as I am today might, I admit, have become even more nonplussed. "This is my baby sister, her royal highness," August said with a fraternal air of exasperation, waving me into position before the stiff-backed chair she sat in as if it indeed were a throne. "She's only nineteen and we all call her Posy, but you can call her April—right, Posy? Oh, don't sneer at me like that, you. Our parents, as you see, had this craze for naming us after months of the year. Thank God neither of us was born in February or December. Come on, Posy, say something to Great Aunt Helga's friend." (At least he hadn't said "young" this time.)

At last the girl extended a be-ringed hand (topaz and amethyst) and, although wondering if I were expected to kiss it, I merely shook it in the usual fashion as she half-rose from her seat. "I'm here, you might as well know," she announced in a voice that was the viola counter-melody to her brother's cello, "to watch after my big brother and keep him out of trouble in the big bad city. I hopped onboard the Amtrak at the last second, so even Aunt Helga didn't know I was coming until today. So you can't say you wore that tie just for me!"

If I were the type to blush—thankfully I can tell at this distance in time and space that I am not—I would have; instead, I laughed a laugh I don't recognize as my own and fumbled at my garrote of a polyester tie until I had it off. "Just got off work," I explained, starting to take off my jacket, as well. It is too bad that my shirt-cuffs were frayed. Maybe no one else noticed. Somewhere along the line I must have excused myself and greeted Mrs. Schwann as well, but I seem to have missed that here.

"We've heard you're working just up the street," April the girl said. "I hope you can get us in free, because we're as poor as church mice on this trip with the allowance our darling parents gave us."

I would have been ecstatic to get any allowance at all from my parents, but let her remark go with just a sympathetic bob of my chin. "I'll see what I can do," I said, trying not to look at brother or sister too directly; it seemed if I did I might not be able to look away.

Mrs. Schwann was already offering "real Viennese torten" from her ever-ready trolley, along with sophisticated demitasses of anise-black and molasses-thick coffee (now I'll never sleep, I thought to myself). "You growing kids dig in," she said, and something about hearing such colloquialisms in an eroded Austrian accent always endeared her even more to me. I am glad to see that she looked so robust and full of life, this woman I considered so aged then, maybe because she was triply rejuvenated by the youth surrounding her. As she passed the cups and saucers around, she spoke in a new kind of high-spirited, almost fevered manner I hadn't heard her use before. "Now, I want you, Dennis, my dear, to do an old lady a favor by acting in my place and guiding meine Lieblinge around this our lawless frontier town. You see, I am not so much fun with the bunions and knees, and I must be close to the store when one of my silly clerks argues with an even sillier customer." She muttered something obscene in French, I think, and then turned to her young relations, pouring out more coffee from an hourglass-shaped carafe. "Look at you two, smiling like pussycats. Why is it you have not been here since you were kleine Kinder? I know, I know, it is because your mama thinks anyone west of Chicago must be living in a what-is-it, a logs cabin. Ach, I love her, but she is an idiot, you know."

August leaned into me conspiratorially. I noticed then that although he did not flaunt ropes of holy beads as I had feared, there was the unmistakable glint of a tiny gold cross tangled in the curious hairs sprouting just below the indentation of his throat. "You maybe have learned that Aunt Helga never minces words," he said in a faked whisper that he was unable to sustain when he began to exclaim. "She thinks Mother is a bore—or, worse, a boor! Well, she can be a bit too much of a priss, we all know. Posy, Posy—April, dearest—don't chime in! Allow me to speak. All right, Mother is a bit of a pill. Mother would make old Mamie Eisenhower in spit-curls seem exciting, her own Tante has said more than once." At that, he winked at Mrs. Schwann, who made a sound something like pfft and shook her head in exaggerated disapproval.

"It's all true, all too true, true, true," April repeated like an echo, verifying her brother's accusations. "If I hadn't gotten away to U Penn she'd have had me in an apron, baking casseroles with her all day long like it's the nineteen-fifties, like what's-her-name—Harriet Nelson—in those late-night reruns." She giggled and scooped an enormous piece of a thick raspberry mille-feuille topped with plenty of creamy schlager into her mouth. (Note to former self: Although I was used to the coarse and horrible and probably fake accents spoken by actors in American television situation comedies set on the Eastern Seaboard, I could distinguish few idiosyncrasies in their speech or speech patterns, outside some bent diphthongs and elongated gerunds. Maybe I wasn't listening closely enough. I know I must have sounded pretty funny to them.)

Inspired by April's gluttony, I too took another piece of gooey pastry. What a party this was! That is, it was a kind of welcoming party for them, right? Why then did I feel I was the one being welcomed to town? Looking at them now, I like how relaxed and uncensored they were around me, a complete stranger, and how eager they were to include me in their private games. They were emissaries from a new world I desperately wanted to regard from their own privileged viewpoint, with their same level of negligent disregard. Actually, I'm jumping ahead of myself here; at first I believe I felt simply too juvenile and insignificant next to them to dare to think on their level, although they seemed eager to accept me onto their team from the start. (Either that, or they were good at pretending.) Always alert to defects in the abilities of others to stimulate discourse, Mrs. Schwann lubricated the gears of conversation by reminding them how she had said they'd be sure to like me, since I was such a smart and promising young writer—along with a caveat that she didn't particularly care for my stuff—and how I would be able to show them some of the many local historical sites with a young craftsman's eye for detail. "Please!" they exclaimed almost in unison. "We mostly just want to go out on the river," one said, and the other added, "Do you have a boat? Everyone here must. You'll be our pilot, won't you?" I was of course highly embarrassed by all this attention (and a little afraid, assuming how difficult it would be to entertain the two for more than a few minutes even if I could borrow my uncle's pontoon boat), but heartened by how much of the benefit of many doubts April and August seemed willing to give me. We talked of a lot of things in a great hurry, with Mrs. Schwann prodding us on further and faster if we ever lagged—I must say the coffee helped. Unlike most people in my everyday life, who had known me too long to bother, they all asked me a great deal about myself, even though I got much less of a chance to give complete answers than what I received in return. That is, although they did pepper me with questions, each new topic became more of an invitation for them to contrast my opinions or insignificant anecdotes with their own much more enlightened ones. That was all right by me—I would much rather hear them ramble on about amusing topics or earnestly held beliefs (not that I could have known at first what the differences were or when they were being sincere and when they were being facetious) than try to think up something as remotely interesting to say about myself or my own ideas.

April, as I soon caught on, could tear into subjects with disdainful little bites, and it could be hard to tell when she was completely serious, if she ever was, though in the course of her arguments she revealed much more about herself than did her brother, who was often circumspect to the point of being evasive. "They've made me go to the shrink to straighten myself out," she said at one point, "but he goes to some naked guy nailed on a cross—now which of us do you think is the sicker?" Again, hearing them before me like this now that I have the advantage time and age have granted me, I can formulate a clearer idea of what was really going on. She actually was being protective of her brother for some reason, although she disguised it with open contempt. "He's a priest-to-be who has more problems accepting the existence of God than I do!" she exclaimed during one lucid, caffeine-fueled moment. "I mean, in the end I'll swallow most of what they feed us during mass, but he's supposed to believe these things in his heart without any questioning, right?" I avoided looking August in the eyes just then, though he did sigh and murmur something about his sister being a great kidder. By then she had finished off three more slabs of some glutinous confection, washed down with great slurps of the strong coffee, but at that age I never wondered how slender, excitable girls did it without gaining an ounce. August kept rolling his eyes, trying to make it all seem a joke—and for all I knew, it might have been. He obviously was used to this kind of good-humored humiliation, and for all I knew, he saw himself as a penitent who must welcome any degree of flagellation, gentle or harsh. "That's why he's taking a break from St. Ignatius," April informed me, drawing up her bare suntanned knees to her chest on her precarious perch. "He's having yet another crisis of faith. A cri de coeur, right, Aunt Helga?"

"Really, dear," Mrs. Schwann interrupted her. "Leave the poor boy alone. Even though I am proudly atheist, as you know, I can sympathize more than you seem to. Nearly all seminarians go through this phase, the monsignor has made it very plain to your maman. Am I not right, Augustin, Liebling?"

August did not appear particularly perturbed by all this discussion of the turmoils of his soul, but I guess that was because the whole family, so I gathered, was used to examining such things in the pure white light of modern progressive thought. Perhaps this was the way socially conscious liberation-theology Catholics behaved in the urban East. The less liberal or simply stuck-in-the-mud English Episcopalians I knew, including my own family, were much more private when it came to similar very personal matters. We never discussed God, and hoped, I gathered, He wasn't discussing us. With both his aunt and sister waiting for him to say something more at last, August took off his cumbersome glasses, rubbed his florid face all over with a paisley bandanna (a gesture that for some reason struck me as exactly something a priest would do) and laughed in the way a much fatter and older man might have laughed. Maybe it was a little too forced. "I'm really more interested in teaching selected poetry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wordsworth and Shelley on down, than consoling or converting souls, anyway, my dear friends and inquisitors," he explained himself as he shifted into a more comfortable position in his own uncomfortable chair. "It may sound terribly retrograde, but there's so much beauty in the verse of that era I'd like to introduce to young people." All at once I could clearly see him standing before a desk heaped with heavy tomes, a yardstick (convenient for pointing to examples on the chalkboard and swatting infidels) in his hand. "Lately it's just that I don't see why one need be on intimate terms with the Holy Spirit in order to stand in front of a classroom full of unruly monsters throwing spitballs. Leave it to the spirit made flesh to intercede on behalf of them; you see, I have no problem believing that aspect of the Trinity exists, or existed. I do believe in developing a Christ consciousness, trying to live and act as Jesus would. I do have faith in Him. Or at least I think I did a few hours ago. Oh, mercy, ask me again in the morning!" He moaned and threw up his hands.

"See?" April insisted. "He may talk fancy like a professor, but he lacks conviction, just like Daddy says. I want him to leave that hell-hole for good. He doesn't need to teach and become part of the establishment, at least not yet. I want him to come back to U Penn and introduce me to people who can help me get out of my rut. Not just any old people—talented, interesting people. People who know things, who can do things. I'm trying so hard to be a mezzo and all, but I need more motivation. I need to take acting classes, I need to fucking learn Italian—sorry, Aunt Helga—and I need to go to Europe, I need to fall in love again! Back when we were both in high school, August used to have such fun friends who, unlike our parents, really and truly believed in me. They were in drama club and band. I was sort of their mascot, you know? Now I'm on my own around these really mediocre, really blasé teachers. How can I sing these big grand godawful arias when I'm not feeling anything from the people around me? Give me emotion, give me passion!" April gave her head a furious toss that tumbled her hair back into her eyes and went on to describe her ambitions to become someone who could perform "the really great stuff." Before she had gone off to college she had taken regular instructions from a retired bel canto singer, someone who left their area, had modest success touring the country, and returned to encourage girls just like her. If she could do half as well, she said, she'd be content, she supposed—although imagine what it would be like singing with Franco Corelli or someone else as utterly suavecito as that at La Scala! But, she added, catching her great-aunt's eye, "I don't want to sing lieder or those art songs that don't have any goddamn melody."

Mrs. Schwann was watching me watch her; maybe she was hoping to foster some kind of summer romance, or at least to come to a deeper understanding of me through observing my reaction to her tempestuous grand-niece. I didn't notice any of this at the time, of course; instead, I was torn between whose side to take and who I thought I liked better. April was funny and spirited, but the scholarly August was one of the few people I'd met who from the start appeared totally accepting of my determination to take a path in life as different as his was. When the brother and sister began to bicker about whether it was more important to train the intellect or the soul, Mrs. Schwann started to say something about them not setting a good example for me (although it was plain she enjoyed their stirring up contention) before August interrupted her. "Dennis," he said, "I am sorry you have to hear us carping like this, but I can tell that as a future laureate and a gentleman, you aren't one to judge, are you? Here you are up late at night with us, virtual strangers, while we prattle on about things that must only annoy a guy like you, somebody who's obviously working hard in this little town, am I right, doing things all on his own, as our aunt has said. We must seem to you like two very spoiled brats." Although it sounded a little overly mature of him, if not almost facetious, I was pleased to be so highly regarded by someone I had met not an hour or two before. At that age, irony tended to fly over my head faster than a flock of annunciatory doves. I should have paid more attention to that look of concentrated concern on Mrs. Schwann's face as her great-nephew allowed his tongue to carry himself away. At some point she no longer seemed to be enjoying herself quite as much, or else the coffee in her cup was failing her.

And as for myself—how was I faring as brother and sister disparaged each other's opinions and took cruel and calculated swipes at one another, as even the most loving brothers and sisters so often do? I am sorry to see that the coffee went to my head as does liquor with some people, making me voluble and causing me to laugh uproariously at their feeblest bon mots. Although I was nattering and giggling away, and answering the frequent inquiry, I can tell I was not really listening very well at all; when they mentioned things only the two of them could know I butted in as if I were privy to their secrets, as well; and when they dropped certain artists' or writers' names I acted as if I were right up on all their most current work, even if some were five hundred years dead. How wonderful, the boy was thinking, to be at last among people who led such fantastic lives and did such amazing things! My old friends, such as they were, and who had mostly drifted away by the time I was into the depths of adolescence and had cloaked myself in self-conscious melancholy, could never again seem of the least interest or importance. The longtime girlfriend whom I had parted with in the early spring, when it became apparent our love, such as it was, would languish away, chaste and unavailing—would she be supplanted by April, or maybe even by August? Could be I would love them both equally. In all honesty, I couldn't really tell just then whose brain or body I was more attracted to, ludicrous as my prospects were and would probably remain. This is maybe what it's like to be grown-up, I was thinking then; maybe someday all my friends and acquaintances will be this worldly and wise, and I will be indistinguishable from them.

Within a few more minutes (once again, only recognized from this vantage point) the siblings had played themselves out—probably more from dealing with this dull, inexperienced high-schooler than because of the late hour—and Mrs. Schwann prudently refrained from pouring any more of the drug into my dollhouse cup. She had the insatiable mind of an insomniac, I had learned over the months I had been reading and staying up late palavering with her, though I suppose she had reached her limit of otiose conversation, and I can tell she was relieved when with a canine yawn and stretch August reported that he was ready to hit the hay because he was so incredibly bushed. "Funny expressions, aren't they?" he said, mostly to his aunt, while suppressing another yawn. "But I'm not kidding—we've had a long day, starting with Union Station in Chicago this morning and then the Trailways from Moline. I hope you all won't mind, but I'm so tired I'll be sleeping like a log—another odd English expression, right, Grosstante?"

"You old poop," April said, getting up nevertheless as soon as August did. "We still haven't decided when Dennis will be taking us out in his boat tomorrow."

I can see that the boy all at once snapped out of his caffeine-induced abstraction, realizing that he would have to trust that his uncle would be accommodating on the spur of the moment—and yet I hear him saying rapidly, so as to disguise any hesitation, "Oh, sure, sure—I'll probably just have to check first, just in case, you know, though of course it will be ok. It might as well be my boat, I use it so often. If you'll just give me enough time in the morning to—if I could just—that is, if I—"

Mrs. Schwann, perceiving how much I was fidgeting, came to my rescue. "Tomorrow they do say it will rain most likely. How about I take all you kiddos out to lunch instead?" She had again assumed her heartiest approximation of American speech, as I was learning she was prone to do when around younger people. Although I had heard nothing about any precipitation, we were all suddenly convinced that tomorrow there would be a veritable downpour. "And, Dennis," she added, "do not you protest—I can afford to take my friends out to eat once in a while, you know."

"Thank you, Mrs. Schwann," I assented, although I couldn't avoid letting a great yawn escape from my own mouth. But I was much relieved.

"There, you see?" Mrs. Schwann said. "More with the yarning. August is correct. We have all of us had a long day. Get along and schlafen Sie wohl, Dennis, before you fall on your feets, and we shall meet you tomorrow half-past noon at the Hansen House, okey-doke?"

"Sounds perfect," April said, already on her way to where I presumed the bedrooms were, and before I was able to protest that the Hansen House, where I had been only once before, after my oldest sister's wedding, was far too fancy and expensive. The girl did not bother to shake my hand or whatever it is I expected her to do when I said goodbye. She merely drifted by measures into the waiting shadows down the hall.

August, however, gave me a quick hearty hug—something few men I knew at that time did outside of sports matches—and apologized again for breaking up the party. "Goodnight and God bless," he said, and I wasn't sure if because he was a priest or priest-in-training I should say something similarly spiritually minded as I bade him farewell. And hadn't he cast the very existence of God into doubt? Lastly, he reminded me, "Don't forget to bring some of your poems tomorrow, Dennis—I'll be extremely disappointed if you don't."

Had I promised to show him some of my poems in the course of the evening's fevered discussion? Somehow, humbled and overawed as I must have been, I had let what I most likely considered an idle request slip my mind. It must have all been Mrs. Schwann's doing, building me up and bragging to her young relatives about my "promise" (which she herself could not have fully believed in)—and I suppose I stammered an objection or two, although now, at the ragged end of this long long evening, I had, incredibly, forgotten what I had agreed to do between my rapidly replenished cups of coffee. In the end, I see, an unmoderated stream of words poured out of me: "Thanks, August, I will if you insist—although I'm feeling stupid already. Just be honest when you tell me they're awful. You're really fantastically nice to ask. I don't know what to say. Remember, they're just attempts. I know they can't be much good. Ok, ok, I better shut up. Tomorrow then. It's been great—better than great!" But by then Mrs. Schwann had providently moved in to remind me of the hour and give me her customary dry Chanel-scented peck on the cheek just before I stepped into the elevator. There—the boy took quite a hop, giddy with delight, as the car went down, and for a moment it looked like he was suspended in air.

Back out on the street I was still much too keen to every sight and sound I encountered, too alive and centered in my youthful euphoria to wish to reenter my normal life, to sleep in the same old bed I'd always slept in. My family's house, I knew, would be silent, dark; even the sulfurous yellow porch light would have been extinguished once my parents turned off the television and went upstairs, for if I did not show up by midnight, no one noticed, no one cared, I may as well not have existed at all. The all-too familiar house was inhabited by people I no longer really knew, so estranged was it from me now. Confident that no one would hear me entering once I did sneak in the back door—it was going on two—I decided to take the long way home and meander through the flowerbeds and hedges of the riverfront park, before taking the steep bluff road up to my neighborhood overlooking the water. The boy, I hoped, would not sense any presence close behind him as he walked a little ways downhill toward the soundlessly flowing river, or in the quiet of the sleeping town mistake the echo of his footsteps against the buildings on either side of the empty streets for another person following him. Fact is, I don't remember worrying for my safety at all (if I ever did) during that prolonged and somewhat dizzy walk home, my mind was such a whirl of novel impressions and sensations inspired by my new east-coast friends. Could I call them friends? No, I hardly knew them—and yet they were so very friendly and encouraging in a way people who truly knew me seldom bothered to be. Plus, they had nothing to do with the rest of my formerly uneventful life, they knew nothing of my past; I could be a brand new person with them. Even so, I wasn't too dumb or starstruck to consider that it could have been anything but Mrs. Schwann's coaxing or pleading that had persuaded them to act so cordially toward me the evening of our first acquaintance. Part of me knew too that there wasn't anything genuinely exciting about myself, especially in their big-city eyes. Nevertheless, I immediately put these negative thoughts out of my mind, because, despite fleeting misgivings, I was so adolescently arrogant that I couldn't believe anything but now that we were getting to know each other, they would continue to be as interested in me as I would be in them.

As I walk close behind myself through town I am gratified and touched by how familiar these corners and crossways are to me after all these years; I haven't been back to my hometown in ages, now that almost everyone I knew so long ago has moved away or is dead. In the end—which is to say it wasn't really the end—I did not find my birthplace a happy place and was glad to get away and not look back. The friends I did retain from my youth I see in other places, and my siblings visit me often enough for me not to have to go back home to see most of them. This probably should make me sadder than it does, but truth to tell I seldom allow myself to indulge in memories of my former life; like everyone else I am a busy person, and I don't often let the past intrude. But tomorrow is a holiday; I've had a drink or two and opened up some old photo albums, and this world I once knew has reappeared before me again, as if it never went away—and I don't suppose it ever really did. Watching the boy I was, if only in my mind's eye, I recollect something of his underlying sadness and loneliness, the inner despair that clung to him throughout the last months of his childhood despite these moments of temporary stimulation, more than I presently feel any such sorrow myself, contemplating this absurd person I used to be.

At the river's dirty flotsam-strewn edge I stopped and gazed out over the black water, winkling with far-flung summer stars and distant barge-lights, and took a deep breath at last. Waves were lapping against the shore, gently, then urgently, still almost inaudibly, and I sank a couple of inches into the muddy sand at my feet before settling myself onto an overturned oil barrel. Overhead I heard the searing cry of one nighthawk to another, and downriver I saw the white skeleton of a dead tree floating past a recently formed sandbar. I sat there a long time. Maybe I even nodded off a little. Warm wet gusts of wind came hurtling down from the wooded bluffs above town; and roiling, seething thunderheads rapidly choked the entire sky. Now that I am reliving the past, I can see that all of this violent movement is an exaggeration, that the night had become only slightly darker and windier, even if in my younger and more suggestible mind I felt I was being tossed by gale-force winds and my soul was being sucked into a whirlpool of purple-black storm clouds. And then the calm before the storm. In this utter darkness, in this impenetrable silence, I felt an emptiness that maybe is all that the universe is made up of. Take this feeling, express it on the page, and it could be a poem, I can hear myself thinking, and yet how do I know enough names for things animate and inanimate, and how do I know how to clothe emotions in words, how to make my lines original when surely so many poets have already owned similar moments, claimed them by describing what I still found indescribable? Yes, I was a seventeen-year-old who had found that he could live quite easily in a rarefied world full of ideas and devoid of much substance. In this respect, I must leave him alone, let him learn for himself.

A thin, tepid rain insignificant as a mist began to sputter out of the clouds, fully sobering me, and so I knew I must be getting home. (Maybe I am able to influence my younger self, and so can take credit for hastening him off the barrel and getting him to vacate the riverside before he got soaked.) On my more hurried walk back uphill to my old and unlamented neighborhood, I entered lanes hemmed in by horse chestnuts and catalpas, whose interlocking boughs overhead shut out the lightning-stroked sky; with keen night vision I surveyed the blank and blind windows of once-familiar houses from the sidewalk as I passed, or searched more boldly into those rare few windows lit by the photocathode glow of late-night television (only one channel would still be transmitting), wondering how I would find a way to impress these Philadelphians, or if I should try to impress them at all. In such respects, I concluded, it is best to remain cool, a bit of an enigma, let the others puzzle over me and thereby grant me the honor of their close attention. (Of course I would fail at this; I was never patient enough in those days to go silent for long before I tried to explain or excuse myself.) August, I decided, rather vainly, would find me an intellectual equal, and fun-loving April would discover that I really could be as entertaining and quick-witted as those people she longed to surround herself with at college. My doubts dispelled at last by my egotism, I approached my house, tall but disrespectable on its weedy rise above the sidewalk, the single sad little "bug light" illuminating the front porch steps (so my mother hadn't forgotten me, after all). Unlike most things we remember from our youngest days, the house seems even larger and more capable of swallowing lives whole than I ever previously remembered it, maybe because I haven't wanted to remember it for so long. Larger, but every bit as neglected, rundown, left to decay—from the unpainted clapboards to the broken attic windows—as I had hoped to forget. Inside I can almost hear the aftershocks of my parents arguing with one another about the rent money or my brothers fighting with my sisters over simple silly things (a stolen Barbie, a flat bike tire) that have long ceased being of any importance. It is all too painful: I will stand out here on the trampled yellow grass we called a lawn and watch the boy disappear into the darkness within, but I will not follow and I will not enter.

Although we had agreed to meet not until the day was half over, I reluctantly recall that I didn't make it down to the waterfront, where Hansen's was (or used to be before it was washed away in the big flood of '93), until I'd already made my lunch-partners wait a quarter-hour for me. After a night such as I'd had, it must have been hours before I put down The Bridge or The Wasteland to slip into sleep just before dawn; I consequently would have woken very late and then, because I had been such a layabout, I would have been last in the long line for our one bathroom. If I was lucky, there might have been enough hot water left for me to take the long and resuscitating shower I needed. Had it been a church-going Sunday and not a Saturday morning, I would never have had a chance. While I impatiently wait out on the front steps for my fresh-faced double to leave the house, I have to wonder why it used to take me forever to get ready for any special event in that period of my life—but then I must allow that in this way, at least, I was like most adolescents I have known. Perhaps it never even occurred to me at this promising stage of our relationship how much I was already expecting my hosts to indulge me, however my uncertainties of the night before had troubled me. I imagine that it took a long time to choose a shirt the Schwann siblings would consider not too much like something a country bumpkin would wear, and although I wore the ubiquitous jeans, they had of course to be just the right brand and cut, the ones I had saved so long to buy with my meager wages. Observing myself rejoin the wider world, I am not overwhelmed by the results, but I am thankful that my own siblings as well as my parents had apparently vacated the house early enough to leave me space and freedom enough to procrastinate so. When they were around I was always feeling harried and irritable. This particular morning I felt groggy, but an unfamiliar warmth was kindling within me, which I might even be able to label pure unadulterated joy. Yes, I was happy! It was as if, I decided, I had finally found the key to a door I had always wanted to unlock.

After the rain I almost thought I had only dreamt, the sidewalks were littered with worms and the skies above were still threatening, but I would have been mortified to carry an umbrella along with me—it would have seemed almost as eccentric a mannerism in the middle of summer, at least, as a walking stick would have been. And it would have impaired my dizzying run downhill to the center of town. When I got to the restaurant, built to overhang the river, and which I and everyone else I knew in town once considered the epitome of refinement, but now appears so humble and uninspired to my more jaundiced eye, the placket-collared nylon shirt which I had so hoped would look good enough for my hosts was soaking, and I was too out of breath to say much when I found August and April studying a collection of pioneer-era livestock branding irons in the entranceway. (Could they have been amused, or genuinely curious?) I didn't even notice at first that Mrs. Schwann was not in attendance. From behind, as yet unseen by them, I saw that April had on what I assumed were her "city clothes"—that is, a sheer muslin blouse and side-slit skirt too daring for the likes of the provinces—and she looked very willowy and long-limbed in them. Although I still barely knew her, I should easily have guessed that she would wear all white, if only to underscore how clean and pure and chic she was in this somewhat grubby little burg. I do remember what's coming next: To my great astonishment she kissed me on the cheek when I surprised her, kissed me as if we were old friends—I wondered if anyone around noticed that! August moved in next, and like a long-lost friend pounded me on the back while pumping my hand. Although it was just the start of the weekend, not a time for brunches after church, he was sporting a tie (but no jacket); I suspect their aunt had insisted they dress up for what she undoubtedly told them was the most elegant place in town. They must have been greatly disappointed, but they never mentioned that I had kept them waiting so long. Maybe they had been tardy, as well.

"Aunt Helga's feeling a bit under the weather today," August alleged as soon as I began to try to apologize for being late—and I made the appropriate sounds, although I suspect she had manufactured the whole ruse with him, to allow the junge Leute to get a chance to know one another on their own terms. "Nothing serious at all, just a little tired, she says. No wonder, after entertaining us until the dawn chorus was warming up. That, and she's had a busy week at the store—back-to-school sales coming up, you know. Everything's a bit harder for her since Onkel Lemmy died." Here he hesitated how to go on so briefly I still wasn't able to interrupt. "Now, Dennis, stop, she's already given me the money to pay, so no use trying to refuse. She says you'll earn your meal by acting as our guide. Take us anywhere you like, show us anything, do anything Dennis would do, she says. Splendid, I say. What do you say, Denny?" At last he paused long enough for me to cut in, although I couldn't have said anything more clever than "sure" or "all right" even if I had thought fast enough. It was the first time he ever called me "Denny," as usually only people I'd known for years did (less and less often as I grew older) and though I had never much liked what seemed to me a belittling nickname, it sounded pleasant on his lips. On his lips it sounded as if it might truly mean what an "endearment" is supposed to mean. Before I was able to tell him I had had no experience showing off my hometown, he added, holding the door open for us: "Please be our honorary cicerone, for we are but babes in this wilderness. Lead us into the light! April, dearest, don't make faces when I'm making speeches, it's not polite. I know I can be a card—and in your opinion, a pompous ass."

If anyone else I knew then had talked the fairly magniloquent way he talked, I would have been suspicious; with August, however, it may have sounded a little stiff and stagey, but still sincere, I thought—the way one would expect a priest outside of church to speak, that is. And he was always sure to amend his most sententious remarks with lusty self-immolating laughter. Nevertheless he sounded and even began to look very much a part of an older generation when he became parietal like this, and I had to remind myself that he was only a half-decade older than me. Well, all three of them look so outrageously young to me now!

Once again I tried to object to their generosity, but they were having none of it, and so I was led (quite willingly) into the wraparound porch of the restaurant, where the thick carpet dampened conversation and the wide windows offered us a panorama of the elegantly arched spans of our local bridge all the way to the swampland of southwestern Wisconsin, and where to my mild surprise a middle-aged waiter soon came sidling up to us (I was only used to waitresses). I was also a little taken aback when August ordered a liter of the Bloody Mary weekend special for the whole table—why had I ever assumed priests didn't drink, at least in public?—and even though I was still several weeks short of eighteen, I was expected to imbibe like the rest of the adults present. When the pitcher arrived and the tall glass was poured for me, however, I sipped it more slowly than anyone else there, partly to show I was used to such things and not going to slurp like a child, and partly because the vodka in it burned my mouth so I couldn't have taken larger swallows if I had tried. How amusing, if I am to be honest, looking across a head that was so curly and fair then, watching the silly faces I made sucking delicately on my bent straw and trying to show how used I was to such potent brew.

April probably could intuit how new all this splendor was to me, and smiled tolerantly. I was and remain grateful that she chose at least this one time to overlook my inexperience. "Is the food really edible in this joint?" she asked, as if I ate here all the time. "It's got to be a little I don't know, don't you agree, Dennis?" She blew a lock of hair out of her eyes and chuckled disdainfully before hurrying to continue. "Oh, sorry, I suppose this place is all right for a town this size. One can't always tell by looks, you know. Our father says truck stops always have the best pie." I felt a bit abashed and didn't know how to respond. April and August studied their menus like good schoolchildren, and I nibbled at my straw and gazed sleepily into the electric flame of the little fake candle in a fancy pewter vessel on our table; it like me must have felt, if it could feel, it was among the most pretentious and unnecessary things in the room. The porch itself was bright with light reflected from the water lapping the edges of the pier below our feet, and for a weekend lunchtime it was not overly crowded—just some of the richer people from town who owned fancy river boats (they affected yachting caps and tinted glasses) and a spattering of red-faced farmers and farmwives out on a spree. There really isn't much need to look around the room or restaurant any further; this was a well-appointed and well-managed establishment for a town like ours, and for all that quite nondescript, I have to admit—though at the moment I was luxuriating in the splendor, still trying to pretend this was somewhere even jaded urbanites could feel at home.

"I've heard good things about the catfish," I eventually woke up enough to say to them both, and this statement at least was true.

"Disgusting," April snarled, still scanning her menu as if it were written in another language, "but I suppose the steak can't be too awful, considering we're out here on the plains with all the buffalo herds."

"It's not the plains, Posey, you poor benighted soul," August corrected her. "And they don't serve bison."

She stuck her tongue out at him—I hadn't expected that! "Close enough, Futz," she said, using the nickname with which I was to learn she liked to harass him. "Fuddly old Futz, you dumb fuck," she added for shock value. It sounded so funny right then that I giggled a little into my straw and sent some bubbles up around my stalk of celery.

August chose to ignore us both. "Eat like a native," he told himself, and then, to the waiter, who had been orbiting around our table until we put down our menus, "I'll have the breaded pork tenderloins." The waiter was a lean, slightly effeminate man with a mustache, and something about him or his professional unctuousness made me a bit uncomfortable. August then pointed across the white linen tablecloth. "And this young lady deserves only bread and water." At that April threw her napkin at him and things might have gotten out of hand if I hadn't rapidly ordered the catfish myself, just to prove to the other two it was comestible, indeed. Although she should have been first, April was the last to order, and then all she wanted was a caesar salad. Still, that sounded very smart, very appropriate.

After we had been served appetizers (sesame breadsticks! so sophisticated!) and eventually the main course and had drunk a little more and indulged in lots of meaningless banter suitable for a lazy Saturday afternoon, August asked, out of the blue, "You did bring those poems, didn't you, Dennis? If only to prove to Miss Bossy here that you really can write. I'm sure you're very ambitious, unlike myself."

The small amount of alcohol I'd swallowed was either going to my head, or I simply felt a little giddy from the sort of attention I didn't usually receive. I hadn't fully taken in the possibility that the two might have discussed me when I was not in their presence, and, unbelievably, I had left the poems I had selected shortly before daybreak (the only copies existent) back at my house. "No problem. We'll go get them after we've eaten, then," August consoled me.

The last thing I wanted was for the two of them to come up to my shabby neighborhood and my even shabbier house, or to run into any member of my family, who would unfailingly say something trite or humiliating. "No, no, that's all right," I said, "I'll bring them down to your aunt's at the store some time later. Besides, my place is in the opposite direction from where I was thinking we might walk after lunch, down the old Ho-Chunk Indian trails alongside the limestone bluffs, where there's a couple caves."

"Indians?" April said, perking up. "I knew I wasn't far off about the buffalo." All through our meal I had been surreptitiously watching her, and saw that she had not had much more to drink than I drank and had only picked at her oily salad. In fact, she had separated every crouton from the lettuce and lined them up on the rim of her plate as if they were poison pellets. No wonder she was lean to the point of being emaciated——which was normal for girls with lots of nervous energy like her, in those days, and probably still is.

"So be it," said August, who was pouring himself more from a second pitcher that had materialized from somewhere, "and so forth. Anyway, I didn't forget the book we were talking about, the one I promised you last night—it's right here..." He produced a slim hardback book from somewhere—even from this angle years later I can't tell from where—and slid it across the table toward me. I had completely forgotten his saying he'd promised me anything the night before; I suspect now he was making the whole thing up and at the last moment had decided to bring the book along that morning. "Do take it," he said, "and return it whenever you've had enough. It's one of my favorite authors, one you should meet if you haven't already—Matthew Arnold. If you'll please just take it as an open-ended loan, you'll be doing me a favor. I'm always proselytizing about him, and I need converts. April could care less. Or couldn't, whatever it is. And Aunt Helga, for all her love of the Victorians, particularly loathes him, I might add. I think it's because she's always been so sure of her pagan convictions. No time for doubting Thomases."

"Oh, please," April said, getting up without any preliminary. "That guy's a big boring bore. Don't hog the rest of the Bloody Mary, Futz. I'm off to the toilet." (I had never heard a female refer to a public restroom as a "toilet," and it both dismayed and intrigued me.)

The book was not a new one, but old—an antique, actually; I wondered if he carried this volume on his travels as the fully ordained do Bibles. It was a lovely late-nineteenth-century specimen, with gold lettering on the spine and a William Morris cover and beautifully marbled endpapers patterned like the traces waves leave on sand. I didn't know at the time that such editions are much more common than one might think; it might have been precious as an original Gutenberg, for all I knew. Taking it from August made me wonder if he should be trusting me with what certainly had to be one of his most prized possessions, but he was so persistent that I borrow it that I gave up declaring "I couldn't" or "I shouldn't" and embraced the book. It felt very special to have someone treat me as enough of a fellow scholar to want to initiate me into an author's cult. Not even a teacher had ever done that for me. "I go to the public library a lot, but I guess it's a lot nicer to have someone lend me a personal favorite," I told him.

"I hope it will become a favorite of yours, too," he responded, and met my eyes. He wasn't exactly a movie star, I decided, with those uneven eyebrows and that broken tooth, but there was nothing at all wrong with him, either. His voice could be deep and soothing in a way I knew mine wasn't and probably never would be; he would certainly sound good in front of an altar one day. His eyes were wide and extravagantly lashed, chocolate-brown in color, and very sincere behind his thick prescription lenses. He had a way of looking at you as if you were being examined by a physician; I suppose he held my admiring gaze for a little too long, or I held his, because there was an unnerving pause before I thought of something else to say.

"April seems a little... unforbearing," I told him, trying out a thesaurus word while fearing I might be stupidly stating the obvious.

"She broke up with her latest greatest jerk of a boyfriend back in Wyndmoor not too long ago," he revealed to me, maybe only because he had the power of the drink within him, "and now she mopes about and doesn't know what to do with her life except sing, when she still knows next to nothing about music, doesn't take the time to learn, to tell the truth..." He leaned across the table and said in a bit more intimate tone: "Between the both of us, she's got to lay off bingeing and purging to stay thin if she wants to save her voice. Ahem." He genteelly cleared his throat. Did he mean she was in the ladies' room to—? "Ahem... Well, that's Posey. I love her, but she's a royal pain, you know. Say, last night you said you broke up with your girlfriend earlier this year, didn't you, Dennis? Looks like we're all three single at this table—though I can't say I'm free for the taking!"

I blinked and spoke. "You have Jesus, don't you?" Immediately it seemed a quite possibly offensive thing to have said, but he took it lightly.

"Well, Jesus can be a lousy date!" he said, and laughed, and so I felt free to laugh, as well.

"What are you two chortling about?" April said, nearing the table, where our dinner-plates now lay empty or, in her case, mostly untouched. I quickly checked her out for any sign of what she might have been doing in the restroom, but she looked exactly the same, no thinner or paler.

"We're laughing at you, Posey, dear," August said, stopping abruptly and seeming to wipe away at his glee with his bandanna until he obtained a more serious mien.

"No, we weren't!" I hastened to say. And then, glancing out the windows toward a passing speedboat, I decided to change the subject as fast as I could: "Would you both like to take a walk along the trails now? If you're lucky, you might find an arrowhead. It's drier out now. Could be we avoided that next storm, in fact I think it's been pretty clear and sunny for some time now."

April looked stricken. "Oh, God, please!" she said. "Just because old Aunt Helga thinks we need to learn some of the history of this place doesn't mean we really have to. Seriously, I'm not a nature girl, either. If you don't mind, I'm not feeling up to it, and I'm awfully tired after our trip. I should catch some Z's, as our dad always says. Why don't you two go without me? Go on and get your fill of local lore, August. You know you love that sort of ho-hummy thing." The way she said it sounded to me like she really wanted none of us to go, but August took the bait.

"And you go on home and take your nap so you won't remain so unbearably cranky," August told her, and drained his glass. A little of the red juice still colored his lips. Then, turning back to me: "I'm much obliged to go with you anywhere, sahib, at least for a little while. Please excuse my sister's terminal rudeness."

"You really don't have to," I said, suddenly afraid of being left alone with August and at a loss for things of sufficient intelligence to say. The waiter, who I could have sworn gave me a sidelong look, was back settling things up with August, however, so I never got to hear his reply—and April was saying goodbye to us before we had even stood up to go. Once I did stand up I comprehended how much two-thirds of a tall cocktail could unravel a lightweight young guy like me—and this time it was my turn to hurry to the restroom.

Back outside the restaurant, April promised me she would see me very soon and told August not to bore me with quotations or drive me crazy talking about religious matters. This time she thrust a rouge-enhanced cheek toward me to be kissed but had run off before I had the chance to pucker up against anything but air. "Denny, my man, do you like her?" August asked, as soon as she was out of earshot.

Fearing what he might be implying (was he implying anything?), I made light of his remark by telling him I liked them both a great deal already and hoped they could tolerate me, as well. I would never have spoken even this freely if I hadn't been emboldened by a drop or more of alcohol still stirring my veins.

"Well, then..." he said, but I could not tell if it was with a tinge of disappointment or relief. We began walking side-by-side along the riparian path that rounded the far side of the restaurant; I see now a barge being tugged upriver, pursued by avaricious seagulls, and hear its wake splashing rhythmically against the pilings along the beachfront, but in that moment of the past I wasn't noticing much of anything but August's contemplative profile as it bobbed in and out of my view. In a minute or two we were just below the bluffs, ascending a crumbling set of steps cut into the hillside. This slowing of our progression gave August the perfect opportunity to speechify. "Which way should we walk, my new friend? I'm game for anything. Walking is the finest sort of meditation—read it for yourself in Thomas Merton. Eh? Don't tell me you haven't read The Seven Storey Mountain! I'll have to get you a copy some day. Listen, I wouldn't be contemplating the monastic life, if not for that... Pretty up here. Flowers—nice. Getting warm again. Say, but are you sure we couldn't go back to your place to get those poems I swear I'm dying to read?"

Then, for a moment, mid-step, I froze again. It seemed August really wanted not so much to examine the misshapen fruit of my labors as to see where I lived, maybe even to visit my tiny room in the attic, and I would rather have anything happen but that. Besides, now that I was walking under a hot sun with all that drink and food in me, I was beginning to feel fairly tired myself. My body was reminding me it had only enjoyed a few hours of sleep. When we came to a broken-backed bench overlooking the river I sat firmly down, not having had any intention to do so a few seconds before. Knowing I was probably making a big blunder—because I really would have liked an opportunity to be alone with August and talk about spirituality or literature or anything else on his mind—I told him I was suddenly a little faint and maybe a walk wasn't such a good idea.

"Damn, I should have known—you're not used to the hard stuff! Damn!" he said, and I was still a bit surprised to hear that mild expletive from the mouth of someone who might soon be a man of the cloth. He sat down next to me and slapped my knee in a manly way. "A kid like you. But I guess I'm a little wasted myself. If I'd have known how stiff those bloody drinks would be, sorry about the pun, I wouldn't have ordered the second pitcher. Or maybe it's only the sun. Nevertheless, have it your way, then. Let's do sit awhile. Though I really was wanting to see your neighborhood," he admitted. "And your poems, too, of course. But I won't push it—we'll have a good discussion some day soon, won't we? Just the two of us, without April butting in."

I didn't like the "kid." And did he suspect that I was ashamed of my undistinguished neighborhood? Not knowing anything about the suburbs of the greater Philadelphia area, I had an idea that this Wyndmoor they spoke of, their home base that was probably as small as mine, was as tony as Chestnut Hill, which I had read about somewhere, and that the Schwanns lived in a "deluxe" "moderne" mansion on a high hill there and had a pool and tennis courts and of course servants. Ordinarily I wouldn't care much what people thought of my background—I was proud to count myself among that era's post-hippie anti-materialists, as well—but I wanted August and April to somehow mistake me for being closer to their level, in all ways. That, and I also wanted more fiercely than ever to remain something of a cypher to them. August was seated very close beside me, looking at me then through the slits of his dark piercing eyes—I can see now that he really did have a different sense of personal space than my fellow midwesterners did—and it was as if he were reading my mind like a book, so I jumped up, thanked him much more profusely than was necessary for lending me the book and for the fancy meal (even if brunch had been both Mrs. Schwann's proposal and treat), and walked away as fast as I could without seeming I was hurrying to get away from him or to get back home. Just look at you go—you coward! If August had wanted to hug me again, I didn't give him a chance. It had not even occurred to me that he might not know the most direct route back to his aunt's—but then again, there was little chance of him getting too lost in our small town. I turned back only once and saw him still sitting there on the bench alone, smiling to himself, and, despite actually feeling a wee bit sick, I was still left wondering if I had lied to him or not. Was I more afraid of being alone with him or that I might tell him too much, give away my secrets?

But I was capable of bouncing back fast, in my youth, and I did have my everyday working life among mortals, after all. I managed to put brother and sister Schwann out of my mind for a significant stretch of hours—easy when my family was such a drag on my time and I had numerous deferred chores to accomplish. That afternoon my father wanted me to help him change the spark-plugs on the Chrysler, and my mother had me mowing the already short grass and hacking weeds back of the garage. I was incompetent at the former and lazy about the latter, but did what I could manage. Bit by bit, therefore, I slipped unwillingly back into what I had long considered my one and only possible life and got on with it all like one condemned to servitude in Hades. The next day, when Saturday already seemed like a dream and the Schwanns mere figures of myth, I walked broken but unbowed down to the department store on my way to the Arion; I'd been called in to work the Sunday matinee shift, which was always the loneliest stint of the week during warm weather, though, being me, I liked the relative peace of those sparsely attended showings. At least I wouldn't be home listening to everyone bickering and complaining. Early that morning, on the untrustworthy old portable Underwood typewriter I'd found in a junk shop, I had quickly begun banging out copies in red and black ink of a few of my shortest and what I hoped would be my least problematic poems, and when finished put them in a manila envelope addressed to "A & A," along with an abjectly apologetic note trying to explain a few things about what lay inside. "Only because you asked!" I rushed to conclude in my own handwriting after one of my sleepy sisters pounded on the ceiling above her. "Sorry—I've had to use the number '1' for the letter "L" ever since that key broke," I added as an afterthought, and then I was off. At the rear of the department store, where from the stone-paved alley visitors reached on one side a service entrance with a ramp and on the other a locked door leading to the elevator shaft, I rang the bell for the penthouse, but no one answered. So they had all three gone out. There was a brass receptacle for personal deliveries next to the elevator, where I placed the envelope, half-hoping it would be overlooked, and wishing I could forget all about those poems now—really wishing, as well, that none of them would mention the wretched things to me if they ever did care to look at them. (Another part of me, just as strong, longed for their unequivocal praise.) Next I went without further delay to the theater, feeling a little left out (already!) because they hadn't told me they were going someplace that day and hadn't asked me if I'd like to come along. As if I even could have, with my job... Besides that, only a couple days had passed since I'd first met them. Oh, you young man, you vain thing. And look at you—your uniform trousers are getting too short again, and you really need another tie.

Only a few diehard movie-lovers or hapless single people wandered into the theater for the sole presentation that Sunday, and so most of the time I and the chitty-chatty ticket girl, who I now remember was from a big farm family and was called Patty, gossiped and made sarcastic remarks about the patrons and our workmates, trying to fill up the long afternoon hours. She could be friendly to me, when she wanted to—Patty with the overbite but tolerably winsome blue eyes and bluer eyeshadow; I wonder whatever happened to her. Since Mr. Moore had anticipated a small audience on such a fine day, he had the two of us doubling as usher and candy counter attendant, rather than call in more help. Our manager had stopped in earlier and told me I was doing a good job "for a such a scrawny bookworm" (he always expected me to laugh at that, so I did) but I had to make sure the restrooms were kept cleaner—he told me this nearly every time we met, but I never felt any the worse about him afterward. All his employees liked Mr. Moore: he was a short, pudgy, avuncular man with a drooping mustache that gave him a dour aspect even though he was actually full of jokes and japes (dumb punchlines and trick handshakes); with some dourness myself I realize I am older now than he was then. After he left to go play golf at the county links with his equally avuncular son, Patty and I joked about his weight and his sophomoric sense of humor the way we always did and then went back to discussing the individual quirks of our colleagues who weren't there.

"Bobby and Doug have been smoking pot down in the cellar again," Patty said, wiping the ticket booth windows clean with a vinegar solution, the way Mr. Moore had asked her. I wondered how she could take that stinging smell in such a small space.

"Nothing new with those two stoners," I commented from across the lobby. It would be at least forty minutes before I had to go wind down the projector, so I had this lull in my assigned tasks to while away. "Half the hours those two are supposedly working with us they're high. I actually get more done around here without them. Did you hear how Mr. Moore called this place a monkey gym?" I was idly squirting nozzles on the pop dispenser, pretending I was checking gas pressure, before looking below to make sure the ice machine wasn't churning away for no reason again. Then I guessed I'd have to make sure the restrooms weren't too much of a disaster. It would be wise of me, too, to find that misplaced ledger—probably in his little office under the stairs right where Mr. Moore had left it. Time passed faster when I kept busy.

In half an hour or so Patty was counting change and wrapping it into paper tubes. "Say," she called to me from over at her post, "what do you think of Callie?"

"What do you mean, what do I think of her?" I said, a little annoyed. People were always asking me what I thought of certain girls ever since Alyssa and I had broken up.

"You know—do you kind of like her?"

"She's nice, but she had to have graduated ages ago, don't you think. She must be halfway to thirty. And she's a little strange. Why, did she say something about me?"

Even at a distance I could tell Patty was batting her big blue eyes at me. Was she just trying to be funny? "Don't you wish!" she called to me, jangling some coins in her fist. "And she's not that old, only just turned twenty-one, she told me, if she's not lying. But no, really, she asked about you once. Don't worry, I didn't say much. But I do think it'd be kind of cute to see the two of you get together—sort of the older woman-younger man thing. And it might get Bobby and Doug to shut up about you, if you know what I mean. Not that I ever believe anything those morons say."

I paused in the middle of replenishing the Arion's supplies of Beech-Nut and Doublemint chewing gum. Yes, I knew what she meant. It didn't take me much figuring to guess what those two slackers might have been saying about me. We'd all been forced to feel their biceps often enough since they'd begun working out after school, and they listened to heavy metal in their Trans Ams and had told me when they'd heard I'd won a prize that they thought poetry was "for pansies." We could kid around all right, since I was technically their boss, but I had always suspected they talked about me behind my back. As it was, they rarely took any of my orders seriously; if Mr. Moore didn't eventually get on their case, they might never have done a single thing. "Why doesn't everyone just shut up about me?" I said to the lobby, slamming the candy case shut. Patty leaned farther out her window, a know-it-all smirk on her face. She could put on a show of being my friend when she liked, but ultimately she was on Bobby's and Doug's and the rest of the world's side. Right then I wished I had April and August with me; they were obviously too above-it-all to engage in such childish name-calling—or at least they would see no point in spreading rumors about things they couldn't understand, so I thought. I was glad when people started exiting from within and I could run upstairs to attend to the film that would now be slipping its last through the sprockets and spools.

What a relief and what a wonderful surprise it was to see April stubbing out a cigarette under the marquee, avoiding the harsh just-declining sunlight, when I locked up the theater a few minutes later. She needn't have lingered there in the shade, because she emanated coolness in her filmy not-quite see-through blouse and shortie culottes, almost my height in her cork-soled sandals. This time I went right up to her and impulsively hugged her, and she hugged me back as if we were long-lost friends. "Hey, Den!" she said—and I liked this even better than being called "Denny." "I'm glad I didn't miss you. Who was that bucktoothed chick who looked at me so funny?"

Stepping back, I realized only then that she was alone. Should I have hugged her? Now I was feeling a little self-conscious. "Oh, that must have been my coworker Patty, never mind her. Where's your brother?" I asked, still hoping he might be coming around the corner.

"Off with Aunt Helga shopping for groceries," she answered—and it seemed a wonder to me that Mrs. Schwann ever had to buy groceries herself; somehow I had always assumed those sorts of things were just done for her by others—like that woman who cooked and cleaned for her, which to me evidenced a very patrician display of status. "We just got back from an all-day ride to the Effigies or whatever they call them and back. What a bumpy bore."

"The Indian Mounds, you mean. You went all that way?" I said, as if they were a thousand miles away and not a mere thirty; meanwhile I was beginning to follow her lead down the street—which I didn't notice at first was taking us farther and farther away from the department store. "Did you take a cab up there, along the Great River Road? That must have been really expensive. You guys travel like royalty." I had already been told that although Mrs. Schwann didn't drive and had sold the Lincoln when her husband died, she did take the occasional town taxi (there was only one).

When April laughed she would toss back her long sunny hair over one shoulder with a quick jerk of her chin—an almost haughty gesture I thought was extremely worldly as well as confidently feminine. Watching her do this again, my opinion hasn't changed. "No, silly boy, don't be absurd," she said when her rolling, throaty laughter finally died down. "August drove us. In Mrs. Jurgen's car, which she's letting us borrow while she's out of town. If there were a Hertz or something nearby and we had enough money, you better bet we'd have a nicer car, though."

Once again she surprised me—although I guess she was right about being stranded here without much money. In hindsight I of course could see from the start that they weren't as rich as I had once hoped they'd be. "Wouldn't your aunt rent you a car if you needed one?" I asked, already knowing I shouldn't have.

"That old tightwad!" April spun on me in front of Dehner's stationery shop (I see there's another retailer that's long gone). "She's got all the money from her store and I'm sure I overheard her on the phone complaining that we're eating too much of her food and drinking too much of her liquor. She told me I could pick up some part-time hours at the makeup counter, if I liked—though of course she couldn't pay me! 'For the experience, it's worth it, my little Grünschnabel,' she had the nerve to tell me. Do you know what that means? I sometimes wonder why we even came here, if it's just to be at her beck and call and only get thrown goddamn crumbs."

Her attitude stupefied me, but I tried not to show it. "Gee," I said in my mildest way, "I hadn't realized—she's always been so generous with me when I come over."

"That's because you're not her poor relation."

Poor? I thought. I'd assumed because their father was an orthodontist and they lived near the celebrated Chestnut Hill they were anything but that.

"I wish we could do something more exciting than listen to August drone on to us from those guidebooks and clamber around some funky old redskin graves," she said, her voice as sour as her expression. She was looking at me intently in front of the windows that displayed a reflection of our sunlit images, and behind those two ghosts, an exhibition of sleek Selectric typewriters and some of the new electronic calculators, almost as large as the old manual adding machines we still used at the theater. Perhaps even more clearly than the illuminated numbers lighting up the undersized screens in those calculators I could see an idea lighting up her eyes: "Wait a minute!" she exclaimed, taking me by the arm as if I were her real boyfriend. "You told us about your boat, didn't you? Why don't we do that tomorrow? It's supposed to be another blazing hot day, but think of how breezy it will be out there on your river. God, yes! Floating downstream like fucking Huck Finn on his raft, far away from her." She closed her eyes, already caught in the current of her thoughts, and I couldn't help but want to join her.

"Sure!" I agreed too quickly, already knowing it was wrong of me to say I could when I hadn't asked. For all I knew, my uncle Earl would be out fishing for gar and muskies, if he wasn't at the meat-packing plant with my father that day, where they both held positions as foremen between the constant layoffs of that era. "We could take a picnic, like you wanted, and explore around the wetlands and the game preserves or whatever."

"Fan-fucking-tastic!" I do believe she was the first person I'd ever heard insert the obscenity into the middle of a word, and I would not hear anyone else do it for quite some time. "It will be so good to get out of Aunt Helga's clutches for a little while." And right there on the street she leaned into me and lip-smacked me squarely on the mouth, though of course both of us knew it didn't mean anything. Still, I wouldn't have minded if someone I knew who happened to be driving by had seen us. Getting kissed by her didn't mean she was in love with me or even romantically interested, most likely, but it did mean I was fully accepted as one of her set—at least for the moment. Any difficulty procuring the boat would be worth the hassle now.

We stepped away from one another. "Gotta run now, Den!" April said as soon as I caught my breath. "It's getting later than I thought."

I knew I had to keep playing it cool. "Oh," was all I said, although I was hugely dismayed, when I'd thought we might keep walking together to the end of the earth, or until we collapsed—whichever came first. Where did she have to run to, and why? Dinnertime was still hours off.

"I've got to go this way," she said, turning in the opposite direction from which we had been heading. Was she going back to her aunt's apartment, or somewhere else I couldn't begin to imagine? Once again all I could manage was a weak "oh." And then a "bye," and she was gone. For a moment I felt very alone, as if I'd lost her and August forever, but then my heart began to alternately soar and plummet as I thought of the coming day and its complications. Looking into the past from a long way off is almost like looking down from a great height—for I looked very small, down there on the warm sidewalk, trudging back home by myself. And it makes me a little lightheaded.

Back in those days I could be a great deceiver—deceiving myself most often, I might add. In response to a seemingly innocent query, my mother told me early on Monday morning that her brother was back at work, so I knew that at least in one regard the coast was clear. Once I'd thought things over, I was so afraid of anything jinxing my luck that I had already decided the previous night to just outright take the boat the next day, without asking or telling anyone. If I were to ask permission, I might be denied for one reason or the other, so why risk it? I reasoned. This was a special case. I knew where my Uncle Earl kept the key (under the lid of the cooler he always kept close to the pilot's wheel of the pontoon boat, so he could easily pull out a fresh bottle of cold Pabst while he steered), and I knew I'd be recognized and therefore ignored by anyone who might see me at the marina, so it would be an easy crime to commit. If we weren't out too long and didn't go too far, no one might notice that a little gas was depleted or that anything looked out of the ordinary. And if for any reason I were caught, I could always try just lying and saying that my uncle had promised me, but forgotten. Should my uncle come along, after all—well, I would improvise as best as I could.

I'd arisen from a sleepless bed to find my mother alone at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee before she went off to her job at the steakhouse, where she was the lady at the lamplit podium who called the waitress to you when you entered the building. This morning my mother was tired from a long night at the restaurant, too tired to be suspicious. She gestured like a b-movie actress with her cigarette and told me to enjoy my day off from work, to go see "those kids" again. I think my mother was glad that I had become part of Mrs. Schwann's coterie—after all, she was one of the wealthiest women in town, and to be asked to give a tour of the area to her relations was more of a privilege than a duty. She was heartened now that after a long time I was starting to have more friends—any friends—again. I know that she worried too much, and she more than anyone else had been very dismayed to see Alyssa and me go our separate ways. Alyssa had rarely visited our house—I wouldn't allow her—but my mother considered her a nice unassuming girl, shy and studious like me. She probably thought that Alyssa had been my anchor of sorts in the world most people insisted on living in. But, to coin a phrase, I was trying so hard at that age to be true to myself. To do so, I had to become a different person from the one everyone else had always thought they knew—and then to hide it. My poetry and the books I loved were just a part of it all. The rest I hoped to find. I didn't want to lie to my mother, but I often did; whether she ever knew she was living with such a duplicitous son I'll never know.

Times I had alone with my mother in those days were as brief as they were infrequent. Partly it was circumstance, and partly it was by design. While I poured myself some cereal, I tried to think of more to tell her, but nothing I actually could say came to mind. In another year or so I would be living away from home, and not all that much later my mother would be dead, and I'd never live in this house again. I should have used these moments to better purpose, but could not see across the wide gulf that had grown between us by then. Go and have fun, honey, my mother had most likely said when I told her I would indeed be spending another day with the young Schwanns. Then she kissed me on the cheek with lips that always tasted of Benson and Hedges and was out the door on her way to the pitiful rusted-out compact car I wish I had forgotten and wish I hadn't had to see again. Up to the moment when my mother came down the porch steps, hair still in curlers and heavy "pocketbook" over her shoulder, all of the above, I must note, is largely conjecture—I can't bear to go back into that cluttered kitchen with its nicotine-yellowed windows, or in fact any other room of that house, and relive the scenes of so many of my childhood struggles, the tribulations and the retributions. Hard to imagine it all happened in there: from outside, our house looked so ordinary, that is as ordinary and rundown and unnoticeable as the rest of the houses on its block. I must be in the kitchen still, gulping down my breakfast and trying to think of ways I'd have to entertain my easily bored guests out on the river that afternoon. As soon as my mother was gone, she was out of my mind. From my commanding and dry-eyed perspective in the present, I can tell that my long-suffering mother was spoiling me during this period, even playing favorites, something I hadn't even recognized then, stupid fool that I was. To think what else I could have achieved had I only realized that she would pretty much let me have my way about anything—maybe because she saw that I was at such a precarious time of my life and maybe because she would have moved heaven and hell to get me to intermingle with other people in a normal way. My father, now that he was employed again after a long hiatus, basically ignored me at this period, perhaps because he was so afraid I would shirk my responsibilities and float away with my head in the clouds, and my siblings younger and older raced a wide berth around me as they occupied themselves with their more average and understandable pursuits. In turn I did not even do them the honor of admitting their existence. In those days, ours was a tense and divided household. Say what you like, we did not find any lasting love for one another until many years later, when we were all past competing for our parents' attentions and affections. All I can say in my defense is that I was not much more terrible than the rest of them.

When I got to the marina, a little winded and more than a little agitated, I was thrown off as I had been before at the restaurant, to find August and April already there, sitting on a slatted bench with a new-looking picnic basket between them, looking different and not so glorious in the merciless morning light, wearing duller and more wrinkled clothes; I think I had half-expected them to oversleep or not show up at all. "Blessings of the day, Cap'n Baxter, sir!" August hailed me as I came down the path to the riverfront, and "You don't always have to sound like we're in church," April countered, taking off her wraparound sunglasses to get a closer look at me. "It's strange to see you again without your funny jacket and tie." More than half the time she'd spent with me so far, I remembered, I'd been in my work clothes. Today I was just myself.

"You know, I've been working so much I do feel strange without them sometimes," I said as I stood before them, and I can see from here that the boy is wearing newish sandals, one of his nicer short-sleeved shirts, a plaid one, and the frayed and patched denim shorts that were nearly mandatory back then (like most young people, I almost never wore any type of hat in those days). I knew that I must nevertheless appear as unstylish as any other Iowan to them and—not that style counted much in those relatively anti-consumerist days—even more ungainly at either end, with my big feet and scarecrow hair, than I had feared up to that moment. But thankfully neither of them was out to look like trendsetters that day, either. August hadn't shaved and had on a washed-out madras shirt, and April wore what looked like one of her aunt's old flowery blouses over a halter top and the same culottes I'd last seen her in (dirtier now), and she had an army-surplus type of canvas bag around her neck. Now I can see that the girl I had thought so good-looking in the flattering lamplight of Mrs. Schwann's parlor or in golden late-afternoon sunlight or the subdued lighting of a restaurant was not quite so beautiful and flawless in the full unforgiving light of the sun—but actually because of her questionable complexion (she was wearing none of her Bonne Bell products that day) and less-than-perfect nose looked more approachable and even more likable because she wasn't. On the other hand, her brother had left his eyeglasses behind and looked more robust and bright-eyed, not the pallid-faced clergyman I had first mistaken him for. Both of their faces were shiny with "invisible" suntan lotion, and they both produced green-shaded sun-visors out of their basket (visors and basket, I assumed, had just been acquired at their aunt's store). "You've never been out on the mighty muddy Mississippi?" I asked, wondering in this sober new day how to maintain an amusing conversation—how not to become tiresome to them. I didn't want them to retreat from me again, as they had seemed to after our last time together as a trio. My two recent departures from them, singly and not as a pair—April on the street, August at the bench—had felt rushed or awkward. There had been an unexpected terseness in each case I couldn't explain. Today I would have to make up for those miscalculations.

"Of course we've never really seen this river," April was saying. "But we've flown over it, haven't we, August? I mean, it must have been down there somewhere. Back when our father was doing better we'd go to Palm Springs or Las Vegas on Christmas breaks."

August kicked her in the insole and told her to stop acting like a jet-setter; he was rummaging through the vinyl-webbed basket, which must have been the store's best. "Here they are, at last," he mumbled, taking out a pair of aviator sunglasses that made him look rather dashing once he put them on. We all agreed that now we were ready to go, since it was only getting hotter by the minute. "You absolutely sure your uncle doesn't mind?" August asked as I led them down the dock to where the small flat-bottomed boat was anchored. In fact, I was wondering if my uncle would ever allow me on his boat again, were he to find out I was in effect stealing it for the day, but I tried to act nonchalant.

"I borrow it all the time," I lied expertly. 'It's pretty easy to maneuver, you'll see, although I'm not much of a river rat. The river for most people is just a big party place, and I hate that. I'd rather just wander up and down the slower currents running through the inlets—and out the outlets, of course. In and out, out and in, despite its looks, my Uncle Earl always says this boat's slick and quick as a needle on a sewing machine."

"So have you ever drifted all the way down to the darkies in the dusky ol' Delta?" April made her own sort of alliterative joke, in a rather weak Gone With the Wind accent—at least I was pretty certain she was joking. At any rate, she smiled but didn't join in when her companions laughed. We had reached the boat, and I can tell even at this distance how disappointed the two must have been to see the ugly old thing, although they tried hard not to show it. What did you expect, a yacht? I want my former self to say, but instead all I offered was a meek apology and a guarantee that it offered a generally steady ride despite its ungainly looks. The boat, an old one indeed, had a striped canopy over padded seats facing each other across what I think might be called "midship" in something larger; there was barely enough room for three people, a picnic basket, the cooler already there, the motor, and the pilot's station. But once we were all aboard, it suddenly became the picaresque raft April had hoped for, and our trip promised to be a rousing adventure. My companions surprised me greatly by pulling a six-pack of Michelob from the basket and putting it in the insulated cooler (alas, we had all forgotten ice). There were also thick chicken-salad sandwiches wrapped in armor-like aluminum foil (not the flimsy wax paper my mother used) and cheese-curls and apples and five different flavors of pop and, lastly, tollhouse cookies I was afraid would begin melting sooner than we could eat them. "Where to?" April said next, interrupting her own self to say, "Oh, oh, I hope we can ride some rapids!"

Once more I couldn't tell if she was naive or making another joke. "I thought we'd head for the pumping station up north," I said. "We'll go around a heck of a lot of islands, so we have to watch out for snags, especially now that the river is so low. But we're sure to find a shady sandbar where we can haul up and have our lunch."

As I was talking I was untying the ropes and acting like I knew how to make sure the pontoon was shipshape. The key to the ignition was under the cooler lid as usual; at least my uncle hadn't gotten crafty, and so I would be spared any embarrassment in that regard. As I began to start the boat up, August pulled his visor lower and shouted above the soon-sputtering engine, "It's really gorgeous out here! I hadn't expected there to be so much water and yet so many trees. Like the Everglades, almost. It's virtually an archipelago, isn't it?"

I hadn't ever thought of the river and its myriad islands big and small that way, but told him he must be right; I hadn't seen much to compare it to.

And then the engine died before it had even really been resurrected, just as I knew it would. The boat had a motor not much bigger than a lawnmower's, and like most mowers from those days, it had to be started with a furious round of curses and frustrated yanks on the whip-cord. How well I remember it and the fumes of potent blue smoke it expelled! That day I struggled to mask my mounting anxiety while cranking the colicky engine back into action, and thankfully it for once roared into sustainable life without more than a minute or two of coaxing. My passengers, anyhow, hadn't seemed to notice my momentary exertions as they arranged themselves and their belongings. Hard to believe I had forgotten how loud that engine was, and with the additional clamor of the prow's relentless chopping through the current and the consequential wake as we struggled upstream, conversation was at a necessary minimum, once we'd pulled away from the docks and begun threading our way through the nearby islands in the direction of Prairie du Chien to the north. At one point the girl shouted out that she hadn't expected pelicans (neither had I; they probably had flown all the way from the Gulf), and again when she was certain we had just passed an alligator (a half-submerged log, in fact). Often when I was out on the river like this in the summer this region felt more like a mangrove swamp in the Torrid Zone than any place in the middle of the continent, for the foliage was so thick and the sandbars so ever-shifting it was easy to get lost amid all the tributaries and channels. The river was running thick and yellow, full of silt, at such a low this year that the boat was in danger of running into unfamiliar sandbanks around every turn; so, after about twenty minutes of naval negotiations I found a secluded cove where the overarching branches of tall cottonwoods provided some much-needed shade, and there I ran the boat up onto the mud-caked beach of an islet where some other picnickers had recently left the remnants of a campfire and some seats made out of sections of sawn-off stumps rolled into a circle around it. Even these many years later my ears are deafened by the boat and its noisy wake, so I am relieved when the boy cuts the engine and hops down to tie the boat up to one of the uprooted willows—victim of last spring's flooding—scattered along the shoreline. When my passengers had gathered up food and drink and hopped down as well, I pulled the boat farther ashore and secured the knot. At last we were able to hear one another again and attend to our lunch: we all declared we were starving. The area around the campfire was a little more sandy than muddy, and there were still enough late morning shadows ensnared in the treetops here to make the breezeless air feel noticeably less stultifying. April produced a checkered tablecloth from the basket (that must have been at Mrs. Schwann's insistence; she had a genuine fondness for American traditions) and August distributed the sandwiches ("Chicken Waldorf," April said they were, "very fancy"), snacks, pickles, and drinks (we all immediately chose beer despite the early hour). It took a while longer for us to get settled—each one of us kept running back to the boat to retrieve items we had forgotten: sunglasses, a paperback Siddhartha I'd never get around to reading, flip-flops. Our ears still ringing, we said little and kept bumping into one another. And then— "Oh! Oh!" April shrieked, as if she'd been bitten by a mosquito, "I better swim before I eat. It's hot enough already. Don't you guys want to join me?" In a flash she cast off her canvas bag and discarded her culottes and top to reveal a figure fuller in the hips than I had expected; she ran into the water but ran back almost immediately when she found it to be too full of unidentifiable scum for her liking. She stayed down in the shallows a while, nevertheless, scouring the river-bottom for treasures she wouldn't find. In the meantime August and I had removed our shirts; I saw how much thinner and more hairless I was than he, prompting me to wonder again when if ever I might acquire a similarly manful physique. On his naked chest, in a thick patch of black-gold hairs, flashed his little cross; while talking his busy fingers would frequently touch or even rub it unconsciously, the way a primitive warrior might with his talisman. Not daring to risk being caught staring too long or sharply at him, I turned to the label on my blue and white can. As reading matter goes, it was less than spellbinding. I didn't tell August this would be only the second or third time I'd ever had a beer, or for that matter, anything else alcoholic, including my recent Bloody Mary; I had already fantasized that their family had wine in crystal goblets at every meal. So I tried to act disinterested as I snapped off the ring-tab on my can (girls would make necklaces of them in those days) and took a swig to equal the ones he had already begun gulping (I can state now that I obviously wasn't thinking about having to pilot the boat back home). Though I didn't much like the malty taste, I made a ridiculous face to show my approval and told him how good the lukewarm beer was.

"Thatta boy! Just what the good doctor ordered," August concurred, thumping me lustily on the back until I burped as modestly as I could. Despite that embarrassment—for I still couldn't admit to myself why—I liked the feel of his broad bare palm against my bare back, as briefly as it had alighted there. August spoke to me as if he were confiding a secret: "This is a little wicked of me and April. I suppose we shouldn't be corrupting anyone under the age of eighteen, but then again if I'm to be a priest I have to learn what it's like to serve alcohol—if only weak wine—to minors." He smiled at me; he had those uneven teeth, and that made it even easier to like and trust him.

April, returned wet and chastened, as well as empty-handed, bit into her sandwich and washed it down with a beer her brother handed her. She squinnied up her face in the dappled light, a little like a kitten's when it greets a sunbeam, and I was heartened to see she was growing a smile of her own. I had been afraid the unsatisfactory swimming might leave her in another cranky mood. We gulped down the rest of our food as if not one of us had eaten breakfast that morning, and likely they hadn't; their great-aunt had told me often enough that she was a very late riser, and I couldn't imagine her getting up at dawn to prepare waffles and omelets. We continued to neglect the Nehi and Diet Rite (the easterners called it "soda"), which Mrs. Schwann had probably insisted on packing. The warm yeasty beer was all we drank, and it was beginning to have a real effect on me, much more so than last Saturday's Bloody Mary, which I'd sipped very slowly; but once again, I tried to act like I was well-used to the stuff. The three of us were laughing a lot but not really saying much as we finished off our provisions. I was both relieved and glad that I'd apparently been able to make brother and sister so happy on our island paradise. Then, as soon as we had consumed every last one of the soft and buttery cookies, as if at a signal, all three of us fell back into the warm sand and luxuriated in the feeling one can only obtain with a belly full of food and alcohol, with the blood-red throbbing sun imprisoned on the inside of one's eyelids. How amusing they all look, down there on the driftwood-strewn beach.

And then. "God, I thought we'd never get so far away from Aunt Helga!" April commenced from somewhere to my left. "We've barely been out of her sight for days, and I think I'm going flipping crazy. Her and her telling me to do this and that in three languages. Fuck. All I've been wanting to do this week is hide from her. She just won't leave me alone. Once I had to lock myself in the bathroom for an hour, but she never even noticed. Sure, she loves August, he's always been her favorite because they're both full of such brainy horseshit." August tried to interpose his own views, but it was futile. "Oh, you know it's true, brother of mine! She's always on my case. Always. It's wrong, I know you'll both say, but I'm absolutely boiling with anger against her so much of the time. Last night she told me I should cut out the long-distance calls to my friends, they're too expensive. She told me I should write letters instead, the way she did at my age! What a crazy old bird. Notice I said 'bird,' when someone else might very well have said 'bitch.' "

I was a little shocked by this tirade; it had seemed to me that despite April's brief burst of invective outside the stationery store, both of them must be enjoying their first stay in years with their somewhat eccentric relative quite a lot; at least, they had showed no signs of such extreme exasperation or annoyance with her the night we'd spent together, and neither had they hinted of it since, at least not to this degree. When I'd listened to April complaining about her aunt being too economical the evening before, I had taken it as just the sort of thing people of our generation always said about our elders. It hadn't occurred to me that she really might despise her great-aunt. I raised myself up on my elbows to address both of them. "Sorry for saying this, but if you don't mind, I think she's a wonderful person," I said, my wishy-washy sense of chivalry emboldened by the beer.

"We love her dearly, in fact," August pronounced on my right, without a second's delay. Condemning his sister with a look, he let forth a very audible sigh—or covert belch—behind the hand he'd raised politely to his lips. Then he pitched his voice higher, just in case any of us wasn't listening. "April should watch her tongue and remember that we're our aunt's guests. And Helga's been incredibly patient with us, when I know she ordinarily treasures her privacy above all things. Besides that, she has a lot on her mind with keeping the store afloat since Great-Uncle Lemuel passed away. That's been harder on her than she admits. Posey, you should be terribly ashamed."

"Well, Futzie, angel darling, I am not! She told me I should try to be a more patient person, can you fucking believe that? And then she told me that I'm careless or heartless or something like that, I don't know what the foreign word meant exactly, and that my wanting to make a career in music was a dangerous decision in today's world. Can you believe it? Those were her exact words—'a dangerous decision, Liebling.' If I didn't have to love her, I'd hate her, I really would. 'A dangerous decision'—scheisse!" She had made a rather poor attempt at imitating her Aunt Helga's withered Weimar-era intonation. Through increasingly misty eyes I watched the girl get up from where she lay in the sand and start stomping up and down along the shoreline, flailing her skinny arms. Now that I am older I can see that she was probably drunker than either of her male companions was at the time. Either she had been drinking faster or her stick-figure body could handle it even less than mine.

August passed me another beer, my third one, and winked at me. "She hates being criticized, always has," he said, and popped another can open for himself. "Posey!" he called to her as she tripped over a tree-root in a hurry to get away. "This is an incredibly rude display of immaturity before our host. You better take a recess and reflect upon your moral conduct." At the time, it struck me as somewhat peculiar how paternalistic if not to say elderly a posture August kept striving to project, and strikes me now as even more peculiar, though I suppose it all had something to do with being the big brother and his hoping to be a clergyman who would wish for his future congregation to take such a young man seriously. I can't really remember if I was more ashamed for April then or more startled by August's rather magisterial tone: everything was magnified by the alcohol. At some point I was back up on my feet, running after April to tell her it was all right; I hadn't meant to make any excuses for her great-aunt's prickly nit-picking. But there was no reason for me to run—April had merely gone to sit under the boat's awning, pouting over her latest beer. I wish I could say I found her in tears or maybe laughing hysterically, because that would have been more dramatic. But she was doing neither, just idly kicking her bare muddy feet against the aluminum cooler she sat upon and watching me from under her very pale eyelashes as I approached. "You must think August and I are terrible people, always fighting like this," she said as I came to sit down beside her. I didn't know where August had gone, but I can see him now, going back into the trees, probably to relieve himself and maybe to poke around a little.

"You should hear me and my brothers and sisters," I told her. "Except we're never arguing about anything interesting or important; we're just arguing. At least you and August have intelligent things to say to one another."

She barked out a caustic little laugh at that. "We're not always so brilliantly witty," she said, self-deprecatingly. "I just get irritated because he's so holier-than-thou, you know, top of his class, the perfect altar boy and all that malarky—but, boy oh boy, the things I could tell you!" And then she pulled back on her own reins and changed her tone, looking down on her smooth, flat little belly. "Just look at that," she said, rubbing herself over her bellybutton, above the waistband of her lacy bikini bottom; I saw there were whirls of fine golden hair there—I don't think I had ever looked at a girl so closely, even my own so-called steady girlfriend. "I'm already starting to burn!" she said, pressing down with her palm on her stomach. When she raised her hand back up she noticed the white palm-sized print she had left on the reddened skin of her abdomen. "Here, put your hand there and see," she commanded, and though I began to shrink away, she seized my wrist and pressed the palm of my right hand directly over where her palm had just lain. Her warm soft skin felt as if there were a small fire ignited within her. For a moment she held my hand there—an interminable, humiliating moment—and then pushed my hand away again. "There, you see," she said, pointing to where the epidermis was now strangely pale. "Didn't you feel how hot my tum is? Now you can definitely see how burnt I am. I should have put on more Coppertone."

I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what she wanted me to say. I felt dizzy and a lot more excited than I wanted to let on. Was she wanting me to be her boyfriend? I thought, naively, conceitedly. I looked into her eyes for an answer, but just as quickly she turned away—and then I saw to my intense relief that August was approaching the boat. "Hey," he hollered up to us, "don't go into the jungle. The bugs will eat you alive. What have you two lovebirds been talking about here?"

"Nothing," we both said simultaneously, and now that he was shinnying up onto the boat he looked at us a little more suspiciously than he should have. Of course he had only been joking, but I was so embarrassed that I stood up and started blathering something about the weather and this year's flood levels. As I blathered on I noticed that August kept watching his baby sister, as if something in her facial gestures or bodily movements might reveal more about what we really had been saying or doing.

Before I knew it I was jackknifed over the stern of the boat, retching into the water below. August was at my side in another moment—from here in the future I can see that April had instantly vanished into the woods despite August's fears—helping me stand up straight again and leading me a few steps over to the padded bench to sit down in the shade. He plopped down beside me, threw a comradely arm across my shoulder—that seemed sunburnt as well—and told me to just close my eyes and breathe, and most of all not to think. He gave my neck a short friendly rub and laughed. For some reason, for every reason, I relished his friendly touch and laughter, but I don't think I told myself I did at the time. "Feeling any better, Denny, me boy-o?" he almost whispered, brushing sand off me, and next I sensed his fingers lightly tracing vertebrae from the nape of my neck on down for a second or two before giving me another slap on the back for good measure.

With that, I relaxed and let a loud belch escape my lungs, not trying to suppress it as I had earlier. "A little," I lied, for I was still feeling the waves rising and falling inside me as I leaned further back in my seat. The day had grown even more sultry, and I wished I could melt into sleep then and there. It would be nice, I was thinking, just to put my head on August's wet warm lap and sink into oblivion. If I heard right, I think I heard my younger self groan, halfway between pain and pleasure.

"Going to live, aren't we?" August asked. He remained close by my side, his hand massaging my blistering knee. (I told myself that didn't mean a thing, though my opinion has changed.)

"Now I am. Sorry about all the fuss," I apologized from somewhere within my woozy self.

"Happens to the best of us—must be a bit of seasickness after the boat-ride. Don't blame yourself. At least you didn't force yourself to do it."

"No... Oh, right. You sure April is going to be okay?"

"Don't worry about my prima donna of a sister and her tantrums, she'll be fine," August assured me, when he saw me opening my eyes, anyway, to see if she might be coming back. "Close your eyes, now, close your eyes, keep them closed tight, tighter," he chanted as if repeating commands from the holy mass, "it'll help the spinning." He leaned his long body back, too, alongside mine, and I was very aware of the heat coming off his body, as well as his eye-smarting deodorant: Rite Guard, and too much of it, same as with all the boys in every locker room I had ever known. "Posey—April—gets into these moods," he continued, "and it's all our mother's fault, not Aunt Helga's, really. Don't tell her I told you this, but Mother's the one who's told everyone she's not quite good enough to be a first-class opera singer. Church choirs or musicals, certainly, but not Aida or Butterfly or whatever mezzos get into. Consequently she wants Posey to do something more practical. Or better yet something impractical like get married. Actually, I think Mother is just afraid of her getting hurt or disappointed out in the real world. Hey, she isn't likely to run into a snake back in there, is she? Any quicksand?"

"Maybe a cottonmouth," I said, wishing I could go look for her. In spite of it all, I hadn't felt so conflicted when April had been this close to me. In equal measure I wanted to get away from August and to let August lead me anywhere. I did neither by joking around. "Or she might come face-to-face with another giant gator up from Louisiana. Quicksand is just a hoax, they say, but you never know. Still, don't worry, she'll survive—probably the most she'll be attacked by is the mosquitoes and chiggers, the way you were."

"In that case," said her brother, "let's leave her to her own demise. I wanted to get a chance to talk with you alone, anyway."

This time I did reopen my eyes and looked, not into his eyes, as I had hoped, but into the double reflection of myself within his smoked-glass lenses. I looked tiny and insignificant. He gave myself no more than a momentary glance, anyway, before raising his stubbled chin to the striped tarpaulin over our heads. When he at last removed his sunglasses, in the becoming peach-colored shadow of the awning, I decided then and there that he was the better looking of the Schwann siblings, after all. It was always pleasing to me when I, the kind of person other people usually overlook, was told someone wanted especially to talk to me alone. Maybe we were going to get around to discussing my poetry, if he had gotten around to reading any of it. "I'm afraid I'm only passably engaging when I've injected a lot of caffeine or alcohol into my system," I said, trying to sound as educated as he did. "You probably thought I was a pretty excitable guy last week."

"On the contrary," he said—and I am always a sucker for people who say "on the contrary" when I denigrate myself, which was often in those days. "On the contrary, you're pretty calm compared to some of the dudes I used to hang out with. Believe it or not, I used to be a pretty wild guy in my faraway youth, I mean I was barely fourteen, running around with a bunch of other long-haired pill-popping freaks back in Philly, and it took the seminary to save me, knock some sense into me—I least I thought it would, and it did for a few months. Dennis, Denny, Den, you set me to thinking, and so I've got to come clean. Last week at Aunt Helga's you talked about being fed up with all religions, and that means maybe you've got less trouble defining yourself than I have lately. You see, these past few months at the seminary have been pretty rough on me, and last May I ended up dropping out, at least until I can get my act back together. The trouble is, I think I may really have quit believing in God, and that's tough on someone who is—or was—going to be a priest."

"A theological crisis, like April was talking about?" I asked, thinking then that was something that could only happen to a select few, most of them nineteenth century romantics or twentieth-century existentialists, but never to anyone I might meet.

August sighed and gave me another chummy pat on my shoulder—it hurt a little more this time; I had indeed gotten a dose of sunburn while lying on the beach. "If only I could ennoble it with a label like that," he said. "It's so complicated! Do you think it's possible to simultaneously believe and not believe in God, or a God?"

"As someone leaning toward agnosticism, I can't even be sure of that. I just feel ignorant pretty much all the time about what might be up there" —I pointed to the sky— "or down there" —and I pointed to the hull beneath our feet. Preposterous gestures.

"Well, I could be an atheist like Aunt Helga sooner than I could be an agnostic, Denny. I've got to have definite answers, and I have to make firm commitments. Maybe God, if He exists, doesn't want me on his team."

"Maybe just trying to believe is enough, it makes us human, whether there's any deity or not." Without really meaning to, I was staring at the little golden crucifix about his neck that shook upon his chest-hairs whenever he laughed, and there was just enough alcohol or simple fearlessness left in my bloodstream to encourage me to playfully press the tips of two fingers of my right hand upon it, down onto the top of his heavily perspiring sternum. Curiously, the metal was cold even in this heat, but I imagined I felt the hot throb of a vein beneath where I had pressed for a mere two seconds. I snatched my fingers away as if they had received an electric shock, at any rate, and uttered something inconsequential. Within an hour I had touched first the sister and then the brother. Once involuntarily, and now this. To my disappointment but also I suppose relief, August merely giggled and said he was ticklish. Obviously, my touch, cautious as it was, had meant nothing more to him than a fly's. For a minute neither of us said anything, just stared across the dull brownish-green expanse of the sluggishly flowing slough. August continued to take pensive sips of his Michelob. I have to admit that I was confused and intrigued by this man of the cloth who seemed about as decisive as Hamlet; I had grown to consider all clerics from the lowliest snake-handling preacher to the Pope to be either zealots or despots, with little in between. This was my period of reading apostate fragments of Voltaire and Nietzsche, when I was taking a break from my modern poets, and if I was crazy, I generally considered all the world crazier still. When I was feeling hopeful I called myself a pessimist; at other times you wouldn't want to know. "Maybe you should just quit the seminary for good, then, if you think you'd make a rotten priest," I said at last, a bit cruelly, and stood up to start straightening the things the siblings had scattered across the boat while getting the picnic ready. It upset me a little, I suppose, to find the sort of person I might have gone to for spiritual reassurance was more messed up than myself. At least I wasn't a screwed-up Catholic and my parents hadn't insisted I go back to our church. Deep down inside, I was probably more disturbed that he had all but ignored me when I'd touched him, if only through the conductive gold of what I considered no more than a good-luck charm.

He rose to help me, and began picking up the last of the utensils and napkins he and his sister had dropped. "I can't really leave the seminary for good," he stated with no discernible emotion. "I have too many friends and too much of a past there now, it's my home, it's my haven, and yet I'm afraid to go back. I wish I could be as young as you again and maybe have made a few different choices in my life." Looking at them together—the young man just twenty-two or so and the boy nearly eighteen—it strikes me as outlandish that the elder of the two should consider himself separated by such a wide gulf in years from the younger. We tend to forget how a small disparity in age can seem nearly insurmountable when we are so young. But even at the time I noticed, as I had before, how prematurely "mature" and "wise" August appeared to be, or wanted to be mistaken for being. "Here comes Posey," he concluded, "so please don't tell her what we've been talking about. She torments me for being 'too deep.' "

As he spoke the girl came trotting across the sand, flapping her hands all around her head and body—making a show of being pursued by insect life. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" we heard her shouting as she slapped at her shoulders and thighs. But she was laughing, too, and so soon were we. "They nearly flew off with me in their nasty little jaws!" she told us as she approached the boat. "And all I wanted was to find the ladies' room." I was glad to see that she was in a good humor about it all, especially after the mood we had last seen her in, although she did indeed appear to have been feasted upon by a variety of gnats, mosquitos, or flies—her skin had erupted in a mass of gooseflesh-like bumps, and there were bloody marks on her arms where she had either been attacked by thorny bushes or scratched her bites until they bled. "There's lotion in my bag," she said, tossing it up onto the floor of the boat. "You would have thought the insect repellant could have worked better, though. Damn you, Dennis, you should have told us this place is hell for non-natives. I think they could smell my tender young Atlantic-coast flesh. Now, have you two been talking about me, or haven't you?"

"Yes," and "No," August and I said, respectively, at the same time. August added, "And it was really boring, because he made me tell him your life story."

"Oh, really?" she said, settling herself onto the deck of the boat and starting to search her bag. I could tell she thought it must be because I was interested in her in some way, and she was either flattered or alarmed. "Here it is. So, Dennis, did you get up to the part where I kicked my junkie boyfriend to the curb and I told our mother to go to hell?"

"Posey, please," August told her, "Dennis doesn't need us to air all your soiled laundry."

"Would you rather have me air your dirty drawers, you futzy old futz?"

"Why don't I untie the boat and start the engine?" I cut in, and danced around the boat until the necessary preparations were made. This time it took twice as long to revive the engine, and I was sweating and swearing without shame by the time I got the boat going. August and April had to jump down and push to get the pontoon off the sand, and then jump back on again, yelling at each other the whole time, but I think they enjoyed the physical and verbal commotion. Once back in the deeper waters of the main channel we sliced through the waves, this time taking a quicker, more straightforward route back south to the marina, and though we occasionally yelled to one another above the roar, none of us heard any replies that made sense. The sun was hotter than ever now, but the freshwater spray and even fresher wind in our faces made us all feel remarkably less overheated, even a trifle chilly at times. Nevertheless, it was with a sense of great relief that I pulled the boat back along its pier and got my passengers safely back onto dry land. Whenever one has spent even only part of the day going down a river at a high speed, one feels either exhilarated or exhausted, and this day, after my new intimacy with each sibling, I felt a mix of both. They thanked me and I found myself telling them I would get them into the Arion for free the next night they found themselves with nothing to do, although I knew Mr. Moore, jolly as he was, would frown on this were he to find out. August and April said they would love to, even though I'd neglected to tell them what the coming week's movie would be, and we parted a little happier with one another, as if those intense discussions and awkward moments we had shared back on that out-of-the-way island had never happened, could never have happened, at least to them—for that island had permanently vanished. Not until later did I remember that August still hadn't said anything to me about my poems, and I began wondering and worrying, naturally, if that was on purpose. Were they so bad as to be better off not mentioned at all? There is nothing quite like the monomaniacal self-doubt of the seventeen-year-old poetaster.

It had been another stiflingly hot and humid day, as it seemed all the summers of my youth were, so I was more than happy to get back into the air-conditioned theater just before six the next Wednesday evening, when I had given up on the elaborate vicissitudes of Matthew Arnold's soul-searching and come seeking simpler occupations at work. But the people I worked with nearly every day seemed different—or else I was. The midweek girl at the box office, whom I had once convinced myself I had something of a fleeting crush on and still flirted with quite often, thinking she liked the attention, looked surly that day—maybe it was the heat—so I avoided her; the new and the novel, namely April, captivated me much more. Oh, what was that bespectacled, froggy-voiced girl's name? After all these years I am ashamed to say I don't remember it, although she was a drum majorette and a singer in the sophomore class choir, just behind me at school, and she remained within my sight many of my working hours. And my ushers that night—one's name was Skip, but who was the other, the blond? It wasn't Bobby or the other one; I could only remind myself how I had never talked to them about anything more than insipid things, adolescent things like rock music and the movies playing inside, nothing like the intense, bookish conversations I had already had with August, whom I had known for less than ten days. Besides, I always suspected they too called me "pansy" behind my back because it was known that I wrote poetry and avoided sport. Whatever their opinions of me, both ushers barely gave me a nod as they rushed about their business that evening. There was another girl at the concession stand—the short-legged big-boned older junior college student in gypsy braids and hoop earrings called Callie—whom I tried cracking jokes with as I went about my duties, but she seemed in a bad mood like everyone else (maybe it was the prolonged heat wave, after all) and ignored me. Even merry Mr. Moore, ordinarily such a self-amused and congenial man, was short with me and the rest of the staff as he issued orders and established treaties with feuding employees. I was hoping he wouldn't be around when the highly noticeable Schwanns walked in, coolly expecting to be shooed past the usher designated as that evening's ticket-taker. When they had not shown up after the first show had let out and the new one had already begun, I assumed they had decided the tedious action movie we were showing, something that had probably passed the Northeastern Corridor by in a wink, wasn't worth even a free viewing. Indeed, I had already told the girl up front that she could start totting up our receipts and rolling up quarters when August and April sauntered in at last. The girl gave them a quick, knowing look over the top of her granny glasses, instantly classifying them as Not From Our World. (Could her name have been Deborah, Debbie, Deb? yes, that's it—Deb Shields.)

In turn I gave Deb a look she recognized as meaning it was friends or relatives I was doing a favor, and she in turn signaled to Skip further down the lobby that he should wave these two on when they approached his courtly purple ropes. We had played this game enough times to accomplish it all with barely a wink or word. The siblings appeared to recognize the pantomime and walked by silently so as not to attract more attention than they already had, should there be anyone else about who was not in on our little ruse. I hurried over to open the big double-doors for them, and before I led them to a seat (the long and loud opening credits had just ended) whispered that it was good to see them. "It's an awfully juvenile movie, you'll probably think," I prevaricated in my most would-be jaded tone. "You probably won't like it much, but try to think of it as a window onto America's dying cultural wasteland." Obviously, even though I hope my tone was meant to be satiric, I was influenced by the arts columnists I read in weekly news magazines.

(How wonderful to be back among the rows of worn and scratchy corduroy-upholstered seats again! The Chiclets and Red Hots boxes scattered about, the gum stuck to the floor, the popcorn ground beneath the heel, the zombie-like concentration of an audience happily willing to be victimized by Hollywood. I remember well those seashell-like sconces on the walls, and the little dusty lights behind their grilles at ankle-level, and the cola-stained carpet runner, and between every seat the heavy-lidded ashtrays that opened up when you pressed a lever to reveal small wells in which to rub out your cigarette or deposit your burnt-out matches. The corduroy smelled like stale tobacco, and there were plenty of burn-holes in the armrests. When one comes back unannounced into the past like this, one realizes how much has really changed, all things considered, in our modern world.)

"Hey, baby, I think Burt Reynolds is dynamite," April objected to my critique, giving me a jab in the ribcage. "I hope he takes off his shirt and shows off that hunka-dunka chest of his." I think she was being serious.

"Shh, Posey," August hissed, and allowed me to find a good seat for them—which wasn't difficult, considering there were only about a dozen people in the audience. Since the girls up in the lobby would be busy flirting with the ushers and closing down shop for the night, I stayed in the seat next to them for a while to watch the convoluted car chase I'd already seen more than enough times to memorize every zoom shot and extreme closeup.

"How's your aunt?" I asked, keeping my volume low and professional.

August, who was just beginning to take shape again as my eyes became readjusted to the darkness, cleared his throat and replied, "Getting tired of tolerating just the two of us, I'm afraid. She's hoping you'll come up again after the show."

After just a few days, or was it already over a week, I already felt like I was familial enough with them to become part of their routine; I had never been summoned into Mrs. Schwann's presence more than two or three times a month. "Sure," I said, "and if you can wait around while I lock up, we can go up together. But do you really mind me horning in on your time with her?"

"Posey and I are fighting over who gets the bigger chunk of you," he whispered. "We need an outsider to keep the balance. And Helga needs to be kept amused."

Now it was Posey's turn to shush us as Mr. Reynolds stepped out of his racing car, and following quickly after, an actress whose name has been lost not just by me but also by public consciousness. When I got back to the lobby I saw that my ushers had already left—skipping out early as they were wont to do—and Callie, the junior college hippie chick (a species that already seemed dated by the mid-seventies), was polishing her counter in preparation to go home herself. "New buddies, Dennis, my love?" she asked. "Patty and Deb and I not good enough for you anymore?" She flipped one of her thick orange braids back seductively behind her ear as she spoke.

I am surprised to see that back then my smile could also be so quick and yet so coy. "Sort of, I guess," I answered, helping myself to some of the leftover popcorn inside her machine. (The remainders were sometimes soggy, sometimes savory.) "I'm just showing them around town and stuff, is all."

Callie, I remember, could be as tactless as she was short and freckled. "They look kind of stuck-up to me," she said, making another of her snap judgments. Her dangly earrings shook. "If you don't mind me saying so. I bet they think we're awful kooky-crazy like Green Acres. Where are they from—somewhere out east? I heard them talking to each other and they've got those bizarro accents, and her shoes and earrings are way out of my league, so I bet they're rich, too. You probably won't be hanging with the old crowd anymore, will you, Den-Den, baby?"

I was a little amused by Callie's critical evaluation and also a little taken aback that she thought I hung out with any crowd at all, as if I were more popular than I really was—but she was a kind of 'bizarro' (borrowing that exaggerated term she used frequently) young woman herself, and unless I am mistaken she was from one of a very few Christian Scientists families in town. Once she had given me a Mary Baker Eddy tract that I was polite enough to read part of and question her about. Because of that, I think, she thought I was a nice guy she could be free to speak her mind around. Still, since she was ages older than I, she couldn't have known me as well as some of my actual classmates who worked at the theater did.

"Come on, you know-it-all," I said, knowing I was supposed to be teasing her in return. That was just the way we employees killed time. "They don't speak much different from us, just faster and with more words, and they're only in town for a few weeks, so I'm trying my best to help them have a good experience." As if this were an actual hardship!
"Well," she concluded, slamming shut the heavy cash register drawer with a little mechanical ding, "they must be pretty fed up with what we've got to offer. At least you're having a good time—your eyes lit right up when they traipsed through the front door. Didn't think I'd see that, did you? And then you followed them inside, I bet laughing at us hicks like hyenas, all of you. What are they, better than us? Just send us a card, will ya, when you run off to the big city with them." She paused to catch her breath and lock the register. "And by the way, I noticed how she looked at you—bet she could eat you alive!" Not true at all. How dare she pretend to understand so much?

"I'll try my best not to forget you, Callie," I said, pretending not to have heard the last thing she'd said and tamping down my annoyance with her—why was anyone the least bit "different" in this town considered some sort of threat or weirdo? To think this was coming from Callie, of all people, who maybe because she wasn't a "normal" Protestant or Catholic was rumored to be into witchcraft and magic mushrooms. If August and April were considered strange by people like her, what then did the town think of me? "Good night, Callie," I said with unaccustomed decisiveness, moving away.

"Tell that foxy babe I want those bad-ass shoes," she said behind my back as I walked away—and I am sorry to report that I had barely even noticed April's shoes, let alone could remember them today.

The two out-of-towners stayed behind in the lobby as I hurried to complete my itinerary in record time so I could join them. Just as I expected they would, August had hated the movie and April had loved it—or said she did; I suspected she was only used to taking the contrary position to August's every opinion. Neither of them appeared to look with any favor upon my workplace, though they cooed softly over the funny outdated decor and shopworn furnishings. I expect they were used to much grander venues. At any rate, they both appeared fatigued, and so I saw it was imperative to get them back to their aunt's and be careful to resist the temptation to stay too late this time.

We strolled back out into the cicada-accompanied night, and now that we were alone under a ripe rosy moon and feeling a little more enlivened, both of them began exclaiming more excitedly about the theater and how like something out of our grandparents' heyday it was—they used that awful word "quaint"—and how very like a museum exhibit it was, how "absolutely perfect" it was for this incredibly strange place they had found themselves in. For a moment or two I came close to feeling a bit hurt or insulted, as if they were scoffing at me as well as the community, but then they both assured me that as much as they (especially April) might talk about being dissatisfied with this or that, they actually liked everything about my hometown, they wouldn't change a thing; the theater and the town both were a good antidote to their jaded lives in the bland suburbs, among people who had long since stopped noticing their surroundings or caring what made them interesting or unique. "I wish I could see Philadelphia," I told them, "because I'm sure I could find lots to do there. Everything is always the same around here."

They laughed at my naiveté, as if there wasn't a thing to do in the entire state of Pennsylvania. I was mildly astonished that August was kidding around as much as his sister, who was generally the more cynical one, but he explained himself by saying, "What I like—or liked—about being in the seminary was getting away from always worrying about what to do; everything and everyone there has a purpose; if you keep your head, there are no opportunities for misdirection. You spend a lot of time praying, but you never get restless or bored, they say. Until you do get bored. It took me years to get used to it all, if I ever did." He had paused before the flower shop window, looking at the flanks of cut roses in their vats, his face made ugly and tinted green by the neon sign above. He seemed lost in his thoughts as his voice trailed off, fogging the glass as he contemplated the quiet half-darkness within. April had wandered a bit farther down the street to evaluate the latest fashions—that must have seemed pretty passé to a worldly girl such as herself—in the window of Mundt's Shoe Haven. I saw that she had lit a cigarette, something her great-aunt probably didn't allow her to do indoors. Although I hated when my parents lit up, something about the smoke drifting down the sidewalk and curling up into my nose was vaguely erotic. She continued floating down the pavement, so I turned back to August, who remained frozen before the cellophane-wrapped bouquets.

"You ought to go back to the seminary, then," I said, not really desiring him to do so at all, "and see if you can believe again. It must be pretty important for you to find out. Aren't the Jesuit brothers or whatever helpful, don't they care?" I suppose I was at least half responsible for altering our previously amiable mood.

He spoke, not looking at me: "If only it were easy to go back! Things happened there, I'll have to face up to a lot if I ever return. Damn, I was stupid. I fear I hurt people as much there as I did running crazy in the streets. Who knows if I can be forgiven. I've been pretty miserable, if you must know, my friend..." And then he did turn away from the glass to me, and I saw what might have been tears welling in his eyes. Or maybe that was just a trick of the garish multicolored light. "Sorry. I don't mean to involve you in all this. I like you, Dennis. You're a good guy, I know. Thanks for being a good listener. That means a lot to me at this time of my life."

I didn't know what to say, although I might have said a lot. August leaned against the florist's window, his back against the pane, and fumbled in the pocket of his baggy linen shorts for something to wipe his face—acting as if it was just the sweat, though I wondered if it was to stop the water in his eyes from overflowing. I hated being called "a good listener" at that age—I would have preferred hearing that people enjoyed listening to me. Dull people listen, I thought, that was about all they could do well. I looked down the empty street as August and I stood there in graceless silence. He had closed his eyes, rocking shoulders against the glass slowly, thinking deeply or maybe just sleepy. I just remained in place, looking at a showy memorial wreath, ready for a funeral the next day, on the floor of the shop behind him. April was out of sight, not even a trace of her mentholated smoke on the breeze; she was probably already on her way up in the elevator. Obviously she was giving us space to talk. But what could I say? I wish I could have kicked my younger self, because August was so clearly waiting for me to make some kind of move. What kind? I couldn't say then or now. At last all I found to ask was, "Didn't you have any friends there?"

He emerged only partially out of his trance. "What? In the seminary? Yes, one or two very close ones, guys who were sort of lost or mixed-up like me. Oh, don't ask!" August carefully folded his damp bandanna into quarters before returning it to his back pocket, probably in the way he had been taught to as a boy, and I remember thinking then that despite how superannuated he was always trying to appear, he was very much a lonely little boy in some ways—lonelier even than me. "You might say I got a little too attached to someone there, because we had so much in common—but leave it at that. Please don't ask me anything more, Denny, mein Freund. Oh, why does the body have to get in the way of enlightenment? Know what I mean? Never mind, listen, we better get going." Giving one last look at the floral display on the other side of the glass, he turned away with a certain awkward hostility, and started walking fast down the sidewalk, avoiding my eyes.

I saw that my opportunity—to do or say what?—had passed as quickly as it had come, just like before, and so I followed August back to the department store; April was standing there like a sullen Eve in the garden, among the ferns and sun-mottled snake plants of the small private entryway in the back, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray there. She huffed away the last of her smoke and looked at me with her astigmatic squint, as if she sensed somehow that I had wounded her brother—deep down, I realized again, she could be very protective. "Thought you'd never catch up," was all she said, however. We all three got in the elevator and rode up in silence.

As soon as we entered Mrs. Schwann's parlor I felt the tension in the air between her and her charges; it didn't take much intuition to guess that she had been arguing earlier that day with one or both of them and the experience was taking a toll on her. I was wondering how they were all going to make it through the next couple of weeks as I took my usual hard-bottomed chair and nodded enthusiastically at the offer of coffee and eclairs. For the first evening since I'd known her, the old lady looked tired and drawn, although she tried to hide it with upbeat small talk; she wanted to know all about the movie (of course she wasn't the least bit interested) and more about our boat-ride and how my writing was going, as well as offering lots of advice on where I could take her charges next. Although the rest of us answered all her many questions at length, her weariness seemed to be contagious, despite the potent coffee. She kept lapsing into German, which none of us could really understand, of course, and then punctuating her enquiries with antagonizing reversions to her schoolgirl French. (That was always a sure sign that she was becoming fed up with les Américains.) It soon became apparent that none of us belonging to the younger set had anything particularly scintillating to impart that evening: April talked a lot about the latest colors and cuts, one of the few interests she shared in kind with her aunt, who after all was a clothes-seller; and August brought up exaggerated items of cultural contrast between Iowa and Pennsylvania ("Only the Amish could be the same here," he theorized), which succeeded in diverting us all temporarily; but I was mostly silent, afraid of fueling their interpretation of me as being too earnest or, worse, of trying to sound too cultured, when even I knew I wasn't but would pretend to be if given the chance. Nevertheless, I did attempt to relate the plot of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, which I had only begun reading, taking another much-needed break from Matthew Arnold, but August gave me a curious look when I mentioned the hypocrisies of the Church and, recognizing my mistake, I abruptly changed the subject to Hemingway (whom I knew nothing of beyond my tenth-grade reading of The Old Man and the Sea) before giving up altogether. After about an hour of this kind of pointless discourse—it was past midnight, after all—Mrs. Schwann yawned significantly and told us all that we were free to stay up conversing as late as we liked, but she must get some "shuts-eyes," as she always innocently mispronounced it. She had been up earlier than usual, making calls to elusive distributors and uncivil bank officers, she explained. But before she could even rise from her armchair I was out of my own seat, saying I had to help my father do something first thing in the morning (I didn't specify) and therefore must run, as it was many blocks back to my house. Feeble protests were murmured, but I was out of there within three minutes, and it wasn't until I was back again on the pavement that I realized I hadn't made any actual further plans with my new friends. Oh well, I thought to myself with a halfhearted sigh, let them track me down if they really want to see me, if they truly did like me. For once, I see, I felt more like being the pursued, rather than the constant pursuer.

On my walk back uphill toward home and bed, I tried to examine or parse reasons why the younger Schwanns had come to mean so much to me in just a few days' time: in all honesty, we didn't know each other that well and often only had that kind of repartee strangers can have with one another after becoming too familiar too soon. No question, if they knew me better, really knew me, I convinced myself, they wouldn't like me any more than most people liked me these days; in fact, I was a little afraid that the more they got to know me, the less they would like, the more unappealing I would seem to them. Even seem an oddball, as I had been called by classmates more than a few times. But then I allowed there was something a bit odd about the pair of them, too, and in their native environment maybe they fit in as uncomfortably as I did in this small town. What was odd? I couldn't quite put my finger on it, because on the surface they must look normal, at least by east-coast standards; they just didn't quite add up, I guessed—they were odd in ways too odd for me, someone who had traveled very little and knew few people from elsewhere, to be able to pinpoint and label those oddities. Maybe in time I would learn. In the meantime, for better or worse, I had to live in my old familiar world, as well—like it or not, there was my old unlovable house up ahead, the tremulous yellow light on the porch either a warning or a beacon, and so, with no sound alternatives available, I trudged forward, as much as I didn't ever want to open the front door yet again and go up the dark stairs to my crowded and increasingly foreign little room at the top.

Despite any misgivings, over the next couple of weeks I did in fact see all of the Schwanns more and more frequently; after our boat trip I felt I had passed the crowning test, it seems in retrospect, and they now fully accepted me as a player in their own private and sometimes careless games. Once in a while Mrs. Schwann herself asked me over after work, and we sat around drinking coffee and discoursing amiably about this or that, as we had done that first night together, and other times I received messages at the theater from April or August, to either meet them at such-and-such a place the next day, or to come down to the public park immediately after I locked up, so we could sit on the benches there and watch the midnight passage of a tourist steamboat, with its colored lanterns swaying on the decks and old-fashioned calliope echoing across the water, or just to observe the bolide showers of August, when the falling stars seemed to meet their reflections in the black water below. There was an unspoken sort of agreement that neither brother or sister should call me at home or try to come over to my house; I think they came to see as clearly as I did how disillusioning that might be for all of us. Mrs. Jurgen had, I discovered, taken the California Zephyr to visit her grandchildren out west and again left her car at the Schwanns' disposal. Although Mrs. Schwann had forewarned us that we shouldn't take advantage of her friend's generosity, April and August and I would drive aimlessly around the streets of my hometown with some abrasive top forty on the radio and sometimes out onto the narrow blacktop or gravel roads that criss-crossed cornfields and circumscribed quarries. Often we would stop to explore little backwoods churches or desolate pioneer cemeteries (even April, who professed to hate tales of yesteryear, was intrigued by the many short life-spans and German elegies inscribed upon the weathered gravestones) or search in ditches for weed-choked markers denoting the advances and retreats over a century before of Chief Black Hawk and his doomed tribe. Other times we would just drive as fast as we could through tiny depopulated towns, hee-hawing along with Loretta or Porter on a local country station. We seemed to be forever looking for a fun new "down-home" place to eat, and between lengthy excursions returned to Hansen's more than once—I was no longer so reticent about sipping my drinks or Mrs. Schwann picking up the tab—and other times some combination of the three of them and myself would have lunch at a cheap little diner in town or in some little-traveled wayside of the county. August raved about what he called "the local flavor," by which I don't mean just the food, and April enjoyed making wisecracks about the farmers and fishermen who habituated such places. When Mrs. Schwann did join us, she would insist like a good carnivore that her relatives try something like the crappie fillets or authentic homemade bratwurst or "loose meats," and then over our meal regale us with historical anecdotes about the environs that even I had never heard. (April was likely to grow glassy-eyed at such times, or try to change the subject to something about celebrities or fashion, but August always remained alert enough to ask his aunt questions, even when I could tell he was often no more interested than April was.) As a naturalized citizen, Mrs. Schwann cared far more about her adopted land than I did in those days, before I went away and began to miss my home state like a lover I'd been forced to abandon. Sometimes we ran into people I knew, and I might be forced to make awkward introductions, but those times were rare, since more often when people saw me attempting to "rise above my station" like this, they turned away as if they hadn't seen me—even members of my own family. While the Schwanns were at my side, I didn't care, but later, alone in my room, I would be racked by a kind of shame or regret I had never known before. But those moments were short compared to the many happy hours I spent with the Schwanns, and they seemed to enjoy my company—at least the comic relief and occasional sounding-board I provided—almost as much as I enjoyed being with them. And still, even at the height of my happiness, I was secretly assailed by nagging fears of losing them so soon—maybe forever.

One midweek morning when I had nothing else to do and assumed it would be another day or two before I saw any of my new friends, I decided to walk up the old main road that rose hill by hill on its way north to Minnesota (a route which had been superseded by a new freeway not far west) to a little park set amid a grove of black walnuts high on a bluff overlooking a particularly wide and winding section of the Mississippi. Yes, I remember this day and that place well! It was such a quiet and removed spot, especially where the ground was bare and cracked under the walnuts, that I always knew I'd be unlikely to be bothered by anyone there—I had August's book in my backpack, so I could sit and read while admiring the view, along with my notepad and a few snacks. The way was steep and the road long, but I didn't mind when I was getting a rare chance to get away from the people and traffic and cares of that town and theater I was leaving behind, at least for a few unagitated hours. Although I could have borrowed one of my brothers' bicycles (my own had rusted-out gears, so I was saving up for a new one), I wanted to take things slow and appreciate the fine weather, now that the heatwave had at last receded, and think about some lines I was attempting to write in the style—although I never would have owned up to it at the time—of Mr. Arnold. How very presumptuous of you, young man. Obviously, I was hoping to win August's admiration and maybe even his great-aunt Helga's. This was the first poem I had attempted since the Schwann siblings had come on the scene; caught up in their dazzling and complicated lives (well, more dazzling and complicated than anyone else's I'd known), I had neglected my own inner life. But lately August kept saying he was hoping to read something new, and so I was dutiful, even though we hadn't yet had a real chance to talk in private about the ones he might have read. (Whenever I hinted about the poems I'd given him, he said something about patience and uninterrupted time.) Walking such a long way helped me establish the rhythm and pace of my little ode to sunshine and shadows, and as I walked I tried to extract words out of the rather meager reference sources of my mind—shadows, I was thinking, and that led to shade, shadings, obscurity, darkness, dusk, twilight, nightfall, and so on... Nothing sounded especially good or original. I walked so steadily, so lost in thought, that I was surprised to find myself passing the bullet-riddled entrance sign so soon, well before midday. Since the freeway had diverted most day-trippers, the windswept wayside had come to feel more and more isolated, neglected as it was by municipal crews and gardening clubs; people used to come up here to picnic and fly kites, but now saplings were growing through cracks in the asphalt and the historical marker (to some old voyageur or other) had been vandalized and trash blew across the empty parking lot and the binocular viewfinder had long been out of service. Under the trees, in deep shade, was one of those ugly cement-block public restrooms, so humbly utilitarian and dismal it seemed to be ashamed of its own function, and of course it was divided down the middle to suit either sex. Even from a distance you could smell it, for the toilets were frequently stuffed up for one reason or the other. Inside the "men's" there was very little light, for the grimy windows were curtained with trumpet vines, but, as I had known since I was a child, once your eyes adjusted you saw a sink black with filth and empty dispensers and a urinal, as well as two stalls with strange holes carved into a partition covered with a virtual palimpsest of perplexing messages, scrawled in ballpoint or magic marker on the once-whitewashed walls—words and phrases that both unnerved and excited me, however much I tried not to decode them. Sometimes there would be a lewd invitation, complete with a time and a date, although I very seldom encountered anyone up here in this half-forgotten park, and if I was spotted by one of the solitary strollers, that person would quickly lope back to the parking area or down one of the footpaths that disappeared into the thickly wooded ravine below the crest of the hill. (What would I have done if I had met my future self going the other way?) Afraid as I was, I still couldn't help taking a look inside the stalls whenever I came here (which was not often), even though I could easily have done anything I needed to do back in the bushes. This day I didn't poke around long enough to discover anything new—not that I actually wanted to, I told myself—and rushed out feeling that strange chill I often seemed to catch inside that gloomy chapel-like cubicle. As I did so, a car approached very slowly up the slope of the pungent tar-coated road that mounted the bluff; it paused, appeared to think better of it, and then pulled around to the paved circle with the defaced monument in its center. Although I should have recognized the car immediately, I was still astonished when it halted and August hopped out to hail me where I had gone to lean against the blinded viewfinder.

"Hey, if it isn't you!" he said, and now—having grown more cynical, or at least sharper-eyed as I've grown older—I think he looks a little circumspect, as if he might have previously read some of those same messages inside and understood them more than I did. But back then I thought he just looked surprised and happy to see me. He came up to me, all crooked, toothy smile and wagging chin. Just the way he greeted me made it seem like the most natural thing in the world to meet me like this, in such an untrammeled spot (which may in itself be suspect); and even though I'd been enjoying my time alone and looking forward to my book and rough draft, I was glad, as always, to be interrupted by him. He took off his aviators and clapped me on the back in that hail-fellow way he had. "I didn't expect to find you up here of all places, when I figured you must be getting set for one of your matinees. I've been driving around, enjoying this fine weather God or some other entity has granted us, you know, and I was intending to go on up to this used bookstore I've heard about in Guttenbourough, is it? You know it? But I must have taken a wrong turn, and then I saw the sign for the historical marker down the way, so I thought why the heck not." His explanation sounded a little too pat, and I would never have believed him now, but at that moment in time it was so nice just to hear his lower-clef voice in the quiet countryside I never doubted a single comma.

"This is really great, August, seeing you again so soon," I said, initiating one of those half-handshake, half-hugs I'd seen some more macho guys get away with after a touchdown. Was there a trace of something sour-sweet on his breath, like schnapps or something worse? Impossible, I told myself, especially this early in the day, even if liquor was always in ready supply at his aunt's, and put the thought out of mind for the next thirty-seven years. I took a step back and struggled for something casual to say. "Funny, nobody comes to this old out-of-the-way place much anymore. Must be because there's the bypass, and they've got a new state park farther west with longer trails and more things for people to do, campgrounds and a manmade lake and all that. Have you seen those new Winnebagos? And those horse-trailers a mile long?" Why did I have to prattle so when I was happy?

"I've just been exploring the area, like I said, trying to get a break from Aunt Helga and April and their spats," he continued explaining himself and then went on at even greater length, "when I saw how pretty it looked up here and thought I'd come see if there was a good lookout. It really is something—look at all those islands and forests and summits! Everything fades to blue in the distance—a little like the Smoky Mountains. Ever been there? No, I guess not. Peaceful here, too, don't you think? A little windy. Did you bike up?" Again, it never would have occurred to me then, I guess, that August might have been dissembling somewhat, that he may have chanced on this place another time, in search of something more than a panoramic view.

When I explained to him that I'd walked all the way from town, he naturally enough offered me a ride back in Mrs. Jurgen's car. Even though I'd been looking forward to reading and jotting notes on a picnic table beneath the walnut boughs, as well as doing some more thinking on my way home, I was glad to save the shoe rubber. After we'd admired the view for a few more minutes, pointing at turkey vultures circling on thermals and the humble spires of distant grain elevators, I got in. The car was a compact late-model Buick, just the sort a comfortably off retiree would own in those days, shiny and spotless, with acrylic sheaths over the seats and a pungent pine deodorizer dangling from the rearview mirror. The more solvent of my two grandmothers had a car almost exactly like this one—I wonder if similar grandmothers are still out there, driving cars as clean and cozy and antiseptic as their front parlors. Even though it seemed so small to me then, especially when four life-size people were crammed inside, it looks boxy and bulky to me now. In a flash I tossed my pack into the backseat, slid across the warm and somewhat tacky seat-cover, and buckled the heavy belt across my lap; I noticed August didn't bother to buckle on this trip, which wasn't what I would have expected from such an otherwise correct and cautious person. That tiny bit of devil-may-care negligence or latent rebelliousness on his part may have made me begin to reassess his whole character. Perhaps he thought I was being just a stupid kid for buckling up—I wished I could undo my seatbelt without his noticing. A rumpled packet of Belair cigarettes on the dashboard and a few butts in the ashtray looked recent: could he have been smoking—or had that just been April? (As much as I hated smoking, I was beginning to like thinking my friend the priest-to-be was not quite so straitlaced as I had once assumed.) Once August rolled up all the windows with one magic finger and turned on the air-conditioner, I felt like we were in a soundproofed, sealed-off room together, and I enjoyed this new sort of intimacy. Inside the car we could speak softly and be close to one another in a way we never could in public. My chauffeur's right elbow and my left arm sometimes grazed each other when he or I shifted in our seats or pointed out something alongside the road. Of course, we both ignored such contact, even though I was sure we were both highly aware of it. This is what they mean by "tension in the air," I was thinking, troubled by why it should frighten me so. After we had driven three times around the historical marker (to read every word on it, including the graffiti) and down the bumpy hill, we fell silent for a minute or two—each of us trying to think of the best way to begin a real conversation, I suppose.

"Say, then, pardner, where shall we go on such a gorgeous day?" August began after obvious consideration, shifting into higher gear when we got back out onto the main road. "To the ends of the earth? Timbuktu? With you, Denny, me buckeroo, I'm game for it."

Even if I'm not the blushing sort, my ears must have reddened. He often seemed to nearly be saying what I most secretly wanted him to say. When he didn't, of course, I was quick to say something myself—too much—and drop some names of books or people along the way, if only to prove I was not wholly illiterate. When I swallowed and got my tongue back, I was enthusiastic and idiotic to the same degree. "All right, Admiral August, I'm game, too! Keep heading north, follow this route through what they call Little Switzerland, that is, the rugged mountains of Ioway, through the frozen wastes of Minnesota, until we reach the pole, ok? It's like we're in some epic story about two adventurers in a boat—maybe Heart of Darkness or Herman Melville—and it's all about how they're determined to sail into the sun until they find the land where, what is it, 'no one cries and no one ever dies.' Is that something I read, or am I making it all up? Or is it in Kipling? Sometimes when I've—"

"What I like about you," August interrupted me before I started sounding even more foolish, "is that beneath what one might call your untamed youth I can tell you're a quiet, serious type of guy who just likes to get lost in words and books—kind of like myself, I guess."

"Not many people have ever called me serious," I said, glad to hear it nonetheless. I leaned back and stretched out in my seat, watching the clouds race across the windshield. "Maybe your aunt thinks I am, too, at least part of the time, and that's why she likes me to read aloud to her. She's not from here, so she doesn't judge me the same way everyone around here always does. Most people think they can look at me for like two seconds and know everything there is to know about me. It really annoys me, how they think they can label me and then tell me what I'm thinking or that I'd do this or that when I haven't done anything at all. Not yet, anyway. It drives me crazy!"

August chuckled at me, although sympathetically, and took one hand off the steering wheel to take my left hand, which I hadn't realized I'd raised in a fist of rage, and bring it gently against my hip. He held my hand down for a second or two and then let go. "Don't let it get to you, Den," he said, and I immediately felt calmer. This was only the second time he had called me "Den," and I think it pleased me even more than the many times his sister had called me that. "Listen, Den, Den my friend," he went on, seeming to be judging how the nickname sounded on his tongue, "listen—the reason I'm bringing up your serious side is because I've been reading those poems you gave me."

My eyes, I can presently attest, widened, and my mouth went dry again. Maybe my heart even stopped. August had come to a yield sign before a one-lane bridge and was looking at the boy beside him very intently. "You didn't really need to," I said, although naturally I was thrilled.

"Shut up. Of course I wanted to," he was quick to say. "And I'm sorry I never said anything until now, but we simply haven't had a chance to be alone for more than a minute or two. I said you were a serious person. You're serious about your writing, aren't you?"

"Sure, I try to be, when I can," I said, carefully. Was I, really? "That is, I mean, sometimes it's just so hard to find something worthwhile to say. Or to say anything new or novel."

"It's not all bad, so quit being so tough on yourself," he chided me, as if anticipating what I was going to say next. Having crossed a dried-up creek bed, we were driving faster across open land now, with endlessly rolling fields of yellowed, wilting soybeans on either side of us. When I tried to protest again, he only shushed me. And then something caught August's eye: "Hey, let's go take a look," he said, taking a sharp left turn. He must have seen the same peeling hand-painted billboard for the "smallest church in the world," which is outside the tiny town of Festina, Iowa, and so it looked like we were headed there. (Oh, no, now I remember... ) Before I could tell him it was at least forty minutes away to the west, he returned to the topic at hand. "Some of your efforts show a lot of promise, like the ode to the bird nobody can see. That one's full of colors, even if they are, as you say, all invisible."

"Oh, that one," I said noncommittally. "Believe me, even though I don't think it works, I was afraid you were going to say it was 'interesting.' The way people talk about things they don't like or don't understand, when they don't want to hurt your feelings. Right before or after they say 'promising.' "

August looked a bit stricken, but then a more encouraging grin formed on his face. "Maybe they said the same thing about our friend Matthew Arnold in the beginning," he said, his asymmetrical smile widening.

I turned from the view on my side of the window to his profile and tried to read what I saw in his eye, but he was concentrating on the dashed yellow lines in the road running before us. "I'm so sorry," I said, wincing in the sunlight that was striking blows from the west. "I've been meaning to reread more of them before you asked about your book. I'm terrible, I got swept away by Joyce. Maybe I should just give it back next time I see you. Or you can have it now, it's right there in my backpack, I swear. I mean, I really am reading some of them over and over, they can be so tricky. Like, what do you think 'Grande Chartreuse' is trying to say about death? He's so dense, or maybe I mean deep. I'm afraid I'm not really as serious as you'd hoped I was!"

He laughed yet again, and that set me at ease. "Take your time," he said. "You've got all the rest of your life. I think you mean 'heavy,' not exactly dense. 'Heavy, man!' as my pot-smoking friends used to say. But look, I don't understand everything he wrote myself. Heck, I don't know if I actually understand what I think I understand. But like I probably said before, he and Tommy Merton changed my life, maybe saved it. And ol' Gerry Hopkins, too, of course."

"Hopkins? I think I've heard of him—is he any easier? Did he write religious poetry, too?" I asked this, although I had hoped to steer the conversation immediately back around to my own work. Even with so many miles still to go, I didn't want to waste any of my precious time alone with August, and I selfishly preferred to use it to my own advantage. "I've been so busy trying to interpret Arnold, I haven't dared to churn out any more of my doggerel lately..."

"The Jesuit brother, that is, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who burned his early work and changed his course of studies to follow Jesus, you see, and likewise he wanted to change our very language. Some day you've got to read 'Pied Beauty' or the one about the kingfisher or even better, 'The Windhover.' Next thing you know you'll be writing your own what they call sprung rhythm."

I intended a quizzical look, and I see now that I achieved it. And yet it felt very grownup and knowledgeable to have this elevated sort of conversation with my new best friend. It was nice to receive such conscientious criticism from someone older, especially August, for I knew no matter how I pretended to regard my poetry as just an ultimately inconsequential hobby, I would wrestle far into the night on a passage before I was semi-satisfied with any random phrase or image—and only hours later my sense of accomplishment would evaporate like morning dew. "Well, he must be good, Hopkins," I said, trying to appease my companion's intellect, "if you like him so much. I promise to give him a chance."

"Then you'll find out why 'The Windhover' is maybe my favorite poem—'The mastery of the thing!' " (I didn't realize he was quoting from the poem at the time.) "Both the sound and the sense are beyond compare. 'This morning morning's minion': the falcon is Christ, you see, and a better representation I never came across. Talk about heavy—man, he blows me away! He truly had the spirit within him!" He spoke in exclamations, as if to a large crowd, with an energy I'd never heard anyone muster when talking about literature—even his aunt—and when I glanced over at him behind the wheel, it was, I could have sworn, almost as if a spark leaped from his eyes into mine. Or maybe I was just imagining things—I can't really see it now.

We were zipping down the sealcoated road faster than ever, and the faster we went the more passionate August became, or maybe it was the other way around. "The man is a genius, but it's funny," he went on, not bothering to expand upon what he'd said earlier, "because the real reason I was attracted to him at first wasn't because of his language, or his subject matter especially, but because he was a convert, to Catholicism, from the High Anglican church—that is, the British side of your supposedly former faith, mister."

"Oh, but you see I don't—"

"Yeah, right. Didn't I tell you once, I used to try to get Aunt Helga to convert?" he interrupted me. "But she's unrepentant. It makes me sad the way she treats religion like a joke. How can it be a joke when she was driven away from her homeland because of it? At least we do agree on Manley Hopkins. You see, she's the one who got me interested in him—and the English poets in general, so I can't entirely fault her. No one else in my family cares. Oh, April has her music, but she's still just dabbling, and that's different. She could very well be smarter than I am, and yet she doesn't read. If you don't count People magazine. I suspect you know what it's like when no one else cares. So thank goodness for Aunt Helga. When she used to come visit us she'd take me to bookstores and libraries and read out loud to me the way you do for her now. So, I can't fault her. Even if she thinks people with one foot in Himmel like me are Dummkopfs."

"Does she, really?" I couldn't really believe she could be that critical, but August was fixated on something else now.

"But as much as she admires Hopkins, she called him a—what is the German word—a Perverser, can you believe that? When, you know, he joined a holy order and remained celibate his whole life! Imagine the strength that takes—Jesus knows if I will ever be able. Yes, they say Hopkins had a very close friend, once, they say, he fell in love at first sight, but I can't see it, you know, it's not..." His voice began to trail off. And then he started up again, and gave the horn a jovial tap. "Then there's Walt Whitman, a real perv, people say, who of course you must know all about. 'I sing the Body Electric!' Love is love, was all he was saying. And even my favorite American monk, Merton, fell for his nurse, and knew love, physical closeness of that sort, I guess. Who can deny the flesh completely? Sorry, I'm making us both uncomfortable, I know." And he returned his attention to the pavement and a coming four-way stop—I'd scarcely realized how I'd drawn away from him into my small corner of the car, but he seemed to notice it and now made an effort to look the other way. It could be as well that he was trying his hardest not to stir up certain memories or images.

"I—I promise I'll go to the library and look him up, Hopkins, I mean," I said, tentatively placing my hand on his shoulder, to show him I wasn't so afraid, after all. "Maybe he'll be a good influence."

Before my friend and mentor could respond, a tractor lurched out in front of us off a red-dirt road; although he should have seen the vehicle sooner, August honked twice and scattered some gravel off the shoulder as we swerved around the lumbering vehicle. Once the car had rocked back into place he looked over to me, smiling again. "When you do read him, and then later, Whitman," he said, as if nothing at all had happened, "think of me."

The rest of the way to the Church of St. Anthony of Padua, as it is called, we discussed more of our favorite authors and shared the food in my backpack and listened to the farm reports on the radio—for some reason August always found these very amusing, especially any mention of pork bellies. He drove so fast that we arrived at the cluster of evergreens and lilacs at the side of the road long before I had predicted we would, with most of the long late-summer afternoon still stretched before us; a pretty belfry rose above the bushes into a sun-struck sky, and below was the church, built of yellow limestone and not much bigger than a shepherd's hut. The countryside was preternaturally quiet and calm, with no traffic at all and the only sound the distant whip of wind through pine branches and the cank-a-ree of some redwing blackbirds flying over the marshy fields opposite. We entered the tiny vestibule, where August dipped his fingers in the dry font and mimed a sign of the cross on his body. Perhaps it was only force of habit, perhaps it was another lesson for me. Despite my recently acquired disrespect for all of life and love, I was touched by the half-reverent, half-embarrassed look on his face, yet pretended not to notice what he did and went ahead into the miniature vaulted room with its blue benches and doleful-eyed saints crowding the altar. I hadn't been in more than a couple of Catholic churches before, but this one, small as it was, appeared the same as the others, only shrunken to almost diorama-like proportions. After a half-minute August followed me into the room. "Look up," he told me, gesturing, and I saw that the sky-blue ceiling was sprinkled with gold stars. "We're in heaven." Something moved across or within me then, like a feather tickling the middle of my back—yes, it really did—not because I had witnessed an appropriately small but still divine revelation, but mostly, I swear, because the room was so clammy and cold after the warmth outside. Blood-red and ice-blue colored light beamed through the two leaded glass windows on either side, and vivid spots of each hue stained the immaculately white altar cloth. It is impossible to write of such places without sounding a little medieval. August did a kind of curtsy before entering the front pew and motioned me to kneel next to him; we were closer now even than we had been in the car, and as much as I disliked that what I was doing made me look like a believer, and was no better in my opinion (or Nietzsche's) than groveling before an obscene idol, I felt a little blasphemous shiver because I enjoyed the proximity to my companion so. "I was reading about the background of this place up front," he said. "It was built in honor of a veteran of the Napoleonic wars—how strange here in the middle of nowhere!" I always hated when people called my native region "nowhere," but let him go on. "He's buried out back, the plaque says. And up there is St. Anthony carrying aloft the Christ child—isn't it a wonder! I bet you thought it was St. Christopher of the medals. He's the one who preached a sermon to the fishes—Anthony, I mean. I don't know if that could be true, but he had to have really lived and done good works and died, he wasn't just someone's sculptural commission. You might ask why I wanted to devote my life to the Church, even if it's just to teach ornery high school boys verse most of them will be sure to loathe. The best way I can explain it is to say is that after all my irresponsible running around I want or wanted something as pure and simple and clean as this little capella, and as humble. It's the classic story of so many prodigal saints from privileged families, you know. Buddha, too. And Mohammed. The thing is, one gets fed up or scared, one longs for something more lasting. Or better still, everlasting. Life outside the Church, the seminary, the cloister, if you will, can be so overwhelming, you know. Or maybe you can't know—yet."

"But I think I can understand, I do," I disagreed. "Those times I've told you about, late at night at the Arion, all alone there in the quiet, with my Big Chief tablet in front of me, wrestling words to the page, as I think someone said—that's the same kind of peace and escape from the rush of the world I'm longing for, too. It's a hunger, don't you think? Don't you think we want the same thing, that maybe everybody does in their own hungry way?" I looked over at him, but he was looking up, lost in the constellations above, a plaintive look in his eyes. A practiced, saintly look. I tried to say something more. "I mean, there in the ticket booth, with just darkness all around, like in space among the stars, feeling like I'm almost in touch with something a lot bigger than I am, that's the closest I get to prayer these days."

"Funny," he said, his shoulder pressing warmly into mine, "I've always had such a hard time trying to pray—although it seems as easy as breathing for most people. For me, it's always seemed too presumptuous of me to demand anything of God. Certainly He needn't go chasing after every single lamb that strays, really? I've never been able to say pretty-please and I won't beg. Pretty crazy for someone who might be standing up there before the altar some day."

In profile, silhouetted against the colored panes of the window illuminated by the bright sunlight outside, he would never again look to me so like a holy figure as he did then, a veritable scribe's marginal ornamentation in a medieval breviary, and if I had been the artist I wouldn't have hesitated just then to apotheosize him with a resplendence of gold. For once, I have to totally agree with that boy kneeling down there—at that moment August seemed to be composed more of plaster and paint than flesh and blood. "If only I could," I said, "I'd be happy to pray for you."

He just sighed, thrummed my shoulder with a heavy hand, and rose to light a votive candle on a little iron rack beneath one of the windows. Its tiny blue flame throbbed weakly like something dying there against the cold stone wall. August stood motionless, watching it for some time. He was no longer the icon on a wall or the illustration in a book. He was just himself. The sad sweet smell of beeswax soon filled the air of the little high-vaulted room. I wondered if I had somehow said the wrong thing, he had gone so quiet. Or maybe he was actually trying to shine a beacon out to God. It wouldn't matter: I know that in a couple of minutes we would be gone from that place forever, never to return. We must have spoken more on the ride home and up to the point where he dropped me off at the department store, but I have forgotten what our conversation was about, as I have forgotten or buried so much of that part of my life, and maybe with good reason.

Three or four days passed before I saw either of my new friends again, busy days at home and at work, days too busy to read or write much, and it could be I was keeping myself constantly active just so I wouldn't have to think of August or April too much. Somehow, for some reason, some voice inside told me not to give over all of myself to them, that to do so would only hurt me in the end. But such cool logic didn't always work. The devil preys best on the mind engaged not in idleness, but in monotonous tasks. However much I might try not to think of them and concentrate on the chore at hand—when I was weeding my mother's little plot of tomato plants, when I was sweeping the lobby's perpetually filthy carpet—I kept reliving not only my recent long car ride with August to St. Anthony's and back, but all the other things I had done and debated with the Schwanns, as well. Just as often I reopened the wound of that night when they had come to the theater and they—as well as I—had been exposed to the scornful scrutiny of my coworkers, especially Callie's. She had comprehended so little but still had touched a nerve. Not wishing to be ribbed or misinterpreted any further (which is how I excused my evasions), I had carefully kept brother and sister away from the Arion since that time. Better that they—and I, as much as possible—should remain somewhat of an unknown factor and not targets of gossip. (One would think that in my moments of second thoughts and second guesses I might have been asking myself more about how August had chanced upon that lookout north of town, but I continued to suppress those doubts.) That night immediately after the movie with the Schwann siblings nothing much had happened, I remembered. August had started to tell me something crucial, I figured, and then backed off, fearful or mistrustful of me. He had mentioned getting "too attached" to someone at the seminary, and that had troubled and in retrospect eventually angered me. April, angry then herself, had been what I already assumed to be her usual moody teenaged self. Later we had had an uncomfortable time at the penthouse with their great-aunt. Neither of them had said anything exactly malicious or simply wrong to me that night or since, and yet I sometimes felt as if I were being brought up short, cut down to size: I was just a stupid hayseed who happened to write bad free verse and had somehow insinuated himself into the life of their too-charitable aunt. When I got into these morose phases of self-torture and self-doubt I would have to go for a long ruminative hike, across downtown, in and out of parks, through churchyards or schoolyards, crossing bridges and railroad tracks, along the riverfront and farther, into the fields both fallow and tall with corn encircling our small town, over trickling creek beds and across culverts, lastly through splintered doors and into the airless and light-deprived rooms of abandoned farmhouses. Sometimes I would just sink to the ground at the end of my journeys, too physically exhausted or simply too weary with my own regrettable self to go on.

After working the matinee one afternoon I took off into the depths of the nearly deserted industrial district as soon as I shut the Arion's doors behind me, and wandered as I often did down the brick and cobblestone alleys, cooler and quieter than the main thoroughfares and full of surprises and secrets, tunnel-like alleys and disused railroad sidings where I would try to chart new routes home and discover fresh imagery for my poems among the ragged sumacs and overflowing dumpsters and discarded furniture and auto parts I found there. This day I was only trying to clear my head, full as it was with shrill movie scenes and fragments of dull half-remembered conversations. I seldom met a soul when I traveled via alleyways and train tracks, especially after business hours, and I often thought of them as a kind of shadow-double of the busier streets on the other side of the buildings. From time to time I took a book with me to read in the sun on some forgotten loading dock or up a water tower, but today I was content just to circle the district aimlessly. Some people were even afraid of our town's older and most ill-maintained passageways—afraid of rats and bats and maybe the hobos who would sometimes hop off the freights that ran through town, dope-dealing child-molesting hobos, so it was said, who many swore made a practice of sleeping in mossy cellar wells behind otherwise respectable buildings. But the worst I ever saw was a drunk passed out underneath the Mississippi River bridge. This afternoon, like any such afternoon, it seemed I had failed once again to find whatever I was looking for, something I couldn't have named myself if asked precisely what it was, then or now. So it was with unexpected delight that on my way back around the last block I found August and April posed leisurely on the fire escape behind Schwann's Department Store, fifteen feet above the discarded pallets and garbage bins below. It was another oppressively hot day, so I suppose they were enjoying the cooling breezes wafting up the shadowy alley from the river. April was smoking what was probably her twentieth cigarette of the day, standing along the guard-rail, and August was cross-legged on the grating, reading a paperback and drinking from a can of beer.

"Hey, howdy!" I called up to their perch, suddenly realizing how much I desperately missed them both, even if it had been only half a week. "How's it going, you guys?"

They did not appear taken aback in the least to see me fully materialized below them in such an unexpected place. "Hang on," April shouted, waving her menthol in the air, "and we'll hop right down." In no time at all she and her brother, the can left behind and the book stuffed into the waistband of his jeans, had clambered down the rungs that hung over the side of the alley and hopped the last three feet onto the stones below, right in front of me.

"Wow, I don't suppose it should be any surprise, running into you two like this!" I exclaimed, probably much too enthusiastically, aggressively embracing them both at once when I knew I should have been underplaying things a bit more. I shouldn't think I would have wanted them to guess I'd missed them too much or anything like that. "Since August and I got back from our trip together," I told them, "I've been thinking the three of us should do more of that kind of thing and see some of the other places your aunt and I have talked about. There's a lot I could show you, still. Like the wildlife sanctuary, and the first log cabin, and the one-room schoolhouse..." Young man, you know that's not exactly what you've been dwelling on in recent days, and now you can't stop this flow of words and promises coming out of you.

April (who had lowered a pair of new big leave-me-alone sunglasses over her nose, so I couldn't gauge her expressions with any accuracy) was chortling hoarsely before I had finished, her lungs still filled with smoke. "Honestly, Dennis, I think we've seen about all there is to see, or we want to see—Aunt Helga's been having August drive us around nonstop and boring us to tears with all the Sauk and Coyote or whatever wars and stuff." I was a bit chagrined to hear that again I hadn't been included, but tried to keep smiling, stay upbeat. "It's pretty countryside, I guess, it's nice and green and quiet," she went on a little more consolingly but still acting the world-weary traveler, which she could do better from behind those outsized glasses, "but, you know, I wish there were mountains or an ocean or something a little more dramatic. Back home I'd be at the beach on a day like today." She threw back her head and spread her arms out as if she could touch the walls on both sides of the alley. "Oh, man, I could be singing like Delilah in Samson, 'Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix' or something else romantic and glamorous and decadent, waltzing down the sand with some studly stud on my arm!" She had started talking and laughing even louder and faster than I had as we walked on together, August a little behind, and she paused only to catch her breath; by this time we were all three approaching the end of the long alley, as if this meeting and our destination had been planned. She was carrying on so much I wondered if she might be on those funny kind of diet pills I'd heard girls sometimes took. "I suppose you could hang out with us some more, if you want, baby boy. That was a lot of fun, out on the river, and seeing you at the movies, and driving out to those hole-in-the-wall dumps. I wish we could do more way-out stuff like that, but I guess we've done it all, right? I can't be bored out of my fucking skull forever!"

August, who had been trying to speak all along, succeeded in interrupting his sister at last, as he often tried to do and often failed at, and gave her a little punch on her bare shoulder; she shoved him back, and they were like two little kids horsing around again. "Be quiet, for God's sake, Posey!" he shushed her. "It's really unbecoming when you get heavy-handed like this. Let someone else say something for a change." It was as if he were wanting her to shut her mouth before she said something too condescending. She started to deny she was being anything and that it was true they had run out of things to do and that another two weeks in this godforsaken town might kill her. "We haven't seen everything yet at all," he contradicted her, "and I bet you've got some other interesting out-of-the-way places up your sleeve, Denny." He took me by the arm and pulled me away from his sister, who was huffing blue-black smoke like a mythic fury.

"As a matter of fact," I said, thinking quickly and talking quietly, "I could take you through the closed-down hotel up to the roof deck—you can see even farther than your aunt's living room, I mean her salon windows. There's an incredible view at sunset. Come on along, it's still broad daylight, nothing to be scared of." Although I was clutching at any idea that would keep them by my side, I saw that as soon as I said these words I had piqued a faint interest. "Hmmm," they both hummed in unison—it was almost humorous. April tossed away her cigarette butt and raised her sunglasses to get a better glimpse of the tallest building in town looming straight ahead of us, and August, cautious again, stopped in his tracks, probably wondering if he should risk doing something most probably illegal. The Avalon Hotel had been shut up for about five years, I explained to them, owing to a change in the habits of tourists and travelers because of the new interstate and the loss of nearby passenger trains—those things, as well as a couple of new motels between here and the county seat, out where they were talking about building one of those new shopping malls. Lately, people were divided as to whether the hotel should be demolished or converted to retirement housing. Some wanted it added to the national register of historic buildings, or something like that. We were just another block away from the hotel, and so without much more salesmanship on my part they agreed to sneak with me through another back alley and through a basement-level door in the rear whose lock I knew how to jimmy until it would open. I had always loved exploring vacant buildings—from those empty farmhouses to falling-down factories—and the hotel had become one of my favorite places to explore since I had learned from Bobby the usher about the faulty security on that door. Mostly, I just liked wandering the dilapidated, deserted rooms, which had been left pretty much as the last traveling salesmen had seen them, almost ten years ago: the beds and desks, the chairs and drapery, and even the discolored mass-produced paintings of sunflowers and seashores on the walls, all of these furnishings probably considered too worn or outdated to be worth saving. The hotel was tall but not wide, with fewer rooms than it looked like it might have, actually, but a good place for lonesome wights to gather, and I enjoyed imagining who had visited these premises and what they had seen and done: Women in furs who opened their compacts and powdered their noses nonchalantly in the lobby, sleek men eyeing them from the lounge, under cover of the Chicago dailies: men who smoked cigars and bragged of horse-races, bellboys in livery who hauled steamer trunks on their backs, harried night clerks who could provide bootleg gin for a bribe. I also liked the sadness I felt in this place, because it was an elegant despair sealed up in the past and thus could not be altered or lessened. You couldn't exactly call it nostalgia, because I had never experienced that past myself. An abandoned hotel full of the echoes of dead encounters was incredibly romantic in a way I couldn't quite understand at my age. Young people of my sort, young people who wrote self-indulgent poetry, always fall for that sort of thing.

I was trying to express all that, but even more ineptly, as we groped half-blind at first through the basement and then slowly made our way up the interior stairs to the dusty litter-strewn lobby, where shriveled roses hung their heads in dry vases and a moldy guestbook still rested face-up on the front desk. Only a few of the windows were unboarded, but the remaining light was enough. No one breathed, as if to do so might trigger a chain of events that would result in the collapse of the entire hotel. The scene before us had left us all speechless, anyway, even me. (It has since become my experience that often when I visit a derelict building like this one I am awestruck by how the inhabitants or workers seem to have fled the scene as if from a coming tornado or nuclear attack, so much is always left behind or discarded where it lay or fell, never to be returned for by anyone.) We filed past the toppled-over information kiosk and the mail cubbies and then climbed the grand staircase up to the mezzanine, where we investigated the conference rooms with their tipped-over chairs and tattered window shades, and next we began ascending more steps to the upper floors, checking out some of the rooms along the way—although April church-whispered that she didn't like the smells or rot and August said he agreed that the whole place was creepy and being a grownup he ordinarily wouldn't do anything like this, but he knew he couldn't leave April on her own in such a place (so, what did that make me?). I could tell then it was only an excuse and he was just as curious as his sister. We might have gone on to wander about some of my favorite corners—one of the roomier suites at the top or the tiny places at the end of the corridor where they put the cheapest guests—but April said she was anxious to get out of the gloom and into the open air; she'd heard of rooftop parties in novels of the twenties and thirties and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I was almost sorry to disappoint her when I brought her up the last flight of stairs and through double doors to find no Japanese lanterns or jazz orchestra or bartenders shaking cocktails, just a wide expanse of flat roof covered with white gravel and an endless universe above of unblemished blue sky. Nevertheless she was so excited to be out of the dark and dank hotel she bounded across the roof, flinging open her arms like wings and singing in a voice twice as large as her body, "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle..." "Don't fly away, Carmen!" August shouted, and we all laughed, although I understood neither the French nor the reference. The three of us ran to the circumferential wall, which was chest-high, and looked down appreciatively on the toy cars and miniature pedestrians on the pavement far below, and then across the serpentine river and the innumerable islands (more gray than green in the haze of afternoon) all the way toward the undulant interior of Wisconsin, which, because it was so far away, looked as magical as any kingdom might from the gondola of a passing hot-air balloon, a storybook illustration with tidy forests and checkerboard fields and miniature farm-spotted hills and valleys arranged in orderly patterns far below. The bright clear air was much fresher at this height and the strong updraft cooled our sweaty faces; after checking out the entire panorama, we decided to sit with our backs against the warm brick wall, within its shadow, alone in the turquoise-blue, peacock-blue heights and out of direct assault from the harsh postmeridian sun.

As August stooped to sit, he let out a short cry and took out the item that had been tucked into the backside of his pants. "Damn, I almost forgot!" he said, handing me the bent-backed little book with its orange and white cover. "I wanted to give you this, Denny—Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Don't worry, it's just a cheap old pocket edition, and this is my traveling copy—I have another edition at home—so you can have this one. Don't say no, it's just a token, it's a crummy old book, but you've really got to read him."

I turned the warm soft-backed thing over in my hands and glanced at some of the biographical information on the back cover. April was watching me, a look of annoyance on her face, but she was silent for a change as she busied herself lighting another Belair with a Bic lighter that kept blowing out in the wind. "It's too much—but thanks so much," I said, genuinely touched. "I've been dying to try him out since you raved about him last week. But—" I looked up from the book and into his eager face— "I still have your Arnold book, remember—I've got to get it back to you first, I should have the other day when it was right there in my backpack. Though I've been trying to give him another go. I reread 'Dover Beach,' the other day, but still have trouble understanding why it's so important. It just didn't get me like, say, Berryman's Dreamsongs does." I always liked showing off my interest in poetry that was far above my head.

" 'Like two armies clashing on a darkling plain,' " August recited, standing up again. (Little did I know how many politicians and pundits can quote that line.) "It's about the abandonment of the old dogmas and our blind faith in them for a new but deeper kind of commitment to one another. But I find that one a bit overanalyzed, to be honest. You've got to read some of the earlier ones, when he's still testing the waters."

"Jesus, there he goes again, sounding like a god-damn English teacher," April said to neither of us, settling herself back against the wall and pushing her sunglasses farther down her abrupt no-nonsense nose (the skin on its bridge, I saw now, so close to her, was peeling).

"Maybe because I just happen to want to do something useful with my life, to teach English and American literature in a parochial school one day... when, I mean if only I could, go back and complete my education," August said, answering his overbearing sister but looking at me, not her. "By which I mean I hope to some day. I think I'd love talking about these sorts of things with students who know even less than I do. Even those ones who couldn't give a flying you-know-what, like I told you before. Not that I'm trying to tutor you, Denny. I just thought you'd really like these poems, if you give them a chance—they mean a lot to me."

"Thanks, really," I said again, flipping through the book and a bit dismayed to see more poems that rhymed and lay in dense double columns down the fly-spotted pages.

As I was doing that, August took a look at his watch and declared, "Posey! We forgot! Or at least I almost forgot, I know you don't care. Remember, we have to meet Mrs. Morton at Aunt Helga's for one of her hifalutin Euro-style teas at four-thirty, and it's already almost a quarter past. We better get going. Sorry, Denny, but thanks for bringing us up here. It really is like being on top of the world. Enjoy Brother Hopkins."

April did not budge. She had been contemplatively smoking while her brother and I conversed about poetry, and now her resentful look told us that being asked to leave before she had even finished enjoying her cigarette could very well be the biggest imposition ever inflicted upon her. "You go on without me," she stated flatly, and then turned to me to justify herself. "I've hated that old bag Edna Morton ever since she told me my skirts were too short when she visited Mother and Daddy back home a few years ago."

August furrowed his brows and frowned in a way I somehow found disarming, it was so very like the expression a monkey who has bitten into a rotten banana might make, not that he looked much like a monkey—but, anyway... "Posey!" he barked. "You've got to be there. Aunt Helga wants to show us off, you know. Come on, don't make me go alone. You're such a little snot!"

"And you quit always being such a big goddamn crybaby, Futz!" she snarled back and shot her cigarette stub at him as if he were a target. "You can handle her on your own, you big hulking dummy. Tell darling Aunt Helga I'm busy shopping or something. Tell her anything, tell her I'm dead, but this time I'm not coming."

August opened his mouth to say something, but April jumped right in again: "Can't I ever be alone? Can't we do what we each want to do apart from the other once in a while? For Christ Almighty's sake, I'm not your babysitter!" And she hurled down her Oleg Cassinis (or maybe they were only dimestore Foster Grants) so hard on the rooftop they shattered.

Then there was silence. But only brief silence; I probably could have counted no further than fifteen. "All right, all right," August said once he had regained his temper. April, too, had just as quickly regained her composure, perhaps sobered by the sight of all that expensive, shattered glass. In an instant they were no longer two squabbling children but level-headed adults. "Have it your way, then, dearly devoted sister," August continued in a more reserved tone, his words spoken with all the authority of a proclamation delivered ex cathedra, "but remember, you'll have to face the consequences later. I promise you that. You and Dennis stay here, then, have a nice talk—I know you both just want to be alone together for a bit, anyway." He may have giggled a bit at that, or he may have just been clearing his throat. Of course, April tried to say something, but he held up his hand in a pontifical gesture and stopped her. "Go ahead, talk about me behind my back, Posey-Po. You have my blessings. Sorry, Dennis—I understand, just be gentle on me. So goodbye. I'll see you two another time." And he was off even quicker than someone could blink twice and look away shyly—what could he mean, about wanting to be alone with April? Was he jealous of my friendship with his own sister—and was he more jealous of me or her? Before I could ruminate much more on the implications, April took my wrist and held me down so I couldn't run after her bothersome older brother. Once her sharp-nailed fingers relaxed their grip, we sat back again, shoulder to shoulder against the wall, looking up into the empty sky.

"He can be such a silly, simpering ass," April hissed, spitting out the exaggerated sibilants like someone speaking into a microphone. "He's always wanting to control me, telling me who I should see or not see. Like he's my personal priest or something. Damn if I'd want to give him my confession. He just wants to get alone with you, not to leave us on our own."

I picked up what I could of the broken lenses that lay at my feet, and looked into her blinking eyes—"What do you mean, wants to get me alone?" I asked, a little too innocently to be believed.

She gave me a look. "Come on," she said, "you must be able to tell he likes you an awful lot."

"Well," I said, "I like him, too. And you."

Another look. "I was right about your being naïve. Look, August isn't like most guys—he's more like you, I believe."

Meaning what? I wanted to ask, but said instead, "I feel sorry for him, having to drop out of the seminary like that, with his spiritual crisis and all. It must have been tough on your whole family, but he is going back, right?"

"Listen, and I mean listen," she demanded of me, "there are some things you really don't need to know." She took what remained of her glasses from me, considered the twisted frames and shards of glass for a few seconds, and then tossed the works carelessly over the wall before addressing me again: "Look at me, Dennis. No, not there—here. I'm right here in front of you, damn it. What would you do if I kissed you right now, right here? Would that make us both shut the hell up about August?"

What happened next happened so quickly I could scarcely believe what I had done once it was over. Even looking on all these years later I am a bit surprised. Her words had sounded like a dare, and I felt like I had been backed into a corner, and so in spite of my fears, I met her challenge and kissed her soundly on the lips. I pressed in a little too hard, trying to force her mouth to open, but it did not. This was not the way I had kissed Alyssa the various times we had tried to make a go of it. April's lips were dry and tasted like stale tobacco. Her face tightened, grew immobile as a porcelain mask. I withdrew. Nothing else happened. She moved away silently, expressionlessly. I felt like crying, but held it all in.

"Just as I thought," she said, adjusting the strap on her halter top. She flicked her tongue over her lips, as if to wipe any trace of me away. For a moment I wondered if she felt disgust—or worse, pity. Then she spoke again. "Didn't you say you had a girlfriend?"

"Up to a few months ago. We kind of fell apart, and I just haven't seen anyone since. April, wait, look—"

"Let me guess—it was a very chaste relationship, wasn't it? Almost like a church dance, am I right?"

"I respected her. I've known her a really long time, we'd been going steady since ninth grade. She has nice teeth and hair. Not that that's important, I liked her most of all because she was smart. But she is pretty. We used to make out quite a lot, if you must know. Her name was I mean is Alyssa, by the way. She's a real person, and I used to think I loved her, so don't look at me like I'm making up things."

"The only thing you're making up is your attraction to girls. I can tell, you're another one."

"What do you mean, another one?"

Her story came out in a rush, so fast it wasn't until much later that I managed to bring sense and order to it all. I leaned back against the rough wall, feeling the sun press hot against my closed eyelids, and took in just her voice; her words and a fever born of the sun were all I heard or felt. It was as if my real self were shrinking away while I heard her speak; I was no longer a body, just a listening device, just an impartial consciousness, taking it all in. I suppose the sun and the kiss had made me dizzy. Maybe I couldn't bear to look at her just then. "I mean August went through the same sort of charade you're putting on," she was saying, "dating girls and all that until the pressure on him got so hard he joined the seminary just to try to change his real urges. I guess it worked for a time, worked well enough, and then it didn't. Classes were tough for him at first. They give you a lot of applesauce to learn and rubbish to do for no good reason. It was so much different from his time at U-Penn. The priests are really strict with first-year students, they want to weed people out. He met this other first-year student named Michael there, and they helped each other cope, they became really good friends, I guess you'd say. Very close friends—too close, August told me himself in a letter. Maybe they were in love, I don't know or care. Some of the other seminarians began to talk. You must know how things are. August says there's more gossip at a seminary than there is in a girls' powder-room. But Michael kept pushing it and threatened to kill himself if he and August didn't do something about their feelings. At last August said he gave way, I don't know how exactly, and then Michael really cracked. He went to the monsignor and blamed August, you see. That's why August had to leave—it wasn't voluntary. He was told to take a break and not come back until he had made amends to Jesus or whatever the fuck he's supposed to do. Maybe he's going to be banned forever. Only excommunication could be worse, I guess August thinks."

I opened my eyes at last and looked at her. She was still staring off into space, motionless. "So what happened to this Michael person?" I said, stupidly.

Her voice neither rose nor fell; it just seemed to grow hoarser and frailer. "He... he hung himself," April said as if to herself, questioning if such an act were possible. As it so often did, her hair had fallen into her eyes so it would have been impossible for me to detect tears, even if they were there. She said something more under her breath, and then louder: "He hung himself, all right? Right there in the bell-tower. Ding-dong-ding. Now you know." And then she stood up and slowly walked away, extracting another cigarette from the front pocket of her cut-offs. (I remember now how girls back didn't carry purses so much back then and would, like males, often stuff as much in their pockets as they could.) I watched her, struck dumb, wondering what I could possibly say next. Halfway across the roof she stopped and grimaced at the bent cigarette, considering whether or not to light it, but then flung it down in anger. "Scheisse!" I heard her hiss, just as Posy, sister of Futz, would have imitated her great-aunt. From somewhere far below I heard an insect-like motorcycle engine approach and then retreat.

With some hesitation I found my voice. "Hey!" I shouted and ran up to where she was still standing, looking about blankly as if she had just woken up from a dream. "Don't go away. Tell me more, please, April. Are you saying August blames himself?"

She swung around violently and faced me. "Why should August blame himself? Jesus Fucking Christ, you're dense, Dennis. Michael was obviously crazy, he got August into this mess. If you want to know, I blame him."

"But he's dead," I said innocently, "you can't blame someone like that."

"Oh, no—oh, no?" she said scornfully, coming closer to me. She paused, thinking, then began again. "See what you've walked into, mixing with our fine family? So don't go thinking August actually cares anything about you. Or me. He's too screwed up to care about anyone but himself. And screw you if you think I'm jealous. Ha! That's the very last thing on my mind."

And then she began walking away again. But I caught up with her and we went back into the hotel, newly blind the way one is when first finding a seat in a movie theater; we proceeded cautiously down the stairwell until our eyes adjusted, and began retracing our steps through the corridors. Over the last hour or so the corners and alcoves had grown darker and the corroding fixtures more menacing—neither of us wanted to be caught here inside when the sun sank still lower. As we descended, stirring up more feathery dust, ducking the pigeons flying from one broken window to the next, we could see through open doors those sad half-stripped rooms, and it seemed more than ever that they were haunted by former occupants waiting right behind the tattered curtains, curtains billowing in the gusts blowing through shattered panes. April took my arm as I led her on. Neither of us spoke. Stumbling our way through the lowest level to the cellar steps was worst, for it seemed anything—corpses and other unimaginable horrors—might be concealed in the closets and storerooms there. Once we were securely back out into daylight and I had conscientiously fixed the broken padlock into place upon the back door of the building, the fright I had felt seemed almost laughable, but April broke into a near run, as if she really had to get well away from there and shake the anguish of the last few minutes away.

"Wait up!" I called to April, but she ignored me as she jogged down the alley and turned the corner; I didn't catch up with her until she had reached the river's edge, down by the public landing. I was afraid she might be bawling her eyes out, but she wasn't. Neither would she say much to me except that she wanted to be alone. She stood there like a statue forged of iron, a determined look on her face, only giving me the most cursory attention. I should have walked away then, but I didn't want to leave her when there was still so much more I wanted to find out, to understand. Still she wouldn't answer, and I gave up searching for the right questions. Instead we stood watching the silt-yellow water churning its way down to the Delta, saying nothing, but then the late-summer mosquitoes got too much for us as evening began to fall ahead of schedule, and so she said goodbye to me, pretending as best she could that nothing of any real importance had happened—and maybe for her it hadn't. I knew some girls were like that, enjoying the theatrics of making a fuss and then running away from the havoc they had created; my own sisters could be like that. Then again, April was hiding things, acting so stoic now. Maybe deep inside she felt she had betrayed her big brother. "Please, couldn't we talk some more?" I begged her one last time, but she shook her blonde head and continued staring out across the sandbars and islands, between which the barges came and went like sentient beings, like enormous Nile crocodiles or hippos. "You won't tell August what happened between us, will you?" I asked, feeling very much the little kid next to her stalwart figure. It's true—I wanted to hug her or something, but she scared me too much now.

"I better go, Dennis," she was all she said, and then she carefully walked away. Some higher sensibility in me knew better than to try to follow her. I watched her retreat among the mildewed lilac bushes and mud-splattered parked cars, and then she was gone. All at once I felt very much alone, and so I sat down on the dry prickly grass, regretting everything I had said and done and learned over the last hour. What had April said about being jealous—did she mean she was jealous of August's friendship with me? How could that be when she was the one I kissed? (Never mind that it had gone nowhere.) Or was she jealous because I was coming between her and her only brother? It was almost incestuous, I should have been thinking then, but was too unsophisticated to even countenance the possibility. Hot as it was, a frigid breeze seemed to come up from the river's furrowed surface then, drying the sweat on my forehead. That was a small blessing when I felt so tired and confused. For some reason all I wanted to do was go find August, just to sit down and be quiet with him the way April and I had just been quiet with one another. There was nothing really I could say to him, but I wanted to let him know I didn't blame him, either—that he and I might be more alike than either of us had previously realized.

But once again I wasn't to hear from either of them for several days, and in those troubled days when I was busy working and putting up with my family or whenever I got a chance to look over the Penguin paperback August had given me, I was making a conscious if failed effort not to think about what had happened up there on the Avalon Hotel rooftop. Despite my full schedule I wasn't sleeping so well, and I barely ate enough to keep myself going. My mother complained that I was looking "peaked." Mr. Moore said I was acting "distracted." Obviously, I had stepped into a drama that was beyond my means to comprehend. Obviously, I shouldn't have further complicated things that were already so complicated. If either August or April wanted to see me again, they knew where to find me—I wasn't far away. I hadn't left Planet Earth. But not even Mrs. Schwann called to see if I'd come up again to read another forgotten Poet Laureate among those we had been recently exploring in her girlhood editions, with August alternating stanzas with me (April would just sigh and flip through Spiegel catalogs). Just as well: I was happiest, if you could call it that, when I was buzzing around the movie house, joking with the girls and ineptly bossing the boys; we were showing a big overly long blockbuster that attracted what were for us huge crowds, and so I was kept later than usual and was often completely worn out by the time I limped home under the careening and exploding meteorites of the August night.

While the hit movie crawled on interminably during the late show one night (explosions and machine-gun fire vibrated so strongly through the walls and even floor it felt like an earthquake), Callie at the concession counter and I engaged in some idle chatter, as we often did when recovering from the crush of herding people in an orderly way through the front doors and supplying them with all the necessary refreshments. Over at the ticket booth, Patty and an usher whose name and face I've both forgotten were engaged in similar conversation, but out of our earshot. Callie had her frizzy braids roped back under a tie-dye scarf, and she had lacquered her nails bright orange to match her hair; to her fingers she had affixed a half-dozen or so cheap and flashy rings. She was either the colorful queen of the gypsies or a genuine nut-case. All evening she had been swishing her sparkly hands about—parrot wings flashing by in my peripheral vision—to get my attention. I was as usual too dense to tell if she was flirting with me or just trying to get my goat. "Hey, Denny-Denny Bo-Benny," she had hallooed to me from where I was sweeping up some spilled popcorn in a corner, "You've been looking kind of tense, man. What say you and me smoke some weed, get really wasted after the show's out, the way Bobby and Greg do? I've got some good Mexicali. Guy from Iowa City gave it to me and I hardly had to do a thing for it. Come on, Dennis, you goodie-good Boy Scout. We could have us some real fun." I knew the way she rattled on, she was probably lying about the marijuana, and she knew I thought drugs were overrated—that was why I was always annoyed when my ushers came in red-eyed and slow-witted. But she always liked to kid me that I could be worse than those two, given the chance, and the fact that my mind was so often in the clouds supported her fantasy.

I dumped out my dustpan and walked over to where she stood, slumped as languidly over the illuminated glass-topped case as that popular rolling-paper's Mucha muse (yes, even I was familiar with that brand), chin in one hand, twisting a strand of fiery locks in the other. All these years later, I just remembered that she called herself the Jujube Fairy. She'd titter about spreading sugar-dust and being the arch-enemy of the Tooth Fairy. All right, I guess after all I did sort of like her—she was even more different than I was. "Come on, Callie, I'm just kind of worn out these days, is all," I told her. "It's this muggy weather and all these late nights. Did they have to make this movie so long?" I saw Patty glance up from over in the ticket-booth (the unknown usher had vanished into the thin air of history), but I knew it was hard to hear things from over there. Fuck her, I could just hear April's voice saying. Never let any of them get to you, Den, August might add. Patty went back to reading the nurse book (it was always a nurse book) flattened before her. Callie was still regarding me suspiciously as she moved to shut down the popcorn machine. "You're looking awfully—sunshiny tonight," I said to appease her and change the subject.

"Like 'em, cowboy?" she cooed, fanning her extravagant gemlike nails before her freckly face. Then she scrunched up her funny freckly nose and squinched her green eyes, as if she were looking down a telescope—or maybe a bayonet—at me. "So, where's your big-time big-city friends?" she asked, scooping up a handful of hot buttered popcorn. (I may have neglected to say previously that we ate it like manna at the theater.) "They've never been back. Least I haven't seen them. Didn't they like our little ol' picture palace? I suppose the Arion must look kind of ratty to swingers like them." She stuffed another handful into her mouth, so much I could barely make out her words. "Are they as snobby as they look?" (I think she said.) "Ain't we poor simple folk good enough for you anymore, honey pie? I always thought you were on the snoot side yourself, but... Hold on, don't go away! You know I'm always just joshing you." It was just her style to keep on pelting the seat of my pants with old maids. Giving up with a shrug, I turned back to her, wincing but ensnared once again. She regarded her captive. "Hey, Den-Den-Dennio, tell me, and tell me true—are they a couple or what?"

"No," I said firmly as she munched away. "Brother and sister. You hardly saw them before, but I guess word gets around. But if you must know, they're not so bad, and I think they like everything here all right. It's a change for them, anyway." I tried to sound fairly noncommittal. Best not to incriminate myself too much in front of this vixen. (Can you even call a woman that, anymore?)

Callie winked at me—the only girl I'd ever met who made a habit of winking—impishly or devilishly, whatever. "Don't let that hussy steal you away," she reproached me. "Not before we announce our engagement!" She laughed at her own weak joke and I turned back decisively to the work before me.

It always really embarrassed me when an older girl—a young woman, in fact—acted that way around me; I had been told they did it because they wanted to run their fingers through my curly dirty-blond hair, as a little girl does with a doll; I had even been told once by Patty in one of her boldest moods that she and Callie had been discussing whether I was cuter than Bobby or not, but my mirror always answered me with a definite "no." At this time of my life I was worrying if there was something a little too wispy and waifish that people saw in me, especially girls—and that's why they sometimes made such outrageous statements. Boys, of course, had their own epithets for me. The worst criticisms always sting the most because they are at least partly true. My desires had not yet been fully formed, but they were taking shape. Despite all my best efforts I was still thinking of that kiss on the rooftop and how I had maybe chosen the wrong sibling to bestow it upon. This growing realization shocked me, and yet I kept creating scenarios in my mind where I, ever selfish, got exactly what I wanted, even if I didn't know then at all what I needed.

Another day or two passed. I was wondering if I might ever see August or April again when I got a call at work late one night, as I waited for the last stragglers to leave. I was otherwise alone at the theater, sitting in the ticket booth, Matthew Arnold before me, testing my intellect once again (it seemed I was perpetually carrying the book around with me, in case I ran into August and could return it, as I had promised so many times), when the phone rang. It was a by-now familiar voice. He started off by apologizing a little too profusely for being out of touch and for calling so late, but the Arion's phone he claimed had always been busy—and so he had left a message for me at home the Tuesday previous, and when I never called back he decided to try to reach me at work one last time when he guessed I'd be preparing to depart for the night. Then it was my turn to apologize: I had to explain how with all my siblings and with the general hubbub of friends and relatives constantly coming and going at my house it was easy for messages to get delayed or even lost. (Of course this was long before anyone had an answering machine at home. I'm wondering again if that might have been more of a blessing than a curse, back then.) But what was up? How were the others? What was he reading? I was trying my best to sound a little glib, although my heart had (so predictably!) started to pound as soon as I'd heard his voice.

"Could you come over tonight, Den?" he interrupted me. Whenever he called me by that shortest of nicknames, I felt as if I were being pinched. "I've really got to see you, now that April is gone." He didn't need to say anymore; I told him I'd be there in just a few minutes. I flew through the motions of putting the theater to bed, barely aware of what I was doing, the only thing on my mind being what he meant by April having gone. Maybe he meant that she was only gone for a short while, possibly just for the night, but the tone of his voice had implied much more than that. I was hoping he hadn't fought with his sister after our time alone on the roof—I was hoping most of all she hadn't told him about how I'd humiliated myself so with her. Maybe also she had told him that she had told me what had happened with him at the seminary; yes, that was the most likely story. Or maybe she had dared to tell him that she had thought I was a better match for him than for her. So many possibilities! I was nearly frantic by the time I was riding up with agonizing slowness the oven-like, airless elevator, and by then I was also fretting over how I would ever talk candidly with Mrs. Schwann present.

I shouldn't have worried; Mrs. Schwann wasn't in. August explained when he met me at the elevator door that his aunt had gone with one of her assistant managers to Des Moines to do some buying for the store, and she would be gone for two nights. That was all perfectly reasonable; she did that all the time (even at her age! I used to think), but where was April? With her aunt?

"Come in, sit down," August said, leading me into the parlor, where the lights were dimmed lower than normal and windows on every side were wide open to the brisk and erratic breezes known at such heights. Not until I had entered the room did I realize that we had both been so self-absorbed that we had neither shaken hands (as we most often did in public) nor hugged (as we did in private) before we left the foyer. August was soon ensconced in his great-aunt's throne-like chair, feet up on a leather hassock, while I sat bolt-upright in my usual. He had already poured me some of his aunt's finest burgundy (so he said) into one of her best goblets, and I had begun to sip it without even thinking, not even appreciating its taste, although all of this formality was highly out of the ordinary. For one thing, I had tried wine only once or twice before, although I wasn't going to let that show now. "All right," August began when his eyes met mine over our wine-glasses, satisfied that we were both comfortable, "at least now we can talk face-to-face with no eavesdroppers." He was wearing another one of his crisp seersucker shirts, but his normally slicked-back hair was disheveled, he hadn't shaved recently, and he had taken his eyeglasses off, could be for good or just for our talk. Those small changes alone made him look very different to me, both handsomer and uglier, if that is possible, and I got a strong feeling he might have had more than a little wine before he gathered the courage to phone me.

"It's strange here, without your aunt," I said, looking around, watching the rattan blinds beat against the frames of the windows, which lacked screens in the European fashion, Mrs. Schwann had demonstrated to me once, because no bugs, she swore, flew up this high. "And even stranger without your sister," I added after a beat or two.

August set down his goblet on the Mondrianesque rug in such a clumsy fashion that it wobbled and nearly fell over. "Little Po-Po's back home," he informed me somewhat wearily, swabbing his forehead in his characteristic way with the usual paisley rag. "You might as well learn from me before you hear it anywhere else that she had one last big blow-out with Aunt Helga and took the next express out of Moline. I tried to get her to stay, we both tried, but she wasn't having any of it. It's so like her. The stupid spoiled brat!"

We were interrupted by the cuckoo darting out of its Alpine chalet to advertize that it was midnight. Patiently we waited for it to gasp out its last and then die. Ten, eleven, twelve... Several of the other timekeepers in the room disagreed.

"What—what was the argument about?" I dared when the bird, which I had until then never heard, at last flew away. (Had someone wound him up at last?)

He looked at me intently, you might even say philosophically, and with his heavy brows not disguised by his horn-rims and his black beard coming in, he did appear older and a bit more intimidating—it was almost as if I were talking to a person I had never met before, and again I felt a strange combination of uneasy attraction and mild repulsion. "Do you really want to hear the whole story?" he asked, settling deeper into the sagging bottom of the chair. I wasn't sure if I really did, but he went on without waiting for my reply. "Okay, then, if you have the time, mon compère... Are you comfortable, by the way? Another spill? Good. Here goes, then: After I got mad and Posey didn't show up that afternoon for tea with Mrs. Morton, Aunt Helga got really testy with her over dinner. We—the two older ladies and I—had already had a very agonizing time without Posey being here. Despite what my sister may have thought, I think Aunt Helga was genuinely wanting to show off her niece. Mrs. Morton's always going on about her daughter the pediatrician. Anyway, the ladies squabbled politely over bicentennial plans for the town, as I recall, but the excitement soon played itself out. At some point I tried getting their opinion on these social-justice nuns in Central America, but even I didn't know exactly where I was going with my argument, then Helga got a bit bitchy—excuse my language—with me, as well she might. Despite all the clocks ready to give her advice in this room, Mrs. Morton kept checking her watch, and it soon got to the point where none of us dared say a word. We kept expecting my darling sister to waltz into the room and make everything right. Aunt Helga had to make up one excuse after the other, which she really hates, and when her friend gave up and left and Posey came back at last just when we had pulled up chairs to eat, Aunt Helga told her she must show a little more respect and act less thoughtlessly, that she shouldn't have been fooling around up on the roof with you—I'm sorry I said anything, I'm afraid she got the wrong idea..." I was horrified that now Mrs. Schwann might be as angry with me as she was with April, too horrified to say anything, and waited for him to continue. August shifted in his chair, swirling the wine in his glass like a real connoisseur. "Oh, if you must know, and if I might wax a bit folksy, they've been like two alley-cats tied up in the same gunnysack ever since we got here. It's not really anything to do with you or Aunt Helga thinking it's your fault, so don't worry about that. Posey keeps going on like the world owes her a big favor because Mother's always been so strict with her, won't let her fly free as a wild bird the way our parents let me, but then she's a girl, and when my sister's away from home she's always wanting things her way. Part of the problem is that Aunt Helga disdains most singers, as you probably already know, and isn't any more supportive than Mother about Posey's future career. As our aunt said as diplomatically as she could to me, 'Her top notes are not wholly beyond debate.' Besides that, she's always nagging Posey to eat more and keep it down for a change. Believe me, I get pretty tired of hearing about it...

"So anyhoo, Aunt Helga kept on berating her, telling her how tough things got between the wars, you know—the bread-lines, the rock-throwing, and all that, I don't know how we got onto such a topic—when... well, dainty Miss April went a little too far, let's say. She doesn't understand the world wars and she shouldn't be invoking the Third Reich. Worse, she simply wouldn't apologize, so things were broken, doors were slammed, and in the morning she had all her bags packed. I still don't know for sure if Aunt Helga told her she had to leave or not—Posey tried to convince me she had decided all on her own. I carried her bags down to Mrs. Jurgen's car and then drove her all the way to the nearest Amtrak station I knew of, in the Quad Cities. We barely talked the whole way, just listened to Paul Harvey on the radio, and then she wouldn't even let me kiss her goodbye on the platform. Plus she never said thank you or goodbye to Aunt Helga, and Aunt Helga never said goodbye to her. When I've tried to call her back in Wyndmoor, Mother says she won't come out of her room for anything short of the Apocalypse. It's like she's blaming me! Tell me now, what did I do, Denny? What did I do?"

An angry gust outside shook the window frames. I rested my chin atop my knuckles, thinking, making it clear to August that I was thinking. What could I do, how could I be his counsel? Another imprudent gulp of the bittersweet wine helped. It didn't sound like April had told him or her Aunt Helga everything that had happened on the roof—she probably hadn't had enough time or inclination to do so. There wasn't any substantive proof to incriminate me in any way for accelerating Posey's flight, even if her hasty departure could indeed have been partly my fault. There was no way it would be any easier for either of us the next time we might meet. Then, too, maybe April was angrier at August than at her aunt—maybe it was that whole jealousy thing again. Oh, so many possibilities, and I couldn't have read April's mind even if she had been in the room with electrodes fixed to her brain. Clocks ticked on. The wind whipped. Time to clear my throat and make my case: "Well, it's plain to me you were just being the responsible big brother. April, girls in general, I think, can be like that, too defensive, too easily offended, you just can't expect them to always be logical. I know what it's like, even I've had to do just what you did, hold your ground—sometimes with the Alyssa I've mentioned or my own younger sisters—and they'll always resent you for it. Still, you've got to do what you think is the right thing. Posey will get over it. She loves you. Listen, Auggie, I think, I know you were trying to be a nice guy. And you are a very nice guy, for sure, so don't blame yourself." I'm not sure if this was the only time I'd been presumptuous enough to call him "Auggie," as he'd once claimed his family sometimes did, but it is the only time I remember doing so, and either he didn't notice or didn't mind. "Way down I think she knows that, too, that you're always just trying to be good and kind—imitation of Christ, right?"

Without any preliminary, quite spontaneously, he smiled across the infinite space between our chairs in such a shy and endearing way, his thick black eyelashes trembling as if he might be fighting back hot tears again, that I couldn't help but grin back at him more emphatically, like an idiotically leering ventriloquist's dummy, I see, hoping that at last we had come to that deeper sort of understanding I'd always hoped to find with somebody—and then he sniffed loudly just once and seemed his usual self again, if not quite so lofty or distant. The room was incredibly still, just the soft soughing of the wind from the west outside the windows and the blinds rustling. "So..." he began, his voice barely more than a whisper.

"So," I said. "So!"

"You're a nice guy, too, Denny, really you are, for listening to me rant like this. You're an awfully special guy yourself, you really are, and you just don't realize it."

"Oh, you didn't rant, you didn't!" I said quick as I could, and then hurried to deflect the subject away from me, even though that was just about the kindest thing anyone had ever bothered to say to me, true or not. "By the way, thanks again for the book," I said, trying not to look at him anymore. "Could be I like the Hopkins better than the other one, although he bewilders me as much as he astounds me, or maybe it's the same thing." Absurdly, I hoped to transform our conversation into one about literature, and for a time, while the wine worked, my diversion worked. "Today I was reading that one about 'elected silence,' and I thought of you taking holy orders—do you say the veil or the vow?—that is, what I mean to say, so I'm saying it—is he really trying to tell us that you have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to find God? It's like that opera by The Who, the Pinball Wizard, isn't it?"

He managed to laugh at my simple-minded pop reference, just the kind of thing a teenager would find profound, I knew he was thinking but not expressing even then. "That used to be one of my favorites, 'The Habit of Perfection,' " he said, glad enough for this unexpected digression. "What does he say about walking golden streets and housing or un-housing the Lord? That's a funny one, even the title is a pun. I think like a lot of poetry, you can't take it so literally, obviously. It's more about exchanging your own senses for the Divine's, I think. And he's right, that's how one feels after some time in the cloister—as if you were remaking yourself by shutting out the rest of the world and focusing on what our savior would like you to see. But I admit it is difficult—both the poem and the task. Where Arnold intellectualizes, I think, Hopkins feels, and hears this beautiful ringing music in our language that he believes, and I used to believe, comes straight from God."

"Oh, Matthew, your Matthew Arnold!" I interrupted, pleased that the more wine August drank the more he was apparently able to articulate. While I grew less and less lucid. "He's in my backpack—I mean, his book, your book—don't let me forget to return him, it, I mean. Finally. I've had enough of him for now, really. And maybe of this wine. They're pretty rough going, all those meandering lines, but some aren't as hard or heavy as others. I do like the one about the king of what-is-it, Bokhara, and is it the one about Shakespeare?"

" 'All pains one's spirit endures,' " August quoted (not entirely correctly, I have subsequently found), " 'All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow...' I'm afraid I can't remember the rest."

I was struck again by his casual ability to pull memorable lines from the air, nevertheless. "That's more than I could call to mind, and I just read that yesterday! You must have always liked reading to your aunt when she visited or whatever, as much as I do, I bet."

"I confess I have, she is so grateful to get anyone to read English to her, although she says you do a good job yourself for someone so young—reminds me, I like 'The Youth of Nature' best. It ends, doesn't it, 'They are dust, they are changed, they are gone! But I remain.' But I remain! Supposed to be all about Wordsworth and immortality, you know."

I had read that one as well but missed most of the allusions. "You'll make a great teacher some day, Auggie," I praised him.

"Oh, mercy. If I ever finish my studies. But wait, I forgot—there's something for you over there on that little stand by the chaise with the statuette of the faun on it. Go ahead, go on over and open it."

The table was just a few queasy steps away, I was to discover, but I hadn't notice the pretty wrapped package on it. Picking it up, I appraised its heft and volume, and withdrew the envelope tucked beneath the thick blue ribbon. A pricey present, I could guess by weight and size alone. And friends didn't normally wrap presents for other friends so elaborately, did they? I honestly couldn't think what to say.

August had risen from his chair to get a closer look at my reaction to his gift. "Do me a favor," he asked, as he absorbed some of my anxiety, "and don't embarrass me by reading that silly, sentimental card right now. Oh, Jesus, I've already half-forgotten what I wrote—it was when I was feeling pretty bereaved after Posey left, and its—my words—are maybe, I don't know, too much, although I think I meant them, mean them, and still do. I hope you won't mind. Sorry, I'm a little nervous you might have already come across this, the gift inside I mean. But please do open the package now and tell me if you like him or not."

Of course he'd given me a book—coming from August, what else could it be? Already feeling undeserving, I painstakingly untied the bow and unstuck the tape and folded back the shiny embossed paper, much fancier than the kind of paper my presents usually came in.

"You're the slowest gift-opener I've ever seen!" August chided me, so close behind my shoulder I felt his warm fermented breath on the back of my ear. "Most people just rip right into the goodies."

"Sorry," I said. "I don't often get surprises like this, so I like to make the experience last. And you ought to know I'm just not the sort to rip anything apart." I was saying this as I slipped the book out of the paper—it was, I soon saw, a fancy leather-bound edition of Leaves of Grass, printed on stiff creamy paper with a deckle edge and a red satin bookmark; it was one of the nicest books I'd ever held in my hands until then, and quite possibly the most thoughtful gesture that had ever been made on my part. (Really—that was too obvious of him, the Whitman. I should have known so even at my tender age.) "Oh, August, oh, no," I said, sobered (for a moment) and afraid to look at the book any longer, for fear of becoming too attached to this offering that was far too marvelous for the likes of me; "I really can't accept this—it must have cost way too much. And I've only ever gotten a present a tenth this special from Santa." He laughed as I tried to thrust the book into his hands, before he did take and place it on the small marble-topped table between us.

"There it is, Christmas came early this year, or at least your birthday," he said, sitting back down. "You'll take it before you go, or I'll be very insulted. After all, it will be your eighteenth very soon, an important landmark. And don't worry, I got a big discount by ordering it through the store. Just don't tell Helga Schwann."

I sighed, pleased despite myself. "Well, I've never really read enough of the old guy, outside that one about lilacs and Lincoln," I admitted.

"Good. Wait until you get to the ones about nursing wounded Civil War soldiers—they're heartbreaking. And yet he's so clear-eyed and unsentimental, or at least sentimental in the right way. And I also like it when he just seems to be listing any old thing off the top of his head that he likes and loves. He's so, so—generous, so effusive, so magnanimous." He was in his most teacherly mode then, but I liked it. He poured himself another glass of wine as if to celebrate and asked, generously, "How's your own writing going?"

I demurred. "Well..." I began, "I've been thinking your suggestions over, but I've been so busy at home and at work I haven't done much about them. The more I read other people's accomplishments—real poets—the worse my own drivel looks."

"That," he interjected, "is when you know you're getting better, when you see how inadequate you've been. But I do admire you—at least you're trying. I could never write more than a few inept lines before throwing my hands or my pages up into the air in disgust. Lord knows what a little encouragement might have done for me once—it's potent poison, encouragement. Here, let me pour you a little more, too." I tried to slap away his hand, but he was so quick about replenishing my goblet there was nothing I could do about it but imbibe some more. And I have to confess I was enjoying the sensations the alcohol gave me, how I could have sworn then and there that August was the best and closest friend I'd ever had or would ever have. After a few more immoderate sips I felt I had known him a very long while, indeed, not just two or three weeks.

We talked more as the night wore on, and over the course of time moved onto the low, scratchy couch against the far wall that no one ever sat on, the open book balanced between us on bare knees and Dacron-sheathed knees. He read me some of his most beloved passages in a tone I thought engagingly dramatic then but think a little too self-consciously elevated now. When he came to the conclusion of a line his voice would often dip down and at the inception of another rise up. It felt very grownup to me, sitting this close to someone who still might one day be a priest, and a good one, listening to the singing and soaring of fine poetry and sharing another bottle of illicit wine. Once in a while I felt the hairs on August's bare arms brush against mine—purely by accident, I remain convinced—and I liked those tiny tender points of contact, their secret intimacy. Whenever August leaned over my shoulder to point to a particular image or phrase upon the page, I smelled his own personal odor—the sweat, the soap, the wine on his breath, and found it not at all offensive; and I liked the pressure of his forearm against my chest as he underlined a significant phrase with his stubby pearly-nailed index finger. " 'I mind how once we lay,' " August intoned Whitman's words to my increasing discomfort but also private ecstasy, " 'such a transparent morning;/How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn'd over upon me/And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart....' " At that point he stopped, highly embarrassed himself, and flipped ahead to another, slightly less lascivious page. Once in a while as he recited, he moved in so close I felt the bristles on his cheek momentarily graze my much smoother cheek. Line by line I reclined further into the bony back-springs of the couch, feeling resplendent as a pasha, loving these precious minutes of shared privacy and intellectual (as well as physical, no matter what his intentions) stimulation. Sad to say, memory provides no further notes regarding exactly what either of us said to each other all the time we sat there together, but I can recall every image of Walt Whitman's and every accidental or deceptively engineered touch. Eventually my eyelids began to grow weighty and the typeface before me blurred and I yawned despite myself. "Maybe you better be getting home... it's awfully late," August answered my yawn with (I flattered myself to think) a trace of regret or reluctance in his voice.

"Please, not yet," I said, stifling another yawn with the heel of my palm. "It's really wonderful being here with you tonight, August—Auggie. And listening to you read. It's so kind and generous of you to devote so much attention to me, I don't know how I'm worthy." My words came out sounding much more stilted than I had wanted them to be. And then without wholly meaning to I threw my head back against his quite sturdy, very inviting shoulder and closed my eyes, completely content. All was still for a moment. For once all the clocks in the room seemed to be counting out the seconds in perfect synchronicity.

But this moment suspended in time, like any other, did not last. He roused and his shoulder grew rigid under me. "Den—Denny..." He belatedly responded to my falsely desultory and not-so-subtle movement with a new kind of voice I hadn't heard him use before, small and soft but firm, and his words came out more than a bit flustered. "Hey, Den... Gee... You're a nice kid and all, but... Damn, I didn't want to say anything so banal. I just mean, I don't want you to get the wrong idea or anything—I'm not—"

I lifted my chin up a little, so close I could have easily kissed him, but couldn't—why not, when it had happened almost instantaneously with Posey? Then again, she had practically dared me to, even if she had really just been testing me. August would take it much more seriously, of course, wouldn't see it as a joke or even schoolboyish horseplay at all. Of course I knew why I couldn't take it lightly, either. "Listen, Auggie," I said then, maybe for the only moment in my life knowing exactly what characters (maybe heroes) who "face up to the facts" in books are feeling, "I don't mean to—I'm not trying to make you do or anything, or, or—it's just that it doesn't have to be a secret, ok? I mean, it can be just our secret. And besides I'm not a Catholic or anything at all nowadays, so I'm not afraid of what Jesus thinks or the pope or whoever." I began to rush to my conclusion as August turned away, head half-buried in his hands. "It's just that Posey told me what happened with you and another classmate at the seminary, and I'm really, really sorry. But you have a right to make yourself happy in the way you want. I'm not trying to be all sappy and soppy, but you have the right to be who you are, you do. In fact, it makes me kind of mad that you're always blaming yourself."

He drew apart his hands and turned back to me, wiping away some genuine tears this time. Even though I had considered August so grownup since I had met him, almost part of an older generation (as I've said) he was openly sobbing before me like a little boy. "What did she say, Denny, what did she say?" he begged me. "Damn that girl. What in the hell did she tell you?"

I had to be honest; he deserved that. "She told me that other guy Mike, Michael killed himself because of what he did to you."

Something broke in the space between us. August made a sound that was low and sarcastic, what in any other circumstance would be called a laugh, even a guffaw. He was so near to me I could hear, I swear, his heart beating like a trapped thing within his chest. "Is that what she told you, the little bitch? And you believed her? You actually believed her, you gullible idiot! You're too young to understand, that's your fault. Yes, some of it happened, but probably not in the way she told you, and he didn't actually succeed, if you must know. I'll never see him again, though, so he might as well be dead."

He had called me an idiot, and that had really stung, but I was too caught up in the broader situation to lick my wounds just then. The way he had just explained or excused himself—despite the quaver in his voice and a teary glitter in his eyes—made me doubt him, but now I also doubted Posey—who was I to believe? I wanted to, had to believe only one or the other, when I wanted to trust in them both. It was somehow more thrilling, I can admit or allow only at this date, to believe Posey's story, and to make August all the more tragic. Obviously neither of them was going to tell me the whole story or the whole truth (for what could the "truth" mean when measuring human emotion, a wiser man than I might ask), the truth I would debate with myself later—so I may as well drop it at least for the moment, I reasoned, and just hug August tight, let him know he was all right, he was perfect, and I was willing—for what I didn't exactly know and certainly couldn't have said. Mastering all my wine-soaked energy, I pressed against his body—so much heavier and solider than my own—and tried to embrace him, to reclaim him, as it were, but he wriggled out of my arms and rose and stumbled into the center of the room. "Dennis," he said, standing there, teetering back and forth a little, "you better get home. It's late. We've had too much to drink. Your parents are going to worry. I'd ask to you to stay, really, let you sleep here on the couch, but someone's bound to ask questions. I promise you'll feel better about all this in a day or two, I promise."

I managed to get on my feet as well, not quite sound of mind, but no longer in a swoon, if that's what you might call it. "I'm sorry, August," I told him in a faraway voice that didn't sound like my own. "I didn't mean to upset you when we were having such a meaningful time, wouldn't you say, such a pleasant evening, just the two of us. I've never... It's just that, that—I—I—oh, never mind, I'll go if you insist."

"Go while you're still able and take the book, please."

"Right. The book. Thanks again. You know I love you, August."

"Go home, Dennis. You're getting maudlin and in another minute I might, too. Don't think I don't love you, as well, just go."

In the elevator, that pine-box coffin, with my empty backpack on my back and the heavy Whitman in my arms, I felt like I was flying down a long black hole. I might have fainted, or vomited, but didn't either one, and when I was back out on the absolutely silent streets the fresher air striking my face sobered me considerably, or at least enough to give my lungs and legs enough renewed inspiration to walk uphill and uphill and uphill forever to my long-forgotten home. Did August really mean he loved me, then, the way I loved him? Was he just being nice again, just trying to get rid of me? I could see him waving people out of his confessional with just that same sort of false assurance. God loves us all, I could hear him saying. Or was his promise of affection but another one of the Schwann siblings' jokes at my personal expense? It was quite possible they thought I was just a bumbling rube, a cat's toy, or worst of all, a convenience. August had called me an idiot earlier. Had he said "stupid" or "little" idiot? No, just idiot—that was bad enough, maybe worse. He had said nothing about getting together again, and I knew his return to Pennsylvania was imminent; our opportunities would be very limited. And, damn, I had left the card he had written me back at the apartment, on the table, so I might never even learn what he had felt about me before I ruined it all. My mood thus soured even further, I entered the back door of my family's sleeping house, made my way in the dark up the mile-long stairwell, and fell into a hateful bed, but didn't sleep until the sun was already up and the town was coming back to life.

For three, maybe four days I walked through the streets like one of the undead and performed my job like an automaton. All the while I was hoping August might visit the theater or at least call me at home, but he didn't—and I didn't dare ring him at his great-aunt's. I comforted myself by telling myself it was better to give him a few days to forget at least a modicum of what had happened even if I couldn't and (so I told myself even then) probably never would. Perhaps he was the type for whom drink erases all unseemly memories or transmutes them into something both hazier and nobler. Perhaps by the seventy-second hour he could only vaguely recall a diverting theological discussion he'd had with his young friend, what's-his-name. Whatever the case might be, I couldn't stop myself from circling the block on my breaks like a hungry nighthawk, hoping against hope to run into him in the well-trafficked vicinity of the department store—but it never happened, and I might as well have been a sleepwalker for all else I noticed of the world or people besides what little I saw or imagined I saw around each corner, obscured by the long evening shadows cast by that tall indomitable building. Once I even shouted at a slightly stocky figure materializing from the depths of the alleyway who turned out to be merely a night watchman. The days went on uneventfully and the farther into the future I traveled, the less distinct and more implausible that night we had spent together began to seem to myself—if I hadn't come back here to witness it all over again, I might have gone on thinking it had all been half a dream and half a lie to this day. Therefore it was with some surprise that I received a message from Mrs. Schwann at my workplace, in the middle of the late show, asking me if I might stop by after I'd wound up the last reel. Immediately I felt something close to exaltation (one of the rarest of all emotions) as I realized that all might yet be mended, that she and August and I might be able to go on as if nothing—or little more than nothing—had happened that night, and we'd have a good time, laughing and saying witty things and maybe even reading some more poetry aloud, and all that could be forgiven would be silently forgiven, and I would once more feel part of something larger than just my small life and the small radius of that with which I was familiar, encompassing what I had always known and taken for granted.

Alone in the men's room after everyone else had gone home to sleep, I contemplated myself in the flaking mirror above the sink. First, that tie—the same old stained and wrinkled tie—must be straightened, right, then that rebellious hair combed into some semblance of twentieth-century civility, yes, and lastly the dandruff brushed from my uniform jacket's shoulders—good. Stand back then and look at that being in the glass—who is, who was he? Could he see or sense any penumbral overlay of the much older person I've become, looking into the questing eyes of an adolescent? Any time I caught a passing glimpse of myself at that age it was as if I were looking for a new person, or looking at someone I barely knew, or maybe someone who just kept changing in order to avoid confronting what is philosophically called one's true self. Ah, well. Once I'd washed my face and hands with that gritty astringent soap that always smelled of institutional corridors and synthetic lemons, I felt refreshed, maybe a new person after all, and ready to meet my happy destiny.

When I arrived at Mrs. Schwann's she met me in the half-lit foyer, instead of calling me in from the salon, as she usually did. There was a hot and airless hush in the apartment, as if all her fancy Austro-Hungarian Empire timepieces within had stopped. I knew something definitely must be wrong as soon as she shook my hand, instead of kissing me on both cheeks—in the continental fashion—as she had begun doing not long after I had first met her. "Dennis, for coming at such short notice, danke," she said, taking my backpack from me and hanging it from a hook between the shiny potted vines that might have been machine-made or might have been real. "You see we really must talk." She sported a sleek and stylish gray silk pantsuit with accompanying earrings and necklaces of glossy jet, not something she normally would be wearing at this hour, maybe because she had, I guessed, recently returned from her buying trip in Des Moines; also, she had on more makeup this evening than I had ever seen a woman of her age wearing. "I have just been having dinner with some important people," she said, by way of explaining why she was so "done up." "Und," she continued, "I was so how it is said, 'on edge.' I could not concentrate on what anyone was saying. Ach, though I am late and sehr erschöpft and I have come a long way, I knew I had to see you—come in, instantly, Dennis, bitte, and we shall sit down and talk." It was very late in fact and she was tired and her English was deteriorating. I followed her down the short passageway and into the salon, where with one flip of a switch she set all the light fixtures ablaze, bright as noon, and chased all the shadows back into hiding—quite a bit different from the atmosphere of a few days ago. Then, in the relative darkness, this room had seemed vast and full of dark possibilities, like a room in a castle or a catacomb—now it was like a shop-floor where one might peruse all the cheap, sad memorabilia of her husband's Old World detritus. "Please to open the windows," Mrs. Schwann ordered me. "Mein Gott, it absolutely makes to oneself suffocate!" I hurried to fling up one sash after the other, my heart-rate quickening at each window, and every hot gust in my face felt like a slap. In another minute Mrs. Schwann motioned me to sit down in my regular chair but remained standing where she was, pausing to think and looking over my head, through the now wide-open windows, across the glittering black sky and down over the wide river blacker still. It was another windy night with the tassels on the blind-cords twisting in the breeze, and although the sky was unclouded I saw the neon flicker of heat lightning on the horizon, as though a real storm might be gathering its forces in secret. When I turned back to her for further instructions, Mrs. Schwann had set in place her half-glasses and was busy riffling through various strata of papers on her writing desk, so I occupied myself by looking around. Aside from the glaring light (at least glaring after the darkness of the Arion), all the lamps and clocks and furniture and throw-rugs and memorabilia in the apartment appeared to be in their usual places. However, there was not a single candle lit and there was no gleaming trolley and no tray laden with pastries and no hospitable pot of coffee or tea. I had the strange sensation that I was looking through time and space at a museum exhibition of a room from a bygone era—my own era—a meticulous recreation where every object and element was left the way I had last seen it, many years before. For once, it is clear, I had in a sense merged consciousness with my present self; I was looking through adult eyes at a room I somehow knew I would soon be leaving behind forever.

But Mrs. Schwann was still bustling about, very much alive and of the present. I tried not to act nervous or as if I were watching her as closely as I actually was. "Will August be joining us?" I asked after a few minutes waiting on her in silence, although I think I already knew he wouldn't.

Mrs. Schwann blinked twice and dropped a pen she had been holding, and regarded me menacingly over the top of her glasses, as if I were nothing but the blank face of an alarm clock and she had suddenly and unpleasantly been aroused from deep sleep. Then she said something short and sharp in German and walked over to where I was sitting. For such a tiny woman she seemed to tower over me. "August has returned to Pennsylvania," she said slowly. "And why, why I think you need not guess."

I was not altogether surprised by August's abrupt departure, but also anguished. Later I would have time to play and replay in my mind everything that had happened between myself and Mrs. Schwann up to this point. "Will he be coming back here at all before his vacation is over and he returns to school?" I asked, as guilelessly as I could. At once I began to panic inside, but tried my best not to show it. Impossible, I was thinking, that I would not be seeing him again—or at least not be seeing him any time soon.

Mrs. Schwann sighed, as if I were a stupid and stubborn child. "Dennis!" she snapped. "Do you not understand that it is I have sent him away? First his sister to me acts what is the word, what is it—abominable—and runs home quite of her own accord, and then August, ah my wicked Augustin, I can have here no longer. O la la, les enfants terrible! You have read that horrid Cocteau, I suppose? They have always been an absolutely impossible family. Unmöglich! I could not expect more I suppose from that pious Mutter of theirs. Aldo always did say she was as if choked by her own rosaries. But I want to hear it from you first, why you think August has left us. Go on, now, speak, boy!" Her face had flushed under its powder and her voice had grown guttural with rage.

At first it seemed the ground under my feet was shaking, but that was just my body—under the bright lights of Mrs. Schwann's interrogation chamber I felt terrified. I wanted to run away, too; now I was beginning to understand a portion of why her nephew and niece had feared her vehemence so. "I don't know what to say," I said, drawing back into the chair I found under me, feeling very small indeed before this enraged giantess. "August and I met here a few nights ago, soon after you left for the big city, I guess. We talked a while. He was kind of upset about his life and how it's going, his religious doubts, you know—I myself may have said or done one or two things I shouldn't have, but then that was it, we said good night and I went home. That's all, I swear, he didn't do anything but give me a little wine, no worse than what you've offered me yourself." In my own ears my weak accusation—that she had also done what he did—sounded ungrateful and false.

Mrs. Schwann then whirled away from me and took a piece of paper from under a tortoise-shaped paperweight on the little marble-topped table below the largest of the room's many windows. With a sigh of triumph she held the paper up before me—it was a half-fold card with a picture I could not quite make out on one side—flowers or maybe a watercolor portrait. "When I got home, afternoon before last," she explained, moving closer to me, fanning the card before her, "I found this lying on the table, in plainest view. Maybe I missed it earlier, this is what I thought—maybe it is for me. I had no idea where it comes from, and because it was in an envelope with no name or address on it, I must to open it—it was unsealed—to take a look at whom for, who from. Once I saw some words upon it, I thought it must be an apology August has left for me, telling me why we has been in such a extreme bad mood lately. He has been known to communicate to me this way. At last, I think, we will understand. For he had spoken barely trois mots to me since from Des Moines I arrived. After I find my reading glasses I begin to read. I saw your name after a couple of sentences but I am afraid by then I have to read all the rest. Forgive me that, but once I realized what my nephew was saying I saw it was my duty to know what as you would say was 'up.' This is my house, I must not of my guests expect to embarrass or is the word compromise me, yes?"

I tried to speak up, but my tongue seemed thick and useless, and—at the risk of overstating my confusion—I felt successive waves of anger, resentment, and fear sweeping over me. "I—I for-forgot, I did-didn't—" I stuttered and thereby failed abjectly in my defense, or August's.

"Ja, ja, talk, talk, you must have dropped it when you left with just the book," Mrs. Schwann interrupted me, flicking the card back and forth in my face. "Yes, I know about your Mister Whitman and the other little favors August has done for you—when I confronted him, he told me himself. And this card here tells me the rest."

"But I never even got to read the card—I left it behind and forgot it!" I objected.

"You shall have it when you go. And then you will better perhaps understand why I had to ask my Augustin to leave. It was very hard on me, I assure you, to discover what has been going on under mine very nose. Auf Deutsch, it is eine Schande. A shame. I don't know what I shall say to his horrid mother, if ever comes it to that. For now, he is zu Haus, weighing as one says his options."

At last my impatience got the better of me. It seemed she was overacting her part and straying too far from the script I'd imagined we'd always be following. It seemed, at the moment, that she was just seizing upon any random possibility to banish me from her realm. "I really don't get it!" I shouted, as if to a member of my own family, while getting up at last out of that horrible hard chair, only to move farther away from my accuser. "Nothing like you're thinking ever happened. I don't know what August said there, but it can't be so bad when I swear nothing ever went on between us."

She stepped a foot closer to me, but no more. "He said he—he—" she stammered, said something else in German, and I wasn't sure if it were because she couldn't express in English what so appalled her that she could not go on, or if she was merely speaking to herself, as she often did. "Je suis desolé, Denis, du dumme Gans," she murmured, before giving up. What did the card reveal? What inside it could possibly have upset her so? No, I was not so ignorant of the intricacies of human relationships as I had been assured I was by the Schwann siblings. That was why I could guess so many things might have been written inside—so many things I secretly hoped might be true that could have been expressed in the card August had told me he had labored so long over, trying to say all he had to say about his feelings—or lack of them—for me. Could it be I was only flattering myself yet again? Mrs. Schwann placed the piece of stiff folded paper back down on the table, and I saw that its back side was crammed with very small handwriting, from edge to edge, leaving no margins, as if the writer could not contain all he had to say or reveal within the boundaries of one simple greeting card. But I did not go pick up that pitiful rectangle of thin pasteboard just then, for Mrs. Schwann was staggering backwards into her familiar chair, and I saw it was my duty to pour her some of the Campari she always kept on the sideboard, just within my reach should she need a little pick-me-up as the night wore on—it was the only alcohol I ever saw her drink, and she never took it with ice. Why I should suddenly act so subservient in the face of so many unfounded accusations I cannot say, except that I acted reflexively and I was well-trained to be accommodating to theater patrons and my elders. In a flash I brought her the tumbler and she took it in her outstretched hand, like a queen. As she drank the subtly narcotic apéritif she closed her eyes and sighed, as if she were transported for just a few seconds into another world. When she opened them she saw, unfortunately perhaps, that I was still in front of her, that she hadn't driven me away quite yet.

"It wasn't August's fault," I tried reasoning with her. "You wouldn't, you couldn't understand, but there was nothing shameful, nothing wrong happened, he's a great guy; I only wanted him to—to..." I couldn't have gone on even if I had known where that thought was leading. Another stiff blast of wind had blown up the side of the building and with gratification I felt it instantly cool my hot face. "Don't blame August when it was me," I concluded, and began to walk away. "Goodbye, Mrs. Schwann," I said, not turning around. I could feel her eyes on my back. She said nothing more, but I don't think she was ever sentimental enough to cry.

And then, halfway across the broad room, I remembered to turn back to retrieve the card that was rightfully mine. The wind was blowing ever stronger, making the venetian blinds rebel angrily against the sashes, knocking over a picture frame, and sending news-clippings flying from Mrs. Schwann's writing desk.

The past is infinite, but our own individual pasts are finite; looking back upon certain highly charged moments of my life—maybe of anyone's life—is like peering into the rooms of a haunted dollhouse, where everything is reduced, while made both more awful and more compelling. I see our last conversation in the salon I had once visited so often that way, see as if through a keyhole Mrs. Schwann and myself alone amidst the faded tapestries and worn upholstery and run-down clocks of that old-fashioned room, once upon a time long ago; the wide windows are open on all sides of us, the rattan slats rustling ominously as a summer thunderstorm approaches—we are far up above the world, we are the last two people alive on earth, who have realized too late that they hate one another. She hated me because of how she thought I had betrayed her with her nephew, and I hated her for thinking so. Neither of us was right, nor entirely wrong.

Here my adult self, who has been watching—or you might better say revisiting all that had happened above—did something a time-traveler should never do: interfere with the past. Before my adolescent self had turned back at the last moment for the card, I seized it as the crosswind swept furiously over the table, seized the card and flung it as hard as I spectrally could out the window, out of reach of that silly and senseless boy. Why? To save myself more unnecessary pain, to stop me from becoming more hopelessly entangled in a hopeless cause, to free me from all the humiliating consequences or shortfalls of a relationship (you may call it romance, real or imagined) which, at that time and in that place and subject to the rules and conventions of a punitive society in a small midwestern town, could not and never could be. Yes, I took pity on my former self, saved him from prolonged torture and further regret. Or one might say such an intrusion from the future is impossible, a defiance of the immutable limits of time and space, and that it was just the errant wind that snatched that letter to me away (plea? apology? confession?) and hurled it into the depths of the sky. Hold, listener—I will allow that, that is easier to comprehend, but I would also like to think that I cared strongly enough for the boy (even if he were just myself, a few decades removed) to have leaped across this barrier dividing the possible from the impossible and do this as a personal favor—to save his life. It could be that is why I am alive now and writing this.

Later I would search for hours within a circumference of several blocks, between hillside and riverside, from just below Schwanns' Department Store to the foreclosed ends of the business district, for that lost scrap of paper, but of course I never found it; for all I know, the battered card went sailing down to the river, and from there all its sodden way to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Or else it went into a gutter and thence into a drain and met the same fate, or was swept away by the street-cleaning trucks, if not picked up and thrown away by some enemy of litterbugs (who I pray never read the card, as I would have done without hesitation, had I been the one to find a similarly discarded letter on a sidewalk). It is trivial and useless to imagine what might have happened to it, no one need tell me that.

When I did not hear from Mrs. Schwann again for some weeks I assumed, as an easily slighted and overly impressionable young person naturally enough would do, that she never wanted to see or talk to me again. That I had, indeed, been banished and the gates were now barred. It was she who had ended our nocturnal visitations, those late evenings of poetry and good conversation, not I, and her salon would remain sealed off from me forever. Would she ever speak to anyone about what she wrongly believed had occurred between August and me? That was an outside probability, I eventually reasoned, because she cared more about matters of trust than perceived sin, and would, even at her most moralistic, never have wanted anyone to question the behavior of her close relations—for that might invite questions by strait-is-the-gate Christians regarding her own morals; and besides, in our insular little world, where I suspected she had no truly close friends, who would she tell? I knew whom she would blame. And so Mrs. Schwann and I must remain apart. Little did I calculate that as the perceived offender I might have taken the undeniably awkward but probably necessary step of contacting her myself and apologizing more formally and profusely for having (I thought) helped to bring about a schism between herself and her favorite nephew. But again, as a solipsistic young person (in that regard I was of a type far too common) I could see things only from my fixed and passive point of view, and for overcomplicated reasons I also thought it was only older people who could ever actually do anything to rectify or wholly vanquish problems such as ours. Certainly it had always been thus with my parents. In my inexperienced opinion, that last confrontation with Mrs. Schwann was indeed final and fatal, whereas from the perspective of adulthood I can see that she probably saw it as just another one of life's many passing disappointments. Her distress, I wrongly assumed, was all about me, albeit with the benefit of many years—or what is less generously called hindsight—it is clear to me now that I mattered little in the whole scheme of things as she saw them, that in fact, I could have been almost anyone who had by chance intersected with her life and the life of her long-dead brother-in-law's troublesome grandchildren. On occasion, it is true, I manufactured portentous visions of our doomed relationship, likening it to one of my favorite poems (and which I couldn't possibly have fully appreciated at that age), Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady," that pained dialogue of a young man's intermittent encounters with an elderly woman, the latter who says, with increasing bitterness, things like: "I have been wondering frequently of late .... Why we have not developed into friends."

Although I felt that somehow in a town as ridiculously small as ours I would never have to run into Mrs. Schwann again—and it is true, I avoided the store and its surrounding shadows as much as possible—we did meet on the sidewalk almost directly under the Arion Theater's illuminated marquee on a warmish evening early that autumn as I was on my way to work. A small crowd was gathering outside the doors to buy tickets for the shoot-'em-up thriller playing that night. The myriad little colored bulbs above cast their illusory light as usual on the townspeople's abstracted faces. Stacy, the newest girl, was already at her station, ruffling bills crisp and fresh from the bank. "Why, Dennis Baxter!" a familiar voice accosted me as soon as its possessor saw me making my nimble way through the moviegoers. "Do you not say hello to me anymore? You are walking right past me."

I looked around sheepishly and took her in; she seemed to have shrunk somewhat in the time since I had last seen her, in the same way that in my life she was already beginning to diminish in importance. People glanced at us and seemed to whisper to one another, so, feeling paranoid and greatly chagrined, I greeted her as impersonally as I could.

"Some day you must visit me," she said, pulling me a little to one side. Neither of us, I thought then and have ever after continued to think, believed that was going to happen. "I miss the old poems. I try to read them but I cannot place the stresses correctly, and so I lose the music."

"There must be someone around who can read to you better than I did," I said, wanting to get away to the privacy and isolation of my projection room. Now the girl was peering at us curiously through the glass of the ticket booth, and I knew how false my words must have sounded.

My interrogator looked at me with genuine sadness in her heavy-lidded eyes; I could smell the naphthalene in the fur-collared coat she must have recently taken out of storage and the stale Chanel splashed recklessly across her décolletage. The handbag strapped around her shoulder no longer looked à la mode but ungainly and gruesomely reptilian. Imagine what April would think of that! "Ach, I miss you, but you see I understand," she said, dropping her soft suede-gloved hand from my wrist. "Je suis une vieille veuve très folle, and I think it is I will not complexify your life any further."

"But, Mrs. Schwann—" I began. I really wanted to ask her about August and April, but there was hardly time for that now, and this was hardly the place. "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Schwann," I tried again, "but—"

"Shush," she demanded, "I will now say auf Wiedersehen, Dennis Baxter. I do not feel like the picture shows, after all. Please know you will remain in my thoughts." Again I tried to say something, but she had already shown me her lopsided back and shoulders and was hurrying away. For a moment I stood there before the "Coming Attractions" display, as immobile and speechless as a figure cast in bronze; and then reluctantly, full of guilt, I followed her for a few steps down the sidewalk and reached out from behind for her elbow—but once she felt my touch, she stopped and faced me, clutching her bulky carry-all to her breast and breathing heavily. "Ach, ach, do not startle me so! I have already said goodbye."

"But I haven't," I said meekly.

This time she just shook her head and began moving down the sidewalk again, but hadn't gone ten feet before she turned and called back to me. "I almost forgot, since last we have met you turned eighteen, non? Happy birthday, Dennis, Herzlichen Glückwunsch, we say auf Deutsch. You are now a man? And so, and so I must go and you must to work." Before I could reply, she had walked quickly away, the clacking of her heels on the concrete departing with her, as I wracked my mind for something of my own that would have been appropriately gracious and yet definitive to say. There was still a hint of her sad scents fading in the air around me, clinging lightly to my clothes, and in another moment, as quickly as Mrs. Schwann had, I turned in the other direction and caught up to the restless crowd ahead to unfasten the Arion's front doors. Stacy, the recent hire, whom I cannot remember so well because I never really looked at her then, said nothing as I walked past. I suppose I had some sort of expression on my face; I can't quite tell from this angle.

Whenever I happened to see Mrs. Schwann after that—which was not often because we hardly ran in the same circles or kept the same hours—we would nod to one another politely and, if we were forced to—say, in a line at the post office or during the intermission of a municipal band concert, we would exchange uneasy pleasantries regarding the weather or the time of day; wisely we never spoke of anything of importance, nor did we mention anything that might resurrect the memories we had carefully laid to rest. I was good at acting as if those fatal episodes of that regretfully unfinished summer we had shared never truly could have taken place, and she—because she was so much older, with so many more years to drag about after her and so many other things to attend to than I did—must have succeeded, I figured, in forgetting much faster than I could. Otherwise, I had the audacity to believe, how could she have carried on? Even if nothing had ever happened to spoil our relationship, it was doubtful either of us could have carried on as we had, with the road ahead still beckoning to one of us and rapidly vanishing toward the horizon for the other. Frequently I reminded myself things about ships crossing paths and seasons turning, as if those unoriginal phrases had anything at all to do with our own real situation. I saw no means to make amends. How very cruel I was—worse to her or myself, I still don't know.

My more well-off grandmother would ask me now and then if I were still visiting her odd old coeval Mrs. Schwann, and I would lie and said "on occasion," though I had barely any time to give her, I'd quickly footnote myself, what with the rigors and demands of college life. After a few years my grandmother simply quit asking, and probably no longer saw it as possible that I had forged such a curious bond with a woman as old as herself. At some point my mother mentioned to me that Mrs. Schwann had lately been in and out of the hospital quite a bit, and I must have murmured some words of sympathy; after that, time obscures the rest. It is likely that over the years everyone acquainted with me no longer remembered that I had known Mrs. Schwann well, or even remembered the woman herself—and forgetting a person is just a slow and less painful kind of death, I imagine. After I left for college I had even fewer opportunities of running into her, and then, once I had moved away to a distant city, I never saw her again, for in a few years, she was dead—an old woman, I thought at the time, although with each succeeding year she seems to have died at a younger and younger age. Well, we had never truly been good friends, I told myself when I heard the news, busy with many other things in my busy new life, and though we had been more than passing strangers, I had been part of and privy to but a few short months of her long life. I couldn't have been of much importance—dare I say use—to her, while, although unquestionably she had been of more importance to me, I had been misinterpreting my feelings for her for many years by the time she died.

As for August and April, I never heard from them again—and the shocking thing is, I resolutely avoided trying to learn what had happened to them. If I had known them for a longer period, maybe I wouldn't have been so remiss. At the very least it proves that I probably wasn't as attached to them as I had for a brief time considered I was—ah, but such are the vicissitudes of youth. Many times I came to the point of beginning a letter to August in which I would valiantly explain my point of view—for in all probability his great-aunt had let hers be known after my departure from their lives—but after a few agonizing lines I could not, could never go on. In fact, I continued to deny to myself that I had even countenanced the possibility of having fallen so outlandishly into a state of infatuation (a displaced hunger for affection, my imaginary analysts might say) with either brother or sister. In retrospect—meaning almost as soon as it was all over, in fact—I told myself I had never really gotten the chance to know them very well at all. Our friendship—my attachment—had lasted less than a month, and then they were gone. I had behaved very foolishly—by admitting this, I was able to forgive myself for more of what happened than I otherwise would have been able to—but they had behaved no better, and we were better off apart. It also occurred to me that they didn't even have my home address (although they could have written me care of the Arion, it is true) and I didn't have theirs—and of course it would be difficult, given the circumstances, to obtain theirs now. Strange that I never faulted them for not trying to reach me: I supposed then (and half-suppose now) that it was better that way. Well, I lived, and I imagine they did, too.

That autumn, which was my last year at high school, I plunged back into my poetry, and though I was not getting much better very quickly, if at all, I felt I had been helped in setting words upon a page by my experiences and the stimulating literary discussions of the past summer. At least, my explorations in verse no longer seemed so much a product of introversion and isolation; whatever their worth, my poems began to feel part of a greater whole, if only an especially insignificant part. Of course, most of what resulted from my labors was merely a product of vanity—though who is to say self-conceit hasn't always been one of the wellsprings of literature? The good thing was, I was throwing away almost as much as I wrote, and that might be the best lesson I had taught myself, with August's help. And I did have the books he gave me, although I could not and would not read every part of them.

I told myself I was over it all; new pursuits at school and even some tentative new friends who were a bit more attuned to me than my old ones were supplanting my thoughts and consuming my days. I worked hard on the school paper and even did a little acting in the senior play. But I was fooling myself, no question about it. Once, on one of the first frost-glazed nights of the aging year, I struggled with a poem about nothing in particular, or perhaps about too many particulars, until almost dawn. There was something I was trying to say in the poem that I hadn't yet been able to express in any other poem—that I do recall, although I cannot bear to look over my own shoulder and reread those halting and incompetent words at present. All of a sudden I realized I was writing about love—the world's most hackneyed subject, I believed at the time—and there before me materialized August, or August as he was on the night when we had parted for the last time: unshaven, wild-haired, daemon-eyed, like an antagonist out of the Bröntes or Hawthorne—really, not the way August had been at all. Half asleep, I shook myself, threw down my pen, and switched off the green-hooded lamp on my little bedside desk, but I could not get my numinous friend's disturbingly kinetic image out of my head. I lay newly alert and wide awake for hours, neither stirring from my blankets or reaching for a book to divert me. For the first and only time, perhaps, I admitted to myself how much I wanted to see him—and April, too, I allowed—but especially how I wanted to feel August's strong arm around my shoulder again, to smell his warm sweetly sour breath so close upon me, to touch him as I had hoped he would touch me... and now I truly cannot go on. As I said, I never knew what happened to him—if he finished out his time at the seminary, if he re-found God and became a priest after all, if he lived and loved and taught the masters and was happy—and I never tried to find out. I never even tried to find out! For that alone, I cannot forgive myself.

You might have me stop there, but I won't just yet. For you see, this last paragraph is important to me, too. A few years later, when I was well along in graduate school at Northwestern, years as uneventful as they were unfulfilling, I spent an afternoon every now and then at the Art Institute. Those cool halls and expansive windows overlooking the lake calmed me like nothing else at that time, I daresay. Everything else about Chicago, its immensity and its chaotic energy, overwhelmed me, the diffident young man from a small and unremarkable town. Although I knew little about the visual arts, being a PhD candidate in modern American fiction who had always been interested in little beyond the printed page, I did come to like looking at paintings and sculpture when the heated arguments of preeminent critics and scholars began to grow cold upon the page; and once among a milling crowd of people I came across a large oil on canvas by the Illinois artist Ivan Albright, who had died not a month before. It wasn't as if I knew or cared anything about the painter at the time, but over the years I have done my share of research into his methods and obsessions. The painting I had chanced upon that afternoon was created at the height of his powers. In his characteristic dark and meticulous style, Albright had depicted an elaborately embossed door blackened by time, with a decaying wreath upon it; the entire canvas is encrusted with an almost sickening level of deliquescence and disintegration. One doesn't quite see it at first in the overpowering gloom, but there is a wrinkled old hand reaching out from one side of the composition—perhaps to part the heavy damask draperies partially covering the door, perhaps to snatch away the withered wreath; or is it moving away, the gnarled hand, afraid to knock? It is without doubt an arresting image. The name of the painting is "That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do." Seldom had a title struck me with such force up to that moment, and less seldom still in all my reading since, and looking then at the black-upon-black door and the emaciated hand, I was immediately reminded of the recently deceased Mrs. Schwann, whom I had left behind along with the corpse of my former self in my hometown, and consequently reminded of her young charges; I would likely never see them again, either. Never, never, never: the awful word seemed to echo off the surface of that frightening canvas. All at once I felt a dull leaden weight manifest itself inside me, something like the weight of a pendulum swinging back and forth in that chamber where my heart should have been—and so I think I will name this report of my travels back to those truly misbegotten days of my youth, long ago in another century, after the painter Albright's consummate work of art. Whatever be the worth of this account, it is, I think, an appropriate title.
